The Dervish Bowl: The Many lives of Arminius Vambery by Anabel Loyd
Published by Haus Publishing, September 2024
Review published in Cornucopia, Issue 69, 2025
I was anxious about this new biography. I have long maintained a private cult for Arminius Vambery. This was first fuelled by a youthful reading of his Travels Across Central Asia. I was a volunteer working in the press office of the Afghanistan Support Committee in London and was trying to find my feet. The slippery identity of Arminius, and his outrageous camouflage, posing as a Sufi Dervish embedded in a Haj caravan returning home to Central Asia, added further zest to his dazzling personal achievement. Arminius was a Hungarian Jew by birth.
He travelled across Central Asia in 1863 just twenty years after the sensational disappearance of two British officers. Captain Arthur Conolly and then his rescuer, Colonel Charles Stoddart had been imprisoned by the Khan of Bukhara. After three years incarceration, these two British officers were publicly executed as spies on 24 June 1842.
My admiration for the heroic chutzpah of Arminius would also be enhanced by chancing on a thin blue book in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. In Struggles of My Life, he recounted his extraordinary tough childhood in Hungary. Arminius’s father died when he was one years old, his step-father was a drunk inn-keeper and though his mother sounds an enterprising woman, after the age of twelve, Arminius was a penniless, crippled Jewish orphan. He survived through his wits, always hungry for a home and a proper meal, but driven by his extraordinary questing intelligence and fascination for languages. He became an intellectual artful-dodger, picking up part-time jobs to fund his education, topped up by a growing talent as a tutor. He worked his way up in society, learning how a tutor with good manners could get his knees under the dining room table at the manor house. All this is recounted in Struggles and ends, if I remember rightly, with the exhilaration of a young man standing on the bows of a Danube steamer at night, setting off alone on his travels into the East, having at last escaped the privations, caste snobbery, petty humiliations and casual anti-semitism of his homeland - the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is stirring stuff.
Over the subsequent years, I was able to add other odd tales to the legend of this extraordinary man. Arminius would become a professor of Oriental languages at Budapest, where he continued his lifelong research into the lost origins of the Hungarian language with translating classic epics from the East. Fluent in a dozen languages and a charismatic speaker, he became a star turn in lecture halls, which he backed up by a stream of public letters, articles and pamphlets. He was a ferocious Russophobe and became a passionate Anglophile, though in truth (as we will discover later) Ottoman Istanbul was also his adoptive homeland. He became a confidential adviser to the Ottoman Caliph-Sultan Abdul-Hamid II and was a friend of Edward VII, the British King-Emperor. To add a twist of mystery to this already complex picture, he quested after traces of lost libraries, such as that owned by King Mathias Corvinus of Hungary, taken by the Ottomans after the battle of Mohacs, and the Ottoman library at Brusa rumoured to have been taken by Tamburlane’s grandson to Samarkand. He lived in the golden era of the train, and due to his book tours and shuttle diplomacy from one royal court to another was a familiar figure in all the grand railway stations of the fin de siècle worlds of London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest and Istanbul. It was listening to Arminius speak about Transylvania after dinner, that gave Bram Stoker the nightmare dream which he would turn into the gothic-novel Dracula. Such is the man, that I admired at a suitable distance.
I found Anabel Loyd’s biography completely compelling, not only of the man but of his age. It also completely undermines my hero. Arminius is gradually exposed as self-aggrandising, duplicitous, mercenary and self-obsessed. The scholar-mystic become just another master of spin, a publicity agent of fake news and a blustering political populist. But if you are interested in adventurers, his life remains utterly compelling. Time and time again I was reminded of the fictional villainy of a Tom Ripley, Harry Flashman or a Becky Sharp.
The old rumours that Arminius Vambery was a paid agent of the British, which he both denied, hinted at and elaborated upon throughout his life (even once claiming to have been recruited by Disraeli) are revealed to be true. Papers released by the Foreign Office in 2005 confirm this, but the process, as revealed by Anabel Loyd is more opaque and nuanced than the evidence of these annual, annotated payment slips at first suggested.
Arminius’s first important encounter with the British establishment was as a passing traveller in Tehran in 1863. He had an affable but brief encounter with Charles Alison, who was the resident British envoy in Tehran from 1860-1872. They would almost certainly have been able to identify friends in common, for they both had spent many years in Istanbul. Charles Alison asked the thirty-one year old traveller to keep his eyes and ears open in the Khanates, for the British were interested in discovering the fate of Lt Wyburd of the Royal Indian Navy. A year later Charles Alison was able to interview Arminius on his return from the Khanates of Central Asia, but stepped up the formality of the occasion by doing this in front of two secretaries. They recorded Arminius telling the story of a death of a 24 year old Englishman “of a beautiful exterior and a very clever mind” killed because he expressed interest in travelling east to Chinese Kashgar.
There is no question where Arminius’s true loyalties lie at this moment, for though he might have received tea and a sympathetic ear at the British Legation, he was a guest of the new Ottoman Ambassador (Ismail Effendi) in Tehran for two whole months. Ismail Effendi had arranged for Arminius to have an audience with the Shah where he received an order. But the British had their own style of doing things. Arminius was invited to lecture in London, but Charles Alison turned their teatime chat into a confidential memorandum which was quickly sent to the Foreign Office and read by such influential figures as Palmerston, Percy Strangford, Henry Rawlinson and John Russel in London.
So when Arminius visits London a year later (arriving 9 June 1864) everything of interest to the Foreign Office was already well known. He was entertained by Lord Strangford (who spoke perfect Turkish, Hungarian as well as the Romany of the gypsies.) They got on like a house on fire, sealing their linguistic friendship by reciting an ancient Turkic epic in Chagatai together. Arminius remembered how Percy Strangford “levelled the ground before me” whilst another new ally, Lady Shiel briefed him on the social laws and tone of London’s West End. After his triumphant lecture at the RGS he was feted and was signed up (with a £500 advance) to write a travel book for the top-notch publisher John Murray. He did this in just three months, though separated from his field notes which had already been deposited in Budapest with the Hungarian Academy who had funded his travels. As a travel publisher myself, always fascinated by the genesis of travel books, this was a biographical gem indeed. It explains at a stroke the odd omissions and errors within Travels in Central Asia, but also explains its conversational fluency, and the discernible pro-British current that flows through the narrative. But this all makes sense when you find out that Arminius was writing in London, for a specific English audience, who were at that moment in his life wining and dining him as the hero of the hour. Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire they had continued to treat him as a poor boy from the slums. During his time in London Charles Dickens took him to dinner at the Athenaeum club, wrote him up as “the Hungarian Dervish” and introduced him to Mathew Arnold. But Arminius was to become even more enchanted with the easy-going nature of England society after he met the twenty-three year old Prince of Wales at the late night Cosmopolitan Club. Our future King Edward VII was neither scholar nor saint but an enthusiastic womaniser, bon viveur and gambler. The prince was however fluent in French and German, a free-thinker and completely untouched by the prevailing antisemitism that washed across the rest of Europe. He had a genuine interest in the world and at the end of his life would become an influential peacemaker. This unlikely friendship between the two men would blossom over the years, and included personal visits to Windsor Castle and Sandringham (where Arminius charmed the Prince of Wales’s mother Queen Victoria). Arminius would also accompany the Prince, literally walking arm in arm, to formal dinners in Budapest (in 1873, 1885 and 1888). Indeed it was the influence of the Prince of Wales that first started the annual gift of £100 (about £15,000 in todays values) from the Foreign Office, which provides historians with the documentary proof of Arminius’s role as a British secret agent. Or does it?
Arminius labelled these payments as contribution to his travel expenses, and insisted on a certain formality, receiving the cash in notes in the British Embassy directly from the hands of such influential career diplomats as Sir Arthur Nicolson. The Foreign Office had at first wanted Arminius to be openly paid from the Civil List but realised that was legally impossible for a foreign citizen. In return for these travel expenses Arminius fed the Foreign Office with a flood tide of his own opinions as well as his personal observations of the key characters in the Ottoman court and filled the press with pro-British and anti-Russian letters and articles. From the marginal notes preserved in the Foreign Office archive, he was always viewed as a loose cannon. For instance on one note to a colleague, who had agreed to meet Arminius, “I pity you, I have seen him.” This was not always Arminius’s fault. British foreign policy was going into slow but complete about turn in this period, as old enemies (France and Russia) get turned into “Our Glorious Allies” by 1914. British party politics also rocked the boat of a consistent national Foreign Policy. The Liberals liked Russia and hated the Ottoman Empire. The Conservatives feared Russia and supported the Ottoman Empire.
But we will get even closer to the man yet, for Anabel Loyd has made good use of Theodore Herzl’s diaries to give us a close insight into how Arminius Vambery worked the system. The first meeting of these two charismatic Jewish intellectuals is full of euphoric and mutual enthusiasm. Herzl describes Arminius as “this limping 70-year old Hungarian Jew who doesn’t know whether he is more Turk than Englishman, writes in German, speaks twelve languages and has professed five religions”. Arminius’s first pitch was also recorded “I am a rich man and cannot even spend half the interest. If I help you, it’s for the sake of the cause.” Yet two meetings later, Arminius had pocketed 1,000 guilden (for travel expenses) and had negotiated a £5,000 commission from Herzl (half a million pounds in todays values) if he can help place a loan (backed by a cabal of pro-Zionist bankers) to the Ottoman court. After months of negotiation, Arminius does succeed in helping set up a brief meeting between Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Herzl on 17 May 1901. Though the Sultan behaves with dignity to his guest that day, he is also clearly cross with Arminius, and banned him from Istanbul at the time of this meeting. Arminius for his part was well aware of the Sultan’s attitude and begged Herzl not to mention the Zionist plans to colonise Palestine. He was advised to talk only about assistance in public relations and the consolidated loan. Arminius is meanwhile feeding the British Foreign Office with every snippet of information, and in 1904 manages to get his annual payment doubled to a stipend of £250 a year.
On another occasion, Arminius had openly talked about receiving an annual salary from both the English Queen and from the Sultan. No Turkish receipts have yet been published, but it would seem likely that Arminius felt a lifelong loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty. To understand this we need to return to his youth in Hungary and how Ottoman Istanbul transformed him.
When Arminius Vambery was a young man, trying to hold body and soul together, and to cut an academic dash but without an educational certificate to his name, the tables of Budapest’s Café Orczy were his headquarters. The café was dirty but animated as it was the centre of the grain trade and an informal Jewish labour exchange. Specialist agents would sell (for earnest money) cantors to synagogues and tutors to households on year-long contracts. Arminius was presenting himself just then, as Professor of Seven Languages, but he was also a little bit in disgrace for having fallen in love with the daughter of one of the households that he had been employed in, which crossed over with rumours that he had somehow profited from a burglary in the house of another employer. He was rescued from these doldrums by one of the most admirably liberal and progressive figures within Hungarian society. Count Jozsef Eotvos (accents on o”) recognized Arminus’s unique skills, bought him a set of new clothes, gave him some letters of recommendation and put him on board a Lloyd steamer to Constantinople in the summer of 1857.
Arminius had crossed the Black Sea and migrated from one Empire to another, but on a personal level he had just moved from one set of café tables to another. He now frequented the Café Flamm de Vienne on the Grand Rue de Pera inhabited by a flotsam and jetsam of disappointed adventurers, bankrupts, political exiles from ‘48 and Hungarian officers in the Ottoman service, all plotting their next move. At one such table an impoverished and intelligent cook had introduced him to a Hungarian officer turned book-dealer, which in turn led to his meeting Ismail Pasha (the famous Hungarian soldier of fortune Gyorgy Kmety) who introduced Arminius to his powerful friend General Hussein Daim Pasha (who had started his career as a slave-boy from Circassia).
Arminius was appointed tutor to the Pasha’s son. He delighted in the cosmopolitan society of Ottoman Istanbul where scholarship and piety and poetry was so highly regarded, even if their servants quietly judged him by his shoddy boots. He was passed from household to another, and mingled with the Levantine Dragomen, who worked as interpreter-intelligence gatherers for all the various foreign powers whilst keeping their ultimate loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. In 1858 Arminius published a pocket German-into-Turkish dictionary and started researching Chagatai, the archaic but extinct Turkic language of Central Asia. Having served Fuat Pasha and the Chief Chancellor of the Divan well he was recommended to become the tutor to Princess Fatima, daughter of Sultan Abdul Mejid. They met three times a week, divided by a heavy curtain. The Princesses brother was the future Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. His star was now set in the ascendant.
A year later, Arminius, was invited to become a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy, and in 1861 they agreed to his proposal of a travel fund (1,000 florins) for an expedition to Central Asia, to see if there were any links between the Hungarian language and Chagatai. Aside from settling a linguistic feud (which is still not entirely dead) there was a political angle to this expedition, which could connect the Hungarians and the Turks as distant cousins.
Such an expedition would have been a suicidal act for any Western scholar, but Arminius was now a known character within Ottoman court society. The first half of his journey had much more in common with a diplomatic mission than an expedition. Arminius travelled in the entourage of an Ottoman Pasha to Trebizond, and at Erzurum stayed with the Ottoman military governor, who was his old employer, General Hussein Daim Pasha. In Tehran he was equipped with a tent and topped up with some gold coins by the resident Ottoman Ambassador, Haider Effendi. Under the identity of Reshid Effendi he also received a letter of safe conduct from the Persian foreign minister, to be put alongside his Ottoman passport ornamented with the magnificent Tugra of the Sultan. Arminius was also briefed by Haider Effendi about the local political situation. There was a war between Dost Mohammed in Kabul and his son in law, Ahmed Khan of Herat, while the rivalry between Uzbeks and Persian speaking Tajiks needed to be understood, as well as that between the Turkmen tribes, and between the three rival Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand who were always in competition with each other. Men trusted by the Ottoman ambassador, such Suleyman Effendi in Bukahra and Shukrullah Bey in Khiva were almost certainly given advance warning of Arminius’s journey.
So I gradually learned from Anabel Loyd to distrust Arminius’s stories about travelling in disguise as a Dervish. It was a literary device that put a popular spin on his Travels. It added a shiver of tension to the narrative of his journey across Central Asia. If you were a British reader this would instantly have translated into the executions of Connolly and Stoddart, and the death of Moorcock amidst the ruins of Balkh, and that of Bukhara Burnes at Kabul. But Arminius was in no danger, for he was a courtier of the Ottoman Sultan. He was everywhere protected by the Tugra signature on his Ottoman passport which was kissed by each governor that he showed it to, or raised in respect above their heads.
Despite this it is still just possible to admire the chutzpah of the man. As we have seen at one point in his life he does appear to have been a triple agent - to the extent that he was being simultaneously paid ‘travel expenses’ by both the Zionist Congress, the British and the Ottoman courts). He also collected a load of medals and honours and ornate silver cigarette boxes from various rulers. But there is one more telling personal detail in Anabel Loyd’s biography that we need to take on board. As a professor he never taught at the Budapest university, preferring to teach his one or two students from the library shelves of his home. His most brilliant student, Ignaz Goldziher, was appalled by what he unearthed in Arminius’s library shelves, such as his fictional journeys to Tibet and to Mecca, but finally lost all faith in his old teacher when he discovered that Arminius had been making up his own Koranic quotations. Arminius’s last pupil, Gyula Germanus was another prodigy linguist. He remembered his old professor with greater affection but also his habit of casually accosting workmen on the pavements of Budapest and telling them ‘incredible, fantastic stories from his life.” I bet at least half of them were true.
“ I found Anabel Loyd’s biography completely compelling, not only of the man but of his age.”