The office of grand vizier carried enormous power—on occasion, grand viziers could arrange the fall of sultans—but it also entailed enormous risks and offered little prospect of a peaceful death. Defeat in war was blamed on the grand vizier and was followed inevitably by dismissal, exile and, not infrequenty, strangulation. Only a master of intrigue could attain the office. Between 1683 and 1702, twelve grand viziers came and went from the Divan and the Sublime Porte.
Nevertheless, earlier in the seventeenth century, it had been the grand viziers who saved the empire while the sultans sat in their harems indulging their tastes and fantasies.* Outside, Ottoman power had declined so greatly that Venetian ships cruised off the Dardanelles while Cossack "seagull" corsairs from the Dnieper raided the western entrance of the Bosphorus. The empire, bubbling with corruption and dissolving into anarchy, was rescued by the skill of what amounted to a dynasty of grand viziers: father, son and brother-in-law.
In 1656, with the empire near collapse, the harem hierarchy reluctantly named as grand vizier a stern, seventy-one-year-old Albanian, Memmed Korpulu, who solved problems ruthlessly: Between 50,000 and 60,000 executions purged the Ottoman administration of graft and corruption. By the time he died, five years later, the decline in the empire's fortunes had been halted. Under his son Ahmed Korpulu and later his brother-in-law, Kara Mustapha, a brief revival of Ottoman power occurred. The fleets and armies of the Christian powers, Austria, Venice and Poland, were driven back. In 1683, responding to a Hungarian appeal for aid against the Emperor Leopold, Kara Mustapha decided to capture Vienna. An army of over 200,000 men under a banner with horsehair plumes, commanded by Kara Mustapha himself, marched up the Danube, conquered all of Hungary and, for the second time in Ottoman history, stood before the walls of Vienna. Through the summer of 1683, Europe watched anxiously. Regiments of soldiers from the German states enlisted under the Hapsburg Emperor's banner to fight the Turks. Even Louis XIV, normally the enemy of the Hapsburgs and secret ally of the Turks, could not afford not to help save the great Christian city. On September 12, 1683, an allied relieving army fell on the Turkish siege lines from the rear and drove the Turks in flight down the Danube. By order of the Sultan, Kara Mustapha was strangled.
*One sultan, Ibrahim the Mad, encased his beard in a network of diamonds and passed his days tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosphorus. He wanted to see and feel nothing but fur, and levied a special tax for the import of sables from Russia so that he might cover the walls of his apartments with these precious furs. Deciding that the bigger a woman was, the more enjoyable she would be, he had his agents search the empire for the fattest woman they could find. They brought him an enormous Armenian woman, who so fascinated the Sultan that he heaped riches and honors upon her and finally made her Governor General of Damascus.
The years that followed the repulse from Vienna were disastrous for the Turks. Buda and then Belgrade fell, and the Austrian armies even neared Adrianople. The great Venetian admiral Francesco Morosini captured the Peloponnesus, advanced across the isthmus of Corinth and laid siege to Athens. Unfortunately, during his bombardment one of his shells hit the Parthenon, which the Turks were using as a powder magazine. On September 26, 1687, the building, then still largely intact, blew up and was reduced to its present state.
In 1703, Sultan Mustapha II was deposed by the Janissaries in favor of of his thirty-year-old brother Ahmed III, who came to the throne from the seclusion of "The Cage" and ruled for twenty-seven years. An esthete, unstable, morose, greatly influenced by his mother, he liked women, poetry and painting flowers. He had a passion for architecture and built beautiful mosques to please his people and beautiful gardens to please himself. Along the Golden Horn, he erected a series of luxurious pleasure pavilions, some in Chinese design, some in French, where he would sit in the shade of a tree and, in the company of his favorite concubines, listen to poetry. Ahmed loved theatrial entertainment; in winter, elaborate Chinese shadow plays were performed, followed by a distribution of jewels, sweets and robes of honor. In summer, elaborate mock sea battles and firework displays were staged. Tulipmania possessed his court. In the spring evenings, in gardens hung with lanterns or drenched with moonlight, the Sultan and his court, accompanied by musicians, would stroll, stepping carefully over hundreds of turtles that crawled among the tulips and through the grass with lighted candles on their backs.
