Veritas (Atto Melani) (68 page)

“But precisely because the Ottomans are bloodthirsty people, with an inclination for wars of conquest,” I objected, “it’s easy to see that they want to invade
Europe.”

“Bloodthirsty people, with an inclination for war, you say?” asked the Abbot, resuming his walk. “I could tell you things about the Ottoman Empire that you don’t even
imagine, and which would change your mind at once. Do you know what the derebeys are?”

“The dere-what?”

Like all empires, Atto explained, the Ottoman Empire was based on a feudal system. The Grand Sultan, absolute Sovereign, was represented in the provinces by a network of rulers, who were,
however, far from loyal: the derebeys.

“They are restless, ferocious lords, forever in revolt against the Sultan. They seize control of the collecting of taxes, which are supposed to be paid to the Sultan; they refuse to
respond to the central government’s conscription call, instead enlisting troops for their own personal armies; they have their own standards and wear their own uniforms; and they often go to
war against the Sultan himself.”

Almost all of Asia Minor was subdivided among a small number of such derebeys. Not to mention the mountain territories, Atto went on, where again nobody answered the conscription calls.

“In the Giaur-Daghda not a single mountain dweller wears the uniform or pays a single para, which is the fortieth of a piastra, to the Sultan’s treasury.”

Whenever the Sultan tried to reduce them to obedience, the inhabitants of the valleys would all flee to the mountains, leaving the enemy army to wander over their abandoned lands, or they would
pour out
en masse
to confront the Sultan’s men, twenty-five thousand mountaineers against a thousand soldiers, which was enough to put an end to hostilities and re-establish peace
with Constantinople. At least until the next recruiting drive or the next tax collection, when the war would inevitably start up all over again.

“The Ottoman empire has many such peoples. This shows how absurd it is to claim that the Turks are ready to invade the neighbouring nations. The very opposite is true: they have huge
internal problems, which would make any act of external war highly inadvisable. The desire to expand at all costs into Europe, as they have done, threatening Vienna, Venice or Hungary, while just a
few miles from Constantinople their empire is wholly ungovernable, means that their main aim is not the preservation of the Ottoman Empire, but the destruction of those faithful to Christ and their
lands.”

“But don’t you think that is inevitable? They’re different from us, incompatible by birth with the Christian religion.”

“That isn’t true either. Countless Christians live in Constantinople and carry on their trades there freely. But I’ll go even further. Suleiman the Magnificent, like his
predecessors, chose the highest ranks of the Ottoman state from the
devsirme
, the so-called ‘harvest’: the nursery of fifteen thousand Christian children who were kidnapped
every year on his orders in Rumelia, the European part of the Ottoman Empire, for example in Hungary. These children were then brought up in Constantinople, because he secretly believed they were
more intelligent than the Turks.”

From this “harvest” they then chose the ones who would join the janissaries, the elite and highly trained army corps. The janissaries were therefore all Christians by birth, and had
not a drop of Turkish blood, also because originally they were obliged to remain celibate, and so had no offspring: year by year the old members were replaced by kidnapping new children. When they
arrived in the territories of the Muslim empire, the children were carefully studied from a physiognomical point of view: depending on their facial features, which revealed this or that
inclination, they were sent to serve in the Sultan’s private palace, in the state administration or in the army, among the janissaries.

“But I imagine that the highest-ranking dignitaries, the ones closest to the Sultan, were Turkish,” I objected.

“On the contrary. The Grand Vizier, or the prime minister, subordinate in authority only to the Sultan, has hardly ever been Turkish, and not even Muslim. Of the forty-seven Grand Viziers
who succeeded to the Porte between 1453 and 1623 only five were of Turkish origin: the others included eleven Albanians, six Greeks, a Circassian, an Armenian, a Georgian, ten Chaldeans and even an
Italian. And Ibrahim Pasha, the famous Grand Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent, was not Turkish but Venetian.”

“Venetian?”

“Certainly! He was born in the territories of the Venetian Republic. That is why I say: the destructive power of Mahomet in reality does not exist, it is a creation of the West, turned
against the West itself.”

