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There was a new market in a Greek primary school in the Hora neighborhood selling mullet fish as well as sorrel, mallow, and other similar plants. The President went with Hadid and Majid to visit this building where Greek children used to go to school before the plague began. Old quarantine posters still hung on the walls, and inside, in its gloomy classrooms set up with mousetraps and smelling strongly of Lysol, they saw that there were Muslim vendors too, selling consecrated prayer sheets against the plague. The plague had blurred the lines—both real and imaginary—that separated Arkaz’s Muslims from its Christians.

Commander Kâmil and the brothers Majid and Hadid had been talking among themselves and taking stock of the situation as they stood among the many traders who had clustered in the courtyard of this tiny, charming little school, when they were approached by one of the boys who had come there, fishing boots still on their feet, to sell their catch from the creek.

The guards were about to intervene, just in case of any possible danger, when the Commander stopped them.

“In these troubled times, there is no one more deserving of our respect than these young heroes whose fishing exploits have rescued our free Mingheria from starvation,” said Commander Kâmil. “Let him speak to his commander, whatever his petition may be!”

When the guards stepped aside, the sweet-looking, fez-wearing, pimply, unshaven boy—who was actually sixteen—took a few steps forward, pulled out a gun from the wide sash around his waist, and started shooting at the Commander’s chest and face.

CHAPTER 57

The first bullet that emerged from the young man’s revolver made a hole in the shoulder of the Commander’s uniform, but did not touch his flesh and did not even leave a scratch.

Majid had already begun to suspect there was something wrong before the shot was fired, and when he saw the youth pull out a gun, he moved toward him. Some witnesses would describe seeing Majid trying to grab the weapon from the young man’s hands, while others said that he had stepped in front of the Commander and shielded him with his own body.

The second shot hit Majid’s heart, and the third landed right by his spine. Majid stumbled backward under the force of the bullets, then collapsed to the floor face-first and died on the spot.

The fourth bullet broke one of the primary school’s windows, made with glass imported from Thessaloniki. The young man—whose name was later discovered to be Hasan—had pulled the trigger again while wrestling with the guards who were trying to take his gun, and hadn’t been able to take aim.

Before he could fire for the fifth time, Hasan was finally and thoroughly overpowered, at which point he fell into an enduring, determined, and mysterious silence. Everyone was as confounded by his silent resolve as they were astonished and perhaps even a little incredulous to see young, handsome, strapping Majid drop dead the way he had. After all, this humble little market (visited mostly by children, curious passersby, and the unemployed, all of whom came to browse the stalls rather than to buy anything) was situated in the relatively sparsely populated neighborhood of Hora, far from the dangers and the atmosphere of violence that hung over the city center, the docks, and the area around the Castle.

Everyone in the market had scattered as soon as the first gunshots were heard, and the villagers and children who had been trading there did not return to their stalls and their baskets of fish for a very long time. The Commander had remained composed in the face of the sudden attack, thinking only—as he would later recount—of death, his wife, his unborn son, and the motherland.

The guards tied the young attacker’s hands but did not have to hit him or rough him up, for sixteen-year-old Hasan didn’t even try to resist when they led him to one of their carriages (which had swiftly turned up at the scene), took him to the former State Hall (still Sami Pasha’s domain), and locked him up in the second of three narrow, empty cells across from the interrogation rooms in a corridor on the lowest floor of the building.

The attack on Commander Kâmil, hero of Mingheria’s independence, had taken place around the time of midday prayers (though there was no call to prayer anymore). The President had wanted to visit the market before it closed for the day. But the only people who had known that the Commander would be there at that time were his deputy and the clerk on the second floor of the Splendid Palace. Could it all have been a coincidence? After all, Bonkowski Pasha had been killed in a similarly random encounter too.

Four hours later, a meeting on the second floor of the Splendid Palace attended by Chief Minister Sami Pasha and Deputy Mazhar resulted in a series of “radical” decisions which were put into action that same evening. Nationalist historians who enjoy drawing parallels between the humble Mingherian Revolution and some of the most significant events in world history have likened the days that would follow to the French Revolution’s Jacobin Reign of Terror. There was indeed a resemblance, both with regards to the use of court trials and executions to subjugate the populace, and in the emergence of a political will based on the conviction that the “ideals of the revolution” would only succeed if their opponents were met with violence.

