"Without, the scented roses twine,The Suleymanieh tow'rs o'erhead,The flagstones, flecked with shade and shine,Re-echo to the pilgrim's tread,And soft grey doves their wings outspreadIn the blue vault above the shrine."
"Without, the scented roses twine,The Suleymanieh tow'rs o'erhead,The flagstones, flecked with shade and shine,Re-echo to the pilgrim's tread,And soft grey doves their wings outspreadIn the blue vault above the shrine."
"Without, the scented roses twine,
The Suleymanieh tow'rs o'erhead,
The flagstones, flecked with shade and shine,
Re-echo to the pilgrim's tread,
And soft grey doves their wings outspread
In the blue vault above the shrine."
If Roxelana was the evil genius of Suleiman, his reign was not more happy after her death. Her two elder sons, Selim and Bayezid broke into open war. Bayezid attacked Selim, and, betrayed, it would seem by the basest of intrigues, he was defeated, and fled to Persia. Every letter that he wrote to his father was suppressed, and the Persians sold him to his brother by whom he and his four sons were put to death. A few months later his fifth son, a child of three, was strangled at Brusa by the Sultan's orders.
To the last, Suleiman led his troops to the field. He died on August 30, 1566, while he was conducting the siege of Szigeth, a small fortress in Hungary. The grand Vizier concealed his death from the army and sent messengers at once to Selim, who hastened to Constantinople.
Suleiman left behind him a name more famous than any of his predecessors save Mohammed the Conqueror. His lofty and enterprising genius, his heroic courage, his strict observance of the laws of Islam tempered at times by a wise tolerance, the order and economy which were combined with his magnificence and grandeur, his love of knowledge and the protection he extended to learned men, all mark him out, says the historian of the Ottomans, among the noblest of his race.
Selim II. began ill by not paying the largesse which the Janissaries expected from a new sovereign. They mutinied, and he was obliged to yield. His father had altered the ancient rule which required the Janissaries only to go to the war when the Sultan himself took the field. The Janissaries now compelled him to allow the enrolment of their children in their ranks. Selim was no warrior, and he was glad to send his troops without him. He preferred, the ambassadors say, "the society of eunuchs and of women, and the habits of the serai to the camp:" he "wore away his days in sensual enjoyments, in drunkenness and indolence." "Whoever beheld him and saw his face inflamed with Cyprus wine, and his short figure rendered corpulent by slothful indulgence, expected in him neither the warrior nor the leader of warriors. In fact, nature and habit unfitted him to be the supreme head, that is the life and soul, of that warlike State."[37]
He was the first of the Turkish Sovereigns who was unworthy of the throne that had been won by hard and incessant work. "I think not of the future," he himself said, "I live only to enjoy the pleasure of each day as it passes." A drunkard ruling over the Mussulmans, sworn to total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks, was a grotesque and disgusting anomaly. The people mocked while they followed the example. "Where shall we get our wine to-day," they said, "from the Mufti (priest) or from the Kadi (judge)?"
But whatever might be the character of the Sultan, it had become a fixed policy with the Turks that the Empire could only be carried on by aggressive war. Under Selim, though without his personal intervention, war was made with Russia, but without success: the conquests of Suleiman in Arabia were made complete, and Yemen fell into the hands of the Turks. Then it was determined to complete the conquest of the Mediterranean: war was declared against Venice, and Cyprus was captured in August 1571. But this capture, which Selim described to Barbaro as "cutting off one of the arms of the Republic" was avenged by the famous naval league against the Turks. On October 7, 1571, Don John of Austria utterly destroyed the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, capturing 130 galleys, 30,000 prisoners, and 15,000 Christian slaves. It was the first sign of the long decline of the Ottoman power. Europe awoke to the belief that the Turks were not invincible.
THE GOLDEN HORN FROM PERA, AFTER SUNSET
THE GOLDEN HORN FROM PERA, AFTER SUNSET
The news was received with consternation in Constantinople. An outbreak of Mohammedan fanaticism, as so often since, found its expression in the ferocity of the Sultan. Selim issued orders for the massacre of all the Christians in the city: happily his Vizier deferred the execution of the command, and it wasrevoked. The incident is characteristic. From 1453 the Christian inhabitants of the capital have held their lives simply at the pleasure of the Commander of the Faithful. At any moment the word may be spoken which the loyal Turk must obey
"For an order has come from the PadishahI must go and kill the Giaour."
"For an order has come from the PadishahI must go and kill the Giaour."
"For an order has come from the Padishah
I must go and kill the Giaour."
The butchery was countermanded in 1571, but little more than twenty years later it was again seriously proposed. When the Spaniards in 1595 sacked Patras, the extermination of the Christians in Constantinople "was discussed in the divan, but the result was confined to the publication of an order for the expulsion of all unmarried Greeks from Constantinople within three days."[38]This was in the reign of Murad III., and when he died, in the same year, "the Janissaries, in their wonted manner, fell to spoiling Christians and Jews, and were proceeding to further outrages, when their aga, to restrain their insolence, hung up a Janissary taken in the act of murdering a rayah."
The alarm of Mussulman Constantinople was ended by the speedy reconstruction of a fleet, and by the capture of Tunis. But with none of these triumphs was it possible to associate the name of Selim. He died on December 12, 1574, "the victim," in the phrase of the Vicomte A. de la Jonquière, "de sa passion pour le vin."
