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“Our other notable case of poisoning—and one that was also never properly investigated—involved a half-mad but beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from the poor Tuzla neighborhood who, in my estimation, poisoned more than forty people. Over the course of a year, as her family sought to sell her into marriage and entertained a series of old matriarchs, prospective grooms, and matchmakers come to appraise her, as well as go-betweens, relatives, and prying acquaintances, she mixed small, nonfatal, and indeed initially imperceptible doses of ratsbane into their cups of coffee, and poisoned them all. But nobody realized. In any case, the Governor at the time had banned newspapers from reporting on cases of murder by rat poison. The idea that a person could slowly be poisoned with small doses of flourlike white arsenic is an insidious thought. But it is certainly not prevalent on our island. The cook’s apprentice must either have been given a bag of poison by someone, or he must have heard about this method somewhere. We did try to ban traditional herbalists from selling ratsbane in their shops here too, just as we did in Istanbul through the Pharmacists’ Guild.”

“Why do you think you were not able to succeed?”

“Just a moment longer, Doctor Pasha, and I shall explain … Sometime after our current Governor took up his position, he lifted the ban on the story of the beautiful, cursed girl with arsenic in her pocket. This was supposed to help establish the notion that ‘the old governor was incompetent.’ The old story was quickly picked up by the newspapers, particularly Greek ones, who used it to ridicule the delegations that lecherous men sent to approach marriageable girls on their behalf, and hint at the enduring backwardness of Muslims who still seemed incapable of getting married unless there was a matchmaker involved. As I said, arsenic poisoning is not known on our island because nobody here reads French novels. Sometimes they bring people to me who have become unhinged with romantic heartbreak and swallowed fistfuls of rat poison; I know from these cases that people who have ingested rat poison will exhibit small, whitish, soil-like particles in their vomit. When they are close to dying, they also tend to regret their decision, and reveal what poison they took. That is indeed one of its more unusual symptoms … It is an agonizing death.” There was a silence. Then: “The famous French novel’s immoral, unstable heroine Madame Bovary also committed suicide in the same manner,” said Bonkowski Pasha’s learned friend, correctly surmising that Doctor Nuri would not know who she was.

There was a glass cabinet between them, and from where they were sitting, they could see inside it a number of pill jars, small, colorful boxes of imported medicines, bottles of all shapes and sizes containing mostly dark-colored pastes and preparations, and various packages. In the room next door were gas lamps, alembics, scissors, brushes, and mortars. Three customers came into the pharmacy, carefully studying the goods on display, and lingering over their shopping as if there were no plague in the city.

“Twenty-two years ago the Sultan commissioned Bonkowski Pasha to write a treatise on how to extract poison from the plants in the Palace Gardens.”

“Yes!” said Pharmacist Nikiforos. “I knew you would remember and ask me about it, so I have been thinking very hard indeed and sifting through my memories. What I have concluded is that this is ultimately the story of the development of modern Western-style pharmacies in Istanbul and on the island of Mingheria.”

On the one hand there were young, Western-educated pharmacists like Bonkowski and Nikiforos, returning from their studies in Paris and Berlin with an unwavering commitment to the notion of “scientific pharmacology” and supported by a faction of angry “radicals” demanding a ban on the sale of poisonous (or otherwise harmful) substances and on the provision of drugs without prescription. Another faction included the big pharmacies clustered around Istanbul’s Beyoğlu and Beyazıt neighborhoods and selling all kinds of products, local and imported. Like the first faction, they too were mostly Christians. Everyone in Istanbul frequented the Rebouls’s pharmacy or the British-run Kanzuk. These establishments also sold products usually found in herbalists’ shops, as well as ready-made and continually evolving European drugs, medicinal pastes that came in boxes and dainty bottles, syrups, creams, and assorted luxuries ranging from European chocolates to canned foods.

Abdul Hamid knew from his spies and informants that several Ottoman princes, worried that they might be poisoned if they shopped at the palace pharmacy, would make their purchases from these big Beyoğlu pharmacies instead. The Sultan understood that even those princes who were lowest in the line of succession were so wary of him that they felt safer shopping in Beyoğlu, while others did it purely to show off, but what he really wanted to know was whether the princes ever bought any substances from these pharmacies that could later be used to produce poison. As our readers will be able to glean from Princess Pakize’s letters, the Sultan had requested an exhaustive report on this subject from Bonkowski Pasha.