These words made me thoughtful: Atto’s explanations tallied with what Simonis had told me about Maximilian and his struggle against Suleiman the Magnificent. Had not the fire of Ottoman
aggression against the Empire, according to my assistant, been lit by the German Protestant princes and their secret emissaries, Ilsung, Ungnad and Hag? After seeking in vain to convert Maximilian
to Lutheranism, they had taken their revenge by unleashing the Turkish armies against him.

“But the financiers of the siege that Suleiman laid against Vienna in 1529 were from Constantinople,” I objected.

“And where do you think they came from, if not from Europe? Families of merchants who had moved to Constantinople for the greater freedom they could enjoy there in trading. There have
never been any Turks so rich that they could choose to bleed themselves dry for the sole pleasure of seeing the Sultan take up arms against the Holy Roman Empire.”

I was surprised. It was hard for me to think that beneath the Turkish turbans, the distinctive mark of Mahomet’s fearsome followers, more Christians were concealed than Turks.

“With Joseph and the Grand Dauphin,” Atto went on, “we are faced with two assassination attempts in which the victims are fortunately still alive. To solve the case, we must
presume the instigator is someone manipulating the Turks and capable of striking at the highest level. But who?”

The Abbot now indicated that he was tired. I suggested returning to the Golden Eagle.

“Better to rest here, by the side of the road,” he answered.

The old spy was forever afraid of eavesdroppers, I thought. I led him to a staircase leading up to a small building set back from the road, which appeared to have been closed for years. I
cleaned the dust and dirt from the steps as best I could and helped the Abbot to sit down.

There are a thousand people who might desire these deaths, Atto continued in a low voice, each one for a different motive.

“The maritime powers, Holland and England, are interested in weakening the two greatest contenders in the conflict, the Empire and France, to prevent whichever of them wins the war from
gaining a position of supremacy. If the anti-French alliance won the conflict, and Joseph’s brother Charles ascended to the throne, the Habsburgs would hold Europe in a vice-like grip from
east to west, from Vienna to Madrid, becoming far too powerful a giant.”

“That’s exactly what the English and Dutch want to stop France from becoming,” I remarked.

“Precisely, and you don’t change your mind after eleven years of war. Now they have almost reached their objective: to make France powerless. The country is already on its knees
financially. In addition, the grandson of the Most Christian King has not proved as pliant to his grandfather’s wishes as was feared. It is rumoured that he is even thinking of proclaiming a
formal renunciation of the throne of France, just to finish the war. There is only one last step: to deprive the Most Christian King of an heir who might disturb their plans to weaken
France.”

“How could the Grand Dauphin disturb them?” I said in surprise. “From the gazettes it’s clear that he doesn’t have his father’s strong temperament.”

“That is all outward show, as with his mother, the deceased Queen Maria Theresa of Habsburg – may the glory of God be upon her. He is a man of few words and has made it clear that he
has no wish to interfere in political and military matters. But it is not from want of experience, but rather on account of the great respect and deference he has for His Majesty. France and the
whole of Europe would suffer a great loss if the Grand Dauphin were to die, because if he ever becomes king, his reign will be a golden century for his own people and for those of other states:
“For, unlike his father,” and here the Abbot pronounced his words very carefully, “ambition would not lead him into any enterprise prejudicial to the general peace, as he is a
prince of justice, of prudence and fairness, full of humanity and charity towards the poor.”

“And why should such a good, peace-loving sovereign be a source of trouble for the maritime powers?”

“The power of Holland and England is based on large-scale commerce throughout the world, which makes its greatest profits through war.”

“I thought war was the ruin of commercial transactions.”

