Of Calligrams and Force Protection

 

The Islamic rule against graven images did not prevent early-modern Muslims from developing capacious traditions of representational art. It merely required them to develop an extra measure of creativity. Some artists kept to the prohibition’s letter (so to speak) by adapting the acceptable, even praiseworthy, art of calligraphy to the goals of the painter. Calligrams, drawings comprised of skillfully curved and interwoven Arabic verses, first appeared in Islamic art at least one thousand years ago. By the early modern period artists had developed the form to a high level. 

One skillfully executed calligram, drawn in 1766 CE (A.H. 1180) by Abd al-Qadir Hisari, now reposes in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, golden Arabic letters trace out the hull, gunports, and windows of a three-masted Ottoman galleon. The artist has drawn in grey the sails, rigging, and two other warships in the background. Tiny “dust-letter” inscriptions in Ottoman (Arabic letters, Turkish words) run around the outside of the painting and adorn the edges of the waves, describing there the art and vicissitudes of sailing. The ship itself bears the monographic seal (or tughra) of Sultan Mehmet III, and a flag at the stern bears the Quran’s “throne verse,” which reads, in part, “Allah is He besides whom there is no god…His knowledge extends over the heavens and the earth; the preservation of them both tires him not.” The flag declares the ship’s owner a humble servant of God and invokes the supreme being’s protection. 

"Calligraphic Galleon," Metropolitan Museum of Art

It is not the only protective device in the painting: the calligraphic letters that form the ship spell out the names of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” righteous men whom the Abrahamic deity protected by immuring them asleep in a cave. To some early-modern Muslims, including the artist, these names (which appear in the Quran) had almost magical protective powers; the Sleepers served the same function as saints in Christianity. Hisari’s painting is thus both aesthetically pleasing and practical: it twice asks for God’s blessing upon the sultan and his fleet.

God, it seems, helps those who help themselves, and reserves much of his aid for the prudent and humble. Mehmet III did not number these traits among his virtues. In 1768 the sultan, incensed by Russian troops’ border violations and goaded by his French allies, declared war on neighboring Russia. Mehmet perhaps believed that Ottoman forces would fare as well in this conflict as they had in the 1714-15 campaign against Venice or in the 1735-39 war with Austria and Russia. If so he believed wrongly. At the Battle of Cesme (1770), Catherine II’s Mediterranean fleet sank an Ottoman naval force twice its size. Four years later, facing ongoing Russian incursions and Russian-inspired rebellions in Greece and the Levant, the Porte and the Empress signed a treaty ceding the Crimea to Russia (first as a protectorate, later outright) and ending Turkish dominance of the Black Sea. There’s only so much that good art can do.

Caught the Car

An empire in decline rarely admits it. The republic of Venice, whose trading empire once dominated the Mediterranean, sustained a nearly mortal blow in the Candian War (1645-69). During a quarter-century of bitter fighting with the Ottomans, Venice lost her prime colony of Crete, much of her navy, and a good part of the public treasury. Rather than retrench and recover, La Serenissima sought revenge and new conquests. The chance for both came in the 1680s, when most of Central Europe’s fighting men (including George of Hanover, future King of England) defeated a Turkish army outsides of Vienna. In 1684 Venetian leaders opportunistically joined the Christian powers’ war on the wounded Ottoman Empire. Crete was the objective, but it proved a prize out of reach; Venice lacked the ships and men to take it. Instead the republic fought a bloody campaign on the Greek mainland, briefly occupying Athens (where Venetian artillery wrecked the Parthenon) and capturing the principal towns of the Peloponnese. After a few desultory attempts to recapture Greece’s southern peninsula, the Ottomans in 1699 ceded the region to Venice. The republic now had a strategic base to develop and a large new colony to govern.       

Venice soon revealed itself as the proverbial dog who had caught the car. It lacked the resources to defend Morea, and its officials lacked the inclination to govern its people fairly. The republic did encourage western Christian farmers and merchants to settle in the colony, offering them land grants and protected markets for silk and foodstuffs. Morea’s indigenous majority, however, did not prosper under Venetian rule. Many lost their land, fell more deeply into debt, or found themselves pressed by heavy taxes or corvee labor demands. At least one-sixth of the population (as measured by village abandonment) had died or fled during the Venetian conquest, and others, both Muslim and Christian, ran away to Turkish-occupied Greece in the early 1700s. The province’s overlords had to institute sea patrols to prevent their subjects from running away to greater freedom in the Ottoman Empire.

