Peace Be Upon You (31 page)

God raised out of nothing this powerful empire of the Ottomans, in place of our Roman [Byzantine] Empire which had begun… to deviate from the beliefs of the Orthodox faith The all-mighty Lord has placed over us this high kingdom, for there is no power but of God, so as to be to the people of the West a bridle, to us the people of the East a means of salvation. For this reason he puts into the heart of the Sultan of these Ottomans an inclination to keep free the religious beliefs of our Orthodox faith and… to protect them, even to the point of occasionally chastising Christians who deviate from the faith.
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For centuries under the Byzantines, a sizable minority of Christians had nurtured grievances and built up resentments against the Greek Orthodox, who dominated political and religious life. While the Orthodox were able to retain a measure of influence under the Ottomans, their story was one of relative decline. Other Christian communities took the defeat of the Byzantines as an opportunity to make up lost ground. The Armenians initially thrived under the
millet
system, and were able to carve out a sphere of autonomy and prosperity. Armenian merchants captured a monopoly on the trade of valuable items such as silk, and in provincial Anatolian towns such as Diyarbakir they had nearly as much power as at any point in their storied history.

Later, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Armenians suffered from the emergence of Turkish nationalism, and more than a million were killed as a result of Turkish policies during World War I. But the treatment of the Armenians at the hands of early-twentieth-century Turks is in sharp relief to their success earlier in the empire’s history. Only in the late nineteenth century, in its attempts at reform, did the Ottoman Empire move away from the decentralized
millet
system and begin to emulate the European model of centralization and modernization. With that came a more explosive and destructive force, nationalism, which was hostile to religion, rested on a secular view of the world, and would prove far more lethal to groups like the Armenians than the Ottoman ruling class ever was.

Until then, in many corners of the empire, Christians lived peacefully and securely. The island of Cyprus and much of the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece, for instance, were predominantly Christian when they fell under the control of the Ottomans, and they remained that way
until the empire disintegrated. Conversion was less typical than it had been under the Umayyads and Abbasids. The Ottoman authorities did not encourage it, and at times actively discouraged it. Being Muslim was not a requirement for playing a meaningful role in the life of the empire.

True, non-Muslims never occupied the innermost sanctums of power in Istanbul. Politics, however, have always been local, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. Christians tended to focus on their local community and region. The Orthodox Christians of Crete wanted dominion over the island, and so long as the Ottoman authorities were willing to abet those ambitions, they were content. Though Crete saw a higher rate of conversion than other parts of the empire, that was more a function of Cretan peasants looking to join the Janissaries than any active attempt by the Ottomans to evangelize. On the contrary, Ottoman governors and elites worked with the heads of the
millets
to prevent non-Muslims from converting. Given that the primary goal of the Ottoman state was to keep the family of Osman in power and the sultan’s treasury full, conversion served no purpose. To the contrary, it threatened the delicate status quo. Conversion was change, and if there was one thing the Ottomans did not welcome after the sixteenth century, it was change.
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Unfortunately, change was forced on them. Uncurious about their enemies, the Ottomans after Suleyman complacently rested in the knowledge that they were the most powerful state in the world. The navies of Venice and the Habsburgs triumphed at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, but the Ottomans shrugged off the defeat the way an elephant shrugs off a gnat. They rebuilt their fleet within a year, and the balance in the eastern Mediterranean shifted hardly at all. But their enemies learned a crucial lesson from the victory: the Ottomans, formidable and feared, were not invincible.

