The Sultan's Eyes (29 page)

A Genoan galley rounded Seraglio Point. The ship moved fast, its sails full and all oars heaving against the water as it headed out into the Sea of Marmara.

‘They haven’t seen us,’ I said. ‘They’re sailing right past.’

‘If we don’t catch them —’

‘I know.’

There was nowhere else to go, no other option. We had to stop that ship.

‘Ho!’ Justinian shouted. ‘You there! Hey!’

I joined in, both of us shouting at once, but there was no sign from anyone aboard the ship that they had either heard or seen us.

‘This is not what’s supposed to happen,’ said Justinian.

I tore my veil away from my face, kicked off my slippers and clambered to the bow. I turned to face the ship, wedging my bare feet firmly against the boat’s ribs. Then I stood up gingerly, both hands on the gunwales at first. The boat lurched sideways.

‘Easy now,’ said Justinian.

‘I’m trying. This is not something I’ve ever had to practise.’

‘One slip and you’ll send us all to the bottom of the sea.’

‘Not here,’ said Ay
e. ‘Please. There are ghosts in these waters.’

‘Do not fear,’ I said.

I let go of the gunwales and stood up straight. The boat shuddered beneath me. It took a heartbeat or two before I felt steady, but then I raised my arms above my head and waved them madly, shouting, ‘Wait! Ho!’

Still no answer from the ship. It was right in front of us, a hundred yards away. We were so close I could see the sailors hauling on ropes and racing across the deck, and Willem standing in the bow with his arms wrapped around Suraiya.

‘Will!’ I cried. ‘Make them stop!’

But he looked straight ahead, not back at the city or at us.

‘The sailors are too busy,’ I said. ‘They won’t notice.’

‘Isabella.’ Ay
e’s voice was calm. ‘Help me with this.’

I twisted around, one hand clutching the side of the boat. She pulled a veil from her bag, handed one corner to me, and kept
pulling. Yards of bright golden fabric spilled out, overflowing into the water.

‘That’ll do it,’ said Justinian.

So Ay
e and I both stood in our little boat, there in the middle of the strait, our arms stretched high. Our gold banner billowed above our heads, brilliant against the sea and sky and the palace on the hill.

Willem raced across the ship’s deck to the starboard side and leaned over the rail towards us. I couldn’t hear him shout, but he waved his arms, then raced back to the forecastle where the captain stood. Almost imperceptibly, the ship slowed at last.

As we sailed through the dusk and on towards dawn, Al-Qasim and Luis kept a constant watch on deck, with Paco standing a few feet behind them, one hand on his sword. Valentina, Willem and Suraiya had retreated below, appearing occasionally to gulp a few mouthfuls of fresh air, groan and disappear.

We journeyed once again through the Dardanelles and out into open water. Justinian and I pointed out Hero’s tower, the plains of Troy and the towering island of Lemnos to each other and to Ay
e, who gazed around her in wonder at the sea, the widening horizon, the ship and the sky.

We all came together at last one evening as twilight gave way to stars.

‘Here we are again, my dears,’ said Valentina. ‘If only I had known, the day you arrived at my
atelier
, that together we would sail the seas and explore the whole world.’

‘You might have slammed the door in our faces,’ said Willem. He still looked rather ill.

She laughed. ‘Perhaps. But I would have missed so much.’

‘I have known for many years,’ said Luis, ‘that Venice was too small a city to hold you,
signora
.’

‘I thought it was the centre of the universe,’ said Valentina. ‘I had no wish to leave it.’

‘I felt the same about Constantinople,’ said Ay
e. ‘But look!’

‘We all think that of the place we are born,’ said Willem. ‘But we can’t all be right.’

‘Then we find that the universe is much greater than we imagined,’ said Al-Qasim.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘But one day you’ll go home, Valentina, and you, too, Princess.’

Ay
e gazed back over the ship’s wake, watching her brother’s empire fade into the darkness. ‘One day.’

‘But first,’ said Justinian, ‘you must allow me to introduce you both to the city of London.’

‘What will you do there?’ Willem asked.

‘I don’t know about you, Isabella,’ said Valentina, ‘but I feel like making trouble.’

This is a work of fiction and most of the characters and incidents are invented, but some of the people in it were real. The time span of this book is only two years — 1648 and 1649 — but some events have been borrowed from history, even though they really happened later. Here are some of the real people and their stories.

Sultan Mehmed IV took the throne at the age of six after his father, Ibrahim I, was deposed. Ibrahim’s mother, Kösem, refused to give up the title of Valide Sultan (or Queen Mother) and acted as regent for her grandson. But this deprived the Sultan’s mother, Turhan Hadice, of her title, and the two queens struggled for supremacy in the harem and the empire for years. This was either the zenith or the nadir of the famous Sultanate of the Women, depending whose side you were on.

