Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews
Mark Mazower
Please note that this edition does not include illustrations.The history of a bewilderingly exotic city, rarely written about: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi occupation.Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries.Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research, Salonica evokes the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands of both Europe and the East.Mark Mazower has written a work of astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city. Magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with violent endings and new beginnings.
SALONICA
CITY OF GHOSTS
Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950
MARK MAZOWER
Copyright (#ulink_63ecb6f0-00ce-51d2-82dc-aaea5ab875f5)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Mark Mazower 2004
Mark Mazower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007120222
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007383665
Version: 2016-08-24
Dedication (#ulink_f990fbb1-0298-5d25-ac94-f8c13488a6bf)
To Marwa
Contents
COVER (#u31cd631a-387a-5783-9621-12edc10866fe)
TITLE PAGE (#uc2388842-f02c-54e8-a968-d297aa25adf5)
COPYRIGHT (#u2d8f1b40-efa0-5d97-ab18-9f714b185b4e)
DEDICATION (#u275ed193-9fae-50d9-83d2-3c467aa3c732)
LIST OF MAPS (#u37e2f38b-5607-5796-8934-c1605038cc47)
INTRODUCTION (#uc1c437d9-8093-5c3f-8f10-a1fe79d0e420)
PART ONE: The Rose of Sultan Murad (#u7f64903d-8f6e-52e0-ae40-719276603835)
1 Conquest, 1430
2 Mosques and Hamams
3 The Arrival of the Sefardim
4 Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles
5 Janissaries and Other Plagues
6 Commerce and the Greeks
7 Pashas, Beys and Money-lenders
8 Religion in the Age of Reform
PART TWO: In the Shadow of Europe
9 Travellers and the European Imagination
10 The Possibilities of a Past
11 In the Frankish Style
12 The Macedonia Question, 1878–1908
13 The Young Turk Revolution
PART THREE: Making the City Greek
14 The Return of St Dimitrios
15 The First World War
16 The Great Fire
17 The Muslim Exodus
18 City of Refugees
19 Workers and the State
20 Dressing for the Tango
21 Greeks and Jews
22 Genocide
23 Aftermath
CONCLUSION: The Memory of the Dad (#litres_trial_promo)
GLOSSARY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Maps (#ulink_9106d450-9c98-5cca-9e9d-82a4723d2d41)
The topography of the Balkans. (#litres_trial_promo)
Inside the Ottoman city. (#litres_trial_promo)
The first map of the Ottoman city, 1882, showing the new sea frontage. (#litres_trial_promo)
The late Ottoman city and its surroundings, c.1910. (#litres_trial_promo)
Area destroyed by the 1917 fire. (#litres_trial_promo)
After the fire: the 1918 Plan. (#litres_trial_promo)
The Balkans after 1918. (#litres_trial_promo)
The 1929 Municipal City Plan. (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_0fa3d9a8-7421-5cd3-848b-90657b319ddf)
Beware of saying to them that sometimes cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.
ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities
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THE FIRST TIME I visited Salonica, one summer more than twenty years ago, I stepped off the Athens train, shouldered my rucksack, and left the station in search of the town. Down a petrol-choked road, I passed a string of seedy hotels, and arrived at a busy crossroads: beyond lay the city centre. The unremitting heat, and the din of the traffic reminded me of what I had left several hours away in Athens but despite this I knew I had been transported into another world. A mere hour or so to the north lay Tito’s Yugoslavia and the checkpoints at Gevgeli or Florina; to the east were the Rhodope forests barring the way to Bulgaria, the forgotten Muslim towns and villages of Thrace, and the border with Turkey. From the moment I crossed the hectic confusion of Vardar Square – ‘Piccadilly Circus’ for British soldiers in the First World War – ignoring the signposts that urged me out of the city in the direction of the Iron Curtain, I sensed the presence of a different Greece, less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures.
The crowded alleys of the market offered shade as I pushed past carts piled high with figs, nuts, bootleg Fifth Avenue shirts and pirated cassettes. Tsitsanis’s bouzouki strained the vendors’ tinny speakers, but it was no competition for the clarino and drum with which gypsy boys were deafening diners in the packed ouzeris of the Modiano food market. Round the tables of Myrovolos Smyrni [Sweet-smelling Smyrna], its very name an evocation of the glories and disasters of Hellenism’s Anatolian past, tsipouro and mezedes were smoothing the passage from work to siesta. There were fewer back-packers in evidence here than in the tourist dives around the Acropolis, more housewives, porters and farmers on their weekly trip into town. Did I really see a dancing bear performing for onlookers in the meat market? I certainly did not miss the flower-stalls clustered around the Louloudadika hamam (known also according to the guidebooks as the Market Baths, the Women’s Baths, or the Yahudi Hamam, The Bath of the Jews), the decrepit spice warehouses on Odos Egyptou [Egypt Street], the dealers still installed in the old fifteenth-century multi-domed bezesten. This vigorous commercialism put even Athens to shame: here was a city which had remained much closer to the values of the bazaar and the souk than anything to be seen further south.
The topography of the Balkans.
Athens itself had eliminated the traces of its Ottoman past without much difficulty. For centuries it had been little more than an overgrown village so that after winning independence in 1830 Greece’s rulers found there not only the rich cultural capital invested in its ancient remains by Western philhellenism, but all the attractions of something close to a blank slate so far as the intervening epochs were concerned. Salonica’s Ottoman past, on the other hand, was a matter of living memory, for the Greek army had arrived only in 1912 and those grandmothers chatting quietly in the yards outside their homes had probably been born subjects of Sultan Abdul Hamid. The still magnificent eight-mile circuit of ancient walls embraced a densely thriving human settlement whose urban character had never been in question, a city whose history reached forward from classical antiquity uninterruptedly through the intervening centuries to our own times.
Even before one left the packed streets down near the bay and headed into the Upper Town, tiny medieval churches half-hidden below ground marked the transition from classical to Byzantine. It did not take long to discover what treasures they contained – one of the most resplendent collections of early Christian mosaics and frescoes to be found anywhere in the world, rivalling the glories of Ravenna and Istanbul. A Byzantine public bath, hidden for much of its existence under the accumulated top-soil, still functioned high in the Upper Town, near the shady overgrown garden which hid tiny Ayios Nikolaos Orfanos and its fourteenth-century painted narrative of the life of Christ. The Rotonda – a strange cylindrical Roman edifice, whose multiple re-incarnations as church, mosque, museum and art centre encapsulated the city’s endless metamorphoses – contained some of the earliest mural mosaics to be found in the eastern Mediterranean. Next to it stood an elegant pencil-thin minaret, nearly one hundred and twenty feet tall.
Like many visitors before me, I found myself particularly drawn to the Upper Town. There, hidden inside the perimeter of the old walls was a warren of precipitous alleyways sometimes ending abruptly, at others opening onto squares shaded by plane trees and cooled by fountains. One had the sense of entering an older world whose life was conducted according to different rhythms: cars found the going tougher, indeed few of them had yet mastered the cobbled slopes. Pedestrians took the steep gradients at a leisurely pace, pausing frequently for rest: despite the heat, people came to enjoy the panoramic views across the town and over the bay. Down below were the office blocks and multi-storey apartment buildings of the postwar boom. But here there were few signs of wealth. Abutting the old walls were modest whitewashed homes in brick or wood – often no more than a single small room with a privy attached: a pot of geraniums brightened the window-ledge, a rag rug bleached by the sun served as a door mat, clotheslines were stretched from house to house. Their elderly inhabitants were neatly dressed. Later I realized most had probably lived there since the 1920s, drawn from among the tens of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor who had settled in the city after the exchange of populations with Turkey. Their simple homes contrasted with the elegantly dilapidated villas whose overhanging upper floors and high garden walls still lined many streets; the majority, once grand, had been badly neglected: their gabled roofs had caved in, their shuttered bedrooms lay open to public view, and one caught spectacular glimpses of the city below through yawning gaps in their frontage. By the time I first saw them most had been abandoned for decades, for their Muslim owners had left the city when the refugees had arrived. The cypresses, firs and rosebushes in their gardens were overgrown with ivy and creeping vines, their formerly bright colours had faded into pastel shades of yellow, ochre and cream. Here were vestiges of a past that was absent from the urban landscape of southern Greece – Turkish neighbourhoods that had outlived the departure of their inhabitants; fountains with their dedicatory inscriptions intact; a dervish tomb, now shuttered and locked.
With later visits, I came to see that these traces of the Ottoman past offered a clue to Salonica’s central paradox. True, it could point, as Athens could not, to more than two thousand years of continuous urban life. But this history was decisively marked by sharp discontinuities and breaks. The few Ottoman monuments that had endured were a handful compared with what had once existed. The old houses were falling down and within a decade many of them had collapsed or been demolished. Some buildings have been recently restored and visitors can see inside the magnificent fifteenth-century Bey Hamam, the largest Ottoman baths in Greece, or admire the distinguished mansion now used as a local public library in Plateia Romfei. But otherwise the Ottoman city has vanished, exciting little comment except among preservationists and scholars.
Change is, of course, the essence of urban life and no successful city remains a museum to its own past. The expansion of the docks since the Second World War has obliterated the seaside amusement park – the Beshchinar gardens, or Park of the Princes – where the city’s inhabitants refreshed themselves for generations; today it is commemorated only in a nearby ouzeri of the same name. In the deserted sidings of the old station, prewar trams and elderly railway carriages are slowly disintegrating. Even the infamous swampy Bara – once the largest red light district in eastern Europe – survives only in the fond memories of a few ageing locals, in local belles-lettres, and in its streets – still bearing the old names, Afrodite, Bacchus – which now house nothing more exciting than car rental agencies, garages and tyre-repair shops.
But ridding the city of its brothels is one thing and eradicating the visible traces of five centuries of urban history is quite another. What, I wondered, did it do to a city’s consciousness of itself – especially to a city so proud of its past – when substantial sections were at best allowed to crumble away, at worst written out of the record? Had this happened by accident? Could one blame the great fire of 1917 that had destroyed so much of its centre? Or did the forced exchange of populations in 1923 – when more than thirty thousand Muslim refugees departed, and nearly one hundred thousand Orthodox Christians took their place – suddenly turn one city into a new one? Was the sense of urban continuity, in other words, which had so powerfully attracted me to Salonica at the outset, an illusion? Perhaps there was another urban history waiting to be written in which the story of continuity would have to be told rather differently, a tale not only of smooth transitions and adaptations, but also of violent endings and new beginnings.
For there was another vanished element of the city’s past which I was also beginning to learn about. On the drive into town from the airport, I had caught intriguing glimpses of substantial nineteenth-century villas hidden behind rusting railings and overgrown weeds amid the rows of postwar suburban apartment blocks. The palatial three-storey pile in its own pine-shaded estate, now the main seat of the Prefecture, turned out to have been originally the home of wealthy nineteenth-century Jewish industrialists, the Allatinis; this was where Sultan Abdul Hamid had been kept when he was deposed by the Young Turks and exiled to the city in 1909. Along the same road was the Villa Bianca, an opulently outsize Swiss chalet, home of the wealthy Diaz-Fernandes family. On the drive into town, one passed a dozen or more of these shrines to the eclectic taste of its fin-de-siècle elite – Turkish army officers, Greek and Bulgarian merchants, and Jewish industrialists.
Turks and Bulgarians figured prominently in the histories of Greece I had read, usually as ancestral enemies, but the Jews were in general remarkable only for their absence, enjoying little more than a bit-part in the central and all-important story of modern Greece’s emergence onto the international stage. In Salonica, however, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they had dominated the life of the city for many centuries. As late as 1912 they were the largest ethnic group and the docks stood silent on the Jewish Sabbath. Jews were wealthy businessmen; but many more were porters and casual labourers, tailors, wandering street vendors, beggars, fishermen and tobacco-workers. Today the only traces of their predominance that survive are some names – Kapon, Perahia, Benmayor, Modiano – on faded shopfronts, Hebrew-lettered tombstones piled up in churchyards, an old people’s home and the community offices. There is a cemetery, but it is a postwar one, buried in the city’s western suburbs.
Here as elsewhere it was the Nazis who brought centuries of Jewish life to an abrupt end. When Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian politician who had served in the city as an army officer, was accused of being involved in the deportations, I came back to Salonica to talk to survivors of Auschwitz, resistance fighters, the lucky ones who had gone underground or managed to flee abroad. A softly-spoken lawyer stood with me on the balcony of his office and we looked down onto the rows of parked cars in Plateia Eleftherias [Freedom Square] where he had been rounded up with the other Jewish men of the city for forced labour. Two elderly men, not Jewish, whom I bumped into on Markos Botsaris Street, told me about the day the Jews had been led away in 1943: they were ten at the time, they said, and afterwards, they broke into their homes with their friends and found food still warm on the table. A forty-year-old woman who happened to sit next to me on the plane back to London had grown up after the war in the quarter immediately above the old Jewish cemetery: she remembered playing in the wreckage of the graves as a child, with her friends, looking for buried treasure, shortly before the authorities built the university campus over the site. Everyone, it seemed, had their story to tell, even though at that time what had happened to the city’s Jews was not something much discussed in scholarly circles.
A little later, in Athens, I came across several dusty unopened sacks of documents at the Central Board of Jewish Communities. When I examined them, I found a mass of disordered papers – catalogues, memoranda, applications and letters. They turned out to be the archives of the wartime Service for the Disposal of Israelite Property, set up by the Germans in those few weeks in 1943 when more than forty-five thousand Jews – one fifth of the city’s entire population – were consigned to Auschwitz. These files showed how the deportations had affected Salonica itself by triggering off a scramble for property and possessions that incriminated many wartime officials. I started to think about deportations in general, and the Holocaust in particular, not so much in terms of victims and perpetrators, but rather as chapters in the life of cities. The Jews were killed, almost all of them: but the city that had been their home grew and prospered.
The accusation that Waldheim had been involved in the Final Solution – unfounded, as it turned out – reflected the extent to which the Holocaust was dominating thinking about the Second World War. Sometimes it seemed from the way people talked and wrote as though nothing else of any significance had happened in those years. In Greece, for example, two other areas of criminal activity – the mass shootings of civilians in anti-partisan retaliations, and the execution of British soldiers – were far more pertinent to Waldheim’s war record. There were good reasons to deplore this state of cultural obsession. It quickly made the historian subject to the law of diminishing returns. It also turned history into a form of voyeurism and allowed outsiders to sit in easy judgement. I sometimes felt that I myself had become complicit in this – scavenging the city for clues to destruction, ignoring the living for the dead.
Above all, unremitting focus upon the events of the Second World War threatened to turn a remarkable chapter in Jewish, European and Ottoman history into nothing more than a prelude to genocide, overshadowing the many centuries when Jews had lived in relative peace, and both their problems and their prospects had been of a different kind. In Molho’s bookshop, one of the few downtown reminders of earlier times, I found Joseph Nehama’s magisterial Histoire des de Salonique, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The arrival of the Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica’s emergence as a renowned centre of rabbinical learning, the disruption caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers who followed him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi noted, called the city ‘our Salonica’ – a place where, in addition to Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants ‘know the Jewish tongue because day and night they are in contact with, and conduct business with Jews.’
Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew of the home of Saint Dimitrios – ‘the Orthodox city’ – with the Sefardic ‘Mother of Israel’, it seemed to me that these two histories – the Greek and the Jewish – did not so much complement one another as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from 1962 which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its capture from the Turks, contained almost no mention of them at all; the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians masterminding the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias Petropoulos excoriated as ‘the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek bourgeoisie’, for whom the city ‘has always been Greek’. But at the same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the other was of Jews.
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As for the Muslims, who had ruled Salonica from 1430 to 1912, they were more or less absent from both. Centuries of European antipathy to the Ottomans had left their mark. Their presence on the wrong side of the Dardanelles had for so long been seen as an accident, misfortune or tragedy that in an act of belated historical wishful thinking they had been expunged from the record of European history. Turkish scholars and writers, and professional Ottomanists had not done much to rectify things. It suited everyone, it seemed, to ignore the fact that there had once existed in this corner of Europe an Ottoman and an Islamic city atop the Greek and Jewish ones.
The strange thing is that memoirs often describe the place very differently from more scholarly or official accounts and depict a society of almost kaleidoscopic interaction. Leon Sciaky’s evocative Farewell to Salonica, the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul Hamid, begins with the sound of the muezzin’s cry at dusk. Albanian householders protected their Bulgarian grocer from the fury of the Ottoman gendarmerie, while well-to-do Muslim parents employed Christian wet-nurses for their children and Greek gardeners for their fruit trees. Outside the Yalman family home the well was used by ‘the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians of the neighbourhood.’ And in Nikos Kokantzis’s moving novella Gioconda, a Greek teenage boy falls in love with the Jewish girl next door in the midst of the Nazi occupation; at the moment of deportation, her parents trust him with their most precious belongings.
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Have scholars, then, simply been blinkered by nationalism and the narrowed sympathies of ethnic politics? Perhaps, but if so the fault is not theirs alone. The basic problem – common to historians and their public alike – has been the attribution of sharply opposing, even contradictory, meanings to the same key events. They have seen history as a zero-sum game, in which opportunities for some came through the sufferings of others, and one group’s loss was another’s gain: 1430 – when the Byzantine city fell to Sultan Murad II – was a catastrophe for the Christians but a triumph for the Turks. Nearly five centuries later, the Greek victory in 1912 reversed the equation. The Jews, having settled in the city at the invitation of the Ottoman sultans, identified their interests with those of the empire, something the Greeks found hard to forgive.
It follows that the real challenge is not merely to tell the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious co-existence – in the early twenty-first century such long-forgotten stories are eagerly awaited and sought out – but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative. National histories generally have clearly defined heroes and villains, but what would a history look like where these roles were blurred and confused? Can one shape an account of the city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities – the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and genocide – which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a time when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a ‘museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions’. Since then what he called its ‘hybrid spirit’ has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it is worth trying again.
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In the 1930s, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropolises. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.
But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers – drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure – penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century – though no earlier – there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands – maps. As for the archives, they are endless – Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American – compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multi-confessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world – as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages – to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.
The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that elsewhere Greeks too lost out – in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon, Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of 1922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.
Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe – in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw, Vilna and Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trauma caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of nation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property after 1948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier? Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the remnants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country garden, an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving their memories of a city that is long gone.
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By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica’s Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely-packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street pedlars are entering Salonica’s bloodstream. Many of them quickly learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city’s position within the modern nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to Greek hands has become ancient history.
PART 1 The Rose of Sultan Murad (#ulink_97f13e39-4f2e-5eb8-a54c-7aaa8c6552b6)
1 Conquest, 1430 (#ulink_384c3a03-e77e-5680-8231-69080cea6729)
Beginnings
BEFORE THE CITY FELL IN 1430, it had already enjoyed seventeen hundred years of life as a Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine metropolis. Sometimes it had flourished, at others it was sacked and looted. Foreigners had seized it and moved on. Throughout it remained a city whose inhabitants spoke Greek. But of this Greek past, only traces survived the Ottoman conquest. A few Christian survivors returned and saw their great churches turned into mosques. The Hippodrome, forum and imperial palace fell into ruins which gradually disintegrated and slipped beneath the slowly rising topsoil, leaving an invisible substratum of catacombs, crypts and secret passages. In a very different era, far in the future, archaeologists would assign new values to the statues, columns and sarcophagi they found, and new rulers – after the Ottomans had been defeated in their turn – would use them to reshape and redefine the city once more. One thing, however, always survived as a reminder of its Greek origins, however badly it was battered and butchered by time and strangers, and that was its name.
Salonicco, Selanik, Solun? Salonicha or Salonique? There are at least thirteen medieval variants alone; the city is an indexer’s nightmare and a linguist’s delight. ‘Is there really a correct pronunciation of Salonika?’ wrote an English ex-serviceman in 1941. ‘At any rate nearly all of us now spell it with a “k”.’ His presumption stirred up a hornet’s nest. ‘Why Saloneeka, when every man in the last war knew it as Salonika?’ responded a certain Mr Pole from Totteridge. ‘I disagree with W. Pole,’ wrote Captain Vance from Edgware, Middlesex. ‘Every man in the last war did not know it as Salonika.’ Mr Wilks of Newbury tried to calm matters by helpfully pointing out that in 1937 ‘by Greek royal decree, Salonika reverted to Thessaloniki’. In fact it had been officially known by the Greek form since the Ottomans were defeated in 1912.
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It is only foreigners who make things difficult for themselves, for the Greek etymology is perfectly straightforward. The daughter of a local ruler, Philip of Macedon, was called Thessaloniki, and the city was named after her: both daughter and city commemorated the triumph [niki] of her father over the people of Thessaly as he extended Macedonian power throughout Greece. Later of course, his son, Alexander, conquered much more distant lands which took him to the limits of the known world. There were prehistoric settlements in the area, but the city itself is a creation of the fourth-century BC Macedonian state.
Today the association between the city and the dynasty is as close as it has ever been. If one walks from the White Tower along the wide seafront promenade which winds southeast along the bay, one quickly encounters a huge statue of Megas Alexandros – Alexander the Great. Mounted on horseback, sword in hand, he looks down along the five-lane highway [also named after him] out of town, towards the airport, the beaches and the weekend resorts of the Chalkidiki peninsula. The statue rises heroically above the acrobatic skateboarders skimming around the pedestal, the toddlers, the stray dogs and the partygoers queuing up for the brightly-lit floating discos and bars which now circumnavigate the bay by night. It is a magnet for the hundreds who stroll here in the summer evenings, escaping the stuffy backstreets for the refreshment of the sea breeze as the sun dips behind the mountains.
But in 1992, after the collapse of Yugoslavia led the neighbouring republic of Macedonia to declare its independence, Alexander’s Greek defenders took to the streets in a very different mood. Flags proliferated in shop-windows, and car stickers and airport banners proclaimed that ‘Macedonia has been, and will always be, Greek’. Greeks and Slavs did battle over the legacy of the Macedonian kings, and Salonica was the centre of the agitation. In the main square, hundreds of thousands of angry protestors were urged on by their Metropolitan, Panayiotatos [His Most Holy] Panteleimon (known to some journalists as His Wildness [Panagriotatos] for the extremism of his language). The twentieth century was ending as it had begun, with an argument over Macedonia, and names themselves had become a political issue in a way which few outside Greece understood.
The irony was that Alexander himself never knew the city named after his half-sister, for it was founded during the succession struggle precipitated by his death. He had a general called Cassander, who was married to Thessaloniki. Cassander hoped to succeed to the Macedonian throne and having murdered Alexander’s mother to get there, he founded a number of cities to re-establish his credentials as a statesman. The one he immodestly named after himself has vanished from the pages of history. But that given his wife’s name in 315 B C came to join Alexandria itself in the network of new Mediterranean ports that would link the Greek world with the trading routes to Asia, India and Africa.
As events would prove, Cassander chose his spot well. Built on the slope running down to the sea from the hills in the shadow of Mount Hortiatis, the city gave its inhabitants an easy and comforting sense of orientation: from earliest times, they could see the Gulf before them with Mount Olympos across the bay in the distance, the forested hills and mountains rising behind them, the well-rivered plains stretching away to the west. Less arid than Athens, less hemmed in than Trieste, the new city blended with its surroundings, marking the point where mountains, rivers and sea met. It guarded the most accessible land route from the Mediterranean up into the Balkans and central Europe, down which came Slavs [in the sixth century], and Germans [in 1941] while traders and NATO convoys [on their way into Kosovo in 1999] went in the other direction. Its crucial position between East and West was also later exploited by the Romans, whose seven-hundred-kilometre lifeline between Italy and Anatolia, the Via Egnatia, it straddled.
Poised between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, the interface of two climatic zones brings Salonica highly changeable air pressure throughout the year. Driving winter rains and fogs subdue the spirits, and helped inspire a generation of melancholic modernists in the 1930s. The vicious north wind which blows for days down the Vardar valley has done more damage to the city over the centuries than humans ever managed, whipping up fires and turning them into catastrophes. A bad year can also bring heavy falls of snow, even the occasional ice in the Gulf: freezing temperatures in February 1770 left ‘many poor lying in the streets dead of cold’; in the 1960s, snowdrifts blocked all traffic between the Upper Town and the streets below. Yet the city also enjoys Mediterranean summers – with relatively little wind, little rain and high daytime temperatures, only slightly softened by the afternoon breeze off the bay.
