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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

Murad’s use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced resettlement kick-started Salonica’s economy and more than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian population, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families, the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities, each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams, they had one religious leader for each 166 Muslims, compared with an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly established though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If the urban grid – the course of the walls, the main roads, the location of markets – remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salonica’s physiognomy.⁸

An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a city medrese informs us about the spread of Muslim learning. The appointee, mevlana Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of 20 aspers daily and instructed to pray ‘for the continuity of the State’. He was to teach ‘sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths of the exegesis of the Quran.’ He was not only to give lessons to students, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly fed ‘so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the position of ulema attains the highest degree.’⁹

Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul – the three imperial capitals – and its mufti [chief religious adviser] was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day – an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim – 90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times – in 1831 – Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and tekkes [monasteries] were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was ‘a little piece of Istanbul’.¹⁰

Mosques and Vakfs

In modern Salonica, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. But as the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret [now gone] and a spacious columned courtyard.¹¹

One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building – the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name [Aladja = coloured] has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.¹²

Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables – Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in ‘Old Friday’ – the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a bridge over the Struma river, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.

What is striking about these large-scale building projects – especially when compared with western Europe – is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf.

The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his [or her – the donors included many wealthy women] possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details – saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.¹³

The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the great mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great hamam complex on Egnatia. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten [market building], for the storage of valuable goods. Still in use across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.¹⁴

In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey hamam as a place to prepare for the city’s main mosque, only a stone’s throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica’s Bey hamam, with its separate baths for men and women is one of the outstanding examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until the 1960s, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illuminated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut deep into the domed ceiling.¹⁵ Vakfs also fostered trade. In addition to Bayazid’s central market building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather goods, there was the so-called ‘Egyptian market’ just outside the gate to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained ‘all the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee’. Nearby were the city’s tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century. Ship’s biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and taverns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the Abdur-Reouf mosque – ‘a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place of devotion, respite and recovery’ – founded by a mollah of the city, who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the walls, and endowed this too as a vakf. ‘Day and night,’ reports a seventeenth-century visitor, ‘the faithful are present there, because Muslim traders from the four corners of the globe and god-fearing sailors and sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the ships in the harbour.’¹⁶

It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. In 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish market, (next door to that owned by ‘the bey’) as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises of ‘Kostas son of Kokoris’). They also had three stalls in the candle-makers’ market, and two cobblers’ workshops next to those owned by ‘Hadji Ahmed’ and ‘Hadji Hassan’. They owned cook-shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water-mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and acquired yet more properties.¹⁷