On the Sultan's Service

Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil's Memoir of the Ottoman Palace, 1909–1912

Douglas Scott Brookes

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253045522
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The renowned Turkish author's memoir of serving Sultan Mehmed V provides a rare look inside the palace politics of the late Ottoman Empire. Before he became one of Turkey's most famous novelists, Halid Ziya Usakligil served as First Secretary to Sultan Mehmed V. His memoir of that time, between 1909 and 1912, provides first-hand insight into the personalities, intrigues, and inner workings of the Ottoman palace in its final decades. In post-Revolution Turkey, the palace no longer exercised political power. Instead, it negotiated the minefields between political factions, sought ways to unite the empire in the face of nationalist aspirations, and faced the opening salvos of the wars that would eventually overwhelm the country. Usakligil includes interviews with the Imperial family as well as descriptions of royal nuptials, the palaces and its visitors, and the crises that shook the court. He also delivers an insightful and moving portrait of Mehmed V, the man who reigned over the Ottoman Empire through both Balkan Wars and World War I.

1 | A New Court for a New Monarch

On His Majesty’s Service

Whenever Dolmabahçe Palace comes into view along the Bosphorus, it brings to mind not so much the stately and serious chateaux of Europe, fashioned as they are to the rules of an accepted school of design, as it does one of those magnificent white cakes that adorn the windows of pastry shops, only puffed up enormously and set down into place here.

And now I was approaching this Dolmabahçe Palace, about to take my first steps across its threshold. Who could say how many years of my life I would spend in this place, what arduous duties would flatten me here, what torturous grindstones would crush my spirits and scatter them to the winds?

Raising my head as I neared the palace, I could see at a distance that peculiar piece of patchwork known as Camlıköşk, the Glass Pavilion, the glazed conservatory perched high atop the palace walls so that it overlooks the city road behind Dolmabahçe. I’d heard many a tale about this glass chamber, which always struck me more as a badly done greenhouse in a winter garden than as anything that deserved the name pavilion.

I recall one of those tales. It seems that now and then Sultan Abdülaziz would come to this pavilion, which served the palace as something like a pair of spectacles directed toward the life of the city. Here he’d take a few moments from his merrymaking to post himself by the glass panes, observing the scenes on the road below. One day while so engaged, he spied a simit seller who had set up his tray atop a stool in the road, awaiting customers. Pondering the man’s shabby clothes, faded fez and scarf, and torn sandals on his feet, he turned round and said in his strong voice to the chamberlains gathered behind him, “Come over here.” Pulling them to the windowpanes, he motioned to the simit seller and said, “The nation! . . . Is not that rascal down there what they call ‘the nation’?”

I don’t know if this story is true or a fabrication, but to invoke the noted phrase of the Italians, Se non è vero, è ben trovato—“If not true, ’tis nonetheless well coined.” One wonders, though, if, at that very moment, a mysterious hand capable of disclosing secrets had revealed the monarch to the simit seller, what would His Majesty have thought of this creature then, who would have shouted himself hoarse with “Long live the padishah!” and was at every moment willing to shed his blood for his sovereign’s sake?

Fig. 1.1. The Glass Pavilion, atop the walls of Dolmabahçe Palace. Şehbal, 14 October 1909.

* * *

And so now I was entering the Imperial Palace of Dolmabahçe. Only, to make my entrance, I was passing down the most squalid and stinking of passageways. This, I was to learn later, was the staff entrance, the Koltuk Kapısı as it was called, “Blind Alley Gate.”¹ I would not have been able to find it by myself; it seemed to be hiding in shame at its appalling misery and squalor. In fact, the protocol officer accompanying me felt compelled to make clear he was not responsible for bringing me this way.

Taking care not to stumble as I made my way down this nearly dark passage, whose walls oozed moisture, whose mixed brew of smells from above and below besieged the stomach, I muttered to myself, “Surely this is the sort of tunnel that’s going to end in a narrow little stair leading up into a hole, where we’ll have to cram in our heads like squeezing through a chimney!” But suddenly to our right I found myself in the lower end of a garden bathed in a cascade of sunlight, and with a generous gasp of air I cleansed my lungs of the poisoned stench of Blind Alley Gate.