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This combination of winter rains and summer sunshine makes for intensive cultivation. Apricots, chestnuts and mulberries grow well here, as do grains, potatoes, cucumbers and melons. Fringed now by the Athens motorway, vegetable gardens still flourish in the alluvial plains – ‘our California’, a farmer once happily told me. ‘There is excellent shooting in the neighbourhood,’ noted John Murray’s Handbook in 1854, ‘including pheasants, woodcocks, wildfowl etc.’ Cutting wide loops through the fields the Vardar river to the west runs low in summer, sinuous and fast in the winter months, too powerful to be easily navigable, debouching finally into the miles of thick reedy insect-plagued marshes which line its mouth. All swamp and water, the Vardar plain in December reminded John Morritt at the end of the eighteenth century of nothing so much as ‘the dear country from Cambridge to Ely’. For hundreds of years it emanated ‘putrid fevers’, noxious exhalations and agues which drove horses mad, and manifested themselves – before the age of pesticide – in the ‘sallow cheeks and bloodless lips’ of the city’s inhabitants.
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‘From water comes everything’ runs the inscription on an Ottoman fountain still preserved in the Upper Town. Fed by rivers and rains and moisture rising from the bay, water bathes the city and its surroundings in a hazy light quite different from that of parched Attica, softer, stranger and less harsh, shading the western mountains in grey, brown and violet. After days of cloudy and stormy weather, the Reverend Henry Fanshawe Tozer realized ‘what I had never felt before – the pleasure of pale colours’. Artesian wells are dug easily down to the water table which sits just below the surface of the earth, and there are plentiful springs in the nearby hills. Winter rains have etched beds deep into the soil on either side of the town, torrents so quick to flood that well into the nineteenth century they would carry away a horse and rider, or sluice out the poorly buried bones of the dead in the cemeteries beyond the walls.
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From earliest times, too, fresh water has been channelled through fountains, aqueducts and underground pipes, attracting the rich and the holy, plane trees, acacias and monasteries, where it bubbles to the surface. Archaeologists have traced the remains of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman water-mills which dotted the water-courses leading down into the city’s reservoirs. Until the 1930s, villagers on nearby Mount Hortiatis produced ice from water-bearing rocks in the thickly forested slopes above the town, kept it in small pits cut into the hillside and brought it down by donkey into the city each summer. With nearby salteries vital for preserving cod and meat, abundant fish in the bay, partridge, hare, rabbits and tortoises in the nearby plain, and oaks, beech and maple in the hills above, it is not surprising that the city flourished.
Romans
A Hellenistic dynasty gave Salonica birth but it was under the Romans that it prospered. Shrines to Macedonian and Roman rulers intermingled with temples to Egyptian gods, sphinxes and the city’s own special tutelary deities, the mysterious Samothracian Kabirii. They were probably worshipped in the Rotonda, the oldest building still in use in the city, whose holy space has since attracted saints, dervishes and devotees of modern art and jazz. Even before the birth of Christ Salonica was a provincial capital with substantial municipal privileges. Later it became the base of Emperor Galerius himself. By the side of the main road running through town the carved pillars of a massive triumphal arch still commemorate Galerius’s defeat of the troublesome Persians. His own urban ambitions, influenced by Syrian and Persian models, were extensive. Today students sun themselves on the walkways above where his now vanished portico once connected the triumphal arch with an enormous palace and hippodrome. Meanwhile, in what is still the commercial heart of the city, archaeologists have uncovered a vast forum, a tribute to Greco-Roman consumerism, with a double colonnade of shops, a square paved in marble, a library and a large brothel, complete with sex toys, private baths and dining-rooms for favoured clients.
This was, in short, a flourishing settlement of key strategic significance for Roman power in the East. We may find it puzzling that Greeks even today will call themselves Romioi [Romans]. But there is nothing strange about it. The Roman empire existed here too, among the speakers of Greek, and continued to exert its spell long after it had collapsed in the West. Yet we need to be careful, for when Greeks use the term Romios, they do not exactly mean that they are ‘Roman’. Hiding inside the word is the one ingredient which has shaped the city’s complex cultural mix more strongly than any other – the Christian faith. The Ottomans understood the term this way as well: when they talked about the ‘community of Romans’ [Rum millet] they meant Orthodox Christians, not necessarily Greeks; Rum was Byzantine Anatolia; Rumeli the Orthodox Christian Balkans. Until the age of ethnic nationalism, to be ‘Greek’ was, for most people in the Ottoman world, synonymous with belief in the Orthodox Christian faith.
With this Christianization of the Roman Greek world few cities are as closely identified as Salonica. When the Apostle Paul passed through, Christians were merely a deviant Jewish sect, and members of the two faiths were buried side by side. By the late fourth century, however, Christianity had triumphed on its own terms and turned itself into a new religion: the Rotonda had been converted from pagan use, and chapels, shrines and Christian graveyards were spreading with astonishing speed across the city.
The figure who came to symbolize Christ’s triumph in Salonica, eventually outshining even the Apostle himself, was a Roman officer called Dimitrios who was martyred in the late third century AD. A small shrine to him was built alongside the many other healing shrines which studded the area around the forum. After a grateful Roman prefect was cured by his miraculous powers, he built a five-aisled basilica to the saint, which quickly became the centre of a major cult, attracting Jews as well as Christians and pagans. The adoration of Dimitrios swept the city, and by the early nineteenth century – the first time we have a name-by-name census of its inhabitants – one in ten Christians there were named after him.
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Like the other major early Christian shrines – the massive, low-sunk Panayia Acheiropoietos [the Virgin’s Church Unmade by Mortal Hands], the grand Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda itself – Dimitrios’s church shows how deeply the city’s Greco-Roman culture had been impregnated with Christian rituals and doctrines. Although the fire of 1917 caused irreparable damage to the priceless mosaics that line its colonnades, enough has remained following its restoration to illuminate the imperial-Christian synthesis: the saint is shown heralded by toga-clad angelic trumpeters, receiving children, or casting his arms around the shoulders of the church’s founders. Another saint, Sergios, is depicted in a purple chiton with military insignia around his neck. The city’s devoted inhabitants are Christians, but they are also recognisably Romans. Incorporated into the church’s structure is part of the original baths, the place of the saint’s martyrdom, which became a site of pilgrimage in the following centuries. And crowning the pillars which line the nave are marble capitals whose writhing volutes and acanthus leaves, doves, rams and eagles, sometimes taken from earlier buildings, sometimes carved specially for the church, cover the entire range of Roman design in the centuries when Christianity began to take hold of the empire. Byzantium is the name we have given to a civilization which regarded itself, and was regarded by those around it, as the heir to the glories of imperial Rome. Its character was defined by its cultural synthesis of the traditions of Greece, Rome and Christianity, and Salonica was one of its bastions.
Invaders
‘Guarded by God, greatly surpassing every city in Thrace and in all of Illyricum as to variety of wealth’, the city was superbly protected by its towering walls, by its fortress perched commandingly above the bay and even by the spit of land which guarded the entrance to the gulf itself. It needed all the divine protection it could get, however, for through the centuries its riches and location seemed to attract one invader after another. In the sea raid of 904 an assault by Sudanese, Arab and Egyptian soldiers, led by Byzantine converts to Islam, left the city strewn with corpses and thousands of its inhabitants were sold into slavery. But that remained an isolated event, for Macedonia was far from the centre of the long-running Byzantine-Arab land war, and in eastern Europe – unlike in Syria and Anatolia – the men of Christ had almost a thousand more years to proselytize before confronting a serious rival in Islam.
Infinitely more important in the long run than the booty-hunters were the nomadic tribes who found Salonica on their path as they migrated from the central Asian steppes to the verdant lands of Europe. Some passed through before veering off to the north and settling elsewhere. But starting in the mid-sixth century, Byzantine military experts became aware of a new threat – the Slavs. According to the court historian, Procopius, they lived in miserable huts, were often on the move, and went to war mostly on foot and armed only with small shields and javelins.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet despite their poverty and their crude weaponry the Slavs had numbers on their side, and quickly became a serious threat to Byzantine rule. In the late sixth century, they reached the walls of Salonica for the first time, and a huge army gathered on the plains outside the walls.
(#litres_trial_promo) Only Saint Dimitrios saved the day: thanks to his inspiration, the defenders suspended curtains below the ramparts to blunt the shock of the missiles hitting the walls, while armed sorties frightened the attackers into retreat. Again and again the Slavs laid siege to the city; each time, Saint Dimitrios, it was said, kept them at bay in a series of miracles which were collected, written down, and re-told over centuries.
The Slav tribes did not disappear. They settled as farmers and traders in villages across Greece and down into the Peloponnese, and the fundamental ethnographic balance between Salonica and its hinterland over the next fourteen hundred years was henceforth established: a predominantly Slavic peasantry cultivated the soil and was kept under the political and economic control of non-Slav elites based in the city.
(#litres_trial_promo) But frontiers are places of interaction, and few frontiers were more permeable or symbiotic than that between the Slavs and the Greeks. The former trickled into Salonica, drawn by the seductive power of a Hellenic education and the upward mobility this bought. Only nineteenth-century romantic nationalism turned the permeable boundaries between Slav and Greek into rigidly patrolled national cages.
Moreover, the city did not only take in the Slavs, but it reached out to them too, and converted them, through the Church, into members of its own civilization. It was two brothers from Salonica, Constantine [better known to posterity by his later name, Kyrill] and Methodius, themselves possibly of Slavic descent, who drew up a new alphabet, adapted from Greek, translated the Christian liturgy into Slavic and spread Christ’s message across eastern Europe. The extent of their success was matched only by that with which others were spreading the word of Mohammed in the Middle East. The seeds of their mission were planted in Dalmatia, Hungary, Moravia and Poland; by the end of the ninth century the pagan Bulgars too had been converted. As a result, a version of the Cyrillic alphabet first devised by these two sons of a Byzantine officer from Salonica is taught today in schools from the Adriatic to Siberia.
The Coming of the Ottomans
Over the next six hundred years, the city became a centre of humanistic learning and theological debate. Many new churches were established, turning it into a treasure-house of late Byzantine art. Monasticism spread to the Balkans from Egypt and Syria, and the great foundations of Mount Athos attracted pilgrims, scholars and benefactors to the city as they made the journey to the Holy Mountain just to its east.
Yet amid this cultural ferment, the Byzantine emperors were staggering from crisis to crisis. Ambitious Bulgarian and Serb rulers were – despite their shared Christianity – more of a threat than they were allies. In 1185 Salonica was pillaged by Norman invaders. In 1204, Catholic crusaders – Franks, as they were contemptuously known in the Orthodox world – sacked Constantinople itself and carved up its possessions. In the east, Byzantine power was largely spent. Turkish tribes had moved in from central Asia, and the rise and fall of the Seljuk sultans turned Anatolia into a battleground between competing emirates. That the empire survived at all was owing to the weakness of its enemies, and the judicious bribery of foreign allies.
In the early fourteenth century, however, as Catalan mercenaries, Genoese, Venetians, Serbs and others fought for mastery in the eastern Mediterranean, an entirely new power began the remarkable ascent which would turn it within two hundred years into the greatest force in the world. Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, initially ruled a small emirate on the frontier with Byzantine territory in Anatolia. To his east lay more powerful Muslim emirs, and behind them the mightiest state of all, that of the Mongol khans. By comparison, fighting the fading Greeks was easy. In 1302 Osman defeated a mercenary army sent out by the emperor and by the time of his death in 1326 he had established his capital in the former Byzantine city of Bursa. Feuding between the Byzantine Palaeologues and Cantacuzenes gave his successors their chance in Europe. In 1354 his son Orhan won a foothold at Gallipoli and less than twenty years later the Byzantine emperor Jean V Palaeologue made his submission to his successor Murad I. By the end of the century, Murad’s successor Bayazid I – the Thunderbolt – was styling himself Sultan.
Thanks to the distortive effects of both sixteenth-century Ottoman ideology (when the empire’s rulers were keen to demonstrate the purity of their Sunni credentials, following the conquest of the Arab provinces) and nineteenth-century Balkan nationalism, the character of the early Ottoman state remains poorly understood. The Ottomans were Muslims, but their empire was built as much in Europe as it was in Asia. In fact before the sixteenth century they probably ruled over more Christians than they did Muslims. Their form of Islam was a kind of border religion spread both by warriors dedicated to Holy War, and through religious fraternities which took over Christian shrines, espousing a surprisingly open attitude to Christianity itself. They were in many ways heirs to central Asian Turkic versions of Islam, like that embraced by the Grand Khan Mongha, for whom the religions of his empire ‘are like the five fingers of the same hand’. They followed the Hanafi school of Sunni law, the most tolerant and flexible in relation to non-Muslims, their rulers married Serbian and Greek princesses – which meant that many Ottoman sultans had Christian mothers – and their key advisers and generals were often converts recruited from Byzantine service.
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One historian has recently argued that before the fifteenth century, the empire was actually what he terms a ‘raiding confederacy’, in which the Ottomans joined with several other great families in the search for land and plunder. Ghazi [frontier warrior] Evrenos Bey, the leader of the most feared squad of raiders, was a former Byzantine military commander who converted to Islam. Evrenos acted in a way which suggested he was virtually a junior partner with the Ottoman emirs, and when he spearheaded the Ottoman assault on northern Greece the value of his support was recognized by them with huge grants of land. The fiefdoms his family won in the vicinity of Salonica made them among the largest land-owners in the empire and a dominant force in the city well into the twentieth century. His descendants included Ottoman pashas and Young Turks, and his magnificent tomb was a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims alike.
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The Turks’ attitude to religion came as a pleasant relief to many Orthodox Christians. Held captive by the Ottomans in 1355, the distinguished archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, was surprised to find the Orthodox Church recognized and even flourishing in the lands under the emir. Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship of the two faiths with him and the emir organized a debate between him and Christian converts to Islam. ‘We believe in your prophet, why don’t you believe in ours?’ Muslims asked him more than once. Palamas himself observed an imam conducting a funeral and later took the opportunity to joust over theology with him. When the discussion threatened to overheat, Palamas calmed it down by saying politely: ‘Had we been able to agree in debate we might as well have been of one faith.’ To which he received the revealing reply: ‘There will be a time when we shall all agree.’
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As Byzantine power waned, more and more Orthodox Christians felt caught between two masters. Faced with an apparent choice between the reviled Catholics (their sack of Constantinople in 1204 never to be forgotten) and the Muslim Turks, many opted for the latter. Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was in fact a powerful one for the Ottomans could be seen as protectors of Orthodoxy against the Catholics. The hope for political stability, the desire for wealth and status in a meritocratic and open ruling system, admiration for the governing capacities of the Ottomans, and their evident willingness to make use of Christians as well as Muslims explain why administrators, nobles, peasants and monks felt the allure of the sultans and why many senior Byzantine noble families entered their service. Murad II’s grand viziers were well known for their pro-Christian sympathies; Murad himself was influenced by dervish orders which preached a similarly open-minded stance, and the family sheykh of the Evrenos family was reputed to be a protector of Christians. In the circumstances, it is not surprising why surrender seemed far more sensible an option than futile resistance against overwhelming odds, and why the inhabitants of Salonica themselves were known, according to at least one Byzantine chronicler, as ‘friends of the Sultan’.
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In the second half of the fourteenth century, one Balkan town after another yielded to the fast-moving Ottoman armies; the Via Egnatia fell into their hands, and even the canny monks of Mount Athos submitted. Salonica itself was blockaded for the first time in 1383, and in April 1387, surrendered without a fight. On this occasion, all that happened was that a small Turkish garrison manned the Acropolis. The town’s ruler Manuel Palaeologue had wanted to resist, but he was shouted down by the inhabitants, and forced to leave the city so that they could hand themselves over. Manuel himself paid homage to the emir Murad, and even fought for his new sovereign before being crowned emperor.
Had the city remained uninterruptedly under Ottoman control from this point on, its subsequent history would have been very different, and the continuity with Byzantine life not so decisively broken. Having given in peacefully, Salonica was not greatly altered by the change of regime, its municipal privileges were respected by the new rulers, and its great monastic foundations weathered the storm. The small Turkish garrison converted a church into a mosque for their own use, and the devshirme child levy was imposed – at intervals Turkish soldiers carried off Christian children to be brought up as Muslims – which must have caused distress. But returning in 1393, Archbishop Isidoros described the situation as better than he had anticipated, while the Russian monk Ignatius of Smolensk who visited in 1401 was still amazed by its ‘wondrous’ monasteries. Christians asked the Sultan to intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, bishops relied on the Turks to confirm them in office, and one ‘said openly to anyone who asked that he had the Turks for patriarchs, emperors and protectors.’
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Unfortunately for Salonica, the Byzantine emperor Manuel could not resist taking advantage of the Ottomans’ own difficulties to try to wrest the city back for himself. For in 1402, the Ottoman army suffered the most crushing defeat of its entire history at the hands of the Mongol khan Tamurlane. Sultan Bayazid died in captivity and his defeat led directly to a vicious Ottoman civil war which lasted nearly twenty years. Exploiting the dynasty’s moment of weakness, Manuel got one of the claimants, Suleyman, to marry his daughter, and to agree at the same time to return Salonica to Byzantine rule. Local ghazis like Evrenos Bey were not pleased, but apart from delaying the withdrawal of the Ottoman garrison they could do nothing. But in 1421 a new ruler, the youthful Murad II, fought his way to the throne, and determined to put an end to the confusion and internecine bloodletting which had divided the empire.
The Siege
In 1430 Sultan Murad II was ‘a little, short, thick man, with the physiognomy of a Tartar – a broad and brown face, high cheek bones, a round beard, a great and crooked nose, with little eyes.’ Only twenty-six, he had already established his place in history by restoring the authority of the Osmanlis after the defeat by the Mongols. Hard-living, harddrinking and a keen hunter, he enjoyed the affection of his soldiers and the respect of diplomats and statesmen who encountered him. He was a brilliant warrior, who spent much of his reign building up Ottoman power in the Balkans and Anatolia, but he preferred a life of spiritual contemplation, tried twice to withdraw from the throne, and was eventually buried in the mausoleum he had designed himself at Bursa, a building of austere beauty, with an earth-covered grave open to the skies. The much-travelled Spaniard, Pero Tafur, described him as ‘a discreet person, grave in his looks, and … so handsomely attended that I never saw the like’.
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According to an Ottoman legend, the sultan was asleep in his palace one night when God came to him in a dream and gave him a beautiful, sweet-smelling rose to sniff. When Murad asked if he could keep it, God told him that the rose was Salonica and that he had decreed it should be his.
In fact Murad had set his heart on the city from the start. So far as he was concerned, it was not only a vital Mediterranean port, but belonged to him by right since it had fallen under Ottoman control previously. After 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his control, there was little the Byzantine emperors could do but watch. The empire itself was dying. The city’s inhabitants invited the Venetians in, thinking they at least would bolster the defences, but the situation went from bad to worse. By 1429, urban life had virtually collapsed, three-quarters of the inhabitants had already fled – many into Ottoman-controlled territories – and only ten thousand remained. Despite occasional Venetian grain convoys, food was scarce. Defenders let themselves down by ropes to join the Turks. Others passed messages saying they wished to surrender: the pro-Ottoman faction within the walls was as powerful as it had ever been, its numbers swelled by Murad’s promises of good treatment if the city gave in.
To the aged Archbishop Symeon, the defeatism of his flock came as a shock. ‘They actually declared they were bent on handing over the city to the infidel,’ he wrote. ‘Now that for me was something more difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths.’ But angry crowds demonstrated against him. When he invoked the miraculous powers of their patron Saint Dimitrios, and talked about a giant warrior on horseback coming to their aid, they heard nothing but empty promises. God had preserved the city over the centuries, he told them, ‘as an acropolis and guardian of the surrounding countryside’. But the Turks were outside the walls, and the villages and towns beyond were in their hands. Their control of the hinterland had turned the fortified city into a giant prison. Resistance meant certain enslavement. In 1429 Archbishop Symeon died, but the Venetians brought in mercenaries to prevent the defenders capitulating and the siege dragged on until in March 1430 Murad determined to end it. He left his hunting leopards, falcons and goshawks and joined his army before the city.
Combining levies from Europe and Anatolia, his troops gathered outside the walls, while camel-trains brought up siege engines, stone-throwers, bombards and scaling ladders. The sultan took up a position on high ground which overlooked the citadel, and sent a last group of Christian messengers to urge surrender. These got no more favourable response than before. Prompted by the sight of a Venetian vessel sailing into the Gulf, and fearing the garrison was about to be reinforced, Murad ordered the attack to begin.
For two or three days the desperate defenders managed to hold out against the assault troops and sappers. But then Murad galvanized his men. ‘I will give you whatever the city possesses,’ he pledged them. ‘Men, women, children, silver and gold: only the city itself you will leave to me.’ At dawn on 29 March, a hail of arrows ‘like snow’ forced the defenders back from the parapets. Crowds of ghazi fighters, spurred on by the sultan’s words, attacked the walls ‘like wild animals’. Within a few hours, one had scaled the blind side of the Trigonion tower, cut off the head of a wounded Venetian soldier and tossed it down. His fellow ghazis quickly followed him up and threw open the main gates.
The Venetian contingent fought their way to the port and boarded the waiting galleys. Behind them the victorious Turks – ‘shouting and thirsting for our blood’ according to the survivor Ioannis Anagnostes – ransacked churches, homes and public buildings, looking for hidden valuables behind icons and inside tombs: ‘They gathered up men, women, children, people of all ages, bound like animals, and marched them all to the camp outside the city. Nor do I speak of those who fell and were not counted in the fortress and in the alleyways and did not merit a burial,’ continues Anagnostes. ‘Every soldier, with the mass of captives he had taken, hurried to get them outside quickly to hand them over to his comrades, lest someone stronger seize them from him, so that any slave who as he saw from old age or some illness perhaps could not keep up with the others, he cut his head off on the spot and reckoned it a loss. Then for the first time they separated parents from their children, wives from their husbands, friends and relatives from each other … And the city itself was filled with wailing and despair.’
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As ever, Murad followed the customary laws of war. By refusing to surrender peacefully, after they had been given the chance, Salonica’s inhabitants had – as they knew well – laid themselves open to enslavement and plunder. Had they been allowed to follow the path of non-resistance that most of them wanted, the city’s fate might have been less traumatic. A few months later, Ottoman troops went on to besiege the city of Jannina, and their commander, Sinan Pasha, advised the Greek archbishop to surrender peacefully ‘otherwise I will destroy the place to its foundations as I did in Salonica.’ ‘I swear to you on the God of Heaven and Earth and the Prophet Mohammed,’ he went on, ‘not to have any fear, neither of being enslaved nor seized.’ The clergy and the nobility would keep their estates and privileges, ‘rather than as we did in Salonica ruining the churches, and emptying and destroying everything.’ Jannina obeyed and remained an important centre of Hellenic learning throughout the Ottoman period: indeed one of Murad’s generals actually founded a Christian monastery there. Salonica’s fate was very different: ruined and eerily quiet, its streets and buildings lay empty.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Acheiropoietos church the sultan held a victory thanksgiving service. Then he had the building turned into a mosque, and ordered a laconic inscription to be chiselled into a marble column in the north colonnade of the nave. There it survives to this day, and if your eyesight is good enough, you can still make out in the elegant Arabic script: ‘Sultan Murad Khan took Thessaloniki in the year 833 [=1430]’.
2 Mosques and Hamams (#ulink_06e6258c-4762-536a-825c-3603c866e2ce)
The Mightiest War
CENTRES OF TRADE, learning, religious piety and administrative control, cities were essential for the prosperity of the Ottoman lands. Yet as the sultans knew, it is one thing to conquer a city, another to restore it to life. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror called the task of reviving Constantinople after its conquest the ‘mightiest war’ compared with which the business of taking it had been merely one of the ‘lesser wars.’ Twenty years earlier his father, Murad, had viewed Salonica in a similar light. The man who for all his military genius was reputed ‘not to love war’, now pondered how to return it to its former glory. No other city in his domain matched its imposing fortifications or its commercial possibilities. It was the key to the Balkans, and the Balkans were fast on their way to becoming the economic powerhouse of his empire. According to Anagnostes: ‘When he saw a city so large, and in such a situation, next to the sea and suitable for everything, then he grieved and wanted to reconstruct it.”
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The first thing he did was to chase out the looters, camp-followers and squatters. ‘The money and slaves which you gained should be enough,’ he told his troops, T want to have the city itself and for this I made many days’ march and tired myself, as you know.’ He began by repairing the damaged walls and ordered the new garrison commander to modernize the fortress. Less than one year later, an inscription above the entrance to the newly built main tower marked the swift completion of the work. ‘This Acropolis,’ it runs, ‘was conquered and captured by force, from the hands of infidels and Franks, with the help of God, by Sultan Murad, son of Sultan Mehmed, whose banner God does not cease to make victorious. And he slaughtered and took prisoner some of their sons, and took their property.’