It is hard to imagine a world frozen for more than two hundred years, but from the middle of the sixteenth century until late in the eighteenth, the Ottoman state was rarely as innovative as its European rivals. Some laws were rewritten, administrative districts were redrawn, and titles were changed. Sultans lived and died; inconclusive battles were fought against the Persians to the east; somewhat more conclusive ones were waged against the Hungarians, Austrians, and Russians to the north and west. But through it all, the core of the empire was untouched and undisturbed. The recruitment of the Janissaries, once so dramatic and disruptive,
became routinized. The Janissaries were supposed to be celibate and loyal only to the sultan, but over time, they devolved into an interest group bent on their own self-perpetuation. They turned to commerce and industry to augment their income. Their officers took wives, and with that came familial ambitions. As the children of Janissaries themselves became Janissaries, the need for fresh blood decreased. The Janissaries lost the edge born of a harsh system of recruitment and training; they became less effective and less feared. Soon, they were simply one group—albeit a heavily armed one—competing for influence and prestige in Istanbul. They were the subject of endless gossip, the butt of countless jokes, a dangerous, independent force still living in barracks near the imperial palace, immersed in networks of graft and marriage with the elites of the capital, and a bulwark against any who might even think about reforming a system that was becoming a shadow of its former self.

Meanwhile, the states of Europe began to fight one another less and turned instead to conquering the world. After the Thirty Years’ War nearly destroyed Central Europe, the princes and premiers gathered in Westphalia in 1648 and agreed not to wage wars over religion. The strength of the “Westphalian system” has been lauded and overstated, but it did lead to fewer pitched battles in the heart of Europe for the next century and a half, until the twin earthquakes of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans focused less on the Ottomans than on expanding across the seas. The Mediterranean remained a vital link in world trade, but the Venetian stranglehold on commerce in what was otherwise an Ottoman lake spurred the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English voyages of exploration that led to the discovery of the New World and the extension of European influence throughout the globe.

The Venetians and the Ottomans continued to skirmish over Crete, Malta, and other strategic islands. At the same time, Venice was the European gateway for trade with the Ottoman world, conducted through intermediaries such as Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians who resided in cities such as Salonica, Alexandria, Smyrna, Istanbul, and Beirut. The regular flow of foreign goods was an important source of revenue for the Ottomans, and the state welcomed European merchants even as the sultan retained designs on conquering Europe itself.

Until 1683, the Ottomans had good reason to believe that they might
achieve what Suleyman had not. In that year, a new army was raised for the sole purpose of taking Vienna. The other cities of the Danube had succumbed to Ottoman rule, and Vienna was all that remained between the sultan and the fertile lands of Germany and Poland. The sultan’s armies, led by the grand vizier Kara Mustafa, seemed on the verge of victory when an unexpected ally came to the rescue. The Polish king, Jan Sobieski, at the head of a substantial force, injected new life into the defenders, inflicted severe casualties on the Janissaries, and caused the Ottomans to withdraw in confusion. The defeat led Sultan Mehmed IV to order the gruesome execution of Kara Mustafa. It also permanently shifted the momentum from the Ottomans to the West. The war between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs technically ended in a stalemate, but in truth, it was a defeat for the sultan.

For the next century, the empire drifted. While the ruling class hardly noticed, others did. Slowly, quietly, almost imperceptibly, the non-Muslims of the empire became less content with the status quo. At times, that triggered a reaction. Local
ulama
would issue edicts designed to put the People of the Book in their place. These included restrictions on dress and attempts to make it more difficult for Jews or Christians to build churches or synagogues. But these were isolated incidents, shortlived and usually ineffective. Ottoman Jews found themselves less secure, but the reason had less to do with the Ottomans than it did with the influence of Europeans. As the states of Europe started to expand internationally, they looked to the Christians—and not the Jews—of the Ottoman lands as natural allies. Those Ottoman Christians welcomed the support, and they began to supplant Jewish merchants and businessmen.

But there was one other reason for the shifting fortunes of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, which spoke to both the strength and the weakness of the Ottoman order. In 1665, a Jew from Smyrna proclaimed himself the messiah. It was not the first time such claims had been made, nor was it to be the last. But it was certainly one of the most divisive and disruptive, as much for its ending as for its beginning.

