The Regiment of the Air
The Imperial Aerial Regiment — Alay-ı Havâî-i Hümâyûn on the muster roll, the carpet men everywhere else — was raised by rescript in the spring of 1850, in the eleventh year of Abdülmecid I. The date is not an accident. The Tanzimat reforms were then at their busiest, seating new institutions by decree at a rate nobody in the Porte was troubling to keep up with, and a state that was giving itself a commercial code and a secular bench in the same twelve months saw no particular reason to deny itself a corps of the air.
Its establishment was one hundred and twenty carpets, two hundred and forty men — a pilot forward and a signaller aft on each — four regimental imams, and one mule wagon for the spare wool. It answered to the Serasker’s office, drew the pay of light cavalry, and was quartered where nothing had been quartered for twenty-four years: the Janissaries had been shelled out of existence in 1826, and the Porte had a habit of filling an empty barracks with whatever idea was fashionable that decade.
The Ancestors
Descent was claimed and could not be documented. The regiment’s founding ancestor was Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi, the man of a thousand sciences, who is said to have strapped on eagle wings around 1630 to 1632, thrown himself off the Galata Tower and come down in Doğancılar Square at Üsküdar, having crossed the water on a south-westerly while Murad IV watched from Sarayburnu. The sultan gave him a purse of gold and then exiled him to Algiers on the reasoning that it is not right to keep such people close. He died there at thirty-one. The regiment kept a copy of that exile order framed in the mess and called it the first flying licence issued in the empire.
Lagâri Hasan Çelebi, who is supposed to have gone up from the same promontory in 1633, a year after him, on sixty-four kilogrammes of gunpowder to mark the birth of a princess, and to have landed in the sea remarking that Jesus sent his regards, was ruled an artilleryman and not an airman. He was commemorated on a different wall, with markedly less enthusiasm, and the regiment’s rocket section never had more than four men in it.
The Machines
Every carpet on the strength came from the imperial factory at Hereke on the Gulf of İzmit, opened in 1843 and by then the only shed in the empire that could hold a hundred knots to the square centimetre without an argument. Regimental pattern was two and a half metres by one and a half, silk warp, wool pile, symmetrical Gördes knot throughout, with the squadron’s number worked into the border in a place the rider could not see and the ground crew could not miss. Dry weight eleven kilogrammes. Wet weight nineteen, which is why the regiment lost more machines to rain than to every other cause put together, and why the standing order on cloud was to go over it, never through it — an order the ballad below cheerfully ignores.
The Course
Flying was done out of Okmeydanı, the arrow field north of the Golden Horn that Mehmed II had set aside for archery and which is still littered, street by street, with the stones that mark where a particular shot came down. The airmen took the practice over without altering a comma of it: a menzil was a distance, a distance was a stone, and a stone once set could only be moved by beating it. The city course ran from the field, over the Horn, three times round the Süleymaniye and home, and was flown every Friday by whoever was not sick.
The long course was the deniz menzili, the sea distance: out over the Marmara, down the Aegean shore and along the Lycian coast to the harbour at Antalya. Six hundred and forty miles as the course was flown, against three hundred as the crow declines to fly it, because the crow does not have to keep a wet carpet within gliding distance of a beach. It was run once a year in the last week of May, and in thirty-one runnings it was never completed in under two days.
The Green Carpet
The prize was the Kilim-i Ahdar, the Green Carpet: three metres by one of green silk with a gold weft, presented by the sultan’s own hand at Antalya and confiscated by the regimental quartermaster before the winner had got back to Istanbul with it. The name was lifted, without embarrassment, from Solomon’s carpet of legend — green silk with a golden weft, sixty miles by sixty, on which Solomon is said to have breakfasted at Damascus and supped in Media. The regimental version was smaller by a factor of about a hundred thousand and nobody ever ate anything off it. Winners were entered in a ledger the corps called its menzilname, in the manner of the imperial festival books — the Surname-i Hümayun of 1582 set down each day in order, for fifty-two days, of the circumcision festival Murad III held for his son Mehmed; the difference being that the festival books were illustrated by the court artists of the palace studio and the menzilname was kept by a corporal.
The Ballad of the Air Menzil
Nothing survives of the regiment’s paperwork, which is convenient, and a great deal survives of its singing, which is not. What follows is the verse the carpet men are said to have sung at the Antalya finish. It has four stanzas, and the corps held that there was one for each leg of the sea distance — a claim the Bureau passes on without endorsing, since the third of them is unmistakably over Istanbul, which the field had left two legs earlier. Nobody in a hundred and twenty carpets appears to have raised the point. The rhymes are reproduced exactly as they were collected and defended not at all.
In skies where warriors of the air take flight,
On carpets woven with spells of might.
With banners fluttering, proud and high,
They race through the boundless, sapphire sky.
The start on the arrow field: the line away together, and the signallers already at their banners.
Threads of magic and valor combined,
Speed through clouds, in paths they find.
Prowess honed in battle’s embrace,
Shown in the daring, high-flying race.
Into the cloud bands over the Marmara, against every standing order the regiment ever wrote.
