Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (18 page)

Merchants and tavern-keepers were at greatest risk. In April 1734, to take a typical episode, the city was immobilized by the violent behaviour of Bosnian irregulars en route to Syria. As usual, wine shops and taverns were a magnet for trouble. In one they killed the owner, a baker and a Greek wine salesman. Others robbed the house of a Muslim woman, “raped her and tormented her cruelly until she died.” Armed with stones, knives, sabres and revolvers, they swaggered through the streets in gangs of as many as fifty, holding up anyone they met. “We are all locked inside our houses and well guarded until they depart for Syria,” writes the Venetian consul. Even the Pasha remained in his palace, since he lacked sufficient troops to keep order.
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T
HE
J
ANISSARIES

A
NYONE 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 empire’s own subjects.

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.”
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In Salonica, the janissaries fell into two categories. There were the heavily armed infantrymen, who formed the town garrison, a total of somewhere between twelve hundred and two thousand 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.”
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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 land-owners, 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 grain supply, 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 wheat 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.
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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.
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To make matters worse, through the eighteenth century Istanbul was exporting its own janissary problem, as it expelled
troublemakers 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.
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By 1751 they were said to “rule” the city, ready to kill “a man for a salad.” The following year, a crowd of five hundred 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.
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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.
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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.

A
LBANIANS

I
N 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.”
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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.
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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 Muslim 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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. And 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.”
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