Murad III. his son and successor was not without good instincts. He was a striking contrast to his father. He loved study, he was temperate, he was a soldier. But the terrible custom, now become almost a law of state, laid its frightful burden of crime upon him at the moment of his succession. For eighteen hours he refused to be proclaimed, he argued with the Muftisand the Ministers, to save the lives of his brothers. But he yielded, willingly or unwillingly, and the chief of the mutes was summoned to his presence, shown the body of the dead Sultan, and given nine handkerchiefs for the nine princes in the Seraglio. Weeping, Murad gave the order, says the Venetian ambassador: and men thought when he began his reign that he would be sober, wise, and just. He did not long retain the reputation. He began a war with Persia and his troops were engaged on the Hungarian frontier. But he followed the example of his father. He did not himself lead his armies in the field. He rarely left the seraglio, where he gave himself up entirely to the pleasures which appealed so powerfully to the Moslem. The harem and the treasury became his sole delights. The ambassadors tell stories that sound fabulous of his insane desire for gold. He stripped ornaments from ancient works of art and coined them into money; he collected from every quarter; he pinched and starved everything but his private pleasures, and year after year he cast into the great marble well which he had made beneath his bed "two and a half millions of gold, all in sequins and sultanins." Under him the sale of offices, which was begun by Rustem, the vizier to whom Roxelana induced Suleiman to give his favour, became a settled and almost fundamental rule of the state. Even judicial and military offices were given for bribes, and the money was caressed by the insane Murad and cast into the pit over which he slept. The ambassadors describe in ludicrous language the impression which Murad made upon them. He sat in state to receive them, he received their presents, he listened to them with a stupid stare; then he "went back to his garden, where in deep sequestered spots his women played before him, danced and sang, or his dwarfs made sport for him, or his mutes, awkward and mounted onas awkward horses, engaged with him in ludicrous combats, in which he struck now at the rider now at the horse, or where certain Jews performed lascivious comedies before him." In fact the Sultans were becoming ridiculous, without ceasing to be terrible. As for government, Murad left it to his vizier, a Bosnian, Mohammed, who held his office in three reigns and far surpassed any European minister in riches and power. It was he who peacefully arranged the succession of both Selim and Murad, and so long as he lived there was order and firmness in the government. But after his death the chief office was passed from hand to hand, according to the Sultan's fancy, and always a large sum found its way, at each change of viziers, into the pit of gold. The elevation of Ferhat reads like a tale in the Arabian Nights. Murad would wander like Haroun al-Raschid through the bazaars. One day he heard a cook bewailing the misgovernment of the city. He questioned him, approved his replies, and next day summoned him to the palace and appointed him to the office whose holder he had criticised, from which he rose to be vizier. It was a perilous rise. Ferhat did not long retain his position, but at least he escaped with his life. It was different with others, and the precedent of handing over officers to the vengeance of the Janissaries was set in 1590, when the soldiers attacked the Seraglio and demanded the execution of the Beyler bey of Roumelia and another. The plane tree of the Janissaries began its deadly history.
Murad died on January 6, 1596. His eldest son and successor, whose mother was a Venetian, marked his accession by the most bloody of all the murders which inaugurated the reign of the Sultans. He had his nineteen brothers strangled in his presence, and then proceeded to govern as though he had no objects but those of the most exalted virtue. After a fewweeks he left all the work to his ministers, and was himself ruled entirely by his mother. In 1596, however, the disasters of his army induced him to go himself to the war in Wallachia. The sacred standard of the Prophet, preserved at Eyûb, was unfurled, and on the field of Kereskte, Mohammed won a great victory over the Austrians. He returned in triumph to Constantinople, where the rest of his reign was marked by rebellions and misfortunes on all sides. The plague made fearful ravages in the crowded streets of Stambûl. It penetrated into the Seraglio, and it is said that seventeen princesses, sisters of Mohammed, died. The sipahis rose and demanded the heads of the eunuchs who ruled under favour of the Valideh Sultan. They were given up and strangled. But then the Sultan determined to take vengeance, he entrusted its execution to the Janissaries. The sipahis were ordered to lay down their arms; if they failed to do so they were threatened with the penalties of treason. The soldiers thereupon delivered up their officers, who were put to death. The Sultan himself died in 1603. His son Ahmed succeeded him, an elder son having been put to death on pretence of having shown independence of character which threatened the throne.
Ahmed I. was but fourteen when he came to the throne. Well served by a wise Grand Vizier, his reign was marked by some signs of activity, and, strange to say, by two years of peace. But the treaty of Sitvakorok (1606) with Austria was another step in the decline of the Ottomans.
Ahmed did something to redress the corruption that had infected the government. He administered justice like the chieftains of old; he received petitions, and saw that grievances were redressed. He began, as he grew up, to read of the exploits of Suleiman, and to promise himself that he would surpass them; but hehad no stability of purpose, and his reign passed away in disasters, with the murder of the one eminent man, Nousouh Pacha, who might have saved the State, and with the introduction of usages which seemed to the Ulemas to strike at the very heart of Moslem law. Constantinople was almost abandoned to mob-rule because the muftis forbade the use of tobacco, which was introduced by the Dutch. It is impossible now to conceive a Turk without this solace; and it is strange that it needed the most ingenious arguments and the most stubborn defiance to procure the withdrawal of the edict which forbade it to the Moslem. The poets, we are told, called tobacco, coffee, opium, and wine the four elements in the world of happiness; the Ulemas replied that they were the four chief servants of the devil. The people settled the question for themselves.
With Ahmed the custom of butchering the brothers of the new Sultan had ceased. He not only spared the life of his brother Mustafa, but left directions that he should succeed him on the throne. But the custom which he began was even more fatal to the power of the Turks than that which he ended. The succession of the oldest male of the royal house might not itself have been a misfortune. But from the time when the princes ceased to be strangled they were kept in the Seraglio, with no knowledge of the work of government, trained only to a voluptuous and effeminate life. Mustafa had almost lost his wits when he became Sultan; he had been a prisoner for nearly forty years. Within three months his violence, his promotion of two pages to be Pashas of Cairo and of Damascus, his dislike of the female sex, convinced the ministers that he was incapable of governing; he was again removed to the Seraglio, and Osman II., the son of his brother Ahmed, was elevated to the throne.
Of the troubles which beset the ambassadors and how they were redressed more shall be said hereafter. Osman's six years of rule were disturbed by sterner men. The Janissaries again showed that their power was greater than that of the Sultan. Osman decimated them in war, and executed many who drank wine; but they were too strong for him, dragged the unhappy Mustafa again from prison, and again declared him to be the ruling Sultan. The Kafess (cage), the splendid building in the grounds of the old Seraglio, which even now may not be approached, which had so long held him prisoner, has memories of no stranger history than his. When he was dragged forth he trembled before his nephew, and threw himself at his feet. Osman taunted the Janissaries with the weakness of the ruler they preferred to himself; but it was not weakness that the Janissaries feared. Osman was dragged to the Seven Towers, and there, after a desperate struggle, he was strangled in a dungeon. Within a few months the idiot Mustafa was again deposed and sent back to the Kafess, where soon afterwards the bowstring ended his miserable life. For the few months of his nominal reign he was entirely in the hands of the soldiery; minister after minister was given up to them, and ended his life by the bowstring or on the fatal tree. The Janissaries held Constantinople in terror, and raised and deposed a Sultan as easily as a minister.