Venetian fortifications at Acrocorinth, Wikimedia Commons

Turkey’s re-conquest, one might say liberation, of Morea came less than two decades after the peace treaty with Venice. Partial credit for the success of Turkish arms goes to Charles XII of Sweden, who after the Battle of Poltava took refuge in Ottoman territory. His overconfident Russian adversary Peter I gave chase, only to find himself surrounded by a Turkish army. In subsequent negotiations the tsar traded his freedom for the surrender of several Russian border fortresses. With the Russians at bay, Ottoman officials could contemplate a rematch with Austria and Venice, and as the weaker of the two powers the republic made a better first choice. In 1714, the same year that George of Hanover became King of Great Britain, Grand Vizier Silahdar Damat Ali Pasa arranged a declaration of war. Morea was the closest and softest target, as Venice had only 3,000 troops in the entire kingdom and few locals wanted to fight for the colonizers. Silahdar brought an army to the Isthmus of Corinth in Jun 1715, reduced the impressive but undermanned citadel of Acrocorinth in a five-day siege, and occupied Morea’s most important strategic town. The remaining fortresses on the peninsula fell to Turkish troops a few months later. 

Not everyone in the reconquered province benefited from the renewal of Ottoman rule: the Grand Vizier rounded up and executed any Muslim apostates who had converted to Christianity. Most Moreans found that the Ottoman “yoke,” so-called, lay more lightly on their shoulders than the Christian Venetian one. The province’s population and economy recovered, and even Christian merchants prospered in subsequent decades, even as their former protectors’ fortunes continued to decline.               

Sources: Alexis Malliaris, “Population Exchange and Integration of Immigrant Communities in the Venetian Morea,” in Siriol Davies and Jack Davis, eds., Between Venice and Istanbul (Amer. School of Classical Studies in Athens, 2007), 97-108; Kenneth Setton, Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century (American Philosophical Society, 1991), 400, 426-38; J.M. Wagstaff, “War and Settlement Desertion in the Morea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1978): 295-308

To Crush Your Enemies and See Them Driven Before You

Signed one hundred years ago today, the Treaty of Versailles contributed more to the outbreak of World War Two than any other event not named "Adolf Hitler." Meeting amidst the splendors of Louis XIV's palace with representatives of the German state, the victorious Allies kicked their Great War adversaries in the teeth, hard. Germany lost most of its armed forces and twenty-five percent of its territory, and took on a reparations bill of 130 billion marks (about 400 billion dollars in modern currency), a sum so great that it fueled the hyperinflation that ruined the Weimar Republic. Germans also had to accept responsibility for World War One, declaring themselves the sole guilty party and Britain and France spotless victims. The German commissioners had no choice but to accept this humiliating treaty: thousands of their countrymen were dying from Britain's blockade, which the Royal Navy continued after the Armistice to keep Germany on its knees. The British and French planned to keep the German nation in that posture for years to come.

Joseph Finnemore, Signing of the Treaty of Versailles (Public Domain, 1919)

As important as the onerous terms of the Versailles treaty was the Allies' decision to conclude it with a united Germany. The victors of World War One had broken up the other two empires in the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire), but left the German polity of 1871 intact. A.J.P. Taylor drew attention to this peculiarity of the post-1918 peace settlement in Origins of the Second World War (1962). He did not need to explain why the German exception proved a fateful one. When a violent nationalist regime took power in Berlin in the 1930s, and began looking for vengeance, a united Germany's population and resources ensured that it would be able to take revenge on its former conquerors.

Also worth noting: the statesmen at Versailles and the other post-WWI treaty conferences may have thought themselves makers of a lasting peace, but hundreds of thousands of more obscure men still had guns in their hands and wounded pride in their hearts. The guns fell silent in France and Italy but continued their deadly work elsewhere. Germany surrendered, but the reactionary freikorps kept killing in Bavaria and the Baltics, gunning down socialists and Latvian nationalists. Fighting continued on the old Eastern Front for years, until the Bolsheviks triumphed over the counter-revolutionary armies who opposed them. By then over a million people had died, not including those who succumbed to famine in southern Russia and Ukraine. Turkish nationalists did not accept the Allies' colonization of the Ottoman Empire. Under Kemal Ataturk they defeated a Greek army sent to colonize western Anatolia, forced Britain and France out of Istanbul, and created a united Turkish ethnostate. At the southern end of the Ottoman domain, the Saud family cancelled the political victory of Britain's clients, the Hashemites, seizing the Hejaz in 1924-25 and establishing the independent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Domination and humiliation make poor foundations for peace, particularly if those doing the dominating and humiliating are themselves exhausted by years of war. (See Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End [2016].)

Sic transit: Alfred Crosby's Intellectual Legacy

I was sorry to hear of the recent death of Alfred Crosby (1931-2018), professor emeritus at the University of Texas and one of the more influential historians of the past half-century. Crosby’s principal claim to fame was his authorship of The Columbian Exchange (1972), a study of the transfer of organisms between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that became a foundational text in colonial and environmental history. Crosby’s book was so far ahead of its time that he could not find a university press willing to publish it and had to sign with Greenwood, an obscure independent academic publisher. Greenwood and Crosby had the last laugh, as Columbian Exchange went on to sell more than 80,000 copies (about 100 times as many as the typical academic book) in the next quarter-century.