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Murad’s initial thought was ‘to return the city to its inhabitants and to restore it just as it had been before.’ Anagnostes tells us that he would have liberated all the captives had not one of his senior commanders prevented him. As it was, he personally ransomed members of some of the city’s notable Byzantine families (as was his custom after a siege), and his vassal, the Serbian despot George Brankovich – whose daughter Mara he married a few years later – paid for others. In all, about a thousand Greek ex-prisoners were thus rescued from slavery and returned to their homes. They were joined by refugees who had fled the siege earlier and were now ordered back. Shocked by the scenes of devastation that greeted them, they blamed Archbishop Symeon for having blocked a peaceful outcome to the siege, and some even questioned the powers of St Dimitrios himself. Gradually, the Byzantine caravanseray, public baths, old manufactories, tanneries and textile workshops were brought back to life. The Venetians patched up their relations with the sultan and were allowed to set up a consulate one year after the conquest. But the city was a shadow of its former self, a mere vestige of the flourishing metropolis of forty thousand inhabitants which had existed a decade earlier.
Once Murad realized the extent of its depopulation, he changed his mind and decided to bring in Muslim settlers as well. He handed over many properties to senior officials at his court, and craftsmen, attracted by tax breaks, were resettled from the nearby town of Yannitsa and from Anatolia. Their arrival injected new blood into the urban economy. But it was a major blow to the city’s Christian identity and the Greek survivors were shocked. Salonica, wrote Anagnostes, ‘wore this ugliness like a mourning garment … The hymns to God and the choirs have fallen silent. In their place one hears nothing but alalagmoi [the sounds of Allah] and the noise of the godless who make Satan rejoice. And yet no sign of divine anger has appeared to punish the unbelievers who defiled the churches, made families and houses vanish, looted and destroyed churches and the city.’
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Thousands of the city’s former inhabitants were still enslaved. ‘On numerous occasions we saw Christians – boys as well as unmarried girls, and masses of married women of every description – paraded pitiably by the Turks in long lines throughout the cities of Thrace and Macedonia,’ wrote the Italian merchant-antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona. They were ‘bound by iron chains and lashed by whips, and in the end put up for sale in villages and markets … an unspeakably shameful and obscene sight, like a cattle market.’ (Cyriac’s sorrow did not prevent him buying a young Greek slave and sending her home to his mother’s household). Some converted to Islam in the hope of better treatment; others, yoked to one another by the neck, could be seen begging for alms in the streets of the capital, Edirne, where they were brought to be sold off, or entered the imperial service.
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Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harmful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefactor. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions (in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping with the Muslim custom in cases where towns had been won by force, a few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building materials, turned into private homes or abandoned. But how many were taken over at the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion of the Muslim population. Of the city’s noblest buildings, Ayios Dimitrios was converted into a mosque only in 1491, Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda a century later.
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The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the expropriation of places of worship – for scores of them had lain within the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to serve the city’s sharply reduced population – as the lack of priests to run them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, ‘the majority of the clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition prevails up to today.’ Orthodoxy – though recognized by the Ottoman authorities – was scarcely flourishing. ‘One can hear only from the more elderly people,’ wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, ‘that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what the beauty and charms of each had been.’
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As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamicization of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity shifted into the rural areas where monasteries, especially in Mount Athos, prospered. The cities were more deeply altered. With the newcomers came their faith, their places of worship and characteristic institutions of their way of life. A few Christians converted to Islam, both before and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Anatolia that Salonica was transformed – in the words of the chronicler Ashikpashazadé – from a ‘domain of idolatry’ to a ‘domain of Islam’. The sounds of Christian worship – the bells, processionals and Easter fireworks – were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street feasts, parties and Karaghöz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity shocked later travellers. Minarets – spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured or unadorned – dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visitors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In 1853 the Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each ‘circled by a ring of glittering lamps’; as he sailed away by night ‘they formed a delicate bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon.’
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Murad’s use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced resettlement kick-started Salonica’s economy and more than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian population, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families, the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities, each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams, they had one religious leader for each 166 Muslims, compared with an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly established though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If the urban grid – the course of the walls, the main roads, the location of markets – remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salonica’s physiognomy.
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An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a city medrese informs us about the spread of Muslim learning. The appointee, mevlana Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of 20 aspers daily and instructed to pray ‘for the continuity of the State’. He was to teach ‘sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths of the exegesis of the Quran.’ He was not only to give lessons to students, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly fed ‘so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the position of ulema attains the highest degree.’
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Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul – the three imperial capitals – and its mufti [chief religious adviser] was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day – an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim – 90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times – in 1831 – Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and tekkes [monasteries] were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was ‘a little piece of Istanbul’.
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Mosques and Vakfs
In modern Salonica, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. But as the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret [now gone] and a spacious columned courtyard.
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One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building – the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name [Aladja = coloured] has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.
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Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables – Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in ‘Old Friday’ – the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a bridge over the Struma river, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.
What is striking about these large-scale building projects – especially when compared with western Europe – is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf.
The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his [or her – the donors included many wealthy women] possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details – saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.
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The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the great mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great hamam complex on Egnatia. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten [market building], for the storage of valuable goods. Still in use across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.
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In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey hamam as a place to prepare for the city’s main mosque, only a stone’s throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica’s Bey hamam, with its separate baths for men and women is one of the outstanding examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until the 1960s, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illuminated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut deep into the domed ceiling.
(#litres_trial_promo)Vakfs also fostered trade. In addition to Bayazid’s central market building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather goods, there was the so-called ‘Egyptian market’ just outside the gate to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained ‘all the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee’. Nearby were the city’s tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century. Ship’s biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and taverns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the Abdur-Reouf mosque – ‘a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place of devotion, respite and recovery’ – founded by a mollah of the city, who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the walls, and endowed this too as a vakf. ‘Day and night,’ reports a seventeenth-century visitor, ‘the faithful are present there, because Muslim traders from the four corners of the globe and god-fearing sailors and sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the ships in the harbour.’
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It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. In 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish market, (next door to that owned by ‘the bey’) as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises of ‘Kostas son of Kokoris’). They also had three stalls in the candle-makers’ market, and two cobblers’ workshops next to those owned by ‘Hadji Ahmed’ and ‘Hadji Hassan’. They owned cook-shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water-mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and acquired yet more properties.
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Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, ‘which the Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers, without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return.’ As the key naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the fifteenth-century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the old Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power controlled the region as a whole.
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Running the City
In the Balkans the Ottomans conquered a region whose cities were already in decline as a result of the political and military instability of the previous centuries. They had, therefore, not only to repopulate them but to reorganize them administratively as well. Salonica itself was brought under the direct control of the sultan and placed by him under the supervision of appointed officers. There was no clear legal or institutional demarcation between the city and its rural hinterland – the same officials were often responsible for both and in contrast to the Romano-Byzantine tradition there was no municipal government in the strict sense. City-based tax farmers controlled the local salteries and city officials were instructed to look after the mines in the Chalkidiki peninsula. Moreover large areas within the walls were given over to vineyards, orchards and pasture, so that the countryside came within the city as well: indeed the Christians who patrolled the sea-walls nightly, as ordered by Murad [in return for tax exemptions] were mostly local shepherds and farmers. Nevertheless, the needs of the urban economy and rhythms of urban life themselves required special attention.
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We lack documents which would show us precisely how Salonica was run in the fifteenth century. But on the basis of what was happening in other provincial towns we have a good idea. There would have been a governor who combined military and urban functions – on the one hand, overall responsibility for the garrisoning of the fortifications, gates, local troop contingents and horses; and on the other, keeping an eye on the local tax officials, especially those who had bought concessions for customs duties, and on the needs of the city in general. The collection of taxes and the running of the market were the Ottoman state’s priorities. It laid out, in enormous detail, the duties to be levied on each good brought into the city, and the governor was supposed to check that these were properly paid. The guardian of the gates examined the produce and animals brought in by farmers and traders. Another official called the muhtesib regulated the buying and selling of ‘all that God has created’. He and his assistants paid weekly visits to the flour market and the slaughter-houses, checking weights and measures and monitoring the price and quality of silver. He also kept an eye on the behaviour of slaves and made sure they prayed regularly, and looked out for any signs of public drunkenness or debauchery. Production itself was organized in trade guilds, some – like the butchers, confined to one religion – others (like the shoe-makers), mixed. In Salonica – unlike many other places – guild members did not cluster together in the same residential areas.
This was a system of multiple legal jurisdictions. The governor and several of his subordinates had powers of arrest and imprisonment. The city’s chief law officer and public notary was the kadi but there was sometimes another judge, subordinate to him, whose remit covered ‘everything that could trouble public order’ – murders, rape, adultery, robberies – crimes which in the Balkans at least were often judged not according to the divine law but ‘on the basis of custom’ or royal decree. For the empire had a triple system of law with the shari’a providing a foundation, the body of customary law – adet – which varied from place to place, and the decrees and regulations issued by the sultan himself – the kanun.
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With no municipal authority to watch over the city, it was up to the governor to organize its policing, fire prevention, sewage disposal and hygiene. Policing came out of the pockets of merchants and local people who paid the pasvant [from the Persian word for nightwatchman] to patrol their neighbourhood. Four hundred years later, visitors to Salonica were still being kept awake by the unfamiliar sound of his metal-tipped staff tapping out the hours on the cobbles as he made his rounds. Householders also paid for rubbish to be collected, and were supposed to be responsible for the condition of pathways outside their homes. Guilds had the responsibility to provide young men for fire duty, but the frequency with which the city was hit by devastating conflagrations was testimony to their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, the water system was surprisingly sophisticated – early travellers commented on the abundance of public wells and fountains – and the flow could be controlled and directed in an emergency to where it was needed.
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Thanks to the survival of a 1478 cadastral register, the third which the conscientious Ottoman scribes had prepared since the conquest (but the first to survive), we have a fairly precise picture of who was living where roughly half a century after the conquest. The pattern of settlement indicates a kind of transition from the Byzantine period to the Ottoman city in its heyday. A total of just over ten thousand people lived there – so the population had recovered at least up to the level it may have been when the Ottoman army burst in – roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, with the former still very slightly in the majority. The Muslims were immigrants and there do not appear to have been many converts from among the Christians, in contrast with some other former Byzantine towns.
The Byzantine past lingered on, and could be discerned in the Greek names which continued to be used for neighbourhoods and districts. The Ottoman scribes faithfully referred to Ayo Dimitri, Ofalo, Podrom [from the old Hippodrome], Ayo Mine, Asomat after the old churches. Even Akhiropit [Acheiropoietos] was used although the church had been converted into a mosque; it would be replaced by a Turkish name only in the next century. Large churches – such as Ayia Sofia – and the Vlatadon Monastery still lived off their estates. The garrison was made up of Ottoman troops, but Christians were assigned the responsibility for maintaining and even manning the sea walls and the towers – an arrangement which another governor in the start of the seventeenth century regarded as a security risk and put an end to. As the details of the Vlatadon monks’ property portfolio show, Muslims and Christians lived and worked side by side, probably because Murad had settled newcomers in the homes of departed or dead Christians. Indeed Christians still outnumbered Muslims in the old quarters on either side of the main street.
Only in the Upper Town – a hint of the future pattern of residence – were Muslims now in the majority. There they enjoyed the best access to water and fresh air. The poor lived in humble single-storey homes whose courtyards were hidden from the street behind whitewashed walls; the wealthy slowly built themselves larger stone mansions with overhanging screened balconies and private wells in their extensive gardens, connected to the city’s water system. Cypresses and plane trees provided shade, and there were numerous kiosks which allowed people to escape the sun and drink from fountains while enjoying the views over the town. The highest officials were granted regular deliveries of ice from Mount Hortiatis, which they used mostly in the preparation of sherbet, one of the most popular beverages. In the eighteenth century if not before, they started painting their houses and ornamenting them with verses from the Qur’an picked out in red.
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Imperial edicts had successfully replenished the city with the trades for which it would shortly become renowned – leather and textile-workers in particular – together with the donkey and camel-drivers, tailors, bakers, grocers, fishermen, cobblers and shopkeepers without which no urban life could be sustained. The city was now producing its own rice, soap, knives, wax, stoves, sherbet, pillows and pottery. Saffron, meat, cheese and grains were all supplied locally. Fish were so plentiful that local astrologers claimed the city itself lay under the sign of Pisces. Scribes provide one badly needed skill; the fifteen hamam attendants – a surprisingly high number at this early date – another. And the presence of merchants, a furrier, a jeweller and a silversmith all indicate the revival of international trade and wealth.
Yet the city was still far from its prime. Many houses had been abandoned or demolished, and great stretches of the area within the walls, especially on the upper slopes, were given over to pasture, orchards, vineyards and agriculture. Two farmers are mentioned in the 1478 register, but many more of the inhabitants tended their own gardens (the word the Ottoman scribe uses is a Slavic one, bashtina, a sign of the close linkage between the Slavs and the land) or grazed their sheep, horses, oxen and donkeys on open ground. Centuries later, when the population had grown to more than 100,000, the quasi-rural character of Salonica’s upper reaches was still visible: Ottoman photographs show isolated buildings surrounded by fields within the walls – the Muslim neighbourhood inside the fortress perimeter was virtually a separate village – while the city’s fresh milk was produced by animals which lived alongside their downtown owners right up until 1920. In fact, most of the time under the sultans there was more meadow within the walls than housing. A Venetian ambassador passed through at the end of sixteenth century and what struck him – despite the ‘fine and wide streets downtown, a fountain in almost every one, many columns visible along them, some ruined and some whole’ – was that the city was ‘sparsely inhabited’.
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Yet not nearly as sparsely in the 1590s as it had been a century earlier. For after 1500 Salonica’s population suddenly doubled, and soared to thirty thousand by 1520, putting pressure on housing for the first time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the city. The newcomers emanated from an unexpected quarter – the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were taking Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the Jews from their kingdom. Attracted by Bayazid’s promises of economic concessions and political protection, Spanish-speaking Jews arrived in droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him round, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained within the walls – Muslims, Christians and Jews – this last, which had been entirely absent from the population register of 1478, had suddenly become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.
3 The Arrival of the Sefardim (#ulink_63bee8ba-b9ec-51eb-a1a7-f330e51df0df)
WHEN EVLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantastic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon – ‘may God’s blessing be upon him’ – had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba when she looked down and saw ‘in the region of Athens, in the land of the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue’. There he built her a palace ‘whose traces are still visible’, before they moved on eastwards to Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city’s walls to the ‘philosopher Philikos’ and his son Selanik ‘after whom it is named still’. Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine ‘slew the Greek nation in one night and gained control of the fortress’. Hebrew kings did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually took over, and ‘until our own days, the city is full of Jews’.
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Evliya’s tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time of his visit in 1667–68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families [or Romaniotes]; despite often severe persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a Jewish presence for perhaps the first time in over a millennium. This was why in the 1478 register they did not appear. But then came a new wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Christendom, and the Ottoman willingness to take advantage of this.
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Flight across the Mediterranean
When the English expelled their Jews in 1290, they inaugurated a policy which spread widely over the next two centuries. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of banishment forced thousands from a homeland where they had known great security and prosperity. Sicily and Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples followed suit. By the mid-sixteenth century, Jews had been evicted from much of western Europe. A few existed on sufferance, while many others converted or went underground as Marranos and New Christians, preserving their customs behind a Catholic façade. The centre of gravity of the Jewish world shifted eastwards – to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman domains.
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In Spain itself not everyone favoured the expulsions. (Perhaps this was why a different policy was chosen towards the far more numerous Muslims of Andalucía who were forcibly converted, and only expelled much later.) ‘Many were of the opinion,’ wrote the scholar and Inquisitor Jeronimo de Zurita, ‘that the king was making a mistake to throw out of his realms people who were so industrious and hard-working, and so outstanding in his realms both in number and esteem as well as in dedication to making money.’ A later generation of Inquisitors feared that the Jews who had been driven out ‘took with them the substance and wealth of these realms, transferring to our enemies the trade and commerce of which they are the proprietors not only in Europe but throughout the world.’
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The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power between Islam and Catholicism. One might almost see this as the contest to reunify the Roman Empire between the two great monotheistic religions that had succeeded it: on the one side, the Spanish Catholic monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, the Ottoman sultans, themselves heirs to the Roman Empire of the East, and rulers of the largest and most powerful Muslim empire in the world. Its climax, in the sixteenth century, pitted Charles V, possessor of the imperial throne of Germany and ruler of the Netherlands, the Austrian lands, the Spanish monarchy and its possessions in Sicily and Naples, Mexico and Peru, against Suleyman the Magnificent who held undisputed sway from Hungary to Yemen, from Algiers to Baghdad. Ottoman forces had swept north to the gates of Vienna and conquered the Arab lands while Ottoman navies clashed with the Holy League in the Mediterranean and captured Rhodes, Cyprus and Tunis, wintered in Toulon, seized Nice and terrorized the Italian coast. The Habsburgs looked for an ally in Persia; the French and English approached the Porte. It was an early modern world war.
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In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman authorities exploited their enemy’s anti-Jewish measures just as they had welcomed other Jewish refugees from Christian persecution in the past. They were People of the Book, and they possessed valuable skills. Sultan Murad II had a Jewish translator in his service; his successors relied upon Jewish doctors and bankers. Those fleeing Iberia would bring more knowledge and expertise with them. In the matter-of-fact words of one contemporary Jewish chronicler: ‘A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The French agent Nicolas de Nicolay noted:
[The Jews] have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.
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The newcomers were not enough in numbers to affect the demographic balance in the empire – the Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian, the Asian and Arab lands overwhelmingly Muslim. But they revitalized urban life after many decades of war.
And of all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited most. Since 1453, while Istanbul’s population had been growing at an incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, turning it into perhaps the largest city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind. Bayezid had been concerned at its slow recovery and had been doing what he could to promote it himself. Did he order the authorities to direct the Jews there? It seems likely, although no such directive has survived. According to a later chronicler, he sent orders to provincial governors to welcome the newcomers. Since Salonica was the empire’s main European port, many were bound to make their way there in any case. As wave after wave of Iberian refugees arrived at the docks, the city grew by leaps and bounds. By 1520, more than half its thirty thousand inhabitants were Jewish, and it had turned into one of the most important ports of the eastern Mediterranean.
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Perhaps only now did the real break with Byzantium take place. In 1478 Salonica was still a Greek city where more than half of the inhabitants were Christians; by 1519, they were less than one quarter. Was it a sign of their growing weakness that between 1490 and 1540 several of their most magnificent churches – including Ayios Dimitrios itself – were turned into mosques? A century later still, if we are to judge from Ottoman records, the number of Christians had fallen further, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the whole. While Istanbul remained heavily populated by Greeks, local Christians saw Salonica re-emerging into something resembling its former prosperity under a Muslim administration and a largely Jewish labour-force.
Not surprisingly, Greco-Jewish relations were infused with tension. Occasional stories of anti-Jewish machinations at the Porte, long-running complaints that the newcomers paid too little tax, bitter commercial rivalries between Christian and Jewish merchants, the emergence of the blood libel in the late sixteenth century, even the odd riot, assault and looting of Jewish properties following fire or plague – these are the scattered documentary indications of the Greeks’ deep-rooted resentment at the newcomers. It cannot have been easy living as a minority in the city they regarded as theirs. Jewish children laughed at the Orthodox priests, with their long hair tied up in a bun: está un papas became a way of saying it was time to visit the barber. We learn from a 1700 court case that the Greek inhabitants of Ayios Minas were so fed up with Jewish neighbours throwing their garbage into the churchyard, and mocking them from the surrounding windows during holiday services, that they appealed to the Ottoman authorities to get them to stop. The balance of confessional power within the city had shifted sharply.
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For the Jews themselves, a mass of displaced refugees living with other recent immigrants among the toppled columns, half-buried temples and ruined mementoes of the city’s Roman and Byzantine past, this Macedonian port was at first equally strange and alienating. Lost ‘in a country which is not theirs’, they struggled to make sense of forced migration from ‘the lands of the West’. Some were Jews; others were converts to Catholicism. With their families forced apart, many mourned dead relatives, and wondered if their missing ones would ever return or if new consorts would succeed in giving them children to replace those they had lost. The trauma of exile is a familiar refrain in Salonican history. One rabbi was forced to remind his congregation ‘to stop cursing the Almighty and to accept as just everything that has happened.’
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If Europe had become for them – as it was for the Marrano poet Samuel Usque – ‘my hell on earth’, we can scarcely be surprised: Salonica, by contrast, was their refuge and liberation. ‘There is a city in the Turkish kingdom,’ he wrote, ‘which formerly belonged to the Greeks, and in our days is a true mother-city in Judaism. For it is established on the very deep foundations of the Law. And it is filled with the choicest plants and most fruitful trees, presently known anywhere on the face of our globe. These fruits are divine, because they are watered by an abundant stream of charities. The city’s walls are made of holy deeds of the greatest worth.’ When Jews in Provence scouted out conditions there, they received the reply: ‘Come and join us in Turkey and you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty.’ In the experience of the Sefardim, we see the astonishing capacity of refugees to make an unfamiliar city theirs. Through religious devotion and study, they turned Salonica into a ‘new Jerusalem’ – just as other Jews did with Amsterdam, Vilna, Montpellier, Nimes, Bari and Otranto: wrapping their new place of exile in the mantle of biblical geography was a way of coming to feel at home. ‘The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come there to find a refuge,’ wrote Usque, ‘and this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours.’
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Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though it formed part of the same Ottoman realm. As in Spain itself, the Jews came to feel – as one historian has put it – ‘at home in exile’ and had no desire to uproot themselves once more, not even when the destination was the Land their holy books promised them. But this home was not only their ‘Jerusalem’; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-abandoned homelands – Ispanya, Çeçilyan [Sicilian], Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan [Italian], Otranto, Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others – which survived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917. Their family names – Navarro, Cuenca, Algava – their games, curses and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate Pan d’Espanya [almond sponge cake] on holidays, rodanchas [pumpkin pastries], pastel de kwezo [cheese pie with sesame seed], fijones kon karne [beef and bean stew] and keftikes depoyo [chicken croquettes], and gave visitors dulce de muez verde [green walnut preserve]. People munched pasatempo [dried melon seeds], took the vaporiko across the bay, or enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.
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For this, the primary conduit was language. As a Salonican merchant, Emmanuel Abuaf, tried to explain in 1600 to a puzzled interrogator of the Pisan Inquisition: ‘Our Jewish youngsters, when they begin from the age of six to learn the Scripture, read it and discuss it in the Spanish language, and all the business and trade of the Levant is carried on in Spanish in Hebrew characters … And so it is not hard for Jews to know Spanish even if they are born outside Spain.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In Salonica, there was a religious variant – Ladino – and a vernacular which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as ‘Jewish’ [judezmo], and quickly became the language of secular learning and literature, business, science and medicine. Sacred and scholarly texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because ‘this language is the most used among us’. In the docks, among the fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon, Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, Italian and Provencal. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest. ‘The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, Venice and other commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not better,’ noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of Toledo, found that the city’s Jews ‘speak Castilian as fine and well-accented as in the imperial capital’. They were proud of their tongue – its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive. By contrast, the Jews further inland were derisively written off as digi digi – incapable of speaking properly, too inclined to the harsh ds and gs of the Portuguese.
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Serving the Imperial Economy
Early in the sixteenth century, the Porte entrusted the Jews of Salonica with the responsibility of manufacturing the uniforms for the janissary infantry corps, and over the next century this turned the city into one of the principal producers and exporters of cloth in the eastern Mediterranean. Wealthy Jewish merchants bought up the local supply of wool, imported dyes, and set up poorer Jews with equipment and wages for weaving, brushing, dyeing and making up the finished material. Ottoman authorities banned all exports of wool from the region until the needs of the manufacturers had been met and tried to chase back any weavers who tried to leave. By mid-century, the industry was not only supplying military uniforms, but also clothing the city itself and sending exports to Buda and beyond.
