Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
city as they made the journey to the Holy Mountain just to its east.
Yet amid this cultural ferment, the Byzantine emperors were staggering from crisis to crisis. Ambitious Bulgarian and Serb rulers were – despite their shared Christianity – more of a threat than they were allies. In 1185 Salonica was pillaged by Norman invaders. In 1204, Catholic crusaders – Franks, as they were contemptuously known in the Orthodox world – sacked Constantinople itself and carved up its possessions. In the east, Byzantine power was largely spent. Turkish tribes had moved in from central Asia, and the rise and fall of the Seljuk sultans turned Anatolia into a battleground between competing emirates. That the empire survived at all was owing to the weakness of its enemies, and the judicious bribery of foreign allies.
In the early fourteenth century, however, as Catalan mercenaries, Genoese, Venetians, Serbs and others fought for mastery in the eastern Mediterranean, an entirely new power began the remarkable ascent which would turn it within two hundred years into the greatest force in the world. Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, initially ruled a small emirate on the frontier with Byzantine territory in Anatolia. To his east lay more powerful Muslim emirs, and behind them the mightiest state of all, that of the Mongol khans. By comparison, fighting the fading Greeks was easy. In 1302 Osman defeated a mercenary army sent out by the emperor and by the time of his death in 1326 he had established his capital in the former Byzantine city of Bursa. Feuding between the Byzantine Palaeologues and Cantacuzenes gave his successors their chance in Europe. In 1354 his son Orhan won a foothold at Gallipoli and less than twenty years later the Byzantine emperor Jean V Palaeologue made his submission to his successor Murad I. By the end of the century, Murad’s successor Bayazid I – the Thunderbolt – was styling himself Sultan.
Thanks to the distortive effects of both sixteenth-century Ottoman ideology (when the empire’s rulers were keen to demonstrate the purity of their Sunni credentials, following the conquest of the Arab provinces) and nineteenth-century Balkan nationalism, the character of the early Ottoman state remains poorly understood. The Ottomans were Muslims, but their empire was built as much in Europe as it was in Asia. In fact before the sixteenth century they probably ruled over more Christians than they did Muslims. Their form of Islam was a kind of border religion spread both by warriors dedicated to Holy War, and through religious fraternities which took over Christian shrines, espousing a surprisingly open attitude to Christianity itself. They were in many ways heirs to central Asian Turkic versions of Islam, like that embraced by the Grand Khan Mongha, for whom the religions of his empire ‘are like the five fingers of the same hand’. They followed the Hanafi school of Sunni law, the most tolerant and flexible in relation to non-Muslims, their rulers married Serbian and Greek princesses – which meant that many Ottoman sultans had Christian mothers – and their key advisers and generals were often converts recruited from Byzantine service.9
One historian has recently argued that before the fifteenth century, the empire was actually what he terms a ‘raiding confederacy’, in which the Ottomans joined with several other great families in the search for land and plunder. Ghazi [frontier warrior] Evrenos Bey, the leader of the most feared squad of raiders, was a former Byzantine military commander who converted to Islam. Evrenos acted in a way which suggested he was virtually a junior partner with the Ottoman emirs, and when he spearheaded the Ottoman assault on northern Greece the value of his support was recognized by them with huge grants of land. The fiefdoms his family won in the vicinity of Salonica made them among the largest land-owners in the empire and a dominant force in the city well into the twentieth century. His descendants included Ottoman pashas and Young Turks, and his magnificent tomb was a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims alike.10
The Turks’ attitude to religion came as a pleasant relief to many Orthodox Christians. Held captive by the Ottomans in 1355, the distinguished archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, was surprised to find the Orthodox Church recognized and even flourishing in the lands under the emir. Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship of the two faiths with him and the emir organized a debate between him and Christian converts to Islam. ‘We believe in your prophet, why don’t you believe in ours?’ Muslims asked him more than once. Palamas himself observed an imam conducting a funeral and later took the opportunity to joust over theology with him. When the discussion threatened to overheat, Palamas calmed it down by saying politely: ‘Had we been able to agree in debate we might as well have been of one faith.’ To which he received the revealing reply: ‘There will be a time when we shall all agree.’11
As Byzantine power waned, more and more Orthodox Christians felt caught between two masters. Faced with an apparent choice between the reviled Catholics (their sack of Constantinople in 1204 never to be forgotten) and the Muslim Turks, many opted for the latter. Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was in fact a powerful one for the Ottomans could be seen as protectors of Orthodoxy against the Catholics. The hope for political stability, the desire for wealth and status in a meritocratic and open ruling system, admiration for the governing capacities of the Ottomans, and their evident willingness to make use of Christians as well as Muslims explain why administrators, nobles, peasants and monks felt the allure of the sultans and why many senior Byzantine noble families entered their service. Murad II’s grand viziers were well known for their pro-Christian sympathies; Murad himself was influenced by dervish orders which preached a similarly open-minded stance, and the family sheykh of the Evrenos family was reputed to be a protector of Christians. In the circumstances, it is not surprising why surrender seemed far more sensible an option than futile resistance against overwhelming odds, and why the inhabitants of Salonica themselves were known, according to at least one Byzantine chronicler, as ‘friends of the Sultan’.12
In the second half of the fourteenth century, one Balkan town after another yielded to the fast-moving Ottoman armies; the Via Egnatia fell into their hands, and even the canny monks of Mount Athos submitted. Salonica itself was blockaded for the first time in 1383, and in April 1387, surrendered without a fight. On this occasion, all that happened was that a small Turkish garrison manned the Acropolis. The town’s ruler Manuel Palaeologue had wanted to resist, but he was shouted down by the inhabitants, and forced to leave the city so that they could hand themselves over. Manuel himself paid homage to the emir Murad, and even fought for his new sovereign before being crowned emperor.
Had the city remained uninterruptedly under Ottoman control from this point on, its subsequent history would have been very different, and the continuity with Byzantine life not so decisively broken. Having given in peacefully, Salonica was not greatly altered by the change of regime, its municipal privileges were respected by the new rulers, and its great monastic foundations weathered the storm. The small Turkish garrison converted a church into a mosque for their own use, and the devshirme child levy was imposed – at intervals Turkish soldiers carried off Christian children to be brought up as Muslims – which must have caused distress. But returning in 1393, Archbishop Isidoros described the situation as better than he had anticipated, while the Russian monk Ignatius of Smolensk who visited in 1401 was still amazed by its ‘wondrous’ monasteries. Christians asked the Sultan to intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, bishops relied on the Turks to confirm them in office, and one ‘said openly to anyone who asked that he had the Turks for patriarchs, emperors and protectors.’13
Unfortunately for Salonica, the Byzantine emperor Manuel could not resist taking advantage of the Ottomans’ own difficulties to try to wrest the city back for himself. For in 1402, the Ottoman army suffered the most crushing defeat of its entire history at the hands of the Mongol khan Tamurlane. Sultan Bayazid died in captivity and his defeat led directly to a vicious Ottoman civil war which lasted nearly twenty years. Exploiting the dynasty’s moment of weakness, Manuel got one of the claimants, Suleyman, to marry his daughter, and to agree at the same time to return Salonica to Byzantine rule. Local ghazis like Evrenos Bey were not pleased, but apart from delaying the withdrawal of the Ottoman garrison they could do nothing. But in 1421 a new ruler,