Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews

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, the youthful Murad II, fought his way to the throne, and determined to put an end to the confusion and internecine bloodletting which had divided the empire.

The Siege

In 1430 Sultan Murad II was ‘a little, short, thick man, with the physiognomy of a Tartar – a broad and brown face, high cheek bones, a round beard, a great and crooked nose, with little eyes.’ Only twenty-six, he had already established his place in history by restoring the authority of the Osmanlis after the defeat by the Mongols. Hard-living, harddrinking and a keen hunter, he enjoyed the affection of his soldiers and the respect of diplomats and statesmen who encountered him. He was a brilliant warrior, who spent much of his reign building up Ottoman power in the Balkans and Anatolia, but he preferred a life of spiritual contemplation, tried twice to withdraw from the throne, and was eventually buried in the mausoleum he had designed himself at Bursa, a building of austere beauty, with an earth-covered grave open to the skies. The much-travelled Spaniard, Pero Tafur, described him as ‘a discreet person, grave in his looks, and … so handsomely attended that I never saw the like’.14

According to an Ottoman legend, the sultan was asleep in his palace one night when God came to him in a dream and gave him a beautiful, sweet-smelling rose to sniff. When Murad asked if he could keep it, God told him that the rose was Salonica and that he had decreed it should be his.

In fact Murad had set his heart on the city from the start. So far as he was concerned, it was not only a vital Mediterranean port, but belonged to him by right since it had fallen under Ottoman control previously. After 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his control, there was little the Byzantine emperors could do but watch. The empire itself was dying. The city’s inhabitants invited the Venetians in, thinking they at least would bolster the defences, but the situation went from bad to worse. By 1429, urban life had virtually collapsed, three-quarters of the inhabitants had already fled – many into Ottoman-controlled territories – and only ten thousand remained. Despite occasional Venetian grain convoys, food was scarce. Defenders let themselves down by ropes to join the Turks. Others passed messages saying they wished to surrender: the pro-Ottoman faction within the walls was as powerful as it had ever been, its numbers swelled by Murad’s promises of good treatment if the city gave in.

To the aged Archbishop Symeon, the defeatism of his flock came as a shock. ‘They actually declared they were bent on handing over the city to the infidel,’ he wrote. ‘Now that for me was something more difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths.’ But angry crowds demonstrated against him. When he invoked the miraculous powers of their patron Saint Dimitrios, and talked about a giant warrior on horseback coming to their aid, they heard nothing but empty promises. God had preserved the city over the centuries, he told them, ‘as an acropolis and guardian of the surrounding countryside’. But the Turks were outside the walls, and the villages and towns beyond were in their hands. Their control of the hinterland had turned the fortified city into a giant prison. Resistance meant certain enslavement. In 1429 Archbishop Symeon died, but the Venetians brought in mercenaries to prevent the defenders capitulating and the siege dragged on until in March 1430 Murad determined to end it. He left his hunting leopards, falcons and goshawks and joined his army before the city.

Combining levies from Europe and Anatolia, his troops gathered outside the walls, while camel-trains brought up siege engines, stone-throwers, bombards and scaling ladders. The sultan took up a position on high ground which overlooked the citadel, and sent a last group of Christian messengers to urge surrender. These got no more favourable response than before. Prompted by the sight of a Venetian vessel sailing into the Gulf, and fearing the garrison was about to be reinforced, Murad ordered the attack to begin.

For two or three days the desperate defenders managed to hold out against the assault troops and sappers. But then Murad galvanized his men. ‘I will give you whatever the city possesses,’ he pledged them. ‘Men, women, children, silver and gold: only the city itself you will leave to me.’ At dawn on 29 March, a hail of arrows ‘like snow’ forced the defenders back from the parapets. Crowds of ghazi fighters, spurred on by the sultan’s words, attacked the walls ‘like wild animals’. Within a few hours, one had scaled the blind side of the Trigonion tower, cut off the head of a wounded Venetian soldier and tossed it down. His fellow ghazis quickly followed him up and threw open the main gates.

