From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

From Budapest to the Black Sea

Again the scene has changed and dim descried

A silver crescent marks the Danube’s tide;

Where broad sails glancing o’er the regal stream,

Spread their white bosoms to the morning beam,

With towers that skirt and towns that seem to lave

Their tattled walls in that majestic wave.

From Pozsony to Budapest we passed many places of great scenic beauty and historic interest. Among them was Esztergom, which possesses the most beautiful cathedral in Hungary. It is the birthplace of St. Stephen, patron saint of the country and the see of Hungary’s ecclesiastical primate.

No city in Europe offers a more superb approach than does Budapest to the traveler who enters it on the deck of one of the beautiful steamers of the Danube Navigation Company. As we glide downstream towards the twin city, an immense mass of palatial structures suddenly bursts on our view. Among them is the imposing Royal Palace, which crowns an eminence on the right bank of the many-spired House of Parliament, which stands on the left. Soon we get a glimpse of the beautiful boulevards along the river, which, at the hour of our arrival, are crowded with animated, happy multitudes, who are enjoying their daily promenade and watching the arrival and departure of the numerous steamers and smaller craft which contribute so much to the life of the city.

Hungarians declare that theirs is the most beautiful of all European capitals, and, judging by one’s impression of the city as seen from an arriving steamer, most visitors, I think, will agree with them. Certain it is that neither Paris nor London nor Petrograd can claim such an enchanting river view as that in which Budapest so justly glories.

And they are as proud of their country as of their capital. According to an old Hungarian proverb, “Extra Hungarian non est vita”—“Life is not life outside of Hungary.”[13] “Have we not,” the people here ask, “all that is necessary for our welfare? Our blessed soil provides for all our wants.” And Sandor Petöfi, Hungary’s greatest lyric poet, does not hesitate to declare:

If the earth be God’s crown,

Our country is its fairest jewel.

But it is the people of this fair capital that make the strongest appeal to the traveler. It matters not if he be a stranger. Their proverbial hospitality immediately makes him feel at home. Like the Viennese they have a savoir vivre that is truly admirable. Their courtesy and cordiality are boundless and make one desire to prolong one’s sojourn among them. And one no sooner comes in contact with them than he is conscious of a certain indefinable charm that is found only among people of rare culture and refinement. In leaving them—old friends and new—I experienced in a peculiarly keen manner the sincere regret that I have so often felt in other parts of the world when the hour came for departure from people whom I had learned to admire and love for their exceptional goodness and worth.

From Budapest to Belgrade our course for the greater part of the distance was almost due south. For twenty-four hours we journeyed through the Alfold—the great central plain of Hungary—about which so much has been written during the last few years. In many respects it reminds one of the broad maize lands of eastern Kansas and Nebraska. It is also equally productive and has for centuries constituted one of the most important granaries of Central Europe.

Although to the traveler the Alfold—the Hungarian word for lowland—offers little of scenic interest, the Magyar bard finds in it as much to awaken his muse as does the Arabian poet in the broad expanse of his much-loved desert; and each would recognize as his own the sentiment of Sandor Petöfi, when he sings:

I love the plains. It is only there I feel free.

My eyes can wander as they please, quite unconstrained.

One is not confined by barriers.

Throughout the region which we are now traversing legend still lingers, but it is history that has now most to tell. And how much could it not relate regarding the struggle between the barbarians and the Romans in these parts—of the long contests between Christians and Ottomans. It was at Mohacs that the Turks, under Solyman the Magnificent, achieved, in 1526, the decisive victory which enabled them to hold Hungary in a state of vassalage for a hundred and fifty years. It was at the same place that the Ottoman forces, after being defeated by Sobieski in Vienna, made their final stand before they were forced to relinquish the land which they had so long held in subjection.

Further down the river is Illock, which was for a time the home, as it is the burial place, of St. John Capistran. It was this celebrated Franciscan friar who led an army of Crusaders, which he had collected by his preaching, to the assistance of Hunyady Janos when this renowned warrior compelled the Turks under Mohammed II to raise the siege of Belgrade.

Still further down stream is the little town of Petervarad with its strong fortress, long known as the Gibraltar of the Danube. It is so named because Peter the Hermit here marshaled in 1096 the hosts which he had assembled from far and wide for the First Crusade.

As the tones of the vesper bell of a village chapel are wafted over the peaceful waters, the famed “White City” of Serbia appears in the distance. Situated at the confluence of the Danube and the Save, Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, has for more than two thousand years been a strategic point of prime importance. Occupied by Celts, generations before the Christian era, it became, under the name Singidunum, a stronghold of the Romans, who held it for four centuries. It subsequently belonged to the Byzantine Empire and, later on, was occupied at various times by Avars, Huns, Gepids, Goths, Sarmatians, Turks, Hungarians, Austrians, until in the beginning of the nineteenth century the Serbians made it their capital. The Turks, however, did not relinquish possession of its citadel until 1867.

Few places have passed through more sieges or experienced more frequently the horrors of war than Belgrade. Aside from its historical associations, I found little of interest in the city. The inhabitants had none of the gayety and animation of the people of Vienna and Budapest. Their cheerless faces were like those of a race that has witnessed many tragedies and is living in constant fear of impending disaster.

