went on for days at a time, with chicken, salted olives and lemon jam washed down with copious quantities of vodka, wine and coffee. Orlyk and his entourage were fond of the bottle too and he coped easily enough with his often inebriated Jewish interpreter and his manservant ‘Red’, found more than once sprawled in the gutter after a hard night. But the dangers and risks of urban life hemmed him in. At the minor end of the scale they included frequent indigestion from over-eating, the ‘horrid muck’ of the city streets, and the bribery necessary to smooth relations with Greek and Ottoman officials alike. He was shocked by the corruption of the church and the readiness of Christians to use the Ottoman courts when it served their interests. His diary is also sensitive to disturbing portents – a full moon cleft with deep black fissures, earth tremors and ‘great lights flying in the air like a big lance’. Meanwhile, crimes went unpunished, pirates threatened voyagers by sea, and as the streets echoed with the sounds of gunfire, janissaries and irregulars acted much as they wished. Of all the numerous dangers Orlyk’s diary describes, however, none was more frightening, murderous or unpredictable than what an earlier traveller described as ‘the terrour of horrid Plagues’. Arriving in the city in the aftermath of the epidemic of 1718–1719, Orlyk quickly became familiar with the biggest killer of the early modern Ottoman world.34
Plague
‘Thank God the plague is not here!’ wrote a relieved traveller arriving in Salonica in 1788. Borne on the trade routes from Central Asia and the Black Sea through to the Mediterranean, it could come by both land and sea. A century before Orlyk, an epidemic in Istanbul had killed one thousand a day, according to the British ambassador there, and forced more than two hundred thousand to flee into the countryside. Izmir lost perhaps one-fifth of its entire population in 1739–41, and as many as a quarter may have died between 1758 and 1762: the historian Daniel Panzac estimates it lost the equivalent of its entire population to the plague in the course of the century. At such times, one saw ‘the Streets … filld with infected bodies as well alive as dead; the living seeking remedies either from the Phisitians or at the Bathes, the Dead lying in open Beers, or else quite naked at theyr dores to be washd before theyr buryalls.’35
In Salonica, athwart the empire’s main carrying routes, warm summers and a humid climate offered the plague bacillus a near-ideal environment in the lethal months from April to July. Compared with Izmir, with 55 plague years in the eighteenth century, and Istanbul [65], Salonica got off lightly: even so plague struck one year in three. Outbreaks in 1679–80, 1687–9, 1697–99, 1708–9, 1712–13 – which supposedly claimed 6,000 victims – 1718–19, 1724 and 1729–30 were just the start. In 1740, a ‘bad plague’ carried off 1337 Christians, 2239 Turks and 3935 Jews. That was not the only really serious outbreak: in 1762 10–12,000 people, roughly 16–20% of the population, died. The figures were similar in 1781 when as a survivor put it, one could ‘die of fright’, and again in 1814. Over the century, roughly 55–65,000 victims were carried off, something close to the mid-century population of the city itself. Only the constant inflow of new, mostly Christian migrants from the countryside and high mostly Jewish local birth rates can account for the lack of a very steep decline in numbers. It is testimony to the resilience of the city’s economy that unlike ports such as Alexandria and Aleppo, its growth was not more seriously checked.36
Through Orlyk’s entries during the epidemic of 1724 – a serious year but not nearly as bad as 1713 or 1762 – we can see the astonishingly rapid trajectory from rumour to full-scale panic and mass death. It all started fairly quietly: ‘On Wednesday morning, after I came back from the Orthodox Church after mass, I was told by my people that the small daughter of a man who lives close by the cemetery at the Orthodox Church is extremely sick with the plague.’ Hearing this, Greeks from the vicinity had already started moving out to villages in the mountains. And there were omens: ‘My people told me they heard an owl on my inn, and this is a fatal bird, which is proven by experience.’37
The next day the girl was dead and the church had closed. Orlyk asked his servant to find lodgings for him in a nearby village, together with the English consul and some other members of the community, in order to escape ‘God’s awful punishment’. But the villagers, as often happened, were understandably reluctant to take in refugees from the city and started arming and erecting barricades to prevent them coming. Reportedly they were being encouraged by the pasha of Salonica who planned to make wealthy foreigners pay handsomely for the privilege of leaving.38
As a political exile Orlyk had particular difficulties getting out. When he presented himself to the mollah, ‘this heathen made me more annoyed, telling me there is nothing written down in the emperor’s order that I can go wherever I want and choose inns, but that it is written down that I shall stay at the inn in this town and have to stay here. I discussed it a long time with him and put forward lots of arguments; he promised to speak about it with the aghas tomorrow and to tell me what they decide at their stupid council.’ Despite Orlyk’s efforts, the mollah stuck to his guns, perhaps fearing the consequences if he absconded. Meanwhile, the younger son of his landlord fell ill as well, which scared the household so much ‘that all of us ran away from the inn, and left our stuff and also the carriage on the street, at which the servants slept the whole night in the rain, and I slept over in some monastery house … where I slept in great fear.’ Two days later, Orlyk tried again and this time he informed the mollah that the entire street where he lived was infected, including the house next door, and that he had given up sleeping in the inn. Even this had little effect. Only when the English consul intervened, and promised to be responsible for his eventual return, was he allowed to depart.
After the usual difficulties with the janissaries guarding the gates, who blocked his way until they received payment, he and his party set off, their carriages loaded down with clothes, provisions, guns, books, and tents. They had left the walls far behind and were heading for the prosperous little town of Galatista in the wooded hills to the southeast when they heard that its inhabitants were threatening to burn down their own houses and retreat to the mountains if they came. Neither Orlyk nor the British merchants he was travelling with took the threats seriously. Desperate to put the infected city behind them, they travelled together to protect themselves against robbers and sent their Jewish interpreter to deal with the village headman. Eventually they arrived, 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
