A History of the World in 100 Objects (61 page)

The novelist Elif Shafak gives a Turkish perspective:

Suleiman was an unforgettable sultan for many people, for the Turks definitely – he reigned for forty-six years. In the West he was known as Suleiman the Magnificent, but we know him as
Suleiman Kanuni
– Suleiman ‘the law maker’ – because he changed the legal system. When I look at this signature, it speaks of power, glory, great magnificence. Suleiman was very interested in conquering East and West, and that’s why many historians think he was inspired by Alexander the Great. I see that statement, that world power, in this calligraphy as well.

How do you govern an empire of the size of Suleiman’s and ensure that power in the centre is properly deployed at the periphery? You need a bureaucracy. Administrators all over the empire need to demonstrate that they have the authority of the ruler, which is done by issuing a visible emblem that can be carried and shown to everyone. That emblem is the tughra. It acted like a royal warrant, or a sheriff’s star, giving officers of the empire a badge of power. The tughra would be at the top of all important official documents, and Suleiman issued about 150,000 in his reign. He was industrious in establishing diplomatic ties, creating a formidable civil service and promulgating new laws. All of this required letters of state, instructions to ambassadors and legal documents, all of which would begin with his tughra.

The tughra itself names the sultan, while the line below reads, ‘This is the noble and exalted sign of the Sultan’s name, the revered monogram that gives light to the world. May this instruction, with the help of the Lord and the protection of the Eternal, be given force and effect. The Sultan orders that …’ At this point our paper has been cut, but the document below would have continued with a particular instruction, law or command. Interestingly, there are two languages here: the tughra names the sultan in Arabic, reminding us that Suleiman is protector of the faithful with a duty to the whole Islamic world; the words below it are in Turkish, and proclaim his role as sultan, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Arabic for the spiritual world, Turkish for the temporal.

Turkish would certainly have been the language of the official to whom this document was addressed. Given the opulent artistry of this tughra, the recipient had to be very grand, so it might be a governor, a general, a diplomat, or perhaps a member of the ruling house; and it could have been sent to any part of Suleiman fast-growing empire, as the historian Caroline Finkel explains:

He overthrew the Mamluk Empire, so Egypt and Syria with all their Arab population, the Hejaz [in south-west Saudi Arabia] as well, with the Holy Places which were extremely important, all these people were now Ottoman subjects, for better or worse. Suleiman’s tughra could be seen as far as the Persian border, where their great rival in the East, the Shi’a Safavid Empire, was always trying to challenge the Ottomans; in North Africa, where Ottoman naval expeditions were having great success against the Spanish Habsburgs in the western Mediterranean; and up into the lower reaches of what we now call Russia.

Suleiman’s Ottoman Empire controlled the whole coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, from Tunis all the way round almost to Trieste. After 800 years the Eastern Roman Empire had been re-established, but now as a Muslim imperium. It was this huge new state that compelled the western Europeans to look for other ways of travelling to and trading with the East, forcing them from the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic. But that is for a later chapter.

Most official documents get lost, destroyed or thrown away. Our driving licences, our tax bills, don’t usually survive death. Similarly, the huge bulk of the official paper of the Ottoman Empire is lost to us. The most common reason for keeping any official document is that it has to do with land, because subsequent generations need to know the authority by which land is owned. So the best guess is that our tughra was at the head of a document giving a major grant of land, conferring or confirming ownership of a huge estate. That would explain why the document survived long enough for a later collector, probably in the nineteenth century, to cut off the tughra from the document and sell it as a separate work of art.

And it certainly is a work of art. In between the lines of cobalt blue enlivened with gold leaf are great loops containing riotous flowerbeds of swirling lotus and pomegranate, tulips, roses and hyacinths. This is magnificent Islamic decoration, rejoicing in natural forms while avoiding showing the human body. It is also a virtuoso demonstration of calligraphy, of sheer skill and joy in writing. The Ottoman Turks, like their predecessors and contemporaries in the Islamic world, held the art of writing in high esteem. The word of God had to be written with all the beauty of holiness. Calligraphers were important bureaucrats who staffed the Turkish chancery, the
Divan
, which gave its name to the official script of the Ottoman Empire, known as ‘Divani’. The calligraphers developed beautiful and extremely intricate forms of this script. It is notoriously difficult to read – deliberately so – and is designed to prevent extra words being inserted into the text and forgery of official documents. The calligraphers were artists as well as bureaucrats, often belonging to dynasties of craftsmen, passing skills from one generation to the next. In the Islamic world, red tape is often high art.

Modern politicians proudly announce their desire to sweep away bureaucracy. The contemporary prejudice is that it slows you down, clogs things up; but if you take a historical view, it is bureaucracy that sees you through the rocky patches and enables the state to survive. Bureaucracy is not evidence of inertia, as we saw in
Chapter 15
; it can be life-saving continuity – and nowhere is that clearer than in China. China is the longest surviving state in the world and it is no coincidence that it has the longest tradition of bureaucracy. My next object is a piece of Chinese paper that, like the tughra, is a powerful tool of the state: paper money.

‘Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!’

