A while ago, during the Turkish section of the "shadow journey" that helped keep me sane in 2020, I read an Istanbul-based historical detective story by Jenny White. That one featured Kamil Pasha, a late-19th-century Istanbul magistrate. On the hunt for something along the same lines to serve as a travel book, I opted for The Bellini Card, written by Jason Goodwin, published in 2008, and nicely narrated, in my audio-version, by Daniel Philpott.

I came to it via the recommendation of the late (and decidedly controversial) historian Norman Stone.

Normally, I like to start at the beginning of things, but this is actually the third in the "Yashim the Eunuch" series.

Yes, you did read that right. The hero -- Yashim Togalu, who investigates crimes for the Ottoman Sultanate in the Istanbul of the 1830s and 1840s -- is a eunuch. We're not given many details, thank goodness. And although his situation prevents his fathering children, it does not, it seems, preclude much else.

The choice of protagonist is not driven by a yen for the prurient and/or exotic, however. According to the author, Yashim represents "a character with a slightly detached view of society -- someone who didn’t quite belong to the world in which he found himself... Eunuchs ... could be described as 'perfect servants', because they could have no dynastic ambitions of their own... There’s a practical reason, too, why a eunuch would make a good detective in Ottoman society: there is nowhere he cannot go. He can go behind the veil, visit women in the harem. He is almost invisible."



(The pictures were all taken during our recent stay in Istanbul, more specifically during our expeditions across the Golden Horn to Pera and environs. Yashim is rather dubious about the construction of a new bridge to link the tranquil old city and frenetic Pera: "Old Ottoman gentlemen brought their families to Pera now and then, and led them in stately astonishment through crowds of every nationality and none, staring into the big glass windows of the shops on the Grande Rue, before embarking again for home...")

The story is actually set as much in Venice as it is in Istanbul. But the lagoon city is a little down-at-heel at this point. Goodwin again: "[It's] a Venice quite unlike the one we think we know -- poor, shabby, unloved, a grubby backwater nobody wants to visit." Istanbul, on the other hand, was thriving: "[It was] that peerless city, torn between past and future, between Asia and Europe, between nations, races, creeds... Istanbul in the early 19th century was so riven with divisions that it almost writes its own plot! It is the perfect place to find a dead body..."

Which is a good point at which to note the description of the corpse with which the book opens (although this one is found in Venice, not Istanbul): "He sank slowly through the dark water, arms out, feet pointed: like a Christ, or a dervish, casting a benediction on the sea. The stone at his feet hit the mud with a soft explosion, his knees buckled, and in a moment he was bowing gracefully with the tide." I was struck by it at the time, and can't help but agree with Margaret Donsbach, who feels it must rank "among the most beautiful in the mystery genre".



Venice offers an interesting foil to Istanbul. The Venetians and the Ottomans had had what has been termed a "love-hate relationship". There were many conflicts, but there were also many years of peaceful trade, and many examples of cultural exchange. And at the end of the day, it was Napoleon, not the Ottomans, who put paid to the Republic of Venice in 1797... (Our story takes place post-Napoleon, so the city-state has already been handed over to Austria.)

More specifically, the plot centres around a portrait of Mehmet II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. This likeness is a real thing: "To spread his fame, Mehmet requested that the Venetian government send an artist to immortalize him in portraits and a sculptor to forge medallions with his image. The Venetians thought it would be in their interest to please the conqueror of Constantinople, so they selected Gentile Bellini, the most prominent painter of the time, and sent him off in 1479. In the nearly two years he resided at the Ottoman court, Bellini painted numerous portraits that ultimately left their marks on local artists and miniaturist painters in Istanbul and as far away as Isfahan and Tabriz. Mehmet’s publicity campaign succeeded beyond his dreams. The Bellini portraits have spawned so many copies on everything from book covers and posters to banknotes, stamps and comic books that, according to the Turkish Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk, 'any educated Turk must have seen them hundreds, even thousands, of times.' They embody the iconic image of an Ottoman sultan 'the way Che Guevara’s portrait incarnates that of a revolutionary,' Pamuk observes in the French magazine Connaissance des Arts. After Mehmet’s death, his son and successor, Bayezid II, who warred with the Venetians over their southern Greek territory of Morea, sold Bellini’s portraits in the Istanbul bazaar to help finance the construction of a mosque complex."

Goodwin's story opens in 1840, with a request to Yashim from the new Sultan (Abdulmecid, a young man, who has just succeeded Sultan Mahmut) to locate this painting, whose existence in Venice he has recently been made aware of. Powerful Vizier Resid Pasha, however, is intent on discouraging Yashim from indulging the young and inexperienced ruler's potentially expensive whim. Torn in two directions, Yashim delegates the trip to Venice to his friend, Stanislaw Palewski, "the Polish ambassador".

Now this is an interesting thing, because at that point, there was no Poland... In one of those egregious bits of great-power highhandedness that always shocked my students, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been dismembered in 1795, and distributed among Russian, Prussia, and Austria.



Poles celebrate the Ottoman Empire as the only polity that did not recognize this piece of political barbarity. One anecdote goes like this: "Whenever the diplomatic corps was received by the Ottoman Sultan, on the sight of the empty chair of the Polish deputy, the Ottoman chef de protocol would ostentatiously ask: 'Where is the deputy from Lehistan?' At each occasion, he would receive the same reply from his aide: 'Your Excellency, the deputy of Lehistan could not make it because of vital impediments' -- to the annoyance of the diplomats from the partitioning states."

The anecdote is unlikely to be accurate, and quite how the "recognition" thing worked is not crystal-clear either. But it certainly opens the door for Goodwin's invention of Palewski, which also draws inspiration from the story of Kajetan Aksak, the last Polish deputy to the Sublime Porte before the partitions. Not only did he never leave the Ottoman Empire, but he also always strove to keep the injustice done to Poland fresh in the minds of the Ottoman statesmen: "Since Aksak was convinced that only the monarch who had appointed him to his function could call him back, he continued his service as an envoy of Poland-Lithuania until the end of his life in 1824... Ottoman dignitaries, who felt sorry for him, continued to pay him the same honors they paid to the dragomans of other states."

Which brings us to the Big Question: Is Goodwin's story "history"?

Goodwin replies like this: "How far can you go in monkeying around with history? How far can you distort 'what really happened'? The answer, in fiction, must be -- all the way, and as much as you like. Fiction IS make-believe. The standard I hold to, in writing historical fiction, is this: the atmosphere, the major public events and even major public figures, have to be authentic. I don’t want to create a phony sultan, or give 19th century people 20th century gizmos, or introduce any jarring notes. I want the warp and weft of the historical tapestry to be as realistic as I can make it: I am taking the reader back to another world. The past, as they say, is another country: with the right guide you can go there, I think."

No, then... Not history. But the story certainly motivated me to follow up various interesting topics, with the results I've been noting above. I knew very little about Venetian-Ottoman relations, or Polish-Ottoman relations. To that extent, the novel serves a useful pro-history purpose.



Yashim is the only character who is really developed. He's not only astute, observant, cultivated, and dashing, as befits an aristocratic detective, but he's also essentially kind. He has a gift for languages, and speaks eight of them "perfectly"... And he likes to cook and eat...

Otherwise, we have a cast of stock personae, who exist purely to feed the melodrama: The feisty but melancholy countess, who also turns out to be a handy fencer; the loyal prostitute; the Tartar thug; the meddling but over-reaching cicerone; the talented but mute artist, tragically separated from his mother at an early age; the block-headed and dangerous Austrian bureaucrat; the conscientious Venetian police officer... The theatricality continues with Palewski himself, disguised as an American "connoisseur", and Yashim, outrageously, disguised as a beggar, when he goes to rescue Palewski...

I guess it's all a little too swashbuckling for my taste. I'm always more into the unravelling of the clues than the hand-to-hand combat.

But I loved the atmosphere. There's crumbling, fetid Venice, full of empty palaces, brooding canals, and washed-up aristocrats. And Goodwin clearly loves the Ottoman capital (there's an interesting little video here on Yashim's Istanbul).

And the intrigue is fun. The plot is enormously convoluted, labyrinthine even, but eventually the ends are tied off, and it all makes sense (kind of).

I would risk another outing in this strange detective's company.