The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (32 page)

28

LEAVING ÜSKÜDAR

From: Alvise Gritti, the Venetian Bailo at Istanbul

To: The Illustrious Senators of the Serene Republic of Venice

Date: June 9, 1534

Most Gracious Masters:

I report with pleasure that the little jeweled timepiece you selected as a wedding present for the Sultan arrived in pristine condition and has been delivered to Topkapi. My informants at the palace tell me that Sultan Suleiman and his bride have greeted no other wedding gift from a foreign power with such delight. Even more than the valuable gems that adorn it, they dote on the little figures dressed as Swiss guards that pop out to announce the hours. I recall an equally enthusiastic response from the French king when we sent him a timepiece not unlike this one to cheer him up while he was languishing in the Italian prison. Set down here in Istanbul in the midst of these Saracens, who often seem to belong to a different race of men than ourselves, I find it somewhat reassuring that our kings and their sultans do have some commonality of interest. Clocks and kings.

Ever since I first took up the office of consul here in Istanbul, I have been kept a virtual pariah like all the other foreign representatives (except, on occasion, the French). Even my request to visit the underground cisterns has been denied, although what they have to hide down there I cannot imagine. Could it be that a little gold clock is all it takes to banish the morbid suspicion of foreigners that lurks in the Oriental mind?

Customarily the Sultan responds to gifts with a formal note of acknowledgment, nothing more. This time when I received the formal note of thanks for the wedding gift, it was accompanied by an invitation to pay a visit to Üsküdar where the Turkish army is preparing to embark on their campaign against Persia. As my account books will attest, we normally employ paid informants to find out what these people are up to. Suddenly we are invited in to look for ourselves.

Only one small detail of the wedding gift fails to please. The Sultan hates the chimes. He has requested me to recruit a mechanic who can silence them without disabling the little Swiss guards. This Sultan prizes silence.

I suggest to you, my masters, that the speedy dispatch of a clockmaker with the requisite skills to still the offending tinkles would strengthen our hand at this court immeasurably. Due to the arrival of the clock, we Venetians presently occupy a position of extraordinary favor at the Ottoman court. A window of opportunity has opened. We can use it to press for the trading concessions that we have been pursuing for some time without success.

Some weeks ago when I received an invitation to visit the staging area for Suleiman’s army at Üsküdar, the timing of the departure surprised me. Mid-July was fatally late for the Ottomans to launch a campaign, I thought. And so it would have been were Suleiman attempting yet a third siege of Vienna. But he seems to have given up — at least for the present — his plans to capture the Austrian capital. Now his eyes are firmly fixed on Baghdad, and in Mesopotamia the summer heat makes it impossible to fight from June through September. On that account the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, was sent ahead with half the army in mid-winter to reoccupy the Persian strongholds in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan. He carries with him the huge cannons needed to lay siege to the cities along the way, making his a slow, heavy slog. But it enables the Sultan to speed off with the balance of the army to join his Vizier unburdened by the weight of the big guns, so that their combined forces can march on together in late autumn. That is the best season, they say, to cross into Mesopotamia.

Once the Sultan has conquered Baghdad (
inshallah
, as everybody here says), Suleiman can spend the winter establishing himself in Iraq as the reincarnation of the caliphs of the Arab Golden Age. Then, with Ottoman rule firmly established in Mesopotamia, there will still be time to return home before the winter of 1535.

Until now everyone — including the Sultan — believed that his father had subdued the Persians once and for all at the Battle of Chaldiran some twenty years ago. But now we have a new king in Teheran, and this Shah Tahmasp has wasted no time rekindling the old Turkish-Persian enmity. All he needed was provocation, and as if on cue, up stepped Zultikar Khan, the governor of Baghdad, to make a public declaration of his independence of Persia and his fealty to the Ottoman Sultan. No doubt the rascal had been conniving with the Ottomans behind Persia’s back all the while. These people are always changing loyalties. But the Khan, who seems to have had an unfortunate flair for the dramatic, had the poor judgment to follow up his defection from the Persian Empire with packaging up the keys to Baghdad and sending them to Suleiman in a golden
casque
! Naturally, Tahmasp responded by storming Baghdad, chopping off the governor’s head, and sending it on to Topkapi Palace in a velvet bag — the Saracen equivalent, it would appear,
of throwing down the gauntlet. This puts Turkey once again at war with Persia.

I have now paid two visits to the staging area at Üsküdar, one a week ago and the other this very day on their eve of embarkation. Before I went, I had been told that the Ottomans lodged more grandly in the field than at home. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes.

The encampment is laid out in a vast field at least five times longer than the hippodrome. On my first visit, only the Sultan’s private quarters were in place and they stood — a multitude of tents of varied shapes, sizes, and colors — in the very center of the field. Here I must pause to point out that what we Europeans speak of as tents bears almost no resemblance to the structures I saw in Üsküdar. In the style of their nomadic forbearers, these Ottomans create the big, important tents out of heavy felt panels suspended by silk cords from posts as thick as a man’s waist and painted top to bottom with gorgeous designs. The smaller tents that surround the Sultan’s entourage are made of stiff canvas panels.

But do not think that Suleiman wallows in
lusso
in his tent while his subordinates live in squalor in theirs. As I watched, a crew of workmen was dressing the rough exteriors of the smaller tents with embroidered hangings. Even the stables on the periphery of the compound are covered by canvas!