“Small transactions, certainly. But large-scale trafficking thrives on the weakening of nations. The Lord God gave man the possibility to live on an earth fecund with fruits. But when the
fields are made barren by the raids, fires and ravages of war, the people fall into the hands of speculators and usurers, who make them pay for their goods fifty times what they are worth! Peasants
can no longer rely on the efforts and skill of their own hands to survive; they need money, a great deal of money, to buy for its weight in gold what in peacetime they used to produce for
themselves with no difficulty. Without money one can no longer do anything, even in the remotest village. You don’t know how many have grown immensely rich thanks to war! Take the Thirty
Years’ War, which broke out under a century ago. The usurers of then are the powerful of today. And when it was kings that incurred debts, those vultures were even rewarded with noble
titles.”

From a wily and unscrupulous castrato to a moralising old codger: what changes life can bring about, I reflected while Atto talked. Now the Abbot was even railing against the aristocracy. His
arguments were quite different from those I had heard from him twenty-eight years ago; they almost sounded like the grumblings of my late father-in-law, who had been a Jansenist.

“With a king like the Grand Dauphin,” Melani went on, “France would finally emerge from its downward spiral of arrogance and destruction; England and Holland want the opposite
to happen. The country must continue to degenerate, the court must be hated by the people. It annoys them that the Most Christian King has adult sons and grandsons; the ideal would be if there were
no heir, or if he were a baby, which amounts to the same thing. It would not be like the days when the Most Christian King ascended the throne, aged just four: then there were the Queen Mother,
Anne of Austria and the Prime Minister, Cardinal Richelieu and later Cardinal Mazarin, who defended the country from any interference by other potentates. Now there is no longer a queen, nor a
prime minister. Louis XIV has taken everything into his own hands. After his death a regency would leave the country at the mercy of the first scheming meddler, who might just happen to be sent by
England or Holland to set off a mine under France’s backside.”

But there was more to it than that, continued Atto:

“There has been a rumour going round since February that Joseph I is thinking of proposing to France that Spain should be divided, so as to leave his brother Charles at least with
Catalonia and its capital Barcelona.”

“Really? That would solve the Spanish question.”

“Quite. But you know what it would really mean? That the two major contenders, France and the Empire, would lead the peace process, and the destiny of Europe would remain in their hands,
as has been the case for centuries. This is just what England and Holland do not want: the commercial powers are planning to sweep away the old world order and create a new one under their
auspices. No, France and the Empire must not make peace, it must be imposed on them. On conditions set by England, above all, and Holland.”

“So you think that Joseph I is not going to find favour with England and Holland, no matter what he does.”

“Exactly. War or peace, the Empire, France and Spain must no longer be arbiters of their own destiny. The English and Dutch want an end to national sovereignties. That’s why they
entered the war, and why they cannot wait to carve up the possessions of the Spanish Crown in the New World. A rich, boundless, virgin land, with no law or morality: sharp-eyed merchants as they
have always been, they know perfectly well that whoever dominates it will rule the world. And they have no intention of leaving it to the Spanish, French or Germans.”

“So you say it’s for these reasons,” I summed up at the end of Atto’s harangue, “that the two maritime powers are plotting against His Caesarean Majesty.”

“It’s a possibility. But it’s not the only one.”

There was a second hypothesis: a motive within the Empire.

“You know that Charles and Joseph detest each other,” said Atto. “They have always done so, ever since their father set them against each other, favouring the younger over the
elder. Nature made them different, the family made them enemies. And ever since Joseph became emperor, Charles has hated him even more profoundly, he himself being forced to fight for his
throne.”

If Joseph were to die, Charles would lose an uncertain crown, that of Spain, for one that was perfectly secure and far superior: that of Emperor, in Vienna.

“Joseph has only two daughters; his only son died as a child. If he died, Charles would succeed him. Does that not strike you as a slight motive for murder?”

But that was not all. During his short life, Joseph had left a formidable trail of hatred and envy.

“The Jesuits hate him: when he ascended the throne he at once excluded them from government, and was quite brusque about it. You may have heard about the threatening remarks a Jesuit made
to Joseph as soon as he ascended the throne, and Joseph had him expelled. But his father’s old ministers also hate him: even as a boy Joseph fought them mercilessly, until he finally became
emperor and drove them all out. All except one. But he hates Joseph too.”