The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (8 page)

The earliest and most original innovator was Ibrahim Pasha Kulliyesi, who became Ahmed III’s Grand Vizier in 1718, after two years as
kaimakan
(deputy Grand Vizier).
²
Foreign observers portray Ibrahim as a sybaritic impresario, with an aesthete’s eye for the beauties of landscape, and great intellectual curiosity. But he
was also a shrewd diplomat and a skilled manipulator of palace politics, able to remain Grand Vizier for twelve years, at a time when fourteen months had become the norm. He survived by playing off
his enemies against each other, by close marriage links with the dynasty, and by constantly keeping the Sultan amused, entertained and free from all cares of state.

Ibrahim married the Sultan’s eldest daughter; and he is generally called Damat (‘son-in-law’) Ibrahim to distinguish him from the many namesakes whose ambition never carried
them so high. Like his imperial master, he was greedy for wealth and personally extravagant. Yet, despite his many failings, Damat Ibrahim cut an impressive figure, showing broader vision than any
of his predecessors. He was the first Ottoman
minister to send envoys to the greater European capitals: in 1719 to Vienna; in 1720–1 to Paris; and in 1722–3 to
Moscow. As well as negotiating trade agreements, they were to serve as observers, reporting back to the Grand Vizier on aspects of life and culture which might be ‘applicable’ to
conditions in the Ottoman Empire. The instructions to Celebi Mehmed, the envoy to France, have survived. He was to visit ‘fortresses, factories, and see generally the products of French
civilization’. This task he performed diligently. Reports were sent to the Grand Vizier describing the French court, Parisian street scenes, hospitals, military training grounds and schools.
Above all, Celebi lavished praise on the spread of books in libraries and the wonders of printing—a skill to which the envoy’s son, Mehmed Said, gave particular attention.
³

The two visitors to France were cultural missionaries. They helped dispel the legendary suspicion of the ‘cruel Turk’ and stimulated a fashionable interest in
turquerie
, even
to the extent of introducing kebabs to Western Europe. But their main influence was on court life in Constantinople. Although the Blue Mosque was completed in 1616 and the Yeni Cami ‘new
mosque’ in 1663, the classical period of Ottoman-sponsored architecture had long since ended. During their half-century of campaigning in Europe the Sultans had favoured Edirne, a pleasantly
relaxed city which was also a week’s journey nearer to the battle fronts. But with the return of peace Ahmed III was prepared to burnish the fading glories of his imperial capital, if only
Ibrahim could provide him with the funds.

Ibrahim did just that—and more. A property tax was invented and, at least in the centre of the empire, successfully levied. Emergency ‘campaign assistance taxes’ were raised
regularly, even if there was peace along every frontier. On the Anatolian waterfront Ibrahim built a new villa, prompted by the first detailed reports from Celebi in Paris; and there he entertained
his father-in-law throughout May 1721, looking out across the Bosphorus. Ahmed III’s aesthetic sense was highly developed; he was interested in poetry, in painting and calligraphy, and
particularly in horticulture. He was delighted with his Grand Vizier’s villa and its gardens. The Venetian envoy reports that Ibrahim promptly presented it to him.
⁴

But a new villa was not enough to satisfy Ahmed’s cultural acquisitiveness. Celebi Mehmed’s descriptions of Fontainebleau and, even more, of King Louis’
compact château at Marly, fascinated him. In imitation of what he assumed to be French royal fashions—and with active encouragement from Damat Ibrahim—Ahmed III created
Sa’adabad (‘The Place of Happiness’), an exquisite summer palace above the ‘Sweet Waters of Europe’, beyond Eyüp, some four miles up the Golden Horn from the
Topkapi Sarayi. The palace was built in 1722, with astonishing speed. The two streams which constituted the Sweet Waters, the Alibey Suyu and the Kagithane Suyu, were canalized, so as to give
Sa’adabad a long, ornamental lake and feed fountains and cascades set in the grounds of the palace. Other members of the Divan sought to emulate their sovereign’s example. A new
waterfront palace went up for Damat Ibrahim at Kandilli, some five miles up the Bosphorus, where he sumptuously entertained the Sultan in 1724 and again in 1728, on both occasions for a fortnight.
Foreign architects were invited to Constantinople; small waterfront villas, often of timber or moulded plaster rather than the more expensive marble and stone, went up along the Anatolian shore of
the Bosphorus as well as at the head of the Golden Horn.