Murad IV., still a child, the surviving son of Ahmed, was made Sultan in 1623. In him the Turks had again a masterful and determined ruler. His mother the Valideh, and his Vizier Hafiz, made the first years of his reign distinguished if not glorious. Till 1632 he trained himself in all military exercises; he rode, he drew the bow with the best of the Janissaries. Then came the revolt of the Sipahis andJanissaries, which gave him his opportunity. Constantinople was for many days in the hands of the military mob, reinforced by disaffected troops who had returned from Persia. They assembled in the Atmeidan (the old Hippodrome); thence they went to the Seraglio and demanded the "seventeen heads" of the Sultan's chief advisers and friends. For some days Murad held out. He summoned the Vizier, Hafiz, who rode through the crowd, past the barracks of the Janissaries, in at the Orta Kapou, after dismounting, the stones of the mob falling round him as he disappeared. Murad ordered him to escape to Juntan. Within a few hours the Sultan was compelled to come forth to the people and hold Divan. They demanded the seventeen—the "vizier, the aga of the Janissaries, the deftarder, and even a boy, because he was liked by the Sultan." "Give us the heads," they cried. "Give the men up to us, or it shall be the worse for thee."
Murad summoned Hafiz to return to die. The Vizier came back, made the ablution of the Moslem law before death, went forth calmly to the mob, and was hewn in pieces outside the gate of the Seraglio. "Infamous assassins," cried Murad, "who fear neither Allah nor his prophet, some day if God wills you shall find your victims terribly avenged." "The sole remedy against abuses is the sword," one said to the Sultan; and the rest of his life showed how well he understood the lesson. One by one the leaders of the revolt were secretly assassinated; their bodies were found floating on the Bosporus. The Janissaries and the sipahis were ostensibly received into favour again, justice was promised, and the strict rule of law. But it was a reign of terror that Murad inaugurated. His first execution had given him a passion for blood. Sometimes he gratified it in the chase, when heslaughtered thousands of head, driven together by an army of beaters. More often it was displayed in the slaughter of men. In the year 1637 it was declared that he had executed 25,000 men, many of them with his own hand. "He was now terrific to behold. His savage black eyes glared threateningly in a countenance half hidden by his dark brown hair and long beard; but never was its aspect more peculiar than when it showed the wrinkles between the eyebrows. His skill with the javelin and the bow was then sure to deal death to some one. He was served with trembling awe. His mutes were no longer to be distinguished from the other slaves of the Serai, for all conversed by signs. While the plague was daily carrying off fifteen hundred victims in Constantinople, he had the largest cups brought from Pera, and drank half the night through, while the artillery was discharged by his orders."[39]
Drunken and brutal as he was he had still much of the terrible force of the early Ottomans. He led his own troops to battle, and when they flinched—for the old spirit seemed to have deserted even the Janissaries—he drove them forward with his own sword. He appears in history as the Conqueror of Bagdad (1638) a conquest marked, it is said, by a massacre of 25,000 people. He was the last Sultan whom the people of Constantinople saw return in triumph from a war of which he himself had been the leader.
He died on February 9, 1640, leaving behind him no child. Only his mother's craft had prevented the murder of his only brother, the last of the race of Osman. He left behind him an empire which seemed entirely subdued to the Sultan's will. But the terror which he had inspired could not endure; and while it lasted it could only paralyse the forces which shouldhave given strength and permanence to the empire. Greedy, avaricious to an extent as enormous but not so ridiculous as Murad III., the supreme passion of his life was the lust of blood. It became an insanity; at night he would rush through the streets, cutting down all whom he met. Yet he died in his bed; the time had not come when Sultans were murdered as easily as Viziers. Ibrahim, his successor, had been imprisoned in the Kafess since he was a child of two. He had lived through the reigns of Mustafa, Osman and Murad. He had been allowed no offspring. He was utterly ignorant of politics and war. He cared for nothing but the pleasures of the harem. When the soldiers went in to announce his accession he would not believe that they desired anything but his death. He would not be convinced till the corpse of his brother was brought before him. Then he screamed with insane delight, "The empire is at last delivered from its butcher."
His reign of nine years was a horrible mixture of tragedy and farce. In licentiousness he outdid the worst of his predecessors, in folly the silliest of them. The capture of the child of a favourite slave led to the war of Candia: the marriage by his orders of his baby daughter to a rich Pacha was used as an occasion to strangle the bridegroom and seize his treasures. At length the shameful crimes of the sovereign, of which murder seemed the least, caused an organised insurrection in the city. The chief Mufti, whose daughter had been shamefully used by the Sultan, assembled all the mollahs, and the officers of the Janissaries and the sipahis in the Orta djami (a mosque on the Etmeidan, the old quarter of the Janissaries, now destroyed). They first demanded the execution of the Vizier. When that was refused, the Janissaries secured the gates, surrounded the Seraglio, caughtand slew the Vizier. In S. Sophia, the Mufti, the Sheik-ul-Islam, proclaimed to a vast multitude the iniquities of the Sultan, and demanded his deposition. Solemnly the Osmanlis declared Ibrahim, the padishah, the king of kings, the commander of the faithful, unworthy to reign. His little child, Mohammed, only seven years old, was fetched from the charge of his mother, the famous Valideh Sultan, and invested with the ensigns of sovereignty. Ibrahim was again carried to the Kafess. Ten days later appeared the mutes, with the Vizier and the Sheik-ul-Islam; and the bowstring ended the life of Ibrahim.