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Another imperial corvée a few years later jump-started silver-mining outside the city – crucially easing the desperate Ottoman shortage of precious metals. Because the silver shortage was one of the main constraints on Ottoman economic growth, Grand Vizier Maktul Ibrahim Pasha brought in Jewish metallurgists from newly-conquered Hungary, and within a few years the Siderokapsi mines had become one of the largest silver producers in the empire, with daily caravans making the fifty-mile journey to Salonica and back. Bulgarian and Jewish miners did the hard work, and rich Jewish merchants were commanded to bankroll operations. But running the economy by imperial fiat in this way was not popular with the wealthy. The bankers complained bitterly at an obligation which was not shared by the community as a whole, and which more often than not led to losses rather than profits. They bribed Ottoman officials, hid or fled the city. The industry itself became such a drain on resources that Salonican Jews shunned the miners when they came into town: ‘They would rather meet a bear that lost its cubs than one of those people’.
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In order to curb the impact of such obligations and to allow for greater fiscal predictability, the city’s Jews sent a delegation to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1562 to plead for a reform of their overall tax burden. The move indicated the surprising degree of self-confidence with which the Sefardim dealt with their Ottoman masters. It took many visits, several years, and at least one change of sultan, before an answer was forthcoming. It could easily have resulted – had the imperial mood been rather different – in the delegates losing their lives, as happened to another rabbi when he tried to negotiate a later reduction in the tax burden. But in 1568, it still seemed vital to the Porte to stay on good terms with Salonica’s Jews and the principal delegate, Moises Almosnino, was able to return with welcome news: in return for the abolition of many special taxes, the community committed itself to collecting and handing over an agreed sum annually to the authorities.
For the Ottomans were not modern capitalists. They did not aim at unlimited growth in unrestricted markets but rather at the creation and maintenance of a basically closed system to keep towns alive – in particular the ever-expanding imperial metropole – and to guarantee the domestic production of commodities essential for urban life and the provisioning of the military. Salt, wheat, silver and woollens were what they needed from Salonica, a list to which they occasionally added gunpowder and even cannons. The primary value of the Jews lay in their ability to provide these things, thereby freeing Muslims for other occupations. After a century of Ottoman rule, more than half of the latter were now imams, muezzins, tax collectors, janissaries or other servants of the state and its ruling faith. They administered the city; the Jews ran its economy. It was a division of labour which suited both sides and the city flourished.
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For the rich, the buoyant Ottoman economy allowed them to invest their funds in attractive and profitable outlets such as the tax farms and concessions upon which the sultan relied for the gathering of many of his revenues. Salonican Jews thus came to play an important part in the regional economy of the Ottoman Balkans. Local Jewish sarrafs [bankers] collected taxes from drovers, vineyards, dairy farmers and slave dealers. They bankrolled prominent Muslim office-holders such as the defterdar and local troop and janissary commanders, and farmed the customs concession for Salonica itself – one of the most important sources of revenue for the empire – and the salt pans outside the city, where at their peak more than one thousand peasants worked. Many had interests in the capital, in Vidin, and along the Danube. Much of the wealth of the Nasi-Mendes family – the most politically successful and prominent Jewish dynasty of the sixteenth century – was invested in concessions of this kind.
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Capital accumulation was easy because Salonica was such a well-placed trading base. It reached northwards into the inland fairs and markets of the Balkans, south and east [via Jewish-Muslim partner-ships] to the Asian trading routes that led to Persia, Yemen and India, and westwards through the Adriatic to Venice and the other Italian ports. Italian, Arab and Armenian merchants all participated in this traffic: but where the crucial Mediterranean triangle with Egypt and Venice was concerned, no one could compete with the extraordinary network of familial and confessional affiliates that made the Salonican Jews and Marranos so powerful. Shifting between Catholicism [when in Ancona or Venice] and Judaism [in the Ottoman lands], they dominated the Adriatic carrying trade, helped to build up Split as a major port for Venetian dealings with the Levant, and wielded their Ottoman connections whenever the Papacy and the Inquisition turned nasty. They combined commerce with espionage and ran the best intelligence networks in the entire region. So confident did they feel, that some threatened a boycott of Papal ports when the authorities in Ancona started up the auto-da-fé in 1556, and one even talked about spreading plague deliberately to frighten the Catholics in an early attempt at biological warfare.
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Greeks and Turks must have been astonished at the assertiveness of the newcomers, for the Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews they had known had always kept a low profile. In the early years, it is true, the Sefardim tried to tread cautiously. Congregants were reminded by their rabbis to keep their voices down when they prayed so that they would not be heard outside. In external appearance, synagogues were modest and unobtrusive and even larger ones, like the communal Talmud Torah, were hidden well away from the main thoroughfares, in the heart of the Jewish-populated district. Thanks to the benevolence of the Ottoman authorities, however, more than twenty-five synagogues were built in less than two decades. After the fire of 1545, a delegation from Salonica visited the Porte and obtained permission for many to be rebuilt.
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But the Iberian Jews had always known how to live well, and their noble families had been unabashedly conspicuous, with large retinues of servants and African slaves. Even before Murad III introduced new sumptuary legislation in the 1570s to curb Jewish and Christian luxury in the capital, the extravagant silk and gold-laced costumes of rich Salonican Jews, the displays of jewellery to which the wealthier women were prone – they were particularly fond of bracelets, gold necklaces and pearl chokers worn ‘so close to one another and so thick one would think they were riveted on to one another’ – the noise of musicians at parties and weddings, where men and women danced together – to the dismay of Greek Jews – were all attracting unfavourable comment. In 1554 a rabbinical ordinance ruled that ‘no woman who has reached maturity, including married women, may take outside her home, into the markets or the streets, any silver or gold article, rings, chains or gems, or any such object except one ring on her finger.’ Murad himself had, according to an apocryphal story, been so angered by Jewish ostentation that he even contemplated putting all the Jews of the empire to death. Fear of exciting envy often lay behind the rabbis’ efforts to urge restraint. It took more than rabbinical commands, however, to stop women wearing the diamond rozetas, almendras [‘almonds’], chokers, earrings, coin necklaces and headpieces which still awed visitors to Salonica in the early twentieth century.
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It must have been as much the sheer number of the newcomers as their behaviour which struck those who had known the town before their arrival. The once sparsely populated streets filled up and population densities soared. At first Jews settled where they could, renting from the Christian and Muslim landlords who owned the bulk of the housing stock. The very first communal ordinance tried to prevent Jews outbidding one another to avoid driving up prices. But the continuous influx led to many central districts becoming heavily settled. Muslims started to move up the higher slopes – enjoying better views, drainage and ventilation, more space and less noise – while the Greeks – mostly tailors, craftsmen, cobblers, masons and metalworkers, a few remaining scions of old, distinguished Byzantine families among them – were pushed into the margins, near Ayios Minas in the west, and around the remains of the old Hippodrome.
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South of Egnatia, with the exception of the market districts to the west, the twisting lanes of the lower town belonged to the newcomers. Here wealthy notables lived together with the large mass of Jewish artisans, workmen, hamals, fishermen, pedlars and the destitute, cooped up in small apartments handed down from generation to generation. The overall impression of the Jewish quarters was scarcely one of magnificence. Clusters of modest homes hidden behind their walls and large barred gates were grouped around shared cortijos into which housewives threw their refuse. As the city filled up, extra storeys were added to the old wooden houses, and overhanging upper floors jutted out into the street. Every so often, the claustrophobic and airless alleys opened unpredictably into a small placa or placeta. Rutted backstreets hid the synagogues and communal buildings.
These were the least hygienic or desirable residential areas, where all the refuse of the city made its way down the slopes to collect in stagnant pools by the dank stones of the sea-walls. The old harbour built by Constantine had silted up and turned into a large sewage dump, the Monturo, whose noxious presence pervaded the lower town. The tanneries and slaughter-houses were located on the western fringes, but workmen kept evil-smelling vats of urine, used for tanning leather and dying wool, in their homes. People were driven mad by the din of hammers in the metal foundries; others complained of getting ill from the fumes of lead-workers and silversmiths – like the smell of the bakeries but worse, according to one sufferer. Living on top of one another, neighbours suffered when one new tenant decided to turn his bedroom into a kitchen, projecting effluent into the common passageway. The combination of overcrowding – especially after the devastating fire of 1545 – and intense manufacturing activity meant that life in the city’s Jewish quarters continued to be defined by its smells, its noise and its lack of privacy. Why did people remain there, in squalor, when large tracts of the upper city lay empty? Was it choice – a desire to remain close together, strategically located between the commercial district and the city walls, their very density warding off intruders? Or was it necessity – the upper slopes of the city being already owned and settled, even if more sporadically, by Muslims? Either way, the living conditions of Salonican Jewry provoked dismay right up until the fires of 1890 and 1917, which finally dispersed the old neighbourhoods and erased the old streets from the map so definitively that not even their outlines can now be traced amid the glitzy tree-lined shopping avenues which have replaced them.
The Power of the Rabbis
Historians of the Ottoman empire often extoll its hierarchical system of communal autonomy through which the sultan supposedly appointed leaders of each confessional group [or millet] and made them responsible for collecting taxes, administering justice and ecclesiastical affairs. The autonomy was real enough, but where, in the case of the Jews, was the hierarchy? It is true that in 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed the Conqueror appointed a chief rabbi just as he had a Greek patriarch: the first incumbent was an elderly Romaniote rabbi who had served under the last Byzantine emperor. But this position probably applied only to the capital rather than to the empire as a whole, did not last for long and was then left vacant. Once Salonica emerged as the largest Jewish community in the empire, dwarfing that in Istanbul itself, the authority of the chief rabbi of the capital depended on obtaining the obedience of Salonican Jewry. But this was not forthcoming. ‘There is no town subordinated to another town,’ insisted one Salonican rabbi early in the sixteenth century. What he meant was that his town would be subordinated to no other.
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The usual rule among Jews was that newcomers conformed to local practice. But the overwhelming numbers of the immigrants, and their well-developed sense of cultural superiority, put this principle to the test. The Spanish and Italian Jews regarded the established traditions of the Griegos (Greeks) or the Alemanos (Germans) as they were now somewhat dismissively known, as distinctly inferior. ‘Ni ajo duke ni Tudesco bueno,’ – neither can we find sweet garlic nor a good German [Jew] – was a local saying. No one likes being condescended to. Outside Salonica, the French naturalist Pierre Belon witnessed an argument that flared up around a fish-stall. Did the claria have scales or not? Some Jews gathered and said that as it did not, it could be eaten. Others – ‘newly come from Spain’ – said they could see minute traces of scales and accused the first group of lax observance. A fist-fight was about to erupt before the fish was taken off for further inspection.
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Rabbis took the same unbending line over the superiority of the Sefardic way that their congregants had done in the fish-market. As early as 1509, one wrote:
It is well-known that Sephardic Jews and their hakhanim [rabbis] in this kingdom, together with the other congregations who join them, comprise the majority here, may the Lord be praised. The land was given uniquely to them, and they are its majesty, its radiance and splendour, a light unto the land and all who dwell in it. Surely, they were not brought hither in order to depart! For all these places are ours too, and it would be worthy of all the minority peoples who first resided in this kingdom to follow their example and do as they do in all that pertains to the Torah and its customs.
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Less than twenty years since the expulsions, this was a stunning display of arrogance – turning the Romaniotes [Greek-speaking Jews], who had lived in those lands since antiquity, into a subservient minority. Such an attitude created friction with Istanbul where Romaniotes were more numerous and not inclined to bow so easily. In Salonica itself, the argument for Spanish superiority was repeated over and over again until it needed no longer to be made. ‘As matters stand today in Salonica,’ commented rabbi Samuel de Medina in the 1560s, ‘the holy communities of Calabria, Provincia, Sicilia and Apulia have all adopted the ways of Sefarad, and only the holy community of Ashkenaz [Germany] has not changed its ways.’ Thus it was not only because of the lack of a Jewish hierarchy comparable to that which structured the Orthodox Church that the model of communal administration suggested by the patriarchate was bound to fail. Salonica’s largely Sefardic Jewry never for a moment contemplated allowing itself to fall under the guidance of a Romaniote chief rabbi.
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Yet not only did the Ottoman authorities apparently not bother with a centralized imperial Jewish hierarchy based in the capital, they scarcely bothered to formalize how the Jews organized themselves in Salonica either. Under the Byzantine emperors, there was apparently a Jewish ‘provost’. No such post was established by the Ottomans. The community could not fix upon a single chief rabbi, and its early efforts to set up a triumvirate of elderly but respected figures met the same fate as the chief rabbinate in the capital. There was thus not even a Jewish counterpart to the city’s Greek metropolitan. For a time, the local authorities appointed a spokesman for the Jews to act as intermediary between the community and themselves. But the only mention of this figure in the historical record paints him as an unmitigated disaster, who used the position for his own advancement, insulted respected rabbis and eventually, through his blasphemous conduct, brought down the wrath of God in the shape of the fire and plague of 1545. We do not hear about a successor: if he existed, he was of no importance. More or less all that mattered for the local Ottoman authorities was that taxes were regularly paid to the court of the kadi or to the assigned collectors. The community as a whole gathered as an assembly of synagogue representatives to apportion taxes. When there were difficulties it sent elders to Istanbul to plead at court, or contacted prominent Jewish notables for help.
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In fact, in many ways it is misleading to talk about a Jewish community in Salonica at all. From the outside, Jews could be identified by language and officially-imposed dress and colour codes. But with the exception of a small number of institutions which were organized for the common good – the redemption fund that ransomed Jewish slaves and captives, or the Talmud Torah, the community’s combined school, shelter [for travellers and the poor], insane asylum and hospital – what the Sefardim created for themselves was a highly de-centralized, indeed almost anarchic system, in which Jewish life revolved around the individual synagogue, and Jews argued bitterly among themselves as to what constituted right practice. Fifteenth-century Spain had in fact been not a unitary country so much as a collection of disparate cities, regions and states united eventually under the authority of a single monarch; it was this keenly local and often rivalrous sense of place that was reproduced in Salonica.
From the outset, congregations guarded their independence jealously from each other. Synagogues multiplied – a fundamental principle of Jewish life was that everyone had to belong to one congregation or another – and within half a century there were more than twenty. Not all were of equal standing or size and many of the larger ones were constantly splitting apart thanks to the factionalism which seemed endemic to the community: before long, the Sicilians were divided into ‘Old’ and ‘New’ as were the ‘Spanish Refugees’. But the congregation was, at least at first, a link to the past and a way of keeping those who spoke the same language together. No significant differences of liturgy or practice divided the worshippers in the New Lisbon or Evora synagogues; only the small Romaniote Etz Haim and the Ashkenazi congregations might have pleaded the preservation of their traditions. Nevertheless whether the differences were liturgical or purely cultural and linguistic, each group preserved its autonomy as passionately as if its very identity was at stake. ‘In Salonica each and every man speaks in the tongue of his own people,’ wrote the rabbi Yosef ibn Lev in the 1560s. ‘When the refugees arrived after the expulsion, they designated kehalim [congregations] each according to his tongue … Every kahal supports its own poor, and each and every kahal is singly recorded into the king’s register. Every kahal is like a city unto itself.’
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This then was what the city actually meant for most Jews – a kahal based in a squat and modestly decorated building, unobtrusive from the street and plainly adorned inside, from which they ran their charity funds, their burial societies and study groups. There they organized the allocation and collection of taxes and agreed salaries for their cantor, ritual slaughterers, the mohel [responsible for circumcisions] and rabbi. Since usually only the taxable members of the community voted on communal policies, the domination of the notables was a frequent bone of contention with the poorer members.
Not surprisingly, such a system was highly unstable. Indeed the Jews were well-known for their dissension and often bemoaned the lack of fellow-feeling. Acute tensions between rich and poor, extreme factionalism, and the lack of any central organization made wider agreement very difficult and delayed badly-needed social reforms: marriages took place with startling informality outside the supervision of rabbis, leading unfortunate girls astray; conversions – especially of slaves – to Judaism were perfunctory; moreover, any rabbi was free to issue ordinances and excommunications, and some on occasions evidently abused these rights. In 1565 it was finally agreed that an ordinance could be applied to the community as a whole only when it was signed by a majority of the rabbis in the city.
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Rabbis formed a privileged ruling caste free of communal or government taxes. There was, of course, an Ottoman court system, presided over by the kadi, an appointed official, who dispensed justice throughout the city. The kadi courts, though designed primarily for Muslims [who were treated on a different footing to non-Muslims], were considerate of Jewish religious demands: they never obliged a Jew to appear on the Jewish Sabbath, and sent Jewish witnesses to the rabbi when it was necessary to swear an oath. But the kadi did not try to monopolize the provision of justice, and it was the rabbinical courts which constituted the chief means through which Jews settled their differences. Because they were never given any formal legal recognition, these existed for centuries in a kind of legal limbo sanctioned by the force of custom. It was an extraordinary state of affairs and one which offers an important clue into the way the Ottoman authorities ran their state: strictly regimented where taxes and production were concerned, it was in other areas – such as law – almost uninvolved and only sporadically prescriptive.
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Interventions by the Ottoman authorities in rabbinical affairs were rare. It is true that a kadi would be deeply displeased to learn that rabbis treated his court with disdain, or to be informed that Jews were being urged by their rabbis not to use them. But only rarely did he stir into action. In one case, a dispute between two contenders for the position of rabbi in the Aragon synagogue led to the kadi stepping in and making the appointment himself; but this rendered the victorious candidate so unpopular with his congregants, who were after all paying his salary, that he was forced soon after to move on. Another kadi dismissed a rabbi for instructing his congregants not to have recourse to the Ottoman courts. But in this case it was the congregants themselves who had shopped their rabbi by bringing his alleged remarks to the attention of the authorities so as to get rid of him, and in any case he was employed soon after by another congregation.
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In fact Jews did attend the Muslim courts, despite rabbinical injunctions against their doing so, usually to register commercial agreements, or divorce settlements in case of future legal disputes [for which the rabbinical courts were useless precisely because of their unofficial status]. Jewish workers ran to the courtroom to disclaim responsibility when a soldier’s gun accidentally went off in their yard and killed someone: only a judgement from the Ottoman judge could help them escape paying a blood price for a death which they had not caused. Otherwise, the Ottoman authorities seemed happy for the rabbis to run the legal affairs of their community, cooperating with them and giving them support, for instance, in enforcing sentences, an area where the rabbis often felt their weakness. Without this backing, the rabbinical courts could not have functioned.
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For the main point about this system was the enormous power it gave to the rabbis themselves. Although they were appointed and paid by the lay notables who ran the synagogues, Ottoman practice in effect turned them into something approximating Jewish kadis – religiously-trained lawyers. But this is not really so surprising when one bears in mind how, over time, Salonica’s Jews were beginning to adapt some Ottoman legal institutions to their own needs – for instance, the charitable foundation [vakf ] and inheritable usufruct [yediki] – and starting to follow Muslim custom by growing their beards longer, wearing turbans, robes and outer cloaks, and making their women cover themselves more than in the past. In the law, as in other areas of life, the Jews of Sefarad were becoming Ottoman.
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The range of issues rabbis pronounced on was vast: tenancy disputes, matrimonial, probate and commercial law made up the bread and butter business, but there were also medical matters – what kinds of venereal disease justified a woman in divorcing her husband; or when abortion was permissible. The traumatic rupture of family life experienced by the refugees was reflected in various dilemmas: Could the son of a Jewish man and a black slave inherit his father’s estate? What was the situation of women whose husbands had converted to Christianity and had remained in Spain? How many wives was a man allowed to take? To help decide, entire libraries were brought over from Spain and Italy, and merchants paid scribes and copyists to transcribe rare manuscripts and translate Hebrew texts into Ladino. In fact, rabbis felt at a disadvantage when forced to rule without the judgements of their predecessors to guide them. One, caught outside the city by a supplicant at a time when the plague was raging, apologizes in advance for offering an opinion without having his books at his elbow.
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Controlling power and resources unmatched by their peers elsewhere, Salonica’s rabbis possessed a degree of training and a breadth of outlook which made the city a centre of learning throughout the sixteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. A centre of print culture too: Jewish books were printed there centuries before any appeared in Greek, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish where religious objections to seeing the sacred texts in print held things back. Equipped with the wide-ranging interests of the Spanish rabbinate, exploiting the familiarity with the holy sources that their availability in translation offered, these scholars simultaneously kept in touch with the latest intellectual fashions in western Europe and pursued extensive programmes of study that took them far beyond the confines of scriptural commentary. They applied Aristotle and Aquinas to the tasks of Talmudic exegesis, engaged with Latin literature, Italian humanism and Arab science, and were not surprisingly intensely proud of the range of their expertise. Insulted by charges of parochialism, for instance, one young scholar challenged an older rabbi from Edirne to an intellectual duel:
Come out to the field and let us compete in our knowledge of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of rabbinic literature; in secular sciences – practical and theoretical fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine; in logic – the Organon, in geometry, astronomy Physics; … Generatio et Corruptio, De Anima and Meteora, De Animalia and Ethics. In your profession as well, that of medicine, if in your eyes it is a science, we consider it an occupation of no special distinction and all the more in practical matters. Try me, for you have opened your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner.
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All this was not love of learning for its own sake – though that there was too – so much as the fruits of the sophisticated curriculum required by the city’s scholar-judges, and their response to the opportunities created by Ottoman policy.
Nor did the rabbis, left to their own devices as they mostly were, ignore the fact that they lived in a state run on the basis of the shari’a: Jews might be represented by Muslims professionally if they lived in certain neighbourhoods or belonged to certain guilds; Jewish men [like Christians] converted to Islam for financial advantage or to marry – even on one occasion to get the help of the authorities in wresting another man’s wife away from him; some Jewish women married Muslim men, or converted to facilitate a divorce when their husband was reluctant to grant it. All these situations made a knowledge of the shari’a desirable on the part of the rabbi-judge. But if a degree of familiarity with secular Ottoman law, the Qur’an and the shari’a was common practice in many Ottoman Jewish communities, a few Salonican scholars took their interest in Arab thought even further. ‘I will only mention the name of Abuhamed and his book, because it is very widespread among us,’ notes rabbi Isaac ibn Aroyo, referring to the philosopher al-Ghazali. Rabbi David ibn Shoshan, blind and wealthy, was said to have been not only ‘a master of all wisdom, both Talmud and secular studies, astronomy and philosophy’, but also ‘very familiar with books on the Moslem religion to such an extent that Moslem scholars and judges used to visit him to learn their own religious tomes from him.’ When he moved to Istanbul, ‘the greatest Arab scholars used to honour him there greatly because of his great wisdom.’ One of his students, Jacob HaLevi, translated the Qur’an, a book which we know other Jewish scholars too kept in their libraries.
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Where Salonica was concerned, the Ottoman strategy proved highly effective, and by attracting a large number of Jews and Marranos, the sultans succeeded in revitalizing the city. By the mid-sixteenth century its population had grown to 30,000 and it generated the highest per capita yield of taxes in the Balkans and the largest revenue of any urban settlement to the west of Istanbul. It would not be going too far to say that this economic success provided much of the fiscal sinew for the sultan’s military triumphs. The Jewish immigrants embraced the opportunity Bayezid II had given them and brought an entrepreneurial and productive energy which astonished the city’s existing residents. The resulting Hispanization of its culture was long-lasting: although there were ups and downs in the state of the economy, and in standards of rabbinical learning, the cultural imprint of Judeo-Spanish was felt right up to the end of the empire. In 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the edict of expulsion, Spanish journalists and politicians visited the Macedonian port. There they found a continuing link to their own past, an outpost of Iberian life which had been forgotten in the home-country for centuries. In the words of the Spanish senator Dr Angel Pulido Fernandez, they were Spaniards without a Homeland; but this was not quite true. Their homeland was Salonica itself.
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4 Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles (#ulink_36694a63-8508-5c70-ab37-84b13727b3d4)
‘When I was in Salonica the second time, I received an order to perform contrary deeds and so when I met a Turk on a Greek street I drew my sword & forced him to speak the name of the First and the Second and to make the sign of the cross, and then I did not let him go until he did it; similarly, having met a Greek in a Turkish street I forced him to say the words ‘Mahomet is the true prophet’, and also the names of the first two & ordered him to lift one finger upward according to the Mahometan custom. And again, when I met a Jew he had to make the sign of the cross for me, and also to pronounce those two names when this happened in a Greek street, while when I met him in a Turkish street he had to raise one finger upward & name those two names. And I was performing those deeds daily’
Yakov Frank (1726–1791), Autohagiography no. 15
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IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE religious affiliation provided the categories according to which the state classified its subjects. Muslims had to be readily distinguishable from non-Muslims, who existed in a position of legal inferiority. ‘Their headgear is a saffron yellow turban,’ wrote the French agent Nicolas de Nicolay of the Salonican Jews in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘that of the Greek Christians is blue, and that of the Turks is pure white so that by the difference in colour they may be known apart.’ Yellow shoes, bright clothes and white or green turbans were reserved for members of the ruling faith, as were delicate or expensive fabrics. A later traveller, Tournefort, found ‘the subjects of the Grand Signior, Christians or Jews, have [their slippers] either red, violet or black. This order is so well-establish’d, and observ’d with such Exactness, that one may know what Religion any one is of by the Feet and the Head.’