And what country, indeed, has passed through more and greater disasters than Serbia? For it is not too much to say that during the past twenty-five centuries of its history it has been almost continually in a condition of social unrest and political chaos. Times without number the tides of invasion and devastation have swept over this unfortunate land. The general poverty and intellectual stagnation of the people were aggravated by the follies of their rulers and by dynastic scandals that shocked the civilized world. For generations at a time the administration of the country was little better than organized brigandage. Unscrupulous officials, living in Oriental indolence, prospered on the life-blood of the down-trodden peasantry, for whom justice was but a myth. Blood feuds, political murders and internecine strife were long endemic, and guaranties for life and property were, consequently, impossible.

And this was true not only for Serbia but also for the whole of the Balkan peninsula—for Bulgaria, for Macedonia, for Roumania and for the half-barbarous principalities along the Adriatic. So completely separated were they from the rest of the world that little was known of them in western Europe until less than a century ago, when they began to give stronger evidence of national consciousness than they had previously exhibited, and to manifest a united purpose to liberate themselves from the Ottoman yoke, under which they had suffered for so many centuries.

But it would be contrary to the teaching of history to assert that all the disorders endured and all the cruelties suffered by the inhabitants of the Balkans during the long period when they were deprived of their independence were due to the Turks. Nothing is farther from the truth. The fact is that the various Balkan races—the Greeks and Bulgars for instance—hated one another far more than they—either individually or collectively—hated the Turks.

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From the point of view of humanitarianism [as has been well said] it is beyond a doubt that much less blood was spilt in the Balkan Peninsula during the five hundred years of Turkish rule than during the five hundred years of Christian rule which preceded them; indeed it would have been difficult to spill more. It is also a pure illusion to think of the Turks as exceptionally brutal or cruel; they are just as good-natured and as good-humored as anybody else; it is only when their military and religious passions are aroused that they become more reckless and ferocious than other people. It was not the Turks who taught cruelty to the Christians of the Balkan Peninsula; the latter had nothing to learn in this respect.[14]

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But, notwithstanding the long and trying ordeal through which the peoples of the Balkans have passed, a new era seems to be dawning for them at last. Education is receiving more attention and law and order are gradually assuring to the masses the blessings of civilized life. When, however, we think or speak of the Balkans and their inhabitants there are, as the distinguished British writer D. G. Hogarth reminds us, certain salutary things to bear in mind, among which is that “less than two hundred years ago England had its highwaymen on all roads and its smuggler dens and caravans, Scotland its caterans and Ireland its moonlighters.”[15]

As I viewed from the citadel the magnificent panorama that unfolded itself before me in the broad valleys of the Save and the Danube, I recalled certain alliterative verses which I was wont to recite in my youth, beginning with

An Austrian army awfully arrayed,

Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade,

Cossack, commander, cannonading come,

Deal devastation; dire destructive doom.[16]

While gazing at the sun-bathed vineyards, ruin-crowned heights and broad, verdant plains which followed one another in rapid succession as our steamer bore us seawards, I was especially impressed by the multiplicity of languages I heard spoken by the passengers. For among my fellow travelers were Germans, French, Turks, Serbs, Croats, Russians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, Greeks, Albanians, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, English, and Americans, and probably several others whom I did not recognize. There was, indeed, a Babel of tongues such as one would scarcely find elsewhere. How the famous polyglot, Mezzofanti, would have reveled in such a gathering where he could have held converse with all of them, as he was wont to do with the students of the Propaganda, in Rome, who came from all parts of the world and with the languages of all whom the illustrious Cardinal was perfectly familiar.[17]

And variety of garb of this motley crowd was almost as manifold as was that of their languages and dialects. From the sedate Englishman in tweed to the animated Roumanian in his Phrygian cap of liberty, the tarbooshed Ottoman dreamily fingering his tespis (string of beads), the sad-faced Serb with his conical Astrakan cap, and the voluble Albanian in a snow-white fustanella, there was every conceivable variety of wearing apparel. And the styles and colors of the dresses worn by the women exhibited even greater diversity. They could be compared only with those of the infinitude of shades and adornments of the feathered songsters of a large aviary or of the multitudinous flowers of a botanical garden.

From Belgrade eastwards Oriental color becomes rapidly more pronounced. This results from the long occupation by the Ottomans of the country through which we are now passing and constant communication between Turkey and the Balkans.

The first objects of note to arrest our attention below Belgrade are the great ruined fortress of Sendria and, further downstream, the ruins of the two castles of Galambocz and Laszlovar. These massive strongholds, located on opposite sides of the river, guarded what was long known as “The Key of the Danube.” They, like the scores of ruins which we have passed on our way from Ratisbon, are rich in historic and legendary associations of the most interesting character.

Near Galambocz is shown a great cavern, in which, legend has it, St. George slew the dragon. When we reflect that practically nothing is known of the patron of chivalry and the champion of Christendom, except that he suffered martyrdom at or near Lydda in Palestine before the time of the Emperor Constantine, it becomes difficult to account for the existence of this dragon-slaying tradition in this spot. Its origin may be due to pilgrims or Crusaders, who brought it from the Holy Land in the same way as they popularized the cultus of the Saint in England as early as the days of Arculph and Richard Coeur de Lion.

But after all, it is no more difficult to account for the contest between St. George and the dragon here than at “a stagne or a pond like a sea,” near Silena in Libya, as we read of it in Caxton’s version of the Legenda Aurea, or, to explain the associations of the martyr-knight with the Order of the Garter, the Union Jack or the white ensign of the British Navy.