In this secluded, scented environment, Ahmed III lived out the same years which saw the active, turbulent reign of Peter of Russia. Although Ahmed's reign outlasted Peter's, its end had a distinctly Ottoman flavor. In 1730, with the empire once again in turmoil, Ahmed thought to appease his enemies by ordering the current grand vizier, who happened also to be his brother-in-law, strangled and his body given to the mob. This only temporarily postponed Ahmed's own fate. Soon after, he was deposed and succeeded by his nephew, who had him poisoned.
41
LIBERATOR OF THE BALKAN CHRISTIANS
In
the second half of the seventeenth century, a new and quite unexpected danger appeared in the north to threaten the Ottoman Empire. Muscovite Russia waxed in power and portended menace for the throne of the Shadow of God. Traditionally, the Turks had regarded the Muscovites with disdain; it was not they, but their vassals the Crimean Tatars who dealt with the Muscovites. Indeed, such was the order of ascendancy that the Crimean Tatars, the sultan's tributaries, themselves received tribute from the tsar. For the Crimean khans, Muscovy was a harvest ground for slaves and cattle taken in the great annual Tatar raids into the Ukraine and southern Russia.
That the Ottoman Empire had been able to display this indifference toward the Russian tsardom was due to Moscow's involvement with its other enemies. The two most numerous Christian people of Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Poles, had been fighting each other for generations. But in 1667 a change disagreeable to the sultan occurred: Russians and Poles resolved their differences at least temporarily to unite against the Turks. And it was in 1686 that King Jan Sobieski of Poland, anxious to fight the Ottoman Empire, surrendered temporarily (the transfer became permanent) the city of Kiev to the Regent Sophia in return for Russian adherence to a Polish-Austrian-Venetian alliance against Turkey.
Prodded by her allies, Russia finally initiated military action in this war. The offensives launched against the
Crimean
Tatars in 1677 and 1689, both commanded by Sophia's favorite, Vasily Golitsyn, ended in failure. In Constantinople, the insignificance of Russian military power seemed further confirmed, while in Moscow, Golitsyn's failures precipitated a shift in power. The revelation of Sophia's weakness led to the Regent's downfall and the assumption of power by the Naryshkin party in Peter's name. Thereafter, while the youthful Tsar was drilling soldiers, building boats and visiting Archangel, relations between Russia and Turkey
remained quiet. Technically, they were still at war but in fact there was no fighting.
As Peter came of age, he discovered in the anti-Turkish alliance and the never ended war the opportunity to realize a personal dream: to break through to the south and sail a fleet on the Black Sea. The two summer campaigns of 1695 and 1696 against Azov were the first Russian assaults not on Tatars but on a Turkish fortress manned by Turkish soldiers. Peter's success in his second attempt alarmed the sultan's government: Russian warships seemed more dangerous than Russian soldiers. Now, the Tsar had cleared the mouth of the Don and was massing a fleet at Tagonrog and Azov, but—fortunately, from the Turkish point of view— Ottoman fortresses still commanded the Strait of Kerch and prevented these ships from sailing on the Black Sea.
Officially, of course, it was to reignite the war, to invigorate his allies and perhaps to find new ones that Peter set out on his Great Embassy in 1697. As we have seen, he failed in this purpose, and once his allies signed a treaty of peace at Carlowitz, Russia, a minor combatant, was left to make the best peace it could with the Turks. Denied the fruits for which he hungered, the Tsar never forgave the Austrians for deserting him at Carlowitz. "They take no more notice of me than they do a dog," he complained bitterly. "I shall never forget what they have done to me. I feel it and am come off with empty pockets."
Despite the incompleteness of Peter's gains, Azov was to have far-reaching consequences. The first Russian victory over the Turks, it demonstrated at least a local and temporary superiority over a power which the Muscovites had always before treated with circumspection. It was fortunate for Russia that no great sultan or grand vizier like those of the Ottoman past rose up in Peter's day. The vast power to Russia's south was somnolent, but it remains colossal in size, still possessed of immense resources, and, when provoked, could bring crushing weight to bear on its neighbors.
It was this lethargic but still formidable giant that Peter challenged in 1711 with his march into the Balkans.