This doorway from the passage opened out onto the far end of Dolmabahçe’s front garden, which begins at the clock tower at the palace’s southern side and stretches north from there along the seafront. From this spot, ten steps would take one to the mounting block in the palace forecourt, used by the sultans when departing in processions. There is another mounting block like this one for traveling by sea, and later on I was to learn when and how these devices were employed.

Having just navigated that dank and squat passageway, rather with the foreboding one might feel at approaching those dungeon cells of the Middle Ages that could be cranked downward into the sea, now we were starting up the low marble steps of the palace entryway. Four or five court officials were drawn up here to greet us. Straightaway we received the most painstakingly rendered and elaborate of salaams, with which I was familiar from having seen them at Abdülhamid’s court. Still bashful with modesty, though, I couldn’t quite acknowledge to myself, “I was just saluted!” even though the salaams were certainly intended not for the protocol officer at my side but rather for the new Başkâtip Bey, the first secretary. Or to use his official title, Mabeyn-i Hümayun-ı Cenab-ı Mülûkâne Başkâtibi, “First Secretary of the Imperial Chancery on His Majesty’s Service.”

But how did these gentlemen know this was the new first secretary making his way up the steps? As it turned out, understandably enough, everyone at the palace—or better said, the people still left in the palace (I shall explain later where the previous court people had gone)—including the new monarch, were awaiting with enormous curiosity the representative of the power that had overthrown Abdülhamid, seized sovereignty over Istanbul and the entire country, and placed Prince Reşad on the throne as the country’s first constitutional monarch, under the regnal name of Sultan Mehmed V. Because truly, who knew what sort of intentions that representative might be bringing along with him?

Inwardly rather amused, but also a bit unnerved at the jumbled thoughts that must be running through the minds of these people (none of whom I knew, but they clearly knew who I was and had been awaiting my arrival), I paused at the upper landing of the steps for someone to point me in the right direction. One of that group of court officials, a somewhat short, genial chap in a frock coat, smiling broadly, salaamed me again, and said, “Please, sir, through here. If you allow me, I shall show the way!” With that he led me off, the palace guards who formed the rest of the greeting committee remaining behind. We turned into the first room on the landward side of the palace, a half-dark chamber whose windows, for reasons I could not in the least fathom, were covered in iron grills.

A bit disconcerted by these new surroundings yet summoning all my resolve not to reveal even the slightest trace of nerves, I took a seat on the edge of the broad and low divan that faced the door. This backless divan was intended for palace personnel accustomed to sitting cross-legged on it, but I of course couldn’t do likewise since I wanted to preserve the creases in my trousers.

It didn’t take long to realize that this courteous gentleman was a member of the Privy Household staff—the court officials in personal service to the sultan and members of the Imperial Family, addressed by the term Bey. In the airily swank language of the palace, to which I would soon need to become accustomed, he proclaimed: “If you would pray vouchsafe your permission, allow me to tender to Our Lord His Imperial Majesty the announcement of your esteemed call. In fact, His Majesty departed the Imperial Harem early and is awaiting the honor of your arrival.” Perhaps he said more, but that last sentence made clear the degree of anticipation that surrounded my arrival. Maybe he even said it on purpose.

It was quite natural for the sultan to wonder what sort of a creature this person was who had been sent him as first secretary. Or had this secretary perhaps, in all probability, been sent as overseer on the government’s behalf? For this was the league of men who had unleashed a revolution in the country and dispatched into exile a monarch despotic, tyrannical, and brazen enough to confront any threat with boldness despite his innate cravenness, wrenching him from the throne he’d occupied resolutely for thirty-three years solely with thought to his own existence and security, and marching him off through a sea of bayonets. Surely a new monarch, awaiting with trepidation this man, sent by this league, would indeed have risen early to leave the harem and was now asking every few minutes, “Is he here yet?”

For quite possibly this new secretary was a frightful brute who twisted his mustache in bandit fashion, stashed pistols in his back pockets, and fully intended to strut about the palace with menacing arrogance.

But then again, maybe he was nothing of the sort. Maybe he was a gentle, polite, gracious man like the new first chamberlain, whom the sultan had met the day before and had liked. Possibly this first secretary, with whom he’d have to spend hours on end, and meet countless times each day, just possibly this secretary too would seem to him a proper man of the palace, of whom he needn’t be frightened at all.

