It was only three years into his stay at the Edirne caravansary, together with the other gifted young men, that the experience of fighting a war was forced into his life. Five years after the capture of Belgrade, in April of 1526, Sultan Suleiman set off on a new campaign against Hungary. His favourite, Grand Vizier Ibrahim-pasha, by background a Greek from Parga, demanded that the mature boys from the caravansary accompany the ruler so that they would become war-hardened as quickly as possible, ready to become officers. Thereby, Deli Husrev-pasha, as the one who carried out secret and important missions, once again determined the path to success for the young men. He left his brother Mustafa, as being too young, at the court in Edirne (even though he had arrived at the caravansary before Bajica/Mehmed and was thereby ‘older’ than him).
In his first life as Bajo Sokolović, Bajica had thought of Belgrade mostly as a capital city in which he, in fact, had never set foot. News from that gorgeous fortification had reached him, like it did to others, from merchants who often visited unfamiliar places. Even when he discounted part of their stories as the normal exaggeration of facts, even then the remainder indicated that it was undoubtedly a proper, seriously fortified city. He had thought about the city often, but had no desire to go there. Because nearby he had the River Drina which, he reflected, could not be much different from the Sava or Danube; and in other places he had seen several smaller fortified towns, and he could therefore imagine what a capital might look like. Travellers told that, except for its size, it was not much different from the town previously built in 1404 under the Serbian despot, Stefan Lazarević.
Since he had become Mehmed Sokollu, however, his thoughts about Belgrade had gone further. For five years now, since the town had been taken by Sultan Suleiman, it had become primarily Ottoman, and then the most important Ottoman point of departure (and therefore of resistance) toward Central Europe and the starting point of the old dream to conquer, after Hungary, the Austrian empire and, of course, to get to the gates of Vienna. Bajica now saw the place also as an Ottoman who had mastered strategy, planning and military strength, but who also possessed an imposed belief in invincibility. At the same time, a new emotion began to recur that he recognised in amazement because it rose in anticipation in him about a city that he had never seen. The only answer he could offer himself in this questioning was found in the probability that this was part of the resistance of the still crude duality of which he was made. And when he did see the city, he realised that he had to fall in love with it as he had – ahead of time and in his head. Looking at the gates, the towers, the ramparts and the buildings within this Fiçir bayir,11 and its European style houses next to Kalemegdan12 connected by cobblestone streets and alleys, the old Orthodox churches and the mosques being built, with a fountain here and there and an outer city gate; seeing all that, he understood why he had had to fall in love with it. Belgrade was like him: a half-breed with clear signs of the addition of a new life on the existing one, quite different from the previous one. Still, in the city he saw both Serbs and Turks. They were right next to each other; whether they liked each other, put up with each other or simply stomached each other, he could not tell. But it seemed that he could tell, unable to explain to himself why, that the future and destiny of this city could be like his own: the Serbs would never renounce it, and the Turks would consider it their own!
Seen in a broader context, this kind of thought was backed by several facts from their common past. The first Turkish attack and first successful defence had occurred in 1440. An entire fifteen-odd years later, and just three years after the conquest of Constantinople and its transformation into Istanbul, Sultan Mehmed II began an enormous new campaign against Belgrade in 1456. The short span in between indicated just how important Belgrade was in the political priorities of the Ottoman Empire. In the battles on Belgrade’s rivers and their banks, the defenders showed incredible courage, especially the Serbian sailors among them. They managed to save the city. From that moment, Belgrade became the symbol of the overall defence of Europe and was given the title of the ‘Ramparts of Christianity’.13 But, it could not defend itself against Suleiman I the Legislator. This ruler gave the ‘White City’14 an Islamic name – Dar ul-Jihad,15 and he was thereafter given the name ‘the Magnificent’ by his enemies.
The truth was as follows: to the Turkish Empire, this city was the perfect springboard for each new conquest toward the ultimate goal – Vienna, but to the European powers united against the Ottomans – it was a much-needed borderline peopled with victims who were not their citizens. The Serbs were in an ideal position for the interests of the two sides – both Moslem and Christian: a malleable mass compacted and stuck between a rock and a hard place.
That was the past. But what if the future said something in contradiction to what he had just been thinking: the Serbs will reject him, and the Ottomans will never accept him as one of their own? He did not dare to think more about that when the similarity or even sameness of the destiny of the city and his own appeared before him.
Bajica was finding out what the Emperor’s highway was, the one the Serbs called the Constantinople highway, by which he had arrived in Belgrade. There was no way for him to know just how many times, usually following the river valley, he would travel back and forth on it. That road would become more than a symbol of his entire life.
The military commanders spared the boys from Edirne in only one way: they never sent them under any conditions among the fighters on the front line, nor did they send them into direct battle. They could not take the risk of losing their lives because they still had to prove to the sultan and the empire how capable they were, primarily in the defence of their own lives. Above all they had to stay alive. For the beginning, it was quite enough that they saw a lot of bloodshed close at hand; it was not necessary for them to bloody their own hands as well. This first encounter with massive death shocked Bajica and his comrades just enough that they managed to keep their wits about them and go on with the quite simple tasks the agas gave them. Their superiors, it could be seen, had a lot of experience with such situations and they never made a single excessive move. The large number of responsibilities that an attack demanded, especially of the commanders, proved welcome in justifying their ‘lack of care’ for the young men. In actual fact, this was all planned: the boys were allowed, on the surface, to harden themselves and realise what their future held. Of course, the agas were, carefully hidden, more careful than usual in looking after them and watching out for their safety. At first this semblance of being alone caused terrible fear in the boys, but after the job was done, they were rewarded with self-confidence.
By the very nature of the place where they were bivouacked, Bajica and his friends were among troops made up of fighters – assault troops, janissaries and units made up of local soldiers. Behind each assault soldier stood several regular soldiers and reservists, craftsmen, merchants, supply officers and others whose burden it was to ensure that each of them was able to do their jobs as well as possible. Whether a soldier at the head of the attack would die, when and to what end – it all depended on them. Or perhaps they would not die. It was then that Bajica understood the importance of strategy, of the organisation of a whole chain of jobs and tasks that made up the integral whole. If one link in this chain gets fractured somewhere, regardless of how insignificant that link may seem, the whole enterprise falls into danger. Seen from the outside, things looked quite different: those (individuals or events) at the forefront were visible, but the whole armada that made that visibility possible remained deep in the shadows. Using this example, he could apply the mechanisms of action to the entire empire as well. The fighters on the front lines (like the sultan and those close to him in the state) risked their lives more than anyone else (meaning that they carried the greatest responsibility in the state), sometimes even losing them, but they also, therefore, took on the greatest ‘burden’ of fame and fortune when there was a victory (meaning power and comfort