34 honored by the glory of islam
walking through a fl ower garden in spring.^38 Merchants from Yemen unloaded
coffee, traders from India brought valuable cloth, Crimean slave-traders dis-
gorged their human cargo of Circassians and Georgians to be sold as slaves, a
central pillar of the Ottoman economy, and hundreds of porters carried their
immense burdens on poles.^39 Eminönü Square bustled with crowds coming
and going. Skiffs for hire constantly dropped off and carried people to and fro
along the Golden Horn and up the Bosporus. Noticeable about the district was
its Jewish neighborhood, stretching along the coast to the walls of the palace.
The Eminönü region, or the area bordered by Jews’ Gate/Fish Gate and Garden
Gate, was almost entirely made up of Istanbul’s Jewish residents, two-thirds
of whom lived in this district.^40 Istanbul Jews lived and worked primarily in
the economic center of the city on the Golden Horn. Eminönü appeared as a
partially Islamized landscape. It was also the site of the hulking foundation
of an incomplete sixteenth-century imperial mosque constructed as high as
the arches or grilles above the fi rst windows half a century before, yet “like an
orphan son its arches did not reach the prime of manhood, instead remain-
ing defi cient and incomplete. According to its foregoing condition it became
abandoned.”^41
Even with its shadow of a mosque at its heart, Eminönü sat beneath thelargest and most imposing mosque in the city built by the Ottomans, that of
Sultan Suleiman I. It contains four huge ancient porphyry marble pillars, two
of which are Byzantine pillars found in Istanbul. Completed in 1557, it allowed
thousands of Muslims to pray simultaneously beneath its lofty dome and in its
immense courtyard.^42 The mosque also articulates Muslim confi dence in plac-
ing a stunning mosque on a dominant hill in the city.
Further along the Golden Horn en route to Eyüp the skiff passed the impe-rial dockyards near Galata, which were busy preparing vessels for the ongoing
costly battles with Venice; the ships would pass Topkapı Palace, take on troops at
Beşiktaş, and then sail on to Gallipoli, Chios, and fi nally Crete. The skiff passed
visible Armenian and Orthodox Christian settlements on the coast of the pe-
ninsula of Istanbul, including Fener, where the Orthodox Patriarchate has been
located since 1601. Finally, as the skiff neared its destination, the royal family
could observe Hasköy across the water. It was the only district the majority of
whose inhabitants were Jewish, and it was renowned for sacred springs, the
Jewish cemetery up the hill, and an estimated one hundred taverns, where,
according to the records of Shariah courts, which had to arbitrate brawls that
arose between drunken men, Christians, Jews, and Muslims rubbed shoulders.
The same was true of the bars along the Bosporus and in Galata. The taverns
in Hasköy served, among other drinks an Earring-Wearing Jew’s liquor made
from musky apple juice and a muscatel grape wine made from the grapes he