So the twenty-nine-year-old Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote home to Lady Bristol in April 1718, describing the city where her husband was in residence as King George I’s
ambassador.
⁵
But she was writing before the Sa’adabad craze swept the Court. Had she returned to the Bosphorus five or six years later, she would
have seen her symmetrical ‘cabinet’
embellished with Rococo extravagance. The French envoy, Louis Sauveur de Villeneuve, commented particularly on two aspects of
court life—the Imperial Progresses from palace to palace, and the liking of the Sultan and his ruling class for festive illumination in the night sky.

Soon after his arrival in Constantinople, Louis de Villeneuve wrote back to Paris:

And one night, looking across to Stamboul from the hill of Pera (now Beyo
ğ
lu), Villeneuve was fascinated by ‘the domes of its mosques, rising from
within crowns of fire, while an invisible apparatus strung between the minarets made it possible for verses from the Koran to be inscribed in the sky by letters of fire.’
⁷

The Venetian envoy (
bailo
), less surprised by processions of boats or by carnival chains of slow-burning resin lamps, commented as early as February 1723 on the wealth of decoration
brought by the Sultan’s leading officials to the pavilions or kiosks they had erected in the tree-festooned parkland of Sa’adabad.
⁸
Every
visitor seems to have been impressed by some particular novelty in these socially giddy years: a
halvah
fête, perhaps, with dishes of sesame seed and honey available to all comers; or
the painting of portraits, in defiance of the Islamic inhibition against the representation in art of the human figure; jugglers and wrestlers and midgets; parrots and exotic caged singing-birds;
confectionery made to look like palm trees or, at the wedding feast of three of the Sultan’s daughters, a sugar and candy garden seventeen square metres in area. To many foreign envoys it
seemed a toy world of frivolous inconsequence, fascinating in itself but in startling contrast to the realities so often exposed along the lower waterfront of the Golden Horn, where non-Muslims
suffered the bastinado or gasped for death
after they had been impaled, or left to hang with a meat hook inserted under the chin.

‘Let us laugh, let us play, let us enjoy the delights of the world to the full,’ proclaimed the principal court poet, Ahmed Nedim, boon companion to the Sultan in his later
years.
⁹
This was a happy philosophy for an empire allegedly in decline. But it was not an utterly hedonistic way of life. New Muslim schools were
founded and old ones, fallen into neglect by misappropriation of their endowments, received support either from individual viziers or from the Sultan and his chief minister. Books had been printed
in non-Turkish languages by Jews and Christians in Constantinople ever since the closing years of the fifteenth century, and on Mehmed Said’s return from Paris, Damat Ibrahim encouraged him
to set up the first Turkish language printing press, with technical assistance from Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam. Despite complaints from the
ulema
that the
printing of the Koran and other Islamic sacred works was blasphemous, and strong hostility from scribes and calligraphers fearing for their jobs, Muteferrika brought out the first Turkish printed
book in 1729, a treatise on historical geography. Twenty-three more volumes were printed over the following thirteen years; among them, in 1732, Muteferrika published his own study of magnetism,
Fuyuzot-i minatisiye.
¹⁰

