The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Volumes 1 and 2

by Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq

I had a fancy also to be conducted through the shambles where the sheep were slaughtered, that I might see what meat there was for sale. I saw but four or five sheep at most, which had been flayed and hung up, although it was the slaughter-house of the Janissaries, of whom I think there were no fewer than four thousand in the camp. I expressed my astonishment that so little meat was sufficient for such a number of men, and was told in reply that few used it, for a great part of them had their victuals brought over from Constantinople. When I asked what they were, they pointed out to me a Janissary, who was engaged in eating his dinner; he was devouring, off a wooden or earthen trencher, a mess of turnips, onions, garlic, parsnips, and cucumbers, seasoned with salt and vinegar, though, for the matter of that, I fancy that hunger was the chief sauce that seasoned his dish, for, to all appearance, he enjoyed his vegetables as much as if he had been dining off pheasants and partridges. Water, that common beverage of men and animals, is their only drink. This abstemious diet is good both for their health and their pockets.

I was at the camp just before their fast, or Lent[216] as we should call it, and thus was still more struck with the behaviour of the men. In Christian lands at this season, not only camps, but even orderly cities, ring with games and dances, songs and shouts; everywhere are heard the sounds of revelling, drunkenness, and delirium. In short, the world runs mad. It is not improbable that there is some foundation for the story, that a Turk, who happened to come to us on a diplomatic mission at one of these seasons, related on his return home, that the Christians, on certain days, go raving mad, and are restored to their senses and their health by a kind of ashes, which are sprinkled on them in their temples. He told his friends that it was quite remarkable to see the beneficial effects of this remedy; the change was so great that one would hardly imagine them to be the same people. He referred of course to Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday. His hearers were the more astonished, because the Turks are acquainted with several drugs which have the power of rendering people insane, while they know of few capable of speedily restoring the reason.

During the days which immediately precede the season of abstinence, they do not alter their former mode of life, or allow themselves any extra indulgence in the way of food and drink. Nay rather, on the contrary, by diminishing their usual allowance they prepare themselves for the fast, for fear they should not be able to bear the sudden change. Their fast recurs every twelve months; and, as twelve lunar months do not make up a year, it annually comes some fifteen days earlier. Hence it follows that, if the fast is at the beginning of Spring, six years later it will be kept at the commencement of Summer. The Turks limit their fast to the period of one lunar month, and the most severe fasts are those which fall in summer, on account of the length of the days. Inasmuch as they keep it so strictly as to touch nothing, not even water—nay, they hold it unlawful even to wash out the mouth—till the stars appear at even, it follows of course that a fast which occurs when the days are longest, hottest, and most dusty, is extremely trying, especially to those who are obliged to earn their livelihood by manual labour. However, they are allowed to eat what they please before sunrise, or to speak accurately, before the stars are dimmed by the light of that luminary, the idea being that the Sun ought to see no one eating during the whole of the fast. On this account the fast, when it falls in winter, is not so hard to bear.

On a cloudy day of course some mistake might be made about sunset. To meet this difficulty the priests, who act as sacristans, put lighted paper lanterns on the pinnacles of the minarets. (It is from these minarets that they utter the loud cry which summons the people to prayer, and they therefore answer to our belfries.[217]) These lights are intended to remove all doubt as to the time being come when food may be taken. Then at last, after first entering a mosque and reciting their customary prayers, they return to supper. On summer days I remember seeing them making in crowds from the mosque to a tavern, opposite our abode, where snow was kept for sale (of which, by the way, there is an unfailing supply from Mount Olympus, in Asia), and asking for iced water, which they drank, sitting cross-legged, for the Turks have a scruple about eating or drinking standing, if they can help it. But as the evening was too far gone for me to be able to see what they were squatting down for, I got some of my acquaintance, who understood Turkish customs, to enlighten me, and found that each took a great draught of cold water to open a passage for their food, which otherwise would stick in their throats, parched as they were by heat and fasting, and also that their appetite was stimulated by the cold drink. No special kinds of food are appointed to be eaten during the fast; nor does their religion prescribe abstinence during that season from anything which they are allowed to eat at other times. Should they happen to have any illness which prevents their observing the fast, they may disregard it, on condition, however, of making up, when they get well, the number of fasting days which their health has compelled them to miss. Likewise, when they are in an enemy’s country and an engagement is apprehended, they are ordered to postpone their fast to some other time, lest they should be hungry and faint on the day of battle. If they hesitate to do so, the Sultan himself takes food publicly at midday before the eyes of the army, that all may be encouraged by his example to do the same. But as at other times of the year they are forbidden, by their religion, to drink wine, and cannot taste it without committing a sin, so they are most scrupulous in observing this rule all the days of the fast, and even the most careless and profligate people not only abstain from wine, but shun the very smell of it.

