1218 A.D., WHEN MY FAMILY RODE INTO TURKEY...
NOT MANY TURKISH FAMILIES, OTHER THAN THE OTTOMAN DYNASTY ITSELF, CAN TRACE THEIR HISTORY THAT FAR BACK. THE MENEMENCIOĞLUS CAN, BECAUSE OF THEIR UNIQUE FAMILY CHRONICLE. OSMAN STREATER TELLS HOW IT DESCRIBES EVERYTHING FROM CONFLICTS TO CONCUBINES.
In 1865 my great great grandfather Ahmed Bey, the Derebey or Lord of the Valley of the Karaisalı region of Cilicia between Adana and the Taurus mountains, patriarch of the nomadic Menemencioğlu tribe, commander of a private army of 1,200 horsemen, ultimate owner of - inter alia - 80,000 sheep, 20,000 mountain goats, 18,000 cattle and 2,000 camels, not to mention an unspecified number of Nubian concubines, was deposed by an Ottoman ‘Reform Division’ or Fırka-i İslahiyye sent by sea from Istanbul - [postcard view of a nomadic family from this region, to give an idea of the lifestyle].
Ahmed Bey was treated more favourably than the other Cilician Lords of the Valleys who were deposed at the same time. Whereas the others were exiled to remote parts of the Ottoman Empire, he was moved with his family and servants to Istanbul and given a very comfortable pension of 5,000 piastres a month to see him through his enforced retirement, which he spent encouraging his sons to get a French education and putting the finishing touches to a chronicle he had written in 1861 of the history of the tribe.
This chronicle, the Menemencioğlu Aşiret Tarihi, which traces back the Menemencis to their arrival in Asia Minor in the 13th Century, was described by the late Professor Faruk Sümer as “an event which is very rarely encountered in the history of Turkey”. Unfortunately, Professor Sümer then went off at a tangent, disagreeing with what the chronicle says about the origins of the tribal name, and advancing a theory of his own without feeling the need to back it up with evidence, something which Turkish historians of the old school were wont to do. (Briefly, he insisted that the name owed its origins to the scrambled egg dish menemen).
The chronicle states that the original Menemenci rode into Asia Minor in 1218 in the retinue of the father and grandfather of the future founder of the Ottoman dynasty. “He was called Habib Çelebi. He settled in the place called Menemen, which is to the north of Izmir and five or ten hours distant. Migrating with about fifteen or twenty relatives and with his followers and their households he came to the province of Adana and took the name Menemenli and later Menemenci from their old homeland. Although the present population of the Menemenci tribe consists of several thousand households, most of these came from İçel and other places, or are descended from households that came under the rule of our ancestor...our ancestor’s migration here is thought to have taken place two hundred years ago.”
This unusual account of the ancient origins of the Menemencis finds some support in a passage at the very end of the chronicle, where Ahmed Bey is describing how he was told of the family’s impending exile. Informed by the Governor that an Imperial order had been received for their being shipped under escort to Istanbul, Ahmed Bey asked: “Sir, you have been our Vali for three years, can you tell me where I have been at fault?” The Governor replied: “I cannot say that you are at fault, but you have fame and a reputation. The word is that to say ‘Menemencioğlu’ is to say ‘sword’. Please have all your people gather under your roof. The ship will sail in a day or two.” Ahmed Bey replied that he would send his eldest son to inform his family of their forthcoming journey. The Reform Division officers, knowing from past experience of escape bids, refused and said that he should send someone unrelated to him. Whereupon one local official, Sururi Efendi, turned to them and said of Ahmed Bey: “This man before you is different. His is a dynasty (hanedan) of three or four hundred years’ standing. He cannot be dealt with like the others.” Ahmed Bey’s wish was then immediately granted and his son sent to round up the women, children and servants.
So the Menemencis were different. In fact, they were different in a number of ways. Whereas all the other Derebeys were called ‘Ağa’, in the old provincial fashion, the Menemencis uniquely insisted on being called ‘Bey’. When his first pension payment came addressed to him as ‘Ağa’ Ahmed Bey refused to accept it and forced the authorities to re-address him as he wanted. Another way in which they were different lies in the number of animals I listed at the outset: scrupulously counted by Victor Langlois, whose Voyage dans la Cilicie of 1861 was researched and published on the instructions of Emperor Napoleon III, their sheer quantity indicates that the Menemencioğlus must have been at least relatively more interested in honest agriculture as a money-making pursuit, as opposed to the brigandage which occupied the sole attention of some other tribes: the need to stamp out the brigandage had become impossible to ignore by 1865. (The Nubian concubines are mentioned in the chronicle as saving bedding from Ahmed Bey’s Harem when enemies set it on fire in 1848.)
Langlois also counts the number of houses, as opposed to tents, and the 3,000 houses he credits to the Menemencis are more than all the houses of all the other tribes put together. This tends to show that the Menemencioğlus were not as rough and uncouth as some of their neighbours and enemies, which in turn helps explain why they attracted less contemporary interest from Western travellers: roughness and uncouthness were features which fascinated the travellers. Here, for example, is the description by James Skene, traveller and sometime British Consul in Aleppo, of his visit to the Menemencioğlus’ enemies the Kozanoğlus in his 1853 book Anadol, the last home of the faithful:
“Some thirty or forty tents of goats’-hair cloth were extended in a semicircle on a rising ground, with a scarlet flag hoisted on a spear in front of the largest of them. Rows of fleet horses were picketed by the feet, moored stem and stern, as clippers are along a wharf; and bulky camels, with trussed fore-legs, just brought from the road to discharge the spoil they bore lay like deeply laden Indiamen at anchor in the offing and guarded by the privateers which had captured them; while delicate greyhounds, with feathered tails and legs, frisked to and fro... A circle of wild-looking Turcomans rose to receive us in the principal tent. They bade us welcome, and made us squat with them on coarse carpets, smoke the most delicious tobacco with pipes of pine branches, and drink bitter black coffee out of common earthenware. A supper of cream, honey, sour curds with pilav, and messes of melted mutton fat with onions; grave discussions on things in general; oft-repeated washings of many hands; and a wadded cotton quilt to sleep on, if the roving, tickling, biting nature of its dense population militate not against that desirable result; such were the more prominent amongst the many novel features of our entertainment. It is surprising how comfortable they make you in a Turcoman tent.”
Meanwhile William Burchardt Barker [family history], ‘for many years resident at Tarsus in an official capacity’, also writing in 1853 in his Lares & Penates or Cilicia and its governors, was fascinated by the activities of another tribe: the Küçükalioğlu, whose base at Payas, near the site of Alexander the Great’s victory at Issus, gave them control of the pilgrimage and trade route to Aleppo. Barker noted that their patriarch “prided himself on the discipline he maintained. ‘I am not,’ he would say, ‘as other Lords of the Valley are, fellows without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the Sultan’s highway;-- I am content with what God sends me. I await his good pleasure, and Elhamdülilla, God be praised, He never leaves me long in the want of any thing.”
So if what it says in the chronicle is true, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be, the Menemencis first settled in Menemen near the Aegean after their entry into Anatolia in 1218-19, and then as the chronicle also says made their way as a small family grouping of fifteen to twenty households across Anatolia to Cilicia. Ahmed Bey is clearly telescoping several generations into one when he implies that it was the original Habib who made the journey from Menemen to Cilicia: Habib was a common Menemenci name. Moreover, the two hundred years before the time of his chronicle that Ahmed Bey dates the migration at works out at about 1660. However, we know from other sources that they in fact entered Cilicia from the neighbouring province of İçel in 1571. The story of population movements in Anatolia during the 16th and 17th Centuries is a fascinating and at times grim one. Briefly, inflation became rampant and taxes became exorbitant. The Celâli rebellions, risings of rootless rebels, made life unbearable in many localities, rising to a climax between the years 1603 and 1608 when it is estimated that fully two thirds of the population of Anatolia fled their homes, in many cases leaving behind their animals – and things have to be very bad indeed for farmers to move without their animals. In this process, there were many losers and some long term winners, amongst them the Menemencis. Cilicia, the then remote province they moved to, was almost only in name part of the Ottoman Empire, and thus ideal for a tough tribal grouping with a strong tendency to independence. Karaisalı, the area and future town they moved into, had originally been named after the Karaisalı – literally, ‘Black Jesus’ – Turcoman tribe which had settled there in the 13th Century, and which, like many others, had become too settled, or if you prefer too civilised, or if you prefer too soft, for their own good, and were destroyed by the Celâli risings. Their loss was the Menemencis’ gain. But as the chronicle shows, it was also the gain of many others who came to them for protection. There are, at times, distinct similarities with Mario Puzo’s description in his best-seller ‘The Godfather’ about how their power grew with their ability to offer protection.