Immediately below Galambocz we enter the wildest and grandest scenery along the Danube. The foaming rapids and the towering cliffs of the gorge of Kazan recall the famed cañons of Colorado or Montana, although in magnitude and grandeur it is far inferior to the stupendous gorges of the Arkansas or the Yellowstone.

But far more interesting to me than the gorge itself was an inscription at the lower end which is cut in the solid rock and commemorates the completion of the marvelous roadway which the Romans constructed along the western face of this formidable defile. To me it seemed one of the most extraordinary of all the countless achievements of imperial Rome in the entire length of the Danube valley. The inscription reads:

IMP. CÆS. D. NERVÆ. FILIUS. NERVA. TRAJANUS.
AUG. GERM. PONT. MAX....

But even more noteworthy than the wild Kazan ravine and the wonderful Roman thoroughfare is the celebrated Iron Gate at the confines of Serbia, Hungary and Roumania. This narrow defile long constituted an almost impassable barrier to intercourse between the peoples of the upper and lower Danube. During low water, navigation, except for the smallest craft, was impossible, until the completion, in 1896, of a channel which was blasted out of the living rock on the Serbian side of the seething cataract. This canal guarantees a sufficient depth of water the entire year for steamers of considerable draft and contributes enormously to the importance of the Danube as a highway of international commerce.

Shortly below the Iron Gate we were shown remains of the mammoth stone bridge which was built by Trajan across the Danube. This was even a more astonishing achievement than the construction of the roadway through the gorge of Kazan. I had often admired the wonderful, lifelike reliefs of Trajan’s column in Rome, which represent, among other things, the celebrated campaign of the emperor in Dacia, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to contemplate the remains of the road and the bridge he built during this memorable period of his reign. Dacia, which embraced modern Roumania, is noted as being the only province that the Romans ever possessed north of the Danube. And “the last province to be won, it was,” as Freeman puts it, “the first to be given up; for Aurelian withdrew from it and transferred its name to the Mœsian land, immediately south of the Danube.”[18]

But the remarkable thing about Roumania, as the same eminent historian observes, is that although it has been cut off “for so many ages from all Roman influences, forming, as it has done, one of the great highways of barbarian migration, a large part of Dacia, namely, the modern Roumanian principality, still keeps its Roman language no less than Spain and Gaul. In one way the land is to this day more Roman than Spain or Gaul, as its people still call themselves by the Roman name.”[19]

The Roumanians are not only proud of their Roman origin but take special pleasure in recalling the fact, especially when conversing with foreigners. “We are,” they will tell you, “neither Slavs, nor Germans, nor Turks; we are Roumanians.”

Roumania, they will insist, is a Latin islet in the midst of a Slavic and Finnish ocean which surrounds it. This island when known as Dacia was in reality a new Italy and its inhabitants were the Italians of the Danube and the Carpathians. In a recent speech delivered in Rome, the distinguished Roumanian historian, V. A. Urechia, proudly claimed the capital of the Cæsars as the mother of his country—“Nous sommes ici pour dire à tout le monde que Rome est noire mère.”

A short distance below the ruins of Trajan’s bridge we pass, at the embouchure of the Timok River, the frontier of Serbia and Bulgaria. Thenceforward, until we reach the Black Sea, we have Bulgaria on our right and Roumania on our left. But there is little on either side to arrest our attention, for the history of this part of the world is little more than a chronicle of the horrors of warfare and marauding armies from the time of Alexander the Great. No part of Europe, not even Belgium or northern Italy, can point to so many battlefields in the same limited area, and none of the many peoples inhabiting the vast Danube basin have suffered more than Roumania from the calamities of war—of the long and bloody struggle between the Cross and the Crescent for the mastery of this part of Europe.

As I surveyed the broad plains of Bulgaria, I vividly recalled the thrill of horror that stirred the civilized world when my old friend and schoolmate, Januarius A. McGahan, of Perry County, Ohio, there penned his famous letters to the London Daily News on the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria.[20]

He told the Ottoman authorities that their depredations and carnage would have to cease forthwith or he would have the Russian army across the Danube in six months. They laughed him to scorn. But he was as good as his word. In a brief space of time the Russians, accompanied by their brave Roumanian allies, were in Bulgaria, and at Plevna and Shipka Pass the fate of Turkey in this part of Europe was sealed and the greater portion of the Balkan peoples was at length liberated from the Turkish yoke. The Russians, under their gallant commander, Skobeleff, pushed on to San Stefano, within sight of the domes and minarets of Constantinople. Then, by orders from St. Petersburg, the conquering general was halted in his course just when Russia’s long-coveted goal, the capital on the Golden Horn, was within his grasp.

The chivalrous McGahan, whom his distinguished associate, Archibald Forbes, declared to be the most brilliant war correspondent[21] that ever lived, was stricken with typhus and after a very brief illness died in Constantinople, June 10, 1878, in the early bloom of a glorious manhood. His chief mourner was his bosom friend, the noble Skobeleff, who, with unfeigned emotion, declared at the grave of his illustrious friend, whom he loved as a brother, that his heart was interred with his beloved Januarius and that he had nothing more to live for.