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But regulations were one thing, and what people did in real life was another, especially when out of sight of the imperial capital. Boundaries were constantly being subverted by accident or design and in a bustling commercial port in particular, religious communities could not be impermeably sealed from one another. Young Muslim boys served as apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim hamals and casual labourers scoured the docks together for work. When well-off Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian servants and milk-nurses, the children of the families intermingled and the boys often became ‘milk-brothers’, a relationship which could endure for many years. In Salonica, with its unique confessional composition, there thus arose what a later visitor described as ‘a sort of fusion between the different peoples who inhabit the place and a happy rapprochement between the races which the nature of their beliefs and the diversity of their origins tends to separate.’
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The stress Islam laid on the unity of God made possible what was, within its own self-imposed limits, an inclusive attitude to other religions of the Book. For unlike the Jews, who regarded themselves as a chosen people, and the Christians who repudiated and distanced themselves from their origins by focusing on the charge of deicide against the Jews, Muslims explicitly acknowledged their own connection to the earlier monotheistic faiths. Christ himself, though not regarded as divine in nature, was celebrated as a prophet – one particularly stern preacher is even reputed to have had someone executed for blaspheming against his name. The adaptation too of churches and Christian shrines for Muslim use could be seen not as deliberate humiliation and desecration – though it was naturally seen that way by Christians – but as a recognition by Muslims that God lingered already in the holy places of their predecessors.
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One should not, obviously, ignore the powerful evidence for the mutual contempt and hostility that could be projected across the religious divides – the janissaries who beat a Christian arms merchant to death in the market, shouting ‘Why are you an unbeliever? So much sorrow you are!’; the Jewish householders who mocked Christian worshippers during holy festivals; the stuffed effigies of Judas burned with much glee by the Orthodox during Easter. (Muslims were occasionally mocked in public too, but only by those who wished to become martyrs.) Popular hostility was palpable against those who converted and abandoned their ancestral faith. Yet even – perhaps especially – when confessional boundaries were not crossed, the daily life of the city fostered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices.
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For contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested in policing people’s private beliefs. In general, they did not care what their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of piety. This attitude was shared by many non-Muslims too. Visiting Catholics, for whom doctrine mattered a great deal, were struck by the perfunctory character of Orthodox observance. ‘Among this people there is immense ignorance not only of councils but of the Christian faith,’ noted a Ukrainian Catholic in the early eighteenth century. ‘They retain the name of Christ and the sign of the cross but nothing else.’ Such accusations of doctrinal ignorance said as much about the accuser as about Salonica’s Christians, for the latter tenaciously observed the feast-days and customs they felt to be important. But it is true that there was far less theological policing under the Ottomans than there was in Christendom at this time, and this laxity of atmosphere and absence of heresy-hunters fostered the emergence of a popular religious culture which more than anything else in the early modern period united the city’s diverse faiths around a common sense of the sacred and divine.
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Marranos and Messiahs
On Sunday 2 January 1724, a Jewish doctor was chatting with one of his Christian patients and telling him his life story. He had grown up a Catholic in the Algarve where he had been baptized and went to church regularly. But his parents had also secretly instructed him in the tenets of Judaism as well and ‘inside he was a Jew’. At the age of thirty, after constant harassment and petty persecutions, he had left Portugal, and for the past fourteen years he had been settled in Salonica where he had returned to his family’s original faith. ‘So stubborn are heathens in their unbelief,’ his shocked patient confided to his diary.
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It was not only Jews who had remained true to their ancestral faith that took the path of exile from the Iberian lands to Salonica, but also large numbers of so-called Marranos and New Christians – in other words, those who had already converted to Catholicism, in some cases many generations before leaving. Some of them – like the doctor – had kept Jewish customs alive secretly for decades, and equipped their children with two names [‘If you ask one of their children: “What’s your name?’”, reported one observer, ‘they will respond: “At home they call me Abraham and in the street Francesco’”]. On the other hand, many others were fully observant Catholics who had been forced from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition, essentially on the grounds of race rather than religion. In Salonica, this group had trouble adjusting to rabbinical Judaism, and the rabbis in turn found it hard to make their minds up about them. The question of whether or not they were ‘still’ Jews divided learned opinion. Many leading rabbis thought not, since many Marranos had only abandoned Iberia (and Catholicism) when forced out. The 1506 Lisbon massacre of Portuguese ‘New Christians’ induced a more sympathetic attitude, but many of Salonica’s Jews and their rabbis, even those descended from Marrano families themselves, remained highly suspicious of the latters’ motives and regarded them as apostates.
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For as they well knew, religion could often serve simply as a flag of convenience. Catholics returned to Judaism as they had left it, to protect their wealth or to inherit property from relatives; in Italy Jews allowed themselves to be baptized for similar reasons. Traders even switched between faiths as they sailed from the Ottoman lands to the Papal states. One seventeenth-century Marrano, Abraam Righetto, in his own words, ‘lived as a Jew but sometimes went to church and ate and drank often with Christians’. Another, Moise Israel, also known by his Christian name of Francesco Maria Leoncini, was baptized no less than three times as he shifted to and fro, and ‘was making merchandise of sacred religion’ in the graphic words of an outraged commentator. Such men were dismissed by contemporaries as ‘ships with two rudders’, but they were not particularly uncommon. A certain Samuel Levi went even further, converting to Islam as a boy in Salonica – mostly, according to him, to avoid punishment at school – then reverting to Judaism once safely across the Adriatic to marry an Ottoman Jewish woman – la Turchetta – in the Venice ghetto, before ending up baptized as a Catholic by the Bishop of Ferrara.
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Salonica offered the Marranos the possibility of a less concealed, perilous and ambiguous kind of life, and the activities of the Portuguese Inquisition after 1536 led many to make their home there. Yet even those who returned to Judaism for good preserved characteristic features of the old ways. Their past experience of the clandestine life, their inevitably suspicious attitude towards religious authority, as well as their exposure to Catholic illuminism, inclined them to esoteric beliefs and mysticism. Salonica became a renowned centre of Kabbalah where eminent rabbis were guided by heavenly voices and taught their pupils to comprehend the divine will through the use of secret forms of calculation known only to initiates.
And with Kabbalah came the taste for messianic speculation. Each bout of persecution since the end of the thirteenth century had generated prophecies of imminent redemption for the Jews. Their exodus from Spain, the Ottoman conquest of the biblical lands, and the onset of the titanic struggle between the Spanish crown and the Ottoman sultans, stoked up apocalyptic expectations to a new pitch. The learned Isaac Abravanel, whose library was one of the most important in Salonica, calculated that the process of redemption would begin in 1503 and be completed by 1531. Others saw in the conflict between Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent the biblical clash of Gog and Magog which according to the scholars would usher in the ‘kingmessiah’.
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In 1524, a mysterious Jewish adventurer called David Ruebeni arrived in Venice and presented himself as prince of one of the lost tribes of Israel. He gained an audience with the Pope and told the Holy Roman Emperor to arm the Jews so that they might regain Palestine. Crossing his path was an even less modest figure – a Portuguese New Christian called Diego Pires. After rediscovering his Jewish roots and changing his name to Solomon Molcho, he studied the Kaballah in Salonica with some of the city’s most eminent rabbis and gradually made the transition to messianic prophet. He predicted the sack of Rome – which occurred at the hands of imperial troops in 1527 – and then declared himself to be the Messiah, and went to Rome itself, in accordance with the apocalyptic programme, where he sat for thirty days in rags by the city gates praying for its destruction. Before being burned at the stake, Molcho saw the future: the Tiber was flooding over, and Turkish troops were bursting into the seat of the Papacy. The truly striking thing about Molcho is how many people believed in him and preserved and reinterpreted his messianic timetables. Relics of the martyr were carried across Europe and a century after his death, they were still being displayed in the Pinkas Shul in Prague.
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By the mid-seventeenth century, millenarian fever had grown, if anything, more intense. In the centres of Jewish mysticism, Salonica and Safed in particular, scholars prepared for the coming of the Messiah. The apocalyptically-minded saw positive signs in the murderous wars of religion in central Europe, the Turkish campaigns in Poland and the Mediterranean, the admission of Jews into the Protestant lands, and the persecution of east European Jewry by the Cossacks. Expectations – both Jewish and Christian – focused on the year 1666. ‘According to the Predictions of several Christian writers, especially of such who Comment on the Apocalyps, or Revelations,’ wrote one commentator, ‘this year of 1666 was to prove a Year of Wonders, and Strange Revolutions in the World.’ Protestants looked forward to the Jews’ conversion, Jews themselves to their imminent return to Zion. Rumours ran across Europe, and it was reported ‘that a Ship was arrived in the Northern parts of Scotland with her Sails and Cordage of Silk, Navigated by Mariners who spake nothing but Hebrew; with this Motto on their Sails, The Twelve Tribes of Israel.’12
That winter a forty-year-old Jewish scholar from Izmir headed for Istanbul with the declared intention of toppling the sultan and ushering in the day of redemption. Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaiming himself the Messiah on and off for some years while he wandered through the rabbinical academies of the eastern Mediterranean. Helped by wealthy Jewish backers in Egypt, and by a promotional campaign launched on his behalf by a young Gaza rabbi, he was mobbed by supporters when he returned to his home-town. According to one account ‘he immediately started to appear as a Monarch, dressed in golden and silken clothes, most beautiful and rich. He used to carry a sort of Sceptre in his hand and to go about Town always escorted by a great number of Jews, some of whome, to honour him, would spread carpets on the streets for him to step on.’
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It was only, however, once he headed for the capital, announcing he was planning to depose the sultan himself, that the Ottoman authorities became alarmed. By this point, he had thrown the entire Jewish world into turmoil. From Buda to Aleppo and Cairo, thousands declared their allegiance and shouted down the doubters. ‘It was strange to see how the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabatai and his Doctrine flew through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited’, noted an English observer. ‘I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to prepare themselves and Families for a Journey to Jerusalem: All their Discourses, their Dreams and disposal of their Affairs tended to no other Design but a re-establishment in the Land of Promise, to Greatness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah.”
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Nowhere was the frenzy greater than in Salonica, where Zevi was a well-known figure. He had spent some years studying there with local scholars, and preached regularly in the synagogue of the Marranos. In 1659 he had outraged his audience by pronouncing the divine name and was excommunicated and forced to leave. Now, however, the city was gripped by millenarian hysteria. Anticipating the Messiah’s arrival, rabbis ordered acts of penance and fasting; in their enthusiasm some acolytes starved themselves to death, or whipped themselves till their backs were bleeding. ‘Others buryed themselves in their Gardens, covering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads onely excepted remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the cold and moisture: others would indure to have melted Wax dropt upon their Shoulders, others to rowl themselves in Snow, and throw their Bodies in the Coldest season of Winter into the Sea, or Frozen Waters.’ Preparing to go and meet him, shopkeepers sold off their stock at bargain prices, parents married off their children and all sought ‘to purge their Consciences of Sin.’ Christians and Muslims looked on in bemusement and scorn. When a French onlooker smiled at the wild abandon of the crowds, a young Jewish boy told him ‘that I had nothing to smile about since shortly we would all become their slaves by the virtue of their Messiah.”
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Even Zevi’s arrest en route to the capital, and his subsequent detention, did not diminish his influence. To the Grand Vizier he denied ever having claimed he was the Messiah; but at the same time, he addressed the Jews of the capital as ‘The Only Son and Firstborn of God, Messiah and Saviour of the World.’ Delegations visited him from as far afield as Holland, Poland, Germany and Persia, and hundreds of pilgrims made their way to see him. A light – so bright as to blind those who looked upon it – was said to have shone from his face and a crown of fire was seen above his head. He was dressed in expensive garments paid for by his admirers; in return, he sent out instructions for new festivals to be celebrated in his honour. Only in Istanbul did doubters publicly resist his claims. In the Balkans his supporters held sway; women dressed themselves in white and prepared to ‘go and slay demons’. His fame even prompted another Kabbalist, a Polish Jew named Nehemiah, to make his way to Gallipoli, where Zevi was being held, to tell him that the books foretold the arrival of a second, subordinate Messiah, which unsurprisingly he proclaimed himself to be.
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Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi suspected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct – and his well-known views that ‘God permittest that which is forbidden’ – made highly plausible. Although Mehmed IV’s first impulse seems to have been to have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give him the chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interrogated in the sultan’s presence where one of the royal physicians, Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi – a convert whose original name was Moshe Abravanel – translated for him from Turkish into Judeo-Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte, receiving instruction in Islam from – and offering insights into Judaism to – the Grand Vizier’s personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others, he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later. Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse, the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out.
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The Messiah’s conversion was not the end of the matter, however. After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers remained undeflected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves onto the right path – for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all kinds – Jews, Christians and Muslims. Zevi’s apostasy was recast in Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the rabbis managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi’s followers – like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan – never did convert and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.
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The Ma’min
Hundreds more, however, did actually follow Zevi into Islam – some at the time, and others a few years later – and by doing so they gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious communities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Dönmehs [turn-coats], a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Ma’min – the Faithful – a term commonly used by all Muslims.
(#ulink_104e6113-c327-5795-966f-a988e313abcc) There were small groups of them elsewhere, but Zevi’s last wife, Ayse, and her father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Salonica, and after Zevi’s death, they returned there and helped to establish the new sect which he had created. By 1900, the city’s ten-thousand-strong community of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims was one of the most extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional mosaic of the late Ottoman empire.
Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the Sunni-Shia split in mainstream Islam, the internal divisions of the Ma’min stemmed from disagreement over the line of succession which followed their Prophet’s death. In 1683 his widow Ayse hailed her brother Jacob – Zevi’s brother-in-law – as the Querido [Beloved] who had received Zevi’s spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions. Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi’s birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and left Salonica to make the haj in the early 1690s but died during his return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out, both the Izmirlis and the Yakublar [the followers of Jacob Querido] saw themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had ‘withdrawn’ himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology.
(#litres_trial_promo) A few years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and artisanal classes, broke off from the Izmirlis to follow another charismatic leader, the youthful Barouch Russo [known to his followers as Osman Baba], who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi’s spirit but his very reincarnation.
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Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.
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Gradually they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. [Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?] They prayed to their Messiah, ‘our King, our Redeemer’ in ‘the name of God, the God of Israel’, but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city – certainly well into the nineteenth century – was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.
The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma’min girl who had fallen in love with her tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma’min spearheaded the expansion of Muslim – including women’s – schooling in the city, and were prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated huge fortunes, built villas in the European style by the sea and entered the municipal administration. Others were in humbler trades – barbers, coppersmiths, town-criers and butchers.
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Gradually – as with the Marranos of Portugal, from whom many were descended – their connection with their ancestral religion faded. High-class Ma’min married into mainstream Muslim society, though most resided in central quarters, between the Muslim neighbourhoods of the Upper Town and the Jewish quarters below, streets where often the two religions lived side by side. ‘They will be converted purely and simply into Muslims’, predicted one scholar in 1897. But like many of Salonica’s Muslims at this time, the Ma’min also embraced European learning, and identified themselves with secular knowledge, political radicalism and freemasonry. By a strange twist of fate it was thus the Muslim followers of a Jewish messiah who helped turn late nineteenth-century Salonica into the most liberal, progressive and revolutionary city in the empire.
The juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in a fin-de-siècle Ma’min household is vividly evoked in the memoirs of Ahmed Emin Yalman. His father, Osman Tewfik Bey, was a civil servant and a teacher of calligraphy. Living in the house with him and his parents were his uncle and aunt, his seven siblings, two orphaned cousins and at least five servants. ‘The strife between the old and the new was ever present in our house,’ he recollects. His uncle was of the old school: a devout man, he prayed five times a day, abhorred alcohol, and disliked travel or innovation. For some reason, he refused to wear white shirts; ‘a coloured shirt with attached collar was, for him, the extreme limit of westernization in dress to which he felt that one could go without falling into conflict with religion … He objected to the theatre, music, drinking, card playing, and photography – all new inventions which he considered part of Satan’s world.’ Yalman’s father, on the other hand – Osman Tewfik Bey – was ‘a progressive, perhaps even a revolutionary’, who wore ‘the highest possible white collars’, beautiful cravats and stylish shoes in the latest fashion, loved poetry, theatre and anything that was new, taking his children on long trips and photographing them with enthusiasm. He adorned his rooms with their pictures and prayed but rarely.
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Esin Eden’s memoir of the following generation shows Europeanization taken even further. Hers was a well-to-do family of tobacco merchants which combined a strong consciousness of its Jewish ancestry with pride in its contemporary achievements as part of a special Muslim community, umbilically linked to Salonica itself. The women were all highly educated – one was even a teacher at the famous new Terakki lycée – sociable, energetic and articulate. They smoked lemon-scented cigarettes in the garden of their modern villa by the sea, played cards endlessly, and kept their eyes on the latest European fashions. Their servants were Greek, their furnishings French and German, and their cuisine a mix of ‘traditionally high Ottoman cuisine as well as traditional Sephardic cooking’, though with no concern for the dietary laws of Judaism.
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When the Young Turk revolt broke out in Salonica in 1908, Ma’min economics professors, newspaper men, businessmen and lawyers were among the leading activists and there were three Ma’min ministers in the first Young Turk government. Indeed conspiracy theorists saw the Ma’min everywhere and assumed any Muslim from Salonica must be one. Today some people even argue that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk must have been a Ma’min (there is no evidence for this), and see the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the secular republic of Turkey as their handiwork – the final revenge, as it were, of Sabbatai Zevi, and the unexpected fulfilment of his dreams. In fact, many of the Ma’min themselves had mixed feelings at what was happening in nationalist Turkey: some were Kemalists, others opposed him. In 1923, however, they were all counted as Muslims in the compulsory exchange of populations and packed off to Istanbul, where a small but distinguished community of businessmen, newspaper magnates, industrialists and diplomats has since flourished. As the writer John Freely tells us, their cemetery, in the Valley of the Nightingales above Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is still known as the Selanikliler Mezarligi – the Cemetery of Those from Salonica.
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Meanwhile, in the city which nurtured them for many years in its curiously unconcerned atmosphere, little trace of their presence now remains. Their old quarters were destroyed in the 1917 fire, or in the rebuilding which followed; their cemetery, which lay next to the large Sephardic necropolis outside the walls, became a football field. Today their chief monument is the magnificent fin-de-siècle Yeni Djami, tucked away in a postwar suburb on the way to the airport. Used as an annexe to the Archaeological Museum, its leafy precinct is stacked with ancient grave stelai and mausoleums, and its airy light interior is opened occasionally for exhibitions. Built in 1902 by the local architect Vitaliano Poselli, it is surely one of the most eclectic and unusual mosques in the world, a domed neo-Renaissance villa, with windows framed in the style of late Habsburg Orientalism and pillars which flank the entrance supporting a solid horse-shoe arch straight out of Moorish Spain. Complete with sundial [with Ottoman instructions on how to set your watch] and clocktower, the Yeni Djami sums up the extraordinary blending of influences – Islamic and European, Art Nouveau meets a neo-Baroque Alhambra, with a discreet hint of the ancestral faith in the star of David patterns cut into the upper-floor balconies – which made up the Ma’mins’ world.
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The Sufi Orders
The city, delicately poised in its confessional balance of power – ruled by Muslims, dominated by Jews, in an overwhelmingly Christian hinterland – lent itself to an atmosphere of overlapping devotion. With time it became covered in a dense grid of holy places – fountains, tombs, cemeteries, shrines and monasteries – frequented by members of all faiths in search of divine intercession. One of the most important institutions in the creation of this sanctified world were the heterodox Islamic orders – known to scholars as Sufis and to the public, inaccurately, as dervishes – who played such a pivotal role in consolidating Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Western travellers to the empire never, if they could help it, lost the opportunity to describe these mysterious and otherworldly figures with their whirling dances and strange ritual howlings. But dwelling on such eccentricities – abstracted from their theological context – turned their acolytes into figures of fun and overlooked their central role in bridging confessional divides during the Ottoman centuries.
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Many of these mystical orders borrowed heavily from the shamanistic traditions of central Asian nomad life and from the eastern Christianity they found around them. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were powerful forces in their own right, supported by – and supportive of – sultans like Murad II, who founded a large Mevlevi monastery in Edirne. When Ottoman troops conquered the Balkans, they were accompanied and sometimes preceded by holy men who spread the ideas of the missionary-warrior Haci Bektash, the poet Rumi and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband. Their highly unorthodox visions of the ways to God were shared in religious brotherhoods financed by pious benefactions. Some of their leaders – men like the fifteenth-century heretic sheykh Bedreddin – saw themselves as the Mahdi, revealing the secret of divine unity across faiths, and legalizing what the shari’a had previously forbidden. From the early sixteenth century, as the Ottoman state, and its clerical class, the ulema, conquered the Arab lands and became more conscious of the responsibility of the caliphate and the dangers of Persian heterodoxy, these unorthodox and sometimes heretical movements came under attack. In the mid-seventeenth century, Vani Effendi, the puritanical court preacher who converted Sabbatai Zevi, was outraged by the permissive attitude of some of them to stimulants such as coffee, alcohol and opium, as well as by their worship of saints and their pantheist tendencies. Murad IV took a dim view of such practices, and at least one tobacco-smoking mufti of Salonica got in trouble as a result. In practice, however, many leading statesmen and clergymen were also ‘brothers’ of one group or another, and generally they prospered.
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Most major orders had their representatives in a place as important as Salonica where there were more than twenty shrines and monasteries, guarding all the city’s gates and approaches. We know of the existence of the Halvetiye, who expanded into the Balkans in the sixteenth century and gave the city several of its muftis. Even during the First World War, the Rifa’i were still attracting tourists to their ceremonies: Alicia Little watched them jumping and howling, and was struck by their generous hospitality and their courtesy to guests. One nineteenth-century Albanian merchant, who made his fortune in Egypt, allowed his villa in the new suburb along the seashore to be used as a Melami tekke; among its adepts were the head of the Military School, an army colonel, a local book-dealer and a Czech political refugee who had converted to Islam.
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There were tekkes of the Nakshbandis, the Sa’dis and many others. The magnificent gardens and cypresses of the Mevlevi monastery, situated strategically next to a reservoir which stored much of the city’s drinking water, attracted many of the city’s notable families and appear to have been popular with wealthy Ma’min as well. The Mevlevi were extremely well-funded, and controlled access to the tomb of Ayios Dimitrios and many other holy places in the city. They retained close ties with local Christians and were reportedly ‘always to be found in company with the Greek [monks].’ One British diplomat at the end of the nineteenth century recounts a long conversation with a senior Mevlevi sheykh, a man whose ‘shaggy yellow beard and golden spectacles made him look more like a German professor than a dancing dervish’. Together, in the sheykh’s office, the two men drank raki, discussed photography – local prejudices hindered him using his Kodak, the sheykh complained – and talked about the impact a new translation of the central Mevlevi text, the Mesnevi, had made in London. ‘He did not care about the introduction of Mohammedanism into England,’ noted the British diplomat, ‘but he had hoped that people might have seen that the mystic principles enunciated in the Mesnevi were compatible with all religions and could be grafted on Christianity as well as on Islam.’
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Of all the Sufi orders in the Balkans, perhaps the most successful and influential were the Bektashi. They had monastic foundations everywhere and they were very closely associated with the janissary corps, the militia of forcibly converted Christian boys which was the spearhead of the Ottoman army. Often they took over existing holy places, saints’ tombs and Christian churches, a practice which had started in Anatolia and continued with the Ottoman advance into Europe. In the early twentieth century, the brilliant young British scholar Hasluck charted the dozens of Bektashi foundations which still existed at the time of the Balkan Wars as far north as Budapest, most of which (outside Albania, which is even today an important centre) have long since disappeared. In such places, people came, lit candles and stuck rags in nearby trees – a common way of soliciting saintly assistance. In Macedonia, the Evrenos family supported the order; in Salonica itself, it owned several modestly-appointed tekkes.
