Featured

Constantinople: Not Just Suzerain, but Civilisational Centre

Historical Similarities Hits: 232 24 minutes read

Article 6 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: ‘The Map of Powers in 1780’, ‘The Anatomy of Tribute’, ‘Furnaces Across the Mountains’, ‘What Did Exist in the Principalities’, and ‘The Russian Model’.

I. A Morning in the Phanar, October 1785

The first call to prayer from the muezzin of Süleymaniye echoed at 4:37 a.m. in October 1785—pendulum-clock precision, for the muezzin had, in his upper room of the minaret, a German clock bought by his father in Vienna thirty years earlier. The sound, prolonged and modulated, rolled across the Golden Horn like a warm blanket, first touching the rooftops of the Phanar, then those of Galata, then the ships anchored in the harbour with their lanterns still lit.

In the house of Konstantinos Mourousis—dragoman of the Ottoman Grand Admiralty and a member of one of the four great Phanariote families—someone was already awake. The maid, Angeliki—a Greek woman from Chios, taken into service at the age of twelve, now thirty-six—lit the brass samovar in the ground-floor kitchen. The smoke from the charcoal rose lazily to the soot-stained wooden ceiling. In the inner courtyard, a Siamese cat—a gift from a French merchant with whom Mourousis had done business the previous year—meowed softly, demanding milk.

Upstairs, in the library overlooking the Golden Horn through three narrow windows, Mourousis himself—forty-two years old, with incipient baldness and tired eyes from a night spent with documents—prepared for his day. On his walnut desk, brought from Bohemia, lay: a copy of Encyclopédie, Volume VII (the letter ‘G’, with articles on grammar and geography), printed in Paris in 1757, open to the article ‘Grecs,’ which he had been reading for nearly a week with growing irritation (Diderot claimed that modern Greeks had ‘inherited nothing but ruins’—an insult Mourousis was preparing to refute in a memorandum to the Paris Academy); a Greek manuscript of Aristotle’s Analytics, in a Venetian edition from 1552; an Ottoman Turkish grammar book printed in Constantinople in 1729—among the few secular books to come from İbrahim Müteferrika’s first Ottoman printing press; and a manuscript translation of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, made by a friend from Corfu—a clandestine translation, for any printing press that officially published Rousseau in Ottoman territory would have been shut down within three hours.

Below the library, in the left courtyard, the servants were already moving. The horses were being saddled. At seven o’clock, Mourousis had an audience with the reis-ul efendi—the Ottoman foreign minister, in modern terms. A dignitary with whom Mourousis spoke, depending on the subject, in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, or French. At ten o’clock, he had a meeting with the French ambassador, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier—a learned aristocrat who had spent five years in archaeological research on the Greek islands and who was, technically speaking, under Ottoman protection as long as he remained in Constantinople. The discussion was to be about a delicate matter: the approval of a French expedition to document the ruins of Halicarnassus—an expedition the Porte suspected of being a cover for illegal archaeological looting.

All this took place, on that October morning in 1785, in a neighbourhood of a few hundred houses grouped around the Ecumenical Patriarchate, on the edge of the largest city in Europe—some said the largest in the world, if the comparison with London and Paris was not made too scrupulously. Constantinople had, in 1785, approximately 700,000 inhabitants. Paris had 650,000. London, 750,000. And Bucharest—40,000. One hundred and sixty kilometres from Reșița, but ten thousand kilometres from Constantinople in terms of civilisational scale.

This is the opening scene of our article. A great Phanariote, on an ordinary morning, preparing for a day of high-level dragoman work. With Diderot on his desk. With Rousseau hidden. With Aristotle open. With horses saddled for an audience at the Porte. He was not a provincial. He was not a backward subject. He was an inhabitant of the civilisational centre of the Levant—a centre that national historiography has all too often treated as a mere capital of oppression.

This article attempts to correct this methodological injustice. To show what Constantinople truly was in the decades 1770–1810. A rich, sophisticated, polyglot city with real attempts at modernisation—but with a technological blockage that historians still struggle to fully explain.

