The Sergeant, page 6
This wasn’t just about Good Friday prayers. Russia and France felt the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs and hoped to profit by its demise. Nicholas wanted to seize Turkey’s European vassals, including the current nations of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Napoleon III told British diplomat Lord Stratford de Ratcliffe that “he had no wish to make the Mediterranean a French lake—to use a well-known expression—but that he wanted to see it made a European one…. If he meant that the shores of the Mediterranean should be exclusively in the hands of Christendom, the dream is rather colossal.” England, meanwhile, wanted to maintain good relations with the Turks so it could build railroads through Ottoman lands to its colony in India—a much better link than the long and dangerous sea route around Africa. Rather than seeking to weaken the Turks, it wanted to prop them up to block Russian and French expansion plans.
Expansion, colonization, imperial ambition. That was the true meaning of the fight over Jesus’s cradle and grave, which was on the verge of leading to the Crimean War, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the century. And the threat of war drew one step closer in early 1853, when a Russian envoy arrived in Istanbul who would soon play a key role in the life of Mohammed Ali ben Said.
5 The Thunderer
Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov was dressed in a crisp brown military uniform gleaming with epaulets and medals when he arrived in Istanbul on February 28, 1853. Tall and sleek, with placid green eyes, genteel waves of silvery hair, and a precisely trimmed white mustache, the sixty-five-year-old aristocrat sauntered down the gangplank of the Russian frigate Gromovnik (Thunderer) with regal bearing, followed by a retinue of similarly uniformed officials. Throngs of Orthodox at the waterfront cheered as he arrived, a knightly champion who would fight for their interests in the Holy Land. They followed as he made his way to the Russian consulate in Pera, a Christian neighborhood atop a hill overlooking Istanbul, applauded as he disappeared into the building, and stayed in the street outside to fervently pray for his success in dealing with the Turks.
If Menshikov had followed the standard protocol for new ambassadors, he would have immediately reported to the Sublime Porte to present his credentials to the grand vizier (prime minister) before proceeding to the foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, for a lavish welcoming ceremony. But he did not show up at the Sublime Porte that day or the next. Despite his dignified appearance, Menshikov was an acid-tongued dilettante known for his tactlessness, especially with the Turks. During a war with Turkey in 1828, he was castrated when an Ottoman artillery shell passed between his legs, which left him with no desire to treat them civilly. Instead, he stayed in Pera for two full days, sending a messenger to deliver his credentials to the grand vizier instead of going in person.
When Menshikov finally decided to visit the Sublime Porte, he gave such short notice that Fuad had to scramble to invite Ottoman and Orthodox officials to attend his reception. The kahvejis (coffee servers) at the Foreign Ministry hastily prepared pots of thick Turkish brew; sherbedjis (sherbet servers) filled goblets with sherbet, swirling in cherry juice; and a team of chiboukjis, such as Mohammed Ali ben Said, assembled an array of pipes for guests to smoke at the reception. “Coffee is given to all visitors, but the chibouk is a distinction which is measured by the rank of the visitor and the person who receives it,” wrote Abdolonyme Ubcini, a journalist in Istanbul at the time.
But from the moment Menshikov and his team stalked into the Sublime Porte, it was clear something was wrong. Instead of their medal-bedecked uniforms, they wore casual civilian clothes, as if the Turks were not worthy of standard diplomatic courtesy. At the grand vizier’s office, Menshikov launched into a blistering tirade against Fuad Pasha, calling him a “rogue” and “liar,” and then stormed out, walking directly past the reception Fuad had prepared. With his usefulness as a negotiator in tatters, Fuad resigned two days later, but Said apparently remained as a chiboukji under the new foreign minister, Sadik Rifat Pasha.I
Rifat, a hefty forty-five-year-old with a graying beard and mustache, had spent the past two decades in various government posts and was much more straightforward than Fuad. He wasted no time reestablishing ties with the Russians. The day after he was appointed, he gave Menshikov the kind of reception that Fuad had unsuccessfully attempted, complete with chiboukjis like Said making sure the tobacco stayed lit.
