Picked-Up Pieces (72 page)

T
HE
S
ULTANS
, by Noel Barber. 304 pp. Simon & Schuster, 1973.

T
HE
S
ULTAN
:
The Life of Abdul Hamid II
, by Joan Haslip. 309 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.

It is a pity that Noel Barber, in writing
The Sultans
, could not muster more of the prose-empurpling zest of an Edgar Saltus, who found the follies and atrocities of the Caesars and of the Czars so perversely enchanting; for Mr. Barber tells the supreme saga of decadent misrule in an efficient journalistic manner that in the end seems rather overwhelmed and wan, and he leaves us with no moral beyond the implication that all Turks are crazy. Perhaps it would take a Beelzebub drunk on blood to sing with appropriate inspiration the annals of the royal descendants of Othman and the Magnificent Suleiman. Mr. Barber is a reasonable modern man, who, with the cumulative numbingness of the
Guinness Book of World Records
, sets down the odd facts as one more madman, imbecile, sot, and terror-stricken impotent succeeds another on the throne of the Shadow of God on Earth. Selim II (who reigned as Sultan from 1566 to 1574) laid siege to Cyprus—a siege in which thirty thousand Christians were massacred in Nicosia alone—to ensure himself a steady supply of Cyprian wine. Mahomet III (r. 1595–1603) had his nineteen brothers strangled upon his accession to the throne. Osman II
(r. 1618–1622) practiced archery upon live targets, and used his own page boys when the supply of prisoners of war gave out. It amused Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) to pick off his hapless subjects with an arquebus from a corner of the Seraglio wall, “exercising the royal prerogative of taking ten innocent lives a day”; a sultan of action, he executed twenty-five thousand suspected malefactors in one year, beheaded his chief musician for playing a Persian air, and sank a boatload of women that drifted within range of his palace cannon. Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648), perhaps the maddest of the lot (though the 19th-century Abdul Aziz is an impressive contender), adorned his beard with diamonds and raped the daughter of the Mufti and drowned his entire harem on the suspicion that one concubine was conducting a romance. Not all the excesses were of cruelty: Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730) admired tulips (from the Turkish
tulbend
, meaning “turban”) to such an extent that he was deposed for the extravagance of his moonlit tulip fêtes; Osman III (r. 1754–1757) in his obsession with food prowled Istanbul by night to sample the city’s eating houses. Abdul Mejid (r. 1839–1861) built a palace, Dolmabache, that incorporated fourteen tons of gold leaf, the biggest mirrors in the world, and a bed of solid silver for himself; when one of his daughters married, he spent forty million francs on her trousseau and the wedding breakfast, which lasted one week. Abdul Aziz, his brother and successor, expanded the harem to nine hundred women, fed three hundred dinner guests most evenings, bought locomotives from Britain though there were no tracks to run them on, sometimes refused to sign any documents written in black ink, played soldiers with real soldiers, and bestowed upon cocks and chickens the Ottoman Empire’s highest decorations for gallantry.