Sami Pasha had not invited Doctor Nuri—who always counseled moderation—to the meeting in the Commander’s office. The Commander didn’t ask after the Doctor and Prince Consort either, nor did he send anyone to fetch him. (Perhaps they considered him too much of an Istanbul man, and too close to the Ottoman regime.) The absence of Quarantine Minister Doctor Nuri not only contributed to harsher measures and decisions being made, and to a greater number of death sentences being issued, it also deprived Princess Pakize—and us too—of a source at the heart of events. In writing about the Mingherian Revolution’s phase of “Jacobin Terror,” we have therefore relied less on Princess Pakize’s letters than we have on other witnesses’ accounts.

Sami Pasha learned that although the young assassin continued to maintain his silence in spite of all the pressure he was under, it had nevertheless been quickly established that he came from a family that had arrived from Crete three years ago. Hasan’s family had settled in Nebiler village in the north of the island, where they worked on a rose farm. The villages where Ramiz and his men had taken shelter were in the same area. The boy was bound to confess everything soon anyway, but in any case Sami Pasha had no doubt that Ramiz must be behind it all.

If Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri wished to follow Abdul Hamid’s instructions and look for more clues and evidence “in the style of Sherlock Holmes,” he was free to do so. But according to Sami Pasha, they must not let anything stand in the way of justice this time, for they had all seen Ramiz last week, gun in hand, leading the raid where six people had lost their lives—including some of Ramiz’s own men, the caretaker and provocateur Nusret, and the new governor from Istanbul. In the eyes of the public, that alone would be more than enough to justify having Ramiz and his men hanged. In addition, it was probably Ramiz who was behind the barbaric murders of the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health Bonkowski Pasha and of President-Commander Kâmil’s brother-in-law and champion soldier Majid Effendi, all with the intent to cripple the quarantine effort and destroy the Mingherian people. The Ottoman administration’s failure to punish this brute who’d made a habit of having people killed had been seen as a sign of fragility.

“If we show this unrepentant thug any mercy now, it could lead to even more deaths, and ultimately cost us our own lives too.”

The President’s deputy, Mazhar Effendi, said that the trial for the raid on the State Hall could begin as soon as Ramiz and his men’s statements had been collected, with the resulting sentences carried out the next morning. Everyone at the meeting on the second floor of the Splendid Palace that day understood that there would have to be other executions too, along with Ramiz’s. It was the majority’s unspoken wish that this should happen immediately. It would later be claimed that the President had been instrumental in pushing these tough decisions through, but that he did not wish for this to be known.

It was agreed that six lodges—including the Rifai and the Zaim—that had been causing trouble for Sami Pasha, the doctors, and the Quarantine Regiment, should now be turned into hospitals. Soldiers from the Quarantine Regiment and neighborhood representatives would be sent into the buildings and grounds of these lodges to set up facilities where plague patients could be taken in and treated, and some lodges might have to be vacated completely. Harsher punishments would also be introduced for anyone obstructing the work of the quarantine soldiers, or caught defying quarantine restrictions, and a house in Taşçılar—a neighborhood densely populated with migrants from Crete—would be burned down together with the rubbish dump beside it, given that all efforts to disinfect it had so far proven fruitless.

Sami Pasha also ordered two streets in the Çite neighborhood—where the outbreak was at its worst and the number of deaths just wouldn’t drop—to be cordoned off. Some have suggested that the measures decided upon that day and later enforced by armed soldiers would end up compounding the island’s already catastrophic situation, and to an extent they may be right. It was certainly a thoroughly ill-conceived and indeed primitive move to ban all villagers’ markets from Arkaz simply because that was where the latest assassination had taken place. This same decision would fuel the widespread hunger and rage that eventually followed. But we can also understand why the rulers of the island might have begun to feel there was nothing else they could do now but resort to state-sponsored violence and brutality.

The detail that everyone agrees on is that the Commander’s wife Zeynep was distraught over the killing of her brother Majid. She must have put significant pressure on Commander Kâmil to take revenge on her former fiancé.