Kösem, the Valide Sultan, drew her support from the Kislar Agha (the chief of the Black Eunuchs, named Tall Süleyman) and the janissaries, while Turhan Hadice was backed by the Grand Vizier and the other palace guards. In 1651, a slave alerted Turhan Hadice that the Valide Sultan was planning to depose her grandson and replace him with his younger brother. Some claim that it was Tall Süleyman who finally imprisoned and then strangled Kösem, leaving Turhan Hadice to claim the title of Valide Sultan.

Her son, Mehmed IV, was not the greatest of the sultans, and I have allowed this fictional and youthful version of him enormous benefit of the doubt. He was really much more interested in hunting than reading, and is largely remembered for handing over much of his power to his mother and the Grand Vizier.

In 1658, a young English Quaker, Mary Fisher, dreamed that she should address the Sultan in Constantinople — so she did. It was a remarkable undertaking for a woman of her time. Perhaps even more remarkably, Mehmed agreed to see her and listened patiently while she explained the virtues of Christianity to the leader of the Islamic world. It was Mary Fisher’s story that first sparked the idea for Isabella’s journey to Constantinople, although their motivations and temperaments are very different.

Princess Ay
e is fictional but named for Kösem’s real daughter, who was married off to a middle-aged man when she was seven years old and widowed six times by the age of thirty-seven. The most famous Ay
e (or Aisha) was a wife of the Prophet Muhammad and, according to the Sunni tradition, was an important influence in the development of early Islamic canon. Contrary to many reports, there were powerful and even well-educated women in Ottoman Constantinople. As one, the poet Mihri Hatun (circa 1515), wrote: ‘You say women have little understanding and that you do not listen to them for that reason. Yet … a talented woman is better than a thousand untalented men, a woman of understanding is better than a thousand stupid men.’

Manuscripts by the calligraphers and artists of the Ottoman court are still among the world’s greatest treasures. The first printing presses in Constantinople were introduced in the late fifteenth century by Sephardic Jews who had fled persecution in Spain, just like Master de Aquila in
Act of Faith
. Over the decades
there were a few Hebrew, Armenian and Greek presses, but printed books were rare, no printing in Arabic was allowed, and no religious works could be published. The first Arabic press was set up in 1727 by Ibrahim Müteferrika, and his works included Katip Çelebi’s world atlas, or
Cihannüma
, the first printed book of maps in the Ottoman world. There’s a statue of Ibrahim Müteferrika, most appropriately, near the booksellers’ stalls in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

The astronomer John Wilkins, also mentioned in
Act of Faith
, was a clergyman, scientist and scholar whose works included
The Discovery of a World in the Moone
(1638) and
Mathematical Magick
(1648), which canvassed future technologies such as human flight. By 1648, he was warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Sir Thomas Bendish, Baronet of Steeple Bumpstead, was the Ambassador to Constantinople in those years, having chosen the losing side in the English Civil War. King Charles I of England was executed on 30 January 1649. Lord Fairfax didn’t agree to the execution, but was appointed to the Council of State that replaced the monarchy. General Oliver Cromwell was named Lord Protector of England and Wales in 1653.

Other real historical figures named in
The Sultan’s Eyes
include the authors Marie de Gournay, Michel de Montaigne, Machiavelli, Dante and Leon of Modena; Alexander the Great, the Persian emperor Xerxes, Süleyman the Magnificent; and Byzantine emperors Constantine, Justinian and Leo. Classical writers mentioned include Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Cicero and Tacitus; Herodotus, author of
Histories
, on which Isabella is an expert; the ancient Greek poets Homer and Sappho, and philosophers Aristotle and Socrates; and his namesake Socrates Scholasticus, the Byzantine astronomer and biographer of Hypatia.

Hypatia was an influential philosopher and mathematician, most of whose works were destroyed in the burning of the Library of Alexandria in 415 AD when she was slaughtered by a mob of Christians (the 2009 movie
Agora
is based very loosely on her life). Her
Astronomica
described in
The Sultan’s Eyes
is invented. Almost all of the other works that Al-Qasim and Isabella find in the Sultan’s library are real books now vanished. There’s no evidence that they ever sat in a storeroom in the palace, or anywhere else for that matter. But isn’t it lovely to imagine that they might one day be recovered? After all, many surviving fragments of Sappho’s poems were found in the late nineteenth century when Egyptian farmers ploughed up scraps of papyrus.

