Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire (39 page)

The rules of the game were strictly observed, and unfair or
unnecessary moves that were construed as rough and violent were not permitted. To
strike the horse, instead of the rider, was regarded as a sign of inexperience
and violated the most basic rules of the game. Highly trained players rarely
missed hitting an opponent and were skilled at avoiding hits themselves by
performing special moves on horseback, such as leaning towards either side of
the horse, under the horse’s stomach or even its neck. Some players scored more
points by hitting an opponent three or four times before he managed to escape
and take his place back in his row. All these moves and maneuvers meant that
the participants in the game faced a considerable risk of serious injury and
even death, since the head was one of the principal targets of attack. Part of
the necessary skill lay in training the horses to play a significant role in
the outcome of the game. A player won points when he managed to hit his rival
with the wooden javelin or rode him out or caught an incoming
cereed
in
mid-air. He received negative points for any move that endangered the horse,
such as riding out of bounds or striking a horse with the
cereed
intentionally.
During the mock battle,
cereed
horsemen tried “to gain possession of the
darts thrown earlier in the game and carried for this purpose thin canes curved
at one end.” Throughout a game of
cereed,
as horsemen galloped on the
field, musicians played Ottoman military songs or folk songs performed with
bass drum and reed windpipes. At the end of the game, the referees counted the
number of hits and announced the victorious team, which received awards and a
banquet in its honor.

As intrepid horsemen and skilled archers, the Ottomans, who
brought the war game to Anatolia, used
cereed
as a means of improving
the equestrian skills of their troops and training their army units for battle.
While marching, an Ottoman commander lined up his officers and conscripts
against one another to play 40 to 50 rounds of
cereed
in order to
prepare them for the next military campaign. The exercise stopped as soon as it
was decided that the horses were tiring. Ultimately, a specialized cavalry unit
was organized from those who excelled in the sport.

Numerous
cereed
grounds sprang up throughout
Istanbul and the surrounding suburbs. The best known among these were the
Archery Field, where the sultan himself played both polo and
cereed;
the
field at the Imperial Arsenal; and the field in Cindi Meydan, where the monarch
and the court played every Friday. One European observer wrote that near “the
Hippodrome” (At Meydani), there was a large sports ground surrounded by walls
where horsemen met on Friday afternoons, holidays, and every day during the
summer to play
cereed.
The game allowed the ruler and the palace pages
to show off their physical prowess and dexterity. In Istanbul, large numbers of
court officials, dignitaries, and palace employees played the game regularly,
and “rival factions existed under the name of Lahanadjil (cabbage men) and
Bamyadil (gumbo men).”

Cereed
was not, however, confined to Istanbul. In
every province where Ottoman troops were stationed, the game was played with
great intensity and enthusiasm. During the
Ramazan Bayrami,
which
celebrated the end of the month of fasting,
cereed
and wrestling were
the most popular spectator sports. In villages across Anatolia, teams of
horsemen and javelin throwers contested, as spectators peered through the dust
of the flying hooves and cheered the men on horseback.

In Egypt,
cereed
was played initially by the local
Mamluk elite and the Ottoman soldiers and officers who were stationed in the
country. The Egyptian peasants, however, soon learned the game and played it
regularly during the wedding ceremonies of an important person, such as the
sheikh of a tribe or village, or when a boy was circumcised, or when “a votive
calf, or ox or bull” was “to be sacrificed at the tomb of a saint and a public
feast.” On these occasions, the
cereed
players, usually representing
rival villages or tribes, gathered and were immediately divided into two
contending teams. Each team comprised 12 to 20 combatants with each individual
mounted on a horse.

The Atmeidan (At Meydan) or
Hippodrome. William H. Bartlett. From Julie Pardoe,
The Beauties of the
Bosphorus
(London: 1839).

ARCHERY

Besides
cereed,
archery was viewed as the most
important sport in the Ottoman domains. The Turks were master archers from the
time they emerged as a distinct people in Central Asia. While the sword was
used as the close-range weapon, a bow and arrow remained the standard
long-range weapon. The use of the bow and arrow continued in the Ottoman Empire
until the introduction of firearms. Long-distance and target-shooting
competitions, as well as archery on horseback, took place under early Ottoman
rulers, but not until the reign of Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople,
was an archery field designed in Istanbul. During the reign of Mehmed II’s
successor, Bayezid II, the archery field was expanded and additional ones
designed and developed. Bayezid II also offered special privileges to prominent
archers and the craftsmen who manufactured archery equipments. These artisans
were provided with shops in a designated section of the bazaar. During the 15th
and 16th centuries, there were roughly five hundred bow and arrow manufacturers
in Istanbul.

During the
Ramazan Bayrami,
crowds of spectators
assembled on the plain above Beyoğlu—a district located on the European
side of Istanbul, separated from the old city by the Golden Horn—to watch
archery competitions. First, the archers sat cross-legged in a long line and
chanted the prayers with which Ottomans began all competitions and games. Then
the competition began in complete silence as men used short stiff bows and
special arrows to shoot a target in the fastest possible time. The prize for this
competition was an embroidered towel, which the champion could use for cleaning
and wiping his face. The distance competition then followed, and the spot where
the longest shot had landed was marked by a stone. If a record was broken, a
marble monument with the name of the archer inscribed on it in golden letters
was erected. Archers who set a new record were recognized as champions and
received special gifts and awards from the sultan. During the competition, the
archers also exhibited their skills by targeting small objects such as apples,
bottles, and lanterns. The diplomat and author Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq
(1521–1592), who served as the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire for the
Habsburg ruler Ferdinand I (and later the future Holy Roman emperor), “marveled
at the length of shots he witnessed, but he noticed that the marking-stones
from former times lay far beyond those of his day, and the Turks told him that
they could not equal their forefathers’ strength and skill.”

