One of the most important of the affairs which were to be settled at Erzeroom was the geographical position of the boundaries between the two empires, for along the whole line there ran a broad belt of a kind of debatable land, upon which every man felt it his duty to shoot at every other man whom he did not get near enough to run through with his long spear, or knock upon the head with his mace, these ancient style of weapons being still in use among the Koords. For the purpose of gaining local information, many of the chiefs and principal persons of the wild districts in question were brought up to Erzeroom to be examined before the plenipotentiaries and commissioners. Some of these were most original individuals. The following extract from a letter, written upon the spot, will give a faint idea of two or three of these singular chieftains.

Extract of a Letter.

“Erzeroom, August 11th, 1843.

“One day passes much like another at Erzeroom, and though there seldom occurs any thing new to me, perhaps, as it would be all new to you, you may like to hear how I pass my time, so I will give you a sort of journal of the proceedings of yesterday, that you may see how I occupy myself in this outlandish place. First of all, I got up in the morning, ate my breakfast, and then walked about the terrace on the top of the house. At eleven o’clock a messenger came from Enveri Effendi, to ask us to go to his house at one. So at one o’clock we went; the Russian commissioner, with his suite, came also. At the door of Enveri Effendi’s house I saw a fine mare, with very peculiar housings. It was held by a negro, and a Bedouin Arab was sitting on the ground near it. The head-stall was made of a red silk garter, which went over its head, and was attached to the bit by a piece of green leather strap; the saddle was a common Arab saddle, but the housings, made of wadded red silk, ended in two immense tassels, one on each side of the horse’s tail, and almost as large; the shovel-stirrups were beautifully embossed and inlaid with silver, and there was a heavy mace of the same workmanship under the right flap of the saddle. This curious horse belonged to Sheikh Thamir, the chief of the Chaab tribe, and ex-sovereign of all the land at the mouths of the Euphrates. All the time that I was examining the horse and talking about its accouterments, the Turkish guard were presenting arms, and they looked very much relieved when I turned round and went into the house.

“The staircase of this palace is like a chicken-ladder, and the hall at the top, where the servants wait, like a little barn or stable in England. Here, as I was kicking off my goloshes, I was seized by Enveri Effendi himself, who had come up behind me. This was considered as an excellent good joke by the Chaoushes, servants, &c., who stood in a row to receive us; so we went into the selamlik (or reception room) together, and there I was introduced to three of the most picturesque people I have ever seen. The first was Osman Pasha, late Governor of Zohab; the second, Sheikh Thamir, whose horse I had been looking at outside; the third was yclept Abdul Kader Effendi, chief secretary to the government of Bussorah. These persons were dressed in flowing robes of various colors; they had long beards, and enormous turbans of Cashmere shawl. All three were remarkably ugly, strange-looking men, and I can not describe to you the peculiar way in which their clothes were put on, and the wild and almost magnificent appearance they presented. There were, besides these and ourselves, B—— Pasha and four other gentlemen, in the modern Turkish dress. The three commissioners and their two dragomans sat on the divan under the window, all, except myself, with their legs sticking out, like people waiting for an operation in a hospital. Enveri Effendi sat on a cushion on the floor, in the right-hand corner, and the others were ranged on the two sides of the room. As we were fourteen people, on a sudden fourteen servants rushed into the room with pipes; then one brought coffee on a tray, the brocade covering of which was thrown over his left shoulder; and then came a man bringing to each of us a cup, well frothed up, and in a zarf, or outer cup, of a different kind, according to the rank of the person to whom it was presented. Enveri Effendi and the three commissioners had cups of enameled gold, the rest of the Pashas, &c., of silver. When this ceremony was concluded, the door was shut, the servants disappeared, a curtain was drawn across the door, and two chaoushes, with muskets, put to guard it outside. Then Enveri Effendi lifted up his voice, and, after swinging himself about, and grunting two or three times, he told us that the gentlemen in the turbans had brought up a number of old firmans, teskerÈs, and other papers relating to the lands between Zohab and the Persian Gulf; that he had examined them, and that now he begged the commissioners to put any questions they chose to the worthies before them respecting the lands, &c.