I cannot report on the Sultan’s
sanctum sanctorum
— his sleeping tent, his bathing tent, his meeting tent, his eating tent. Of these I got not so much as a glimpse. But I was shown his main reception tent, a vast rotunda fully carpeted, hung all around with colored glass lanterns and capped by a huge crescent bearing his war standard, his
tugra
. Honored sirs, I have seen many bivouacs in my long service to the Serenissima, but never could I even have imagined such grandeur in the field.

On my second visit, the camp had indeed expanded to cover the entire meadow in a grid of pathways with a place for everyone and everyone in his place, including hunting dogs and camp followers. It was Topkapi re-created in felt and canvas with a palisade of red silk to serve as its fortress walls.

Allow me to remind you, gentlemen, that this temporary city houses only half of the army that is advancing toward Baghdad; the other half, under the leadership of the Grand Vizier Ibrahim, will winter over in Tabriz, which we hear Ibrahim has already recovered from the Persians. Note also that this caravan will be joined by local governors — the
beys
— and various Ottoman feudatories who bring with them their own mounted troops, grooms, servants, horses, mules, and baggage trains as it progresses through Anatolia and Azerbaijan.

By the time I left Üsküdar today, every tent pole was in place and every man and beast accounted for, except for one: the Sultan. At the break of dawn, he will ride out from Topkapi Palace with his honor guard of pages and his Janissaries to take up his central place in the line of march. Then, at the bong of the great bronze vessel they call the Drum of Conquest, he will head east on a journey that local engineers calculate at 1,334 miles.

By noon tomorrow, I am told, the vast field at Üsküdar will be empty. By nightfall it will be cleaned of any evidence of its recent occupiers. The city that grew up in a few weeks will have disappeared in a day without leaving a trace. And Suleiman will be on the march once again, eastward this time, across the vast Anatolian plain to Aleppo, which is still firmly under Ottoman control, and then south through the Kurdish territory that abuts the Persian Empire and seems never to be under anyone’s control.

There are some points on this route of march where Suleiman will be treading in the very footsteps of Alexander the Great on his Baghdad campaign. Apparently, our Sultan was brought up on some piece of Arabic invention, very popular among the Turks, titled Ahmedi’s
Book of İskender
(their name for Alexander), a kind of nursery jumble of Arrian, Ptolemy, Herodotus, and Xenophon’s
Anabasis
mixed in with a good deal of Muslim mythologizing. It was in this book, read to him by his mother, I am told, that Suleiman first encountered the story of Alexander and, at that early age, adopted the Greek hero as his personal model.

Respectfully, Lords, I will take the liberty of pointing out that Alexander himself adopted Homer’s Achilles as his hero at an early age, and that on his Persian campaign Alexander slept with a copy of Homer’s
Iliad
under his pillow, the text of which he had read to him each night by his boon companion, Hephaestus. Indeed, it would not surprise me if Suleiman — who recently received as a gift, I hear, a Latin manuscript of Arrian’s
Life of Alexander
— will give equal pride of place to that volume among his bedding.

They say that Suleiman also fancies being read to sleep in his tent. Coincidentally, he too has a boon companion, the Grand Vizier Ibrahim, who, it is said, shares his bed some nights and always reads to him. But the Grand Vizier is bivouacked many miles away in Tabriz. And I would wager that some page with a good command of Latin, and an eye on the main chance, will glide easily into a place of similar intimacy as a reader to the Sultan before this cavalcade reaches Konya.

Respectfully submitted,

Alvise Gritti

29

MALTEPE

From: Danilo del Medigo at Maltepe

To: Judah del Medigo at Topkapi Palace

Date: June 13, 1534

Oh, Papa:

Four days out of Üsküdar. Riding by day, sleeping by night, always within the confines of the Sultan’s command center tucked into the middle of this vast procession of people and animals, is like living in the middle of a city so large that you cannot see the end of it in any direction. And that is what makes the smooth orderliness of our march most amazing.

Each night, as we prepare to sleep, we hear the horns summoning the engineers and laborers from their beds to wake up and ride on to the next day’s stop. While we continue to sleep, they ride ahead with the camels and wagon trains. At dawn we wake up, wash, eat, and set forth leaving our tents behind and all of our garbage carefully buried. By the time we arrive at the day’s stop we are greeted with a new tent city marked out by trenches, latrines, and the entire array of the Sultan’s household tents (some of which are duplicates of the ones we just vacated). Meanwhile, back at the previous day’s site the rear guards have disassembled that village and leap-frogged past us to our next stop with their wagons full of tents and gear.

I know that this is an old story for you, Papa, who have shared so many of the Sultan’s victories, but your campaigns were waged in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Austria. You had the Danube for your highway. All we have is an old, abandoned silk road.

I don’t know what exactly I expected of a military campaign, but whatever it was, it was not this — the slowness of it, the daily sameness. Pack up, mount the horse, and slowly walk to the day’s destination (no faster than it takes the fully loaded camels of the baggage train). The pack animals set the pace.

What did I think it would be like? How else did I think we could transport a city of men and animals from Istanbul to Baghdad? The answer is, I didn’t think. My only experience of campaigning was when I rode out with Lord Pirro Gonzaga to visit Bourbon’s imperial army outside of Rome. Until we set off from Üsküdar I had seen no other army on the march than that one. I was prepared to die, but not to die of boredom.