Chapter XI: The Flowers of the Garden of Begtash

At the end of the fifteenth century, when the Turkish crescent had won an abiding-place among the constellations of Europe, there dwelt in the Turkish dominions a worthy dervish, Haji Begtash by name.

As the overflowing armies of the newly founded empire submerged the surrounding Christian kingdoms, Haji Begtash went everywhere with the conquering hosts, but in the intervals of peace he begged his way about the empire, and scraped together a little money from the Turkish grandees or from the extravagant, booty-laden Turkish soldiers.

Now wherefore did this worthy dervish make it a point to collect so much money and wear himself out by travelling from the Adriatic to the Euxine, when he might have sat all day long at the gate of the Kaaba, as they call the stone on the tomb of the Prophet, and recited from his long bead-string the nine properties of Allah (no very exhausting labor, by-the-way), and received therefor, from the pilgrims to the shrine, meat, drink, and abundance of alms?

Well, Haji Begtash had taken up a great work. When he accompanied the Turkish armies, and they, on entering a Christian village, began to cut down the inhabitants and tie the captives together with ropes, the dervish would force his way through the bloodthirsty soldiery, and if he beheld any wild Bashkir or Kurdish desperado about to dash out the brains of a forsaken, weeping orphan child against a wall, he would lay his hand upon them, take away the child, cover it with his mantle, caress it, and take it away with him. And thus he would keep on doing till he had with him a whole group of children, all of whom were concealed beneath the folds of his ample cloak, where nobody could hurt them; nay, frequently he would carry babies in swaddling-clothes in his bosom, till people began to wonder what on earth he meant to do with them.

Subsequently he announced that any captive who brought him his children should receive a silver denarius per head for each one of them. This was not much, it is true; but then there was little demand for children. In the slave-market only the adult human animal had its price-current. And so it came about that innumerable children were brought to the worthy dervish.

He took them away with him to a mosque at Adrianople. Folks laughed at him, and asked him mockingly if he was going to plant a garden with them.

Haji Begtash accepted the jest in real earnest, and called his children the flowers of Begtash's garden; and this name they preserved in the coming centuries.

These saplings (amongst them were some of the loveliest little creatures of six and seven years of age) were brought up by the indefatigable Haji year after year. He instructed them in the Kuran; he told them everything concerning the innumerable and ineffable joys which the Prophet promises to those who fall in the defence of the true Faith; and at the same time accustomed them to endure all the hardships and privations of this earthly life.

Most of these children had never known father or mother, and those who had quickly forgot all about them as they grew up. No love of home or kindred bound them to this world, and therefore they were all the more attached to one another. Their comrades were the only beings they learned to love, and every one of them treated old Begtash as a father. His words were sacred to them.

Their days were passed in hard work, in perpetual martial exercises, fighting, and swimming. A youth of twelve among them was capable of coping with full-grown men elsewhere, and each one of them at maturity was a veritable Samson.

In those days the Ottoman armies suffered many defeats from the Christian arms. Their strength lay for the most part in their cavalry, but their innumerable infantry was a mere mob, two of their foot-soldiers not being equal to one of the well-disciplined European men-at-arms who advanced irresistibly against them in huge compact masses; and they were of no use at all in sieges, except to fill up the ditches and trenches with their dead bodies, and thus make a road for the more valiant warriors that came after them.

And now, as if by magic, a little band of infantry suddenly appeared on the theatre of the war. These new soldiers were dressed quite differently from the others. On their heads they wore a high hat bulging outward in front, with a black, floating cock's plume on the top of it; their dolmans were of embroidered blue cloth; their hose only reached down to their knees, below that the whole leg was bare; their only weapon was a short, broad, roundish sword, in marked contrast to the other Turkish soldiers, who loaded themselves with as many weapons as if they were going to fight with ten hands.

None recognized the youths--and youths they all were. They did not mingle with the other squadrons, nor place themselves under any captain, nor did they ask for pay from any one.

But in the very first engagement they showed what they were made of. A fortress had to be besieged which was defended in front by a broad stream of water. The strange youths clinched their broad swords between their teeth, swam across the water, scaled the bastions amidst fire and flames, and planted the first horse-tail crescent on the tower.

These were the flowers of Begtash's garden.

The first battle established the fame of the youthful band that had been brought up by the old dervish, and by the time the second campaign began, Haji Begtash was already the chief of innumerable monasteries whose inmates were called the Brethren of the Order of Begtash. Consisting, as they did, of captive Christian children, and standing under the immediate command of the Sultan, they composed a new army of infantry, the fame of whose valor filled the whole world.

