Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews

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.’11

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’.12

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.13

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.14

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.15 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.16

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.17 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’.18

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.19

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.20

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.21

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.’22 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.’23

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.24

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.’25

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.26

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.27

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.28

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’.29

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.30