Mohammed IV. reigned for nearly forty years, 1649-1687, and he filled a great space in the history of his time. Foreign observers—notably that most entertaining writer Paul Ricaut, Esquire, "late secretary to his Excellency the Earl of Winchelsea, Embassador Extraordinary for His Majesty Charles II., to Sultan Mahomet Han the Fourth Emperor of the Turks, now Consul of Smyrna, and Fellow of the Royal Society," in his "History of the present state of the Ottoman Empire," and a certain escaped slave (unless indeed it be an ingenious gentleman of Grub Street) who wrote in 1663 "A new survey of the Turkish Empire and Government"—made Europe well acquainted with the customs of the Turks, and the manners, especially the least pleasing manners, of their rulers. The Turk become better known, yet hardly less terrible; and our knowledge of the revolutions of Constantinople now comes to us, for the first time, largely from English observers. The story must be briefly sketched. In the first year of the child-Sultan's reign tragedies of the palace succeeded each other with fearful rapidity.
There was a contest between the Valideh, the mother, and Kiosem (as Ricaut calls her), thegrandmother of Mohammed. The aga of the Janissaries took part against Sinan the Vizier, who, with the old queen, determined to put a young child, Suleiman, on the throne. Sinan took prompt measures. He entered the Seraglio, had the Valideh aroused and sent to the bedside of her son. The household was armed. Suspected traitors were slain before Mohammed's eyes, and their blood bespattered his dress as he sat on his throne. While within the Seraglio there was this confusion, without the whole city was in disturbance, and the people were all aroused to defend their Sultan.
Ricaut's description is worth quoting. He derived his knowledge from some persons intimately concerned, and the way he tells the tale, from which a short passage is here given, shows how Eastern doings struck the Westerns of his day.
"These preparations," he says,[40]"were not only in the Seraglio, but likewise without; for the Visier had given order to all the Pashaws and Beglerbegs, and other his Friends, that without delay they should repair to the Seraglio with all the force they could make, bringing with them three days Provision, obliging them under pain of Death to this Duty. In a short space so great was this concourse, that all the Gardens of the Seraglio, the outward Courts and all the adjoining Streets were filled with armed Men: from Galata and Tophana came boats and barges loaden with Powder and Ammunition and other necessaries; so that in the morning by break of day appeared such an Army of Horse and Foot in the Streets, and Ships and Gallies on the Sea, as administered no small terrour to the Janizaries; of which being advised, and seeing the concourse of the people run to the assistance of the King, theythought it high time to bestir themselves; and therefore armed a great company of Albaneses, Greeks and other Christians to whom they offered Money, and the Title and Priviledges of Janizaries, promising to free them from Harach, or Impositions paid by the Christians; which Arguments were so prevalent, that most taking Arms, you might see the Court and City divided, and ready to enter into a most dread confusion of a Civil War."
FOUNTAIN IN THE COURT OF THE MOSQUE OF VALIDEH
FOUNTAIN IN THE COURT OF THE MOSQUE OF VALIDEH
The end of the matter was that "the old queen" was dragged naked from the Seraglio, a horror unknown in Turkish history, and bowstrung outside the Orta Kapou. The banner of the Prophet was unfurled. The Janissaries rallied to it. Their aga was deserted and slain, with his accomplices, and (by retributive justice) the Vizier was stabbed in the streets. Tranquillity was re-established, and the government was carried on from the harem. From 1649 to 1656 six Viziers were deposed or strangled, Pacha after Pacha broke into open revolt, the Janissaries and sipahis fought against each other as if there had been no Christians to conquer, and in turn demanded from the Sultan the heads of those whom they chose to proscribe. The Valideh Sultan was wisely and carefully educating her son. In 1656 she gave him the best of teachers and viziers in Kuprili Mohammed. With him began the age of the great Viziers who for a time revived the glory of the Turks. He showed with severity that he intended to rule; and the Turks have always submitted to one who knows how to command. The sipahis were sent away from Constantinople and settled in the provinces. A rising was sternly checked, and four thousand corpses were thrown into the sea. Thus began the rule of the Kuprilian Viziers, which lasted from 1659 to 1702, a half century of varying fortunes, but never whollyunfavourable to the Turks. The interminable war with Candia went on, and the Austrian and Hungarian campaigns succeeded each other with undeviating regularity. The Turks met Montecuculi, and Sobieski, in the field; and when they were defeated they were at least not disgraced. In 1683 Kara Mustafa, the Vizier, was defeated before Vienna and the Turks were driven back to Belgrade. Though he was the Sultan's son-in-law an order was sent to the camp for him to die; he placed the cord with his own hands round his neck. In the year of continuous warfare, when the forces of the empire bore the Turkish banners against Venice, as well as the Empire, the vices and neglect of the Sultan passed for a time almost unheeded. But in 1687 the defeat of the army led to a demand for the punishment of the general, Suleiman Pacha. Mohammed saw that this was but a step towards his own deposition. He sacrificed his minister, and ordered the execution of his own brother Suleiman, that there might be no one to replace him. But it was too late. The army, in rebellion, marched on Constantinople, released Suleiman and invested him as Sultan. Mohammed was imprisoned till his death in 1693.
Suleiman II. reigned but four years, but he showed an unexpected ability. His accession was marked by what had now become a custom, an insurrection of the Janissaries. The house of the Grand Vizier was sacked, his harem was violated, and the most shameful atrocities were committed in the streets. Constantinople seemed to be given over to pillage; the bazaars were attacked, and some private houses were pillaged. The Sheik-ul-Islam was obliged to arouse the Ulemas and display the standard of the Prophet over the gate of the Seraglio, and when the Janissaries, like spoilt children, returned to their allegiance, theirleaders were executed and peace was restored. In Suleiman the people had again a sovereign who lived according to the precepts of the Koran. His wisdom and impartiality, extended even to allowing the Christians of Constantinople to rebuild some of their ancient churches, were recognised even by fanatics and he was counted a saint. His wars were carried on by Kuprili Mustafa, to whom also his brother Ahmed II. (1691-1695) abandoned all the power of government, at the death of that wise statesman at the head of the defeated army of the Turks at Salankanem. Mustafa II. (1695-1703) was the son of Mohammed IV. His first proclamation to his people was a strange document to issue from the arbitrary sovereign of the Osmanlis. He attributed all the defeats and misfortunes of the last reigns to the vices of the Sultans. "While the Padishahs who have ruled since our sublime father Mohammed have heeded nought but their fondness for pleasure and for ease, the unbelievers, the unclean beings, have invaded with their armies the four quarters of Islam." In any other monarchy it would have been dangerous indeed to criticise after this fashion. At Constantinople neither the pen nor the voice was of much importance. It was the sword that ruled.