By way of illustration, here is my translation of a section of the chronicle describing events early in the 18th Century, the period when central Ottoman rule faded and gave the impetus to the growth in power of the Derebeys:
“In the year 1120 (1708) when Adana had been attached to the province of Konya and was under the governership of Çerkesi Hama Paşa, the Topallı section of the Dündarlı tribe had become very numerous. They spent their time staging holdups and spilling blood. In one year they killed forty business travellers and others, including several men of religion and other worthies. They got so carried away that they even killed an official sent from the Sultan’s government to oversee their exile to a far-off place.
When a decision was finally made in accordance with the will of God and the requirements of justice, an Imperial order was sent to Çerkesi Hama Paşa to exile this tribe by force. The Paşa in turn summoned our fourth generation ancestor Habib Çelebi and informed him of the Sultan’s order. He was in the habit of passing onto him tasks which strained his own capabilities such as this. Habib Çelebi, from whom he requested the punishment of the Dündarlı, was a brave-hearted man and he immediately gathered about him fighters and warriors from his tribe. He fell upon the Dündarlı tribe and considerable fighting took place. In the end, the Dündarlı were routed. The head of Gedik Süleyman from among their leading figures and the heads of five or six others, who had been killed in the fighting, were cut off and sent to Hama Paşa.
The patriarch of the Topaloğlu tribe, part of the Dündarlı, fled with some of his supporters and took refuge in Karapınar. Habib Çelebi again fell upon them. Although the population of the Kozan mountain tried to help the Dündarlı, Habib Çelebi captured alive the Topaloğlu tribe patriarch and six of his retinue. He was leading them back when he found that the Kozan people had cut off his route. He then killed all his prisoners and fought his way through the people blocking his way. He brought the severed heads of the prisoners he had had killed to Adana and sent them to Konya to the Governor Paşa.
In view of the evil that the bandits had been responsible for, added to the fact that he had driven them away from preying on travellers and the poor and in so doing had rendered a signal service, and in order that there should be no return to banditry, the Paşa then assigned the governance of those parts to Habib Çelebi. As soon as he took up his duties, the grateful population of Adana presented him with a petition bearing some 70 or 80 seals. It is a very worn document today, but I still have it in my possession.”
This was a continuing process. Here is Ahmed Bey’s summing up of how his father, who had succeeded to the Lordship of the Valley in 1776, attracted followers:
“He dispassionately brought down all who were inclined to brigandage, and as he did so my father’s fame spread and as time went on he acquired rather a good name for himself. (As a result) many households moved and joined our tribe from İçel and other places. The tribe thus became broader-based, stronger and more numerous.”
On the other hand, it was not always like this. As elsewhere, divisions between town and country grew, with the urban population of Adana increasingly hostile to rural Derebeys. In the 1760s, the then Menemenci Derebey had gone blind, and enemies in Adana had taken advantage of this and inflicted considerable damage on the tribe. When his son Boz Osman – ‘Boz’ meaning grey, as in ‘Bozkurt’ or ‘Grey Wolf’ – succeeded him, he extracted revenge, which in turn led the burghers of Adana in 1776 to demand Boz Osman’s death from Çelik Mehmed Paşa, the Governor of Adana. The description in the chronicle has some similarities, if this is not too far-fetched or indeed blasphemous, with Pontius Pilate’s interview with Jesus Christ before the crucifixion:
“The Governor gave a safe conduct and summoned Boz Osman. He found all kinds of courage and open-heartedness written on his forehead, and understood that here was a person that one found only rarely under the blue skies. An affection was born, he did not want him to be hanged by accusing words. But the local populace made many promises of money to come, and petitioned for his hanging. The Governor tried to get him to escape by many hints and subtle warnings, but Osman Bey’s manhood and courage made him ashamed to flee. In the event, as it did not suit the Paşa’s business interests to deny them their wish, he was forced to have his hanging carried out.” What actually happened was that his prison cell was left unlocked, but Boz Osman was too proud to push the door open and sneak away, so he was still there when the hangman came in the morning.
This up-and-down unpredictability recurs more than once in the history of the Menemencis. I don’t propose to take you through the endless story of tribal conflicts, of alliances and re-alliances, but it is sufficient to say that good times were often, and unexpectedly, succeeded by bad times, and great wealth by financial hardship.
Clearly, the uncertainties of Cilician life necessitated a tribal fortress cum bolthole for security and indeed survival when things got tough. At some time during the 18th Century the Menemencis acquired the ideal bolthole in Milvan Kalesi, the almost inaccessible but surprisingly large old Armenian/Byzantine castle of Milvan high up the Taurus mountains. Milvan was to save many of their lives from tribal rivals in 1800, while in 1815 it enabled them to beat off and defeat the first serious Ottoman threat to their power.
The village of Milvan is 19 kilometres northwest of Karaisalı. Today, it is more frequently called Kale Köy or castle village. The castle of Milvan itself is, however, a good three hours climb from the village, part of it up the almost vertical west face until you reach the peak at 1900 metres. Milvan castle is on the east bank of the Çakıt Suyu river and commands the Çakıt vale, which is of considerable strategic importance as a link through the Taurus mountains from Pozantı to the Cilician plain. It provides an alternative to the Cilician Gates, which link Tarsus to Pozantı, and was the route preferred by German railway engineers working on the Baghdad Railway project at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Today, it is still not user-friendly to motor vehicles, and there is an old pack-animal trail still in use between Karaisalı and Pozantı.
The other great essential was a yayla: a cool mountain pasture for the unbearably hot summer months on the Cilician plain. Here is the description of this climatic phenomenon given by Captain A.F. Townshend in his book A Military Consul in Turkey, published in 1910:
”One naturally expects heat in Arabia and on the shores of the Red Sea, and one is not disappointed: but on the coast of Southern Asia Minor, and especially on the Cilician Plain, the heat is also most oppressive from June to September. I well remember one of the first nights I spent in Adana; the temperature of my bedroom at midnight was 103 degrees, the door and two windows being wide open; that was in August, when the heat of the Cilician Plain is very much the same is that of Cairo, but infinitely more trying owing to the dampness... In the mountains of Asia Minor at a height of even 2500 or 3000 feet, the climate is almost perfect in the summer, and the nights, always cool, brace one up after the heat of the day... Even so short a distance into the interior makes a vast difference. When the people at some southern seaport, such as Mersina or Alexandretta, are sitting on the shady side of the cafés, discussing the latest items of political news brought by a recently arrived steamer, they can see the mountains not ten miles away to the north and north-east where the villages are still clearing the snow from their doors and sitting over huge fires of pine logs. There is an enormous influx of people from the mountain districts to the coast towns in October.”
The Menemenci tribe’s yayla was Kızıldağ, 29 kilometres from Karaisalı, although the family’s own summer houses were even further up for safety reasons.
Back to the chronicle. So far, it may seem to you to be one long history of blood and guts. But it isn’t. Here is part of Ahmed Bey’s story of the wedding celebrations of one of his sons, at the Kızıldağ yayla, with a long guest list of what he calls ‘suitable people’ – some two or three thousand of them:
“Everybody was amazed at the variety of fireworks and magicians and musicians and wrestling displays. Nobody in these parts had ever seen such a wedding, and it was only with God’s help that there was no accident amongst the crowds and nobody was hurt. A great deal of happiness and jollity resulted. All during the wedding festivities tradesmen came up from the towns and did a roaring trade. The variety of things available made the place look like a city.”