I remember that, after I had made many enquiries as to the reason why Mahomet had so strictly forbidden his followers to drink wine, I was one day told this story. Mahomet happened to be travelling to a friend, and halted on his way at midday at a man’s house, where a wedding feast was being celebrated. At his host’s invitation he sat down with them, and greatly admired the exceeding gaiety of the banqueters and their earnest demonstrations of affection—such as shaking of hands, embraces, and kisses. He asked his host the reason, and was informed that such feelings were the consequence of wine. Accordingly on his departure he blessed that beverage as being the cause of such affection among mankind. But on his return the day after, when he entered the same house, a far different sight was presented to his eyes; on all sides were the traces of a cruel fight, the ground was stained with gore and strewn with human limbs; here lay an arm and there a foot; and other fragments were scattered all about. On his asking what had been the cause of so much mischief, he heard that the banqueters he had seen the day before had got maddened with wine and quarrelled, and that a fearful butchery had been the consequence. On this account, Mahomet changed his opinion and cursed the use of wine, making a decree for all time that his followers should not touch it.

So, drinking being prohibited, peace and silence reign in a Turkish camp, and this is more especially the case during their Lent. Such is the result produced by military discipline, and the stern laws bequeathed them by their ancestors. The Turks allow no crime and no disgraceful act to go unpunished. The penalties are degradation from office, loss of rank, confiscation of property, the bastinado, and death. The most usual is the bastinado, from which not even the Janissaries themselves are exempt, though they are not subject to capital punishment. Their lighter faults are punished with the stick, their graver with dismissal from the service or removal to a different corps, a penalty they consider worse than death, by which indeed such a sentence is almost always followed. For when the Janissaries are stripped of their uniform, they are banished to distant garrisons on the furthest frontiers, where their life is one of ignominy and disgrace; or if the crime is so atrocious as to render it necessary to make an example of the culprit, an excuse is found for putting him to death in the place to which he has been banished. But the punishment of death is inflicted on him not as a Janissary, but as a common soldier.

The endurance of the Turks in undergoing punishment is truly marvellous. They often receive more than a hundred blows on their soles, ankles, and buttocks, so that sometimes several sticks of dogwood are broken on them, and the executioner has to say repeatedly, ‘Give me the other stick.’[218] Although remedies are at hand, yet it sometimes happens that many pounds of gangrened flesh have to be cut off from the places which have been beaten. They are obliged notwithstanding to go to the officer by whose orders they have been punished, and to kiss his hand and thank him, and also to pay the executioner a fixed fee for every stroke. As to the stick with which they are beaten, they consider it a sacred thing, and are quite convinced that the first bastinado stick fell down from the same place from which the Romans believed their sacred shields descended, I mean from heaven. That they may have some consolation for such pain, they also believe that the parts, which have been touched by the stick, will after this life be safe from the fires of purgatory.