And the sword of the Sultan had ceased to be victorious. In 1697 Mustafa was utterly defeated by Prince Eugene at Zenta. Again a Kuprili was called to command, but by the treaty of Carlowitz, 1699, by which Hungary and Transylvania were given up, the dismemberment of the Empire had begun.
For the last two years of his reign Mustafa abandoned his capital and lived in a palace at Adrianople. An intrigue deposed him in 1703, and his brother Ahmed reigned in his stead. He began his reign byexecuting all those who had taken part in his elevation, an act which he followed by appointing another Kuprili Vizier. The next year was marked by the beginning of serious wars with Russia, the bizarre sojourn of Charles XII. at Bender, and the treaty of Passarowitz (1718). The wars in which Turkey was now year by year involved continued the slow process of the dismemberment of Turkey; but Constantinople hardly felt the blows which struck the Empire at its extremities. The description which English travellers give of the city shows that strangers passed freely about in it, and that in many respects it was superior to other European capitals as they were then, and particularly in the condition of its streets, to what it became a hundred years later, and remains to-day. A passage from Pococke's travels (published in 1745) is worth quoting here. His description of the four "royal" mosques he saw, those of Ahmed, Suleiman, Selim, and Mohammed the Conqueror, shows that they were much as they are to-day, but on the other hand S. Sophia and the Church of the Studium are manifestly worse now than then; the latter indeed, now a mere ruin, was then "the finest mosque next after Saint Sophia." Of the city he writes thus[41]:—
"Great part of the houses of Constantinople are built with wooden frames, mostly filled up with unburnt brick; and a great number of houses are made only of such frames covered with boards. They have notwithstanding very good rooms in them; and the streets are tolerable, with a raised footway on each side. The street of Adrianople is broad, and adorned with many public buildings; to the south of it there is a vale which is to the north of the seventh hill. The bazestans or shops of rich goods are such as have been described in other places; and many of the shops forother trades are adorned with pillars, and the streets in which they are, covered over in order to shelter from the sun and rain. There are also several large kanes, where many merchants live, and most of these have apartments in them, where they spend the day, and retire at night to their families in their houses. The bagnios also are to be reckoned another part of the magnificence of Constantinople, some of them being very finely adorned within. The fountains, likewise, are extremely magnificent, being buildings about twenty feet square, with pipes of water on every side; and within at each corner there is an apartment, with an iron gate before it, where cups of water are always ready for the people to drink, a person attending to fill them; these buildings are of marble, the fronts are carved with bas-reliefs of trees and flowers and the eaves projecting six or seven feet; the soffit of them is finely adorned with carved works of flowers, in alto relievo, gilt with gold in a very good taste, so that these buildings make a very fine appearance."
Dr Pococke was certainly a somewhat dull person, and as certainly a thorough Englishman. One feels that he never quite got over his surprise that S. Sophia was not like Westminster Abbey or the Golden Gate like Temple Bar. Happily we have a contrast to him in the literature of his time.
Certainly the most charming, perhaps the most characteristic, account of the city of the Sultan that the eighteenth century has left us, is that of the Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
INTERIOR OF MOSQUE OF AHMED I.
INTERIOR OF MOSQUE OF AHMED I.
Her husband was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte in 1716, and she accompanied him. The letters which form the records of her journey out, of her life in Constantinople and of her return, serve to show, as the "Lady" who wrote a preface to them when they were published says she is 'malicious enoughto desire,' "to how much better purpose the ladies travel than their lords." The skill and point with which she tells the most ordinary incidents of her travels, no less than fixes on the contrasts that are so striking between what she sees and what her correspondents are accustomed to, gives the letter an imperishable charm. But not a little also is due to the position of the writer. Merchants, and ordinary travellers, as she says, had told the world long before a great deal about the marvels of the Turkish Empire; but Lady Mary was a woman, a very clever woman, and an ambassador's wife. She had the entrée where few others could go, and she knew as very few others did how to describe what she had seen.
The position of an European ambassador's household in Pera in the eighteenth century, was by no means entirely pleasant, and indeed it was not wholly without risks, even for an ambassador's wife. Lady Mary, however, went everywhere and saw everything, and, in the midst of a good deal of domestic discomfort, accommodated herself amazingly to the cosmopolitan and polyglot life which she came to delight in. "I live," she wrote, "in a place that very well represents the tower of Babel, in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian, and what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoken in my own family." Children of three years old often speak five languages, she says, a statement that would be as nearly true now as it was then. This she professes to find annoying, it was really delightful, other things were not so pleasant.
Constantinople in earlier times had not been a pleasant resort for ambassadors. TheMémoires sur l'ambassade de France en Turquie, written by M. le Comte deSaint-Priest, at the end of the eighteenth century, show how difficult and dangerous had been the position of the envoys. They are a brilliant sketch of the work of the able French ambassadors who had endeavoured from the time of Francis I. and Suleiman the Magnificent, to confirm an alliance which should secure to France a flourishing trade in the Levant, and a powerful ally against the House of Hapsburg. Their success was considerable, but it was not infrequently interfered with by their own eccentricities. Savari de Lancosme (1585) was so rash that his cousin Savari de Brèves was sent out to supersede him, and he promptly induced the Turks to imprison him in the Seven Towers.
Achille de Harlay Sanay (1611-17) procured the escape of an imprisoned Pole, and was in consequence himself "outragé en sa personne et celle de ses gens" and made to pay 20,000 piastres. The Comte de Marcheville in 1639, found "le logis de l'ambassadeur si infâme, qu'on ne se pouvait imaginer qu'un ambassadeur effectif pût y demeurer." He built, among other additions, two chapels, "one public, the other interior." The Turks were furiously enraged, and after a good deal of acrimonious complaints, in which the people of Galata shared, the unhappy ambassador was expelled the country. De la Haye, a few years later, spent three months in the Seven Towers, and M. de Vautelec also had unpleasant experiences. M. de Ferriol, illuminating his house on the occasion of the birth of a French prince, found himself in danger of expulsion. As late as 1798, a French ambassador, on the declaration of war, was imprisoned as usual in the Seven Towers.
Lady Mary's friend the French ambassadress might tell her of some of these catastrophes, but she shows no fear that they would happen to herself. Her descriptions were evidently written with perfect freedom, day by day, and it is that which preservestheir freshness after nearly two centuries. A passage or two will bring vividly before us what English folk then thought of the Turkish power, and of the sights of the capital.
Here she speaks of the Constitution, just as an orthodox English politician would wish to speak.
"The Grand Signior, with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a Janizary's frown. Here is, indeed, a much greater appearance of subjection than amongst us; a minister of state is not spoke to, but upon the knee; should a reflection on his conduct be dropt in a coffee-house (for they have spies everywhere) the house would be raz'd to the ground, and perhaps the whole company put to torture. No huzzaing mobs, senseless pamphlets, and tavern disputes about politics;
A consequential ill that freedom draws;A bad effect,—but from a noble cause.
A consequential ill that freedom draws;A bad effect,—but from a noble cause.
A consequential ill that freedom draws;
A bad effect,—but from a noble cause.
None of our harmless calling names! but when a minister here displeases the people, in three hours time he is dragged even from his master's arms. They cut off his hands, head, and feet, and throw them before the palace gate, with all the respect in the world; while the Sultan (to whom they all profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dares neither defend nor revenge his favourite. This is the blessed condition of the most absolute monarch upon earth, who owns no law but his will."
To live close to such scenes was an education in Oriental politics. Lady Mary lived still nearer to the outward show and pomp of the Oriental despots. The state of the Sultans was reflected on the ambassadors of powers with whom they desired to be friendly. When she travelled from Selivria, alongthe shore of the Marmora, Lady Mary and her husband had from the "Grand Signior" "thirty covered waggons for our baggage, and five coaches for the country for my women." Of the Sultan's own state she was most impressed, as travellers are to-day, by the Selamlik. Thus she describes it:
"I went yesterday, along with the French ambassadress, to see the Grand Signior in his passage to the mosque. He was preceded by a numerous guard of Janizaries, with vast white feathers on their heads, as also by the spahis and bostangees (these are foot and horse guards) and the royal gardeners, which are a very considerable body of men, dressed in different habits of fine lively colours, so that, at a distance, they appeared like a parterre of tulips. After them the Aga of the Janizaries, in a robe of purple velvet, lined with silver tissue, his horse led by two slaves richly dressed. Next him the kyzlier-aga (your ladyship knows this is the chief guardian of the Seraglio ladies) in a deep yellow cloth (which suited very well to his black face) lined with sables. Last came his Sublimity himself, arrayed in green, lined with the fur of a black Muscovite fox, which is supposed worth a thousand pounds sterling, and mounted on a fine horse, with furniture embroidered with jewels. Six more horses, richly caparisoned were led after him; and two of his principal courtiers bore, one his gold, and the other his silver coffee-pot, on a staff; another carried a silver stool on his head for him to sit on."
Her skill certainly lay chiefly in describing social functions or eccentricities, and her description of S. Sophia—indeed she makes an apology for her ignorance of architecture—shows a characteristic absence of feeling or artistic knowledge. What she says of the mosque of Suleiman however, is worth quoting.
"That of Sultan Solyman, is an exact square, withfour fine towers in the angles; in the midst is a noble cupola, supported with beautiful marble pillars; two lesser at the ends, supported in the same manner; the pavement and gallery round the mosque, of marble; under the great cupola, is a fountain, adorned with such fine coloured pillars, that I can hardly think them natural marble; on one side is the pulpit of white marble, and on the other the little gallery for the Grand Signior. A fine stair-case leads to it, and it is built up with gilded latrices. At the upper end is a sort of altar, where the name of God is written; and, before it, stand two candlesticks, as high as a man, with wax candles as thick as three flambeaux. The pavement is spread with fine carpets, and the mosque illuminated with a vast number of lamps. The court leading to it, is very spacious, with galleries of marble, of green columns, covered with twenty-eight leaded cupolas on two sides, and a fine fountain of basons in the midst of it."
The liberality which allowed Christian ladies to see the mosques, and even permitted Lady Mary, in spite of the horror of her friends and the terrified protests of the French ambassadress, to go about in Stambûl much as she would have walked in S. James's, was especially the characteristic of the reign of Suleiman II., himself something of asavant, and of Ahmed II., who actually allowed a printing press to be established in the city. But none the less society and government were essentially barbarous. Ahmed III. was himself deposed in 1730 by an insurrection of the Janissaries. His nephew Mahmûd I., son of Mustafa II., was his successor. Again within three weeks the leaders of the revolution were executed before his face. "These executions," it is quaintly said, "when they became known, instead of exciting the slightest sedition, gave the greatest joy to theinhabitants of the capital." Step by step the Turks lost ground, by treaties with Persia (1732) and with Austria and Russia, by the mediation of France (Belgrade, 1739); and the new policy of governing the lands of Wallachia and Moldavia by "Fanariotes" (Greeks of the ancient families who still dwelt in the Phanar), was far from successful. In Constantinople itself there wereémeutesif not insurrections, and incendiary fires which gave occasion for them. They were the usual means of expressing dissatisfaction with the government, and the usual means were taken to meet them, by the execution of the Sultan's ministers. Mahmûd died in 1754. He was thought at least to have done no harm; and his successor, Osman III., was regarded as equally blameless.
Mustafa III. (1757-1774) had been many years in the Kafess. He was the son of Ahmed III. His reign was a succession of misfortunes. The astute policy of Catherine II. and her agents in Serbia and Croatia, arousing the religious enthusiasm of the Christians against the Moslems, the utter neglect of the Turkish army and ordnance, the ignorance of the ministers, and the superstition of the people, seemed to invite a certain and immediate destruction of the Empire. Disaster after disaster at last awoke the Sultan and his ministers to the necessity of employing European aid, and the French ambassador Saint-Priest with the Baron de Tott was successful in reforming the army, introducing the bayonet, founding a school of mathematics, and infusing a new spirit into the Turks.
