Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (37 page)

The Arsenal was a natural expression of Venetian capitalism and constitutional government that operated in a way unimaginable at Istanbul. Venice was ruled as a republic with an elected chief executive (the doge) and a Senate of largely aristocratic merchants who allowed capital from commerce to go relatively untaxed and to be legally immune from confiscation. In addition, corporations in Venice were allowed legal protection that made them abstract, meritocratic entities, businesses that might transcend any one individual and find success or failure on the basis of profit. A Venetian corporation was not dependent on the life, health, or status of any particular person or clan, but solely on its efficiency to operate on abstract business principles such as investment and return, with the corollary financial instruments of stock, dividends, insurance, and maritime loans. Since the state undertook the expensive investments of producing merchant ships and providing naval protection, small traders with little capital could compete with larger corporations in bidding on the rights to the use of ships and commercial routes under the aegis of public auctions. By the time of Lepanto more than eight hundred commercial voyages a year were arriving at and departing from Venice’s port—more than two new ships docking in its harbor every day.

When such state-sanctioned capitalism operated in a rather free society overseen by the elected public councils of the republic, the talented of all classes found a hospitable business climate like none other in the Mediterranean. Added to the mix of consensual government, free markets and investment was a devotion to rationalism and disinterested inquiry that explains why the Venetian galleys were the best designed and armed on the Mediterranean. There was nothing in Asia like the European marketplace of ideas devoted to the pursuit of ever more deadly weapons—the published empirical research on bronze and iron cannon effectiveness, for example, found in Vannoccio Biringuccio’s
Pirotechnia
(Venice, 1540), Niccolò Tartaglia’s
La nova scientia
(Venice, 1558), and Luigi Collado’s
Practica manual de artiglierra
(Venice, 1586 [Italian]; Milan, 1592 [Spanish]). Such formal treatises were often supplemented by annual published reports by commissions and boards in Venice and Genoa and more informal tracts from master shipwrights themselves, like Theodoro’s 1546 report on galley construction at the Arsenal. The freedom to exchange ideas and the classical heritage of rationalism—evident in Don García de Toledo’s treatise on seamanship, ship propulsion, and armament (Madrid, ca. 1560) or in Pedro de Medina’s
Regimento de navegación
(Seville, 1563)—meant that Europeans were incorporating firsthand experience with abstract theory to advance the science of nautical construction and navigation. Military research was part of higher learning at Venice centered at the nearby University of Padua, where scientific and medical training, under the direction of the renowned Gabriello Falloppio (1523–62) and Fabricus Aquapendente (1537–1610), was unrivaled. In painting, Tintoretto, Giorgione, and Titian kept alive the Hellenic-inspired excellence of the Italian Renaissance, while printers like Aldus Manutius (1450–1515) soon established the greatest publishing center in Europe, focusing on its famous Aldine editions of Greek and Roman classics.

In contrast, printing presses were not introduced at Istanbul until the late fifteenth century, and even then for a long time were forbidden due to fears that information harmful to the state would be distributed. Islam itself would never come to terms with unfettered printing and the idea of free mass dissemination of knowledge. Most well-known Ottoman art and literature were court-inspired, subject to imperial and religious censorship far beyond anything found in the West. Rationalism was felt to be at odds with the political primacy of the Koran, which lay at the heart of the sultan’s power. Knowledge gained from galley warfare was thus found only from hands-on training and the oral tradition that circulated among Mediterranean seamen, since there were no real Ottoman universities, publishing houses, or widespread readership to facilitate abstract speculation.

Venice’s strength vis-à-vis the Turks lay not so much in geography, natural resources, religious zealotry, or a commitment to continual warring and raiding as in its system of capitalism, consensual government, and devotion to disinterested research. Only that way could skilled nautical engineers, pilots, and trained admirals trump enormous Ottoman advantages in territory, tribute, a cultural tradition of warrior nomadism, and sheer manpower. The sultan sought out European traders, ship designers, seamen, and imported firearms—even portrait painters—while almost no Turks found their services required in Europe.