I should also mention that the Menemencis were religious, with virtually everyone who comes up in the chronicle having made the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. Here is Ahmed Bey’s description of his own pilgrimage:
“In 1851 we went on the Hajj by sea. Around twenty neighbours and friends became Hacı, together with some of our womenfolk and servants. On the return journey by land we rented carriages and camels and horses for our people. Although the holy pilgrimage cost a great deal of money, the expenditure added to our fame and standing, as well as ensuring that we got back in safety and comfort.” You will have to excuse the sexism which meant that the ‘twenty neighbours and friends’ mentioned were naturally all men, and hope that the ‘womenfolk’ were at least allowed into the carriages.
I mentioned the Menemencis’ ups and downs in matters financial. This was well illustrated at the beginning of the 19th Century. In 1800, the then Derebey had been shot dead by a man to whom he had given refuge with the tribe, even though all his advisers warned him, correctly as it turned out, that he was an agent for an enemy tribe. That Derebey, the father of our author Ahmed Bey, had accepted an honorific title from the Sultan without realising that, under Ottoman rules, this would mean that all his property would be forfeit upon his death. They didn’t in fact lose everything, because friends at court took pity, but his widow Ümmügülsüm Hatun, known in tribal legend as Ekber Kızı or Akbar’s Daughter, who was pregnant with our author Ahmed Bey at the time, was to tell him later on that, as all the animals had been sold, the tribe made the journey to the yayla on foot, and that she had only one kilim left to cover six children at night.
Yet within ten years the situation was reversed. In 1810 Ahmed Bey’s elder brother Hacı Habib Bey was made Mütesellim or District Governor of Tarsus. With the food shortage in Europe during the Napoleonic War, and with what Ahmed Bey calls Frankish cargo ships queuing up in the port of Tarsus to buy grain, this gave him enormous power, which I am sorry to say he had no hesitation in using. In other words, the ships’ captains had to pay him for permission to enter port and buy their grain. Ahmed Bey records in the chronicle that his brother made one thousand purses of Maria Theresa Thalers from this trade. Part of this vast fortune was shared round to build large konaks or mansions for all the brothers, each of course with a Selamlık or male section and then a separate Harem. From the chronicle we learn that each Selamlık had about thirty or forty rooms, while each Harem had fifteen or twenty.
Generous as Habib Bey was to his family, he did not stint himself. Here is Ahmed Bey’s description of his visit to the yayla from Tarsus:
“When we went to greet him we were astonished to see his wealth in the style and showiness of the period. There were three to five hundred retainers, most of them almost drowning in silver and gold, wearing Lahore shawls and red headgear. At the time I was a boy of ten and showed it by my behaviour when he was distributing gifts to relatives and retainers, and discovered that he hadn’t brought anything for me. Even though he immediately sent someone back to Tarsus for a good robe (entari) for me, I was very offended by his having forgotten me. I cried a great deal and refused to wear it. The Rahmetli (Deceased) then persuaded me to wear it by displaying winning ways.”
In 1815 came the first real challenge from Istanbul. Sultan Mahmud II, the reforming Sultan, was anxious to reestablish the authority of the state. In 1826, he was to do so by destroying the Janissaries, but in 1815 he made what he considered an even more urgent move against the Derebeys. In many cases, he was successful. For example, he overthrew the Çapanoğlu of Yozgat, to whom the Menemencis owed allegiance, and who at their height had been capable of fielding a private army of 40,000. It is sometimes assumed that the Istanbul government did not move against the more remote Derebeys of Cilicia until fifty years later in 1865. This is not true. An army was sent against the Menemencioğlu in 1815. That it failed in its mission is largely due to Ekber Kızı, Akbar’s Daughter, the clearly very remarkable widow of the Derebey who had been shot dead in 1800.
When I first read about Ekber Kızı, I was tempted to categorise her leadership and sheer determination as an early example of modern Turkish feminism. But having gone into it more, I am now more inclined to put it down as a surviving example of the independence Turcoman women used to display in the heroic age of the Oğuz Turks. You can find examples in Geoffrey Lewis’s translation of The Book of Dede Korkut. More specifically, when the French traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière travelled through Cilicia on his way to Jerusalem in the 15th Century, he was astonished by the independence of Turcoman women: not only did they shoot arrows and fight in battle alongside their men, but Turcoman wives would even tell their husbands in front of guests that they were talking nonsense and should shut up.
At any rate, it was Ekber Kızı who noticed Ottoman forces being assembled, as they thought discreetly, at Tarsus and Adana. She reacted by stocking up Milvan Castle with huge quantities of arms, ammunition and food of every kind, including some 800 sheep, as well as supplies of rakı to which only she had the key – she planned to use it as a reward for deeds of courage. She also secretly informed the tribe’s soldiers of what the signal would be to retreat up to the castle. When a Menemenci horseman rode silently through their villages with a knotted cloth hanging from the back of his saddle, they were to move to Milvan Castle without further ado. It worked exactly as she had planned. When the Ottoman army of Mustafa Paşa made its move against them, the Menemencioğlu family and private army disappeared into their castle redoubt.
The siege lasted some six to seven months. At first, the Ottoman commander thought they would soon surrender out of hunger and thirst. When he realised that they were not going to do so, he had relatives of the defenders in the castle rounded up in chains and marched to the castle walls, where they were made to shout “Save us” to those inside. The defenders shouted back that they did not recognise their relatives and then opened fire. Then the Paşa sent for siege artillery. When this arrived, a party of Menemenci soldiers sneaked out of the castle at night, surprised the sleeping gunners and cut off their noses and ears, sparing just one gunner whom they took back to the castle with a gun and a supply of shells, which they forced him the next morning to fire upon the Ottoman troops. In the end, the Ottoman commander gave up and withdrew. Ekber Kızı published a list of all the most valiant of her soldiers. This appears in the chronicle, and includes two Armenians. Doubtless, they were all rewarded in rakı as well as words.
Why did it take another fifty years from this failed attempt of 1815 before the Menemencis and the other Cilician Derebeys could be successfully overthrown? There were many reasons. Ottoman armies were chronically short of manpower and were engaged elsewhere, in fighting against Russia and Iran. And there was also the extraordinary episode of the Egyptian occupation.
This is not the place to go into the remarkable story of Mohammad Ali or Mehmed Ali Paşa of Kavalla and his rise to power in Egypt. However, in 1832 he sent his European trained troops under his son Ibrahim Paşa into Asia Minor. The new model Ottoman army, now without any Janissaries but also as yet without modern German discipline and training, proved no match, and in two battles lost over 30,000 men – and with all due respect to them, when Arabs start defeating Turks, things must have come to a pretty pass in any Turkish army. Furthermore, the Egyptians were welcomed wherever they went by the population. Mahmud II’s reforms had not been popular, tax collectors had been even greedier than usual, and suddenly they had in their midst these European-trained Egyptians who seemed determined to behave with fairness and decency.
The Kurdish tribes of the Taurus mountains were not, however, having any of it. They had been in constant rebellion against the Ottomans, and before them the Byzantines, and they saw no reason not to be in rebellion against the Egyptians. Mountain warfare proved to be the weak point of the Egyptian army: they had never seen any mountains, let alone fought in them. This was where our chronicle author Ahmed Bey came into his own. By then he had emerged from a period of family in-fighting as Derebey. Already an experienced mountain warrior, he went over to the Egyptians and became their enforcer. In typical Menemencioğlu fashion, the tribe covered itself both ways, with another brother staying loyal to the Ottomans (as part of the preparations for the siege of Milvan Castle in 1815, it had been arranged that one brother would go into hiding away from the castle, so that he could emerge and take over if the castle were to fall). Ahmed Bey’s success was such that he was given the nickname, not very politically correct these days I am afraid, of Kürtkıran – Breaker of Kurds.