The grateful Bulgarians erected a splendid monument to the memory of McGahan, whom they recognized as their deliverer from the age-long domination of the hated Turks. On this monument were inscribed the words, Januario Aloysio McGahan, Patri Patriæ. Some years later his remains were transferred to his home town, New Lexington, Ohio, and in its modest little cemetery is seen above his last resting-place a plain block of granite which bears beneath the deathless hero’s name the simple but well-earned tribute—Liberator of Bulgaria.

On the left bank of the Danube, slightly northeast of Plevna, is the little town of Giurgevo, which was founded centuries ago by that wonderful commercial metropolis, Genoa. Like its great rival, Venice, it was long celebrated for its commercial and military activities in the Levant and in the Crimea. But that its merchant princes should have extended their trade to the lower Danube in that early period when the navigation of this great river was so difficult and dangerous is indeed remarkable.

From Giurgevo I made a hasty trip to Bukharest. I did not wish to pass “The City of Delight,” as the attractive capital of Roumania is named, without calling on some friends there whom I had not seen in several years. But neither the capital nor the country was what it had been but a few years before. A note of sadness, in consequence of the ravages of the recent war, seemed to dominate the joyful greetings of an erstwhile happy and pleasure-loving people. It will, I fear, be a long time before one can again apply to Roumania the epithet—Dacia Feli—Happy Dacia—which it bore in the days of long ago, when it was one of the most flourishing colonies of the Roman Empire.[22] But the self-reliant people of Roumania are not depressed or discouraged by the present condition of their war-tried country. These descendants of the Dacians, whom the Romans called “the most warlike of men,” have abiding confidence in their recuperative power and their ability to make good their claim to an honorable position among the nations of the civilized world. Their native proverb—Romanul non père—The Roumanian never dies—shows in three words what manner of men they are and what may be expected of them when they shall have rallied from the havoc of war and shall again be free to devote themselves to the stimulating arts of peace.

Among the many things that especially impressed me in Roumania was the large number of gypsies. In no part of the world, it is said, are they so numerous in proportion to the population as among the descendants of the ancient Dacians. The chief reason for this is that these strange, dark-eyed, music-loving nomads from India have met a kinder reception here than in other countries, where they have been regarded as pariahs and often treated with harshness bordering on cruelty.

From Giurgevo to the Black Sea the broad, multi-islanded Danube sweeps majestically through the ever-expanding, reed-covered lowlands—the home of many kinds of water-fowl—and the far extending acres devoted to pasturage and agriculture, which contribute so much to the commerce and wealth of the Balkan Peninsula. Near the village of Rassova, on the right bank of the river, we see what remains of Trajan’s wall, which extends from the Danube to Constanza on the Black Sea. This earthen rampart was constructed during the Roman occupation of the country to prevent barbarian incursions into the colonial possessions of the empire. But, like the wall of Probus, connecting the Danube with the Rhine, it withstood but a short while the ever-increasing onrush of the savage hordes from the north.

Not far from this relic of Roman dominion in this part of the world is the colossal steel railway bridge across the Danube, completed in 1895, and justly regarded as one of the greatest engineering achievements of modern times.

At Braila and Galatz—Roumanians great ports of entry—we were greatly impressed by the activity and enterprise of these flourishing entrepôts of commerce. But I must confess I was here more impressed by what tradition declares to be the spot where Darius Hystaspes built a bridge across the Danube at the time of his famous campaign against the Scythians, more than five centuries B. C.[23]

And what a war-theater this ill-fated land has been since that far-off time! Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Trajan, and countless leaders of barbarian and Turkish hordes have been here or in the vicinity during the twenty-five centuries that have intervened between the advent of Darius and his resistless legions. Certain spots of the earth seem to be perennial battle centers and the land bordering this part of the Danube, as history shows, is one of the most notable of them.

It is in this part of the Danube that one begins to have an adequate idea of the size of this historic waterway and of its transcendent importance in the mercantile life of Europe. It is surpassed by no other European river except the Volga. From its source in the lovely park of Prince Fürstenberg, at Donaueschingen, to where it delivers its mighty tribute to the Black Sea, the length of the Danube is nearly eighteen hundred miles—more than two-thirds of that of our famed Mississippi.

But in the amount and character of the traffic it bears and the number of people it serves, the Danube is incomparably superior to the Volga and even to our great “Father of Waters.” The Volga, like the Mississippi, is only a national river, while the Danube majestically sweeps through many principalities and kingdoms and empires of Europe and assures easy relations between regions widely separated. And, as the Danube in the past has served as the great natural route for the migrations of nations and the warring hordes of Asia and Europe, so it is now, more than ever before, one of the world’s great highways of commerce and industry, and from present indications the day is not far distant when, economically, it will be the greatest.

The reason for this seemingly paradoxical assertion is not far to seek. The importance of rivers is not due to their length and volume of water, but rather to the density of the population on their banks and to the industrial productivity of the peoples who dwell in their vicinity. Thus, the Danube not only passes through some of the most fertile lands in the world, where intensive agriculture is carried to the highest degree of efficiency, but also facilitates the exchange of commodities of all kinds between distant nations and delivers supplies and the necessary raw material to the countless industrial centers of middle Europe.

