Читать книгу Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews - Mark Mazower - Страница 14

CENTRES 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.”¹

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, T 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 the 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.’²

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 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 St 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.

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.’³

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.⁴

Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harmful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefactor. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions (in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping with the Muslim custom in cases where towns had been won by force, a few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building materials, turned into private homes or abandoned. But how many were taken over at the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion of the Muslim population. Of the city’s noblest buildings, Ayios Dimitrios was converted into a mosque only in 1491, Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda a century later.⁵

The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the expropriation of places of worship – for scores of them had lain within the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to serve the city’s sharply reduced population – as the lack of priests to run them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, ‘the majority of the clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition prevails up to today.’ Orthodoxy – though recognized by the Ottoman authorities – was scarcely flourishing. ‘One can hear only from the more elderly people,’ wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, ‘that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what the beauty and charms of each had been.’⁶

As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamicization of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity shifted into the rural areas where monasteries, especially in Mount Athos, prospered. The cities were more deeply altered. With the newcomers came their faith, their places of worship and characteristic institutions of their way of life. A few Christians converted to Islam, both before and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Anatolia that Salonica was transformed – in the words of the chronicler Ashikpashazadé – from a ‘domain of idolatry’ to a ‘domain of Islam’. The sounds of Christian worship – the bells, processionals and Easter fireworks – were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street feasts, parties and Karaghöz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity shocked later travellers. Minarets – spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured or unadorned – dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visitors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In 1853 the Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each ‘circled by a ring of glittering lamps’; as he sailed away by night ‘they formed a delicate bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon.’⁷

Murad’s use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced resettlement kick-started Salonica’s economy and more than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian population, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families, the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities, each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams, they had one religious leader for each 166 Muslims, compared with an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly established though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If the urban grid – the course of the walls, the main roads, the location of markets – remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salonica’s physiognomy.⁸

An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a city medrese informs us about the spread of Muslim learning. The appointee, mevlana Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of 20 aspers daily and instructed to pray ‘for the continuity of the State’. He was to teach ‘sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths of the exegesis of the Quran.’ He was not only to give lessons to students, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly fed ‘so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the position of ulema attains the highest degree.’⁹

Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul – the three imperial capitals – and its mufti [chief religious adviser] was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day – an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim – 90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times – in 1831 – Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and tekkes [monasteries] were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was ‘a little piece of Istanbul’.¹⁰