The Egyptians were only removed from Anatolia by the Treaty of London in 1840, a humiliating treaty from the Ottoman point of view. But Ahmed Bey had parted company from them before. Although he approved of much of the civilian reforms the Egyptians brought with them – for example, he joined in their efforts to grow cotton in the Cilician plain, the start of what is today such a major industry – they were in other ways too modern for him. In particular, he didn’t like their deliberate offensiveness towards Islam. The turning point for him came one day when Ibrahim Paşa was describing what he planned to achieve next, and Ahmed Bey said “Inşallah”. He was very offended by Ibrahim Paşa’s reply of “Why are you bringing God into it? I’ve said I will do it and I will, without God’s help or anyone else’s.”
It used to be thought that the reason for the suppression of the Derebeys of Cilicia in 1865 was obvious enough. They had defied the authority of the Sultans; the Sultans had to bring them under control. Moreover, the Cilician Derebeys controlled the vital route south from Asia Minor, whose importance Frederick Burnaby described in his 1898 classic On Horseback through Asia Minor: “It is the route from Smyrna and Constantinople to Aleppo and Baghdad. It is the route of Antioch, Palmyra, and Babylon. It is the route of all the conquerors”. But in fact there were other reasons, some rather surprising.
It was, for example, no accident that their suppression happened in 1865. The Crimean War had a part to play in it: the shortage of men in the Ottoman army showed up the fact that they were unable to recruit from Cilicia because of defiance by the Derebeys, and the British even humiliatingly offered to go into Cilicia and suppress the Derebeys for the Ottoman government. Moreover, after the Crimean War the Russians began forcing Turks and Moslems out of their territories in large numbers, and the Ottoman government saw the under-populated Cilicia of the time as ideal resettlement territory. Almost incredibly, but in fact quite logically, the American Civil War also provided an incentive, interrupting as it did supplies of cotton, and focussing attention on the cotton-growing potential of Cilicia, already proven by the Egyptians. And of course the greatest incentive was the desire of the new, reformist Ottoman authorities of the Tanzimat or Reform movement to impose what they called medeniyet - ‘civilisation’, doing away in the process with the nomadic existence which they contemptuously called bedeviyet - ‘Bedouin-ness’. That ‘civilisation’ was to cost many members of the tribe their lives in the years after the exile of their patriarch.
The creation of the Reform Division sent to suppress the Derebeys and settle the tribes in 1865 was quite an achievement. Not only were sufficient numbers of troops found, but its military commander Derviş Paşa and his civilian assistant the historian Cevdet Paşa were given large funds and almost total discretion. Furthermore, supplies of the brand new rifle, never before used in Anatolia, were shipped in and issued to the Reform Division, thus enabling them to shoot their opponents while remaining out of their old muskets’ range. But in addition to force, persuasion was to be used, again a very rare phenomenon. Tax arrears were to be forgiven. All supplies were to be paid for instead of simply being taken in the usual fashion. On approaching a tribal village, the Reform Division was to set up an open air mosque and say its prayers: they had discovered that Cilicia was so remote from Istanbul that many people there thought that the Sultan and his representatives were not Moslem. Derebeys were to be won over by the offer of generous pensions. And on the whole it worked – except that it had some disastrous consequences.
In a region where life was only made liveable by people escaping the stifling heat and malarial perils of the Cilician Plain by migrating up into the Taurus mountains during not just the summer but much of the year, the ‘civilisation’ that was imposed forbade them to move from the plain and exposed them to heat and disease. This was doubly extraordinary, because in Istanbul one of the earliest and most popular achievements of the reformers of the Tanzimat had been the abolition of the need to wait for the Sultan’s express permission before people could leave the city and move to the coolness of their Bosphorus and island summer homes as the heat closed in. Sultans, obsessed with the need to know exactly who lived in what summer home, had tended to hold up permission until all their records were up to date, so the removal of the need to wait for his go-ahead had been much appreciated by the sweating population. Yet Istanbul, even at the height of summer, is open to sea breezes from three sides and does not contain malarial swamps. In Cilicia, the swamps were very real. So was the heat. The Cilician swamps were not drained until the 1950s, nearly a century later. Meanwhile, the story of the deaths caused by the action of 1865 was for a long time hidden, for the simple reason that the main historian of the events, Cevdet Paşa, was himself the senior government official who accompanied the Ottoman army that carried them out. Yet the suffering was all too real, and affected many innocent parties, amongst them the descendants of Kara or Black Tatars who had accompanied Timur the Lame or Tamerlane in his invasion of Asia Minor in 1402. Unlike Timur, who wanted to get back to Central Asia after his killing spree, they had taken to the grassy and watery areas of Cilicia. Timur wanted to force them back with him, but many fled into the valleys and mountains of the Taurus mountains, managed to evade his patrols and stayed, becoming part of the permanent population of the high regions and never, for atavistic reasons of inherited terror, daring to venture down to the Cilician plain for the mild winter. So in their fear of Timur they had stayed up in the mountains for centuries. In 1865 their mountain homes were torched by the Reform Division and they were forcibly settled in the plain in straw huts. But the Tatars could not adapt to the heat of the Çukurova or Cilician plain. Their population declined from 11,000 in 1868 to 4426 in 1890. This was but one unexpected and at the time unreported result of the imposition of ‘civilisation’.
By virtue of their exile, the Menemencioğlus took no part in the transformation of Cilicia from tribal winter pastureland into what it is now, the bread basket of Turkey, and of Adana from a small town of some 25,000 to Turkey’s fourth largest city. Unlike the Kozanoğlus, who tried to take back their Cilician domains during the Russo-Turkish war in 1878, the Menemencioglus never looked back, either literally or metaphorically.
On arrival in Istanbul, Ahmed Bey bought a large house in Beyoğlu or Pera as it was called, as he informs us for 625 purses of akçes, and lived there with his family for another eight years until his death.
Many of the exiled Derebey families rapidly disappeared from sight, as if their reason for existence had been taken from them and they couldn’t adapt to their new circumstances. By contrast, the Menemencioğlus became rapidly integrated in urban society. Even the district of Istanbul Ahmed Bey chose for his house – Beyoğlu, the sophisticated embassy and European quarter – seems to show a desire to embrace the family’s new life rather than long for the old one. As sophistication in the Ottoman Empire was often supposed to be indicated by use and knowledge of Arabic and Persian words, for a while they used the Turco-Persian Menemenlizâde as the family name rather than the pure Turkish Menemencioğlu.
What is perhaps most remarkable is the speed with which the Menemencioğlus became integrated into the mainstream Ottoman establishment and beyond that into the international framework. In fact, it is very much as if they were welcomed back, so perhaps the word should be reintegrated. My great-grandfather Rifat Bey, who was a little boy when he left Cilicia with his father Ahmed Bey, was three times Ottoman Minister of Finance and then Speaker of the Ottoman parliament. He married the daughter of the great Ottoman patriot poet Namık Kemal, whose opposition to central authority flummuxed the government because he was descended from Sultan Ahmed III. My grandfather, his son Muvaffak Bey, broke further with Turcoman tradition by marrying a Greek girl. Sultan Abdül Hamid had wanted to ‘favour’ Rifat Bey by marrying Muvaffak to one of his granddaughters, but Muvaffak had fallen hopelessly in love with the beautiful Katerina, and Rıfat Bey risked the Sultan’s wrath by allowing them to get married. The family story is that, at the first dinner she attended at the family mansion, Rifat Bey sat Katerina on his right and then told the assembled family that he had something to say to them: “I have heard,” he told them, “that some of you have been trying to convert my new daughter to Islam. I want you to understand that one does not change one’s religion like one changes one’s shirt. I never want to have to speak to you about this again.” And he never did. As for his younger son, Numan Menemencioğlu, born less than thirty years after the suppression of the tribe in Cilicia, he was the Foreign Minister who kept Turkey neutral during the Second World War. He paid his own first visit to Cilicia in early 1943 to meet Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden at the Adana Conference. He also saved some 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, working not only with the Jewish Agency for Palestine – he is named on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre website – but also with his friend Angelo Monsignor Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII and Apostolic Delegate in Turkey during the war. The friendship seems to be symbolic of the remarkable and ever changeful life of the Menemencioğlus who first entered the domains of the Christians at the beginning of the 13th Century.
