Let Our Fame Be Great (11 page)

In his despatch of 2 July, Longworth was already frustrated and despairing. Sefer Bey, now called by the grander title of Sefer Pasha, was lying and wheedling to hide the truth that the Circassians had no army to speak of and no way of raising one. ‘I have despatched trustworthy messengers to ascertain the truth of this statement and have found it to be a deliberate falsehood,' Longworth wrote. The relations between Longworth and Turkish officials, who claimed they were ruling Circassia on Turkey's behalf, were strained since Britain still officially aimed for an independent Circassia. These relations collapsed almost completely when British and French forces arrived to destroy Anapa's fortifications. Sefer wanted the town to be the capital of his province, whereas London and Paris saw it as a threat that must not be allowed to fall back into Russian hands. Sefer threatened to send tribesmen to oppose the landing allies. The threat did not materialize, and may indeed have been empty since Sefer lacked an army, but it was not a sign of good relations between the Western powers and the Circassians.

Longworth set out on a twelve-day trip into the hills to try and discover for himself what was happening. He came back dispirited. The social structure, and the division into nobles, freemen and slaves that had been already on the brink of collapse when he first visited two decades previously, had finally gone. The nobles of the coast, he noted, had lost all authority, and people inland were cooperating with the Russian government as and when they wanted to.

Longworth was rapidly coming to hate Sefer. ‘He is the only man, I believe, who has the slightest control over them [the Circassians]; and that rather of a negative than an active character. He has neither the means nor the energy requisite to raise a Circassian force himself; but he is, in some measure able as he is, evidently disposed to prevent any recruitment on our part, making no secret of his objections on that score. As to his organizing anything out of this anarchy for administrative purposes, I consider such a thing as quite hopeless and out of the question.'

In despair, Longworth tried to meet Muhammad-Emin, a puritan Muslim leader operating inland. But the Muslim leader refused to talk to him, saying any contacts had to go via the Turks. Muhammad-Emin had a low opinion of the British, having met their ambassador during a previous stay in Istanbul. The Turks, angered by the meeting, which they had not been informed about in advance, cut off his allowance and stopped him returning to the Caucasus. Longworth knew nothing of this; he just saw his plans frustrated on all sides by men who were supposed to be his allies.

‘Till the troubles fomented by . . . Mohamed Emin Effendi, in the Kuban provinces, have been appeased, there is no probability of the Circassians being brought to co-operate, in any warlike operation against the common enemy,' he wrote in an angry memo to London, in which he accused Muhammad-Emin of trying to destroy what remained of the social hierarchy. ‘While the lives and properties of a large portion of the inhabitants are at stake we cannot expect that they should take any interest in affairs of a political nature,' wrote Longworth in September 1855.

The whole picture at this point was confused, and it is hard to see what was really going on. But, essentially, the Turks appear to have decided to take over Circassia for good. The British and the French did not support that aim, but did not wish to block it and thus anger the Turks. The good old-fashioned Circassians, meanwhile, took the opportunity of relaxing. Ironically, in the midst of a European war, they had their first opportunity in decades for a bit of peace.

Longworth kept firing back letters to London, but his mission was a waste of time. Circassia would always have been a sideshow compared to the Crimean battlefield, although a force advancing north from Circassia could have seriously disturbed the Russian supply lines. With the degree of dissension and argument that Longworth experienced, however, the country did not even become a sideshow. Longworth took a steamer home, and Circassia was once again forgotten about.

The remaining papers relating to the case in the Foreign Office file are a severe anticlimax, detailing only Longworth's attempts to regain his expenses. They do, however, reveal how much Circassia had changed since the 1830s. The Circassians might have claimed they
were resisting Russia, but the economic facts on the ground suggested something very different.

During the 1830s, Circassian leaders tried to impose a blockade on trade with the Russians, and foreign travellers in the region carried a great supply of goods that they could barter for food, horses, arms, clothes and their other necessities. Longworth, knowing his Circassia, took a similar amount of merchandise to defray his expenses on his return in the 1850s, but to no avail.

‘I discovered however on revisiting Circassia that a decided change had taken place in this respect, not only on the coast but in the interior; and that although these effects were available as presents they could not be disposed of to advantage for the payment of travelling expenses, money being almost everywhere demanded in preference,' he wrote in one of the many letters that deal with his £142 9s. 7d. in expenses and a pile of missing trade goods.

The development of a cash-based economy in Circassia was a major change and goes to show how far the Russians had succeeded in taking over the plain of the Kuban north of the mountains on which the Circassians depended for food and grazing.

The Russian blockade of the coast, via those miserable little forts, had clearly been more successful than it at first appeared, for it stopped large Turkish ships stopping at many points on the coast, thereby forcing the Circassians to rely on Russia for trade goods and salt, which they had no way of producing. Presumably, in return the Russian merchants took their livestock and grain.

At this point, perhaps it is worth questioning what the Circassians would have been able to sell to the Turks anyway.

It is clear what they needed from the Turks: arms and gunpowder, which the Russians would not have sold them. But they produced very little, and with a subsistence economy and restricted trade routes their agricultural system was not geared up to producing enough to earn the goods they wanted to buy. What they needed was a high-value, easily transportable product.

They found one: their own children.

The slave business was Circassia's only significant export trade, except perhaps for the gold found by Jason and the Argonauts in
ancient times. Otherwise, the Circassians sent their sons and daughters to fight and breed for the Turks and received the goods of war in return.