Above the mosques and spires they glide,
In formation, where destinies ride.
Commands echo as they intertwine,
In a contest where courage and skill align.
Formation over the domes — Istanbul, and the ballad two legs past it. Horns carried further than shouting; not much further.
From dawn’s first light to twilight’s fall,
Witness the spectacle that enthralls all.
A legacy of heroes in the skies vast,
Where the glory of the race forever lasts.
The Antalya finish at last light. The crowd is the only part of this the Bureau would swear to.
The Empire the Ballad Leans On
There was no regiment of the air, no green carpet and no sea distance. What is worth noticing is how little else had to be invented — so rather than set the record down beside the ballad, the Bureau proposes to put the two in one room and see which gives way.
An Empire in the Market for a Miracle
The ballad sings as though the empire were still expanding; in 1850 it had not expanded for a hundred and fifty-one years. Suleiman is where it would have liked to be standing — 30 September 1520 to 6 September 1566, at least twenty-five million subjects, the Hungarian royal army destroyed at Mohács on 29 August 1526 — and even he could not take Vienna, failing in front of it in 1529 against a garrison of sixteen thousand and again in 1532 against his own supply lines. The name that stuck at home is not the Magnificent but Kanuni, the Lawgiver, for the codes he consolidated rather than the provinces he took. He died at seventy-one on his thirteenth campaign, in camp at Szigetvár, and his death was kept from the army for forty-eight days so that nobody would go home: an empire that must hide a corpse to hold a siege line is already improvising.
The second Vienna settled the direction of travel. Kara Mustafa Pasha sat down before the city on 14 July 1683 with between ninety and a hundred and fifty thousand men; the relief army of seventy to eighty thousand Poles, Austrians, Saxons and Bavarians under John III Sobieski came over the Kahlenberg on 12 September; and around six that evening some eighteen thousand horsemen went down the slope in what is usually called the largest cavalry charge in history, three thousand Polish winged hussars at its head. The Treaty of Karlowitz, signed sixteen years later on 26 January 1699, handed the Habsburgs what corresponded to much of Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia, gave Podolia back to Poland-Lithuania and most of Dalmatia and the Morea to Venice — the first major Ottoman territorial losses in Europe, and the beginning of the reversal of almost three centuries of expansion, 1299 to 1683. A state does not raise a regiment of the air while its ordinary ideas are still working, and a hundred and twenty carpets is precisely what gets proposed in the fifth generation of their failure.
The Barracks Was Empty and the Date Is Right
The most defensible sentence in this article is the one it throws away: that the Porte filled an empty barracks with whatever idea was fashionable that decade. The Janissary corps, founded 28 June 1363, grew from under a thousand men in 1400 to 7,841 in 1484, 37,627 in 1609 and a nominal 135,000 by 1826, and its ranks were filled by the devshirme, which took Christian boys of about seven to twenty out of the Balkan provinces, one household in forty, every three or four years and sometimes annually, sending the ablest to the Enderûn palace school to be taught science, warfare and bureaucratic administration. First mentioned in writing in 1438, formally finished as a recruiting system in 1638 or 1648 and abolished early in Ahmet III’s reign, it produced grand viziers from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth — a slave administrator with no clan behind him being easier for a sultan to control than a Turkish notable with one. The corps it fed was among the first infantry in Europe to fire by rotating volley, from 1605; the whole organisation was the ocak, the hearth, the unit within it was the orta, headed by a çorbacı, and the badge of fellowship was not a kettle but a spoon, carried in a holder called the kaşıklık on the front of the börk cap — the kaşık kardeşliği, the brotherhood of the spoon, for men who ate, slept, fought and died together. They revolted for the first time in 1449, demanding higher wages, and got them. Mahmud II ended the argument on 15 June 1826 by shelling the barracks and killing about four thousand of the men inside, which the Ottoman calendar files as the Auspicious Incident.
Twenty-four years of empty buildings later, the invented rescript lands in a year that really was manufacturing bodies of men by decree. The Tanzimat calendar for 1850 alone carries a Ministry of Healthcare, a Commerce and Trade Code, and commercial courts of mixed Turkish and European membership — the first secular legal system in the empire — with an Academy of Sciences following in 1851. In the same twelve months two new communities were recognised under the millet arrangement, Armenian Catholic and Armenian Protestant, joining the three carried into the nineteenth century: Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish. Each kept its own courts, schools, hospitals and tax collection under its own religious law, its head answering to the sultan and nobody in between; the tidy story that Mehmed the Conqueror designed the arrangement is a later invention, systematic use of the word dating only from Mahmud II’s reign; and the reform edict of 1856 proclaimed civil equality across all of them, thereby beginning to dismantle what it was reforming. The date, in short, is not where the forgery shows. One more rescript in 1850 would have gone through on the nod.
