Читать книгу Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews - Mark Mazower - Страница 33

One of the questions raised by the Ottoman experience of plague is what it tells us about the attitude of local officials to the management of the city. Although soldiers returning from wars, pilgrims and merchants all carried the deadly disease into the unprotected port, preventative measures were more or less non-existent. Infected houses were sometimes sprinkled with vinegar, limed or even occasionally demolished. But each community took its own measures and there was no overall governmental response. According to the reformer John Howard, who visited Salonica in 1786, the Greeks and the Jews each ran a small hospital, the former enclosed by high walls, the latter ‘lightsome and airy, and better accommodated for its purpose than any I had seen’, situated in the midst of the cemetery, and utilising tombs as tables and seats. But the small European community was far less well equipped than in Izmir, and evidently relied on flight into the countryside. And with no public health service, at least before the administrative reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman officials were no better informed than anyone else about where and when the epidemic struck. In 1744 when rumours of plague ran through the town, the only way the Venetian consul could establish their veracity was by approaching the chief rabbi who got the Jewish grave-diggers to say on oath whether they had observed signs of illness among the deceased. The Ottoman town officials themselves had no idea.⁴⁰

Here as in so many areas, they approached municipal governance in a spirit of extreme disengagement. The plague – like the other risks of urban life such as fire and violent crime – highlighted the limited resources and ambitions of the eighteenth-century Ottoman state. The truth was that the kadi and the pasha of the city had few means at their disposal, for the city and its interests were often squeezed between the demands of the capital, on the one hand, and the powerful regional land-owners on the other. Criminal justice was generally solved through mediation and fines, and imprisonment was limited for many years by the lack of a proper prison in the town. The so-called Tower of the Janissaries was usually used for this but rarely had many inmates and was not designed for large numbers. A considerable amount of alcohol, coffee and opium was being consumed. The city was notorious for its dozens of taverns, coffee-houses and drinking shops – Evliya had been astonished at the brazenness of the unbelievers who would openly get drunk on wine or boza [a drink made from fermented millet] – but they too were largely outside official control, and frequented by janissaries who did much as they pleased. Taxes and the setting of market prices did concern the authorities. But even there, as we have seen, the resources they commanded were limited.

In general, whilst not quite as anarchic as some other Ottoman cities – Aleppo, for example, seems to have been in a state of virtual civil war as notable families and local power-brokers fought out their differences – eighteenth-century Salonica was a place where the authority of the central state could only be enforced sporadically and intermittently. When events threatened to spiral into large-scale violence, the strangulation of janissary ringleaders or the expulsion of troublemakers restored order for a time. But so long as the city fulfilled its role as provider of grain and wool for the capital, the Porte was prepared to tolerate high levels of street violence, and substantial power remaining within the hands of local elites. Food riots were the townspeople’s way of signalling that local land-owners and merchants needed to remember the poor. Controlling the janissaries themselves was almost impossible, and together with the Albanians, they were the main internal challenge to imperial rule. As soldiers rampaged through Salonica’s streets, and the plague carried off thousands a year, it could seem as if this was a city on the verge of chaos. Yet this was a chaos of vitality, not decline.