[ 8 ]
Yashim felt conspicuous as soon as the thought flashed upon him. It was as if the knowledge had made him glow.
In a nearby cafe, the proprietor brought him a coffee while Yashim looked with unseeing eyes down the street. The noise of the tinsmiths insistently hammering had melded with a memory of that terrifying sound, ten years ago, of the Janissaries battering on their upturned cauldrons. It was an age-old signal that nobody in the palace, or in the streets, or in their homes in the city, could misunderstand. It was the mother of all dins, and it hadn’t meant that the Janissaries wanted more food.
It meant that they wanted blood.
Up through the centuries that driving and sinisterly insistent sound of the Janissaries beating on their cauldrons had been the prelude to death in the streets, men torn apart, the sacrifice of princes. Had it always been so? Yashim knew well what the Janissaries had achieved. Each man was selected from a levy of the empire’s toughest, likeliest, most wide-awake Christian boys. Brought to Istanbul, renouncing the faith of the Balkan peasants who had borne them, swearing allegiance as slaves to the sultan mounted at their head, they became a corps. A terrifying fighting machine that the Ottoman sultans had unleashed against their enemies in Europe.
If the Ottoman empire inspired fear throughout the known world, it was the Janissaries who carried the fear to the throats of the unbelievers. The conquest of Sofia and Belgrade. Istanbul itself, wrested from the Greeks in 1453. The Arab peninsula and with it, the Holy Cities. Mohacs, 152.6, when the flower of Hungarian knighthood was cut down in the saddle and Suleiman the Magnificent led his men to Buda, and on, fleetingly, to the gates of Vienna. Rhodes and Cyprus, Egypt and the Sahara. Why, the Janissaries had even landed in France in 1566, and spent a year in Toulon.
Until—who could say why?—the victories dried up. The terms of engagement changed. The Janissaries sought permission to marry. They petitioned for the right to take up trades when there was no fighting, to feed their families. They enrolled their sons into the corps, and the corps grew reluctant to fight. They were still dangerous: loaded with privilege, they lorded it over the common people of the city. Designed to die fighting at the lonely borders of an ever-expanding empire, they enjoyed all the licence and immunity that the people and the sultan could bestow on men who would soon be martyrs. But they no longer sought to martyr themselves. The men who had been sent to terrify Europe made a simple discovery: it was easier—and far less dangerous -to terrorise at home.
The palace made efforts to reason with them. Efforts to discipline them. In 1618 Sultan Osman tried to overturn them: they had him killed, as Yashim knew, by the compression of his testicles, a mode of execution which left no traces on the body. Special man; special death. It was considered fitting for a member of the imperial family. Later still, in 1635, Murad IV rounded up 30,000 Janissaries and marched them to their deaths in Persia. But the corps survived.
And slowly, painfully, the Ottomans had come to realise that they could no longer properly defend themselves. Unreliable as they were, the Janissaries still insisted on being the supreme military power: they had become unassailable. The common people were afraid of them. In trade, they exploited their privileges to become dangerous rivals. Their behaviour was threatening and insolent as they swaggered through the city streets fully armed and wielding sticks, uttering loutish blasphemies. Outside the Topkapi Palace, between Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, lay the open space called the Atmeidan, the ancient Hippodrome of the Byzantines. In it grew a huge plane tree to which the Janissaries had always rallied at the first sign of any trouble, for the blotched and peeling trunk of the Janissary Tree stood at the centre of their world; as the palace lay at the centre of Ottoman government, and Aya Sofia at the heart of religious faith. Beneath its branches the Janissaries divulged their grievances and secrets, and plotted mutinies. From the swaying limbs of the tree, too, they would hang the bodies of men who had displeased them: ministers, viziers, court officials, sacrificed to their blood-lust by a terrified succession of weak and vacillating sultans.
Meanwhile, lands that had been conquered by the sultan’s armies in the name of Islam were being lost to the infidels: Hungary was the first to go. In Egypt, Ali Pasha the Albanian built on the experience of the Napoleonic invasion to train the fellahin as soldiers, western-style. And when Greece disappeared, from the very heartland of an empire where every other man was Greek by speech, it was the final blow. The Egyptians had held the fort, for a while: they were to be commended. They had drill, and discipline; they had tactics and modern guns. The sultan read the message and began to train his own, Egyptian-style force: the seraskier’s New Guard.
That was ten years ago. The sultan issued orders that the Janissaries should adopt the western style of the New Guard, knowing that they would be provoked and affronted. And the Janissaries had rebelled on cue. Caring only for their own privileges, they turned on the palace and the fledgling New Guards. But they had grown stupid, as well as lazy. They were loathed by the people. The sultan had made ready. When the Janissaries overturned their cauldrons on the night of Thursday, 15 June, it took a day to accomplish by modern means what no one had managed to achieve in three hundred years. By the night of the sixteenth, efficient modern gunnery had reduced their mutinous barracks to a smouldering ruin. Thousands were already dead: the rest, fleeing for their lives, died in the city streets, in the forests outside the walls, in the holes and lairs they crept into to survive. It was a trauma, Yashim reflected, from which the empire still waited to recover. Certain people might never recover at all.
[ 9 ]
A man with grime up to his elbows and a leather apron was working on a lantern in the street outside his shop. With a pair of tongs he crimped the tin sheets, fixing them together with a speed and dexterity Yashim was content simply to admire, until the man looked up questioningly.
“I’ve got something slightly unusual I’d like a price for,” Yashim explained. “You seem to make large objects.”
The man grunted in agreement. “What is it you want, effendi?”
“A cauldron. A very big cauldron—as tall as me, on legs. Can you do it?”
The man straightened up and pulled his hand over the back of neck, wincing.
“Funny time of year for a big cauldron,” he remarked.
Yashim’s eyes widened.
“You can do it? You’ve done it before?”
The smith’s answer took him by surprise.
“Do it every year or so. Big tin cauldrons for the soup-sellers’ guild. They use them for the city procession.”
Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of that? Every year, when the guildsmen process through the streets to the Aya Sofia, each guild drags a juggernaut loaded with the implements of their craft. The guild of barbers have a huge pair of scissors and offer free haircuts to the crowd. The fishmongers make their float like a ship, and stand casting nets and hauling on the ropes. The bakers set up an oven and toss hot rolls to the people. And the soup-sellers: huge black cauldrons of fresh soup, which they ladle out into clay pannikins and distribute to the crowd as they go along. Carnival.
“But a tin cauldron wouldn’t take the heat or the weight,” Yashim objected.
The smith laughed.
“They’re not real! The whole float would collapse if they were real. You don’t think, effendi, the barber cuts people’s hair with that giant pair of scissors? They put a smaller pot of soup inside the tin cauldron, and just make believe. It’s for a laugh.”
Yashim felt like a dimwitted child.
“Have you made one of those cauldrons recently? Out of season, even?”
“We make the cauldrons when the guild orders them. The rest of the year, well,” he spat on his hands and picked up the tongs, “it’s just lanterns and such. The cauldrons get a bit battered and they split, so we make more at the right time. If you’re looking for one, I’d talk to the soup-men’s guild if I were you.” He looked at Yashim and creases of amusement showed around his eyes. “You’re not the mullah Nasreddin, are you?”
“No, I am not the mullah,” Yashim laughed.
“Sounds like some kind of prank anyway. If you’ll excuse me…”