II. What Constantinople Was in 1780

A city. The most populous in Europe. Perhaps in the world, depending on the census (Beijing had an estimated 1.5 million; Kyoto, about 300,000; Delhi, about 500,000). But Constantinople was, par excellence, the European-Asian city—the one that belonged neither to the West nor the East, but facilitated communication between them.

Population, in estimated figures for 1780:

  • Muslims (Turks and converts from various ethnicities): 380,000–400,000

  • Greek Orthodox: 130,000–150,000

  • Armenian Apostolics: 80,000–90,000

  • Jews (mostly Sephardic, arrived after 1492 from Spain): 50,000–60,000

  • Latins (Catholics from old Genoese, Venetian families, plus Western consuls and merchants): 8,000–10,000

  • Various other communities (Albanians, Serbs, Romanians, Arabs, Egyptians, free Blacks): 30,000–40,000

Six major communities, plus dozens of sub-communities, plus a European consular network—French, Dutch, Austrian, Russian, English, later American (the first American consul would arrive in 1830). Each community with its own leadership—the millet system, which granted non-Muslim communities internal autonomy in matters of family law, religious education, and the collection of their own internal taxes. The Ecumenical Patriarch was, theoretically, the ‘responsible one’ for all Orthodox Christians in the empire before the Sultan. The Grand Rabbi, for the Jews. The Armenian Patriarch, for the Armenians.

Geography of the city. Three major areas. Stamboul proper—the old Byzantine city on the promontory between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, with the Topkapı Palace, the great imperial mosques (Hagia Sophia converted into a mosque, Süleymaniye, Sultanahmet Cami with its six minarets, the recently built Nuruosmaniye), the Grand Bazaar. Galata—the ‘Latin’ quarter north of the Golden Horn, with the Genoese tower, Catholic churches, European consulates, warehouses of Genoese and French merchants. Pera (today Beyoğlu)—further up from Galata, where most European diplomats lived, in a neighbourhood strikingly reminiscent of a small Naples.

And the Phanar—the special quarter, north of the Theodosian walls, between the Adrianople Gate and the Golden Horn. Here, in six or seven narrow streets descending in steps to the water, the Greek Orthodox elite of the empire was concentrated. Here was the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Here were the residences of the great families—Mavrocordat, Ipsilanti, Suțu, Ghica (when they were in Constantinople between reigns), Karadja, Moruzi, Mourousis, Callimachi, Racoviță.

Commerce. A port with 350–400 ships anchored at any given time. Venetian ships brought silk, glassware, and paper from Fabriano. French ships—wool cloth from Sedan, Provençal olive oil, books from Amsterdam. Dutch ships—cheese, butter, salted herring. Austrian ships—Bohemian glass, Viennese clocks, Hungarian tobacco. And from the interior: Moldo-Wallachian grain (transported by barge on the Danube and then by Ottoman ships on the Black Sea), Wallachian sheep, Moldavian butter, salt from Ocna Mare, furs from Russia, Persian silks, Yemeni coffee, Indian spices, Black slaves from Ethiopia, and white slaves from Georgia and Circassia.

Libraries. The Sultan’s Great Library at Topkapı—approximately 15,000 manuscripts, mostly in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, with unique pieces from the first Islamic millennium. The Ecumenical Patriarchal Library—8,000 Greek manuscripts, several hundred from the Byzantine period. The Armenian Library—4,000 manuscripts, including a considerable part predating the Cilician genocide of the 14th century. The private libraries of the Phanariote families together contained another 20,000–25,000 volumes—the libraries of the Mavrocordats, the Callimachis, the Ipsilantis contained French, Italian, and Latin books, plus inherited Greek manuscripts.

A concentration of manuscripts that probably exceeded any other European city, with the exception of the Vatican (which had 60,000–70,000) and, perhaps, Paris (the Royal Library had about 100,000 volumes in 1780, but most were printed).

