On the Foundation Turks
Jeremy James
Much is written concerning the origin of the thoroughbred
horse and most of it is conjecture. Rarely does one
come across any real scholarly reference to what did or did not distinguish a
Turk from an Arab during the sixteen and seventeenth centuries when these horses
played such a prominent role in the establishment of the modern racehorse. It is
claimed that Turks were Arabs by another name – but is this really the case?
Questions need to be asked to find out why horses were called
Turks and what might have distinguished them from Arabs, since many Turks appear
in the original data of the General Stud Books.
The first question to ask about these horses is where did
they come from?
The Empire the
Turks founded, The Ottoman Empire, was an exceedingly well-organized feudal
military meritocracy. Everyone was part of the war machine. Land was granted to
those considered worthy enough to hold it on behalf of the Sultan. These were
known as timars. A timariot – a landholder – had usufructuary rights over
the land and, as part of the deal, had to provide men and horses for the war
machine. What is crucial to understand is that horses were not bred for money:
they were bred because not only was it a state requirement, but it was also what
an honourable man did and rivalry between timars ensured an ever spiralling
quality of horseflesh. The timariot system could produce 200,000 mounted men on
command riding highly schooled, big, beautifully bred horses without the Sultan
putting a hand in his pocket. These horses were of a very particular type. Many
mounted Ottoman sipahi (cavalrymen) belonged to a chivalric order known as the
Ghazi. These were, in a sense, the samurai of Islam. They still exist. There are
Islamic companies based upon this tradition to this hour. Lots. For them
everything was and is a point of honour.
For a Ghazi
horseman there was only one horse worth riding and that was the big, fast horses
of his ancestors: the horses of the east – the Turks.
And it did not
stop there. Huge state studs called hirashi reared quality Turks – and
there were a lot of different breeds of Turk, the most widely used being the
Karaman, a 16-hand plus horse who would have resembled the Turkoman of today.
Aside from state studs there were specialised centres – called yund and
tayçi - devoted to the rearing of young stock. All things considered this
was an enormous state-of-the-art horse-breeding enterprise. Travellers to the
Ottoman Empire during the 17th Century made observations underscoring
this: Robert Bargrave, Levant Merchant, wrote that: he had ‘never seen such
horses, and that in great number, as all Christendom cannot vie with; many of
whose accoutrements alone are worth thousands, and those are common which costs
less than hundreds…. The most inferior of them would in England be the greatest
gallants.” Bertrandon de la Brocquiére and Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the
Flemish Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (not the Arab court as many writers
have suggested) for the Holy Roman Emperor said exactly the same thing.
So what kinds
of horses were these? It is to be remembered that the Ottoman Empire extended
from the east through Mesopotamia – basically modern Syria and Iraq - right
across Turkey all the way to the modern Austrian border. It also occupied
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary to the Balkans, particularly Serbia and Bosnia, where
the breeding of purebred Turks – Karaman, Uzunyayla, Rumeli, Kastamonu - was
raised to its zenith. All of these countries produce high quality grass and hard
feed stocks – our own ryegrass is a native of the Balkans – and I can state
categorically as an equine nutritionist that higher quality feed stock produces
bigger animals than lower quality feedstock. That’s an indisputable fact. And it
is most likely that any horse caught as a spoil of war in a western campaign
would have been a western-bred Turk – a big horse - because those were the ones
that were used: western horses fought in western campaigns and eastern horses in
eastern campaigns – it was matter of elementary logistics. And what is pertinent
is to note that it was illegal for a foreigner to buy a Turk horse at the time.
The only way to get one was to steal one or, to win him as a spoil of war. You
could, by the way, buy as many Arabs as you liked.
The Turk horse was called a
Turk because that’s exactly what he was. In “The Illustrated book of the Horse”,
Wilshire Book Company 1875, S. Sidney states that “every Oriental horse – Turk,
Barb or Egyptian bred – is called an Arab in this country.” In his preface to
his book, Newmarket and Arabia, even Roger Upton asserts that, “it would
be wrong to encourage the belief that that Turks and Barbs were either Arabians
or even altogether of unmixed Arab blood and I think it more than doubtful
whether all those horses [employed in the formation of the English Stud, from
the time of King James I to the end of the last century (1899)], styled Arabs
really were so.’
We know that John Wootton
painted the Byerley Turk, there are at least three paintings that I know of. It
seems extremely unlikely that he ever painted him from life. Wootton was two
years old when the great Byerley Turk plunged his big, black Ottoman hooves into
British dirt. And he was long dead by the time Wootton was out of his teens. A
close look at the only believed contemporary painting of the Turk and Wootton’s
classic painting of the Turk as a black horse reveals, more or less, a copy. The
attitude of the groom is the same, the hands are the same, the horse stands in
the same posture. Anyway, this is not a horse to which I would safely like to
ascribe a breed, Turk Arab or otherwise. The only horses that I have seen that
Wootton painted that do bear resemblance to a type are styled Three Arabian
Horses to be found in Wimpole House. Without any doubt, these are fit and
running Turks.
To mistake the identity of
the breed of a horse at a time when the known geography of the world was a fog
is wholly understandable. There are still people who do not know where Arabia is
and still people who think the Turkish people are Arabs. And it is muddling
especially when one steps outside the arena and looks at the Marmeluke Caliphate
in Egypt and all the little Egyptian Arab horses (whose chanfrons, by the way
can be found in the Stibberts Museum in Florence and are tiny). And it becomes
even more confusing when you discover that the Mamluks were also Turks -
descended from the Kipchaks - and not Arabs at all.
Other
revealing facts come to light.
Montecuccoli,
military advisor to Leopold 1, Holy Roman Emperor advised him not to meet the
Turks on horses under 16hh, since that was the size of the horses on which the
Turks were mounted when they marched on Vienna in 1683.
The Askeri Musee, the
Military Museum in Istanbul keeps a large stock of 16th and early 17th
Century chanfrons. Chanfrons are gold face-plates, the Turks being described by
Rycaut (17th Century British Ambassador to the Ottoman Court) as
‘marching as if to a wedding’, when they set out for war. Most of the chanfrons
I measured were 60 cm or more and one or two over 70. That’s two foot to two
foot three in proper English. If you go and measure an Arab horse’s head you’ll
find these things would swamp them. They’ll even swamp a few of the finer
thoroughbreds. But they fit the old fashioned thoroughbreds and the Turkomen
horses of today. Having done this, I then went to the Topkapi Palace and
measured the armour the men wore and made a further startling discovery. They
were far bigger than their western counterparts. I have always been astonished
by how small some of the clothes and armour were of our forebears and was
equally surprised by the size of the armour of the Turks. They were big
men.
There is definitely more
work to be done on the subject, more records to be unearthed and the great
beauty of the Ottomans was that they were such fastidious bureaucrats.
The reason that their records have remained largely unexamined is to do with
partisanship: anti-Turkik sentiment. Lord Byron loathed the Turks as did his
grand-daughter, Lady Anne Blunt. The early 20th century was no better
and bred anti-Turkik feeling that led to a rejection of anything Turkish, even
to the point of ignoring or deliberately overlooking their archives. Turkey was
rejected by the west in the late 19th Century, regarded as ‘the sick
man of Europe’. It was a pariah, and nobody combs through the records of
pariahs. So it was with something of a shock when the west was to discover on
the cliff tops of Gallipoli they had made a fatal mistake: the Turk was not a
sick man at all. He was a valiant and determined soldier: he had tradition,
convention, competence and discipline on his side, all learned from a long, long
history of one the most successful Empires on the planet.
Nevertheless,
the First World War wiped out the last remaining quality stocks of Turk horses.
Their day was over. Then came devastating change. Sweeping away the past, Kemal
Ataturk, first modern President of Turkey dragged his country into the 20th
Century. Out went the old ways and in came the new. Gone was the Sultan and
anything to do with him, which meant all the old hiraşi, the yund, the tayçi and
the timars. Ottoman script (Arabic characters, Turkish language) was outlawed
and Latin script became the formal written language of the new Turkey. Overnight
99% of the population were rendered illiterate. Can you imagine what that did to
a society?
So complete
was this transition that you can barely meet anyone today in Turkey who retains
any knowledge of any interest in the history of his country let alone any
understanding of the breeding of the finest horses the world has ever known. You
have to trawl through the old books and old records for these – something, it
would appear, the west has never really done.
Most
thoroughbreds racing today are descended in tail-male line from the Darley
Arabian – who was also, by the way, an Ottoman horse. But, in terms of genetic
inheritance from all quarters of the pedigree, easily the most important
ancestor of the Thoroughbred in the Byerley Turks’ great-great grandson in male
line, Herod, who accounts for 16% of the genes of the modern Thoroughbred,
outranking the Godolphin Barb at around 15% and far ahead of the Darley’s 11% or
so – all this from multiple studies by geneticists of the comparison of the
breed. Herod of course, also had crosses of Darcy’s Yellow Turk (3), Darcy’s
White Turk (2), the Brownlow Turk, Selaby Turk and the Helmsley Turk. And what
is vital to remember here is what type of horse this was. He was not 15 hh
light-boned, witherless type. This horse was heavy in build, confirmed not only
by Ottoman historical archives but also by English Military Records. When the
Byerley Turk was brought to England he was seconded into the Queen Dowager’s
Cuirassiers, a crack mounted regiment which only admitted horses that were ‘bay
and of superior weight and power’. This unit was to be renamed the 6th
Dragoon Guards, and dragoons are heavy mounted infantry. The horse
would have stood over sixteen hands, had a long back, plenty of bone and been
deep through the rib. He’d have been long necked, had big ears, big eyes, a
commanding presence and a lot of ego. This was the quality which the Turks
sought above all. This description does not accord at all with an Arab, which is
light boned, light framed, short eared and – as Arabists will have it – spoon
faced. Even put to what mixed quality of taproot mare would have been around at
the time an Arab would never have produced a horse of 16 hands or more. That
blood, that size, the shape, that speed came from the Turk and it is to be
remembered with some sobriety that this stallion spent two years in Ireland from
1689 to 1691. And what realms of improbability are there to imagine that a young
stallion of this kind of potency hacked from one of the country to other as a
celibate for two long years? We need to take another long look at the Irish
descended bloodlines and consider precisely what they are, and what, precisely,
are their real historical roots, based upon factual evidence and not upon
enthusiasm for a breed in the absence of dispassionate research.
Selected Bibliography
Bargrave, R. The Travel Diary of
Robert Bargrave Levant Merchant 1647-1656. London: The Hakluyt Society,
(Series III, no. 3) 1999.
Başbuğ H. Aşiretlerimizde At
Kültürü, Türk Dünyasi Araştirmalari Vakfi, Istanbul, 1986.
Bökönyi, S. Mecklenburg
Collection Part 1: Data on Iron Age Horses of Central Europe and Eastern Europe.
Peabody Museum. 1968
Richards. J. A Journal of the
Siege and Taking of Buda by the Imperial Army, under the conduct of the Duke of
Lorrain and his Electoral Highness the Duke of Bavaria, M. Gilliflower & J.
Partridge: [London,] 1687. 4o.
Rycaut, P: The History of the
State of the Ottoman Empire, containing maxims of the Turkish Polity…. And Their
Military Discipline. London, printed for T.N for John Starkey at the Mire
within the Temple-Bar, 1682. York Minster Library.
Sidney, S: The Illustrated book
of the Horse, Wilshire Book Company 1875.
The Siege of Buda: an interesting
tale from the German, etc.
PEST.pp. 110. Longman: London, 1855. 8o. Bodleian
Stoye J: Marsigli’s Europe,
1680-1730, The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier Virtuoso.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Sumer F, Türkler’de Aţcilik ve
Binicilik, Türk Dünyasi Araştimalari. Istanbul. 1893.
Upton, R: Newmarket and Arabia,
An Examination of the Descent of Racers and Coursers. Garnet Publishing,
2001.
Upton, R: Travels in the Arabian
Desert, C.K.Paul & Co., London, 1881.
Vitt.O. The horses of the
Kurgans of Pazyryk. Soveitska Archeologica. Vol 16. See also Iz istorii
russkogo konnozovdstva: etc, Moskva: Gos. Izd-vo sel’khoz.lit-ry, 1952.)