These were the "jeni-cheri" (new soldiers), which name was subsequently altered into Janichary or Janissary. But for long ages to come, if any Janissary warrior had a mind to speak haughtily, he would call himself "a flower from Begtash's garden."

Many a glorious name bloomed in this garden in the course of the ages. The power of the Sultan rested on their shoulders, and if they shook the Sultan from off their shoulders, down he had to go.

If they were powerful servants, they were also powerful tyrants. Their valor often reaped a harvest of victories, but their obstinacy again and again imperilled their triumphs. With the increase of their power their self-assurance increased likewise. It was not so much the Sultans and Viziers who commanded them as they who commanded the Sultans and Viziers. And if the rebellious Janissaries hoisted on the Atmeidan a kettle, the signal of revolt, it was always with fear and trembling that the Seraglio asked them what were their demands; and the whole Divan breathed more freely when the answer came that it was gold they wanted, and not blood--the blood of their officers. And when, after the great Feast of Bairam, there was the usual distribution of pilaf, and the dangerous kettles were filled full with this savory mess of rice and sheep's flesh, the Sultan, all trembling, would anxiously watch to see how the majestic Janissaries partook of their pottage. If they devoured it voraciously, that was a sign of their satisfaction; but if they only touched it in a finiking sort of way, then the Sultan would fly into the Seraglio, and lock himself up among the damsels of the harem, for it was now certain that their lordships the Janissaries were displeased, and it was well if their displeasure only expressed itself by reducing a whole quarter or so of the city to ashes.

Two Sultans had tried to break in two this dangerous double-edged weapon, which inflicted as many wounds in the heart of the realm as ever it dealt outside; but the Janissaries' magic influence was so interwoven with, so ingrafted in, the mind of the nation that public feeling was on their side, and both rulers perished in the bold attempt. They dragged Sultan Osman forth from the Seraglio, and set him on the back of an ass with his face to its tail, carried him in derision from one end of the town to the other, and then flung him into the fatal Seven Towers, where the Turkish rulers and their relatives are wont to be buried alive and die forgotten. Mahmoud II.'s father, Selim, on the other hand, expired beneath the sword-thrusts of the rebels, and those swords were still sharp and those hands were still strong when the son of the man whom they had slain sat on the throne, and under no other Sultan did the throne tremble so much as under him.

In these days the mighty corps of the Janissaries lived only to commit crimes or gigantic mistakes; its ancient glory was not renewed. During the last century their arms had constantly been shattered whenever they came into collision with the progressive military science of Europe. In the course of the ages the flowers in Begtash's garden had sadly faded. The flowery petals of their glory had fallen from them, and only the thorns remained; and even these were no longer the thorns of the brave thick-set hedge which defends the borders of the garden against would-be invaders, but the stings of the nettle which hurts the hand of the gardener as he hoes.

Neither life nor property was any longer safe from them. The Sultan himself, when he sat upon the throne, was in the most dangerous place of all, and the Viziers--the chief officials of the realm--trembled every day for their lives. The turbulence of the Janissaries was a perpetually recurring disease running through all the arteries of the realm, and covering the once mighty empire with poisonous ulcers.

These seditious outbreaks occurred even during the deliberations of the Divan, and fear on such occasions was a more urgent counsellor than conviction to the palace magnates who sat in the cupolaed chamber.

The threats of the Janissaries had compelled Mahmoud to take up arms against Ali Pasha; and now, when Ali had kindled the flames of war all over the empire, and the Sultan bade the Janissaries hasten against the enemy and subdue him, they replied that they would not fight unless the Sultan led them in person.

Instead of that, they waged war within the very walls of Stambul, for whenever the news of a defeat reached the capital, the Janissaries would fall upon the defenceless Greeks and massacre them by thousands.

From distant Asia, from the most savage parts of the empire, Begtash's priests appeared and proclaimed in the mosques death and destruction on the heads of all the Greeks. It was they who, with torches in their hands, headed the rush of the fanatical Janissaries against Buyukdere, Pera, and Galata, the quarters of the city where the Greeks resided, and every day they thundered with their bludgeons at the gates of the Seraglio, demanding ever more and more sentences of death against the Greek captives who were shut up in the Seven Towers. The Sultan's officials, trembling with fear, wrote out the sentences demanded of them, and the victims fell in hundreds; and when the Russian ambassador, Stroganov, protested against this butchery, the Janissaries attacked his palace and riddled all the doors and windows with bullets, which was the subsequent pretext for the long war which shook the empire to its base, though the Janissaries never lived to feel it.