As well as checking on the poison trade, the Sultan had also wished to find out what conversations the doctors who saw each other at the Apéry Pharmacy in Istanbul’s Galata neighborhood were having. (In this operation, he was successful.) All of the major pharmacies also had doctors’ clinics and waiting rooms on their premises. But Apéry had turned the waiting room of his pharmacy in Galata into something more akin to a reading room. He had taken out subscriptions to numerous European medical journals and brought in all the latest textbooks. Every doctor in Istanbul, Greek or Muslim, frequented this reading room, and not just to peruse its journals, but also to meet and talk with colleagues.

The Sultan was especially protective of Muslim-owned establishments and their locally produced wares and wished to see these pharmacies—places like the Hamdi Apothecary, the Istikamet (meaning “righteous path”), or Edhem Pertev’s—join Bonkowski Bey’s guild too. But the single largest group that Abdul Hamid wished both to support and to regulate was that of family-run herbalists, who often sold powders, medicines, rat poison, and cinnamon all in the same shop, and who made their own pills and ointments too. It was among these old-fashioned herbalists that the proportion of Muslim shop owners was the highest, and Abdul Hamid wanted both to support them because they were Muslims and to ban them from selling poisons, two objectives that he knew to be contradictory.

“My impression is that as with all subjects to which the Sultan dedicates his undiluted attention, he must have had conflicting feelings on this matter too,” Pharmacist Nikiforos told Doctor Nuri. “Twenty years ago too His Supreme Highness was championing Muslim pharmacies one day and burdening them the next—all in the name of ‘reform and betterment’—with extensive prohibitions and demands that they introduce modern European practices, which these Muslim pharmacists were ill equipped to implement. But whenever a new rule that the Sultan has introduced upon the insistence of the European powers, and that even he doesn’t believe in, turns out to be deleterious to his Muslim subjects, he will not follow it through. Did he not indeed dismiss the parliament for precisely the same and entirely warranted reason—namely, that these new liberties were proving unpropitious to the Empire’s Muslim population?”

The Doctor and Prince Consort briefly wondered if the reason the pharmacist seemed so comfortable making such controversial assertions was that he had rehearsed them beforehand, and upon his return to the municipal guesthouse, he shared this thought with Princess Pakize. What they quickly realized, with the benefit of Princess Pakize’s insight too, was that Pharmacist Nikiforos had spoken that day like a man with a secret connection to Abdul Hamid—like someone whom the Sultan might have issued with a special codebook.

Fifty days before, in a quiet moment during a wedding function teeming with horse-drawn carriages and liveried servants, Princess Pakize’s sister Princess Hatice’s much-older husband had turned to Doctor Nuri and said: “Beware those who have the temerity to openly malign our sultan! They are all agents provocateurs. If you agree with them, they will immediately denounce you to the Sultan. You must ask yourself: ‘How can this person come here and say to my face things that most people would be too afraid to even think about?’ The answer is that they are informers, and they have nothing to fear.”

CHAPTER 31

What is the role of “personality” in history? To some, this question is immaterial. They see history as a colossal wheel much greater than any individual. Yet some historians have sought explanations for historical events in the personalities of the protagonists and key figures of the period. We too believe that a historical figure’s personality and temperament can sometimes alter the course of history. But these individual traits are, in turn, shaped by history itself.

It is true that Sultan Abdul Hamid was of such a suspicious disposition as to warrant Europeans calling him “paranoid.” But what made him so suspicious were the things he had seen and experienced—that is to say, history itself. In other words, Abdul Hamid had perfectly reasonable justifications for his anxieties.