Over the next several weeks, Said spent much of his time accompanying Rifat on his diplomatic rounds, including visits to Pera, where Menshikov had taken up residence. Leaving the Sublime Porte, they traveled through the congested streets of central Istanbul, with Rifat likely being borne in a litter while Said followed on foot, laden with pipes and pouches of tobacco. At the eastern waterfront, they crossed a pontoon bridge over the broad inlet known as the Golden Horn to the largely Orthodox community of Galata, which hugged the opposite shore. From Galata, they climbed one of the crowded hillside walkways leading to Pera, the primary residence of Catholics and Protestants in Istanbul. Atop the hill was a line of European embassies and consulates, as well as foreign-owned hotels, restaurants and businesses.
After a lifetime in Muslim countries, Pera was the first place where Mohammed Ali ben Said was entirely surrounded by Christians, and he was astounded. Since Pera wasn’t subject to the Islamic laws governing the rest of Istanbul, there were saloons where alcohol flowed freely, theaters staging bawdy shows, casinos with card tables and roulette wheels, and ballrooms where men and women waltzed together, holding each other in public like he had never seen before. Even more astonishing was that his master “associated intimately with the Christians, shook hands with them, ate, drank champagne and visited their theatres, and acted in such a way as to excite my fears that he was not truly Islam.”
Rifat’s main business in Pera was to negotiate with Menshikov. In one marathon session, they spent seven hours discussing the problems in Palestine, requiring a lot of work on Said’s part, refilling their pipes. (Some Turks smoked more than forty pipefuls per day, a habit that many Russians had picked up as well.) Said, who by now was in his late teens, could not understand their conversation since it was in French, but he was impressed by Menshikov: “His countenance was extremely prepossessing, and his manners highly polished.”
Something about Said caught Menshikov’s attention as well. He “took a great fancy to me the first time he saw me,” Said wrote. Menshikov never mentioned Said in his diary, so it is impossible to know what caught his eye, but perhaps Said reminded him of a young African who Russian diplomats had bought in Istanbul 150 years before, resulting in an Othello-like story in which Menshikov’s great-grandfather played the villain.
The story began in 1703 when Ibrahim, eight-year-old son of the sultan of Logone, a city-state bordering Borno, was taken to Istanbul, either as a slave or a hostage meant to ensure his father’s fealty to the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim was assigned as a page to the royal harem, where he proved adept at languages, quickly adding Turkish and Persian to his Arabic and Kotoko, the main language of Logone. This brought him to the attention of the Russian ambassador, who was on orders from Tsar Peter the Great to be on the lookout for any “clever little African slave” who could be brought to Russia.
In 1704, the ambassador bought Ibrahim and took him to Russia, where the tsar not only freed him but named him as his godson, baptizing him Peter Petrovich Petrov—Peter, son of Peter, of Peter’s lineage—although the boy decided to keep his first name, translated as Abram in Russian. “Peter the Great took a great fancy to him and kept him about his person,” wrote one observer. “Always bright, the boy now developed exceptional cleverness, and Peter, who was not the man to neglect any intellectual promise, had him carefully taught under his own eyes.”
When Abram was only twelve, he served as a military page in a war with Sweden, and Peter was so impressed that he commissioned a portrait showing them together on the battlefield. Five years later, after Abram helped capture an enemy admiral in a naval battle, Peter rewarded him by sending him to a military academy in Paris, where he wrote a two-volume manuscript, Geometry and Fortifications, covering such topics as military engineering and encryption. Eventually, he adopted the name Abram Petrovich Gannibal, using the Russian spelling of Hannibal, the African general who once threatened the gates of Rome.
As an African-born military officer in a European court, Gannibal resembled the “very valiant Moor” at the heart of Othello, which William Shakespeare had written a century before. And just as Othello was plagued by Iago, plotting in the shadows to destroy him, Gannibal had his own persecutor: Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov.