Mustafa died in 1774, at a time of unexpected success. He had seen at least the necessity of reform. Abdul Hamed I., his brother, who succeeded him, had been forty-four years a captive. He was not the prince to restore the power of his Empire: the treatyof Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) further reduced its territory, and gave the cause for war eighty years afterwards by the clause allowing to Russia a right to represent to the Porte the grievances of the Christians in European Turkey. In 1788 the Crimea was captured by Russia; in 1789 Abdul Hamed died. His nephew Selim III. (1789-1807) had to deal with all the difficulties introduced into the East by the partition of Poland, the schemes of Napoleon, and the Mediterranean policy of Pitt. To follow these wars which resulted from the new political situation would be impossible. It need only be said that the French occupation of Egypt, and the decisive entrance of England into the Eastern question created as great a revolution in the position of Turkey as had occurred in any Monarchy of the West. The old alliance with France was broken. It became the interest of England to preserve the tottering power of Turkey as a counterpoise to Russia, and as a security for her own interests in the East.
Internally Turkey, under the energetic Selim, made a new start. A cannon foundry was begun at Galata, the Top-haneh so familiar to-day: new troops, drilled and armed after the European fashion were embodied; new taxes were levied, and a financial administration was organized which made some pretence of following Western ideas.
After what has been said so often, it may almost go without saying that there was an insurrection of the Janissaries to express the orthodox opinion of these reforms. The separation of the artillery from the Janissaries, and the creation of new regiments of infantry for Constantinople, to act as a counterpoise to the Janissaries, caused a serious revolt which was entirely successful, and the Sultan was obliged to receive the Aga as his chief minister. In the verymidst of these troubles occurred the famous mission of Colonel Sébastiani, which led to the forcing of the Dardanelles by the English fleet under Admiral Duckworth. The fleet destroyed a small Turkish flotilla in the Marmora and cast anchor before the city. It was centuries since the people of Constantinople had seen a hostile fleet threatening their city. They worked night and day to repair the fortifications, to mount cannon, and to man the walls with an efficient force. In five days nine hundred cannon were placed upon the walls, and the English fleet had to retire. The Sultan was forced to declare war against Great Britain.
Within a few weeks he was deposed by another insurrection of the Janissaries, encouraged by the Sheik-ul-Islam. Again they assembled in the Atmeidan, again they overturned their kettles, their picturesque method of declaring that they would no longer eat the food of the Sultan,—attacked the Seraglio, murdered all the ministers, and deposed the Sultan. The ministers had gladly died that they might save their master. It was not sufficient. Can a Padishah, who by his conduct and his laws attacks the principles of the Koran, be allowed to reign? Impossible. And Selim retired to the Kafess.
Mustafa IV. was a mere name under which the rule of the successful revolutionaries was legitimated. Assassination and execution proceeded. The Grand Vizier, in command of the army in Bulgaria, was beheaded. He was the most conspicuous of a hundred victims.
The Pasha of Rustchuk, Mustafa Baraicktar, led 40,000 men to Constantinople, to restore Selim. He had with him the standard of the Prophet, which had accompanied the late Grand Vizier to the field. Encamped outside the walls, he allowed Mustafa still tohold the palace: a few murders and a few depositions were all that marked the suspense. On July 28, 1808, Mustafa Baraicktar entered the city, declared the Sultan deposed, and advanced to the Seraglio to restore Selim III. While the troops were kept back at the gates, the Sultan determined to secure himself. Selim, after a desperate struggle, was murdered in the Kafess. "Take Sultan Selim to the Pasha of Rustchuk, since he demands him," said Mustafa, and the body wrapped in a carpet was thrown out. Mahmûd, the last surviving prince of the house of Osman, but narrowly escaped: the murderers sought him everywhere, but he was concealed under a heap of rugs. The avengers of blood burst in; he was rescued: Mustafa IV. was thrust into the Kafess, and Mahmûd II. at the age of twenty-three ascended the throne.
The reign of Mahmûd (1808-1839) witnessed the first real introduction of Turkey into the atmosphere of the West. He had been trained by the deposed Selim, to hate the Janissaries, to play the part, strange indeed, of a reforming Sultan. Baraicktar was at his side.
It seemed at first that only a new and more blood-thirsty tyrant had begun to reign. On the day of his accession, thirty-three heads were exposed on the outer gate of the Seraglio, the Bâb-i-Humayoun: many of the leaders of the Janissaries were strangled and thrown into the Bosporus: even the women who had shown joy at Selim's murder were sewn up in sacks and drowned at Seraglio point. Within a few months the government of the new Sultan and his Vizier was in danger of ending like those that had preceded it. On November 14, 1808, a new revolt of the Janissaries broke out. They surrounded the palace of the Porte and set fire to it. Baraicktarthe Vizier escaped, but only a few days later to meet death by exploding a powder magazine rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. For four days the streets were abandoned to carnage, and to the horrors of blood were added those of fire. M. de Jucherau, a Frenchman then at Pera, has left a vivid description, which is supplemented by that of an English traveller.
