Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
Empires are often remembered in stone and steel, in the weight of walls and the echo of battles. The Ottomans left those, too, yet they built something more elusive and enduring. They ruled through sound. Every drumbeat carried authority, every prayer and whispered note moved hearts as surely as a decree. Music wasn’t entertainment. It was medicine, diplomacy, persuasion and command. To live in the Ottoman world was to live inside a score written for power itself.
In 1453, as Ottoman armies encircled Constantinople, a sound preceded their swords. The Ottoman military band, or “mehter,” thundered across the horizon. Drums rolled like storms. Zurnas pierced the dawn with relentless cries. Cymbals clashed in disciplined fury, each note a declaration that the city’s fate was sealed. The Byzantine defenders faltered, their courage unraveling under the weight of rhythm. One chronicler wrote, “It was as if the mountains themselves marched against us.” The mehter was no mere accompaniment to war. It was a weapon, crafted to terrify enemies and embolden warriors.
In peacetime, its voice shifted from battlefield to diplomacy. At Topkapı Palace, foreign envoys such as the Venetian Marcantonio Donini in 1564 stood in awe as the band’s rhythms filled the courtyards. The music was a language without words, proclaiming a sovereignty that required no translation. To hear the mehter was to feel dominion in the air.
Makams as codes of power
For the Ottomans, music was never neutral. Each makam was a language, carrying emotion and intent. To grasp the empire, one had to grasp its tones.
Rast spoke of sovereignty – steady and ordered, it echoed in imperial ceremonies as the sound of authority itself.
Hicaz carried distance and longing, its haunting intervals greeting foreign envoys with both allure and warning.
Uşşak brought intimacy and compassion, heard in weddings, funerals and the daily rituals of ordinary life.
Segah reached toward the unseen, its mysticism resonating in dervish lodges where bodies turned and spirits ascended.
Together, these makams were more than art. They were codes of power and feeling, mapping an empire through sound as surely as laws and decrees mapped it on paper.
Music as medicine
In the courtyards of Edirne’s Darüşşifa (Hospital), music became medicine. Physicians prescribed melodies as carefully as herbs. A merchant gripped by anxiety might hear the ney’s sigh in Hüseyni at dawn, the sound echoing beneath domes designed to cradle resonance. A fevered soldier might be soothed by the steady rhythm of Uşşak in the evening light. One traveler wrote of patients “bathed in sound, as if the air itself healed them.” Long before modern science named music therapy, the Ottomans understood that the harmony of sound could restore the harmony of the soul. Their hospitals were sanctuaries of resonance.
Diplomacy in every note
To foreign visitors, Ottoman music was both bewildering and magnetic. In 1672, the French envoy Antoine Galland described a banquet where the melodies “stirred feelings I could not name.” What he did not realize was that the choice of music was deliberate, a language of diplomacy encoded in sound. A makam selected for a Venetian guest might signal welcome. Another, more solemn, might signal dominance. Each performance was a chessboard where notes were moves of power.
Other observers, too, left vivid notes on the empire’s music. The Venetian envoy Marcantonio Donini in 1564 described the mehter as “an army in itself, whose sound strikes fear before the sword does.” Ottoman chronicler Evliya Çelebi wrote that certain makams could “soothe sorrow or inflame the heart,” reflecting how deeply music was woven into political and social life.
The Ottomans knew what few of their contemporaries understood. Music could persuade where words failed.
Sound could also threaten the state itself. In coffeehouses, a mournful ballad could ignite unrest, its notes carrying emotions too dangerous to be left unchecked. Certain songs were banned, their power deemed too potent. To silence a melody was to silence a mood, a truth modern regimes continue to heed.
Legends tell of sound carrying secrets. In a world of spies and courtiers, a wandering minstrel might play a tune laced with hidden meaning, a rhythm meaningless to a crowd but urgent to a conspirator. Whether truth or myth, the idea reveals how deeply the Ottomans understood sound’s reach. It could be as blunt as a drum or as subtle as a whisper.
Echoes in today’s world
The Ottoman genius hasn’t vanished. Step into a mosque in Istanbul and the acoustics still lift the imam’s voice to the heavens. Walk through the Grand Bazaar and listen to street musicians performing traditional melodies that influence mood and movement. In local cafes, soft chords and even some Ottoman makams create a nostalgic atmosphere, connecting visitors to the soundscapes of the past. We continue to live in a world shaped by the politics of sound, often without realizing it.
We imagine empires as fortresses and banners, yet the Ottomans ruled through the ear. Their drums, their makams, their silences were as significant as their swords. For the envoy standing in Topkapı, trembling before the Sultan, music wasn’t art. It was power.
The empire itself has fallen. Palaces stand in silence. Mehter bands perform for cultural events and tourists. Dervishes whirl for visitors at historical sites. Yet, the truth remains: sound is never only sound. It can inspire, soothe, attract attention or ignite collective emotion.
Listen closely in a mosque, a market, a café, or even in the pause before a speech. The Ottomans discovered long ago what we still practice unknowingly. The world is influenced not only by what we see or read but by what we hear. In the faintest hum of music, in the rhythm of footsteps, in the silence before words, the legacy of Ottoman sound still commands our senses, proving that true power has always resonated far beyond walls and swords.