As it was, the new first secretary was on tenterhooks just as much. Here at this moment in this half-dark room, meeting the people who were streaming in one after another to offer congratulations by performing (fawningly, it seemed) the salaam, people whose personalities and positions he could only learn later—in the midst of all this, the new first secretary’s imagination kept speculating as to what sort of a personality he would encounter in the new padishah, into whose presence he would shortly be ushered. For he was about to meet a monarch face-to-face for the first time in his life, a monarch about whose character and personality he hadn’t been able to form a clear opinion from the rumors he’d heard and from the brief glimpses he’d caught of him from a distance as he passed by in his carriage.

For I simply couldn’t find a way to deduce anything about him from the many portraits that history has bequeathed us from the long chain of the House of Osman. Nor could I navigate the tangled paths of heredity to unearth a resemblance between him and some ancestor among his greed-crazed, tyrannical forebears, whose eruptions of lust and rage had claimed many a pitiable girl and lopped off the head of many an innocent victim. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a single trait that he shared with even his nearest relatives—his uncle Abdülaziz and his brothers Abdülhamid and Murad—let alone with his forebears in the distant reaches of history.

It was said he’d inherited a good deal of his disposition from his father, Sultan Abdülmecid. Like Abdülmecid, so the stories went, he was a slave to fits of lust, a drunkard, a spendthrift when opportunity arose. Add to that an intriguer, deceiver, trickster, and hypocrite. Surely the accusations stemmed from a source not difficult to guess: his brother’s court, which had sought to belittle him in the public eye.

Yet even if one attributed the adverse rumors to Abdülhamid’s hostility toward his assumed successor, and even if one trusted only the rumors that seemed more plausible, one would still have to conclude that the new monarch possessed—let us put a nice phrase to it—a somewhat enshrouded intellect, that he spent his days and nights buried in a fog, that he was cunning and insidious by nature, that he never liked anyone in the world and never would, and that he harbored the deepest grudges over the most trifling issues, so that whenever the opportunity arose, he strangled people he didn’t like.

From the few times I’d seen him in his carriage, I could discern a cultured bearing in his way of dressing and his manner of sitting, and in all his features I could easily read his good nature. He seemed so gentle, so filled with patient wisdom from the seclusion of his thirty-year isolation that had differed not one whit from imprisonment, that I might describe the first sentiment I felt about him as a kind of affection. He seemed, in fact, entirely likable.

As for those unfavorable stories that had made the rounds, these I’d always treated with a good deal of skepticism. Quite soon I was to conclude I’d been entirely correct in dismissing them. After all, what could one really know about the public side of a man who’d spent a long life cut off from the world, behind four walls, in the company of but eight or ten private servants, his consorts, and his harem staff? No, the real questions lay elsewhere. Had his horizons opened out now beyond the palace, which had been like a prison for him? Did he possess the intelligence to grasp the circumstances in which the country found itself? The possibilities for the future? The position imposed on the monarchy by the reinstatement of constitutional law? And more than anything, would he be able to adapt to the new conditions?

Surely the most correct judgment of him could only be reached by interacting with him repeatedly, noting the clues that each day’s interactions would provide, and then analyzing these clues to either confirm one’s first impression or overturn it.

I was pondering these riddles in my head as the well-wishers continued to pour in. I can’t say how much time passed, but certainly after only a short delay—which demonstrated how impatiently I was awaited upstairs—the courteous guide reappeared and brandished another of those refined salaams as he announced, “His Imperial Majesty awaits you.”

* * *

I felt not the slightest apprehension as I left the half-dark chamber, climbed the broad flight of stairs that leads up from the ground floor of Dolmabahçe Palace, and crossed the large drawing room that spans the entire width of the buildin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Maps
• Timeline of Late Ottoman History
• Family Tree
• 1. A New Court for a New Monarch
• 2. Redoing the Palaces
• 3. On Show
• 4. The Imperial Household
• 5. The Imperial Family
• 6. Wedding Vows and Dueling Heirs
• 7. Papers, Papers
• 8. Mysterious Yıldız, Daunting Topkapı
• 9. Coming to Call
• 10. Royal Guests
• 11. On Holiday
• 12. Maneuvering, Touring
• 13. No End to Crises
• 14. Caught in the Vise
• 15. Bringing Down the Curtain
• 16. The Man Who Would Be Sultan
• Epilogue
• Glossary of Names
• Glossary of Terms and Places
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author