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The Bektashi themselves had a close connection with the worship of Christ. Their use of bread and wine in their rituals, their stress on the twelve Imams [akin to the twelve apostles], and many other features of their rites all bore a close resemblance to Christian practice. In southern Albania, according to Hasluck, legend claimed that Haji Bektash was himself from a Christian family – he had converted to Islam before coming to recognize the superiority of his original faith, whereupon he invented Bektashism as a bridge between the two. The lack of any basis in fact for the story should not disguise its symbolic truth. As one close observer of the movement explained: ‘It is their doctrine to be liberal towards all professions and religions, and to consider all men as equal in the eyes of God.’
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The Powers of the City
Beneath the confessional divides and helped by such creeds, there existed a kind of submerged popular religion, defined by common belief in the location and timing of divine power. Take the calendar itself: whether under their Christian or Muslim titles, St George’s Day in the spring and St Dimitrios’s Day in the winter marked key points in the year for business and legal arrangements affecting the entire society, the dates for instance when residential leases expired, shepherds moved between lowland and upland pastures, and bread prices were set by the local authorities.
Salonica’s Casimiye Mosque, which had formerly been St Dimitrios’s church, saw the cult of the city’s patron saint continuing under Muslim auspices. Casim himself was an example – one of many in the Balkans – of those holy figures who were Islamicized versions of Christian saints. Dimitrios’s tomb was kept open for pilgrims of both faiths by the Mevlevi officials who looked after the mosque. Near the very end of the empire, a French traveller caught the final moments of this arrangement and described how it worked. He was ushered into a dark chapel by the hodja, together with two Greeks who had come for divine help. This conversation followed:
‘Your name?’ asked the Turk …‘Georgios’, replied the Greek, and the Turk, repeating ‘Georgios’, held the knot in the flame, then commented to the Greek with an air of satisfaction that the knot had not burned. A second time. ‘The name of your father and your mother?’ ‘Nikolaos my father, Calliope my mother.’ ‘And your children?’ And when he had thus made three knots carefully, he put the sacred cord in a small packet which he dipped in the oil of the lamp, added a few bits of soil from the tomb, wrapped it all up and handed it to the Greek who seemed entirely content. Then he explained: ‘If you are ill, or your father, your mother, your children, put the knot on the suffering part and you will be cured.’ After which, turning to me, the Turk asked ‘And you?’ I shook my head. The Greek was amazed and believed I had not understood and explained it all to me. When I continued to refuse he seemed regretful. ‘Einai kalon’ [It is good] he told me sympathetically … and the two Greeks, together with the Muslim sacristan, left the mosque happily.
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These rituals were not especially unusual, though the setting was. ‘If your heart is perplexed with sorrow,’ the Prophet Mohammed is said to have advised, ‘go seek consolation at the graves of holy men.’ Muslims – especially women – made the ziyaret at times of domestic need, and the Arabic term was taken over by Salonica’s Jews, who spoke of going on a ziyara to pray at the tomb of rabbis or deceased relatives. Christian women used both the Jewish cemetery and Muslim mausoleums when collecting earth from freshly dug graves to use against evil spirits. Mousa Baba, Meydan-Sultan Baba and Gul Baba gathered pilgrims to their tombs, even after the twentieth-century exodus of the city’s Turks. In the 1930s, Christian women from nearby neighbourhoods were still lighting candles at the tomb of Mousa Baba and asking his help [against malaria], to the surprise of some Greek commentators who could not understand how they could do this ‘in a city where hundreds of martyrs and holy saints were tortured and martyred in the name of Christ’. The answer was that for many of those who came to seek his help, Mousa Baba was not really a Muslim holy man at all. Rather he was Saint George himself, who had metamorphosed into a Turk with supernatural powers: ‘I heard this when we refugees first came here from Thrace, from a Turkish woman, who told me she had heard it from elderly Turkish women who had explained it to her.’ Why had Saint George assumed this disguise? For the same reason that Sabbatai Zevi had converted, according to his followers: to make the unbelievers believe.
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Power to keep the dead at rest was one of the chief attributes of religious authority, the reverse side of the power to curse or excommunicate. Both powers formed a key weapon in the armoury of the city’s spiritual leaders but also transcended the bounds of religious community. According to a local story an archbishop converted to Islam and became a leading mollah. While he was still a Christian he had, in a moment of anger, cursed one of his congregation: ‘May the earth refuse to receive you!’ The man died and after three years passed his body was exhumed. Of course it was found in pristine condition ‘just as if he had been buried the day before’ – the power of the excommunication had evidently endured even though the cleric himself had since converted, and only he could revoke it, even though he was now a Muslim: ‘Having obtained the Pasha’s permission, he repaired to the open tomb, knelt beside it, lifted his hands and prayed for a few minutes. He had hardly risen to his feet when, wondrous to relate, the flesh of the corpse crumbled away from the bones and the skeleton remained bare and clean as it had never known pollution.’ Christian, Muslim or Jew, one looked wherever it was necessary to make the spell work and bring peace to the living and the dead.
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For the city was peopled by spirits – evil as well as good. ‘There are invisible influences everywhere in Turkey’, writes Fanny Blunt, a long-time resident of Salonica, in her classic study of Ottoman beliefs and customs – vampires in cemeteries, spirits guarding treasures buried in haunted houses, djinns in abandoned konaks, and enticing white-clad peris who gathered anywhere near running water. Fountains were dangerous, especially at certain times of the year, and antiquities like the Arch of Galerius were well known to possess evil powers, if approached from the wrong angle. Church leaders tried to draw doctrinal distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of the supernatural, but Salonica’s inhabitants did not bother. If the rabbi or bishop could not help them, they appealed to witches, wise men or healers. The religious authorities never felt seriously threatened by such practices, and it is a striking difference with Christian Europe that there were never witchcraft trials in the Ottoman domains. Devils, demons and evil spirits – euphemistically termed ‘those from below’, or ‘those without number’, or more placatingly, ‘the best of us’ – were a fact of life.
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‘De ozo ke lo guadre el Dio – May God guard him from the Eye’, elderly Jewish ladies muttered. Was there anyone in the city who did not fear being jinxed by the evil eye – to mati for the Greeks, the fena göz for the Turks – and sought remedies against it? All avoided excessive compliments and feared those who paid them, cursing them under their breath. Moises Bourlas tells us in his wonderful memoirs how his mother was sitting out in the sun one fine Saturday with her neighbours, gossiping and chewing pumpkin seeds when some gypsy fortune-tellers passed them and shouted: ‘Fine for you, ladies, sitting in the sun and eating pumpkin seeds!’ To which his mother instantly and prudently replied – sotto voce in Judeo-Spanish, so that they could not understand: ‘Tu ozo en mi kulo’ [Your eye in my arse].
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Fanny Blunt lists accepted remedies: ‘garlic, cheriot, wild thyme, boar’s tusks, hares’ heads, terebinth, alum, blue glass, turqoise, pearls, the bloodstone, carnelian, eggs [principally those of the ostrich], a gland extracted from the neck of the ass, written amulets and a thousand other objects.’ She tried out the ass gland on her husband, the British consul, when he was ill, and reported it a success. For keeping babies in good health, experts recommended old gold coins, a cock’s spur or silver phylacteries containing cotton wool from the inauguration of a new church [for Christians], bits of paper with the Star of David drawn on them [Jews], or the pentagram [Muslims]. Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child.
Spells required counter-spells. Mendicant dervishes and gypsy women were believed to know secret remedies, especially for afflicted animals. Hodjas provided pest control in the shape of small squares of paper with holy inscriptions that were nailed to the wall of afflicted rooms and Jews wore amulets containing verses from the Torah to ward off the ‘spirits of the air’ which caused depression or fever. Blunt describes some striking cases of cross-faith activity: a Turkish woman snatching hairs from the beard of a Jewish pedlar as a remedy for fever; Muslim children having prayers read over them in church; Christian children similarly blessed by Muslim hodjas, who would blow or spit on them, or twist a piece of cotton thread around their wrist to stop their fever. Doctors were not much esteemed; the reputation of la indulcadera – the healer – stood much higher. Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled.
Orthodoxy: Tax-Collectors and Martyrs
But we should not paint too rosy a picture of the city’s religious possibilities under Ottoman rule. Life was clearly better for some than for others. Muslims were in the ascendant, and the assertive Sefardic Jews, who dominated numerically, found their rule welcoming and were duly grateful. Mosques and synagogues proliferated as a result of official encouragement, and even the extraordinary episode of Sabbatai Zevi can be seen as illustrating the Ottoman state’s flexibility with regard to the Jews, who lived in Salonica, as a Jesuit priest noted in 1734, with ‘more liberty and privileges than anywhere else’.
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For the city’s Christians, on the other hand, Ottoman rule was very much harder to accept. The Byzantine scholar Ioannis Evgenikos lamented the capture of ‘the most beautiful and God-fearing city of the Romans’, and a sense of loss continued to flow beneath the surface of Orthodox life. After all, not even Saint Dimitrios, its guardian, had saved it from ‘enslavement’. Catholic visitors to the Greek lands often saw their plight as a punishment for their sins. So did many Orthodox believers. An anonymous seventeenth-century author pleaded in tones of desperation with the city’s saint:
O great martyr of the Lord Christ, Dimitrios, where are now the miracles which you once performed daily in your own country? Why do you not help us? Why do you not reappear to us? Why, St Dimitrios, do you fail us and abandon us completely? Can you not see the multitude of hardships, temptations and debts that crowd upon us? Can you not see our shame and disgrace as our enemies trample upon us, the impious jeer at us, the Saracens mock us, and everybody laughs at us?
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The small size of the surviving Orthodox population, its lack of wealth, and the constant erosion of its power left none in any doubt of its plight. The Byzantine scholars who had made its intellectual life so vibrant fled abroad – Theodoras Gazis to Italy, Andronikos Kallistos ending up in London – where they helped hand down classical Greek texts to European humanists. Within the city, while rabbinical scholarship flourished, the flame of Christian learning flickered tenuously through the eighteenth century. Such intellectual and spiritual discussions as were taking place within the empire were going on in the monasteries of Mount Athos itself, in the capital, or in the Danubian Principalities to the north. Salonica – the ‘mother of Orthodoxy’ – became a backwater. Bright local Christian boys usually ended up being schooled elsewhere. It is scarcely a coincidence that one of the best-known works to have been composed by a sixteenth-century scholar from the city, the cleric Damaskinos Stouditis (1500–1580), was a collection of religious texts put into simple language for the use of unlearned priests. Stouditis himself had been educated in Istanbul.
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First among the temptations that afflicted its Christians, of course, was Islam itself. During the prosperous sixteenth century, in particular, many poor young villagers flocked into the city from the mountains, and these newcomers soon formed a very large part of the local Christian population. Some of them, finding themselves adrift and vulnerable to the dangers facing those far from home, converted for the sake of greater security. Other converts were Christian boys apprenticed to Muslim craftsmen, or girls who had entered Muslim households as domestic servants: in both cases the economic power of the employers paved the way to conversion. But this was a dramatic step at the best of times and one which laid the individual open to unrestrained criticism from his relatives and community. Relatively few Christians (or Jews) with families in Salonica appear to have abandoned their faith. To judge from the mid-eighteenth century, which is when the first data became available, the overall numbers of converts were not great – perhaps ten cases a year in the city and its hinterland.
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Even so, Orthodox clerics were always deeply anxious about this. A monk called Nikanor (1491–1549) travelled in the villages to the west of the city, urging the inhabitants to stay true to Christ: ‘by his sweet precepts and the shining example of his virtuous conduct,’ we are told by his hagiographer, ‘he was able to hold many in Christ’s faith’ before retiring to the solitude of an inaccessible cave high above the Aliakmon river. Nikanor also built a monastery nearby, and in his will urged the monks to refrain from begging for alms without permission, not to mix with those of ‘another faith’ and to avoid seeking justice in Turkish courts, stipulations which suggest the extent to which monks and other pious Christians were usually interacting with the Ottoman authorities in one way or another.
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In fact, the very manner in which the Church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was brought within the Ottoman administrative system added to Christian woes. Patriarchs paid an annual tribute to the Porte and acted as tax-collectors from the Christians. When one sixteenth-century Patriarch toured the Balkans, Suleyman the Magnificent ordered officials to summon the metropolitans, bishops and other clerics to help him collect ‘in full the back payments from the past years and the present year in the amounts which will be established by your examination.’ In the early eighteenth century, the city’s kadi was told to help when it turned out that ‘Ignatius, the metropolitan of Salonica, owes two years’ taxes and resists fulfilling his obligations towards the Patriarchate.’ Fiscal and religious power were separated in both the Muslim and the Jewish communities [where rabbis were salaried employees of their congregations]; for the Orthodox they overlapped, damaging the clergy’s relations with their flock.
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The buying and selling of ecclesiastical favours and offices did not help either: in the seventeenth century alone, there were sixty-one changes of Patriarch. Most Metropolitans of Salonica had run up debts to get into office, and one of the earliest records to survive in the city’s archives is a 1695 Ottoman decree from the Porte on behalf of a Christian money-lender ordering Archbishop Methodios to pay what he owed him. The problem travelled down the hierarchy. One priest demanded to be paid before he would read the sacrament to a dying man; others were accused of taking payment to hear confession. The more their seniors took from them, the more the priests required.
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Money also explained the endless tussles between Salonica’s religious leaders and the lay council of Christian notables, the archons, which supposedly ran the non-religious side of community affairs. When the archons demanded control over management of the city’s charitable Christian foundations, the Patriarchate angrily told them ‘not to involve themselves in priestly affairs’. ‘There is order in everything,’ they were rebuked, ‘and all things in the world, heavenly and mundane, royal and ecclesiastical and civil, right down to the smallest and least important, have their order before God and before men, according to which they are governed and stand in their place.’ The message was simple: there was no way that ‘lay people’, whatever their motivations, would be allowed to ‘become rebels and controllers of church affairs’. Ironically, the main defence against the rapacity of the clergy were the Ottoman authorities themselves. In 1697 Salonica’s Christians complained directly to the Porte about the demands of their bishops, and the kadi was instructed to look into the matter. Twenty years later, their anger was so great that they even got the local Ottoman officials to throw one archbishop in jail until he could be removed.
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Three hundred years after the conquest, the city was still suffering from a dearth of priests, and lay figures regularly performed ecclesiastical duties. ‘Not many years ago,’ reports the Jesuit Father Souciet in 1734, ‘a lay figure married with children not only had charge of the revenues of the archbishop but acted even as a kind of vicar, giving the priests permission to celebrate and confess, and preventing them as and when he saw fit. I am not even sure he did not claim to be able to carry out excommunications.’ The underlying problem was economic, for until the commercial boom of the mid-eighteenth century, the Christians of the city were, on the whole, of modest means. Only a few descendants of the great Byzantine families still lived there; most were artisans, shopkeepers, sailors or traders.
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For them, faith was not really a matter of theology. Poorly educated, few could bridge the gap between the complex formal Greek of the church and the language of daily life, which for many Orthodox Christians was often not Greek at all, but Slavic or Vlach. ‘The priests and even the pastors – the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops – are extremely simple and unlearned men, who do not know the Hellenic language and have no explanations in the vulgar tongue, so that they don’t know and don’t understand anything they read,’ noted a visiting Ukrainian notable. ‘The people don’t know anything at all except the sign of the cross [and this not everyone]. When we asked them about the Our Father, they would answer that “this is the priest’s business, not ours.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes this uncertainty could be taken surprisingly far, as when a young Greek village priest asked whether Jesus was really God [though perhaps the questioner had been influenced by the scorn with which both Muslims and Jews treated such a claim].
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On the other hand, Salonica’s Christians were deeply attached to their traditional customs – especially fasting, about which they were extremely conscientious – and to the observance of local festivals, which were celebrated vigorously in the city and the neighbouring countryside, combining spiritual and commercial satisfaction. On Saint Dimitrios’s day a majestic service was attended by all the suffragan bishops. There was also a rapidly developing cult of Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century archbishop of the city, whose mystical and political views had made him a highly controversial figure in his lifetime. To the surprise of visiting Christians, who knew him for his much-disputed theology, his memory was revered as that of a saint and his mummified body, laid out on a bier, attracted increasing numbers of worshippers.
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Orthodox Christians were constantly reminded that theirs was a second-class faith: they were not allowed to ring church bells or even beat wooden clappers to bring the faithful to prayer. Yet so far as the Ottomans were concerned, they were a people of the Book and one distinctly superior to the Catholic Franks. During the long wars with both Venice and Austria, Catholic missionaries were accused of leading the local Orthodox astray, and introducing them to ‘polytheism, cunning and craftiness’. When an early eighteenth-century visitor discussed Christianity with one of Salonica’s mollahs, the latter told him ‘that the three faiths, the Papist, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist are the worst, while the Greek is better than all.’ According to him, many of the town’s Muslim scholars studied the Gospels in Arabic and valued the Greek Church above the rest because ‘the Greeks don’t depart from evangelical teachings and from church traditions and … they don’t introduce anything new into their religion or remove anything.’ The very conservatism denounced by visiting Jesuits was thus understood and appreciated by Muslims.
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This sympathy, however, had its limits. The primacy of the ruling faith was axiomatic, and any public assertion of the superiority of Christianity over Islam was punished with severity. But even here Ottoman and Orthodox interests fitted strangely together, since the church, itself founded through an act of martyrdom, regarded the public suffering of new martyrs as a way of demonstrating the tenacity of Christian belief. Priests or monks instructed would-be candidates who then presented themselves to the authorities, or carried out acts designed to lead to their arrest, dragging crosses through the streets, or loudly insulting Mohammed. Seeing apostates – in particular – return to the fold was, wrote one priest, ‘as if one were to see spring flowers and roses bloom in the heart of winter.’
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Those who died for their faith were the popular voice of spiritual protest – the senior church hierarchy, by contrast, were servants of the sultan – and their deeds were carefully recorded by monks at the time. Even today modern editions of these ‘witnesses for Christ’ circulate within the Orthodox world, with stories which are well worth reading for their unexpected insights into Ottoman religious culture. Like most Christians in Salonica, the city’s ‘neo-martyrs’ were humble men [and a few women] – a painter, a coppersmith, a fisherman, gardener, tailor, baker and a servant to take just a few of them. Michael, for instance, who was executed in 1547, was one of the many Christian immigrants from the mountains; a baker, he had got into trouble after chatting about religion with a Muslim boy who came to buy bread. Kyrill’s father died young and he was brought up by his uncle, who had converted to Islam. Alexandros, who also converted, had wandered the Arab world as a dervish, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca, before returning to his ancestral faith, and testifying – in the words that distinguished Christians from Muslims – that ‘one is three and three are one’. Although many of these martyrs had converted to Islam before seeing the error of their ways, what had induced their initial apostasy did not matter to the church – it might have been nothing more noble than the desire to pay lower taxes or to escape punishment for earlier crimes. All their sins were wiped out by their intention to repent and to testify to the superiority of the true faith.
Nor were all martyrs apostates. Some sought to emulate the martyrs of the early Church, or wanted to blot out the stain on the family name caused by the conversion of relatives. Aquilina’s mother had remained a Christian when her father had converted to Islam and brought shame on them. Nicetas was outraged when relatives became Muslims and he decided on martyrdom as a way of upholding the family honour. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land inspired one or two to follow in the footsteps of The Lord. In 1527 the noble Macarios, a monk on Mount Athos, became ‘completely consumed with the heartfelt desire to finish his life with a martyric death.’ He went into the streets of Salonica and began to tell a large crowd of Muslims about the teachings of Christ. Brought before the kadi, Macarios prayed that the judge might come ‘to know the true and irreproachable Faith of the Christians’ and ‘be extricated from the erroneous religion of your fathers by the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity’. His martyrdom followed.
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The path to death could be very dramatic indeed. An eighteen-year-old French convert to Islam repented of his apostasy, confessed to a Greek priest, and then – this appears to have been exceptional even among the neo-martyrs – put a crown of thorns on his head, a small cross round his neck, thrust small spikes into his limbs, and paraded in public, whipping himself and shouting ‘I was an apostate but I am a Christian’. He was arrested, rejected various attempts to get him to return to Islam, and was put to death. Christodoulos, a tanner, was so disturbed to hear of a fellow-Christian planning to convert, that he took a small cross, entered the tavern where the convert’s circumcision was about to take place, and tried to stop the ceremony. He was arrested, beaten and hanged outside the door of the church of Ayios Minas.
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Executions were as public as the celebrations which marked conversion itself. In fact vast crowds gathered to witness the last moments of the dying and to pick up relics of martyrdom. Following the Frenchman’s death, ‘the Christians took away his corpse and buried it with honour in a church’. Many people carefully collected drops of his blood and pieces of his clothing, just as they did with the holy remains of other martyrs: the Ottoman authorities respected this practice and made no attempt to stop it. When a young Bulgarian girl who spurned the advances of a Turk, died after being thrown into prison falsely accused of having pledged to convert to Islam, the guards noticed a great light emanating from the room, and were so struck by the miracle that they spread the news around the city. Once again, the clothes of the martyr were carefully parcelled out as relics.
Ottoman reactions generally ranged from bewilderment to anger. Officials considered would-be martyrs insane, and hence not responsible for their actions. Romanos was regarded as mad and consigned to the galleys the first time round. Cyprian was dismissed as a lunatic by the pasha of Salonica and having ‘reasoned that he would not receive the martyric end he desired at the hands of the Turks in that unbelieving city’ took himself off to the capital where by writing an anti-Muslim epistle to the grand vizier and having it specially translated into Turkish, he achieved the desired goal. The biographer of Nicetas recounts an extraordinary conversation that took place in 1808 between that would-be martyr and the mufti of Serres. After offering him coffee, the latter asked Nicetas if he had gone mad, coming into the town and preaching to Muslims that they should abandon their faith. Nicetas explained that it was only zeal for the true faith that motivated him, and he began to debate the merits of the two religions. Other Turks asked him if he had been forced to do this, and this too he denied. But the mufti only became truly angry when Nicetas described Mohammed as ‘a charlatan and a sensual devil’. ‘Monk!’, said the mufti. ‘It is obvious you are an ill-mannered person. I try to set you free, but by your own brutal words you cause your own death.’ To which Nicetas replied: ‘This is what I desire, and for this have I come freely to offer myself as a sacrifice for the love of my Master and God, Jesus Christ.’
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What is surprising in many of these accounts is how reluctant the kadis were to order the death sentence. They could be forced to change their minds by local Muslim opinion, but they must have been conscious of the power of religious self-sacrifice and unwilling to add to the list of victims. As it is, martyrdom was not a common choice, and the vast majority of Christians who converted to Islam evidently never returned to the fold. The hagiographer of the martyr Nicetas suggests that by the early nineteenth century a note of scepticism was beginning to prevail among Christians themselves. A Salonica merchant, he tells us, cast doubt on the merit of what Nicetas had done, saying ‘it is not necessary to go to martyrdom in these days, when there is no persecution of the Christian church.’ Only after a terrifying dream, in which a loud voice told him that Nicetas was indeed a true martyr, did he change his mind. Following British pressure in the 1840s, capital punishment for apostasy was abandoned, and the need for such dreams ceased.
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Sacred Geographies
In 1926, an eminent Albanian Bektashi sheykh, Ahmad Sirri Baba, stopped for a rest in Salonica during arduous travels which took him from Albania to Cairo, Baghdad, Karbala and back. By this point, the city’s Muslim population had been forced to leave Greece entirely as a result of the Greco-Turkish 1923 population exchange, and the tekkes had been abandoned. The sheykh’s journeys, as he moved between the worlds of Balkan and Middle Eastern Islam, were a last indication of channels of religious devotion which had once linked the city with extraordinarily diverse and far-flung parts of the world.
For centuries, Muslims from all over the Balkans congregated in Salonica to find a sea passage to Aleppo or Alexandria for the haj caravans to Mecca. Christians followed their example, acquiring the title of Hadji after visiting their own holy places. Others came to visit the remains of St Dimitrios before travelling onwards to the Holy Mountain. A Ukrainian monk, Cyril, from Lviv, arrived to raise money for the monastery in Sinai where he worked, and brought catalogues of the library collections there which he passed on to the head of the Jesuit mission in the city, Père Souciet, whose brother ran the royal library in Paris. For Muslim mendicant dervishes and Christian monks, the region’s network of charitable and hospitable religious institutions offered a means of permanent support, especially in the cold winter months when work and money were hard to come by. ‘One monk, almost a vagabond, came from Kiev to Moldavia,’ noted a Salonica resident who met him in 1727, ‘and from there wandered aimlessly through Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Venice, then returned from that unnecessary peregrination to Moldavia, and from there to the Zaporozhian Sich whence, by way of the Black Sea, he came to Constantinople and to Mount Athos.’
