Today's Wisdom - Walsingham, Williams and the Ottomans

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Long before the existence of MI6 or the CIA, a single grave and watchful man built the intelligence machine that kept a queen alive. Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I from 1573 until his death in 1590, is remembered simply as her spymaster, and the craft he pioneered laid the foundations of modern espionage. A devout Protestant, he had fled into European exile during the reign of the Catholic Mary I. While abroad he witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the slaughter of French Protestants that hardened his conviction that England’s Catholic enemies would stop at nothing. His guiding motto captured the whole philosophy of the intelligence officer: there is less danger in fearing too much than too little. From his own pocket he funded a web of informants stretching from Scotland and France to Spain, Italy, and even North Africa, recruited through bribery, charm, and patient pressure.

His masterpiece was the unravelling of the Babington Plot in 1586, a conspiracy to murder Elizabeth and free her imprisoned cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary had been held under strict watch with her mail cut off entirely, so Walsingham quietly arranged a single secret channel: letters smuggled in and out of her residence hidden in the stopper of a beer barrel. Mary believed the route was safe, never suspecting it was Walsingham’s own design. Every letter passed through the hands of his cryptographer, Thomas Phelippes, who decoded the ciphers before sending them on. When Mary wrote approving the assassination of Elizabeth, she sealed her own fate. Phelippes reportedly drew a gallows mark on the deciphered letter, and the evidence carried her to trial and, in 1587, to the executioner’s block.

What makes Walsingham extraordinary is how completely he anticipated tools we think of as modern. He ran double agents, intercepted and resealed letters without detection, broke codes, planted forgeries, and spread disinformation, even feeding Elizabeth false alarms of invasion to push her into ordering Mary’s death. His network also pierced Spain’s preparations for the Armada, helping mask Francis Drake’s raid on Cádiz and gathering the intelligence that gave England its edge in 1588. Yet he guarded his methods so jealously, and spent so much of his own fortune, that when he died in 1590 the system largely died with him, leaving rivals to squabble over the ruins. He had treated espionage as a simple necessity of survival, and in doing so he proved a truth every state has relied on since: that information, gathered patiently and read in secret, can be a more powerful weapon than any army.

The most astonishing fact about the Williams sisters is that their dominance was scripted before either of them was born. Their father, Richard Williams, a former sharecropper from Louisiana with no tennis background, was watching television one day when he saw a player collect a $40,000 check for winning a tournament. He went home and wrote a seventy-page plan for the careers of two daughters he did not yet have, then taught himself the game from books and videos so he could coach them. Venus arrived in 1980 and Serena in 1981. The girls trained for hours daily, often from six in the morning, sometimes returning 500 balls to earn a rest. To harden them further, their coach Rick Macci recalled, Richard would use battered old balls and even toss broken glass onto the court so they learned to move faster and bend lower.

Defying tennis tradition, Richard pulled his daughters out of junior tournaments entirely, wanting them to focus on schoolwork and avoid burning out. Both turned professional at fourteen. Many assumed Venus, the elder and the early prodigy whose serve passed 100 miles per hour by age ten, would break through first, yet it was Serena who seized the first Grand Slam singles title at the 1999 US Open. What followed was a family rivalry without precedent in the sport. The sisters met in nine Grand Slam finals, and from the 2002 French Open through the 2003 Australian Open, Serena beat Venus in four consecutive major finals, a feat the Open Era had never witnessed. Off court they remained inseparable, and as a doubles team they were nearly untouchable, winning 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together and never once losing a major doubles final.

The numbers they amassed are staggering. Serena won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most in the Open Era, while Venus took seven, including five at Wimbledon. The two earned three Olympic doubles golds together. Yet their story carries a deep vein of adversity. At Indian Wells in 2001 the family was subjected to racist abuse from the crowd, and Serena boycotted the tournament for fourteen years. Venus was later diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that drains the body of energy, and fought on through it. In 2003 their eldest half-sister, Yetunde, was murdered, a loss that later moved the sisters to open a community center in her name back in Compton. Two girls from one of the toughest corners of America, guided by a father’s improbable written plan, changed what power, athleticism, and ambition could look like in their sport, and they did it side by side.

For more than six hundred years, from its founding around 1299, the Ottoman Empire stretched across three continents, ruling huge tracts of southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. At its height under Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, it was the dominant power of the Mediterranean world and home to more Christians than Muslims. Historians often point to 1683, when the empire failed for a second time to capture Vienna, as the moment the long contraction began. While Europe surged ahead with the Industrial Revolution, new trade routes, and modern armies, the Ottomans struggled to keep pace, weakened by court intrigue and a run of less capable sultans. By the nineteenth century, European powers had coined a contemptuous nickname for the shrinking giant: the Sick Man of Europe, a patient whose eventual death they were already circling to carve up.

Yet the empire’s end was far from inevitable, and this is the part most people miss. A new generation of historians argues that the Ottomans were not simply doomed to die, but were destroyed by one catastrophic decision: entering the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in a secret alliance. The war was a disaster almost beyond comprehension. More than two thirds of the Ottoman military became casualties, and up to three million civilians perished. Among the dead were around 1.5 million Armenians, killed in massacres and forced death marches during their expulsion from Ottoman territory. Even so, the empire was not toothless in its final years. Its stunning defensive victory at Gallipoli in 1915 humiliated the Allies and proved the Sick Man could still fight ferociously when cornered.

The collapse came swiftly once the war was lost. In October 1918 the Ottomans signed an armistice, and Allied troops occupied the ancient capital of Constantinople. The punitive treaties that followed sought to divide nearly all the empire’s lands between Britain and France, and the lines those diplomats drew across the map created many of the modern Middle Eastern states whose borders still generate conflict today. The humiliation ignited a fierce nationalist backlash led by the war hero Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk, who won the Turkish War of Independence and rendered the old order obsolete. On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, slipped quietly out of his occupied capital aboard a British warship, ending a dynasty that had endured for over six centuries. From its ashes rose the modern Republic of Turkey.

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