Of the affluents of the Danube that are navigable, or large enough to float rafts, there are more than sixty, while the number of inhabitants along the course of the Danube alone is more than fifty millions. Add to this the myriads of people who dwell along its numerous tributaries and this immense number will be greatly augmented. It will not only far exceed the number of people who live along the Volga and are benefited by its traffic, but will also far surpass that of the Mississippi basin, if it does not indeed equal that of the entire United States. It was for this reason that Napoleon considered the Danube the king of rivers and Talleyrand declared that “the center of gravity is not Paris nor Berlin but the Mouths of the Danube.”[24]

If these two eminent personages were now living they would have much stronger reasons for entertaining such views than existed a century ago. For, thanks to the genius of modern engineers, the value of the Danube as a great commercial highway has been immensely enhanced. By dredging the canal at the Iron Gate, by jettying the Sulina branch of the delta and by making innumerable other improvements along the course of the river, the European Danube Commission, which has had charge for more than half a century of the betterment of this great international waterway, has eliminated the dangers to navigation which previously existed and has made the river navigable for much larger craft than was before possible. Since the establishment of this International Commission by the Treaty of Paris in 1856, the amount of traffic passing through the mouth of the Danube has increased enormously. According to a recent official report of the Commission, “Sailing Ships of two hundred tons register have given way to steamers up to four thousand tons register, carrying a dead weight of nearly eight thousand tons and good order has succeeded chaos.”[25]

But this is not all. The far-reaching utility of the Danube has been greatly augmented by the construction of such canals as the one which connects it with the Tisza, and still more by the famous Ludwig Kanal which links it with the Rhine. It was a matter of particular pleasure to the late King Charles of Roumania when the Roumanian flotilla of gunboats was able, thanks to the Ludwig Kanal, to steam directly from London to the Black Sea by way of the Rhine and the Danube.

And yet more. When the projected Danube-Salonica Canal, the Danube-Elbe and the Danube-Oder Canals, both under construction, shall be completed, the Danube will tap the greatest industrial centers of middle Europe and will reduce by one-half the trade water route between the Suez Canal and the ports of the North and Baltic Seas as compared with the present water route by way of Gibraltar.[26]

Recalling the days when the Danube was controlled by the robber barons who tenanted the massive castles along its banks, and trade was all but paralyzed; when Genoese and Venetian merchants sailed their small craft down its treacherous waters to collect grain from the fertile fields of Wallachia and hides and furs from the vast plains and forests of Russia; when it was but a Turkish River as the Black Sea was but a Turkish Lake, we can better appreciate its various phases of development during the past and more fully realize the vast expansion of trade which it has witnessed since its navigation was, in 1856, declared to be free to all nations. And looking forward to the time when all the numerous artificial waterways, now projected or nearing completion, shall extend the arms of the Danube to all the commercial and industrial metropolises of Central Europe, we can well believe that historic river will then, from the standpoint of international trade, be not only the most important river in Europe, but also the most important in the world. Then, indeed, will this highway of commerce be, in the words of Napoleon, the king of rivers, and then, too, will be verified the statement of Tallyrand, if it was not justified when he made it a century ago, “Le centre de gravité de l’Europe n’est pas à Paris, ni à Berlin, mais aux Bouches du Danube.”[27]

CHAPTER II
THE EUXINE AND THE BOSPHORUS IN STORY, MYTH AND LEGEND

The Pontic Sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due course

To the Propontis and the Hellespont.

Shakespeare “Othello.”

Our entrance into the Black Sea was through the well-jettied Sulina Canal—a canal which, for a great part of its length, passes through a reed-covered lowland which is so near sea-level that, when the Danube is in flood, vast stretches of it are completely under water. The delta of the Danube, which has an area of about one thousand square miles, has been built up by the immense accumulation of mud and sand which has been brought down by the great river and its numerous affluents from the rain-drenched Balkans and Carpathians and from the far-off snow fields of the Carnic and Rhætian Alps. The rate at which the delta is encroaching on the sea may be judged from the carefully conducted investigations that have been made, which show that the amount of earth discharged at the mouths of the Danube totals several thousand cubic feet a minute. For many leagues out from land the earth-colored water of the Danube is easily distinguished from that of the Euxine. This alone enables one to realize the extent of the erosion going on in the Danube basin and the immensity of the deposit that is daily laid on this part of the bed of the Black Sea.

As myth and legend hover over the Danube from its source to its delta, so do they also linger along the western shore of the historic Euxine. Even before we have left the earth-colored flood which pours into it, we descry in the distance the little island of Fido-Nisi—Serpent Island—so called from the great number of snakes which are said to infest its sea-lashed cliffs and about which, from time immemorial, Russian and Turkish sailors have told the most fantastic stories.

In antiquity it was known as Leuce—

“Leuce, the white, where the souls of heroes rest.”

According to Homer, the ashes of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, were placed in a golden urn and deposited in a tumulus on the promontory of Sigeum in the Troad. This elevated headland, visible far out on the Ægean, served as a landmark for passing mariners. Later poets, however, inform us that the body of Achilles was snatched from the burning pyre by Thetis, his goddess-mother, and transferred to the Island of Leuce where, with his bosom friend, Patroclus and other heroes,[28] it was speedily worshipped by the Greeks who here erected a temple in the hero’s honor. For this reason Leuce was long known as the Island of Achilles.

