Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (6 page)

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 wealthy 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.

T
HE
S
IEGE

I
N 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, hard-drinking 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 already submitted to Ottoman rule. After 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his control, there was little the Byzantine emperors could do. 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. Some 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 mastery 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, stonethrowers, 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 a 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 nonresistance 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.
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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].”

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Mosques and Hamams

T
HE
M
IGHTIEST
W
AR

C
ENTRES 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, “I 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 his 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 even 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 Saint 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.

In fact, 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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