NOT MANY TURKISH FAMILIES, OTHER THAN THE OTTOMAN DYNASTY ITSELF, CAN TRACE THEIR HISTORY THAT FAR BACK. THE MENEMENCIOĞLUS CAN, BECAUSE OF THEIR UNIQUE FAMILY CHRONICLE. OSMAN STREATER TELLS HOW IT DESCRIBES EVERYTHING FROM CONFLICTS TO CONCUBINES.
In 1865 my great great grandfather Ahmed Bey, the Derebey or Lord of the Valley of the Karaisalı region of Cilicia between Adana and the Taurus mountains, patriarch of the nomadic Menemencioğlu tribe, commander of a private army of 1,200 horsemen, ultimate owner of - inter alia - 80,000 sheep, 20,000 mountain goats, 18,000 cattle and 2,000 camels, not to mention an unspecified number of Nubian concubines, was deposed by an Ottoman ‘Reform Division’ or Fırka-i İslahiyye sent by sea from Istanbul - [postcard view of a nomadic family from this region, to give an idea of the lifestyle].
Ahmed Bey was treated more favourably than the other Cilician Lords of the Valleys who were deposed at the same time. Whereas the others were exiled to remote parts of the Ottoman Empire, he was moved with his family and servants to Istanbul and given a very comfortable pension of 5,000 piastres a month to see him through his enforced retirement, which he spent encouraging his sons to get a French education and putting the finishing touches to a chronicle he had written in 1861 of the history of the tribe.
This chronicle, the Menemencioğlu Aşiret Tarihi, which traces back the Menemencis to their arrival in Asia Minor in the 13th Century, was described by the late Professor Faruk Sümer as “an event which is very rarely encountered in the history of Turkey”. Unfortunately, Professor Sümer then went off at a tangent, disagreeing with what the chronicle says about the origins of the tribal name, and advancing a theory of his own without feeling the need to back it up with evidence, something which Turkish historians of the old school were wont to do. (Briefly, he insisted that the name owed its origins to the scrambled egg dish menemen).
The chronicle states that the original Menemenci rode into Asia Minor in 1218 in the retinue of the father and grandfather of the future founder of the Ottoman dynasty. “He was called Habib Çelebi. He settled in the place called Menemen, which is to the north of Izmir and five or ten hours distant. Migrating with about fifteen or twenty relatives and with his followers and their households he came to the province of Adana and took the name Menemenli and later Menemenci from their old homeland. Although the present population of the Menemenci tribe consists of several thousand households, most of these came from İçel and other places, or are descended from households that came under the rule of our ancestor...our ancestor’s migration here is thought to have taken place two hundred years ago.”
This unusual account of the ancient origins of the Menemencis finds some support in a passage at the very end of the chronicle, where Ahmed Bey is describing how he was told of the family’s impending exile. Informed by the Governor that an Imperial order had been received for their being shipped under escort to Istanbul, Ahmed Bey asked: “Sir, you have been our Vali for three years, can you tell me where I have been at fault?” The Governor replied: “I cannot say that you are at fault, but you have fame and a reputation. The word is that to say ‘Menemencioğlu’ is to say ‘sword’. Please have all your people gather under your roof. The ship will sail in a day or two.” Ahmed Bey replied that he would send his eldest son to inform his family of their forthcoming journey. The Reform Division officers, knowing from past experience of escape bids, refused and said that he should send someone unrelated to him. Whereupon one local official, Sururi Efendi, turned to them and said of Ahmed Bey: “This man before you is different. His is a dynasty (hanedan) of three or four hundred years’ standing. He cannot be dealt with like the others.” Ahmed Bey’s wish was then immediately granted and his son sent to round up the women, children and servants.
So the Menemencis were different. In fact, they were different in a number of ways. Whereas all the other Derebeys were called ‘Ağa’, in the old provincial fashion, the Menemencis uniquely insisted on being called ‘Bey’. When his first pension payment came addressed to him as ‘Ağa’ Ahmed Bey refused to accept it and forced the authorities to re-address him as he wanted. Another way in which they were different lies in the number of animals I listed at the outset: scrupulously counted by Victor Langlois, whose Voyage dans la Cilicie of 1861 was researched and published on the instructions of Emperor Napoleon III, their sheer quantity indicates that the Menemencioğlus must have been at least relatively more interested in honest agriculture as a money-making pursuit, as opposed to the brigandage which occupied the sole attention of some other tribes: the need to stamp out the brigandage had become impossible to ignore by 1865. (The Nubian concubines are mentioned in the chronicle as saving bedding from Ahmed Bey’s Harem when enemies set it on fire in 1848.)
Langlois also counts the number of houses, as opposed to tents, and the 3,000 houses he credits to the Menemencis are more than all the houses of all the other tribes put together. This tends to show that the Menemencioğlus were not as rough and uncouth as some of their neighbours and enemies, which in turn helps explain why they attracted less contemporary interest from Western travellers: roughness and uncouthness were features which fascinated the travellers. Here, for example, is the description by James Skene, traveller and sometime British Consul in Aleppo, of his visit to the Menemencioğlus’ enemies the Kozanoğlus in his 1853 book Anadol, the last home of the faithful:
“Some thirty or forty tents of goats’-hair cloth were extended in a semicircle on a rising ground, with a scarlet flag hoisted on a spear in front of the largest of them. Rows of fleet horses were picketed by the feet, moored stem and stern, as clippers are along a wharf; and bulky camels, with trussed fore-legs, just brought from the road to discharge the spoil they bore lay like deeply laden Indiamen at anchor in the offing and guarded by the privateers which had captured them; while delicate greyhounds, with feathered tails and legs, frisked to and fro... A circle of wild-looking Turcomans rose to receive us in the principal tent. They bade us welcome, and made us squat with them on coarse carpets, smoke the most delicious tobacco with pipes of pine branches, and drink bitter black coffee out of common earthenware. A supper of cream, honey, sour curds with pilav, and messes of melted mutton fat with onions; grave discussions on things in general; oft-repeated washings of many hands; and a wadded cotton quilt to sleep on, if the roving, tickling, biting nature of its dense population militate not against that desirable result; such were the more prominent amongst the many novel features of our entertainment. It is surprising how comfortable they make you in a Turcoman tent.”
Meanwhile William Burchardt Barker [family history], ‘for many years resident at Tarsus in an official capacity’, also writing in 1853 in his Lares & Penates or Cilicia and its governors, was fascinated by the activities of another tribe: the Küçükalioğlu, whose base at Payas, near the site of Alexander the Great’s victory at Issus, gave them control of the pilgrimage and trade route to Aleppo. Barker noted that their patriarch “prided himself on the discipline he maintained. ‘I am not,’ he would say, ‘as other Lords of the Valley are, fellows without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the Sultan’s highway;-- I am content with what God sends me. I await his good pleasure, and Elhamdülilla, God be praised, He never leaves me long in the want of any thing.”
So if what it says in the chronicle is true, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be, the Menemencis first settled in Menemen near the Aegean after their entry into Anatolia in 1218-19, and then as the chronicle also says made their way as a small family grouping of fifteen to twenty households across Anatolia to Cilicia. Ahmed Bey is clearly telescoping several generations into one when he implies that it was the original Habib who made the journey from Menemen to Cilicia: Habib was a common Menemenci name. Moreover, the two hundred years before the time of his chronicle that Ahmed Bey dates the migration at works out at about 1660. However, we know from other sources that they in fact entered Cilicia from the neighbouring province of İçel in 1571. The story of population movements in Anatolia during the 16th and 17th Centuries is a fascinating and at times grim one. Briefly, inflation became rampant and taxes became exorbitant. The Celâli rebellions, risings of rootless rebels, made life unbearable in many localities, rising to a climax between the years 1603 and 1608 when it is estimated that fully two thirds of the population of Anatolia fled their homes, in many cases leaving behind their animals – and things have to be very bad indeed for farmers to move without their animals. In this process, there were many losers and some long term winners, amongst them the Menemencis. Cilicia, the then remote province they moved to, was almost only in name part of the Ottoman Empire, and thus ideal for a tough tribal grouping with a strong tendency to independence. Karaisalı, the area and future town they moved into, had originally been named after the Karaisalı – literally, ‘Black Jesus’ – Turcoman tribe which had settled there in the 13th Century, and which, like many others, had become too settled, or if you prefer too civilised, or if you prefer too soft, for their own good, and were destroyed by the Celâli risings. Their loss was the Menemencis’ gain. But as the chronicle shows, it was also the gain of many others who came to them for protection. There are, at times, distinct similarities with Mario Puzo’s description in his best-seller ‘The Godfather’ about how their power grew with their ability to offer protection.
