The Janissary Tree

[ 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.