By 1710, the thirty-year truce with Turkey, signed on the eve of the Great Northern War, had lasted for ten years; even when Peter had seemed most vulnerable, the truce had been maintained. For this good fortune, the man most responsible was Peter's—and Russia's—first permanent ambassador at Constantinople, Peter Tolstoy. A portrait of Tolstoy depicts a man with shrewd blue eyes, bushy black eyebrows, a high forehead and a gray Western wig.
His clean-shaven face is serene. Everything about the man radiates vigor, tenacity, self-confidence and success.
Tolstoy had needed these qualities plus a great deal of luck to skirt the pitfalls already encountered in a long and remarkable career. Born in 1645 into a landed family of the lesser aristocracy, he had initially favored the Miloslavskys and ardently supported the Regent Sophia in her climactic confrontation with the young Tsar Peter in 1689, but had switched to the winning side just before the end. Peter, not fully trusting this new adherent, sent him to govern the distant northern province of Ustiug. There, as governor, it fell to Tolstoy to entertain the Tsar during the summers of 1693 and 1694 when he was traveling to and from Archangel. Tolstoy made a good impression, which he reinforced by serving capably in the second campaign against Azov. Finally, in 1696, he established himself in Peter's favor when, although fifty-two and the father of a family, he volunteered to travel to Venice to study shipbuilding and navigation. He learned something of these trades and cruised the Mediterranean, but a more important consequence was that he learned to speak Italian and to understand something of Western life and culture, both useful in his subsequent career as diplomat. Shrewd, cool-headed, opportunistic, a man who by Russian standards was cultured and sophisticated, Tolstoy became immensely useful to the Tsar. Recognizing his qualities, Peter entrusted Tolstoy with two of the most difficult assignments of his reign: the long mission to Constantinople and, later, the luring back to Russia of the Tsarevich Alexis. Prizing this talented and useful servant, Peter gave Tolstoy the hereditary rank of count, but he never completely forgot the older man's earlier opposition. Once, when this dark thought flitted across his mind, the Tsar took the older man's head between his two powerful hands and said, "Oh, head, head! You would not be on your shoulders now if you were not so wise."
Tolstoy's character and experience suited him admirably for his assignment as Russia's first resident ambassador at the sultan's court. His instructions, when he arrived near the end of 1701, were those of diplomats since time immemorial: to preserve the truce between Turkey and Russia, to do what he could to stir up trouble between Turkey and Austria, to gather and forward to Moscow information on the foreign relations and internal politics of the Ottoman Empire, to pass along his judgments of the men in power and those likely to come to power, and to learn what he could about Turkish military and naval tactics and the strength of Turkish fortresses on the Black Sea. It was a challenging assignment, made all the more so because the Turks did not really want a Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Other foreign ambassadors were stationed in the Ottoman capital to facilitate commerce, but trade did not flow between Russia and Turkey, and the Turks, accordingly, were suspicious of Tolstoy's presence.
At first, he was placed under something close to house arrest. As he wrote to Peter:
My residence is not pleasant to them because their domestic enemies, the Greeks, are our co-religionists. The Turks are of the opinion that, by living among them,
i
shall excite the Greeks to rise against the Mohammedans, and therefore the Greeks have been forbidden to have intercourse with me. The Christians have been so frightened that none of them dare even pass by the house in which
i
live. . . . Nothing terrifies them so much as your fleet. The rumor has circulated that seventy great ships have been built at Archangel and they think that when it is necessary these ships will come around from the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea and will sail up to Constantinople.
Despite these hardships, Tolstoy had considerable success. He managed to build up an intelligence network based partly on the organization of the Orthodox Church within thde Ottoman Empire (Dositheus, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was especially helpful) and partly with the assistance of the Dutch, who had much experience in the maze of Turkish court politics.
During Tolstoy's years, this maze was particulary complex. Grand vizier followed grand vizier. Some were more tolerant of Tolstoy than others, but his position was never comfortable. In 1702, the Grand Vizier Daltaban Mustapha came to power, determined to back the Tatar Khan in his desire to renew the war with Russia. By generous bribery, Tolstoy managed to bring the Vizier's scheme to the attention of the Sultan's mother, and Daltaban was deposed and beheaded. The next vizier handled Tolstoy more carefully, but two Janissaries still guarded his door and watched his movements.