Ahmed III was the most sophisticated and cultured Sultan for more than a century and a half. His companion, Nedim, was more than a gifted poet; he took charge of the library which Sultan Ahmed
founded, and which may still be seen to the west of his
turbe
, outside the Yeni Cami at the Stamboul end of the Galata Bridge. Elsewhere, too, Sultan Ahmed’s beneficence as a patron of
art and learning continues to delight visitors to modern Istanbul: there is no lovelier chamber in the private apartments of the Topkapi Sarayi than Ahmed III’s dining-room, with its
intricate gilt-patterned ceiling and lacquered wood panels bright with painted flowers or bowls of fruit; and there is no finer roofed street fountain than the huge
ce
ş
me
he erected between
St Sophia and the Topkapi Sarayi. Across the Bosphorus, outside the mosque beside the old ferry landing-stage in Üsküdar (Scutari), is another fine fountain which, in 1726, Sultan Ahmed
commissioned to be placed where the Sacred
Caravan set out each year on its fifteen-hundred-mile pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca. And the two slim minarets at Eyüp have
stood elegantly flanking the historic mosque ever since Ahmed’s progresses passed that way on their journeys to his dream palace at Sa’adabad.

It is, however, as a lover of flowers that Ahmed III is best remembered. Historically his reign became
Lale Devri
(Tulip Era). Tulips had followed the Turks westwards from Anatolia, where
they were wild flowers; a Habsburg ambassador in the sixteenth century took them back to the Low Countries, where from the 1560s onwards the Dutch began to cultivate the bulb, producing more than
twelve hundred different varieties at a time when the flower was no longer of great interest in Constantinople. Ahmed’s father, Sultan Mehmed IV, restored the bulb to imperial favour, first
at Edirne and later in the Topkapi Sarayi. But for Ahmed the tulip was an obsession. His palace gardens were planted with row upon row, each variety given a separate bed. New specimens were ordered
from the West and from Persia. One autumn the Venetian
bailo
thought it worthwhile to inform the Doge that a ship had just arrived in the Golden Horn from Marseilles with a cargo of 30,000
bulbs for the Sultan’s gardens. A little later in the century an acerbic French merchant, Jean-Claude Flachat, commented that the Turks set less value on human life ‘than on a horse or
a fine tulip’.
¹¹

Decorative tiles, lacquered panelling, the binding of books for the new libraries and many other forms of artistic expression made use of the tulip motif, as did the court poets. Every April the
Sultan held a tulip festival in the lower terraced garden, beyond the Fourth Courtyard, of the Topkapi Sarayi—the ‘Grand Seraglio’, as foreign envoys called the palace. The
festival was timed for two successive evenings, coinciding with the full moon. Turtles (or tortoises) with slow-burning candles on their shells moved around the tulip beds to provide illumination
at ground level. On shelves around the wall of the garden were ranged vases of tulips, carefully chosen so that their colours were in harmony when lit by candles in glass bowls among them. Ahmed
III received homage, enthroned in state outside the Sofa Kö
ş
kü pavilion, to the accompaniment of the twittering of song birds in an improvised aviary suspended from the branches of the
overhanging trees. The second
evening was always set aside for what was virtually a springtime party to entertain the ladies of the harem. The evening might include a
treasure hunt for confectionery or, if the Sultan was in a generous mood, for jewelled trinkets hidden in the garden.

‘The favour of the Grand Vizier increases every day,’ reported the Venetian
bailo
in January 1724.
¹²
Damat Ibrahim had taken
advantage of internal discord in Persia to occupy huge areas of the country on the cheap, militarily speaking, and rich booty and reward were flowing back to Constantinople, lessening the burden of
war taxation and encouraging free-spending extravagance at court. But intervention in Persian affairs was rash; feeling against the Ottomans rallied dissident Persian groups, sometimes acting with
Afghans who had moved into Persia from the west. By the winter of 1726–7 it was clear to outside observers that Damat Ibrahim was desperately trying to distract his sovereign from a mounting
crisis in the East, as well as from constant unrest in Cairo and the difficulties of raising taxes in outlying provinces, some of which were suffering from acute famine. ‘What can be expected
of a Sultan lost in the idleness of the Palace, a Vizar who has not seen the face of War, a
Kapitan
Pasha [admiral] who has never left the castles [defensive forts on the Bosphorus]?’,
wrote
bailo
Dolfin impatiently to the Doge in March 1727; and he added, ‘It is still possible to reverse the situation. The Empire lacks the head, not the arm.’
¹³