Home » serendipity (Page 20)

Category Archives: serendipity

Serendipity: The Janissaries

Posted on by | 1 Comment
At One Time, They Were Feared by the Enemies of the Ottoman Empire

At One Time, They Were the Most Feared Infantry in Europe

They look rather silly, don’t they? But in the 15th and 16th centuries, they were the elite infantry of the Ottoman Empire. The Janissaries conquered the Balkans, much of the Black Sea coast, and Hungary. Little known to most people is that they were almost exclusively Christians, who were either kidnapped or bought from their parents by recruiters under the empire’s devshirme system. But, like many things that were once a good idea, it didn’t look so good any more by the time the 1800s rolled around.

The following discussion comes from David Brewer’s excellent book The Greek War of Independence: The Struggle for Freedom from Ottoman Oppression and the Birth of the Modern Greek Nation:

The Sultan’s problem within his borders lay, as it had done before, with the corps of janissaries. They were now practically useless as a military force, and [the Sultan] Mahmoud had to fight his wars with mercenaries and with troops raised by local pashas. The janissary regiments in the provinces drew pay and rations in idleness, while those in the capital were an unruly menace, as a contemporary visitor described. “Lords of the day,” he wrote,

they ruled with uncontrolled insolence in Constantinople, their appearance portraying the excess of libertinism; their foul language; their gross behaviour; their enormous turbans; their open vests; their bulky sashes filled with arms; their weighty sticks; rendering them objects of fear and disgust. Like moving columns, they thrust everybody from their path without any regard of age or sex, frequently bestowing durable marks of anger or contempt.

In 1807 Mahmoud’s predecessor Selim III had tried to bring the janissaries under control by incorporating them into his so-called Army of the New Order. The janissaries reacted violently, the New Army was formally abolished and Selim lost his throne. In the following year, the first of Mahmoud’s reign, his grand vizier publicly advocated reforming the janissaries and curbing their abuses, but lost his life in the ensuing janissary revolt.

In the space of some four hundred years, the janissaries went from an elite military force to a kind of mafia, with members of the corps selling “protection” to merchants. They acted as the firemen of Constantinople, but it was also widely believed that they set the fires in the first place.

For a delightful novel about the decay of the janissary corps, I recommend Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree, a 19th century mystery whose “detective” is a eunuch connected with the Sublime Porte. In 1826, the Sultan could take no more and began arresting and executing the remnants of the corps. In Ottoman history, the persecution is referred to as the “Auspicious Event.”

By the way, Jason Goodwin not only writes entertaining detective stories set in the Ottoman Empire, but he is also a historian whose Lords of the Horizons is perhaps the best introduction to the Empire.

Spirit Voices

Gobi Desert

Gobi Desert

When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason—falling asleep or anything else—he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again, and many travelers have got lost and died because of this…. Even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. For this reason bands of travelers make a point of keeping very close together. Before they go to sleep they set up a sign pointing in the direction in which they have to travel, and round the necks of all their beasts they fasten little bells, so that by listening to the sound they may prevent them from straying off the path.—Marco Polo, Travels

 

Serendipity: Flitcraft and Wakefield

Posted on by

Hawthorne’s Wakefield

The scene takes place in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Sam Spade is describing a case from his past to Brigid O’Shaughnessy while the two are waiting for Joel Cairo to show up. Following is a slightly abridged version by Robert B. Parker:

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned….

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand…. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right….

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch, he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It took only a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like someone had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was that the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had gotten out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

“He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of woman that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

Now this passage set my mind to thinking. There was another story with a similar plot that was written approximately a hundred years before. In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne had released a short story called “Wakefield” and subsequently published it in his collection entitled Twice-Told Tales. It’s worth taking a look at, and you can find it by clicking here. The two stories end quite differently, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.

This is the first of what I trust will be a continuing series of things that surprise me in the course of my reading and traveling. Now it could be that Dashiell Hammett knew the Hawthorne story and copied elements of it, but somehow I don’t think so.

The above drawing of Wakefield, the hero of the Hawthorne story, comes from a Spanish blog called eldesconsciente.