The Greek historian Arrian in his Periplus of the Euxine Sea, written in the form of a report to the Emperor Hadrian, says:

Some call this the Island of Achilles, others call it the chariot of Achilles, and others Leuce, from its color. Thetis is said to have given up this island to her son Achilles, by whom it was inhabited. There are now existing a temple and a wooden statue of Achilles of ancient workmanship. It is destitute of inhabitants and pastured only by a few goats which those who touch here are said to offer to the memory of Achilles. Many offerings are suspended in this temple, as cups, rings and more valuable gems. All these are offerings to Achilles. Inscriptions are also suspended written in the Greek and Latin languages. Some are in praise of Patroclus, whom those who are disposed to honor Achilles treat with equal respect. Many birds inhabit this island, as sea gulls, divers, and coots innumerable. These birds frequent the temple of Achilles. Every day in the morning they take their flight and, having moistened their wings, fly back again to the temple and sprinkle it with the moisture, which having performed they brush and clean the pavement with their wings.... It is said that Achilles has appeared in time of sleep both to those who have approached the coast of this island and also to such as have been sailing a short distance from it and instructed them where the island was most safely accessible and where the ships might best lie at anchor. They also say further that Achilles has appeared to them not in time of sleep, or a dream, but in a visible form on the mast, or at the extremity of the yards, in the same manner as the Dioscuri have appeared. This distinction, however, must be made between the appearance of Achilles and that of the Dioscuri, that the latter appear evidently and clearly to persons who navigate the sea at large, and, when so seen, foretell a prosperous voyage, whereas the figure of Achilles is seen only by such as approach this island.[29]

A short sail southwestwardly from the island of Achilles brings us in view, on our starboard, of the important seaport of Constanza. It is located at the eastern extremity of Trajan’s wall and had a special interest for me because its site is near that of Tomi to which the poet Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus. The privations which he had to endure on this distant boundary of the Roman Empire and the miseries of his life among the barbarians on the shore of the Euxine are graphically described by the poet in his Tristia and Letters from Pontus.

The climate of this inhospitable place was trying indeed to the disconsolate exile who had just come from the palace of the Cæsars and who had so long enjoyed all the delights of the Roman capital. For here, to his eyes, the fields were without verdure, the spring without flowers, and snow and ice were eternal. The long hair and beards which concealed the visage of the rude Sarmatians, among whom he was compelled to live, clicked with icicles. Wine froze and had to be cut with a sword. According to Ovid’s account the cold was more severe in his time than it was during the memorable arctic winter many centuries later when the temperature fell so low that the Euxine was frozen over for weeks and the ice on the Bosphorus was so thick that people were able to pass on foot from the Asiatic to the European shore.

It was in this cheerless and frigid region, far from home and friends, that one of Rome’s greatest poets spent the last eight years of his life and here it was that he died. Before his death he had expressed a wish that his ashes, enclosed in a modest urn, should be taken to Rome in order that he might not be an exile after death, as he had been during so many years of his life, but his request was not granted.[30] A tradition exists that a tomb was erected to his memory in Tomi, but there is among scholars as much doubt respecting the existence, or location of such a tomb, as there always has been regarding the reason of the poet’s banishment by one who had showered on him so many and so great favors.

According to a legend that Ovid recalls in one of his elegies, Tomi was a place of ill omen, for it was here that Medea murdered her brother and strewed the sea with his carved limbs. And it was from this atrocious fratricide, according to the poet, that the town of Tomi took its name:

Inde Thomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo

Membra soror fratris consecuisse sui.[31]

From the most remote antiquity the Euxine has been noted for the fury of its tempests and for the reputed terrors of its navigation, as well as for the savage character of the inhabitants on its coast. For this reason the ancients called it Pontus Axenus—the inhospitable sea. Subsequently, as if to placate its fury, by an euphemism, it was called the Euxine—the hospitable sea—a name which it has since borne.

But the first name given to this extended body of water was simply Pontos—the Greek word for sea—as if it were the sea par excellence. The noted traveler, Giovanni da Piano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, and Ricoldo da Monte di Croce, a Dominican missionary in the Orient, called it Mare Magnum—the great sea. In the Itinerarium, however, of Blessed Oderic of Pordenone it bears the name Mare Majus—the greater sea—as it does also in I Viaggi of Marco Polo who calls it Mare Maggiore. But this is not all. Friar Jordanus speaks of it as the Black Sea—Mare Nigrum, as likewise does Sir John Mandeville who gives it the name Mare Maurum—Mauros, in Byzantine, as in Modern Greek, signifying black. But there was, probably, no better reason for calling this sea black than there was for giving to certain other well-known seas the epithets of red, white, and yellow. From all this it appears that what we now know as the Euxine or Black Sea has been rich in names as well as in myths and legends.[32]

The Euxine, however, is famed not only for legendary associations but for having been for centuries a section of the great highway between the Occident and the Orient. It was by this route that Fra Oderic of Pordenone, that celebrated missionary of the fourteenth century, made his wonderful journey from Venice to China and other parts of the Far East. It was by the same route that Marco Polo—the most famous traveler of the Middle Ages—returned from his long peregrinations in eastern Asia to his home in the Queen City of the Adriatic. And it was by way of the Euxine that Marco Polo’s father and uncle had preceded him to far-off Cathay where they were most cordially received by the famous Kublai Khan.