"No one," says that eloquent author, "attempted to stay the conflagration, which in a short time made terrible progress. Soon the most populous quarter of Constantinople was covered with a sheet of fire. The cries, the groans of women, and old men and children, attracted no attention and excited no pity. In vain they raised their suppliant hands, in vain they begged for beams or planks to save themselves from their burning houses by their roofs: their supplications were vain: they were seen with indifference to fall and to disappear among the flames. The desire of destruction was the only feeling that then prevailed! Sultan Mahmood beheld the awful spectacle from one of the lofty towers of the Seraglio, but not 'like another Nero,' as some have unjustly asserted—the flames were not of his lighting, and he was anxious that they should cease. He ordered Cadi-Pasha to stop his carriage, and to retire with his troops within the walls of the Seraglio, and despatched a hatti-sheriff to the Janissary-agha, commanding him, as he valued his head, to exert himself to stay the conflagration. As Mahmood was Sultan, and from the pledge he had in his hands, was likely to continue so, even when the revolt should end, the Janissary-agha trembled at the imperial mandate and obeyed; but the fire was too intense and active to be subdued or arrested, even by throwing to the ground whole stacks of houses: it vaulted over the chasms thusmade, and only found 'sufficient obstacles in the public squares and in the mosques, whose vast cupolas and massy stone walls have frequently preserved Constantinople from entire destruction.'"[42]
The fire raged from the Seraglio to the aqueduct of Valens, and a man-of-war in the harbour directed its cannon on the barracks of the Janissaries in the At Meidan. The troops of the barracks on the other side of the Horn, at the Arsenal and at Top-haneh, threw in their lot with the Janissaries. Mahmûd within the Seraglio took the precaution which he had so long refrained from: he ordered the murder of his brother Mustafa IV., and the body was thrown out to the Janissaries. In a few hours Mahmûd outwardly submitted. The new troops were disbanded; the barracks were destroyed; the military schools, the mathematical institution, the printing press, every sign of the dangerous introduction of Western ideas, entirely disappeared. Even the ladies of the Seraglio ceased to learn French, and Mahmûd abandoned the enervating amusements of the opera and the ballet. For sixteen years a curtain fell, raised only to show an occasional massacre. Constantinople returned to its condition as the most orthodox of Moslem cities. It was at this time that the greatest of all European ambassadors at Constantinople first made acquaintance with the power in whose fortunes he was to become so powerful a factor. Stratford Canning came to Stambûl in 1808, as secretary to a special mission. These were his first impressions of Turkey.
"The state[43]of Turkey itself was anything but satisfactory in view of those powers who did not wish the Porte to become the prey either of Russia orof France. The throne of the empire was filled by a young Sultan, who had recently succeeded to his brother Mustafa, whose immediate predecessor, their cousin Selim, had fallen a sacrifice to the mutinous spirit of the Janissaries. Mahmûd, the reigning sovereign, was for some time the last of his race. Young, ignorant, and inexperienced, he had everything to apprehend from the circumstances in which he was placed. Both morally and materially his empire was bordering on decrepitude. The old political system of Turkey had worn itself out. The population was not yet prepared for a new order of things. A depreciated currency, a disordered revenue, a mutinous militia, dilapidated fortresses, a decreasing population, a stagnant industry, and general misrule, were the monuments which time had left of Ottoman domination in the second capital of the Roman empire and throughout those extensive regions which had been the successive seats of civilisation, ever varying, generally advancing, from the earliest periods of social settlement and historical tradition. A continual and often a sanguinary antagonism of creeds, of races, of districts and authorities within the frontier, and frequent wars of little glory and much loss with the neighbouring powers, had formed of late the normal condition of the Porte's dominions."
Most European observers thought that the Ottoman power was doomed to almost immediate extinction; and the next few years increased the illusion. The Mussulman population was everywhere declining; a new Greek power was rising; and Ali Pasha at Janina seemed likely to establish a new Mussulman domination which should destroy the Turkish rule. Within a few years Greece secured her independence by rebellion. But Canning saw plainly enough that Turkey was still strong. As early as 1809 he wrote thus:—
"Very false notions are entertained in England of the Turkish nation. You know much better than I do the mighty resources and native wealth which this enormous empire possesses. I am myself a daily witness of the personal qualities of the inhabitants, qualities which if properly directed are capable of sustaining them against a world of enemies. But the government is radically bad, and its members, who are all alive to its defects, have neither the wisdom nor the courage to reform it. The few who have courage equal to the task know not how to reconcile reformation with the prejudices of the people. And without this nothing can be effected."[44]
From 1821 the tide turned. The defects of the Turkish government did not avail against the valour of the Sultan's army, and the dimensions of Europe. The tragedies of those days passed far from Constantinople. Missolonghi, Navarino, Athens, Janina, Adrianople, are names that bring each its memory; but within the city of the Cæsars and the Sultans a different tale was told. It was the great era of reform, when at last Mahmûd was able to use his strength, and re-establish the power of the Padishah.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the authority of the Commander of the Faithful had sunk, decade by decade, till the murder of a Sultan who showed an independent policy was as certain as the sunrise. The Janissaries were the real masters of the city, and of the Empire. The force which had been raised to carry out the absolute will of the Sultan had now entirely superseded him. Anarchy was substituted for the rule of an irresponsible despot. But Mahmûd had a character of strength unknown in any Sultan for two centuries. He had matured his plans,and in 1826 he was able to carry them into execution. But for an utterly unforeseen disaster he would doubtless have been able to secure his triumph earlier than he did. In 1823 the arsenal and cannon foundry at Top-haneh were entirely destroyed by fire. A vast quantity of military stores and ammunition was destroyed. Pera and Galata suffered severely. It is said that fifty mosques and six thousand houses were destroyed. Mahmûd attributed the fire to the Janissaries; and he became the more determined to destroy them.
Already he had dealt with another enemy. In 1821 the plots of the Hetairists, working for the liberation of Greece, became known. Mahmûd immediately ordered all Greeks not engaged in trade to be deported from Constantinople. Then he ordered the patriarch and Synod of Constantinople to excommunicate the leaders who had engaged in the massacre of Moslems. The act was issued; nor can the Church be regarded as having done anything but what was demanded by Christian charity.
Hardly was the excommunication issued before a number of rich Greeks escaped from the city, evidently with the intention of joining the revolutionary armies. On March 26 the city was filled with troops, and arms were issued to the citizens. Several Hetairists were executed; and when the news came of the murder of Moslems in Greece, Mahmûd, who had already imprisoned seven Greek bishops, ordered the public execution of a number of prominent Greeks, who were entirely innocent, solely for the purpose of alarming their compatriots. But this was not sufficient. On Easter Day, April 22, 1821, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregorios, was summoned, at dawn, when he had finished the offering of the Holy Eucharist in his Cathedral Church, into the hall ofthe Synod at the Phanar, by the officers of the Sultan. There, before the clergy and the heads of the chief Greek families, he was declared deposed by the authority of the State, and the trembling priests were required to elect a new Patriarch in his stead.