By way of illustration, here is my translation of a section of the chronicle describing events early in the 18th Century, the period when central Ottoman rule faded and gave the impetus to the growth in power of the Derebeys:
“In the year 1120 (1708) when Adana had been attached to the province of Konya and was under the governership of Çerkesi Hama Paşa, the Topallı section of the Dündarlı tribe had become very numerous. They spent their time staging holdups and spilling blood. In one year they killed forty business travellers and others, including several men of religion and other worthies. They got so carried away that they even killed an official sent from the Sultan’s government to oversee their exile to a far-off place.
When a decision was finally made in accordance with the will of God and the requirements of justice, an Imperial order was sent to Çerkesi Hama Paşa to exile this tribe by force. The Paşa in turn summoned our fourth generation ancestor Habib Çelebi and informed him of the Sultan’s order. He was in the habit of passing onto him tasks which strained his own capabilities such as this. Habib Çelebi, from whom he requested the punishment of the Dündarlı, was a brave-hearted man and he immediately gathered about him fighters and warriors from his tribe. He fell upon the Dündarlı tribe and considerable fighting took place. In the end, the Dündarlı were routed. The head of Gedik Süleyman from among their leading figures and the heads of five or six others, who had been killed in the fighting, were cut off and sent to Hama Paşa.
The patriarch of the Topaloğlu tribe, part of the Dündarlı, fled with some of his supporters and took refuge in Karapınar. Habib Çelebi again fell upon them. Although the population of the Kozan mountain tried to help the Dündarlı, Habib Çelebi captured alive the Topaloğlu tribe patriarch and six of his retinue. He was leading them back when he found that the Kozan people had cut off his route. He then killed all his prisoners and fought his way through the people blocking his way. He brought the severed heads of the prisoners he had had killed to Adana and sent them to Konya to the Governor Paşa.
In view of the evil that the bandits had been responsible for, added to the fact that he had driven them away from preying on travellers and the poor and in so doing had rendered a signal service, and in order that there should be no return to banditry, the Paşa then assigned the governance of those parts to Habib Çelebi. As soon as he took up his duties, the grateful population of Adana presented him with a petition bearing some 70 or 80 seals. It is a very worn document today, but I still have it in my possession.”
This was a continuing process. Here is Ahmed Bey’s summing up of how his father, who had succeeded to the Lordship of the Valley in 1776, attracted followers:
“He dispassionately brought down all who were inclined to brigandage, and as he did so my father’s fame spread and as time went on he acquired rather a good name for himself. (As a result) many households moved and joined our tribe from İçel and other places. The tribe thus became broader-based, stronger and more numerous.”
On the other hand, it was not always like this. As elsewhere, divisions between town and country grew, with the urban population of Adana increasingly hostile to rural Derebeys. In the 1760s, the then Menemenci Derebey had gone blind, and enemies in Adana had taken advantage of this and inflicted considerable damage on the tribe. When his son Boz Osman – ‘Boz’ meaning grey, as in ‘Bozkurt’ or ‘Grey Wolf’ – succeeded him, he extracted revenge, which in turn led the burghers of Adana in 1776 to demand Boz Osman’s death from Çelik Mehmed Paşa, the Governor of Adana. The description in the chronicle has some similarities, if this is not too far-fetched or indeed blasphemous, with Pontius Pilate’s interview with Jesus Christ before the crucifixion:
“The Governor gave a safe conduct and summoned Boz Osman. He found all kinds of courage and open-heartedness written on his forehead, and understood that here was a person that one found only rarely under the blue skies. An affection was born, he did not want him to be hanged by accusing words. But the local populace made many promises of money to come, and petitioned for his hanging. The Governor tried to get him to escape by many hints and subtle warnings, but Osman Bey’s manhood and courage made him ashamed to flee. In the event, as it did not suit the Paşa’s business interests to deny them their wish, he was forced to have his hanging carried out.” What actually happened was that his prison cell was left unlocked, but Boz Osman was too proud to push the door open and sneak away, so he was still there when the hangman came in the morning.
This up-and-down unpredictability recurs more than once in the history of the Menemencis. I don’t propose to take you through the endless story of tribal conflicts, of alliances and re-alliances, but it is sufficient to say that good times were often, and unexpectedly, succeeded by bad times, and great wealth by financial hardship.
Clearly, the uncertainties of Cilician life necessitated a tribal fortress cum bolthole for security and indeed survival when things got tough. At some time during the 18th Century the Menemencis acquired the ideal bolthole in Milvan Kalesi, the almost inaccessible but surprisingly large old Armenian/Byzantine castle of Milvan high up the Taurus mountains. Milvan was to save many of their lives from tribal rivals in 1800, while in 1815 it enabled them to beat off and defeat the first serious Ottoman threat to their power.
The village of Milvan is 19 kilometres northwest of Karaisalı. Today, it is more frequently called Kale Köy or castle village. The castle of Milvan itself is, however, a good three hours climb from the village, part of it up the almost vertical west face until you reach the peak at 1900 metres. Milvan castle is on the east bank of the Çakıt Suyu river and commands the Çakıt vale, which is of considerable strategic importance as a link through the Taurus mountains from Pozantı to the Cilician plain. It provides an alternative to the Cilician Gates, which link Tarsus to Pozantı, and was the route preferred by German railway engineers working on the Baghdad Railway project at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Today, it is still not user-friendly to motor vehicles, and there is an old pack-animal trail still in use between Karaisalı and Pozantı.
The other great essential was a yayla: a cool mountain pasture for the unbearably hot summer months on the Cilician plain. Here is the description of this climatic phenomenon given by Captain A.F. Townshend in his book A Military Consul in Turkey, published in 1910:
”One naturally expects heat in Arabia and on the shores of the Red Sea, and one is not disappointed: but on the coast of Southern Asia Minor, and especially on the Cilician Plain, the heat is also most oppressive from June to September. I well remember one of the first nights I spent in Adana; the temperature of my bedroom at midnight was 103 degrees, the door and two windows being wide open; that was in August, when the heat of the Cilician Plain is very much the same is that of Cairo, but infinitely more trying owing to the dampness... In the mountains of Asia Minor at a height of even 2500 or 3000 feet, the climate is almost perfect in the summer, and the nights, always cool, brace one up after the heat of the day... Even so short a distance into the interior makes a vast difference. When the people at some southern seaport, such as Mersina or Alexandretta, are sitting on the shady side of the cafés, discussing the latest items of political news brought by a recently arrived steamer, they can see the mountains not ten miles away to the north and north-east where the villages are still clearing the snow from their doors and sitting over huge fires of pine logs. There is an enormous influx of people from the mountain districts to the coast towns in October.”
The Menemenci tribe’s yayla was Kızıldağ, 29 kilometres from Karaisalı, although the family’s own summer houses were even further up for safety reasons.
Back to the chronicle. So far, it may seem to you to be one long history of blood and guts. But it isn’t. Here is part of Ahmed Bey’s story of the wedding celebrations of one of his sons, at the Kızıldağ yayla, with a long guest list of what he calls ‘suitable people’ – some two or three thousand of them:
“Everybody was amazed at the variety of fireworks and magicians and musicians and wrestling displays. Nobody in these parts had ever seen such a wedding, and it was only with God’s help that there was no accident amongst the crowds and nobody was hurt. A great deal of happiness and jollity resulted. All during the wedding festivities tradesmen came up from the towns and did a roaring trade. The variety of things available made the place look like a city.”