Educational institutions. Enderun—the palace school, which trained the Ottoman administrative elite from children taken from Christians (through devshirme, officially abolished in 1683 but unofficially continued). Great medreses—Süleymaniye, Fatih, Ayasofya—with over 5,000 students in total, training Islamic religious scholars. The Great School of the Nation (Megali tou Genous Scholi), the Greek school at the Patriarchate—which trained dragomans, officials, doctors, with a bilingual Greek-Latin curriculum. The School of Chalki, on the island of the same name—more theological, but with a solid humanist curriculum.

What was missing? A university in the Western sense (secular faculties, with doctorates, with original research). An engineering school—with the exception of the attempts that would begin only under Selim III, which we will discuss. A modern astronomical observatory (although there were old Islamic astronomical traditions). An academy of sciences on the model of the French or British ones.

III. The Stratified City: Six Communities, One Economy

Here, we must perform an exercise in imagination. A Western urbanite who visited Constantinople in 1780—a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Austrian—would have seen, at first glance, an Oriental city. Minarets, domes, long robes, tea served in small cups, strange music, beggars at the mosque gates.

But at second glance—which required staying a few weeks and learning the social code—they would have seen something more complex: a stratified economy in which each community occupied a traditional professional niche, and inter-community interactions had precise protocols.

The Turkish Muslims dominated the state administration, the army, the religious judiciary (kadi courts), and a considerable part of the internal trade (bazaar, neighbourhood shops). They did not, however, dominate international trade—which involved maritime travel that traditional Muslims avoided. Nor finance—which was considered ‘impure’ due to Koranic restrictions on interest. Nor, to a large extent, precision crafts—for which they had less inclination compared to the Greeks, Armenians, or Jews.

The Greek Orthodox, through the Phanariotes, dominated the functions of dragomans and the administration of the Romanian Principalities. Through the merchants of Chios, Smyrna, and Corfu—they dominated a considerable part of the Levantine maritime trade. Through the islanders of the Aegean—a part of the merchant marine (not the military, which remained Ottoman). Through the court physicians—high-end medical practice, trained in Padua, Bologna, later Halle.

The Armenian Apostolics had a remarkable speciality: jewellery, silversmithing, precision engraving. The Sultan’s gold collars, the earrings of high-ranking ladies, the engraved sabres of the pashas—all came from Armenian workshops in the Kumkapı district. In addition, the Duzian family—Armenians originally from Diyarbakır—dominated for six generations (from 1740 to 1880) the position of sarraf-bashi, chief of the imperial mint. A position that required, in addition to technical metallurgical expertise, the Sultan’s absolute trust. The Duzian family was, for 140 years, the ‘personal numismatists’ of the Ottoman house. No other non-Muslim administrative post had such long continuity within the same clan.

The Sephardic Jews—who had arrived in Constantinople after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s—controlled a considerable part of the trade in jewellery, fine textiles, and medicines. They also had some major private banks (the Camondo, Rothenberg-Beira houses) that provided credit to imperial merchants. They spoke Ladino among themselves (medieval Spanish with Hebrew and Turkish influences), a living language in 1780—and one that would survive until the Salonika genocide in 1943.

The Latins—a small community, but with disproportionate diplomatic influence—were interpreters, merchants, courtiers. Through them, the first contact with the West was often made.

The rest—an ‘ethnic stew’ in which everyone had their niche. Albanians in the corps of arnauts, the personal guard of pashas and, later, Phanariote rulers. Serbs in the horse trade. Sudanese as eunuchs in the harem. Georgians as elite bodyguards. Circassians—men as soldiers, women as privileged slaves.

The interactions. Here is the crucial nuance. All these six communities did not intermarry. A Turk did not marry a Greek woman (unless she converted). An Armenian did not marry a Jewess. A Genoese did not marry a Turk. The communities lived juxtaposed, not integrated. But they did business together. And business had a protocol: in franca (the commercial language of the Levant—a mix of Italian, Spanish, French, with Turkish vocabulary); in Arabic numerals and Spanish talers; with contracts drawn up in two or three parallel languages; with witnesses from a third community.

A Greek merchant doing business with a Turk for a ship going to Alexandria, with insurance from a Jewish house, paid through credit opened with an Armenian with an office in Smyrna—was normal. It was, in fact, what happened every market day.

The irony of the system. This economic cooperation between different communities, which the 19th-century West would idealise as ‘Levantine cosmopolitanism,’ was as real as it was fragile. It depended on the maintenance of the millet system—which presupposed the internal autonomy of each community. When the millet system began to unravel in the 19th century, under the pressure of modern nationalisms (Greek first, then Armenian, finally Arab), cosmopolitanism evaporated rapidly.

In 1780, it was still intact. And Constantinople was, as a consequence, a city of a cosmopolitan vitality that Bucharest or Iași could not have—because they were too small, too ethnically homogeneous, too peripheral.

IV. The Phanar: Surviving Byzantium plus Commercial Levant

We have already mentioned the Phanar in Article 1 as the ‘civilisational heart’ of Phanariotism. Here, in Article 6, we describe it in more detail.

Intimate geography. Six or seven narrow streets descending in steps from the top of the hill to the waters of the Golden Horn. Stone houses with two or three storeys, with enclosed balconies (cumbă) from which women could look out without being seen from the street. Inner courtyards with stone fountains and cypress trees. Small churches, barely visible from the street (the Ottoman rule was that Christian churches should not be taller than neighbouring mosques—so Phanariote architecture privileged interior elevation over exterior). Silversmith and embroidery workshops on the ground floor. Private libraries on the upper floors.

Who lived there. About 300 prominent families, of which 20–25 were ‘great’—those who provided dragomans to the Porte and rulers to the Principalities. The rest—families of scholars, doctors, wealthy merchants, minor officials. The total population of the neighbourhood: 8,000–10,000 souls, a tiny percentage of the city’s 700,000. But the concentration of cultural and social capital, per surface area, was perhaps the highest in Europe.

The library of Alexandru Ipsilanti the Elder—who would become ruler of Wallachia in 1774—is an instructive example. Its partial inventory, made in 1802, shows approximately 3,500 volumes: 40% in Greek (patristic, philosophy, history, literature), 25% in Latin (Roman law, ancient history, surprisingly well-represented Catholic theology), 15% in French (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Diderot; plus some novels and editions of classic theatre), 10% in Italian (Petrarch, Ariosto, Machiavelli, plus Venetian texts on navigation), 5% in German, 3% in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic (Quran, a few legal treatises, a few histories); the rest, a few volumes in English, Russian, and Spanish.

A serious polyglot library. Comparable to the libraries of secondary aristocrats in Paris, Vienna, or St. Petersburg. Not Voltaire himself—who had 25,000 volumes at Ferney—but a notary from Marseille or a court councillor from Berlin would not have been far behind.

What the Phanariotes read. Here is the place for a surprisingly precise observation. The learned Phanariotes read, primarily:

  1. Greek Patristics—Ioan of Damascus, Gregory Palamas, Basil the Great. This was the backbone of their religious-intellectual formation.

  2. Ancient Classics—Aristotle (especially Politics and Nicomachean Ethics), Plato, Homer, the tragedians, Plutarch (extremely popular as a source of political-moral examples), Thucydides.

  3. French Enlightenment—not all, but selected: Voltaire (almost all Phanariotes had Candide, Zadig, Traité sur la tolérance); Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws was the mandatory classic, used as a legal argument in the reforms of Constantin Mavrocordat); Rousseau (The Social Contract read with caution and moderate admiration—for it was too revolutionary); Diderot (less popular than Voltaire).

  4. Byzantine Jurists—the Basilika, the Prochiron, Matthew Blastares’ Syntagma. The basis of Phanariote law and, by extension, of Moldo-Wallachian legislation until the Organic Regulations.

  5. Historians—Byzantium (Cedrenus, Nicetas Choniates), Rome (Livy, Tacitus), sometimes contemporaries (Voltaire as historian of Louis XIV, Robertson for Scotland and America).

What they did not read, or read very little:

  • Newton (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687). An educated Phanariote had heard of Newton. He had not read him. Newtonian physics required mathematics that the princely academies did not teach.

  • Descartes as a philosopher of science (Regulæ ad Directionem Ingenii, Discours de la Méthode). They read him as a metaphysician, more rarely as an inspirer of experimental thought.

  • The complete Encyclopédie. They had it—Alexandru Ipsilanti had almost the complete set by 1780. But the technical articles (on metallurgy, spinning, chemistry, agriculture) were ignored. They read the philosophical, political, and literary articles.

  • Technical manuals of the Encyclopédistes—Bézout’s mathematics courses, Lagrange’s mechanics courses, Fourcroy’s chemistry courses. Practically non-existent in Phanariote libraries.

Here is one of the key observations of the article. The Phanar was a centre of great intellectual refinement—but this refinement was literary-juridical-philosophical, not techno-scientific. ‘Their Enlightenment was literary and juridical. It was not technological’—as we said in Article 1. Here, almost halfway through the series, we reinforce this observation with the partial inventories of the libraries.

A learned Phanariote read The Social Contract and wrote subtle annotations in its margins about sovereignty. He did not, at the same time, open a treatise on the principles of the steam engine.

And if he did not open it, how could he design a furnace?

V. Ottoman Modernisation: Real, Delayed, Blocked Attempts

It is important—and historically corrective—to say that the Ottomans attempted modernisation. They did not refuse it out of Oriental stubbornness (a lazy Western myth). They attempted it, with varying intensity, for a century. And their attempts deserve to be enumerated.

The First Ottoman Printing Press, 1729. In Constantinople, a Hungarian convert named İbrahim Müteferrika (formerly a Christian Calvinist, a Turkish prisoner at 15, converted to Islam, promoted through his services at the Porte) obtained from Sultan Ahmed III, with the support of Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha, authorisation to establish a printing press with Arabic/Turkish characters. The authorisation was conditional: he could print secular books—histories, geographies, military treatises—but not the Quran and religious texts (which, by tradition, remained in manuscript copy).

In 22 years of activity (1729–1751), Müteferrika’s press produced only 17 books, in total print runs of approximately 15,000 copies. The main volume was an Ottoman Turkish grammar followed by dictionaries, historical treatises (a translation of Ibn Khaldun, one of Katib Çelebi’s works), a few geographical atlases based on European sources. After Müteferrika’s death, the press went into decline. It would only be reactivated in 1784 under Abdülhamid I, then expanded under Selim III.

Why only 17 books? Here is the place for an important observation. It was not primarily the technique—the presses of Müteferrika, bought from Europe, worked. It was not religious prohibitions—the Sultan had explicitly authorised printing. The main barrier was demand. The traditional Ottoman Turkish elite—the beys, the pashas, the ulema—did not buy printed books. They preferred copied manuscripts, which were part of the traditional economy (copyists, calligraphers, miniature engravers lived from this economy and opposed change). For their class, the printed book was vulgar, beneath the dignity of a cultivated man. It was a cultural barrier, not a religious one.

The Reforms of Ahmed III (1703–1730). The ‘Tulip Period,’ as it is called in Ottoman historiography. Modest but real modernisations: the first Ottoman embassy to Paris (1721—Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, who would write the first Ottoman report on European society), the first public parks in French style in Constantinople (Kağıthane), the first systematic translations from French and Italian. All this was interrupted by the Patrona Halil uprising of 1730, which deposed Ahmed III and executed the Grand Vizier. Reform stopped abruptly.

The Reforms of Mustafa III (1757–1774). After the military disaster of the war with Russia in 1768–74 (which, as we said in Article 1, would lead to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca), Mustafa III understood that the empire needed military modernisation. He founded two technical schools: Hendesehane (School of Military Mathematics) at the Constantinople Naval Shipyard in 1773, with French professors, including a certain François de Tott—a Frenchman of Hungarian origin who would become a central figure in Ottoman reform. He bought European technical books translated into Turkish. He employed French officers to train the artillery corps.

Selim III (1789–1807) and Nizam-ı Cedid. Here is the apogee of Ottoman reform in our period. Selim, enthroned at 27, with an unusual personal education (he had spent many years in the ‘golden cage’ of the kafes—a kind of residential detention for deposed princes—during which he read enormously, learned French, corresponded with Louis XVI), launched a comprehensive modernisation programme which he called Nizam-ı Cedid—‘The New Order.’

What did Nizam-ı Cedid include? Military reform (the creation of new units, trained on the European model, with European uniforms, with modern weapons—but in parallel with the old traditional army, not as its replacement); fiscal reform (the attempt to collect taxes more efficiently, through salaried officials instead of tax farming); naval reform (the purchase of modern frigates, the construction of new shipyards); diplomatic reform (the establishment of the first permanent Ottoman embassies in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin—until then the Porte had only operated with temporary embassies); educational reform (the expansion of Hendesehane, the founding of a modern medical school—Tıphane-i Amire).

The results were promising. By 1806, the Nizam-ı Cedid corps numbered approximately 25,000 well-trained soldiers, with French and English officers as instructors. The reform budget consumed approximately 20% of imperial revenues. Armament production at the Tophane arsenal had increased by 60% compared to 1789.

And in the same year, 1807, the entire project collapsed. Not because of the reform itself, but because of the Janissaries.

VI. The Janissaries: Modernisation That Could Not Be Done from Above

Here is one of the great paradoxes of the history of modernisation. Selim III was an absolute sultan—he could theoretically decide anything. He had the support of part of the enlightened Ottoman elite. He had the support of European ambassadors. He had imperial resources. And yet, he was overthrown by his own old troops.

The Janissaries. The elite corps of the Ottoman army, founded in the 14th century, recruited through the devshirme system (Christian boys taken from Balkan families, converted to Islam, trained as professional soldiers). At their peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were among the most effective military units in the world—they had conquered Constantinople in 1453, then Belgrade, Rhodes, Cyprus, all of Egypt. A Janissary of Suleiman the Magnificent was a feared professional.

By 1780, the Janissaries were a very different structure. Devshirme had been officially abandoned in 1683 and unofficially in the following decades. The corps now recruited largely from the sons of Janissaries (a closed caste) and, more seriously, through the purchase of ‘positions.’ A merchant of Constantinople could buy a Janissary position for his son—not to fight, but to benefit from the fiscal and salary privileges of the corps. The son became a nominal Janissary, not an effective one. He continued to do business, and the Janissary salary was an additional rent.

The result? In 1789, when Selim III ascended the throne, the Janissary registers listed approximately 400,000 ‘Janissaries’ throughout the empire. Those who could actually take up arms were, it is estimated, under 40,000. The rest were names in the register, drawing salaries without performing military service.

A gigantic system of fictitious rents, fiercely defended by those who benefited from it.

The Nizam-ı Cedid reform directly threatened this structure. The creation of a new, modern, efficient military corps meant, in the medium term, the disappearance of the Janissaries. And the 400,000 names in the register, together with their families, were approximately 1.5 million souls—a huge political clientele, concentrated precisely in Constantinople, with a tradition of uprising (the Janissaries had already deposed several sultans in the past).

What happened in 1807. In May, the Janissary garrison in Belgrade revolted. The fire spread rapidly. On 29 May 1807, the Janissaries in Constantinople proclaimed Mustafa IV, Selim’s cousin, as sultan. Selim III was imprisoned in the kafes. The Nizam-ı Cedid troops were dissolved. The European officers were expelled. The fiscal reforms were annulled. The reformed European embassies barely continued to function.

On 28 July 1808, when a loyal force attempted to restore Selim, Mustafa IV ordered his assassination in his cell in the kafes. Selim was strangled by two eunuchs—probably in the very room where, twenty years earlier, he had prepared his reforms. His body was left, according to a witness, in the palace courtyard for several hours ‘as proof.’

His successor—Mahmud II (1808–1839)—would resume the reform, but with a lesson learned. He did not create troops ‘parallel’ to the Janissaries. He eliminated them physically. In 1826, in a single day—15 June 1826, the Vak'a-i Hayriye (‘Auspicious Incident’)—Mahmud attacked the Janissary barracks in Constantinople with loyal artillery. Approximately 6,000 Janissaries died that day; another 20,000 were executed in the following weeks. The corps was officially dissolved. The Janissaries disappeared from Ottoman history.

Nineteen years after the murder of Selim III, the reform he had desired became reality—through massacre.

This episode teaches us something essential about Ottoman modernisation—and, by extension, about the modernisation of any old society. It is not enough for the tsar, sultan, or ruler to want reform. He must also have the power to impose it over the resistance of entrenched interest groups. Selim III did not have this power. Mahmud II did, but with a generation’s delay.

And the Principalities, during this period, what were they doing? In 1807, the year of Selim’s deposition, the ruler of Wallachia was Constantin Ipsilanti—the son of Alexandru Ipsilanti the Elder. A learned man with Russian sympathies, who would himself be deposed the same year by an Ottoman firman. In 1826, the year of the Janissary massacre, the ruler of Wallachia was Grigore IV Ghica—a Moldavian-Albanian Phanariote, the last before the Organic Regulations. It was not, in any case, a period of Romanian reforms.

VII. What Constantinople Had, What Bucharest Did Not

An exercise in balance.

Constantinople had:

  • A population of 700,000 (Bucharest: 40,000)

  • Six major ethnic communities with their own trade and educational networks (Bucharest: predominantly mono-ethnic Romanian, with small Greek and Jewish communities)

  • A port on two continents with 350–400 ships (Bucharest: riverine, dependent on Giurgiu and Brăila)

  • Public and private libraries with over 100,000 manuscripts and books (Bucharest: probably 15,000–20,000, mostly religious, in the libraries of the Metropolitanate and a few boyars)

  • Three major medreses and a major Greek school training the administrative elite (Bucharest: a princely academy with 80 students)

  • Foreign embassies with learned personnel (French, English, Austrian, Russian, Dutch) (Bucharest: a few foreign consuls, temporary)

  • Printing presses—both Müteferrika-Ottoman and Greek, Armenian, Jewish—with varied secular production (Bucharest: the Metropolitanate press, almost exclusively religious)

  • Doctors trained in Padua, Bologna, Halle, with hospitals of several hundred beds (Bucharest: Colțea Hospital with 40 beds, two doctors)

  • A commercial theatre—Italian and French, albeit modest (Bucharest: nothing until 1817)

  • A fiscal cadastre, albeit imperfect (Bucharest: sporadic cadastral surveys)

  • A permanent diplomatic corps (Bucharest: the capuchehaia in Constantinople, nothing elsewhere)

Constantinople did not have, however:

  • An industrial blast furnace (there were not many in the West in 1780 either; the first serious Ottoman furnace would be in Zeytinburnu in the 1840s)

  • Mechanical spinning mills

  • Armaments factories on a European scale (Tophane was large, but technologically twenty years behind Woolwich or Tula)

  • An academy of sciences on the model of the French or British ones

  • A modern university with doctorates in the natural sciences

  • An independent daily press

  • Commercial banks with joint-stock capital

  • A modern commercial code

So Constantinople, in 1780, was a city advanced compared to Bucharest in dozens of dimensions, but behind London in dozens of others. An intermediate situation. High cultural sophistication. Modest technological sophistication.

And this was, by extension, the situation of the Principalities. Linked to a civilisational centre that was itself advanced in some directions and backward in others. And the direction in which Constantinople lagged behind—industrial technology—was precisely the direction that would define the destiny of modernity in the coming decades.

VIII. Conclusion: The First Globalisation, the First Marginalisation

A great Phanariote, Konstantinos Mourousis, prepared for a day of high-level dragoman work on an October morning in 1785. With Diderot on his desk, with Rousseau hidden, with Aristotle open, with horses saddled for the Porte. He was not a provincial. He was an inhabitant of the civilisational centre of the Levant.

And the civilisational centre of the Levant was, at that same time, the largest city in Europe. Polyglot. Sophisticated. With libraries, embassies, merchants, doctors, scholars. But also with a problem: it was not the civilisational centre that would matter in the coming century. The centre that would matter—because it would dictate the technological paradigm—was London. Or, in acceptable variations, Manchester and Birmingham.

And between Constantinople and London, in 1785, a technological fault line opened that would become, in the coming decades, a geopolitical abyss. Constantinople had the Patriarchate and the Grand Bazaar. London had the Royal Society and the steam engine. Both were centres. Only one was a paradigm.

The Phanariotes understood this change late. Too late. When they did understand it—perhaps beginning with Alexandru Ipsilanti the Younger, who would lead the Greek revolution of 1821 and die as an Austrian prisoner in a Bohemian fortress—it was already impossible to reverse the drift. They were caught in a civilisation that was losing its centrality. And civilisations that lose their centrality are not saved by reform from within—they melt, with suffering, into the new paradigm.

Conclusion in Three Questions.

First: Was Constantinople ‘backward’? No, in the current sense. On the contrary, it was a city of great cultural sophistication, comparable to Paris or Vienna in many ways. But it was unevenly advanced. Refined in literature, law, and commerce. Modest in technology and industry. And this unevenness cost it dearly on the scale of the century.

Second: Could the Phanariotes have done something differently? Little. By their position, they were trapped in an imperial structure that did not prioritise industrial technology. The most enlightened among them—an Alexandru Ipsilanti the Elder, a Constantin Mavrocordat before him, a Grigore Ghica of Moldavia—tried, within their limits, to introduce institutional reforms. They could not introduce industrial reforms, because industry itself was not a category they considered—it was not in their library.

Third—for the contemporary reader. What is today’s equivalent of the Phanar? Perhaps the continental European elites who view Silicon Valley with masked cultural envy—sophisticated in literature, law, and philosophy, but increasingly marginal in technology. Or the European academic elite who still believe that philosophy matters in itself, when only the philosophy that can influence decisions about AI matters. Or the urban elites of Eastern Europe of our generation, with their bilingual libraries, their European sympathies, but with fewer and fewer technological products in the global output.

The Phanar, in 1785, was refined. It was dignified. It was useless. And the uselessness was not its fault—it was the historical condition in which it found itself.

The first call to prayer from Süleymaniye echoed at 4:37 a.m. in October 1785. The muezzin had a German clock bought in Vienna. The sound, prolonged and modulated, rolled across the Golden Horn. And in the libraries of the Phanar, a day began, full of Diderot and audiences and manuscripts, in a civilisation that was no longer a paradigm. Only refined. Only dignified. Only waiting.

Selected Bibliography

  • Wikipedia EN, Phanariots: en.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia EN, Nizam-ı Cedid: en.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia EN, Selim III: en.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia EN, Auspicious Incident (Janissary massacre of 1826): en.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia EN, İbrahim Müteferrika: en.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia EN, Millet (Ottoman Empire): en.wikipedia.org.

  • Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press, 1961 (a classic).

  • Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire, I.B. Tauris, 2000.

  • Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution, University of California Press, 2011—on the Phanariote world.

  • Neagu Djuvara, Între Orient și Occident (Between Orient and Occident): archive.org.

*The next article in the series: ‘The Peasant’s Table: Polenta, Pork, and Wattle-and-Daub—The Anthropology of a World’—a descent to the level of daily life. What people ate, what they wore, what a household looked like, how they were born, married, died. The most anthropological article of the series. Coming in two weeks.*