Ottomanism

Perhaps the most marked example at Lepanto of the difference in the economies of the belligerents was the 150,000 gold sequins found in the captured flagship of Ali Pasha. Treasures nearly as large were also discovered in the galleys of the other Ottoman admirals. Without a system of banking, fearful of confiscation should he displease the sultan, and always careful to keep his assets hidden from the tax collectors, Ali Pasha toted his huge personal fortune to Lepanto. There it was plundered after the battle when the admiral was killed at sea and his ship sunk. If a member of the highest echelons of Ottoman society—he was brother-in-law to the sultan, and on a great jihad for his ruler—could neither safely invest nor hide his capital in Istanbul, then thousands of less fortunate subjects could scarcely hope to.

Wealthy Ottoman traders and merchants often stealthily invested money in Europe and chose to import costly European luxury items; or they hid or buried their savings rather than risk seizure of their stored coined money in the future. The result was a chronic shortage of investment capital in the Ottoman Empire for education, public works, and military expenditure. Perhaps Adam Smith had Ali Pasha in mind when he wrote that “in those unfortunate countries, indeed, where men are continually afraid of the violence of their superiors, they frequently bury and conceal a great part of their common stock, a common practice in Turkey, in Indostan, and I believe, in most other governments of Asia”
(The Wealth of Nations).
In any case, the thousands of Venetians and other Italians and Greeks who lived in Istanbul facilitated, along with Jews and Armenians, a vast East-West trade network. Value-added products such as European firearms, manufactured goods, and textiles were commonly exchanged for raw Asian cotton, silk, spices, and agricultural produce. In contrast, Venice saw no need to welcome an elite trading and banking cadre of Turkish specialists to enhance its own economy.

The political and religious organization of the Ottomans behind their rather closed economy was at once both enlightened and horrific, efficient and static, logical and backward—and in most every way antithetical to market capitalism. Traditional portraits of a corrupt, inept bureaucratic Ottoman government are as misleading as recent revisionist attempts to portray the empire as little different from, if not more progressive than, its European counterparts. At the time of Lepanto, Ottoman political, economic, and military practice could not have been more different from European custom. First, the bureaucracy of the army and government was staffed by slaves—to the number of 80,000 or more—either bought from slave traders, conquered in war or raids, or collected as forced “taxes” under the
devshirme,
the inspection every four years of the conquered Christian provinces to select suitable Christian youths for forced conversion to Islam. The best of the young Christian captives were educated in the language and religion of the Ottomans, given high posts in government and the military, and became the lifelong loyal and prized slaves of the sultan himself.

The result was a continual revolving governmental and military elite. It was not readily open to native-born Muslims and not replicated through hereditary or dynastic succession. The children of the
devshirme
were not promoted on criteria of birth or wealth. Thus arose a meritocracy of sorts—a nightmarish version of the model proposed by Plato in his
Republic—
under which youths would be separated from their parents, publicly educated, advanced on merit, and thereby motivated to serve the state. The
devshirme
ensured the sultan a loyal cadre of followers, who had no parents and no vision of upward mobility for their own children: the latter were born Muslims and thus ineligible to follow as government interns or Janissary recruits. While the theft of Christian youth was bitterly resented by most conquered subjects in the Balkans, the parents of the kidnapped could on occasion confess that imperial service in the sultan’s government might give their children a better future than the impoverishment of their own local serfdom.

The use of former Christians removed some of the threat of native-born Turks’ acquiring power and threatening insurrection, while it provided proof throughout the empire of the dynamism of Islam in its ability to transmogrify the best of Christian youth into the most loyal and devout of the sultan’s Muslim subjects. Millions of Christians were captured and converted during the centuries of the empire. At Lepanto most of the military command, the bureaucrats who handled the logistics of the fleet, the Janissaries, and the chained galley slave rowers were former Christians, who were forced slave converts to Islam.