“Then we all looked at each other for a little time, then they all looked at me. Then I took up my parable, and desired the dragoman to ask Osman Pasha who he was. ‘I am Osman Pasha,’ said he; ‘and I and my family have been sovereigns (or hereditary governors rather) of Zohab for seven generations.’ Having asked him a great many questions, and written down his answers, which made him somewhat nervous, I turned to Sheikh Thamir. ‘What is your fortunate name?’ said I; upon which Sheikh Thamir opened his eyes, then he opened his mouth, then he looked at Abdel Kader, then he shut his mouth again, and said nothing. So I asked him again who he had the honor to be. Upon this, Abdel Kader, who appeared to be his mentor or adviser, came and sat down by him, and said, ‘He is Sheikh Thamir.’ Sheikh Thamir upon this shouted out, at the top of his voice, ‘Yes, I am Sheikh Thamir, the son of Gashban, who was the son of Osman, who was the son of—’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I only wanted to know from your own lips who you were, but am not particular as to the names of all your respected ancestors.’ However, Sheikh Thamir was not to be stopped in this way when he had once begun, so he shouted out a long string of names, and when he got to the end he said he was Sheikh of the Sheikhs of the great tribe of Chaab, and commander of the district of Ghoban, which his ancestors had held before him for one or two hundred years—or more, or less, as I pleased. In answer to other questions, which Abdel Kader always accompanied with his own notes and commentaries, he said, ‘I have no papers; we do not understand such things. What do I know? I am an old man. I am forty-five years of age; let me alone.’ In course of time I did let him alone, and a difficult thing it was to draw out any information from this wild desert chief. Every now and then somebody else put in a word. At about four o’clock the meeting broke up. We returned home and dined, and in the evening went out riding. Passing some tents, which the Pasha has set up at the other side of the town, near a tank—the only place where there are any trees near Erzeroom, and they are only about a dozen poplars—I saw a number of people, so I went up to the tents, and found Sabri Pasha, the commander of the troops, an Egyptian Pasha, who is come to buy horses for Mohammed Ali—he has bought some hundreds; Bekir Pasha, some other military Pashas, Namik Effendi, &c., two little sons of Sabri Pasha, dressed in a very odd way, with petticoats of different colored silks in stripes; he said it was the dress of the girls in Albania, but I never saw any thing like it in that country. Here we stayed and chatted with the Turks. The tents are superb; the principal one was 100 feet long, with an open colonnade round it, and lined inside with silk; rich Persian carpets were spread on the ground. I have never seen so beautiful a tent. When the moon rose I went away, a man carrying a meshaleh, a thing like a beacon, on the top of a pole, with old cotton dipped in pitch burning in it; it is the best light there is for out-of-doors, as it never blows out, and gives much more light than any torches or lanterns.

“When I got home I paid my respects to the kid, who came out to meet me; and to the little cow, eighteen inches high, who sat in the door and would not get out of the way; and having drank tea, I went to bed.”

On another occasion certain men represented to me that a Christian oda bashi, or chamberlain of a khan or inn, had been unjustly seized and tortured by the authorities, to make him confess to a robbery that had taken place in his khan, which in reality had been perpetrated by two Turkish soldiers; but the oda bashi being a Christian, neither his evidence nor that of any other Christian could be taken in opposition to that of a Mohammedan, according to the Turkish law. The case was brought before me, and I took some interest in it. I had no authority whatever to deal with such questions as these, and it was only by representations to the Pasha that I was enabled to obtain justice for the unlucky oda bashi.

Finding the case taken down at the time from the word of mouth of some of those who moved in it, I thought it might be interesting as a picture of manners in an out-of-the-way country, and I subjoin it without making any alterations in the language of this piece of justiciary business.

Case of Artin, Oda Bashi, an Armenian.

“Erzeroom, August 2d and 12th, 1843.

“A merchant, named Mehemed, brought his merchandise to the Khan GhengÉ Aga Khan, where he slept. Two soldiers slept near him. In the morning his goods were gone; he accused the soldiers (who were the only people who had been near him) of the robbery; they denied it, and were let off by the judge at the mekemmÉ, before whom they had been taken. A Turkish woman, named Zeilha, saw the two soldiers bury something, upon which she told the merchant that his goods were buried at such a place by the soldiers. He went there, and found half the goods; the soldiers, therefore, were again taken up, when they confessed to the theft of half the goods, but said that the oda bashi, an Armenian, named Artin, had taken the other half. Artin was accordingly taken before the tribunal of the Kiaya; the Pasha ordered him to be tortured on his declaring himself ignorant of the theft. A tass (metal drinking-cup) of hot brass was put about his head; afterward a cord was tied round his head, two sheep’s knuckle-bones were placed upon his temples, and the cord tightened till his eyes nearly came out. As he would not confess, his front teeth were then drawn one at a time; pieces of cane were run up under his toe-nails and his finger-nails. Various tortures have been inflicted on him in this way for the last twelve days, and he is now hung up by the hands in the prison of the Seraskier, where he will be kept and tormented till he confesses or dies. This is the deposition of his wife Mariam, who begs me to interpose to save her husband, who, she declares, slept at home, and not in the khan, on the night when the robbery took place.”

According to the Turkish law, two witnesses of unimpeachable character are sufficient to convict any man of any crime, on their accusing him before the cadi. Only in the case of adultery four male witnesses are required. A woman’s evidence is never taken, nor is that of a Christian or a foreigner held good in any case against a Mohammedan. These two soldiers, however, being convicted thieves, their evidence was not valid according to the law, and the oda bashi seems to have been taken up and tortured by an entirely arbitrary act of the Pasha. I went to the palace, and these are the words of Kiamili Pasha, the Governor and Viceroy of Erzeroom.

“You are mistaken; the man has not been tortured; I have proof that he was at the khan that night; he has been found guilty by the court (mekemmÉ) on proper evidence, and sent to me to receive the punishment due to his offense. As I wished to recover the goods stolen for the benefit of their owner, the merchant Mehemed, I threatened the oda bashi that if he did not tell what he had done with his share of the property, it was in my power to inflict these tortures upon him.

“After this he desired to be allowed to speak to the two soldiers who had possession of the other half of the goods. I consented, and sent him to the prison at Selim Pasha’s palace, where they were confined. As I would not trust to the report of Selim Pasha’s people, I sent a confidential man of my own, who was put in a place where he overheard all that passed. The oda bashi said to the soldiers, ‘If you will say I am innocent, I will share my portion of the stolen goods with you, and you will gain by this, as your share has been taken from you, and I shall get off freely. Do this, and nobody will know.’

“The oda bashi was brought back to his prison: when I asked him what he had said to the soldiers, he told me quite another story. Then I spoke to him in his own words, whereat he was astonished, but he kept silence. He is still in prison, and I am thinking what to do with him; but he has not been tortured in any way; and as you seem to take an interest in his case, I will set him free, and give him to you, to show my friendship for you.”

I replied, “I am glad to hear that the man has not been tortured, for in England we consider torture to be an act of unnecessary cruelty; but your story alters the case. The man is certainly guilty, and as I only asked for justice in this case, and I wish in all things to see justice done, I will not have the man; let him be punished according to the law, only do not torture him.

“The other day you hung a Koord opposite my windows; he was a murderer, and you did right: it is by acts like these that a country such as this can be kept in order, and that protection is assured to those who do well.”

“I am sorry,” said the Pasha, “that they hung the Koord before your windows. I told them not to hang him before the house of the Persian plenipotentiary, where there is a gibbet; but to take him to any place where the Koords resorted, and as there are many coffee-houses near you, that is the reason probably why they hung him there. His story is a curious one: I have been looking after him for the last three years; he has robbed and murdered many people, though he was so young a man, but he had always escaped my agents. At last, a few days ago, he stole a horse, in a valley near here, from a man who was traveling, and whom he beat about the head and left for dead. He brought the horse to Erzeroom and offered it for sale, when the owner, who had recovered, saw him selling the horse, and gave him up to the guard. He was brought up for judgment before me, when I said to him, Who are you? After a silence, the man said, ‘There is a fate in this, it can not be denied. I am * * * *, whom you have been searching for these three years. My fate brought me to Erzeroom, and now I am taken up for stealing one poor horse. I felt when I took that horse that I was fated to die for it. My time is come. It is fate.’ And he went to be hung without any complaint.”

I said he deserved it, and hoped others would take warning by his death.

“I hope they will,” the Pasha said, “but among the Koords of this country there are so few who do not deserve punishment, that if you see two persons you may be sure that one has stolen something. You can not see two people together here but that at least one has been a thief.”

“Well,” I answered, “the British commissioners are two people whom your excellency has often seen together, but I hope, in our case, when we leave the pashalik of Erzeroom, we may be convicted of having stolen nothing but your good opinion;” and so I took my leave.

In the evening, hearing that the wife of the oda bashi was in my house, I said to Paolo Cadelli, my servant, that my desire to liberate the Armenian was changed; that he had not been tortured, but he was a thief. “How!” said Paolo, in a great state of excitement; “a thief he may be, but tortured he certainly was, for in the morning did I not go forth into the bazaar to get wrappers (pestimal) of Persian silk? I went to the Bezestein, and there did I not see the chief of the criers of the Bit Bazaar? he is my friend. Did I not get from him the embroidery, the cloth of gold which you have, which is in your room? And we went, did we not go together, to the court of the palace of the Pasha? It is opposite, is it not opposite to the entrance of the Bezestein? Do not the soldiers present arms to you there when you go in? Yes. There I went, and I saw the Armenian, a poor devil—quite a poor devil—sitting down like a monkey, altogether quite stupid with fear and martyrdom. They had martyred him; they had drawn his teeth; his finger-ends and toes were black, by reason of the canes they had run into them; his thighs had been torn by pincers; he was half dead. He said to the people, ‘What can I do? I am innocent; kill me; but I can not restore goods which I have not got.’ Ah! he is a Christian. Is he not a Christian—an Armenian? That is what these Turks do. They have not tortured the soldiers who are guilty. Certainly they have not, but this man has been tortured because he is an Armenian. They are Turks, my master (padrone); are they not Turks? They are all Turks; that is what they do;” and with many ejaculations Paolo went away to cool down his indignation in the open air.

I was surprised at this account. Yesterday, August 5, * * * Pasha came to breakfast, and I begged him to find out the truth. In the afternoon I was at Enveri Effendi’s house; * * * Pasha was there, and he said the man had not been tortured; that the account given me by Kiamili Pasha was correct; that the man was out of prison, but that the Pasha would seek for him and send him to me.

I heard that, after I went to the Pasha, the Pasha sent for the Kiaya, and finding the oda bashi had been tortured, he found great fault with him, and ordered the man to be released the next day. He is sentenced, as he understands, to pay the half of the value of the goods stolen. While I was with the Pasha, the Tophenkyi Bashi was enraged with this poor victim for getting the assistance of the Franks, as he thought that we were come to the Pasha on his account, whereas our visit was on public business in no way connected with this affair. It appears that while we were sitting on the divan in the Pasha’s hall of audience, the Tophenkyi Bashi was employed during the same time in inflicting additional torments on the unfortunate oda bashi; he snapped his pistol at his head, and informed him that the Pasha had given orders that he was to be hanged in the course of the day. The oda bashi, after we had rescued him from his various tormentors, presented himself before me. He was a good-looking man, about thirty-five years of age, with a black beard, and respectably dressed in blue, in the style usually adopted by the Armenian Christians. He said he had been tortured by the order of the Kiaya Bey; the bones were put to his temples, some of his teeth drawn, his nails pierced, his left thigh torn with pincers; he was hung up by the arms by ropes, but the hot cup was not placed upon his head. He showed me the marks of the pincers and other scars about his body—evident proofs of the truth of his assertion. The two soldiers who were convicted of having stolen the goods (the oda bashi being entirely ignorant of the whole transaction) were to be brought before the Council on the following Monday. They are now in prison, and will be sentenced to pay the other half of the value of the stolen goods. This information the oda bashi received from the merchant Mehemed, the owner of the lost property. He has not heard any other particulars about the soldiers.

From the above account it appears that much injustice may probably be carried on by the inferior officers of the government which never gets to the ears of the Pasha, small officials being notoriously more tyrannical than greater men. The Pasha himself appears to be a kind-hearted, well-intentioned man in a general way; but, in cases where his own interest is not directly concerned, he does not look into the affairs of the pashalik with sufficient keenness to prevent his subordinate officers from practicing various acts of oppression and extortion, according to the fashion of the good old times, when Turkey, like the United States of America, was a land of liberty, where every free and independent citizen had the right to beat his own nigger; for, according to some doctors of the law, pashas, vizirs, &c., might cut off a few heads every day for no given reason, but just for amusement. The Sultan had the privilege of destroying fourteen lives per day of his faithful subjects, who might have committed no crime; after that number, some reason was expected to be shown for the further use of the sword and bow-string on that day. Now the case is altered: fewer crimes are committed in Turkey than in London, and the Turkish pashas endeavor to stop such practices as are considered discreditable on the part of the inferior officers; though they have to contend with great difficulties in a country where it is hardly possible to get at the truth, and where the inferior officers have for generations been accustomed to plunder those below them, directly they are out of sight of the higher authorities; trusting to the want of communication, the slight knowledge of writing, and the many obstacles in the way which prevent the poor man’s story getting to the ears of the Pasha or the Sultan, who, in these days at least, are anxious to remedy such abuses, and to distribute justice with a tolerably impartial hand. I had great satisfaction in hearing afterward that, owing to my exertions in this and other cases—the good cause being taken up warmly by Colonel Williams, after I was gone—all torture was authoritatively abolished in the pashalik of Erzeroom; and I am in hopes that, except in some snug little dungeon in the rocky castle of a half independent Koordish chief, this horrible custom is almost extinct.

The Koord above mentioned was hanged in so original a manner that I must shortly describe it, as it took place immediately under my window. What we called at school a cat-gallows was erected close to a bridge, over the little stream which ran down the horse-market, between my house and the bottom of the hill of the citadel. The culprit stood under this; the cross-beam was not two feet above his head; a kawass, having tied a rope to one end of the beam, passed a slip-knot round the neck of the Koord, a young and very handsome man, with long black hair; he then drew the rope over the other end of the beam, and pulled away till the poor man’s feet were just off the ground, when he tied the rope in a knot, leaving the dead body hanging, supported by two ropes in the form of the letter V. Hardly any one was looking on, and in the afternoon the body was taken down and buried.

I shall always consider this case as a remarkable instance of the power of fatalism over the mind of an ignorant and superstitious man. This Koord was entirely the cause of his own execution: no one knew him by sight at Erzeroom, and there was not the slightest necessity for his declaring his name to the Pasha, and confessing that he had committed murders and outrages of all kinds among the villages of Koordistaun. His punishment for stealing a horse would not have been very severe, and, but for his voluntary admission that he was a notorious malefactor, for whom the police had long been on the look-out, he might have been alive to this day, to rob and murder, till somebody shot him, or he became too old for the exertion. Fatalism, in other cases, has a powerful influence over the true believers in the armies of Islam. The soldier goes to battle with the firm belief that, if his hour is not come, the cannon of the enemy can have no power over him; and that if his hour is arrived, the angel of death will call him, whether he may be seated on his divan, or walking in full health in his garden at home: just as readily does he bow his head to fate in one place as in another. By this institution of the Koran, the wonderful genius of Mohammed has gained many a victory by the hands of his trusting and believing followers for the caliphs and sultans of his creed. Some of the reforms of Sultan Mahmoud, by treating lightly many of the ancient prejudices of the Osmanlis, have shaken the throne under his feet. The progress of infidelity, which has begun at Constantinople, is the greatest temporal danger to the power of the Turkish empire. The Turk implicitly believes the tenets of his religion; he keeps its precepts and obeys its laws; he is proud of his faith, and prays in public when the hour of prayer arrives. How different, alas! is the manner in which the divine laws of Christianity are kept! The Christian seems ashamed of his religion; as for obeying the doctrines of the Gospel, they have no perceptible effect upon the mass of the people, among whom drunkenness, dishonesty, and immorality prevail almost unchecked, except by the fear of punishment in this world; while in Turkey not one tenth part of the crime exists which is annually committed in Christendom.

A few days after this occurrence, as I was sitting in the summer chamber at the top of the house, I heard a most extraordinary shuffling and screeching behind the curtain which hung over the door; the curtain shook about, and numerous subdued voices and noises were heard, which sounded like cocks and hens suffering from strangulation. I shouted out to know what in the world was going on; after a while the kawass drew aside the curtain, and along the floor advanced a most strange and incomprehensible procession of several women and men, crawling on their hands and knees, each with a cock or a hen in their hands, whose fluttering, and screaming, and crowing now broke forth in full chorus; one or two got away, and flew about the room, as its owner, making use of her hands to walk with, was unable to hold the terrified fowl. This procession advanced to the divan, and, without saying a word, the foremost woman seized hold of one of my legs, which was inadvertently sticking out, and, holding on to my ankle, kissed my foot, and burst out into a string of exclamations in Armenian, no one word of which made any impression on my understanding. Being horribly alarmed, I kicked as well as I could, and, having escaped into the remotest corner of the divan, I begged to know what all this portended; and on the chickens being caught, and comparative silence obtained, I found that these were the family of the poor oda bashi, who had brought the chickens as a present, and came with tears to thank me for saving their father, brother, or husband. They were really pained, poor people, when I would not accept the cocks and hens, for, though of little value, it looked like receiving a bribe for justice; and, after a long explanation of my strange notions, they walked off in smiles upon their hind legs, the cocks crowing triumphantly on their way down stairs.