One reason Sami Pasha was willing to exhibit a degree of ruthlessness in this period to which he had not resorted even during the Pilgrim Ship Mutiny was that the tiny new state of Mingheria could no longer count on the security that the Ottoman Empire had always provided—even as “the sick man of Europe.” Mingheria might be a free and sovereign state now, but it was also completely on its own … Forget the British or the French; if an ordinary pirate ship were to land two hundred armed men on the island’s northern shore and march its makeshift army over the mountains and down to Arkaz, Sami Pasha and the untrained, inexperienced troops stationed in the garrison would have trouble stopping them even with their vastly superior numbers, and the newborn state of Mingheria would be destroyed and wiped off the stage of history before it was even a month old, with nobody left even to remember there had ever been such a thing as a “Mingherian nation.” Sami Pasha believed that if quarantine failed and the outbreak continued to spread, it was very likely that something like this could happen soon.

During his trial, whose outcome was of course preordained, Ramiz claimed that he had only been trying to help the new governor take office, that he had done this because he believed it to be essential for the survival of the people of the island—he would later use the term “Mingherians” too, adapting to the prevailing nationalist mood—and their submission to quarantine rules, that neither his brother nor any foreign consul had given him instructions of any kind, and that he had done what he did solely out of personal conviction. He had never intended to serve the Ottoman oppressor. Ramiz and his entourage were so comfortable with the idea of killing in the name of the causes they believed in that to them there was no ethical dilemma in this at all—particularly if it was Christians they were murdering. They had raided and looted countless villages in the mountainous north and killed plenty of people there already.

The court sentenced Ramiz, organizer of the raid on the State Hall, and each of his surviving men to death, with the sole exception of the youngest who had surrendered at the end of the battle. The judge (and former kadı) who would have ordinarily conducted the trial was Muzaffer Effendi, sent from Istanbul to handle important cases involving murder, serious injury, the abduction of young women for marriage, and blood feuds, without these having to be referred to the courts in the Empire’s capital, but Muzaffer Effendi was currently in the Maiden’s Tower, having been sent there by rowboat in the middle of the night along with the insufficiently revolutionary mayor of Teselli, Rahmetullah Effendi, so instead Sami Pasha had the elderly Christofi Effendi of the rich Yannisgiorgis family, whom he knew through the French consul, and who happened to be the only person on the island who’d studied law in Europe (specifically in Paris), brought to the former State Hall and current Ministerial Headquarters in his armored landau, instructing him upon his arrival to kindly produce a judgment “in the European style.” These were the same killers who had conspired to assassinate the island’s brave doctors and quarantine officials, all so that they could plunder its resources, its precious minerals, its fish, and its rose oil, exploit its people, and deepen the outbreak of plague which had paved the way for foreign powers to intervene. The judgment, Sami Pasha noted, should put all of that in the language of the law. Christofi Effendi had assumed he must have been summoned to compose the judgment in French, but when he found out that the new state’s official languages had provisionally been declared to be Greek and Turkish, he produced a magnificent text in modern legal Turkish, which he had learned after many years spent practicing in Istanbul as a lawyer in commercial disputes between “foreigners.” He had long, slender fingers, and delicate handwriting.

The Chief Minister and former governor Sami Pasha dispatched a clerk and a messenger to the Splendid Palace with the execution orders for Commander Kâmil’s signature, but two hours later, these were returned to him unsigned and with an accompanying note. The note pointed out that according to the constitution currently being drafted for Mingheria, the authority to approve death sentences rested with the Chief Minister, not with the President of the state. In other words, it was Chief Minister Sami Pasha’s signature that would be required before the executions could be carried out, not President Kâmil’s.

Sami Pasha didn’t blame the President for protecting himself and expertly shifting the final responsibility for the death sentences onto the Pasha; on the contrary, he understood why this was necessary. The only way they would all come out of this alive was if he—their bright young hero—was loved by everyone on the island. But wary of all the ire he would have to face, and because he still had some mercy left in him, Sami Pasha commuted three of the death sentences to life imprisonment and signed execution orders only for Ramiz and two of his accomplices. With the clear conscience of a man who had just spared three people “the noose,” Sami Pasha set about doing whatever he could do to ensure that the other three—including Ramiz—were executed at once.