SECTION XII.
Description of the new Seráï, the Threshold of the Abode of Felicity.
The conqueror having thus become possessed of such treasures, observed that the first thing requisite for an Emperor is a permanent habitation. He therefore expended three thousand purses on building the new Seráï. The best of several metrical dates inscribed over the Imperial gate, is that at the bottom in conspicuous gold letters on a white marble tablet, Khalled Allahu azza sáhibihi. May God make the glory of its master eternal! (i.e. A.H. 876, A.D. 1471-2). Never hath a more delightful edifice been erected by the art of man; for, placed on the border of the sea, and having the Black Sea on the North, and the White Sea on the East, it is rather a town situated on the confluence of two seas than a palace. Its first builder was that second Solomon, the two-horned Alexander. It was, therefore, erected on the remains of what had been built by former princes, and Mohammed the Conqueror added seventy private, regal, and well-furnished apartments; such as a confectionary, bake-house, hospital, armory, mat-house, wood-house, granary, privy-stables without and within, such that each is like the stable of ’Antar, store-rooms of various kinds round a garden delightful as the garden of Irem, planted with twenty thousand cypresses, planes, weeping-willows, thuyas, pines, and box-trees, and among them many hundred thousands of fruit trees, forming an aviary and tulip-parterre, which to this day may be compared to the garden of the Genii (Jin). In the middle of this garden there is a delightful hill and rising ground, on which he built forty private apartments, wainscoted with Chinese tiles, and a hall of audience (Arz-ódá) within the Port of Felicity, and a fine hippodrome, on the east side of which he erected a bath, near the privy treasury; close to which are the aviary, the pantry, the treasurers chamber, the Sultán’s closet, the Imperial mosque, the falconer’s chamber, the great and small pages’ chamber; the seferlí’s and gulkhan’s chamber, the mosque of the Buyúk-ódá, and the house of exercise, which joins the bath mentioned above. The privy chambers (kháss-ódá), mentioned before, were occupied by three thousand pages, beautiful as Yúsuf (Joseph), richly attired in shirts fragrant as roses, with embroidered tiaras, and robes drowned in gold and jewels, having each his place in the Imperial service, where he was always ready to attend. There was no harem in this palace; but one was built afterwards, in the time of Sultán Suleïmán, who added a chamber for the black eunuchs (taváshí aghá-lar), another for the white eunuchs (teberdárán khásseh, i.e. privy halbardiers), a cabinet (kóshk) for recreations, and a chamber for the díván, where the seven vezírs assembled four days in the week. Sultán Mohammed, likewise, surrounded this strongly-fortified palace with a wall that had 366 towers, and twelve thousand battlements; its circumference being 6,500 paces, with sixteen gates, great and small. Besides all the other officers before enumerated, there were in this palace twelve thousand Bóstánjís, and, including all, forty thousand souls lodged within its walls.