This Prince Menshikov was an illiterate warrior whose prowess in battle earned a string of promotions, culminating with his being named as a prince—the first time the title had ever been given to a commoner. (In Russia, “prince” did not signify a connection to the tsar’s family, but instead to other lines of nobility.) Menshikov soon became Peter the Great’s right-hand man, but he was so insecure about his lowly background he was paranoid about anyone who got between him and the tsar. So when Gannibal returned from Paris, fluent in French and accomplished in math and science, Menshikov, who could barely scrawl his own name, feared that this dark-complexioned interloper might eventually replace him. Those feelings worsened when Peter assigned Gannibal to design the Kronstadt fortifications near Saint Petersburg, making them so strong they helped stave off Hitler’s invasion in World War II, and build a canal linking the Neva and Volkhov rivers, a task that had eluded Menshikov’s engineers.
Menshikov, who hated being outshone by anyone, started a whispering campaign suggesting that Gannibal was some kind of treasonous pervert. Gannibal at first laughed off the rumors, but his situation soon grew precarious. In 1725, Peter the Great died, leaving the throne to his wife Catherine, and when she died two years later, Menshikov took control of Russia as regent for Peter’s twelve-year-old grandson, Peter II. One of his first acts was to send Gannibal nearly a thousand miles east to the Volga River. Once he got there, he was sent a thousand miles further east into Siberia. “Perhaps as soon as I get there, I will receive a third order, sending me even further away…,” Gannibal wrote to a friend. “Perhaps this is the last time I will write to you, because they will soon send me to some deserted place where I will die in solitude.”
Fortunately, Gannibal’s fate was much happier than Othello’s. As Gannibal labored in Siberia, Menshikov grew so unpopular that Russia’s top aristocrats ousted him, exiling him to Ukraine. When Gannibal returned, he was promoted steadily until he became general-in-chief, Tsarist Russia’s second-highest army rank. He eventually settled down in a 6,000-acre estate with a Swiss-German wife, eleven children, and a large contingent of serfs—Russian slaves laboring for an African-born nobleman.
Gannibal’s legacy continued after his death. His son Ivan also achieved the rank of general-in-chief, but his best-known progeny was his great-grandson Alexander Pushkin, one of Russia’s most revered poets. In contrast, even after Menshikov’s heirs regained their footing in the royal court, his reputation remained a stain on the family honor. Around the time the current Prince Menshikov was sent to Istanbul, a directory of the Russian nobility listed him as “one of the most remarkable men that ever shone in the annals of Russia,” but derided his ancestor as “rapacious, perverse, and cruel.”
So imagine the thoughts that may have run through the prince’s mind when he chanced upon Mohammed Ali ben Said, son of a powerful African leader, skilled in multiple languages, and a trusted slave in the sultan’s court. Could this be another Gannibal? And could Menshikov atone for his great-grandfather’s sins by bringing him back to Russia to serve the tsar?
At some point in the negotiations over Palestine, Menshikov asked if he could buy Said. Despite the friction between their two nations, Rifat agreed, likely thinking that if he appeased Menshikov on such a trivial matter, things might go better at the bargaining table. Said, who had no say in the matter, was soon led to his new quarters in the Russian consulate, an imposing complex of limestone office buildings, staffed by foreigners whose language he could not speak. It was the eighth time he had gotten a new owner during five or so years as a slave, and he worried that “it was my fate to pass from hand to hand, with never a sure and definite resting place.” Making matters worse, Menshikov, who was still deeply embroiled in negotiations, showed little interest in him and instead assigned a staffer to teach him Russian: “the most difficult [language] I ever undertook to acquire.”
In the meantime, Menshikov’s dealings with Turkey were hurtling toward a climax. After much negotiation, Rifat hammered out a deal granting Russia most of what it asked for in Palestine, with reluctant acceptance from France. But Menshikov was not satisfied. Instead, he added one final condition: The Turks had to name Tsar Nicholas as the official overseer of the 12 million Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire, giving him as much power over them as Sultan Abdulmejid had. If the Turks refused, he said, he would break off all diplomatic relations, bringing the two nations to the brink of war. The Turks could not accept such a deal. It’s hard to imagine any nation would. With the approval of France and England, they said no.