It was also for ages an important link in one of the world’s great commercial highways. From time immemorial there were three great trade routes which connected India and China with Europe. One was the Persian Gulf route which ran from the mouth of the Indus to the Euphrates and along this latter river to Zeugma, or Thapsacus, whence it proceeded to Antioch and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean. The second was the sea route which went from India along the Persian and Arabian coasts to Aden, thence by the Red Sea to Alexandria and Tyre and Sidon. The third was the great overland route which started from Bactra—long, like Babylon, a market-place for the races of the world and a great emporium for Indian and Chinese commerce—and reached the West by two roads. One was the caravan route which crossed Parthia and Mesopotamia and ended in Antioch. The other passed down the river Oxus to the Caspian Sea and thence to the Euxine. This is the trade route that has the greatest interest for us at present—a route that served as one of the world’s chief commercial highways for more than two thousand years.

Long before Alexander made Bactra his base for the invasion of India, long before the Greek Skylax of Karyanda made his famous voyage from the mouth of the Indus to Arsinoe on the Red Sea, and many centuries before Hippalus made his epoch-making discovery of the existence of the moonstones of the Indian Ocean, which immensely augmented the ocean-bound traffic between India and Egypt, a very large volume of the luxuries of the Far East found their way to the Occident by the great Oxus-Caspian-Euxine trade route. And while the ships of Tarshish and

Quinquiremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With cargoes of ivory and apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet, white wine,

were bringing to Syria and the Land of the Pharaohs treasures from the coast of Malabar and

The spicy shore

Of Araby the blest,

interminable caravans and countless merchantmen were always busy along the Oxus-Caspian-Euxine route bearing to Byzantium and Athens and Rome silks from China and Bengal; muslin and other stuffs from Benares and Kotumbara; tortoise-shell from the Golden Chersonese; indigo from Sind; drugs, spices, cosmetics, perfumes, pearls, beryls, and precious stones from other parts; costus from Cashmere; pepper from Malabar; gums, spikenard, lycium, and malabathrum from the forests of the Himalayas; and sapphires, rubies, and aquamarines from Burma, Siam, and Vaniyambadi.

What was the volume of this trade between the Orient and the Occident, especially after the establishment of the Pax Romana under Augustus, may be gauged by the fact that the unprecedented demand by the fashionable world of Rome for all kinds of eastern luxuries for a while seriously imperiled the imperial finances. In the single item of aromatics for funerals, the extravagance indulged in seems incredible. At the obsequies of Sulla, before the time of Augustus, more than twelve thousand pounds of precious spices were consumed, while Nero had more expensive aromatics burnt on the funeral pyre of Poppœa than Arabia produced in a year.

When, after the destruction of Bagdad by Hulaku Khan, Tabriz in Persia became the great political and commercial city of Asia, it was by the Euxine that the merchant princes of Venice and Genoa conducted their commerce with the Middle and Far East. Passing through the Hellespont and the Bosphorus, their galleys proceeded to Kaffa in the Crimea which was their chief entrepôt on the Euxine. From this point the enterprising traders continued their course by way of the Sea of Azov, the Don, and the Volga to a port on the Caspian Sea. Thence their caravans started on their long overland journey over lofty mountains and through vast deserts and hostile nations to far distant Cathay in quest of the highly-prized commodities of Chinese kilns and looms. Other traders went directly by sea from Kaffa to Trebizond whence they journeyed over broad, arid plains to Tabriz. Here their numerous caravans were laden with the rich fabrics of Persia and the rare products of India and the Isles of Spicery. From these centers of Asiatic traffic, long lines of patient camels transported their precious burdens to ports on the Euxine where a fleet of Genoese and Venetian galleys was waiting to receive the merchandise collected at so much risk and at the cost of so much labor and which was subsequently distributed among the expectant marts of southern Europe.[33]

Before embarking at Sulina for Constantinople, I almost dreaded the voyage to the Bosphorus. From the time of the Argonauts the tempestuous Euxine has been a byword among mariners and the dread of travelers who have to trust themselves to its storm-lashed waves. In the words of Ovid its fury was inferior only to the turbulence of the fierce barbarians among whom he was exiled. I had prepared myself to endure for a day all the horrors which characterize a rough passage across the English channel. Nor were my fears entirely groundless. The sea was heavy,—the weather was squally. Many of the passengers, unwilling to trust themselves on deck, sought the seclusion of their staterooms. As for myself, I did not feel reassured until we had finally entered the more protected waters of the Bosphorus. Even at the entrance of this famous channel the voyager may, at times, experience great discomfort. Byron states the reason in the well-known stanza of Don Juan:

The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave

Broke foaming o’er the blue Symplegades;

’Tis a grand sight from off “The Giant’s grave”

To watch the progress of those rolling seas

Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave

Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease;

There’s not a sea .....

Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.[34]

Inter utrumque fremunt immani turbine venti.

Nescit cui domino pareat, unda maria.

Nam modo purpureo vires capit Eurus ab ortu;

Nunc Zephyrus, sero vespere missus, adest;

Nunc gelidus sicca Boreas bacchatur ab Arcto;

Nunc Notus adversa praelia fronte gerit.

Tristia, lib. L, Elegia II.

The “blue Symplegades,”—at least what is left of them—to which Byron here refers, are famous for their connection with one of the oldest and most interesting of Greek legends—that of the Argonauts. According to the story which Apollonius of Rhodes has so well developed in his Argonautica, the Symplegades were two floating and ever-clashing rocks, at the junction of the Euxine and the Bosphorus, which were fabled to close upon and crush all ships that attempted to pass between them. When Jason with his fifty-oared ship, the Argos, and his fifty heroes set out for Colchis to fetch back the golden fleece he was obliged to pass between these great colliding rocks. Thanks, however, to the instructions he had received from the seer, Phineus, who had been delivered from the tormenting Harpies by two of the Argonauts, he was able to effect this hitherto impossible passage and to proceed without interruption to his destination.