I should also mention that the Menemencis were religious, with virtually everyone who comes up in the chronicle having made the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. Here is Ahmed Bey’s description of his own pilgrimage:
“In 1851 we went on the Hajj by sea. Around twenty neighbours and friends became Hacı, together with some of our womenfolk and servants. On the return journey by land we rented carriages and camels and horses for our people. Although the holy pilgrimage cost a great deal of money, the expenditure added to our fame and standing, as well as ensuring that we got back in safety and comfort.” You will have to excuse the sexism which meant that the ‘twenty neighbours and friends’ mentioned were naturally all men, and hope that the ‘womenfolk’ were at least allowed into the carriages.
I mentioned the Menemencis’ ups and downs in matters financial. This was well illustrated at the beginning of the 19th Century. In 1800, the then Derebey had been shot dead by a man to whom he had given refuge with the tribe, even though all his advisers warned him, correctly as it turned out, that he was an agent for an enemy tribe. That Derebey, the father of our author Ahmed Bey, had accepted an honorific title from the Sultan without realising that, under Ottoman rules, this would mean that all his property would be forfeit upon his death. They didn’t in fact lose everything, because friends at court took pity, but his widow Ümmügülsüm Hatun, known in tribal legend as Ekber Kızı or Akbar’s Daughter, who was pregnant with our author Ahmed Bey at the time, was to tell him later on that, as all the animals had been sold, the tribe made the journey to the yayla on foot, and that she had only one kilim left to cover six children at night.
Yet within ten years the situation was reversed. In 1810 Ahmed Bey’s elder brother Hacı Habib Bey was made Mütesellim or District Governor of Tarsus. With the food shortage in Europe during the Napoleonic War, and with what Ahmed Bey calls Frankish cargo ships queuing up in the port of Tarsus to buy grain, this gave him enormous power, which I am sorry to say he had no hesitation in using. In other words, the ships’ captains had to pay him for permission to enter port and buy their grain. Ahmed Bey records in the chronicle that his brother made one thousand purses of Maria Theresa Thalers from this trade. Part of this vast fortune was shared round to build large konaks or mansions for all the brothers, each of course with a Selamlık or male section and then a separate Harem. From the chronicle we learn that each Selamlık had about thirty or forty rooms, while each Harem had fifteen or twenty.
Generous as Habib Bey was to his family, he did not stint himself. Here is Ahmed Bey’s description of his visit to the yayla from Tarsus:
“When we went to greet him we were astonished to see his wealth in the style and showiness of the period. There were three to five hundred retainers, most of them almost drowning in silver and gold, wearing Lahore shawls and red headgear. At the time I was a boy of ten and showed it by my behaviour when he was distributing gifts to relatives and retainers, and discovered that he hadn’t brought anything for me. Even though he immediately sent someone back to Tarsus for a good robe (entari) for me, I was very offended by his having forgotten me. I cried a great deal and refused to wear it. The Rahmetli (Deceased) then persuaded me to wear it by displaying winning ways.”
In 1815 came the first real challenge from Istanbul. Sultan Mahmud II, the reforming Sultan, was anxious to reestablish the authority of the state. In 1826, he was to do so by destroying the Janissaries, but in 1815 he made what he considered an even more urgent move against the Derebeys. In many cases, he was successful. For example, he overthrew the Çapanoğlu of Yozgat, to whom the Menemencis owed allegiance, and who at their height had been capable of fielding a private army of 40,000. It is sometimes assumed that the Istanbul government did not move against the more remote Derebeys of Cilicia until fifty years later in 1865. This is not true. An army was sent against the Menemencioğlu in 1815. That it failed in its mission is largely due to Ekber Kızı, Akbar’s Daughter, the clearly very remarkable widow of the Derebey who had been shot dead in 1800.
When I first read about Ekber Kızı, I was tempted to categorise her leadership and sheer determination as an early example of modern Turkish feminism. But having gone into it more, I am now more inclined to put it down as a surviving example of the independence Turcoman women used to display in the heroic age of the Oğuz Turks. You can find examples in Geoffrey Lewis’s translation of The Book of Dede Korkut. More specifically, when the French traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière travelled through Cilicia on his way to Jerusalem in the 15th Century, he was astonished by the independence of Turcoman women: not only did they shoot arrows and fight in battle alongside their men, but Turcoman wives would even tell their husbands in front of guests that they were talking nonsense and should shut up.
At any rate, it was Ekber Kızı who noticed Ottoman forces being assembled, as they thought discreetly, at Tarsus and Adana. She reacted by stocking up Milvan Castle with huge quantities of arms, ammunition and food of every kind, including some 800 sheep, as well as supplies of rakı to which only she had the key – she planned to use it as a reward for deeds of courage. She also secretly informed the tribe’s soldiers of what the signal would be to retreat up to the castle. When a Menemenci horseman rode silently through their villages with a knotted cloth hanging from the back of his saddle, they were to move to Milvan Castle without further ado. It worked exactly as she had planned. When the Ottoman army of Mustafa Paşa made its move against them, the Menemencioğlu family and private army disappeared into their castle redoubt.
The siege lasted some six to seven months. At first, the Ottoman commander thought they would soon surrender out of hunger and thirst. When he realised that they were not going to do so, he had relatives of the defenders in the castle rounded up in chains and marched to the castle walls, where they were made to shout “Save us” to those inside. The defenders shouted back that they did not recognise their relatives and then opened fire. Then the Paşa sent for siege artillery. When this arrived, a party of Menemenci soldiers sneaked out of the castle at night, surprised the sleeping gunners and cut off their noses and ears, sparing just one gunner whom they took back to the castle with a gun and a supply of shells, which they forced him the next morning to fire upon the Ottoman troops. In the end, the Ottoman commander gave up and withdrew. Ekber Kızı published a list of all the most valiant of her soldiers. This appears in the chronicle, and includes two Armenians. Doubtless, they were all rewarded in rakı as well as words.
Why did it take another fifty years from this failed attempt of 1815 before the Menemencis and the other Cilician Derebeys could be successfully overthrown? There were many reasons. Ottoman armies were chronically short of manpower and were engaged elsewhere, in fighting against Russia and Iran. And there was also the extraordinary episode of the Egyptian occupation.
This is not the place to go into the remarkable story of Mohammad Ali or Mehmed Ali Paşa of Kavalla and his rise to power in Egypt. However, in 1832 he sent his European trained troops under his son Ibrahim Paşa into Asia Minor. The new model Ottoman army, now without any Janissaries but also as yet without modern German discipline and training, proved no match, and in two battles lost over 30,000 men – and with all due respect to them, when Arabs start defeating Turks, things must have come to a pretty pass in any Turkish army. Furthermore, the Egyptians were welcomed wherever they went by the population. Mahmud II’s reforms had not been popular, tax collectors had been even greedier than usual, and suddenly they had in their midst these European-trained Egyptians who seemed determined to behave with fairness and decency.
The Kurdish tribes of the Taurus mountains were not, however, having any of it. They had been in constant rebellion against the Ottomans, and before them the Byzantines, and they saw no reason not to be in rebellion against the Egyptians. Mountain warfare proved to be the weak point of the Egyptian army: they had never seen any mountains, let alone fought in them. This was where our chronicle author Ahmed Bey came into his own. By then he had emerged from a period of family in-fighting as Derebey. Already an experienced mountain warrior, he went over to the Egyptians and became their enforcer. In typical Menemencioğlu fashion, the tribe covered itself both ways, with another brother staying loyal to the Ottomans (as part of the preparations for the siege of Milvan Castle in 1815, it had been arranged that one brother would go into hiding away from the castle, so that he could emerge and take over if the castle were to fall). Ahmed Bey’s success was such that he was given the nickname, not very politically correct these days I am afraid, of Kürtkıran – Breaker of Kurds.