The Pedigree Has a Single Witness
Where the regiment does give itself away is in its ancestors, and the giveaway is a method rather than a date. Everything the corps claimed about Hezârfen comes out of one book: Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname is the only source for the glide from the Galata Tower to Doğancılar Square around 1630 to 1632, for Murad IV watching from Sarayburnu, and for the purse of gold and the exile that followed. Lagâri has the same witness and the same author — in 1633, to mark the birth of Murad IV’s daughter, he is supposed to have gone up on fifty okka of gunpowder, sixty-four kilogrammes, announcing that he was off to talk to Jesus, landed in the sea, swum ashore, reported that Jesus sent his regards, and collected silver and the rank of sipahi for it. Two flights, one traveller, no corroboration.
The empire’s own beginning works the same way. The dream of Osman — a moon rising from the breast of Sheikh Edebali and sinking into Osman’s, then a tree from his navel whose shade covered the world — is first communicated in that form in the later fifteenth century, a century and a half after Osman’s death, which is roughly how long it takes a border chieftain to acquire a prophecy; and the 1299 founding date is a tidy-up of the same kind, since Osman took over the district around Söğüt on his father Ertuğrul’s death in 1281, the first datable event of his life is the Battle of Bapheus in 1301 or 1302, and the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm passed out of the historical record in 1308. Even the far end of him is unfixed: tradition has him dying just after the capture of Bursa, while some scholars place his death in 1324, the year Orhan succeeded. A regiment attested in one document, claiming descent from two men who exist in one document, inside an empire that did not record the life of its founder until the fifteenth century, more than a hundred years after his death: the carpet men are not a departure from the Ottoman documentary record but an unusually faithful example of it. The only thing the Bureau can claim over Evliya Çelebi is being open about which century did the writing.
The Weaving Is Turkish, the Flying Is Not
The weaving needed no exaggeration at all. Eight fragments of Anatolian carpet from the Seljuq period came out of the Alaeddin Mosque at Konya in 1905 and four more from Beyşehir in 1925 — geometric, hexagons and stars, in muted blues and reds; Ottoman Ushak rugs turn up so often in Renaissance painting that dealers named a whole class of them after Holbein; the knot is symmetrical, wrapped round two warps with both ends emerging together, and twentieth-century Western traders christened it the Turkish or Gördes knot; and the imperial factory at Hereke is real, was founded in 1843, and wove silk at eighty to a hundred knots per square centimetre. The regimental specification given above is therefore not an invention but a quotation, and a modest one: the forger had a better machine available than the one he troubled to claim. The same schedule governs this page’s rule, whose tulips and carnations are İznik motifs — cobalt blue alone from about 1480 to 1520, turquoise joining around 1520, purple and sage green around 1540, and the thick iron-oxide Armenian bole red only from about 1560, with the more natural quatre fleurs of tulip, carnation, rose and hyacinth introduced in the second half of the sixteenth century and promoted by Kara Memi, chief artist of Süleyman’s court by 1557/8, quality collapsing after the 1590s and the last dated piece falling in 1678. A fake can be caught on a colour.
The flying is where the article stops being Turkish. The most famous carpet in the world got into the Thousand and One Nights sideways: Antoine Galland’s twelve French volumes of 1704 to 1717 were the first European version of it, and several of the tales everybody knows from them — Aladdin, Ali Baba, and the story of Prince Ahmed and the fairy Paribanou — cannot be found in any of the original Arabic manuscripts. Galland wrote that he had them by mouth from a Christian Maronite storyteller, Hanna Diyab, during Diyab’s visit to Paris in 1709. The carpet in that last tale is bought at Bisnagar in India by Prince Husain, eldest son of the Sultan of the Indies, and whoever sits on it and wills it is set down wherever he pleases, near at hand or many a day’s journey off. Behind that stands Solomon’s carpet: green silk, golden weft, sixty miles square, breakfast in Damascus and supper in Media. So the corps’s machines are the most Turkish objects in this article and its central miracle the least — the one component of the Alay-ı Havâî-i Hümâyûn that could not have come out of Hereke is the flying.
Sixty-One Years Late
The empire did get its regiment of the air: sixty-one years after the one described above, wearing a fez and flying Blériots. Under War Minister Mahmud Shevket Pasha, Cavalry Captain Mehmet Fesa and Engineer Lieutenant Yusuf Kenan were sent to a flying school near Paris and certified on 21 February 1912 — and note the rank that went first, the army of 1912 still having no category for a man who moves fast and reports what he sees except cavalry. An aircraft school opened at Yeşilköy, now Istanbul’s airport, on 3 July 1912; fifteen machines were on strength by the end of the year; seventeen aircraft flew reconnaissance through the Balkan Wars from September 1912 to October 1913, losing more of themselves to inexperience than to the enemy; and the fleet peaked at ninety in December 1916 before stopping altogether with the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. Everything the ballad wanted was there in the end — an establishment, a school, a course flown for the state’s own reasons, men who went up and came down and were counted afterwards. It took sixty-one years, it involved no silk, and nobody sang about it.
Four years after the last of those flights, on 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. Mehmed VI, thirty-sixth and last of the line that began with a border chieftain at Söğüt, left Constantinople on 17 November aboard a British battleship; the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 and the caliphate abolished the following March. Six hundred years, thirty-six sultans, one flying legend resting on one traveller’s book — and not a single May afternoon spent racing carpets to Antalya.