One does not need to be Dr. Spock to be reminded, by such behavior, of insanely indulged children begging for someone to set “limits.” The sultans fascinate, indeed, as examples of how far human appetite will go when no obstacle to its satisfaction is posed. They are a spectacle to comfort the average deprived man. Several of them, early given the run of a harem, developed impotence; a surprising number, in a teetotalling culture, drank themselves to death. Over
half
of the sultans after 1600 had to be deposed! Mr. Barber, though his energetic scholarship displays itself in pages of colorful details, does not seize the opportunity to analyze the peculiarities of Ottoman kingship that shaped so preponderantly ineffective a dynasty. Rather, he offers the dark suggestion that the
“unbroken line of weaklings” after Suleiman were not Othmans at all but sprang from a coupling between Suleiman’s empress Roxelana and an unknown lover. Yet the background of Barber’s perhaps too sensational and anecdotal chronicle of the sultanate contains more sociological reasons for its uncorrected debilitation. The Sultan was not only the administrator of a terrestrial empire but a holy man, the Caliph of Islam, and as such (though the claim to the caliphate was shadowy and emphasized chiefly in the latter centuries of the sultans) he enjoyed among the Muslim masses a religious prestige impervious to mortal shenanigans. Though the sultans’ extravagance and the corruption they fostered sorely burdened the empire, the need for
a
sultan was never questioned, and except in cases of blatant imbecility the rules of succession were followed. A second insulating factor was these rules of succession, whereby not the son but the eldest male in the family inherited the throne; the welter of intrigue this invited was combatted, initially, by the extraordinary sanction of fratricide that Ottoman law offered to the newly enthroned—“the right to execute their brothers, in order to ensure the peace of the world”—and then, in a humane modification that proved surpassingly disastrous to the health of the sultanate, by the institution of the
Kafes
, the Cage, a two-storied building, within the Seraglio, set aside by Ahmed I in 1603 for the perpetual confinement of the heirs to the throne. High walls surrounded it; the ground floor was windowless; here, with no company but that of deaf-mutes and sterilized concubines, the sultans’ brothers and sons awaited either the silken bowstring of assassination or the call to supreme power. Mustafa I, the first alumnus of the Cage, emerged demented; Ibrahim, who had spent twenty-two of his first twenty-four years there, proved a monster of debauchery; and Suleiman II, who logged the record of forty-five years in the Cage, had, when at last he was proclaimed Sultan, “all but lost the power of speech.” Has any other nation ever so devalued human personality as to immure its future rulers in total isolation from the workings of the world? The Ottoman Empire gave an extraordinary centrality to the institution of slavery. The Sultan was the only free Turk in the government; the rest were all his personal slaves, often converted Christians from the European realms of the empire. The Janissaries, his personal troops, were impressed Christian boys; an Albanian father and son, the Kuprilis, served as highly effective grand viziers for some of the Cage-crazed sultans;
two of the most powerful of the sultanas who dominated events from the harem were the Russian Roxelana and Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a convent girl captured by Barbary pirates. (The melodramatic annals of the Seraglio contain few incidents as tender
^*
as the summons of Mahmud II, Aimée’s son, for a Catholic priest to absolve his dying mother in her native faith.) Every sultan was the son of a slave; and the dehumanizing designs of slavery are felt everywhere, from the rigor of the pageantry to such animate constructs as the black eunuch and the deaf-mute assassin—his eardrums broken, his tongue slit, and his life consecrated to the use of the bowstring, as that of the concubine was consecrated to a call from the imperial bed which often never came. In his world of slaves the Sultan found little resistance to his fantasies and little helpful advice. Of Abdul Hamid II, the last of the absolute monarchs and one of the few with some gift for government, Mr. Barber says, “As his terror bore increasing signs of madness, he chose the most incredible characters to guide him. His advisers included a slave he had bought in the market, a circus clown whose act he admired, the son of one of his cooks, a Punch and Judy performer, and a bootblack.” Everything, in short, but a graduate of Whittier High School.

Yet one wonders if even a continuous line of philosopher-kings or elected charismatics could have kept the Ottoman Empire from shrinking. Its reduction, in any case, was less rapid than that of the British Empire, and, unlike that of Rome, left the heartland unconquered. Even after generations and generations of being “sick,” Turkey proved capable of the heroics of Plevna. The reader, grateful for so much that Mr. Barber has unearthed from the archives of this curious despotism, regrets that he did not choose to meditate upon his basic subject—that of decadence. Do extravagance and obtuseness in high circles significantly affect the human tides that Tolstoy saw mysteriously sweeping back and forth across the surface of the globe? Or do the expansion and contraction of empires have to do simply with the technology of warfare: the Ottomans organized the first standing army in Europe and developed an artillery that, in the words of Gibbon, “surpassed whatever had yet appeared in the world.” To what extent does this kind of military vitality reflect spiritual vigor or efficacious political institutions? The Ottoman
bureaucracy of slaves, a model of efficiency in the short run, proved cumbersome and unresponsive in the long. But what possible administrative magic could have enabled the Caliph of Islam to rule forever over the Christian peoples of the Balkans as Christian Europe waxed mighty? The wonder is that the Turkish “yoke” lasted so long. One would like to know in what ways Turkish rule impinged upon the subject peoples—if present-day America is taken as an empire, would the analogy be with Puerto Rico or South Vietnam?—and, for that matter, what the sultans
did
all day, aside from playing pranks on their harem and holding hieratically formal audiences, throughout which the audient’s arms were pinned by two stout pashas as a safeguard against assassination.