Mahmoud watched from the summit of the imperial palace the devastation of Stambul and the devastation of his empire, and he saw no help anywhere. He saw nothing but the melancholy examples of his ancestors and the disappearance of his dominions; and as he stroked the head of his first-born, Abdul Mejid, a child of nine, he thought to himself, "This lad will not sit on the throne, he will not be a ruler as his forefathers were; he will not dictate laws to half the world like the other descendants of Omar; but he will be a fugitive on the face of the earth, the slave of strange people, as was the fugitive Dzhem, whom they cast forth ages ago."

How miserable was the life of the Sultan! What avails it though an earthly paradise be open to him if life itself be closed against him? What avails it to be a god if he cannot be a man? The Sultan never knows what it is to have relatives. Very early, while they are still children, the latest born are shut up in the Seven Towers. The first-born son can never meet them, unless it be on the steps of the throne, when the rebellious Janissaries drag one of them from his dungeon to raise him to the throne, and lock up the first-born in his stead. The Sultan cannot be said to possess a wife; all that he has are favorite concubines, in hundreds, in thousands, as many as he chooses to have, and there is no difference between them except differences of feminine loveliness and the blind chance which blesses some of them with children. And he makes no more account of one than he does of another. Not one of them feels it her duty to love her husband; it is enough if she be the slave of his desires. If the Padishah be troubled or sorrowful, there is none about him to whom he can open his heart. He may go from one end of the harem to the other, like one who wanders through a conservatory whose flowers are all so beautiful, so radiantly smiling; but in vain will he tell them of his grief and trouble, for they do not understand him, they do not trouble their heads about his thoughts; and if, perchance, he tells them that from all four corners of the world mighty foes are marching against Stambul, here and there, perchance, he may hear a sigh of longing from some captive maiden, who cannot conceal her secret joy at the thought of the happy hour when the hand of deliverance will thunder at the harem door and break its bolts and give freedom, beautiful sunbright freedom, to the captives.

It is slavish obsequiousness and nothing else which bends its knee before the Padishah; it is fear, not love, which obeys him. And to whom shall he turn when his heart is held fast in the iron grip of that numbing sensation which makes the mightiest feel they are but men--fear?

Mahmoud's sole joy was his nine-year-old son. The child was brought up by his grandmother, the Sultana Valideh, herself scarce forty years of age. This dowager Sultana had civilized, European tastes. She had been educated in France; the young prince was passionately attached to her and she inspired him with all those desires and noble instincts under whose influence, thirty years later, new life was to be poured into the decrepit Turkish Empire.

The Sultana Valideh wished to so educate her grandson that one day he might occupy a worthy position among the other rulers of Europe. She sowed betimes in his heart the seeds of high principles and enlightened tastes, and the Sultan would frequently listen to the wise sentences of his little lad, and, while rocking him on his knee, with a smile upon his face, his heart would beat in an agony of fear, "What if anybody got word of this?"

For the old Turkish party lay in wait for every word that fell from the Sultan's mouth, and the pointing of the little finger of one of Begtash's fakirs was more to be feared than the armed hand of the most valiant of the Greek heroes. If any one of the Ulemas should chance to discover that the young heir to the throne listened to any other bookish lore than what was contained within the covers of the Kuran, which comprised within itself (so they taught) all the wisdom of the world, they were capable of hounding on the Janissaries against the Seraglio, and slaying both sovereign and child.

The recollection of Achmed Sidi was still fresh in the memory of men. Sidi had been one of the Chief Ulemas, and the Imam of the Mosque of Sophia; and when, a few years ago, the warriors and the diplomatists of the Tsaritsa Catherine had won victory after victory over the Ottomans, not only on every battle-field, but also in every political arena, the unfortunate imam advised the Divan that, in view of the indisputable superiority of the Christians, it was necessary to teach the Turkish diplomatists the Bible, the inference being that just as the Moslem sages derived all their military science and all their administrative wisdom from the Kuran, so also the Christians must needs learn all these things from their Bible, thereby tacitly acknowledging the capacity of the Christians for appropriating all knowledge. But the well-meaning Ulema paid dearly for this good counsel. They banished him to the Isle of Chios, and there, for a very trivial offence, he was first degraded from his office (for it is not lawful to kill a Ulema with weapons), and then handed over to the pasha of the place, who pounded him to death in a stone mortar--a deterrent example for future reformers. Let them beware, therefore, of moving a single stone in the ancient fabric of the Ottoman constitution!