In 1876, Abdul Hamid was an unremarkable but respectable (thrifty, earnest, pious) prince, aged thirty-four and second in line to the throne. The Sultan was his uncle Abdülaziz. That year Abdülaziz was removed from the throne and replaced with Abdul Hamid’s older brother Murad V in a nighttime coup jointly carried out by Mithat Pasha and General Hüseyin Avni Pasha (commander in chief of the Ottoman army). Abdülaziz died shortly thereafter, either assassinated or driven to suicide. Through it all—as the Fifth Army’s Arab soldiers besieged Dolmabahçe Palace, and as the overthrown sultan was carried away in a rowboat only to be found dead four days later just a few palaces down the same shore, killed by slashes to his wrists or perhaps by his own hand in a burst of suicidal fury—an increasingly dismayed Abdul Hamid, now next in line to the throne, had sat in his quarters trying to follow and make sense of the events unfolding in the rooms and palaces around him. He was still struggling to come to terms with his uncle’s death—how terrifying to think that even in these modern times, it was still possible to remove and assassinate a sultan!—when, just three months later, Mithat Pasha and the other army bureaucrats who had ousted Abdülaziz did the same to the new sultan, Murad V (Princess Pakize’s father). Murad V had also been greatly disturbed by his uncle’s death (he had, in fact, lost his marbles), and now he too had been deposed. So it was that Abdul Hamid went from being second in line to the throne to sitting on the throne in just four months, during which time he had the opportunity to observe how powerful Mithat Pasha and the other pashas who had orchestrated everything truly were, and come to understand that they could easily do to him what they had already done to the sultans who had preceded him.

But Abdul Hamid had experienced these kinds of fears even before his ascent to the throne. If Ottoman princes in 1901 were afraid they might be poisoned by Abdul Hamid, Prince Abdul Hamid himself and his brother Crown Prince Murad had been afraid thirty years before of being poisoned by their uncle Abdülaziz. For regardless of what Ottoman laws of succession dictated, Sultan Abdülaziz was determined that he should be followed on the throne by his son Prince Yusuf Izzettin Effendi (whom he had promoted to the rank of general, aged fourteen, and appointed as commander of the armed forces).

Tensions between Sultan Abdülaziz and his nephews—the Crown Prince and his brother—intensified during a trip that the Sultan, his above-mentioned son, and his two nephews took to Europe together in the summer of 1867. Usually Crown Prince Murad would spend most of his time in his own residence in Kurbağalıdere rather than in the heir’s designated quarters in the Beşiktaş Palace (known today as Dolmabahçe Palace) precisely to distance himself from these kinds of tensions. According to a letter Princess Pakize wrote to her sister following the death of their father many years later, and to the stories she and her brother and sisters had heard directly from Murad V, the first significant confrontation during this trip to Europe occurred during a ball they all attended at the Élysée Palace in Paris, where Crown Prince Murad was reprimanded by his uncle the Sultan for conversing in French with a group of revealingly clad French ladies he had gathered around him, and for dancing the quadrille with one of them.

According to the Sultan’s nephews, their uncle had also felt “jealous” and angry about the warm welcome that Queen Victoria and her heir, the dull-witted Prince Edward (whom she did not trust with any state secrets), had given the young Ottoman crown prince Murad and his brother Prince Abdul Hamid during a reception at Buckingham Palace in London. The next day Abdülaziz’s aide-de-camp had knocked on Prince Murad’s door and walked into his room in Buckingham Palace bearing a plateful of grapes and conveying “His Excellency the Sultan’s kindest regards.” Murad started eating the grapes immediately, but shortly afterward, he was struck by stomach cramps, whereupon he became alarmed and ran crying into his brother’s room next door. Young Abdul Hamid (aged twenty-five at the time) always carried a bezoar stone with him wherever he went, and was able to save the Ottoman heir to the throne by quickly grinding some of the stone into a glass of water for his older brother to drink and calling for doctors to help. When Queen Victoria heard about all this, she sent her heir Prince Edward to relay the message to Crown Prince Murad and his brother Abdul Hamid that if they truly believed that this had been a planned poisoning attempt, they need not return to Istanbul at all and could wait in England for their turn on the throne. (In later years, both Prince Edward and Murad would become Freemasons—the latter in Istanbul—and exchange several letters, with Edward taking the English throne the same year in which our story is set.) The two Ottoman princes, both future sultans, knew that whole episode—which might not even have been as sinister as they had thought it to be—could have serious political ramifications, and they could also imagine how it would be construed by the press (members of the Ottoman royal family were poisoning one another in the corridors of Buckingham Palace!), so before their uncle the Sultan could hear about it, they decided to forget it had ever happened and began to think that perhaps their suspicions regarding the plate of grapes had been unfounded after all.

But by the time they returned to Istanbul, news of the scandal had already reached Abdülaziz, and the Sultan, choking with rage, had banished Crown Prince Murad—guilty of “humiliating us all”—from Dolmabahçe Palace for a time.