round the outside perimeter past the shacks which cling to the steep northwest side of the ramparts, traces what is left of the invisible outline of this policy.2
But by the start of the eighteenth century, there were signs of imperial over-stretch. In 1732 a commissioner of the Porte reported that many of the towers were badly neglected. Within decades, the walls were of antiquarian interest only. An emissary of Louis XVI described the city as ‘of no importance’ from a military point of view – ‘an enceinte of ramparts without moats and badly linked, even worse defended by a very small number of poor artillery pieces.’ In 1840, the British army captain who drank sherbets and lemonade with the artillery commander found the troops excellent but the batteries ‘defenceless in themselves’. When the guns sounded, as they often did, it was to mark nothing more than the breaking of the Ramadan fast, the strangulation of a janissary or imperial celebrations.3
Until the demolitions of the 1870s, however, which got rid of gates, towers and entire stretches of the muraille, the ring of ramparts held the city tight – marking the boundary between residents and strangers, the living and dead. The claustrophobic airless warren of lanes within contrasted with the dreary expanses of open country – ‘a mournful and arid solitude’ wrote a nineteenth-century French visitor – on the far side of the walls, studded with water-mills, cemeteries, plague-hospices and monasteries. On the approach to the gates, the dangling corpses of criminals hung from trees to remind passers-by of the virtues of obedience. ‘We enter the Vardar-kapesi, or gate of the Vardhari,’ wrote the imperturbable Leake. ‘In a tree before it hangs the body of a robber.’ The gates themselves were manned by guards who checked the passes of non-residents and collected merchandise duties from farmers and traders. Come nightfall, tardy visitors were left outside, and everyone else kept in. The sharp sense of a division between city-dwellers and non-residents reflected the prevailing Ottoman conception of a close link between foreigners and crime. Vagrants, migrants and strangers were the cause of insecurity: the gates helped to keep them at arm’s length.4
For even if it was never itself invaded or attacked, in other ways Salonica was deeply affected by the numerous disorders which punctuated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With every campaign, rumours swept in: invading Austrian armies were coming down from the north, hostile Russian flotillas were just off Cape Caraburnu, a column twenty thousand strong of Napoleon’s troops was marching down from Bosnia. Wars against European states aroused the anger of local Muslims and jeopardized the position of the Christians. In 1715, during the war with Austria, the French consul reported that ‘terror has spread among the Greeks, who fear being chopped to pieces in their churches, and the Franks, who have a reputation for wealth, are worried about a population which does not reason and cannot distinguish between the French and the [Austrians] who are only five or six days’ march from us.’5
War also brought extra taxation to pay for new galleys, uniforms, and provisions. In 1702 the orders were for gunpowder, in 1714 biscuit and flour, and in the great campaign of the following year, which drove the Venetians out of the Aegean, the city contributed the equivalent of 40,000 sheep and 150,000 kilos of flour as well as workers to repair the roads and bridges along which the Grand Vizier’s army passed. In 1734 lead, powder, iron, medicines and thirty cannons were demanded, in 1744 pack-animals. By 1770, during the war with Russia, the Greeks were ‘so exhausted from constant requisitions that they don’t know how they will manage’. Yet seventeen years later, the Greek and Jewish communities were instructed once again to find two hundred ox-carts and three hundred camels – or the equivalent sum in silver.6
For many Muslims, war also meant military service, disrupting trade and family life for up to six months in the year. Town criers publicizing the sultan’s demand for extra troops found little enthusiasm. When decrees were read out in the mosques calling for volunteers, angry voices shouted that Greeks and Jews should enlist too. Most of Salonica’s seven thousand janissaries were liable to serve, but their commanders often claimed they could not be spared. In January 1770, an imperial decree called on all who believed in Mohammed to march on the Moldavians and Wallachians and to annihilate them for daring to rise up in rebellion against the Emperor. They were given licence to act as they would, and to take slaves.7 Yet many preferred to give money and to shut themselves away in their houses. Another appeal for Muslims to enter the ranks explicitly allowed elderly and wealthy Turks, as well as the Ma’min, to make a monetary contribution instead. The city’s growing prosperity was creating new, more sedentary interests which clashed with the old ghazi warrior ideals.8
For troops levied in the hinterland, Salonica was a mustering point whether they were marching by land or sailing across the Mediterranean. The Grand Vizier’s 1715 campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese was probably the last time the imperial army as a whole gathered in its full glory outside the walls. But in 1744 at least 12,000 landed cavalrymen embarked there for the Persian campaign, and three thousand yürüks – settled nomads liable for military service – gathered from the surrounding villages. Albanian contingents from the mountains arrived en route to campaigns in the Crimea and Arabia, and so many men of arms-bearing age flocked to the city that north African recruiters and privateers combed it for volunteers: at least five hundred took the coin of the Bey of Algiers on one recruiting drive in May 1757 alone.9
Since there were no proper barracks, thousands of these unruly, poorly paid and ill-disciplined 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