The Egyptians were only removed from Anatolia by the Treaty of London in 1840, a humiliating treaty from the Ottoman point of view. But Ahmed Bey had parted company from them before. Although he approved of much of the civilian reforms the Egyptians brought with them – for example, he joined in their efforts to grow cotton in the Cilician plain, the start of what is today such a major industry – they were in other ways too modern for him. In particular, he didn’t like their deliberate offensiveness towards Islam. The turning point for him came one day when Ibrahim Paşa was describing what he planned to achieve next, and Ahmed Bey said “Inşallah”. He was very offended by Ibrahim Paşa’s reply of “Why are you bringing God into it? I’ve said I will do it and I will, without God’s help or anyone else’s.”
It used to be thought that the reason for the suppression of the Derebeys of Cilicia in 1865 was obvious enough. They had defied the authority of the Sultans; the Sultans had to bring them under control. Moreover, the Cilician Derebeys controlled the vital route south from Asia Minor, whose importance Frederick Burnaby described in his 1898 classic On Horseback through Asia Minor: “It is the route from Smyrna and Constantinople to Aleppo and Baghdad. It is the route of Antioch, Palmyra, and Babylon. It is the route of all the conquerors”. But in fact there were other reasons, some rather surprising.
It was, for example, no accident that their suppression happened in 1865. The Crimean War had a part to play in it: the shortage of men in the Ottoman army showed up the fact that they were unable to recruit from Cilicia because of defiance by the Derebeys, and the British even humiliatingly offered to go into Cilicia and suppress the Derebeys for the Ottoman government. Moreover, after the Crimean War the Russians began forcing Turks and Moslems out of their territories in large numbers, and the Ottoman government saw the under-populated Cilicia of the time as ideal resettlement territory. Almost incredibly, but in fact quite logically, the American Civil War also provided an incentive, interrupting as it did supplies of cotton, and focussing attention on the cotton-growing potential of Cilicia, already proven by the Egyptians. And of course the greatest incentive was the desire of the new, reformist Ottoman authorities of the Tanzimat or Reform movement to impose what they called medeniyet - ‘civilisation’, doing away in the process with the nomadic existence which they contemptuously called bedeviyet - ‘Bedouin-ness’. That ‘civilisation’ was to cost many members of the tribe their lives in the years after the exile of their patriarch.
The creation of the Reform Division sent to suppress the Derebeys and settle the tribes in 1865 was quite an achievement. Not only were sufficient numbers of troops found, but its military commander Derviş Paşa and his civilian assistant the historian Cevdet Paşa were given large funds and almost total discretion. Furthermore, supplies of the brand new rifle, never before used in Anatolia, were shipped in and issued to the Reform Division, thus enabling them to shoot their opponents while remaining out of their old muskets’ range. But in addition to force, persuasion was to be used, again a very rare phenomenon. Tax arrears were to be forgiven. All supplies were to be paid for instead of simply being taken in the usual fashion. On approaching a tribal village, the Reform Division was to set up an open air mosque and say its prayers: they had discovered that Cilicia was so remote from Istanbul that many people there thought that the Sultan and his representatives were not Moslem. Derebeys were to be won over by the offer of generous pensions. And on the whole it worked – except that it had some disastrous consequences.
In a region where life was only made liveable by people escaping the stifling heat and malarial perils of the Cilician Plain by migrating up into the Taurus mountains during not just the summer but much of the year, the ‘civilisation’ that was imposed forbade them to move from the plain and exposed them to heat and disease. This was doubly extraordinary, because in Istanbul one of the earliest and most popular achievements of the reformers of the Tanzimat had been the abolition of the need to wait for the Sultan’s express permission before people could leave the city and move to the coolness of their Bosphorus and island summer homes as the heat closed in. Sultans, obsessed with the need to know exactly who lived in what summer home, had tended to hold up permission until all their records were up to date, so the removal of the need to wait for his go-ahead had been much appreciated by the sweating population. Yet Istanbul, even at the height of summer, is open to sea breezes from three sides and does not contain malarial swamps. In Cilicia, the swamps were very real. So was the heat. The Cilician swamps were not drained until the 1950s, nearly a century later. Meanwhile, the story of the deaths caused by the action of 1865 was for a long time hidden, for the simple reason that the main historian of the events, Cevdet Paşa, was himself the senior government official who accompanied the Ottoman army that carried them out. Yet the suffering was all too real, and affected many innocent parties, amongst them the descendants of Kara or Black Tatars who had accompanied Timur the Lame or Tamerlane in his invasion of Asia Minor in 1402. Unlike Timur, who wanted to get back to Central Asia after his killing spree, they had taken to the grassy and watery areas of Cilicia. Timur wanted to force them back with him, but many fled into the valleys and mountains of the Taurus mountains, managed to evade his patrols and stayed, becoming part of the permanent population of the high regions and never, for atavistic reasons of inherited terror, daring to venture down to the Cilician plain for the mild winter. So in their fear of Timur they had stayed up in the mountains for centuries. In 1865 their mountain homes were torched by the Reform Division and they were forcibly settled in the plain in straw huts. But the Tatars could not adapt to the heat of the Çukurova or Cilician plain. Their population declined from 11,000 in 1868 to 4426 in 1890. This was but one unexpected and at the time unreported result of the imposition of ‘civilisation’.
By virtue of their exile, the Menemencioğlus took no part in the transformation of Cilicia from tribal winter pastureland into what it is now, the bread basket of Turkey, and of Adana from a small town of some 25,000 to Turkey’s fourth largest city. Unlike the Kozanoğlus, who tried to take back their Cilician domains during the Russo-Turkish war in 1878, the Menemencioglus never looked back, either literally or metaphorically.
On arrival in Istanbul, Ahmed Bey bought a large house in Beyoğlu or Pera as it was called, as he informs us for 625 purses of akçes, and lived there with his family for another eight years until his death.
Many of the exiled Derebey families rapidly disappeared from sight, as if their reason for existence had been taken from them and they couldn’t adapt to their new circumstances. By contrast, the Menemencioğlus became rapidly integrated in urban society. Even the district of Istanbul Ahmed Bey chose for his house – Beyoğlu, the sophisticated embassy and European quarter – seems to show a desire to embrace the family’s new life rather than long for the old one. As sophistication in the Ottoman Empire was often supposed to be indicated by use and knowledge of Arabic and Persian words, for a while they used the Turco-Persian Menemenlizâde as the family name rather than the pure Turkish Menemencioğlu.
What is perhaps most remarkable is the speed with which the Menemencioğlus became integrated into the mainstream Ottoman establishment and beyond that into the international framework. In fact, it is very much as if they were welcomed back, so perhaps the word should be reintegrated. My great-grandfather Rifat Bey, who was a little boy when he left Cilicia with his father Ahmed Bey, was three times Ottoman Minister of Finance and then Speaker of the Ottoman parliament. He married the daughter of the great Ottoman patriot poet Namık Kemal, whose opposition to central authority flummuxed the government because he was descended from Sultan Ahmed III. My grandfather, his son Muvaffak Bey, broke further with Turcoman tradition by marrying a Greek girl. Sultan Abdül Hamid had wanted to ‘favour’ Rifat Bey by marrying Muvaffak to one of his granddaughters, but Muvaffak had fallen hopelessly in love with the beautiful Katerina, and Rıfat Bey risked the Sultan’s wrath by allowing them to get married. The family story is that, at the first dinner she attended at the family mansion, Rifat Bey sat Katerina on his right and then told the assembled family that he had something to say to them: “I have heard,” he told them, “that some of you have been trying to convert my new daughter to Islam. I want you to understand that one does not change one’s religion like one changes one’s shirt. I never want to have to speak to you about this again.” And he never did. As for his younger son, Numan Menemencioğlu, born less than thirty years after the suppression of the tribe in Cilicia, he was the Foreign Minister who kept Turkey neutral during the Second World War. He paid his own first visit to Cilicia in early 1943 to meet Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden at the Adana Conference. He also saved some 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, working not only with the Jewish Agency for Palestine – he is named on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre website – but also with his friend Angelo Monsignor Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII and Apostolic Delegate in Turkey during the war. The friendship seems to be symbolic of the remarkable and ever changeful life of the Menemencioğlus who first entered the domains of the Christians at the beginning of the 13th Century.