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In short, the city found itself at the intersection of many different creeds. Through the Sufi orders it was linked to Iran, Anatolia, Thrace and Egypt; the Marranos bridged the Catholicism of the Iberian peninsula, Antwerp and Papal Italy; the faith of the Sabbataians was carried by Jewish believers into Poland, Bohemia, Germany and eventually North America, while the seventeenth-century Metropolitan Athanasios Patellarios came to the city via Venetian Crete and Ottoman Sinai before he moved on to Jassy, Istanbul, Russia and the Ukraine, his final resting-place. Salonica lay in the centre of an Ottoman oikumeni, which was at the same time Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Perhaps only now, since the end of the Cold War and the re-opening of many of these same routes, is it again possible to calculate the impact of such an extensive sacred geography and to see how it underpinned the profusion of faiths which sustained the city’s inhabitants.
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* (#ulink_9e5ae8f7-1ea0-5e3e-9059-114e352b1605)Frank, a messianic figure in his own right, was a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Barouch Russo (see below).
* (#ulink_4865894e-fc00-5781-bb8a-30166107495d)In Hebrew, the term is Maminim; in Turkish Mümin. Ma’min was a Salonica derivation.
5 Janissaries and Other Plagues (#ulink_d1c07a40-1eff-5205-abe6-bde0ed78ff6b)
IF SCARCELY ANY BUILDINGS from Ottoman Salonica survive today, this cannot easily be blamed on the effects of war. Before the Ottoman conquest, the city had suffered one siege after another; after it, there were none. A visitor to the fortress vaults in the early nineteenth century found chests of rusting Byzantine arrows, their feathers worm-eaten: they were the long-forgotten remains of the ammunition left behind by the defenders of 1430. Every so often, hostile fleets approached the Gulf and on one occasion Venetian shells landed in the port. But apart from sporadic pirate raids, and a spot of gunboat diplomacy in 1876 which ended without a cannon being fired, that was all the fighting Salonica saw, before the Greeks marched in to end Ottoman rule in 1912.
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The early Ottoman rulers never imagined how little actual danger the city would face, and for three hundred years they kept the walls, gates and port in good order. Bayazid II wintered there. Suleyman the Magnificent built the White Tower at the end of the sea-wall, and another tower, now vanished, on the other side of the city. Both men were engaging the Venetians by land and sea, and Salonica was a crucial staging-post for their forces and a major manufacturer of gunpowder. They added batteries – like the ‘mouths of great lions’ – at key points, and a new fortress between the harbour and the land walls. The traveller Evliya counted a tower every five hundred paces, and spent five hours pacing the entire perimeter across the hilly ground. Each night, he writes, ‘the sultan’s music’ is heard within the walls, while the garrison patrols shout: ‘God is One!’ No houses were permitted to be built on the far side of the walls for security, and even today a tiny lane, barely a car’s width, sneaking round the outside perimeter past the shacks which cling to the steep northwest side of the ramparts, traces what is left of the invisible outline of this policy.
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But by the start of the eighteenth century, there were signs of imperial over-stretch. In 1732 a commissioner of the Porte reported that many of the towers were badly neglected. Within decades, the walls were of antiquarian interest only. An emissary of Louis XVI described the city as ‘of no importance’ from a military point of view – ‘an enceinte of ramparts without moats and badly linked, even worse defended by a very small number of poor artillery pieces.’ In 1840, the British army captain who drank sherbets and lemonade with the artillery commander found the troops excellent but the batteries ‘defenceless in themselves’. When the guns sounded, as they often did, it was to mark nothing more than the breaking of the Ramadan fast, the strangulation of a janissary or imperial celebrations.
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Until the demolitions of the 1870s, however, which got rid of gates, towers and entire stretches of the muraille, the ring of ramparts held the city tight – marking the boundary between residents and strangers, the living and dead. The claustrophobic airless warren of lanes within contrasted with the dreary expanses of open country – ‘a mournful and arid solitude’ wrote a nineteenth-century French visitor – on the far side of the walls, studded with water-mills, cemeteries, plague-hospices and monasteries. On the approach to the gates, the dangling corpses of criminals hung from trees to remind passers-by of the virtues of obedience. ‘We enter the Vardar-kapesi, or gate of the Vardhari,’ wrote the imperturbable Leake. ‘In a tree before it hangs the body of a robber.’ The gates themselves were manned by guards who checked the passes of non-residents and collected merchandise duties from farmers and traders. Come nightfall, tardy visitors were left outside, and everyone else kept in. The sharp sense of a division between city-dwellers and non-residents reflected the prevailing Ottoman conception of a close link between foreigners and crime. Vagrants, migrants and strangers were the cause of insecurity: the gates helped to keep them at arm’s length.
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For even if it was never itself invaded or attacked, in other ways Salonica was deeply affected by the numerous disorders which punctuated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With every campaign, rumours swept in: invading Austrian armies were coming down from the north, hostile Russian flotillas were just off Cape Caraburnu, a column twenty thousand strong of Napoleon’s troops was marching down from Bosnia. Wars against European states aroused the anger of local Muslims and jeopardized the position of the Christians. In 1715, during the war with Austria, the French consul reported that ‘terror has spread among the Greeks, who fear being chopped to pieces in their churches, and the Franks, who have a reputation for wealth, are worried about a population which does not reason and cannot distinguish between the French and the [Austrians] who are only five or six days’ march from us.’
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War also brought extra taxation to pay for new galleys, uniforms, and provisions. In 1702 the orders were for gunpowder, in 1714 biscuit and flour, and in the great campaign of the following year, which drove the Venetians out of the Aegean, the city contributed the equivalent of 40,000 sheep and 150,000 kilos of flour as well as workers to repair the roads and bridges along which the Grand Vizier’s army passed. In 1734 lead, powder, iron, medicines and thirty cannons were demanded, in 1744 pack-animals. By 1770, during the war with Russia, the Greeks were ‘so exhausted from constant requisitions that they don’t know how they will manage’. Yet seventeen years later, the Greek and Jewish communities were instructed once again to find two hundred ox-carts and three hundred camels – or the equivalent sum in silver.
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For many Muslims, war also meant military service, disrupting trade and family life for up to six months in the year. Town criers publicizing the sultan’s demand for extra troops found little enthusiasm. When decrees were read out in the mosques calling for volunteers, angry voices shouted that Greeks and Jews should enlist too. Most of Salonica’s seven thousand janissaries were liable to serve, but their commanders often claimed they could not be spared. In January 1770, an imperial decree called on all who believed in Mohammed to march on the Moldavians and Wallachians and to annihilate them for daring to rise up in rebellion against the Emperor. They were given licence to act as they would, and to take slaves.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet many preferred to give money and to shut themselves away in their houses. Another appeal for Muslims to enter the ranks explicitly allowed elderly and wealthy Turks, as well as the Ma’min, to make a monetary contribution instead. The city’s growing prosperity was creating new, more sedentary interests which clashed with the old ghazi warrior ideals.
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For troops levied in the hinterland, Salonica was a mustering point whether they were marching by land or sailing across the Mediterranean. The Grand Vizier’s 1715 campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese was probably the last time the imperial army as a whole gathered in its full glory outside the walls. But in 1744 at least 12,000 landed cavalrymen embarked there for the Persian campaign, and three thousand yürüks – settled nomads liable for military service – gathered from the surrounding villages. Albanian contingents from the mountains arrived en route to campaigns in the Crimea and Arabia, and so many men of arms-bearing age flocked to the city that north African recruiters and privateers combed it for volunteers: at least five hundred took the coin of the Bey of Algiers on one recruiting drive in May 1757 alone.
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Since there were no proper barracks, thousands of these unruly, poorly paid and ill-disciplined fighting men lodged in the city’s great khans and caravanserais. Their arrival invariably sent a shudder of apprehension through the town. In 1770, news that local levies might be ordered into the city provoked the Venetian consul to despair: ‘As soon as they enter the town, God knows what ill deeds they will perform and getting rid of them will be very hard.’ Made up of poor villagers, who associated towns with authority, judges and tax-collectors, these troops often found it hard to stomach the wealth they saw around them. In 1788, a levy of fifteen hundred men, destined for the ‘German’ front, ‘committed much disorder’ and the shops were closed for two months until they left.
Merchants and tavern-keepers were at greatest risk. In April 1734, to take a typical episode, the city was immobilized by the violent behaviour of Bosnian irregulars en route to Syria. As usual, wine shops and taverns were a magnet for trouble. In one they killed the owner, a baker and a Greek wine salesman. Others robbed the house of a Muslim woman, ‘raped her and tormented her cruelly until she died’. Armed with stones, knives, sabres and revolvers, they swaggered through the streets in gangs of as many as fifty, holding up anyone they met. ‘We are all locked inside our houses and well guarded until they depart for Syria,’ writes the Venetian consul. Even the Pasha remained in his palace, since he lacked sufficient troops to keep order.
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The Janissaries
Anyone of any wealth hired bodyguards, usually janissaries whose fearsome reputation and well-organized networks were usually sufficient to ward off troublemakers. Yet if eighteenth-century Salonica was what one resident described as a malsicura città, where one hesitated to travel except with an escort, and where one foreigner kept his own private priest at home to spare his family the unpredictable mile and a half journey to the church, the main reason was the unrestrained and increasingly arbitrary violence of the janissaries themselves. They guarded the city’s gates and towers, patrolled the markets to ensure fair trading, and were in theory at least one of the police forces of the Ottoman state. In practice, however, the fighting prowess and internal discipline of what had once been the mainstay of the Ottoman infantry had degenerated over the years until the chief threat they posed was to the inhabitants of the empire themselves.
As the janissary corps expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recruitment, which had once been through levies of Christian boys, became hereditary and very much less selective; membership was often transferred from father to son, or simply through the sale of the pay slips to which they were entitled. Their training had been so drastically cut that as Paul Rycaut, a well-informed English observer wrote in 1668, some ‘neither know how to manage a Musket, nor are otherwise disciplin’d to any exercise of Arms’. In the capital, they were renowned for their mutinous making and breaking of viziers and even sultans. As there is no question,’ Rycaut noted, ‘but a standing Armee of veterane and well-disciplined Souldiers must be always useful and advantageous to the Interest of a Prince; so, on the contrary, negligence in the Officers, and remissness of Government, produces that licentiousness and wrestiness in the Souldiery, as betrays them to all the disorders which are dangerous and of evil consequence to the welfare of a State.’
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In Salonica, the janissaries fell into two categories. There were the heavily-armed infantrymen, who formed the town garrison, a total of somewhere between 1200 and 2000 men. In addition, there were thousands more Muslim men and boys – mostly shopkeepers and tradesmen – who were enrolled purely nominally in one or other of the four local janissary companies. Although some of the officers controlled the customs house, the city gates, the tanneries, slaughter-houses, and the pasturing lands which they made available to shepherds when they brought their flocks down each autumn, official perquisites were distributed only irregularly by the Porte. Many janissaries enjoyed an uncertain living as bodyguards or fruit-sellers, and observers grouped them together with ‘poor Greeks and the Jews’ as ‘ordinary types who are obliged to make savings’.
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In their own minds, the janissaries were the protectors of the masses, the voice of hard-working Muslim artisans and traders, stepping in when the rich – be they landowners, Ottoman officials or Frankish merchants – tried to exploit the poor. Baron de Tott, a knowledgeable observer of the empire, saw them as the natural opponents of ‘despotism’. And it is true that whenever a sudden downturn in the market or a failure of the harvest threatened the city with starvation, the janissaries found themselves speaking for its consuming classes. The state was supposed to ensure the regular supply of affordable, high-quality daily bread, and it tightly regulated both prices and trade in grain and flour. But caught between the great land-owners, who controlled [and often speculated in] the local supply of grain, and the sultan’s civil servants, whose duty was to make sure enough food reached Istanbul, the poorer inhabitants of Salonica often needed the janissaries to defend them. Why should they starve solely to swell the profits of the wealthy, or to allow precious grain to be shipped to Istanbul? In August 1753 there was a ‘popular revolt’ as a janissary-led mob burned down the bakeries in the Frankish quarter, suspecting them of contributing to the scarcity of bread. Six months later, export of grain from the city was still forbidden. In September 1789 there was a far more serious uprising against the mollah and the mufti for allowing grain to be sent to the capital. An enraged mob went after the mollah, then dragged the mufti into the streets, beat him and shaved off his beard. Only the resolute action of the janissary agha, who ordered the immediate arrest and strangulation of the ringleaders, restored order.
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Yet the janissaries made unconvincing Robin Hoods. With their violent tempers, esprit de corps, rivalrousness and swaggering aggression they were as liable to fall on each other, beat up innocent Christians or ransack taverns as to worry about the food supply. ‘The government, properly speaking,’ wrote a visitor, ‘is in the hands of the Janissaries who act here like petty despots.’ They rarely had anything to fear from those above them for the pashas appointed from Istanbul came and went – sometimes three in one year – and often did not even bother to turn up at their new posting. The janissary agha himself often enjoyed only a nominal authority over the rank and file, and a prudent kadi would steer clear of trying to punish them: usually a few ounces of coffee were enough to buy him out of a guilty verdict. About the only voices they were likely to heed belonged to the senior men of their own company.
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To make matters worse, through the eighteenth century Istanbul was exporting its own janissary problem, as it expelled trouble-makers into the provinces. In April 1743 Salonica was witnessing ‘daily murders by Turks, either of each other or against Greeks and Jews’, and a janissary killed the kahya of Ali Effendi, one of the leading men of the city. Rabbis and bishops prayed to be rid of them; community leaders sent petitions to the emperor to take action against them.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1751 they were said to ‘rule’ the city, ready to kill ‘a man for a salad’. The following year, five hundred of them gathered to demand that certain particularly extortionate officials be handed over to them; when the janissary agha refused, they turned their fire on him. He managed to escape on a ship bound for Constantinople, but they then mounted a noisy guard outside the pasha’s palace, while others opened the wine shops and drank themselves into a stupor. Terrified by the violence which had already led them to three murders, everyone else kept off the streets.
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Yet their bitterest hatred was reserved for each other. In 1763 a good-looking young Jewish boy was seized by a member of the 2nd orta [company] and men from the 72nd were called in to help recover him. Clashes continued throughout the city for three days till the sultan ordered forty men from each company to be put to death, and the janissary agha demolished four cafés which the troublemakers were known to frequent.
(#litres_trial_promo) But although a determined pasha with his own men might frighten the locals into temporary obedience, janissaries could play at court politics too and often engineered the recall of officials they disliked. By the end of the century, the problem had become so bad that even the older janissary officers were losing control over the younger men. Salonica is ‘not a city but a battlefield,’ wrote the Venetian consul despairingly in March 1789. It remained that way until they were finally massacred by Sultan Mahmud II in ‘the auspicious event’ of 1826 which eradicated them forever.
Albanians
In the meantime, the remedy for janissary violence was often worse than the disease. Unable to rely on the troops supposedly under their command, many pashas kept armed retinues of their own. Mostly they recruited young Albanians from impoverished mountain villages, who brought with them an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life. An Ottoman traveller among them a century earlier had warned others what they might expect in the way of Albanian greetings and salutations. His list had included the following useful expressions: ‘Eat shit!’, ‘I’ll fuck your mother’, ‘I’ll fuck your wife’ and ‘I’ll fart in your nose’.
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Salonica lay between the southern Albanian lands and Istanbul, and by the mid-eighteenth century, several thousand worked there as attendants in the hamams, boza sellers, gunsmiths, stonemasons and bodyguards. Others found seasonal work as shepherds, or drovers. Most official entourages relied on them, and they provided the strength which enabled large land-owners [ayans] in the regions to the north of the city to accumulate more and more power for themselves. One redoubtable land-owner of Doiran, for instance, who had most of the pashas of Salonica in his pocket, was able to put three thousand Albanians into the field against his enemies – easily a match for the yürük troops whom the Porte ordered against him. Indeed many of the leading beys in the Macedonian hinterland were themselves of Albanian origin.
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The Ottoman authorities, with their fundamental dislike of migrants, were deeply suspicious of the Albanians (despite the fact that many of the most senior officials were themselves of Albanian descent). Exceptionally in an empire which recognized only distinctions of religion, they were singled out by name – arnavud – and in 1730 the emperor ordered all Albanians, both Muslims and Christian, to be expelled from Istanbul. Such measures simply intensified the problem in the provinces, increasing brigandage and crime, and slowly the government’s attention turned there too. After the long mid-century war with the Russians, when Albanian troops served the sultan in the Peloponnese, they continued plundering the Greek lands, until Sultan Abdul Hamid I, backed by his reforming admiral Gazi Hasan Pasha, decided to take action against them.
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To the French consul in Salonica at the time, they were more than a mere irritant. In fact, the stakes for the empire itself could not have been higher. As he wrote to Paris:
All men of sound sense here hope that the Capudan Pasha follows the example of Topal Osman Pasha who … covered Albania in rivers of blood on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud in 1731. Without this it is to be feared that this nation, which is very numerous and very poor at the same time, will abuse her habit of bearing arms and become powerful and dangerous for this Empire. All the open cities of Rumelia are exposed to its devastations, which could lead it to the gates of Constantinople, if some ambitious man knows how to profit from the number, the courage and the natural discipline of this nation.
Thus in 1779, the Ottoman admiral led a force of more than thirty thousand men against them. En route to the Peloponnese, in an operation impressive for its speed and brutal decisiveness, he personally decapitated two leading land-owners, and shot dead their main rivals: thirty-four heads were despatched to Constantinople and their lands were handed over to members of the Evrenos and other loyalist families. Hasan Pasha also gave the green light for Turks and Greeks to take whatever action they pleased against any Albanians they found: killing them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all the Albanians he encountered, setting fire to a monastery where others were hiding and offering five sequins for every Albanian head brought him. In Salonica the governor expelled more than four thousand within five days, including several hundred in his own entourage, and permitted only a few long-time residents to stay.
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This was only a temporary remedy, however, and it did nothing to reconcile the Albanians to Ottoman rule. Many of them were Muslims, but their shared religion could not override the contempt they now felt for the Turks. ‘The Albanians do not any longer recognize the authority of the Grand Seigneur,’ wrote an observer a few years later, ‘nor by extension that of the pasha of Salonica whom they regard as an odious enemy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1793 the pasha of Shkodra defeated an Ottoman army, captured several senior officers, and sent them back with their beards shaved to show his disdain for the sultan. In Salonica itself, they were soon causing trouble again. When the pasha attempted to arrest a known troublemaker called Alizotoglou in 1793, his house turned out to contain more than 150 of them, amply supplied with food and arms. The pasha, having called on ‘all true Muslims’ to come to his aid, used cannons to fire on Alizotoglou’s house, but his opponent only left the city after taking hostages for his security, and threatening defiantly to return with 2000 men if an official pardon was not forthcoming. A decade later, yet another edict had to be issued ordering local officials to clear the city of ‘an unknown number of Albanians and others belonging to the same category who are not fulfilling any service, without any proper occupation and who are gathering incongruously.’
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And, just as the French consul had predicted, much more powerful Albanian leaders did become a genuine threat to the empire. At the start of the nineteenth century Mehmed Ali, an Albanian soldier from Cavalla, became ruler of Egypt, founder of a royal dynasty, and creator of a short-lived empire in Africa and the Arab lands. Closer to home there was Ali Pasha – the ‘Muslim Bonaparte’ as Byron called him – who ruled the entire west coast of the Balkans from his Jannina stronghold. His writ ran almost to the gates of Salonica and nearby monasteries found he provided more effective protection against brigands than the city’s governor himself, supplying them with small handwritten notes written in ‘extremely bad Greek’ on ‘a small square piece of very dirty paper’, which threatened any Turk who maltreated the monks with execution. Here was an Albanian pasha building his own state and offering protection for the region’s Christians whose safety the sultan could no longer guarantee. There could be no clearer illustration of how fragile the authority of the Ottoman state had become.
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Prisoners and Slaves
The incessant struggles waged between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the Habsburgs, Russians and Persians, left their mark on the city in other ways. In August 1715, after the Venetians were driven out of the Peloponnese, six thousand Ottoman troops ‘dispersed into the regions of Larissa and Salonica, causing much harm along the road to the inhabitants of the country.’ The head of the city’s janissary corps was told to scour the area for ‘evil-doers’ and to imprison any he found. When more than one hundred Venetian deserters were rumoured to be making their way there, the town governor was so alarmed at the potential for disorder that he arranged for them to be seized and sold back to their commanding officers. Every campaign brought problems of this kind. In September 1769 – during the war with the Russians – it was reported that ‘the countryside was filled with deserters, ragged, killing.’
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For war also meant booty, prisoners and slaves. As Busbecq noted in the sixteenth century, ‘slaves constitute the main source of gain to the Turkish soldier’. Edward Browne, the travelling son of Sir Thomas Browne [author of the Religio Medici], was moved ‘by the pitiful spectacle of Captives and Slaves’ when he passed through northern Greece in 1668, men like the polyglot Hungarian Sigismund, a learned man who spoke ‘Hungarian, Sclavonian, Turkish, Armenian and Latin’ and had served a Turk, a Jew and an Armenian before being manumitted. French and Venetian consuls tried to get imprisoned or enslaved prisoners of war released and helped others escape: in 1700 the consulate gave a list to Paris of ‘all the soldier deserters, French, Italians, Spaniards etc., Catholics, Huguenots and infidels’ he had sent on to Marseilles. The Alsace man redeemed by another French consul in 1792, or the deserter who fled his master and made his way to Cavalla were among the dozens of fortunate individuals who were thus returned to Christendom many years after failed campaigns had first brought them to the Ottoman lands.
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The fog of war enshrouded this human traffic in a penumbra of legal uncertainty. Two Hungarians sold in the Larissa market in 1721 had to be released on the emperor’s orders after it turned out that they were not captured in battle but had merely been seized by some enterprising janissaries while about their master’s business. Moreover, peace treaties often stipulated that prisoners of war were not to be sold. ‘I learned ten days ago that in Larissa there are two Venetians, prisoners of some Albanians, who are negotiating their sale,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1739. ‘I immediately sent a trustworthy man there to the kadi with a letter informing him that they are Venetians and that according to the terms of the peace they cannot be sold as slaves. The kadi read the letter, imprisoned the Albanians and gave up the two men into my care.’
But because so many of the sultan’s troops saw the acquisition of slaves as their right, official orders were often ignored and the problem of illegal enslavement persisted, complicating efforts by the Ottoman state to organize prisoner exchanges. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, with a large number of Ottoman troops in Russian captivity, the sultan ruled that all Russian prisoners still in Ottoman hands should be released. Only those ‘Muslims willingly staying in Russia and embracing Christianity’ and ‘those Christians willingly embracing Islam in My supreme empire’ were to be exempt. One year on, however, few of the ‘Russians, Poles, Moldavians, Vlachs and Moreotes’ in Turkish hands had been liberated. The sultan accused Turks and Jews in Salonica of holding on to their captives out of sheer greed, and warned them that until they handed them back, the religious obligation to free ‘brothers of the faith’ in Russian hands remained unfulfilled. As in so many areas of eighteenth-century life, what the sultan ordered and what actually happened were two quite different things.
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The traffic in bodies formed part of the Mediterranean economy until late into the nineteenth century. During the long and complex struggle between Muslim and Catholic powers all sides bought and sold slaves, and the markets of the Barbary coast had their counterparts in the little-studied dealers of Christendom. Salonica’s own inhabitants had been sold into slavery after 1430, but as the Ottoman city grew and flourished, its new residents – Christians, Jews and Muslims – all bought slaves for domestic use, many of whom settled there in their turn. Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Circassia, the Sudan and north Africa were the main sources of supply, and slaves from all these regions were to be found there. We do not know where its slave market was located but wars kept it well-stocked. Large numbers of Christian women and children were sold off in 1715, after the Venetian campaign, and again in 1737 after the Habsburg invasion.
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This was not, as in the Americas, a cheap route to the plantation economy, but rather a feature of the domestic household life of the well-to-do in an empire where slaves had until very recently occupied some of the highest positions in the state. In Salonica, slaves cost far more than domestic servants, especially if the latter were children; there is no evidence for their being used as cheap labour en masse in public works in the way that occurred in north Africa. Some accumulated money of their own, enabling them to buy their way out of service. Others were freed with a legacy on their master’s death. Probably worst off were those who had fled their employer’s service, or were released from the galleys with no money to support them: such individuals eked out a very precarious existence on the margins of society, joining the beggars, gypsies and wandering dervishes at one of the city’s half a dozen soup kitchens. Groups of African beggars roamed around the city and its hinterland, and these were almost certainly manumitted slaves, banding together for protection. Those on their own, in particular women, were frequently kidnapped and sold as slaves by dealers. This happened, for instance, to Amina bint Abdullah, a convert from Christianity, despite the fact that ‘she did not have anything to do with slavery in her genealogy’.
