Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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settled into an inn, and over the coming weeks got used to the scanty rations – olives, salted fish – which made up the local diet, passing the time teaching country children phrases in French.
In an effort to stem the plague’s progress, the mollah had ordered all the inhabitants of the city who had left for the villages to stay where they were. No one appears to have obeyed, however, and into their mountain refuge trickled word of developments eight hours’ ride away down in the plain. ‘A young English merchant who went yesterday to Thessalonica, came back from there this evening and told me that the plague spreads more and more, that every day thirty people die and even more leave the town.’ The next day they heard of the death of a Jesuit monk who had recently arrived from Smyrna. Even more alarmingly, a local peasant had been stricken while in the city and had died since returning to the village. ‘Others say also that he was carried out of the village while he was still alive so that he doesn’t infect the rest.’ Down in the city ‘the plague spreads more and more and especially among the Turks and Jews; just yesterday they carried 250 dead out of the town.’ One could see the sense of the Islamic injunction – derived from a hadith of the Prophet, but only partially obeyed by Salonica’s own Muslim population – that those living in a place afflicted by the plague should accept whatever their fate held in store for them and not budge. Constant movement between the villages and the city extended the range of the epidemic, for as Orlyk himself noted – ‘people from here incessantly go to the city to sell their wares, and another village, very close by, is also infected.’
There were several reports that it had eased off or abated entirely before Orlyk and his party judged it safe to return. Having escaped the worst, a final frisson of terror awaited him back in Salonica. He had spent the summer months wearing a light coat made for him by his Jewish tailors. Now, as they brought him his new winter furs, they confessed that one of them had already been plague-stricken – the tell-tale swellings had appeared under the arm – when he had delivered Orlyk’s summer coat: ‘He could hardly finish his job for the pain, which tormented him and as soon as he got back home he laid down on his bed. I was thrilled when I heard this and thanked God that he kept me and my son alive. I wore this coat through the whole summer and September too, without knowing about the plague-ridden Jews. When I asked them today why they hadn’t told me, these heathens answered that if I had known about it, I wouldn’t have wanted the coat.’
It was not until a century later – well after quarantine restrictions had become customary in Europe, and imposed upon travellers from Ottoman lands – that the city’s vulnerability to plague, cholera and other epidemics began to diminish. Until then, nothing so clearly marked man’s vulnerability to the external world. The rabbis often managed to isolate the houses of victims, sometimes barricading them up, at others setting guards at the doors, but since such measures were not implemented comprehensively, those who could leave did. In 1719 two-thirds of the population escaped, and the city was abandoned. The pashas, beys and notables fled into the villages; the poor remained behind and were disproportionately afflicted, especially in the densely packed Jewish quarters of the lower town. ‘The only prey of the epidemic left are the poor most of whom are dying,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1781. Many tried prayer, seeing in their sufferings the signs of God’s vengeance for their sins. An English merchant reported that some Greek peasants opened up the graves of the victims, and stabbed and mangled the corpses ‘in a fearful manner’ in the belief that the Devil had entered them. Others took a kind of revenge of their own, seizing the opportunity offered by the empty mansions, locked stores and shuttered shops in the markets to loot and steal: ‘More than a few villains have stayed here and there are fears lest they set fires to create the opportunity for looting the abandoned houses.’ Orlyk’s translator turned out to head a gang of Jewish thieves which plundered unguarded warehouses, and stole jewels and cloth. The first Orlyk heard about it was when he was contacted by his former employee from prison, promising to work free for a year for him if he got him out. Wisely, no doubt, he refused. Meanwhile the cemeteries expanded on the slopes of the Upper Town where the thousands of plague victims were usually buried.39
Managing the City
One of the questions raised by the Ottoman experience of plague is what it tells us about the attitude of local officials to the management of the city. Although soldiers returning from wars, pilgrims and merchants all carried the deadly disease into the unprotected port, preventative measures were more or less non-existent. Infected houses were sometimes sprinkled with vinegar, limed or even occasionally demolished. But each community took its own measures and there was no overall governmental response. According to the reformer John Howard, who visited Salonica in 1786, the Greeks and the Jews each ran a small hospital, the former enclosed by high walls, the latter ‘lightsome and airy, and better accommodated for its purpose than any I had seen’, situated in the midst of the cemetery, and utilising tombs as tables and seats. But the small European community was far less well equipped than in Izmir, and evidently relied on flight into the countryside. And with no public health service, at least before the administrative reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman officials were no better informed than anyone else about where and when the epidemic struck. In 1744 when rumours of plague ran through the town, the only way the Venetian consul could establish their veracity was by approaching the chief rabbi who got the Jewish grave-diggers to say on oath whether they had observed signs of illness among the deceased. The Ottoman town officials themselves had no idea.40
Here as in so many areas, they approached municipal governance in a spirit of extreme disengagement. The plague – like the other risks of urban life such as fire and violent crime – highlighted the limited resources and ambitions of the eighteenth-century Ottoman state. The truth was that the kadi and the pasha of the city had few means at their disposal, for the city and its interests were often squeezed between the demands of the capital, on the one hand, and the powerful regional land-owners on the other. Criminal justice was generally solved through mediation and fines, and imprisonment was limited for many years by the lack of a proper prison in the town. The so-called Tower of the Janissaries was usually used for this but rarely had many inmates and was not designed for large numbers. A considerable amount of alcohol, coffee and opium was being consumed. The city was notorious for its dozens of taverns, coffee-houses and drinking shops – Evliya had been astonished at the brazenness of the unbelievers who would openly get drunk on wine or boza [a drink made from fermented millet] – but they too were largely outside official control, and frequented by janissaries who did much as they pleased. Taxes and the setting of market prices did concern the authorities. But even there, as we have seen, the resources they commanded were limited.
In general, whilst not quite as anarchic as some other Ottoman cities – Aleppo, for example, seems to have been in a state of virtual civil war as notable families and local power-brokers fought out their differences – eighteenth-century Salonica was a place where the authority of the central state could only be enforced sporadically and intermittently. When events threatened to spiral into large-scale violence, the strangulation of janissary ringleaders or the expulsion of troublemakers restored order for a time. But so long as the city fulfilled its role as provider of grain and wool for the capital, the Porte was prepared to tolerate high levels of street violence, and substantial power remaining within the hands of local elites. Food riots were the townspeople’s way of signalling that local land-owners and merchants needed to remember the poor. Controlling the janissaries themselves was almost impossible, and together with the Albanians, they were the main internal challenge to imperial rule. As soldiers rampaged through Salonica’s streets, and the plague carried off thousands a year, it could seem as if this was a city on the verge of chaos. Yet this was a chaos of vitality, not decline.
The Routes of Trade
ACCORDING TO THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis, Salonica’s harbour could hold at least three hundred vessels. A hundred