On May 16, 1853, Menshikov ended all negotiations. He and his staff started packing their belongings and shutting down the consulate and embassy, which must have mystified Mohammed Ali ben Said, who had been purchased only a few weeks before. On May 21, Menshikov sailed east on the Gromnovetz, bound for Russia’s port in Odessa to oversee its preparations for war. Two days later, the remaining personnel, including Said, boarded the Egitto, a steamship heading west to the Austrian-held port of Trieste. The highest-ranking diplomats took the Egitto’s narrow passenger cabins in the upper decks, but Said and low-level staffers were likely sent into the hold, near the ship’s stables for sheep and cattle.
On the weeklong voyage to Trieste, Said met his first American: Rev. George Duffield, a fifty-five-year-old Presbyterian minister with a gaunt narrow face framed by an unruly mane of graying hair. Duffield, whose grandfather had been a chaplain for the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, was just completing a year-long pilgrimage to the Holy Lands when he arrived in Istanbul to find it on the brink of war. As a Protestant, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to war over the churches in Palestine, which he viewed as hoaxes with no connection to Biblical events. “It was not until about 300 years after the crucifixion that these places were all hunted up… to help the trade [in religious trinkets] which is being carried on among the pilgrims.” When he learned of Russia’s ultimatum to the Turks, he cut his journey short, having “no desire to be there in the midst of warlike commotion.”
As the Egitto sailed through the islands of Greece, Duffield and a British passenger on board got into a loud debate on the subject of slavery. Although Duffield felt slavery was “one of our great national evils and God-provoking sins,” he worried that immediately freeing the slaves would lead to a bloody war between North and South, so he favored a more gradual path to freedom than most abolitionists. The Englishman, whose country had freed the 800,000 slaves in its colonies in 1833 without descending into war, disagreed, and as they argued, they drew the interest of their fellow passengers, including the Russian diplomats, whose tsar was facing increasing pressure to free their country’s serfs.
As the debate continued, Duffield noticed Mohammed Ali ben Said and drew him into the conversation, probably aided by translators attached to the Russian embassy. Duffield was impressed with Said’s “intelligence and quickness” and chatted with him through the remainder of the voyage. It would not be the last time they would cross paths.
From Trieste, the Russians took Said by train to Warsaw, where they transferred to carriages for a 700-mile journey to the Baltic coast and then boarded a ferry to Saint Petersburg, built on canals along the Gulf of Finland. As the ferry made its way through the canals, Said found himself “gazing upon thousands of the most superb edifices”: palaces lined with gold-trimmed colonnades, cathedrals topped by onion-shaped domes, and the golden-spired Admiralty Building, where Menshikov maintained his offices. “Sooth to say, this city of the Czars is equalled by few, and certainly surpassed by none in the world, for comfort, strength, and magnificence,” Said later wrote.
Just a short walk from the Admiralty Building stood Menshikov’s mansion: “a most magnificent structure… built entirely of pure Italian marble, five stories high, magnificently furnished throughout.” Originally, Menshikov had planned to take a train from Odessa to meet the Russian delegation there. Instead, Tsar Nicholas had ordered him to remain in the Crimean region to prepare for war with Turkey, so he likely sent instructions to his thirty-seven-year-old son Vladimir on how to handle his affairs. One of the first tasks was to tell Said that, after roughly five years of slavery, he was now a free man, since slavery was illegal in Russia.
Ironically, nearly 45 million Russians, or around two-thirds of the population, were in near-slavery, as serfs of the noblemen who owned the land where they lived. Living little better than American slaves, most of them spent their time in backbreaking labor in fields, mines, lumberyards, or factories. On the other hand, they did have some distinct advantages over American slaves, including that they could not be directly sold. They were viewed as an extension of the land where they were raised, so even if the land was sold, giving them a new master, they would remain where they had always lived. That prevented the heartbreaking ripping apart of families that often occurred when American slaves were put up for sale.
