Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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fighting men lodged in the city’s great khans and caravanserais. Their arrival invariably sent a shudder of apprehension through the town. In 1770, news that local levies might be ordered into the city provoked the Venetian consul to despair: ‘As soon as they enter the town, God knows what ill deeds they will perform and getting rid of them will be very hard.’ Made up of poor villagers, who associated towns with authority, judges and tax-collectors, these troops often found it hard to stomach the wealth they saw around them. In 1788, a levy of fifteen hundred men, destined for the ‘German’ front, ‘committed much disorder’ and the shops were closed for two months until they left.
Merchants and tavern-keepers were at greatest risk. In April 1734, to take a typical episode, the city was immobilized by the violent behaviour of Bosnian irregulars en route to Syria. As usual, wine shops and taverns were a magnet for trouble. In one they killed the owner, a baker and a Greek wine salesman. Others robbed the house of a Muslim woman, ‘raped her and tormented her cruelly until she died’. Armed with stones, knives, sabres and revolvers, they swaggered through the streets in gangs of as many as fifty, holding up anyone they met. ‘We are all locked inside our houses and well guarded until they depart for Syria,’ writes the Venetian consul. Even the Pasha remained in his palace, since he lacked sufficient troops to keep order.10
The Janissaries
Anyone of any wealth hired bodyguards, usually janissaries whose fearsome reputation and well-organized networks were usually sufficient to ward off troublemakers. Yet if eighteenth-century Salonica was what one resident described as a malsicura città, where one hesitated to travel except with an escort, and where one foreigner kept his own private priest at home to spare his family the unpredictable mile and a half journey to the church, the main reason was the unrestrained and increasingly arbitrary violence of the janissaries themselves. They guarded the city’s gates and towers, patrolled the markets to ensure fair trading, and were in theory at least one of the police forces of the Ottoman state. In practice, however, the fighting prowess and internal discipline of what had once been the mainstay of the Ottoman infantry had degenerated over the years until the chief threat they posed was to the inhabitants of the empire themselves.
As the janissary corps expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recruitment, which had once been through levies of Christian boys, became hereditary and very much less selective; membership was often transferred from father to son, or simply through the sale of the pay slips to which they were entitled. Their training had been so drastically cut that as Paul Rycaut, a well-informed English observer wrote in 1668, some ‘neither know how to manage a Musket, nor are otherwise disciplin’d to any exercise of Arms’. In the capital, they were renowned for their mutinous making and breaking of viziers and even sultans. As there is no question,’ Rycaut noted, ‘but a standing Armee of veterane and well-disciplined Souldiers must be always useful and advantageous to the Interest of a Prince; so, on the contrary, negligence in the Officers, and remissness of Government, produces that licentiousness and wrestiness in the Souldiery, as betrays them to all the disorders which are dangerous and of evil consequence to the welfare of a State.’11
In Salonica, the janissaries fell into two categories. There were the heavily-armed infantrymen, who formed the town garrison, a total of somewhere between 1200 and 2000 men. In addition, there were thousands more Muslim men and boys – mostly shopkeepers and tradesmen – who were enrolled purely nominally in one or other of the four local janissary companies. Although some of the officers controlled the customs house, the city gates, the tanneries, slaughter-houses, and the pasturing lands which they made available to shepherds when they brought their flocks down each autumn, official perquisites were distributed only irregularly by the Porte. Many janissaries enjoyed an uncertain living as bodyguards or fruit-sellers, and observers grouped them together with ‘poor Greeks and the Jews’ as ‘ordinary types who are obliged to make savings’.12
In their own minds, the janissaries were the protectors of the masses, the voice of hard-working Muslim artisans and traders, stepping in when the rich – be they landowners, Ottoman officials or Frankish merchants – tried to exploit the poor. Baron de Tott, a knowledgeable observer of the empire, saw them as the natural opponents of ‘despotism’. And it is true that whenever a sudden downturn in the market or a failure of the harvest threatened the city with starvation, the janissaries found themselves speaking for its consuming classes. The state was supposed to ensure the regular supply of affordable, high-quality daily bread, and it tightly regulated both prices and trade in grain and flour. But caught between the great land-owners, who controlled [and often speculated in] the local supply of grain, and the sultan’s civil servants, whose duty was to make sure enough food reached Istanbul, the poorer inhabitants of Salonica often needed the janissaries to defend them. Why should they starve solely to swell the profits of the wealthy, or to allow precious grain to be shipped to Istanbul? In August 1753 there was a ‘popular revolt’ as a janissary-led mob burned down the bakeries in the Frankish quarter, suspecting them of contributing to the scarcity of bread. Six months later, export of grain from the city was still forbidden. In September 1789 there was a far more serious uprising against the mollah and the mufti for allowing grain to be sent to the capital. An enraged mob went after the mollah, then dragged the mufti into the streets, beat him and shaved off his beard. Only the resolute action of the janissary agha, who ordered the immediate arrest and strangulation of the ringleaders, restored order.13
Yet the janissaries made unconvincing Robin Hoods. With their violent tempers, esprit de corps, rivalrousness and swaggering aggression they were as liable to fall on each other, beat up innocent Christians or ransack taverns as to worry about the food supply. ‘The government, properly speaking,’ wrote a visitor, ‘is in the hands of the Janissaries who act here like petty despots.’ They rarely had anything to fear from those above them for the pashas appointed from Istanbul came and went – sometimes three in one year – and often did not even bother to turn up at their new posting. The janissary agha himself often enjoyed only a nominal authority over the rank and file, and a prudent kadi would steer clear of trying to punish them: usually a few ounces of coffee were enough to buy him out of a guilty verdict. About the only voices they were likely to heed belonged to the senior men of their own company.14
To make matters worse, through the eighteenth century Istanbul was exporting its own janissary problem, as it expelled trouble-makers into the provinces. In April 1743 Salonica was witnessing ‘daily murders by Turks, either of each other or against Greeks and Jews’, and a janissary killed the kahya of Ali Effendi, one of the leading men of the city. Rabbis and bishops prayed to be rid of them; community leaders sent petitions to the emperor to take action against them.15 By 1751 they were said to ‘rule’ the city, ready to kill ‘a man for a salad’. The following year, five hundred of them gathered to demand that certain particularly extortionate officials be handed over to them; when the janissary agha refused, they turned their fire on him. He managed to escape on a ship bound for Constantinople, but they then mounted a noisy guard outside the pasha’s palace, while others opened the wine shops and drank themselves into a stupor. Terrified by the violence which had already led them to three murders, everyone else kept off the streets.16
Yet their bitterest hatred was reserved for each other. In 1763 a good-looking young Jewish boy was seized by a member of the 2nd orta [company] and men from the 72nd were called in to help recover him. Clashes continued throughout the city for three days till the sultan ordered forty men from each company to be put to death, and the janissary agha demolished four cafés which the troublemakers were known to frequent.17 But although a determined pasha with his own men might frighten the locals into temporary obedience, janissaries could play at court politics too and