The
devshirme
also illustrated the degree to which religion permeated all aspects of Ottoman life. The greatest admirals in the sixteenth-century Ottoman fleet—Khaireddin Barbarossa, Uluj Ali (“Occhiali”), and Turghud Ali Pasha (“Dragut”)—had all been born European Christians. The sultan’s mother herself, Hürrem Sultan, wife of Süleyman the Magnificent, was a Ukrainian Christian, daughter of a priest. The grand vizier, or chief minister of state, of the empire during the battle of Lepanto, Mehmet Sokullu, was a Slav from the Balkans. Part of the secret of the Ottomans’ martial success was its ambivalent relationship to Europe, which it both courted and hated, robbed and traded with—all the time as it welcomed in Western traders, kidnapped European adolescents, and hired renegade criminals. That the capital of the Ottomans was the venerated European city of Constantinople, and no longer in the East, was itself acknowledgment of the financial advantages inherent in proximity to the West.

The empire, as in the case of the earlier Achaemenid rulers of Asia Minor, was completely in the hands of the sultan, in theory himself a slave by virtue of his birth to a member of his father’s servile harem and also as a servant of Allah. Reminiscent of a Darius or Xerxes, in 1538 Süleyman the Magnificent had inscribed at Bender the following:

I am God’s slave and sultan of this world. By the grace of God I am head of the Muhammad’s community. God’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions. I am Süleyman, in whose name the hutbe is read in Mecca and Medina. In Bagdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan; who sends his fleets to the seas of Europe, the Maghrib and India. I am the sultan who took the crown and throne of Hungary and granted them to a humble slave. The Voivoda Petru raised his head in revolt, but my horse’s hoofs ground him into the dust, and I conquered the land of Moldavia. (H. Inalcik,
The Ottoman Empire,
41)

Succession passed to the most ambitious of a ruler’s many sons, aided by the degree to which mothers in the harem and full siblings might eliminate rival claimants who could number in the dozens. Most male offspring of the sultan’s daughters were killed at birth. Court intrigue, poisonings, and gratuitous execution proved every bit as macabre as anything in Suetonius’s account of the twelve Caesars. Autocracy, Eastern or Western, is bad enough, but it could prove ruinous when combined with a succession ritual of bloodletting among the elite to determine the new strongman. Consequently, the two fleets at Lepanto represented opposite poles of political and religious organization—the Ottoman navy, an entire cadre of slaves of the sultan; the Christian fleet an alliance of autonomous states, a few of which were ruled by elected governments.

The spectacular growth of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century had hinged on two phenomena: the ability of nomadic peoples to unite and ride west and southward to capture and plunder the older and more settled wealthy states in its environs—Byzantines, Christian fiefdoms in the northern Balkans, Mamluks in Egypt, and Islamic regimes in eastern Anatolia and Iran—and their skill in taxing and transporting the wealth of the Orient such as cotton, spices, silk, and agricultural produce to Europe in exchange for weapons, ships, and manufactured goods. As long as Ottoman armies could acquire fresh lands and new plunder, find new sources of slaves, and monopolize the trade routes from East to West, the empire could spread and prosper, despite intrinsic inefficiencies in its economy and political instability in its imperial administration.

In principle the sultan owned all the land in the empire; in actual practice the best estates were allotted to military and government grandees. All property was subject to sharp taxes. There was no large landholding class of voting citizens. Local appointments went solely to the aristocracy who collected tribute or owned estates, while national offices, including the viziers, were mostly staffed by Christian slaves brought in through the
devshirme.
The majority of Ottoman military manpower came not from the Janissaries, but from the
timar
system under which a military lord was given conquered land and near absolute control of its environs. After collecting imperial taxes, the timariot kept what remaining profit he could exact from his indentured peasants and then promised to muster his retainers in time of war. If the Janissaries were foreign-born slave soldiers, the rest of the Ottoman military was primarily an army and navy of serf farmers, beholden to their local lord. Such a system of unfree labor was in sharp contrast to the European militaries, which either conscripted many of their fighting men and oarsmen from their own populace (as in the case of Venice) or hired soldiers on the open market with clear and understood contractual obligations. At first glance the Ottoman system of military conscription had the advantage of being “cost-free” and predicated on local trust and comradeship rather than wages. But on closer examination the entire
timar
method of mustering depended on a continual supply of new land, wise battle leadership of an autocratic timariot, relatively brief campaigns to prevent disruptions in agricultural production, and constant victories to provide plunder for what was essentially a coerced soldiery.