Prominent archers of the day met regularly at designated
locations to offer free lessons and display their extraordinary talent and
brilliance. Several Ottoman sultans, such as Murad IV, practiced archery a few
times a week and went so far as to compete in various archery competitions, in
which they set new records that were celebrated by the construction of a marble
column. The targets set up in numerous streets of the capital where young and
old came to practice archery demonstrated the great enthusiasm of ordinary
people for this sport.

Archery remained a passion of Ottoman sultans down to the
19th century. Sultan Mahmud II, who was an avid archer, competed regularly with
his favorite officials. After the sultan had shot his arrows, imperial pages
and attendants ran to the field to collect the arrows and measure the
distances. Once the boys had completed their task, court officials, who had
been standing and waiting in a line, took their turn and shot their arrows, “taking
special care to keep within bounds” and not to outdo and outshine their royal
master. The court-sponsored archery competitions were so frequent that “a long
stretch of hilly country immediately in the rear” of Istanbul’s Military
College had become “dotted over with marble pillars fancifully carved, and
carefully inscribed, erected on the spots where the arrows shot” by the sultan “from
a terrace on the crest of the height had fallen.”

Archery and
cereed
went hand in hand with other
war-related games, such as horseback riding, hunting, swordplay, fencing, spear
throwing, putting the stone or throwing the boulder, and the game of wielding a
mace (
gurz)
, a heavy spiked club whose handling required strong arms. All
these activities were directly connected to military training and battlefield
performance.

WRESTLING

One sport not directly related to warfare was wrestling,
which was enormously popular among most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire,
particularly the Turks, Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Kurds, and
Gypsies. Every village and town had its own wrestling champion, or
pehlivan.
Matches were organized on Fridays, or during
bayrams,
between the
champions of neighboring villages. Large crowds of cheering spectators watched
the wrestlers for hours, cheering both the victors and the vanquished. During
major festivals in Istanbul, thousands of spectators, including the sultan and
the court, attended the wrestling matches between the city’s best-known
wrestlers. Süleyman the Magnificent greatly enjoyed the sport and sponsored his
own strongly built wrestlers, who received a daily wage. These wrestlers were
mostly Moors, Indians, and Tatars, and they wore a pair of leather breeches,
gathered tightly below the knee. They often oiled their bodies to make it
extremely difficult for the opponent to get a grip. After the end of each bout,
“the wrestlers wrapped their sweaty bodies in a blue-checked cotton cloth, but
away from the ring they wore long gowns girdled with silk and a bonnet of black
velvet or astrakhan, which hung down over one shoulder similar to the bonnets
of Polish and Georgian gentlemen.”

Some sultans, such as Murad IV, were wrestlers themselves.
In his
Book of Travels,
Evliya Çelebi wrote that Murad IV frequently
stripped and wrestled his court officials, including the sword bearer, Melek
Ahmed Paşa; the calligrapher, Deli Husayin Paşa; and the champion,
Pehlivan Dişlenk Süleyman, who were all very athletic and fond of
wrestling. These royal bouts were held inside the palace, and before each match
a prescribed prayer was recited: “Allah! Allah! For the sake of the Lord of all
Created beings Muhammad Mustafa; for the sake of Muhammad Bukhara Sari-Saltuk;
for the sake of our Sheikh Muhammad who laid hold of the garments and limbs—let
there be a laying of hand upon hand, back upon back, chest upon chest! For the
Love of Ali, the Lion of God, grant assistance, O Lord!” After this prayer the
challengers began to wrestle. When the sultan grew angry, he knelt down upon
one knee and tried to lift his opponent from beneath.

Murad IV was so infatuated with wrestling and displaying
his strength that, at times, he boasted of his strength by lifting the pages of
his court over his head and swinging them in the air:

One day he came out covered with perspiration from the
hammam (bath) in the Khasoda, saluted those present, and said “Now I have had a
bath.” . . . I said, “My emperor, you are now clean and comfortable, do not
therefore oil yourself for wrestling today, especially as you have already
exerted yourself with others, and your strength must be considerably reduced.” “Have
I no strength left?” Said he, “let us see;” upon which he seized me as an
eagle, by my belt, raised me over his head, and whirled me about as children do
a top. I exclaimed, “Do not let me fall, my emperor, hold me fast!” He said, “Hold
fast yourself,” and continued to swing me round, until I cried out, “For God’s
sake, my emperor, cease, for I am quite giddy.” He then began to laugh,
released me, and gave me forty eight pieces of gold for the amusement I had
afforded him.

To become a wrestler, one had to attend special schools
called
tekkes,
which combined athletic and spiritual training under one
roof. The
tekkes
were modeled after
zurkhanehs
(houses of
strength), a traditional Iranian gymnasium. Here, athletes, who exercised to build
a strong body, also learned the philosophical and spiritual principles of
mysticism (Sufism), such as purity of heart, selflessness, compassion,
humility, and respect toward fellow human beings. They were also taught that
abstinence from sex and bodily indulgence preserved their physical strength. A
true
pehlivan
was not only a man of muscles and physical strength, but
also a spiritual being with unique and distinct personal and ethical qualities.
These included grace and humility, particularly when he defeated a challenger.
If a younger athlete defeated an older wrestler, for example, he kissed the
hand of the defeated man as a sign of respect and humility.