The Venetian contingent fought their way to the port and boarded the waiting galleys. Behind them the victorious Turks – ‘shouting and thirsting for our blood’ according to the survivor Ioannis Anagnostes – ransacked churches, homes and public buildings, looking for hidden valuables behind icons and inside tombs: ‘They gathered up men, women, children, people of all ages, bound like animals, and marched them all to the camp outside the city. Nor do I speak of those who fell and were not counted in the fortress and in the alleyways and did not merit a burial,’ continues Anagnostes. ‘Every soldier, with the mass of captives he had taken, hurried to get them outside quickly to hand them over to his comrades, lest someone stronger seize them from him, so that any slave who as he saw from old age or some illness perhaps could not keep up with the others, he cut his head off on the spot and reckoned it a loss. Then for the first time they separated parents from their children, wives from their husbands, friends and relatives from each other … And the city itself was filled with wailing and despair.’15

As ever, Murad followed the customary laws of war. By refusing to surrender peacefully, after they had been given the chance, Salonica’s inhabitants had – as they knew well – laid themselves open to enslavement and plunder. Had they been allowed to follow the path of non-resistance that most of them wanted, the city’s fate might have been less traumatic. A few months later, Ottoman troops went on to besiege the city of Jannina, and their commander, Sinan Pasha, advised the Greek archbishop to surrender peacefully ‘otherwise I will destroy the place to its foundations as I did in Salonica.’ ‘I swear to you on the God of Heaven and Earth and the Prophet Mohammed,’ he went on, ‘not to have any fear, neither of being enslaved nor seized.’ The clergy and the nobility would keep their estates and privileges, ‘rather than as we did in Salonica ruining the churches, and emptying and destroying everything.’ Jannina obeyed and remained an important centre of Hellenic learning throughout the Ottoman period: indeed one of Murad’s generals actually founded a Christian monastery there. Salonica’s fate was very different: ruined and eerily quiet, its streets and buildings lay empty.16 In the Acheiropoietos church the sultan held a victory thanksgiving service. Then he had the building turned into a mosque, and ordered a laconic inscription to be chiselled into a marble column in the north colonnade of the nave. There it survives to this day, and if your eyesight is good enough, you can still make out in the elegant Arabic script: ‘Sultan Murad Khan took Thessaloniki in the year 833 [=1430]’.

2 Mosques and Hamams

The Mightiest War

CENTRES OF TRADE, learning, religious piety and administrative control, cities were essential for the prosperity of the Ottoman lands. Yet as the sultans knew, it is one thing to conquer a city, another to restore it to life. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror called the task of reviving Constantinople after its conquest the ‘mightiest war’ compared with which the business of taking it had been merely one of the ‘lesser wars.’ Twenty years earlier his father, Murad, had viewed Salonica in a similar light. The man who for all his military genius was reputed ‘not to love war’, now pondered how to return it to its former glory. No other city in his domain matched its imposing fortifications or its commercial possibilities. It was the key to the Balkans, and the Balkans were fast on their way to becoming the economic powerhouse of his empire. According to Anagnostes: ‘When he saw a city so large, and in such a situation, next to the sea and suitable for everything, then he grieved and wanted to reconstruct it.”1

The first thing he did was to chase out the looters, camp-followers and squatters. ‘The money and slaves which you gained should be enough,’ he told his troops, T want to have the city itself and for this I made many days’ march and tired myself, as you know.’ He began by repairing the damaged walls and ordered the new garrison commander to modernize the fortress. Less than one year later, an inscription above the entrance to the newly built main tower marked the swift completion of the work. ‘This Acropolis,’ it runs, ‘was conquered and captured by force, from the hands of infidels and Franks, with the help of God, by Sultan Murad, son of Sultan Mehmed, whose banner God does not cease to make victorious. And he slaughtered and took prisoner some of their sons, and took their property.’2