The famous moment when Peter Pan asks the audience to save Tinkerbell by joining him in believing in fairies is an unfailing winner. That ability to convince others to believe in something they can’t see but wish to be true is a trick that has been effective in all sorts of ways throughout history. Take the case of paper money: someone in China centuries ago printed a value on a piece of paper and asked everyone else to agree with them that the paper was actually
worth
what it said it was. You could say that the paper notes, like the Darling children in Peter Pan, were supposed to be ‘as good as gold’, or in this case as good as copper – literally worth the number of copper coins printed on the note. The whole modern banking system of paper and credit is built on this one simple act of faith. Paper money is truly one of the revolutionary inventions of human history.

This object is one of these early paper money notes, which the Chinese called
feiqian
– ‘flying cash’ – and it’s from the time of the Ming, around 1400. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has this to say on the reasons for this invention:

I think in some way the right aphorism is that ‘evil is the root of all money’! Money was invented in order to get round the problems of trusting other individuals. But then the issue was – could you trust the person issuing the money? So the state became the natural issuer of money. And then the question is, can we trust the state? And in many ways that’s a question about whether we can trust ourselves in the future.

Most of the world until this time was exchanging money in coins of gold, silver and copper that had an intrinsic value you could judge by weight. But the Chinese saw that paper money has obvious advantages over quantities of coin: it’s light, easily transportable and big enough to carry words and images to announce not only its value but the authority of the government that backs it and the assumptions on which it rests. Properly managed, paper money is a powerful tool in maintaining an effective state.

At first glance, this note doesn’t look at all like modern paper money. It is paper, obviously enough, and it’s larger than a sheet of A4. It’s a soft, velvety grey colour, and it’s made out of mulberry bark, which was the legally approved material for Chinese paper money at the time. The fibres of mulberry bark are long and flexible, so even today, though it’s around 600 years old, the paper is still soft and pliable.

It is fully printed on only one side, a woodblock stamp in black ink with Chinese characters and decorative features arranged in a series of rows and columns. Along the top, six bold characters announce that this is the ‘Great Ming Circulating Treasure Certificate’. Below this there is a decorative border of dragons going all round the sheet – dragons of course being one of the traditional symbols of China and of its emperor. Just inside the border are two columns of text, the one on the left announcing again that this is the ‘Great Ming Treasure Certificate’ and the one on the right saying that this is ‘To Circulate for Ever’.

That’s quite a claim. How permanent can for ever be? In stamping the promise on to the very note, the Ming state seems to be asserting that it too will be around for ever to honour it. I asked Mervyn King to comment on this brave assertion:

I think it’s a contract, an implicit contract, between people and the decisions they believe will be taken in the years and decades to come, about preserving the value of that money. It is a piece of paper – there is nothing intrinsic in value to it – its value is determined by the stability of the institutions that lie behind the issuance of that paper money. If people have confidence that those institutions will continue, if they have confidence that their commitment to stability can be believed, then they will accept and use paper money, and it will become a normal part of circulation. When that breaks down, as it has done in countries where the regime has been destroyed through war or revolution, then the currency collapses.

And indeed this is exactly what had happened in China around 1350, as the Mongol Empire disintegrated. So one of the challenges for the new Ming Dynasty, which took over in 1368, was not just to reorder the state, but to re-establish the currency. The first Ming emperor was a rough provincial warlord, Zhu Yuanzhang, who as a ruler embarked on an ambitious programme to build a Chinese society which would be stable, highly educated and shaped by the principles of the great philosopher Confucius, as the historian Timothy Brook details:

The goal of the founding Ming emperor was that children should be able to read, write and count. It was an idea that he had that everyone should be literate, and he thought literacy was a good idea because it had commercial implications – the economy would run more effectively – and it had moral implications: he wanted school children to read the sayings of Confucius, to read the basic texts about filial piety and respecting elders, and he hoped that literacy would accompany the general re-stabilization of the realm. I would imagine a quarter of the population could read what’s on this note, which by European standards at the time was remarkable.

As part of this impressive political programme, the new Ming emperor decided to relaunch the paper currency. A sound but flexible monetary system would, he knew, encourage a stable society. So he founded the Imperial Board of Revenue and then, in 1374, a ‘treasure note control bureau’. Paper notes began to be issued the following year.

The first challenge was fighting forgery. All paper currencies run the risk of counterfeiting, because of the enormous gulf between the low real value of the piece of paper and the high promissory value that appears on it. This Ming note carries on it a government promise of a reward to anyone who denounces a counterfeiter. And alongside this carrot, there was a terrifying stick for any potential forger:

To counterfeit is death. The informant will receive 250 taels of silver and in addition the entire property of the criminal.

The much bigger challenge was to keep the worth of the new currency intact. Here, the key monetary decision of the Ming was to ensure that
the paper note could always be converted into copper coins – the value of the paper would equal the value of a specific number of coins. Europeans called these coins quite simply ‘cash’ – they are round coins, with a square hole in the middle, which the Chinese had already been using for well over a thousand years. One of the things I love about this Ming note is that right in the middle of it is a picture of the actual coins that the paper note represents. There are ten stacks of coins with a hundred in each pile, so a total of a thousand cash or, as it says in writing on the note, one guan. You can get some idea of just how useful and welcome this early paper must have been when you compare carrying the paper around with the actual coins represented. Pictured here is 1,000 cash: 1.5 metres (5 feet) of copper coins all on a piece of string. They weigh about 3 kilos (7 lbs), are extremely cumbersome to handle, and are very difficult to subdivide and pay out. This note must have made life, for some people, very much easier. A contemporary wrote: