MUSTAJ - BEG SABLJAK

(7th century)--One of the Turkish commanders in Trebinje. Contemporaries say that Mustaj-Beg Sabljak could not keep food down and that. like a turtledove, he ate and excreted simultaneously. On his military campaigns he took along wet-nurses to feed him. But he did not mix with women, or with people in general; he could only lie with the dying, so they brought to his tent dying woman, men, and children, who had been purchased, bathed, and dressed for this purpose. Only with them could he spend the night, as thought he was afraid of impregnating anyone who might live. He was wont to say that he made children for the other world, not this.

"I never know," he wailed, "whose heaven and whose hell I'm making them for. They'll wander off to see the Jewish angels or Christian devils, and I will never see them in the other world when I go to heaven. . . . "

He explained his proclivity, in very simple terms, to a dervish; :When death and love, this and the other world, are placed so close to one another, a good deal can be learned about both. It's like those monkeys that periodically go to the other world; when they return, their every bite is pure wisdom. Is it any wonder, then, that some people give these monkeys their hands to bite and then read the truth from the tooth-marks? I don't need that kind of bite. . . ."

And so, in addition to horses, which he loved but did not ride, Mustaj-Beg Sabljak purchased the dying, whom he did not love, but rode. He had a fine horse cemetery near the sea, cut out of marble and tended by a Dubrovnik Jew named Samuel Cohen. This Jew left behind a note about what took place in Sabljak Pasha's camp during the campaign in Walachia.

One of the pasha's solders was suspected of an offence, but there was no solid evidence against him. He was the only one to survive his unit's battle against the enemy on the banks of the Danube. According to he commander, the soldier had saved his neck by deserting the field of battle. According to the soldier, they were attacked at night; all of the assailants were stark naked; he was the only one to stand up and fight, and he survived precisely because he did not let fear get the better of him. They brought him to Sabljak to judge whether he was guilty or innocent. The soldier's sleeve was ripped off; he was led up to the pasha, who, like everyone else in this mute investigation, uttered not one word throughout the trial. The pasha suddenly pounced on the young man like a beast, took a huge bite out of his forearm, and then, just as suddenly, turned indifferently away from the poor wretch, who was immediately led out of the tent. The pasha had not even seen the soldier properly or exchanged a single word with him, but as he calmly chewed the piece of flesh, with the strained expression of a man trying to remember the taste of some food he had not eaten for a long time, or trying to judge a wine. He spat out the meat--a sign for them to slay the man outside, because it was as proof of his guilt.

"Since I have not been in the pasha's service for long," wrote Cohen at the end of his note, "I have not seen many trials, but I know that when the pasha swallows the piece of bitten-off flesh the charges are immediately dropped and the man is acquitted."

Sabljak Pasha has a large irregular build, as though he wore his skin over his clothes and a turban between his hair and his skull.