Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 8

The Renaissance historian Paolo Giovio explained why the Janissaries were a superior fighting force: “Their discipline under arms is due to their justice and severity, which surpasses that of the ancient Romans. They surpass our soldiers for three reasons: they obey their commanders without question; they seem to care nothing at all for lives in battle; they go for a long time without bread or wine, being content with barley and water.”18

The Janissaries were the first standing army originated in Europe, slave soldiers whose lives were dedicated to war, and who were prepared to fight at any time. In the early years of the empire marriage was forbidden. In fact, they were not supposed to consider any life outside their duties as soldiers. The Janissaries were a primary reason for the Ottomans’ success in battle, and they became the germ seed of an elite soldier class that flourished within the empire, until they wielded outsized power in the civilian, commercial, and political spheres. In 1826 the reigning sultan, Mahmud II, after patiently planning the destruction of the Janissaries for some eighteen years, secretly created a new army and, with no warning, trapped the Janissaries and destroyed them. More than ten thousand men perished in one night, gunned down or burned to death in their barracks. The last holdouts died in hand-to-hand combat in a vast murky underground lake, originally built by the Romans, the Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns. The bodies floated down the Bosphorus for days. In Ottoman history, this mass killing of the Janissaries is called “the Auspicious Event.”

The history of the Ottoman Empire parallels the history of the royal line. For all intents and purposes, the story begins with Osman and ends with Abdul Hamid II. (The last two sultans following Abdul Hamid were no more than figureheads representing the Young Turks and the British, respectively.) For centuries, the royal line was generated in the royal harem. It was here that the “politics of reproduction” were played out.19

“Harem” derives from the Arabic haram (h-r-m), with a “root meaning something like ‘forbidden’ or ‘taboo’ and evok[ing] constraint and often heightened sanctity as well.”20 In the Muslim household, it refers to the area of the home where the women live and work. The public is not to intrude on these inner rooms. Traditionally, men spend more time in the outer rooms, where the more public aspects of social life take place. In the sultan’s household, the imperial harem was located in the inner area of the palace grounds, in the “House of Felicity,” where only the closest members of the sultan’s personal retinue could enter. Of course, for sexually obsessed Westerners, the area of most interest has always been that part of the harem where the sultan’s hundreds of potential sexual partners resided, a warren of small rooms called the seraglio, situated alongside the sultan’s quarters, where his complex hierarchy of support staff resided. The seraglio was guarded by black and white eunuchs, who in turn were under the command of the kizlar agasi, the chief black eunuch. The kizlar agasi was one of the most powerful people in the realm. As overseer of the women of the harem, he was responsible for their care and, if necessary, their disposal.

The denizens of the harem numbered in the hundreds, with about half acting as servants to the other half. The women selected to pleasure the sultan and to bear his children were slaves, acquired for the most part in the outer realms of the empire, particularly Greece, eastern Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Crimean Peninsula. Under Islamic law, Muslims cannot be slaves to other Muslims, so these women were almost entirely Christian. (This rule was fudged with regard to Bosnia.) The earliest sultans did marry highborn Islamic women, who could also bear their children, but this practice was eventually abandoned for the more pragmatic selection of young women with no connections to extended families. (The most exceptional case was the concubine Roxana, who married Suleiman and in turn became the most famous of all the slave girls to rise up from the seraglio.) The preferred system of extending the royal lineage was through children born of the concubines. Prisoners of the harem, when concubines were no longer useful they could be put to death, their bodies placed in sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus.

In fact, most of the hundreds of odalisques would never spend even a minute with the sultan. They were under the constant guard and care of the black eunuchs. (Black eunuchs were captured in Africa by traders and, after being subjected to the most extreme form of castration—removal of all their genitalia—sold to the wealthy. The royal eunuchs were named after flowers: Hyacinth, Rose, Carnation.)

The imperial harem was no pool of wanton lust. If anything it was a prison filled with bored inmates, a highly formalized institution: “a machine to perpetuate the dynasty, even against the Sultan’s will.”21 Over the centuries, the sultan became something like a queen bee, sequestered at the center of a massive hive, protected and pampered and not really in charge of anything. The individual personality of any particular sultan was superseded by the idea and the institution. The sultan could always be replaced. “With the exception of such forceful men as Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim I or Murad IV, the Ottoman sultans were little more than cogs in a machine.”22 In the nineteenth century, sultans continued to lead a cocooned life, with activist Grand Viziers and other ministers actually running the empire. Indeed, there were a number of dissolute, even alcoholic sultans. But for the West to brand the Turkish court as decadent was somewhat disingenuous, given the court of Charles II in England or Louis the XV in France, where hedonism was an established institution in its own right.

When the sultan wished to select a girl, he first had to obtain permission from his mother (his mother!), the Valida Sultana, in a long and complicated ritual. The girls were paraded before him, the royal selection was made, and the girl would be separated from the group and, over the next day, prepared for her meeting with destiny. She would be bathed, covered in a mudpack of oil and rice flour, and then scrubbed for hours. Her body would be shaved, her nails would be dyed, her eyelashes brushed with lemon kohl; she would be perfumed and hennaed. Two large candles would be lit, and intimacy would proceed as other women guarded the doors to the sultan’s bedchamber.

In the morning, the sultan rose first, accompanied by his usual entourage. A royal secretary would enter the date of the encounter into a register. The girl would return to her cell and, if nine months later she did not produce royal progeny, she would probably never see the sultan again. Concubines who became pregnant with the sultan’s child immediately rose in status. Male heirs were prized, of course. Mothers of the princes and princesses had the highest status in the harem. Since the various children usually had different mothers (each concubine was permitted to have only one son by the sultan), this put the mothers in competition with one another. And once the new sultan was firmly enthroned, his mother became Valida Sultana, the most powerful woman in the realm, simply by dint of her ability to control him.

As a result of this competition, there was a very dark side to bearing sons for the sultan. Should a boy find his way onto the throne, all of his brothers were in immediate danger. Beginning with Mehmed the Conqueror, all adult male relatives of the sultan were at risk. This culling would ensure that royal competition could not endanger the dynasty itself. Brothers and cousins were strangled with a silken cord, as it was considered sinful to spill royal blood. It made no difference how old or young the victim was. Babies were smothered; grown men were garroted. It was understood that to leave any other heirs alive would jeopardize the stability of the state. Nothing personal. Murder was an essential part of the smooth running of the empire.