Joan Haslip, in
The Sultan
, gives a portrait of Abdul Hamid II considerably more sympathetic than that of Mr. Barber, who makes the last of the all-powerful sultans a maze-loving paranoid surrounded by “incredible characters” and the drab tatters of an outlandish panoply. Miss Haslip sees him as an agile and prescient statesman, able, for the more than three decades of his reign, to play the European powers off against each other and safeguard Turkey’s survival without the entangling alliances that, once he fell, drew the Young Turks into the First World War. A runty younger brother placed on the throne by his sibling’s insanity, Abdul Hamid had some experience of cosmopolitan Europe, more knowledge of history than any sultan before him, a flair for mathematics and carpentry, an engaging fondness for the tales of Sherlock Holmes. He had in his youth enjoyed a bourgeois liaison with a woman not of the harem, a Belgian shopkeeper called Flora Cordier, and even in his reactionary old age his conservatism had the rationale of a Pan-Islamic vision, a sound instinct to salvage the empire’s Muslim East and to let the European fragments go. Abdul Hamid had the self-knowledge to exclaim, in discourse with an English businessman, “What can you expect of us, the children of slaves brought up by eunuchs?” But his story, so respectfully told by Miss Haslip, who even takes the Sultan’s side against the massacred Armenians, is a dreary one, of a devious holding action against a desperate need for reform. It is, furthermore, mere history, full of problematical conferences and détentes and peoples’ uprisings, and tells us little more than the morning’s newspaper. Whereas Mr. Barber’s less solid survey, with its idiots turned sultan and its convent girls turned
into complacent concubines and its claustrophobic sense of an entire empire being crushed into a few terror-filled tiled halls, has the enigmatic depth of a dream, a dream that could tell us some truth about our natures, could we but fathom the symbols.

E
ROTIC
A
RT OF THE
E
AST
, by Philip Rawson. Introduction by Alex Comfort. 380 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

P
RIMITIVE
E
ROTIC
A
RT
, edited by Philip Rawson. 310 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973.

E
ROTIC
A
RT OF THE
W
EST
, by Robert Melville. With a Short History of Erotic Art by Simon Wilson. 318 pp. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973.

Here we have a new genre: the coffee-table book that should be kept out of the reach of the children. Higher coffee tables would seem to be the answer; but the Japanese are using all our tall lumber to make bowling alleys with. So the alternative is to raise a generation for whom there is no pudendum, and that can call a vulva a ——. That generation is here, leaning on my coffee table, and when it takes over I fear G. P. Putnam’s Sons will go begging for buyers as avid as I to wallow in the formerly forbidden delights (1,001 pages, more or less) of their so-called World History of Erotic Art.

These three compendia have texts that, though beside the selling point, in decency should be reviewed. The oldest publication, dating back to staid old 1968, is
Erotic Art of the East
. Dr. Alex Comfort, well known to loving couples as the master chef stirring the stew of
The Joy of Sex
, was announced as general editor and contributed an introduction regretting the “Victorian
terror sexualis
” and our present lack of “a technology of the emotions.” Philip Rawson then, in his long chapter on Indian erotic art, described an elaborate technology based on the notion that semen is a divine substance which prolonged intercourse without orgasm will force up the spinal column into the head, producing enlightenment. By way of technical illustration, there were many tinted depictions of a rubbery prince squatting
en face
with his smiling, netherly
exposed lady, his lingam thrust into her yoni as patiently as the little Dutch boy’s finger in the dike. The Chinese, a later chapter told us, took this Tantric principle—copulation without male consummation—a Confucian step further by making their supreme sex symbol the ancient sage; his longevity and spiritual well-being bore witness to a lifetime of absorbing concubines’ beneficial
yin
without surrendering any considerable portion of his precious
yang
. The Chinese, incidently, considered jade congealed dragon semen. Whatever the cosmological delusions behind them, the Asian doctrines of sexual conduct did place value, Rawson argued, on the gratification of the female. And it is true, the women in these representations look much less alarmed than those in Western erotica. This volume was rounded out by David James’s game plea for the skimpy amorous art of iconophobic, homosexual Islam, and by Richard Lane’s fussy monograph on
shunga
—Japanese “spring pictures,” pictures of sexual activity traditionally part of the printmaster’s production and often given as wedding presents. The shyest bride, after studying the monstrously exaggerated genitals that
shunga
shows, could only be relieved at the sight of her husband’s.