Leonardo da Vinci spent a lot of his time working on the idea of human flight: his notebooks and drawings include
Codex on the Flight of Birds
(1505), now held in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy. Da Vinci built flying machines and launched them off a hill outside Florence, only to watch them crash. But there are reports (mentioned by John Wilkins and the Ottoman memoirist Evliya Çelebi) that around 1630 a scientist named Ahmed Çelebi designed a machine like ‘eagle wings’ and flew from the top of the Galata Tower across the Bosphorus. The Sultan Murad (uncle of our Sultan) watched the flight, paid Çelebi handsomely, and then exiled him to Algeria for being too clever.

The Doge of Venice in the years in which this book is set was Francesco Molin. His successor in 1655 was Carlo Contarini (with whom our fictional
signora
would claim a family connection, I’m sure). Venice appointed its own Inquisitors to ensure the security of the state, with religious matters as only part of their brief, but Inquisitors were occasionally sent from Rome to deal with crimes of heresy. One was so brutal that
Venice’s Council of Ten sent him straight back; he went on to become Pope Sixtus V.

Isabella and her friends, their households in Venice and Istanbul, Fra Clement, Brother Andreas and the Jonson family are all fictional characters. Colonel Orga, Nuri Effendi, Jamael Khoury, Captain Skender and all the other members of the palace staff described in this book are also invented, although their roles are based on those of real people. Suraiya is fictional, and so is the rumour that Turhan Hadice might have had a baby by someone other than the vile Ibrahim.

There are so many excellent books describing the worlds of the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic that I’ll mention only a few that I used most often:
Subjects of the Sultan
(2005), an excellent cultural history by Suraiya Faroqhi;
Discovering the Ottomans
(2009) by Ilber Ortayli;
The Harem — Inside the Grand Seraglio of the Turkish Sultans
(2005; first published 1936) by N. M. Penzer, which was helpful on architectural details, if not cultural matters;
Imperial Istanbul
(1998) by Jane Taylor; and several books by John Freely including
Istanbul: The Imperial City
(1996) and
Inside the Seraglio
(1999).

Contemporary accounts of travellers can be useful, but they often need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to stories about the harem. There is a long European tradition of demonising, fearing, misrepresenting or romanticising the Ottomans. Puritans, in particular, tended to bang on about the wanton ways of the treacherous infidel. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote: ‘… the Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians. Now I am acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion
or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of ’em.’ The accounts of some writers also leave you wondering whether they ever left their homes or simply made stuff up. (Indeed, Lady Mary claims most foreigners never crossed from Pera into Constantinople.) I loved discovering that one of the Venetian chroniclers of Constantinople was a man called Simon Contarini — he was one of those with a tendency to exaggerate.

I read the Istanbul sections of Evliya Çelebi’s ten-volume
Seyahatname
(translated as
Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa in the Seventeenth Century
) for its detailed descriptions of the buildings and quarters of the city as they were around this time (right down to the number of paces between the different palace gates), as well as anecdotes and insights about the people who lived there from the perspective of one of the Sultan’s subjects. I dipped again and again into
Coryat’s Crudities
(1611) by Thomas Coryat and John Evelyn’s diaries of his time in Venice (1646).

I adore almost everything about the no-nonsense Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the English Ambassador from 1716 to 1718: her
Letters
(1881) are rich in detail. Crucially, she spoke to Ottoman women, wore their clothes, ate their food, and noticed everything.
Embassy to Constantinople
(1988) is an illustrated edition of Lady Mary’s Turkey letters, with additional text by the equally no-nonsense Dervla Murphy. Sir Paul Rycaut was the English Consul in Smyrna around the 1670s, and his
History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire
is filled with sensational reports of palace intrigues (and murders) as well as many observations about the society he observed. Sonia P. Anderson’s
An English Consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna
(1989) casts a clear light on him and his world.

If you want to read more about the world of
The Sultan’s Eyes
, look out for John Julius Norwich’s histories of Constantinople and Venice, Peter Ackroyd’s
Venice: Pure City
and Philip Mansel’s
Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire
. All are accessible history books written for adult readers, although descriptions of the political machinations in both cities can be mind-boggling. I’ve read piles of travel books about Venice, especially, over the years: my favourite is still
Venice
by Jan Morris.

In my research, I use libraries and museums, books and maps, online journals and databases. When I can’t see the real thing, I look for digitised collections from all over the world, particularly maps, contemporary paintings, and photos of clothes, buildings, furniture and weapons. Exhibition catalogues are another terrific resource, especially when they are as lushly illustrated as
Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years
(Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2005),
The Age of Süleyman the Magnificent
(National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1987) or
Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond
(State Library of Victoria, 2012).