Crosby observed that the word “exchange” in his title misled readers somewhat. Most of the biological transfers he studied ran in one direction, from the Old World to the New. Europeans introduced to the Americans new plants, like wheat and peaches and Kentucky bluegrass; new animal species, like pigs and horses and cows (all of which flourished); tens of millions of human beings, most of whom, prior to 1860, came involuntarily from Africa; and new diseases like smallpox and typhoid, which reduced the indigenous American population by more than eighty percent. In three of these categories little flowed back to the Old World. Only two or three thousand Native Americans voyaged to Europe before 1800, almost no American animals adapted to Eurasian or African environments (apart from a few small mammals like the raccoon), and no American diseases, except possibly syphilis (and Crosby expressed skepticism about its alleged American origin), crossed the Atlantic from west to east. Plants proved the great exception: Eurasians and Africans slowly but steadily adopted high-yield American food crops like maize, potatoes, and cassava, along with such piquant or addictive newcomers as cacao, tobacco, tomatoes, and chilis. American cultivars increased the total food supply of Eurasia and helped sustain high population growth there,* even as the Native American population plummeted. Columbus and his successors set off not only a major biological exchange but a global demographic revolution.

Crosby followed up this seminal publication with two more works that Native Americanists and colonialists found (I think) equally important. "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America" (1976) asked why Eurasian diseases hit Native Americans with such ferocity, and found an answer in social dynamics. A "virgin-soil" illness, hitting a population with zero acquired immunity, sickens the entire community or region at once, leaving no-one well enough to take care of the sick. Hunger, dehydration, and cold kill many who would otherwise have a fighting chance at recovery. Ecological Imperialism (1986) extended Crosby's observation about the imbalanced character of the Columbian Exchange. In this later book he argued that the success of European colonial ventures in the "Neo-Europes," the high-latitude settler-colonial societies like Australia and the United States, depended chiefly on the organisms that the colonists brought with them, their "portmanteau biota" of livestock, weeds, and pathogens. European imperialism owed its conquests to biology, not technology or culture.**

Alfred Crosby continued publishing into his seventies. His last three books studied quantitative knowledge, projectile weapons, and energy technology, discussing these highly-technical subjects in clear, crisp, often witty prose. That he kept his mind and his writing sharp during the onset of Parkinson's Disease showed a grace and endurance most of us can only hope to attain. For my part, I will account myself very successful indeed if I can write a book even one-tenth as influential as Columbian Exchange. And I am sorry I never had a chance to meet the maestro in person.

* Europe's population doubled and China's population tripled between 1650 and 1800. 

** Ecological Imperialism won an audience outside of History departments and well beyond the academy. I first heard of the book during a panel on world-building at the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention.

Beringia and Geopolitics

While in graduate school I learned, via the then-new H-AMINDIAN mailing list, that Europeans had begun developing the Beringian theory of Native American origins as early as the sixteenth century. Jose de Acosta and Daniel Gookin, among others, had posited a land bridge or narrow strait between Siberia and North America well before Vitus Bering's second voyage, and had asserted Siberio-Indian kinship based on linguistic similarities and other evidence. More recently, I was surprised to learn, from Claudio Saunt's intriguing new book West of the Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014), that eighteenth-century Europeans used this hypothesis to advance geopolitical agendas. In the 1750s the Franciscan Jose Torrubia used “Aztec tradition” and colonial documents to argue that the Indians of Mexico came from Siberia, and that very little distance separated that chilly wasteland from the northwest coast of America. When he learned of Bering's discoveries (which the Russians had kept under wraps for twenty years), Torrubia wrote a long essay warning that the “Muscovites” would shortly move into California if not checked (pp. 52-53). In the early 1770s, Spanish Ambassador Antonio de Lacy noted that the Russians were using not only geography but the Beringian hypothesis to promote colonization: Russia, according to one of Catherine II's advisers, had a clear claim to North America “because that country was once peopled by Siberians” (73-74).

Such reports exaggerated Russia's intentions. It would take another quarter-century before Russian traders established a settlement east of Kodiak Island, and several decades before some built a small trading post in northern California, on the river that a younger Saunt thought must be the “Rushin' River” (12). Spanish officials of the 1760s and '70s did not have the benefit of this hindsight, and their alarm caused them to approve the colonization of California, with, as Saunt observes, devastating consequences for Native Californians. That fear of Russian expansion drove Spain's colonial venture in California is well-established. Saunt's new contribution to the history of that venture is to note how the Beringian-origins theory changed the way the Spanish thought about geography: it made Siberia, the putative homeland of Native Americans (with whom the Spanish were quite familiar), a much more immanent reality, and helped eliminate the mental distance between Russian Siberia and Spanish America, just as Bering's discoveries were erasing the physical distance between them. For all its ivory-tower trappings and pretenses, sometimes intellectual history has a very immediate impact on political history.