Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

Author:Jason Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446420157
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

* From Naima, via Creasy.

† Mme La Quira was rewarded with jobs for all her family, and was eventually strangled at the insistence of the mob.

16

The Spiral

Power was a slippery thing in the early 1600s. The pashas were caught up in the crisis of the closing frontier. New jobs grew scarce. The state had encouraged provincial governors to enrol militias to keep order in these tumultuous times; but they were tempted to use them to defy the Porte, defraying their cost by raising local taxes on their own initiative. The Porte winked at this, for without the levies it might have no army. Assailed on the one hand by the demands of the new breed of warrior, the professional musketeer, and the rise of inflation on the other, the state was forced into massive tax-gathering efforts which increased the burden on the peasantry.

Ipsir Mustafa Pasha, governor of Aleppo, was offered the grand vizierate in 1651. Local rebellions, he replied, made it impossible for him to leave his post. ‘I have mustered 40,000 musketeers,’ he assured the Porte. ‘I am prepared to come with this company and to rub my face on the Imperial Threshold.’ The Imperial Threshold was not sure whether this rubbing would be quite what it liked; but still Ipsir Mustafa Pasha delayed, reluctant to exchange his quasi-independent position for the uncertainties of palace life, and suspicious of the motives that lay behind his summons. When he finally came to negotiate terms and sound out the mood of the city, he covered his approach with the support of an army of ‘seasoned warriors, fully armed and accoutred, from the lands of the Arabs and the Turks and the Kurds, each one a walking armoury, uppity Segban and Sarica vermin, clad in mail and armour and helmets and link-mail neckbands and shields and felts, each one having ready in his hands and at his waist five or six double-barrelled lead-shot muskets with double wick, like so many salamanders in Nimrod’s fire, marching in close formation and brandishing their weapons as though they were entering a skirmish. The Istanbul troops shook like Autumn leaves.’

The biographies of most seventeenth-century pashas make for sombre reading. The kul suffered from overcrowding, like everyone and everything else: between 1640 and 1656 the numbers of salaried officials jumped from 60,000 to 100,000. One Omar Pasha, for example, spent two years waiting for a new post, maintaining the retinue which his rank demanded by borrowing money from his sister. Two jobs were offered to him in this period, but in each case the incumbent refused to budge. A war, in which he and his retinue were bound to participate, sent his debts soaring. He desperately needed a job, with the chance to recoup his losses. Once again, the pasha he was detailed to relieve was in no mood to change places with him. A battle had to be fought, and Omar died in it. The victor made his apologies to the Porte, regretted the confusion, and hung onto his job.

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