What Do the Rose Bowl and the Ottoman Empire Have in Common?
Marching bands.
Beginning in 1299, the elite corps of the Ottoman armies, the janissaries, used military bands made up of wind and percussion instruments to inspire their troops and terrify their enemies. (Not that different from a half-time show, right?) The music they played was called mehter, a stirring mixture of drums, horn and oboe with a distinctive marching rhythm based on the Turkish phrase "Gracious God is good. God is compassionate." Often four to five hundred musicians accompanied the army. Sometimes the music alone was enough to drive enemy forces from the field.
The European troops encountered mehter music during the seventeenth century wars against the Ottomans on Europe's eastern border. European civilians heard mehter music for the first time when Sultan Suleyman II presented Augustus the Strong of Poland (1670-1733) with a mehter band of his very own. Europe was fascinated by the new sound; by 1770 most European armies had bands featuring Turkish instruments and fanciful variations of Turkish costumes.
Turkish music also played into the taste for turquerie (otherwise known as "Turkish stuff") that swept European society in the eighteenth century. Popular composers, including Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, wrote "Turkish" symphonies, ballets, and operas using new percussion instruments borrowed from the Ottomans-- bass drums, snare drums, cymbals, triangles, and Turkish crescent (also known as the "jingling Johnny"). The fashion reached its artistic height in 1777 with Mozart's Escape from the Seraglio. The fad for turquerie soon ended, but Turkish percussion instruments found a permanent home in the western symphony orchestra.
In 1826, the janissaries mutinied against Sultan Mahmud II. They were slaughtered by troops loyal to the sultan and the mehter bands were dispersed. Today a mehter band is attached to the Istanbul Military Museum. The band performs several times a week in a specially designed auditorium. It's well worth hearing, but take your earplugs. Mehter bands don't have an indoor voice.
(In case a visit to Turkey isn't in your immediate future, here's a sample or two.
This post previously appeared in Wonders and Marvels.
When Is A Pirate Not A Pirate?
When he's got a license to steal.
From the 16th through the mid-19th centuries, governments issued licenses, called letters of marque, to private ship owners that gave them permission to attack foreign shipping in times of war. Called privateers, these government-sanctioned pirates were an inexpensive way for governments to patrol the seas. Private investors outfitted warships in the hope of earning a profit from plunder taken from enemy merchants.
Unlike pirates, privateers had rules they had to follow. They were only allowed to attack enemy ships during times of war. Sometimes their commissions limited them to a specific area or to attacking the ships of a specific country. In exchange for following the rules, they would be treated as prisoners of war if they were captured.
In fact, it was sometimes hard to tell a privateer from a pirate. If a privateer attacked foreign shipping in peace time, interfered with the ships of neutral countries, or was just too violent, he was sometimes treated as a pirate if he was captured. Some privateers, like Sir Francis Drake, became national heroes. Others, like Captain William Kidd, were hanged as pirates.
Privateering was made illegal in 1856 by international treaty.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Back to Afghanistan
A while back I blogged about Great Britain's first disastrous attempt to invade Afghanistan.
That post barely scratched the surface of the story, so I was delighted when Shelf Awareness sent me Diana Preston's The Dark Defile:: Britain's Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842 to review.
In The Dark Defile, Preston tells the story of Great Britain's ill-fated attempt to interfere in Afghani politics in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, handling the inevitable parallels between the 19th-century British experience and modern events with a light touch and solid historical research.
Paranoid about Russian expansion into Central Asia, the British government sent the Army of the Indus into Afghanistan in 1838 with orders to overthrow the existing ruler and replace him with a British puppet. The expedition ended with the slaughter of the British forces as they retreated from Kabul.
Reading The Dark Defile is like watching an impending train wreck in an old movie: You are at turns horrified and fascinated, all the while hoping for a last-minute save that never comes. Preston uses diaries, letters and official accounts by both major and minor figures to illustrate the series of personal, political, and military errors of the First Afghan War. While politicians in London suppressed reports in which the British representative in Kabul argued against the political coup, one elderly general was given command of the expeditionary force because the climate of Kabul would be good for his health. Troops were housed in indefensible cantonments; subsidies to Afghani tribal leaders were cut. And when Afghan forces rebelled in the streets, British leaders hesitated to send out their troops. In the end, only one member of the expedition survived.
The Dark Defile is more than just an account of Britain's "Great Game" in Central Asia gone wrong. Preston ends with a critical assessment of Britain's "conspiracy of optimism" in Afghanistan, and its impact on future relationships between Afghanistan and the west.
I talked so much about the book that My Own True Love read it after I was done. His review was pithier than mine: "That was a hell of a book. Heartbreaking."
Pretty much sums it up.
The heart of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers