Chapter Six.
Casting around for a new profession that would bring excitement to my life, I fixed on the military, What could be more exciting than to participate in the historical adventure of the expanding Ottoman empire? After all, I had already benefited, personally, from Ottoman conquests. And to pursue such a career would be to follow in the footsteps of Sarah'il Yaqbul-Yaz’an. So, drawing upon my early years as an apprentice to an architect in Cordoba, and upon my recent experience as a ship’s carpenter, I commenced the study of military engineering. Over the course of the next decade, under a leading Ottoman practitioner (a Christian convert to Islam), I at-tempted to master this demanding new discipline.
My course of study emphasized the historical di-mension. The earliest Ottoman campaigns that I studied included the following: Kulaca Hisar, Bursa, Aleppo, (against the Iranians), Damascus, Jerusalem, Nicaea, Bapheus, and Dimbos. Some of these campaigns took place at the end of the 13th century, and the rest, during the first third of the 14th.
By the early 14th century, the Ottomans were already formidable adversaries, feared for their deployment of human waves of nomadic archers. During that same era, for campaigns involving sieges, their main weapon was starvation. After despoiling the countryside, Ottoman armies would camp outside the enemy’s fortresses, and patiently await capitulation. Nearer the end of the 14th century, Ottoman forces enjoyed many major triumphs, some of which will, undoubtedly, be remembered until the end of time. Such were the victory at Kosovo (1389) and Sultan Bayezid I’s campaign against Wallachia (1394-95).
Innovation, always a key element in Ottoman strategy, was a crucial factor in these successes. Undisciplined hordes of mounted archers gave way to well-organized units of cavalry (the Siladhar, Siphahi, and Akinci), and to highly trained infantrymen. The latter comprised an elite corps of captured Christian slaves known as the Janissaries.
Since the majority of early Ottoman campaigns fea-tured the aforementioned sieges, my technical studies focused on siege weaponry, including catapults (ballistas, onagers, and trebu-chets); side hooks and towers; Sambucas [siege engines]; and artillery launchers. Aware, as well, that a principal limiting factor in Ottoman con-quests had long been the maritime supremacy of the Venetians, my studies came to include naval engineering —not just the vessels, themselves, but the battering rams, catapults, and such, with which they were equipped. Under my master’s tutelage, I spent long hours poring over charts of the naval blockades that had kept besieged citadels from being relieved by sea.
Since fortresses were the centerpieces of siege war-fare, I assiduously studied architectural diagrams of Ottoman for-tresses. Among the most famous were Anadolu Hisari, of Sultan Beyazit Yıldırım (“the Thunderbolt”); and Rumeli Hisari, of Mehmed II (“Mehmet the Conqueror”). Both of these fortresses were in the vicinity of Constantinople, and both were instrumental in the successful 1453 capture of that prized city.
Another key to the famous victory at Constantinople was a colossal engineering feat, conceived and directed by Mehmed, personally. Since the defenders had laid a great chain across the Bosphorus, the Sultan ordered the construction of huge skids on which his ships could bypass the chain, by being dragged across land. The amounts of labor required to cut down so many giant trees, to turn their trunks into logs, to move the skids into place, and to roll the ships across them, must have been enormous.
Neither did my focus on military engineering make me tunnel-visioned. Keys to the conquest of Constantinople were not only the tactical advantages afforded by the two adjacent for-tresses, and Mehmed’s ingenious skids, but the Ottomans’ vast su-periority over their Byzantine adversaries in both numbers and weaponry. As is well known, the outcome at Constantinople was facilitated by the use of huge cannon, known as “Ottoman Bom-bards.” Since these monsters had not been previously seen, their effect on the morale of the Byzantine defenders (not to mention their walls) must have been profound.
Although my own future master, Suleiman I, has been justly accorded the honorifics, “Magnificent” and “Lawgiver,” he was by no means the only outstanding Ottoman commander. Witness the victor of Constantinople, Mehmed II, perhaps Suleiman’s principal rival for preeminence among several Sultans of military genius.
When my decade of apprenticeship had been com-pleted, in the year 5263–5264 [1503] I forsook my soft bed at the shipping company, and signed on with the yaya [mercenary foreigners’] division of Suleiman’s army. During the next two decades, from one successful campaign to the next, I rose to be among the Sultan’s most trusted military engineers. Among these campaigns were the Second Ottoman-Mamluk war, in which Egypt was finally conquered (1516-17); the siege of Jeddah, (1517); and the naval victory at Tiemcen (1518).
In 1523, soon after further victories at Belgrade, Sabac, and Knin, I played a prominent advisory role in the taking of the Portuguese island of Kamaran. A fine map, drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, formerly a pirate, and presently an Ottoman naval commander, was perhaps the key element in this Ottoman challenge to the maritime supremacy of Portugal. Having unhappily sojourned in that perfidious nation after fleeing Cordoba, I derived personal pleasure from the taking of Kamaran, at which I was present as an advisor.
Upon our return to Istanbul, the commanders of the Kamaran expedition, Selman Reis and Husayn al Rumi, singled out for praise my innovative design for the small, armed landing craft that had enabled our forces to establish a beachhead without the loss of a single fighter. More significantly, Kamaran was the first step towards the fulfillment of Suleiman’s ambition to become “Caliph of the World,” the first Sultan to rule not only the land, but the sea.
Inevitably, that same era witnessed some notable defeats, some due to deficient strategy and tactics. Had I been present, Suleiman’s siege of Rhodes, in 1522, might have succeeded. This may sound vainglorious, but my close, subsequent study of that siege suggested that both our sappers’ efforts to undermine the citadel’s walls and our bombardment of those walls were hampered by faulty technique. I mean, for a force of 100,000 to fail to overwhelm 16,000 defenders meant that something was seriously wrong!
Goaded by the fiasco at Rhodes, I began to focus on the deployment of artillery. Although other engineers had spent long hours trying to solve the problem of transporting the afore-mentioned Ottoman Bombards, it was I, Uzriel Abreu, who de-signed the eighteen-wheel flatbed wagon, drawn by six pair of ox-en. This innovation enabled my master to transport his Bombards pretty much wherever he wished, regardless of the terrain. Of course, compared to Mehmet’s giant skids, my “innova-tion” could be called a simple labor-saving device. Nevertheless, I am proud to note that it was my eighteen-wheelers that carried the Bombards through hundreds and hundreds of miles of swamps, deserts and mountains, during several campaigns. (Not Rhodes, of course, which was a naval campaign.) In fact, if my invention could have been brought into play a century earlier, in 1402, it might even have prevented the humiliating defeat of Bayezid I at Angora, or Ankara, at the hands of Timur Lenk [Timur the Lame, or Tamurlane]. But hindsight is always perfect.
The eighteen-wheeler effected singular changes to my professional and personal fortunes. Since I remained stubbornly resistant to conversion, I think that Suleiman and his commanders must have regarded my services as indispensable, or they might have cashiered me. In fact, during my first two decades of service, 1503-23, I rose through the ranks to the third highest Ottoman military office, Birinci Ferik [Lieutenant General], which was certainly a pinnacle for my co-religionists, at least to that date.
With my promotions came a shower of the rich spoils of war. These included large quantities of booty (jewels, furs, and such), grants of tracts of captured land (two fertile estates, one each in Hungary and in north Africa), and a wife! For, after the notably successful 1513 campaign in Mesopotamia, Suleiman presented me with a beautiful Circassian slave. She had previously belonged to one of his brothers, whom he had ordered strangled, thereby removing a potential rival (a custom among Ottoman royalty). Before the brother captured her, this woman —girl, really— had graced the harem of a Safavid potentate. By name, Snezhana, she became so dear to me that I never chose to take any of the other beauties that were on offer.
One day during 1514, about a year after my mar-riage, my commander, a Müşir [field marshal], questioned me about this choice. “Why, Uzriel, my dear,” he asked, “don’t you follow our own congenial custom of taking other wives, not to mention a few concubines, in order to lighten the burdens of your fair Snezhana?”
“I am sure you know, Sir,” I replied, “that our own custom is to take but a single wife.” Hardly an observant Jew, I said this in order to stymie the commander’s possible wish to usurp my Snezhana. Whatever the Müşir 's real motive was, he never repeated his suggestion. As I’m sure he was aware, Suleiman’s policy of tolerance of the customs of Jews, Christians, pagans, and even fellow Muslims who belonged to sects other than his, was an instrument of policy —like everything else the Lawgiver did.
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