Bell noted the story of a young boy whom he met in November 1839, and who pretended to have a sore leg, and was repeatedly sent to different doctors to have his fictitious ailment examined. There was nothing in fact wrong with the boy, except that he was desperate to avoid being sold in Istanbul. Eventually, he had to admit there was nothing wrong with him and he was duly sent off. The case was unique. ‘This is the only instance I can at present recollect, as having come under my observation, of disinclination having been shown by any male or female to being taken to Turkey, which appears to be in general looked to by Circassians as the land of promise,' Bell wrote towards the end of his stay on the Black Sea coast.

Russia was tactically torn over the slave trade. The more people that departed – and those leaving were either fighting-age men or breeding-age women – the fewer people there would be left to conquer. However, the more people that departed the more money would be earned with which the remaining Circassians could resist Russia. The Russians' policy oscillated. In the 1830s, they sought to throttle the trade. Later on they, or at least some of their officials, connived in it.

Alexandre Dumas, when he left the Caucasus through the port of Poti in the 1850s, said his ship was rammed with slaves. ‘There are three hundred prime-bodied Kabardians with us at the moment, travelling steerage,' the captain said, ‘mostly women and children in charge of two tribal chiefs and the headmen of the various villages.'

‘What can I do?' the captain told him. ‘They all have valid passports and have paid their fare. Everything is in perfect order and they never give us any trouble. Besides, the girls do not seem to mind. They all expect to marry a Pasha or join the harem of some great lord. If they complained to us we might take action. They easily could, for twice a day they come up for fresh air and exercise, but they never say a word.'

Visitors to the Caucasus, like Dumas's captain, were always rather torn over what to do about the slave trade. Westerners opposed it on principle and wished to abolish it, but also could not help remarking
that the Circassians appeared to be leaving voluntarily, and that slavery was not the degrading institution that it was in, for example, the United States. In the Ottoman Empire, many high-ranking individuals – including every mother of every sultan – were slaves.

Dr Moritz Wagner, a German traveller, once sailed from Trabzon to Istanbul with a slave-trader and twelve Circassian girls. ‘This Turkish trader was very richly attired in furs and silk and, notwithstanding his vile occupation, a man of very sociable manners. He informed me, among other things, that since the occupation of the Caucasian coast by the Russians, his trade had become much more difficult and dangerous, but also much more lucrative.' Wagner, who travelled extensively in the Caucasus and the Middle East, tried hard to understand why a Circassian would sell his daughter into slavery and in the end struggled to condemn it. ‘The [children] go to pass a happy and splendid existence in Stamboul; the price of their beauty probably rescues the family from starvation, or procures them powder and shot to defend their independence. The Circassians are a poor people; their rugged land is wanting in almost every necessity. When we consider the extreme disproportion between our means and those of the Circassians, we ought not to wonder if they resort to desperate expedients.'

For any visitor to modern-day Istanbul, where the sultan's palace is a magnificent complex of beautiful architecture and stunning views, it is easy to understand how Wagner came to his conclusion. Any Circassian girl would dream of swapping the danger of the Russian wars and the squalor of existence in a wattle-and-daub hut for the glorious peace of one of the grandest palaces on earth.

Of course, now the giant Topkapi Palace, of which the harem is just a small part, is open to the public and no longer home to a sultan and his slave-girls. Where once the sultan strolled in splendid seclusion, thousands of tourists spill over onto the lawns, eat ice creams and queue to goggle at the jewels and treasures of the Turkish state.

In the blazing sunshine of a May afternoon when I visited, the clamour of the tourists was distracting and I wondered if I could ever recapture the mystery and serenity that must once have reigned in this magnificent enclave. Then, passing through the gate into the
harem, there it was. The bright sunshine, parched foliage and brash noise of outside was replaced by a cool gloom produced by blue and white tiles and tall narrow passageways. Its deep courtyards and tiled walls all conspired to keep both the heat and the noise of the outside world where they belonged – outside.

But this tranquillity was a treacherous impression. This serene first courtyard belonged not to the women but to the eunuchs, the living wall of sexless muscle that policed these women and stopped anyone but the sultan interfering with them. As if to emphasize the point, a tour guide with a group of elderly Americans in baggy shorts and sandals passed into the courtyard, and destroyed my peaceful reverie. Her high-pitched and loud voice was to be my constant companion during my time in the harem. It was an irritation, but it served to remind me that the harem should not be romanticized by a lone traveller wandering around in peace. It was a place of intrigue and aggression, and very real danger.

‘There were lives inside lives here. These were high-energy women, and they were competitors in power and energy,' intoned the tour guide, her voice fading away as I moved into another room to escape the bustle.

The girls who came here were all supposed to be from non-Muslim backgrounds, since a Muslim could not be enslaved. However, Muslims could be traded if they were already slaves, and a feudal society still technically existed in Circassia. Some Circassians were therefore already slaves, making them very popular with Turks seeking to buy light-skinned and blue-eyed girls to serve as playthings for the lords of the Golden Horn. Girls were brought to Istanbul and sold alongside slaves from the Christian lands of Greece, Georgia, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Pushing further into the harem, I began to appreciate the intricacy of the power structures that had grown up around the sultan's throne. Access to the girls of the harem was controlled by the sultan's mother, and the system seemed to have a brutal honesty to it. People who had access to the sultan either were essentially sexless – his mother or the eunuchs – or were sex slaves. And the harem was finely designed to ensure the situation was not disturbed. The mother's room and the
sultan's room adjoined each other, a situation that made clear the power that women wielded in this now extinct system.