SABBATAI SEVI

SABBATAI SEVI
was born to a prosperous merchant family. His father, Mordecai, had been a successful chicken merchant who was not content
with the life of a poulterer. In Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, he switched careers and became an intermediary for European merchants. It was common for European businessmen to hire locals who could serve as translators and as representatives who would ensure that goods were delivered and paid for on time. Mordecai Sevi helped make at least one English merchant quite wealthy, and that merchant in turn enriched him. Unfortunately for Mordecai, his successful life and what might have been a decent legacy were obliterated by his son.

Sabbatai had not lived long when people began to notice that there was something strange about him. Few records of his life are unbiased; his chroniclers were either defenders or prosecutors. But friends and foes agreed that Sabbatai, from a young age, was not like others. Manic at times, sullen at others, he entered an altered state while praying, and at synagogue he was a powerful, disturbing presence. To his acolytes, he was a teenager who showed signs of divinity, including miraculous and inexplicable actions. It was said that he glowed when he prayed, that he was given to loud and disturbing outbursts, that his body emitted a faint yet unmistakable perfume that marked him as an anointed one. To his detractors, he bore all the marks of a madman, and that was why, barely into his twenties, he was asked to leave his home city and forced into an exile that would eventually take him to the Holy Land. His community could have tolerated his odd behavior. His obsessive interest in the kabbalah, uncomfortable though it was for the rabbinical establishment, could also have been accepted. But his very sudden and very public declaration that he was the messiah—that was going too far.

Expelled by the rabbis of Smyrna, he made his way across the Aegean to Salonica, which then had a Jewish majority. He was welcomed and honored as a scholar of the Lurianic kabbalah. The mystic rabbi Isaac Luria had lived and died in Safed, in Palestine, in the sixteenth century and had developed a secretive reading of the Torah that explicated the relationship between God and man. By design, the complexity of Luria’s system defies easy explanation. It was a stew that combined the major religious and philosophical traditions of the Near East. Luria held that the Genesis stories of creation and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden were metaphors for the fragmentation of the divine. Centuries earlier, Ibn Arabi of Spain had spoken of the unity of God and man, a unity that was continually obscured by human inability to see the truth. Luria went a step further, and suggested that the divine had been splintered
and that the point of human life was to help it reassemble. At some point, an intermediary would appear who would enable both God and man to become whole once again. Sabbatai Sevi claimed to be that someone.

Once it became clear to the rabbis of Salonica who Sabbatai Sevi thought he was, they expelled him. Sabbatai had enthralled many of those who came to listen to his interpretation of the Torah, and that disturbed the conservative rabbis, who saw him as both mentally unstable and a threat to their status. He did little to assuage their concerns, and in fact seems to have taken delight in flouting their authority. They responded predictably, and sent him on his way. This pattern was repeated in city after city as Sevi moved from Salonica to Athens to Cairo to Jerusalem and finally to Gaza, where in 1665 he proclaimed his mission—to lead an army of followers to Istanbul, announce the coming of a new age, and supplant the Ottoman sultan.

News of this new messiah spread quickly throughout the Jewish world. Sabbatai provided ample grist for the international gossip mill. He violated one of the cardinal rules of Judaism and spoke the name of God; he allowed women to recite the Torah in public; he declared that the laws of the Hebrew Scriptures were null until a new testament could be written; he appointed deputies as kings (and queens) of various parts of the Ottoman Empire and Europe; and he claimed that his disciples were the reincarnated souls of long-dead prophets.

From Poland, Germany, and Italy to the metropolises of the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai Sevi gained adherents. Steeped in the mystical end-of-times prophecies of the kabbalah, Jewish communities throughout the Near East and Europe were receptive to the message that a new messiah had finally arrived, one who would overturn the old laws, announce a new covenant, and restore the kingdom of the Jews. Sevi interpreted the international euphoria as a favorable sign. He marched to Istanbul convinced that the waters would part, the sultan would bow, and a new age would begin. As for his followers, thousands left their homes and converged on Istanbul, certain of “the imminent establishment of the kingdom of Israel, the fall of the Crescent and of all the royal crowns in Christendom.”
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