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What worried non-Muslims was not so much the idea of slavery itself – for this they were familiar with – as the prospect that enslavement might lead to conversion and the loss of Christian [or Jewish] souls. ‘Various Turks have come here,’ reports the Venetian consul in June 1770, following unsuccessful Greek uprisings in the islands and on the mainland, ‘with twenty of those children, male and female, and they sell them to other Turks, who make little Turks [tourkakia] of them.’ The Jesuits and Jews had organizations devoted to redeeming slaves who were of their faith. Other Christians handled matters more informally. In the 1720s, for instance, a female Ukrainian slave who had been badly treated by her captors was brought to Salonica to be sold. She had some hidden savings and sought help in arranging a ransom, or at least a Christian buyer, ‘so that she does not fall into the hands of a Turk’. Because the woman belonged to the Orthodox rite, some of the town’s European merchants questioned whether, being Catholics, they should be involved and proposed that ‘Mikalis, the Greek physician’ should take responsibility, especially since he knew that ‘she can sew and embroider excellently and weave and can cook in the Turkish style very well.’ But Mikalis did not want to pay the asking price, and anyway the Greeks had a reputation for being more reluctant than the Turks to manumit their slaves, ‘especially when the slaves are Polish or Kazak or of any different nation.’ The Catholic Father Superior found a solution by organizing a lottery among the French merchants in the city: within three days he had raised the money and arranged for the woman to be bought and given to the winner. The sale was completed and the necessary deed of sale was signed by the local customs officer, handed over with the woman herself. She was lodged in a French-owned house ‘until she learns the catechism and other mysteries of the Christian confession, which the priest promised to teach her in Turkish, because [she] speaks only Turkish and Russian.’ She had not been freed, but her soul at least was safe.
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Captives of a different kind, fewer in number but equally reliable indicators of far-off troubles were the distinguished guests whom the authorities in Istanbul sent to Salonica as political exiles. The city provided a suitable home where they could live in some style, hunt if they wished and hold court at official expense, remaining all the while under the watchful eye of the authorities. At a time when many were living on the margins, they were treated extremely well. We still have the list of foods provided for Mirza Safi, a Persian pretender, when he was held there in 1731. It includes ‘bread, rice, clarified butter, yoghurt, cumin, sugar, starch, boiled grape-juice, clove, cinnamon, chicken, eggs, almonds, pistachios, pepper, saffron, coffee, coriander, olive oil, flour, honey, bees-wax, grapes, salt, chick peas, vinegar, onions, lemon-juice, black cumin, chestnuts, quinces, tobacco (from Shiraz), soap, meat, barley, straw and vegetables’ – a respectable diet by any standards.
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Patriarchs and grand viziers were parked there when their careers suffered eclipse. Sultan Abdul Hamid II himself was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 and sent into gilded captivity. Hungarian aristocrats passed through, as did the Pole Jan Potocki, the multi-talented author of that remarkable novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, who blew his brains out with a silver bullet a few years later. Following the suppression of the Wahhabi uprising in 1814, the Sherif of Mecca arrived with an entourage of forty and was treated with the greatest honour: he lasted a few years before succumbing to the plague. His son and successor, Abdul Muttalib – ‘a grand old man of sixty, tall, but slender, with the grand manner, distinguished in every way, of very brown colour, almost black, fine skin, a long blue robe, a Kashmir turban’ – eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and even erected a domed tomb in his father’s memory which survived into the early twentieth century.
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Among all these, however, the man who stayed the longest and left the most important record of his experiences was a little-known early eighteenth-century Ukrainian political emigré called Pylyp Orlyk. After years fighting against the Muscovite tsars, Orlyk fled first to Sweden, and then passed through central Europe to the relative safety of the Ottoman lands. On 2 November 1722 – in the month of Moharrem 1135 according to the dating of the imperial firman – the fifty-year-old Orlyk was ordered by the Porte to Salonica. There this cultivated and warm-hearted man spent no less than twelve years in exile, watching the twists and turns of European politics from the sidelines while his impoverished wife remained in Cracow and his eight children were dispersed throughout Europe. Only in March 1734 was he released, thanks to French intervention, and allowed to move north; still trying to organize an uprising in the Ukraine, he died in poverty nine years later.
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Orlyk’s misfortune has proved to be the historian’s gain, for from the day of his arrival he kept a diary which offers a unique insight into the eighteenth-century city. No other journal of comparable detail from Salonica has survived. His urgent scrawl gives access not merely to his voluminous political correspondence, most of which – in Latin, French, Polish and Ukrainian – was duly copied into his journals, but also to the rigours of daily life in his place of exile. The misbehaviour of his loutish servants, the local fare, his bag after a day’s shooting in the plains, stories told him by tailors, interpreters and bodyguards enliven its pages. Jesuits, consuls, doctors, spies and the Turkish judges and governors who ran the city all encountered the busy exile.
Much of the time, he lived well, considering his predicament. He hunted partridge, hogs and hares, which he distributed generously among his acquaintances. There was a lot of drinking, especially among the Christians – the French wandered drunkenly through the streets of the European quarter during Carnival, while parties at the house of the Greek metropolitan apparently went on for days at a time, with chicken, salted olives and lemon jam washed down with copious quantities of vodka, wine and coffee. Orlyk and his entourage were fond of the bottle too and he coped easily enough with his often inebriated Jewish interpreter and his manservant ‘Red’, found more than once sprawled in the gutter after a hard night. But the dangers and risks of urban life hemmed him in. At the minor end of the scale they included frequent indigestion from over-eating, the ‘horrid muck’ of the city streets, and the bribery necessary to smooth relations with Greek and Ottoman officials alike. He was shocked by the corruption of the church and the readiness of Christians to use the Ottoman courts when it served their interests. His diary is also sensitive to disturbing portents – a full moon cleft with deep black fissures, earth tremors and ‘great lights flying in the air like a big lance’. Meanwhile, crimes went unpunished, pirates threatened voyagers by sea, and as the streets echoed with the sounds of gunfire, janissaries and irregulars acted much as they wished. Of all the numerous dangers Orlyk’s diary describes, however, none was more frightening, murderous or unpredictable than what an earlier traveller described as ‘the terrour of horrid Plagues’. Arriving in the city in the aftermath of the epidemic of 1718–1719, Orlyk quickly became familiar with the biggest killer of the early modern Ottoman world.
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Plague
‘Thank God the plague is not here!’ wrote a relieved traveller arriving in Salonica in 1788. Borne on the trade routes from Central Asia and the Black Sea through to the Mediterranean, it could come by both land and sea. A century before Orlyk, an epidemic in Istanbul had killed one thousand a day, according to the British ambassador there, and forced more than two hundred thousand to flee into the countryside. Izmir lost perhaps one-fifth of its entire population in 1739–41, and as many as a quarter may have died between 1758 and 1762: the historian Daniel Panzac estimates it lost the equivalent of its entire population to the plague in the course of the century. At such times, one saw ‘the Streets … filld with infected bodies as well alive as dead; the living seeking remedies either from the Phisitians or at the Bathes, the Dead lying in open Beers, or else quite naked at theyr dores to be washd before theyr buryalls.’
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In Salonica, athwart the empire’s main carrying routes, warm summers and a humid climate offered the plague bacillus a near-ideal environment in the lethal months from April to July. Compared with Izmir, with 55 plague years in the eighteenth century, and Istanbul [65], Salonica got off lightly: even so plague struck one year in three. Outbreaks in 1679–80, 1687–9, 1697–99, 1708–9, 1712–13 – which supposedly claimed 6,000 victims – 1718–19, 1724 and 1729–30 were just the start. In 1740, a ‘bad plague’ carried off 1337 Christians, 2239 Turks and 3935 Jews. That was not the only really serious outbreak: in 1762 10–12,000 people, roughly 16–20% of the population, died. The figures were similar in 1781 when as a survivor put it, one could ‘die of fright’, and again in 1814. Over the century, roughly 55–65,000 victims were carried off, something close to the mid-century population of the city itself. Only the constant inflow of new, mostly Christian migrants from the countryside and high mostly Jewish local birth rates can account for the lack of a very steep decline in numbers. It is testimony to the resilience of the city’s economy that unlike ports such as Alexandria and Aleppo, its growth was not more seriously checked.
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Through Orlyk’s entries during the epidemic of 1724 – a serious year but not nearly as bad as 1713 or 1762 – we can see the astonishingly rapid trajectory from rumour to full-scale panic and mass death. It all started fairly quietly: ‘On Wednesday morning, after I came back from the Orthodox Church after mass, I was told by my people that the small daughter of a man who lives close by the cemetery at the Orthodox Church is extremely sick with the plague.’ Hearing this, Greeks from the vicinity had already started moving out to villages in the mountains. And there were omens: ‘My people told me they heard an owl on my inn, and this is a fatal bird, which is proven by experience.’
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The next day the girl was dead and the church had closed. Orlyk asked his servant to find lodgings for him in a nearby village, together with the English consul and some other members of the community, in order to escape ‘God’s awful punishment’. But the villagers, as often happened, were understandably reluctant to take in refugees from the city and started arming and erecting barricades to prevent them coming. Reportedly they were being encouraged by the pasha of Salonica who planned to make wealthy foreigners pay handsomely for the privilege of leaving.
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As a political exile Orlyk had particular difficulties getting out. When he presented himself to the mollah, ‘this heathen made me more annoyed, telling me there is nothing written down in the emperor’s order that I can go wherever I want and choose inns, but that it is written down that I shall stay at the inn in this town and have to stay here. I discussed it a long time with him and put forward lots of arguments; he promised to speak about it with the aghas tomorrow and to tell me what they decide at their stupid council.’ Despite Orlyk’s efforts, the mollah stuck to his guns, perhaps fearing the consequences if he absconded. Meanwhile, the younger son of his landlord fell ill as well, which scared the household so much ‘that all of us ran away from the inn, and left our stuff and also the carriage on the street, at which the servants slept the whole night in the rain, and I slept over in some monastery house … where I slept in great fear.’ Two days later, Orlyk tried again and this time he informed the mollah that the entire street where he lived was infected, including the house next door, and that he had given up sleeping in the inn. Even this had little effect. Only when the English consul intervened, and promised to be responsible for his eventual return, was he allowed to depart.
After the usual difficulties with the janissaries guarding the gates, who blocked his way until they received payment, he and his party set off, their carriages loaded down with clothes, provisions, guns, books, and tents. They had left the walls far behind and were heading for the prosperous little town of Galatista in the wooded hills to the southeast when they heard that its inhabitants were threatening to burn down their own houses and retreat to the mountains if they came. Neither Orlyk nor the British merchants he was travelling with took the threats seriously. Desperate to put the infected city behind them, they travelled together to protect themselves against robbers and sent their Jewish interpreter to deal with the village headman. Eventually they arrived, settled into an inn, and over the coming weeks got used to the scanty rations – olives, salted fish – which made up the local diet, passing the time teaching country children phrases in French.
In an effort to stem the plague’s progress, the mollah had ordered all the inhabitants of the city who had left for the villages to stay where they were. No one appears to have obeyed, however, and into their mountain refuge trickled word of developments eight hours’ ride away down in the plain. ‘A young English merchant who went yesterday to Thessalonica, came back from there this evening and told me that the plague spreads more and more, that every day thirty people die and even more leave the town.’ The next day they heard of the death of a Jesuit monk who had recently arrived from Smyrna. Even more alarmingly, a local peasant had been stricken while in the city and had died since returning to the village. ‘Others say also that he was carried out of the village while he was still alive so that he doesn’t infect the rest.’ Down in the city ‘the plague spreads more and more and especially among the Turks and Jews; just yesterday they carried 250 dead out of the town.’ One could see the sense of the Islamic injunction – derived from a hadith of the Prophet, but only partially obeyed by Salonica’s own Muslim population – that those living in a place afflicted by the plague should accept whatever their fate held in store for them and not budge. Constant movement between the villages and the city extended the range of the epidemic, for as Orlyk himself noted – ‘people from here incessantly go to the city to sell their wares, and another village, very close by, is also infected.’
There were several reports that it had eased off or abated entirely before Orlyk and his party judged it safe to return. Having escaped the worst, a final frisson of terror awaited him back in Salonica. He had spent the summer months wearing a light coat made for him by his Jewish tailors. Now, as they brought him his new winter furs, they confessed that one of them had already been plague-stricken – the tell-tale swellings had appeared under the arm – when he had delivered Orlyk’s summer coat: ‘He could hardly finish his job for the pain, which tormented him and as soon as he got back home he laid down on his bed. I was thrilled when I heard this and thanked God that he kept me and my son alive. I wore this coat through the whole summer and September too, without knowing about the plague-ridden Jews. When I asked them today why they hadn’t told me, these heathens answered that if I had known about it, I wouldn’t have wanted the coat.’
It was not until a century later – well after quarantine restrictions had become customary in Europe, and imposed upon travellers from Ottoman lands – that the city’s vulnerability to plague, cholera and other epidemics began to diminish. Until then, nothing so clearly marked man’s vulnerability to the external world. The rabbis often managed to isolate the houses of victims, sometimes barricading them up, at others setting guards at the doors, but since such measures were not implemented comprehensively, those who could leave did. In 1719 two-thirds of the population escaped, and the city was abandoned. The pashas, beys and notables fled into the villages; the poor remained behind and were disproportionately afflicted, especially in the densely packed Jewish quarters of the lower town. ‘The only prey of the epidemic left are the poor most of whom are dying,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1781. Many tried prayer, seeing in their sufferings the signs of God’s vengeance for their sins. An English merchant reported that some Greek peasants opened up the graves of the victims, and stabbed and mangled the corpses ‘in a fearful manner’ in the belief that the Devil had entered them. Others took a kind of revenge of their own, seizing the opportunity offered by the empty mansions, locked stores and shuttered shops in the markets to loot and steal: ‘More than a few villains have stayed here and there are fears lest they set fires to create the opportunity for looting the abandoned houses.’ Orlyk’s translator turned out to head a gang of Jewish thieves which plundered unguarded warehouses, and stole jewels and cloth. The first Orlyk heard about it was when he was contacted by his former employee from prison, promising to work free for a year for him if he got him out. Wisely, no doubt, he refused. Meanwhile the cemeteries expanded on the slopes of the Upper Town where the thousands of plague victims were usually buried.
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Managing the City
One of the questions raised by the Ottoman experience of plague is what it tells us about the attitude of local officials to the management of the city. Although soldiers returning from wars, pilgrims and merchants all carried the deadly disease into the unprotected port, preventative measures were more or less non-existent. Infected houses were sometimes sprinkled with vinegar, limed or even occasionally demolished. But each community took its own measures and there was no overall governmental response. According to the reformer John Howard, who visited Salonica in 1786, the Greeks and the Jews each ran a small hospital, the former enclosed by high walls, the latter ‘lightsome and airy, and better accommodated for its purpose than any I had seen’, situated in the midst of the cemetery, and utilising tombs as tables and seats. But the small European community was far less well equipped than in Izmir, and evidently relied on flight into the countryside. And with no public health service, at least before the administrative reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman officials were no better informed than anyone else about where and when the epidemic struck. In 1744 when rumours of plague ran through the town, the only way the Venetian consul could establish their veracity was by approaching the chief rabbi who got the Jewish grave-diggers to say on oath whether they had observed signs of illness among the deceased. The Ottoman town officials themselves had no idea.
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Here as in so many areas, they approached municipal governance in a spirit of extreme disengagement. The plague – like the other risks of urban life such as fire and violent crime – highlighted the limited resources and ambitions of the eighteenth-century Ottoman state. The truth was that the kadi and the pasha of the city had few means at their disposal, for the city and its interests were often squeezed between the demands of the capital, on the one hand, and the powerful regional land-owners on the other. Criminal justice was generally solved through mediation and fines, and imprisonment was limited for many years by the lack of a proper prison in the town. The so-called Tower of the Janissaries was usually used for this but rarely had many inmates and was not designed for large numbers. A considerable amount of alcohol, coffee and opium was being consumed. The city was notorious for its dozens of taverns, coffee-houses and drinking shops – Evliya had been astonished at the brazenness of the unbelievers who would openly get drunk on wine or boza [a drink made from fermented millet] – but they too were largely outside official control, and frequented by janissaries who did much as they pleased. Taxes and the setting of market prices did concern the authorities. But even there, as we have seen, the resources they commanded were limited.
In general, whilst not quite as anarchic as some other Ottoman cities – Aleppo, for example, seems to have been in a state of virtual civil war as notable families and local power-brokers fought out their differences – eighteenth-century Salonica was a place where the authority of the central state could only be enforced sporadically and intermittently. When events threatened to spiral into large-scale violence, the strangulation of janissary ringleaders or the expulsion of troublemakers restored order for a time. But so long as the city fulfilled its role as provider of grain and wool for the capital, the Porte was prepared to tolerate high levels of street violence, and substantial power remaining within the hands of local elites. Food riots were the townspeople’s way of signalling that local land-owners and merchants needed to remember the poor. Controlling the janissaries themselves was almost impossible, and together with the Albanians, they were the main internal challenge to imperial rule. As soldiers rampaged through Salonica’s streets, and the plague carried off thousands a year, it could seem as if this was a city on the verge of chaos. Yet this was a chaos of vitality, not decline.
6 Commerce and the Greeks (#ulink_387f0e67-58a5-5fd7-a8e3-53807facd14e)
The Routes of Trade
ACCORDING TO THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis, Salonica’s harbour could hold at least three hundred vessels. A hundred years later ships were calling from ‘the Black Sea, the White Sea [the Aegean], the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Suez, Tripolis, France, Portugal, Denmark, England, Holland and Genoa’, while the languages used by the city’s traders and shopkeepers included Italian, French, Spanish, Vlach, Russian, Latin, Arabic, Albanian and Bulgarian as well as Greek and Turkish. None of this sounds like a city in the doldrums. And indeed, despite plague, war and the janissaries, the population rose steadily – after stagnating throughout much of the seventeenth century, it was up to 50,000 by 1723 and around 70,000–80,000 by the 1790s. The motor of trade was humming, and even with the decline of the traditional cloth manufacturing industry, and the emigration of some Jewish weavers and businessmen, it was bringing new prosperity.
The Russian monk Barskii, who visited in 1726, was impressed. ‘They come to Salonica from Constantinople, Egypt, Venice, France, by English trading vessels, and by land,’ he wrote. ‘Germans, Vlachs, Bulgarians, Serbs, Dalmatians, people from the whole of Macedonia and the Ukraine, traders in wholesale and retail visit here to import grain and every kind of good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The bazaars themselves were extensive, well-stocked and ‘perpetually crowded with buyers and sellers’ and the shops contained abundant manufactured goods and colonial produce. The city’s inland trade flourished, there was a carrying trade to the thriving regional fairs in the hinterland, and increasingly, a longer-range overland traffic to the expanding markets of Germany and central Europe. Once Catherine the Great conquered the Tatar lands and founded Odessa, the Black Sea grain trade took off as well, passing through Salonica on its way to southern Europe.
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By the century’s end, the old, small wooden landing stage, unable to handle more than two or three vessels a day, was clearly insufficient for the volume of traffic. Goods lay for days in the open, quickly ruined by winter rains, the customs officials were notoriously corrupt, and the Jewish and Albanian hamals had a reputation for helping themselves to goods. Yet despite these obstacles, some merchants amassed substantial fortunes; they were, wrote one observer, the ‘possessors of the treasures of Egypt’. The city could not compete with Izmir, still less Naples or Genoa. Nevertheless, when one Ottoman official compiled a geography of Europe, he mentioned Salonica as one of the three key ports of the northern Mediterranean, along with Venice and Marseille. Henry Holland visited in 1812 and was impressed by the ‘general air of splendour of the place’: ‘We passed among the numerous vessels which afforded proof of its growing commerce,’ he wrote, ‘and at six in the evening came up one of the principal quays, the avenues of which were still crowded with porters, boatmen and sailors, and covered with goods of various descriptions.’
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Intra-imperial trade – with north Africa, the Black Sea and the Middle East – still overshadowed the markets of Europe. The Ottoman economy was a closed circuit, efficient and prosperous on its own terms, only gradually becoming linked to the wider, global economy. Macedonian tobacco went to Egypt and the Barbary coast, even though demand was growing in Italy and central Europe. Armenian merchants travelled to and from Persia with jewellery and other precious goods. Thick woollen capots from the Zagora went mostly to the islands, Syria and Egypt, though some were exported as far afield as the French West Indies. In addition, the obligatory grain shipments to Istanbul were often accompanied by other orders – for silver and metal tools. In return, the city was importing blades and spices from Damascus and further east, coffee, slaves and headgear from the Barbary coast, flax, linens, gum and sugar from Egypt, soap, wood, pepper, arsenic and salted fish from Izmir. From the islands came lemons and oil from Andros, and wine from Evvia. Much of this trade remained in the hands of Muslim merchants and the demand was so substantial that the city ran a deficit on its trade with the rest of the empire. Perhaps we can understand why a well-travelled Ottoman diplomat, Ahmed Resmi Effendi, was so scathing about commerce in Europe. ‘In most of the provinces, poverty is widespread, as a punishment for being infidels,’ he wrote: ‘Anyone who travels in these areas must confess that goodness and abundance are reserved for the Ottoman realms.’
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Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, the balance of economic activity within the empire was changing as wars with Persia hit the Anatolian trade and Europe’s new prosperity made Rumelia more commercially important. Salonica, as the chief port for the Balkans was poised to profit. Izmir was busier, but a much higher proportion of Salonica’s traffic was directed west and north and its trade deficit with Asia and the Middle East was more than outweighed by its surplus on the growing exchange with Europe. Exports of locally-produced grain, cotton, salt and tobacco as well as wax, hides, furs and fats from the Danubian Principalities and Russia paid for Murano glass, books, fine velvets, Italian paper and even furniture. Mid-century also saw a boom in the illegal smuggling of antiquities – one Venetian shipment included five entire columns plus another one hundred ‘stones’ – until the exporters [mostly French and Greek] damaged the roads, houses and even cemeteries so badly that the authorities put a stop to it.
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Despite the increasing competitiveness of French and English textiles, indigo and American coffee, the trade gap in Salonica’s favour remained. It was filled by coin – Ottoman aspres and piastres, the Cairene fundukli and the Stambul zermahboub as well as German and Hungarian thalers, Spanish doubloons and Venetian ducats and sequins. Demand was so high that counterfeits entered the market produced in bulk by enterprising villagers in the Ionian islands – under Venetian control – and the towns of western Macedonia. Both the Ottoman and the Venetian authorities tried vainly to stop them. But despite the constant depreciation in the value of the Ottoman piastre, it was generally traded above its official rate, such was the foreign demand.
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Some European items did appeal to the elite. Heavy English watches, encased in silver, and preferably made by George Prior or Benjamin Barber sold thirty dozen annually, reflecting the scarcity of public clocks. Lyons carpets and gold-fringed Genoese damasks adorned the wealthier haremliks, while the beys, as they had always done, wintered in caftans lined with Russian ermine, sable, fox and agneline. Tastes were slowly changing. The French consul Cousinéry was impressed by the contrast in living styles between the old Albanian bey of Serres, Ismail, who had ‘banished all interior luxury’ which he regarded as ‘useless and ruinous’, and his son Yusuf, who spent the substantial fortune he acquired as deputy governor of Salonica on his country palace, its walls painted to imitate marble, the whole ‘a melange of Oriental ostentation and European taste’ – elegant divans, richly decorated wood-panelled doors and windows, combined with Bohemian crystal in the window-panes, English carpets and gilt-framed pictures in the harem. Yet someone as wealthy and ambitious as Yusuf Bey – the most powerful man in the city in his heyday – was probably the exception. In general, Muslim taste was far less profligate and directed not to European manufactures but to coffee, fruits, metal-work, spices and fabrics which the empire itself supplied. In fact, according to one irritated consul, the average Salonican Muslim simply did not consume enough:
Always the same in his way of being, of living, and of dressing, the pleasures and the wants of yesterday are to him the pleasures and wants of tomorrow. Rich or poor, he puts on every morning the same woollen cloth, and lays it aside only when he has worn it entirely out, in order to purchase another of the same quality, the same price, and the same colour. He has drunk coffee in his childhood, he will drink it in his old age. He will not forsake old habits, but he will not imbibe new ones. This stupid monotony in habits and taste must set constant limits to the consumption of our commodities.
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