La La… Pasha
Since we are on the subject of the Ottomans in Erzurum, it would be remiss not to mention the handsomest building of the period. A mosque, naturally: the Lala Paşa Camii. Like most mosques it is named after whoever paid for it—in this case Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, who deserves a post of his own.
A pasha…
The future grand vizier was born around 1500 in the Bosnian village of Sokolovići, into a clan that produced four Orthodox patriarchs, three grand viziers and a number of Ottoman officers and officials of slightly lesser magnitude—a strike rate no English county family has ever approached.
He began at court as personal barber to Suleiman the Magnificent. He must have shaved well, because he was promoted to çaşnigir—taster and server of the sultan’s food, from Persian čāš- “to taste” and čāšnī “a morsel for tasting; a seasoning.”
A word about false friends. Your mango chutney has nothing to do with the Persian çāşnī, tempting though the resemblance is and close though the senses run. Chutney came into English in 1813 from Hindi चटनी caṭnī, itself from चाटना cāṭnā, “to lick”—an Indo-Aryan root with no Persian in it at all. Two languages independently named a condiment after what you do with it, and arrived at nearly the same sound. It happens.
Having neither poisoned the sultan nor been poisoned himself, Mustafa was made mirahur, master of the horse, and with the office came the title of agha.
The imperial stables were the Istabl-ı Âmire, and the resemblance to English stable is not a coincidence: stable, German Stall and Persian istabl all descend from Latin stab(u)lum, the Persian by the scenic route through Greek and Arabic, and all rest on the Proto-Indo-European root **steh₂-*, “to stand.”
Which is worth pausing on, because English has been here before. A constable is, etymologically, a comes stabuli—a count of the stable, the late Roman and Byzantine officer in charge of the emperor’s horses. The Franks borrowed the office; by the eleventh century the Constable of France was one of the five great officers of the Crown and commanded the cavalry, and by the fourteenth he commanded the army. So when the Ottoman master of the horse turns out to be on his way to running the empire, he is following a career path that Latin had mapped a thousand years earlier, and that English has since demoted to the man who takes your statement about a stolen bicycle.
Since he had managed the sultan’s horses, it was assumed he could keep people in line too. Mustafa had been placed at court in the first instance by his elder brother Hüsrev Pasha; thereafter his career was moved along by his kinship with Mehmed Sokollu—the future grand vizier, from the same village, and related to Mustafa in a degree no source specifies. First came the post of kaymakam, acting governor-general in Egypt; then, in 1555, a permanent appointment as sanjak-bey of Safed, in what is now northern Israel.
Evidently he learned so much in the civil service that it was time to teach others, and he was appointed lala—tutor to a prince of the blood (şehzade) posted to a province for practical training in government. Mustafa managed two of Suleiman’s sons, Selim and Bayezid. He must have taught them the wrong things, because the brothers ended up at war with one another.
The pedagogical setback did him no lasting harm. After a spell governing the Croatian sanjak of Požega he rose to beylerbey, holding in succession the eyalets of Van, Erzurum, Aleppo and Damascus.
But his success at setting brothers against each other had evidently been noted, because it was Mustafa whom his kinsman Sokollu, by now grand vizier, put in charge of the punitive expedition sent to return the newly independent Yemen to the bosom of the empire. The appointment also made him a vizier, and it went to his head. In Cairo, where he was supposed to be assembling supplies, he quarrelled with the local governor-general and was recalled. His grateful former pupil Selim, now sultan, declined to let him fall into disgrace, and the imperial council was enlarged to five viziers so that a permanent seat could be found for him.
The Yemeni fiasco did nothing to dampen his appetite for command. In the early 1570s he took Cyprus from the Venetians, earning the style Kıbrıs Fatihi, Conqueror of Cyprus, and the rank of third vizier; at the end of the decade he took Tiflis and Yerevan from the Persians and moved up to second.
A few more months of waiting, the incumbent died, and Mustafa reached the highest office in the Ottoman Empire. He was eighty. He held it for three months and nine days, and then he died too.
…and his mosque
He did, however, leave Erzurum a handsome mosque—and left it remarkably quickly. He was governor-general here for thirteen months in all, and the inscription above the mihrab gives 970 in the Hijri calendar, which is 1562.
The architect of record is Mimar Sinan: the mosque appears in the tezkire, the contemporary registers of his works. Sinan never went to Erzurum. The plan was drawn in Istanbul, a team of builders was despatched from there, and the local contribution was to follow the drawing. A career that began with a razor at the sultan’s chin ends in a building put up by exactly the method that ran the empire—an instruction from the centre.
The plan is the capital’s, reduced: the type used at the Şehzade and Sultanahmet mosques, with everything the capital had and less of it. A central dome on four octagonal piers, half-vaults on pointed arches to the four sides, four small domes at the corners. The five little domes over the porch, on six marble columns with muqarnas capitals, are the ones that look Byzantine from the street. The minaret is white stone banded in red.
Nor was it only a mosque. A governor’s palace stood alongside it, with a primary school and a bath house. The palace and the school are gone; the bath survives. Officially it is the Lala Paşa Hamamı. Locally it is known as the Çöplük—the rubbish-tip baths. The Conqueror of Cyprus, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, commemorated by a bath house next to the dump.