Murad’s initial thought was ‘to return the city to its inhabitants and to restore it just as it had been before.’ Anagnostes tells us that he would have liberated all the captives had not one of his senior commanders prevented him. As it was, he personally ransomed members of some of the city’s notable Byzantine families (as was his custom after a siege), and his vassal, the Serbian despot George Brankovich – whose daughter Mara he married a few years later – paid for others. In all, about a thousand Greek ex-prisoners were thus rescued from slavery and returned to their homes. They were joined by refugees who had fled the siege earlier and were now ordered back. Shocked by the scenes of devastation that greeted them, they blamed Archbishop Symeon for having blocked a peaceful outcome to the siege, and some even questioned the powers of St Dimitrios himself. Gradually, the Byzantine caravanseray, public baths, old manufactories, tanneries and textile workshops were brought back to life. The Venetians patched up their relations with the sultan and were allowed to set up a consulate one year after the conquest. But the city was a shadow of its former self, a mere vestige of the flourishing metropolis of forty thousand inhabitants which had existed a decade earlier.

Once Murad realized the extent of its depopulation, he changed his mind and decided to bring in Muslim settlers as well. He handed over many properties to senior officials at his court, and craftsmen, attracted by tax breaks, were resettled from the nearby town of Yannitsa and from Anatolia. Their arrival injected new blood into the urban economy. But it was a major blow to the city’s Christian identity and the Greek survivors were shocked. Salonica, wrote Anagnostes, ‘wore this ugliness like a mourning garment … The hymns to God and the choirs have fallen silent. In their place one hears nothing but alalagmoi [the sounds of Allah] and the noise of the godless who make Satan rejoice. And yet no sign of divine anger has appeared to punish the unbelievers who defiled the churches, made families and houses vanish, looted and destroyed churches and the city.’3

Thousands of the city’s former inhabitants were still enslaved. ‘On numerous occasions we saw Christians – boys as well as unmarried girls, and masses of married women of every description – paraded pitiably by the Turks in long lines throughout the cities of Thrace and Macedonia,’ wrote the Italian merchant-antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona. They were ‘bound by iron chains and lashed by whips, and in the end put up for sale in villages and markets … an unspeakably shameful and obscene sight, like a cattle market.’ (Cyriac’s sorrow did not prevent him buying a young Greek slave and sending her home to his mother’s household). Some converted to Islam in the hope of better treatment; others, yoked to one another by the neck, could be seen begging for alms in the streets of the capital, Edirne, where they were brought to be sold off, or entered the imperial service.4

Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harmful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefactor. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions (in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping with the Muslim custom in cases where towns had been won by force, a few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building materials, turned into private homes or abandoned. But how many were taken over at the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion of the Muslim population. Of the city’s noblest buildings, Ayios Dimitrios was converted into a mosque only in 1491, Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda a century later.5

The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the expropriation of places of worship – for scores of them had lain within the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to serve the city’s sharply reduced population – as the lack of priests to run them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, ‘the majority of the clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition prevails up to today.’ Orthodoxy – though recognized by the Ottoman authorities – was scarcely flourishing. ‘One can hear only from the more elderly people,’ wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, ‘that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what the beauty and charms of each had been.’6

As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamicization of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity shifted into the rural areas where monasteries, especially in Mount Athos, prospered. The cities were more deeply altered. With the newcomers came their faith, their places of worship and characteristic institutions of their way of life. A few Christians converted to Islam, both before and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Anatolia that Salonica was transformed – in the words of the chronicler Ashikpashazadé – from a ‘domain of idolatry’ to a ‘domain of Islam’. The sounds of Christian worship – the bells, processionals and Easter fireworks – were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street feasts, parties and Karaghöz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity shocked later travellers. Minarets – spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured or unadorned – dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visitors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In 1853 the Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each ‘circled by a ring of glittering lamps’; as he sailed away by night ‘they formed a delicate bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon.’7