In saying that the camp was free from quarrels and tumults, it is necessary to make one exception, for some trouble was caused by my people. A few of them had gone out of the camp to stroll along the shore without Janissaries, having only taken with them some Italian renegadoes. Among the various advantages which such renegadoes enjoy, the greatest perhaps is the power of ransoming prisoners. They go to the people who have possession of the captives, and pretend that they are their relations or connections, or at any rate their fellow-countrymen. After speaking of the great pain it gives them to see their friends in such a position, they ask the masters to take their value and emancipate them, or else to make them over to themselves. To such a request the masters make no difficulty in agreeing; whereas, if a Christian were to ask the same favour, they would either refuse it or demand a much higher price. To return to my subject, when my men had gone out they came upon some Janissaries, who, by way of performing their ablutions, had taken a swim in the sea. They had left their turbans behind, and their only head-dress was a piece of linen roughly folded. The Janissaries seeing my men were Christians began to abuse them. For the Turks not only consider it lawful to call Christians by insulting names and otherwise abuse them, but even think it meritorious, on the ground that they may possibly be shamed into changing their religion for the faith of the Turks, when they see what insults they are exposed to on its account. My men, when thus assailed, abused them in return, and at last from words they came to blows, the Italians I mentioned taking the side of my men. The end of it was, that the head-wrapper of one of the Janissaries was lost in the scuffle, how or where I cannot say. The Janissaries, having traced my people to my quarters, went to their commanding officer and charged them with having caused this loss. The officer ordered them to summon my interpreter, who had been present at the skirmish. They seized him, as he was sitting at the door, while I was looking down from the verandah above. I felt that this was a very gross insult; here was one of my people being carried off without my permission, and not only so, but carried off, as I knew right well, having heard of the affair from my servants, to receive a flogging. This was certain to be his fate, for he was a Turkish subject. I went down and laying my hand on him told them to let him go, which they did; but they went off to their commander more savage than ever. He directed them to take some more men, and bring before him the renegade Italians I mentioned, charging them at the same time to be careful not to use violence to me or the house where I was staying. Accordingly they came again making a great uproar, and standing on the road demanded the surrender of the men with loud cries and threats. But the Italians foreseeing what would happen, had already crossed the Bosphorus to Constantinople. This went on for a long time with much bad language on both sides, till at last the cavasse I was then employing, an old man on the brink of the grave, becoming nervous at the uproar, thrust into their hands, without my knowledge, some pieces of gold as the price of the lost head-wrapper, and thus our peace was made.

One reason for telling you this adventure is, that it gave me an opportunity of learning from Roostem himself the light in which the Janissaries are regarded by the Sultan. For when he heard of this disturbance he sent a man warning me, to use his own words, ‘to remove every cause of offence which might occasion a quarrel with those atrocious scoundrels. Was I not aware, that it was war time, when they were masters, so that not even Solyman himself had control over them, and was actually himself afraid of receiving violence at their hands?’ These were no random words of Roostem’s; he knew what he was talking about, for his master’s anxieties were no secret to him. What the Sultan dreaded most in the world was secret disaffection among the Janissaries; disaffection which would lie hidden for a time, and then break out at a critical moment when he had no power to counteract it. His alarm is certainly not without foundation; for while there are great advantages to a Sovereign in the possession of a standing army, there are on the other hand, if proper precautions be not taken, considerable disadvantages. The greatest of all is, that the soldiers have it in their power to depose their Sovereign and place another on the throne; and the fear of a revolution of this kind must be ever present to the minds of the masters. Striking instances might be quoted of Sovereigns who were dethroned by their own troops; but it is by no means impossible to guard against such occurrences.

During my stay at the camp, Albert de Wyss,[219] a gentleman and a good scholar, arrived. If I am not mistaken, he is a native of Amersfort. He brought as presents from the Emperor to the Sultan some gilded cups and a clock of skilful workmanship, which was mounted like a tower on the back of an elephant, and also some money for distribution among the Pashas. Solyman desired me to present these gifts to him in the camp, in the sight of the army, as a fresh proof to his subjects that he and the Emperor were firm friends. He was anxious that such an idea should prevail, and also that an impression should be produced, that no warlike movement on the part of the Christians was likely to take place.