After this event the eyotlike rocks became fixed in the positions they now occupy. The one, however, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus has, owing to the action of the elements, long since disappeared beneath the waves. The other, on the European side, is also rapidly disintegrating, and soon will litter the floor of the sea. But the story of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece will endure as long as men shall retain a love for the fascinating in myth and legend and the beautiful in art and literature.

Although the Cyanean Islands—as the Symplegades are now called—and the shores of the Euxine are exceptionally rich in places and things of great historic and mythological interest, they are in this respect surpassed by the Bosphorus. Nowhere in the world do myth and legend, traditional associations and historic souvenirs cluster in such numbers and varieties as they do about every rock and bay and promontory of this famous waterway that connects the Euxine with the Sea of Marmora.

Even the names bestowed upon this channel have been manifold. To the ancients it was variously known as the Mouth, the Throat, the Door, and the Key of the Euxine. To-day it is frequently called the Narrows, or the Strait or the Canal of Constantinople. But the appellation which is still the most popular and that by which it is usually designated is that which has its origin in one of the earliest of Greek legends. As expressed in English, the name, which signifies Cow-Ford, or Ox-Ford, seems very prosaic, but the legend on which it is based has always been a favorite with poets and artists.

Io, the beautiful priestess of Hera at Argos, was loved by Zeus and was, in consequence of the jealousy of the goddess, metamorphosed into a heifer. Arriving at the eastern side of the strait, so the fable runs, she plunged into its swiftly-flowing waters and swam to the European shore. And from that time to the present, this famed watercourse has been known the world over as the Bosphorus.

On the promontory of Anadoli Kavak on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, we get a view of the site of Hieron which was long regarded as one of the most sacred places in the pagan world. Covered then with gorgeous temples dedicated to the twelve greater gods it ranked as a place of pilgrimage with Delphi and Olympia. The most imposing and sumptuous of these temples was said to have been founded by Jason and consecrated to Zeus Urius, in thanksgiving for the safe return of himself and his fellow Argonauts from their successful expedition to Colchis. Within it stood a priceless statue of Zeus made of ivory and gold, at the base of which was a slab, now preserved in the British Museum, on which were inscribed the words:

The sailor who invokes Zeus Urius that he may enjoy a prosperous voyage either toward the Cyanean Rocks, or on the Ægean sea, itself unsteady and filled with innumerable dangerous shoals scattered here and there, can have a prosperous voyage if first he sacrifices to the god whose statue Philo Antipater has set up, both because of gratitude and to insure favorable augury to sailors.

But unlike Delphi and Olympia where there is still, thanks to the labors of French and German archæologists, very much to remind one of the past grandeur of these historic places, “not a stone upon a stone” remains on the site of Hieron to attest to its former splendor and majesty. As in so many other parts of the world, the temples of Hieron served as quarries for peoples of a later age who knew not the gods of Olympus, or who had a special interest in consigning them to oblivion. And where, in days of yore, the clouds of incense and the smoke of sacrifice, in the most superb of temples stimulated the fervor of vast multitudes from far distant lands, the traveler to-day finds nothing of the pristine glory of Hieron except what nature gave it—its superb site and its enchanting vistas of the Bosphorus and the Euxine.

After the fall of paganism, Hieron had many vicissitudes. Having been converted into one of the strongest fortresses on the Bosphorus, it was time and again singled out for attack by the enemies of the Byzantine Empire. Among the most celebrated of them was Harun-al-Rashid who led an army the whole way from Bagdad with a view of effecting the conquest of Constantinople and with it of the Byzantine Empire. At a later date Hieron and the stronghold on the opposite side of the Strait fell into the hands of the Genoese. Not long afterwards it was captured by the Sultan Bayazid I, “the Thunderbolt,” and since then it has been in the possession of the Turks.

A short distance to the southwest, on the European shore, is a beautiful valley where the Crusaders are said to have encamped on their way to the Holy Land. A colossal plane tree is here seen which bears the name of “Plane tree of Godfrey of Bouillon,” from a tradition that it was planted by this famous hero of the Christian host.

At Roumeli Hissar, we reach the narrowest point of the Bosphorus and one which is most rich in historical associations. According to tradition, it was here that Xenophon and his immortal Ten Thousand crossed over into Europe after their famous retreat from the heart of Babylonia—a retreat which, revealing, as it did, the military weakness of the Persian Colossus, paved the way for the victories of the Granicus, the Issus, and Arbela and for the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great.

Here, too, it was that Mandrocles of Samos constructed the bridge of boats that enabled the vast Persian army under Darius to cross into Europe at the time of that monarch’s disastrous campaign against the Scythians. Mandrocles was so elated by his achievement that he had it commemorated in the temple of Hera, in his native Samos, by a picture with the inscription:

The fish-fraught Bosphorus bridged, to Juno’s fane

Did Mandrocles this proud memorial bring;

When for himself a crown he’d skill to gain,

For Samos praise, contenting the Great King.

But a large volume would be required to give even a brief notice of the countless myths, legends, traditions, and historical souvenirs which cluster about the shores of the Bosphorus from the Euxine to the Golden Horn. They have been the scenes of tragedies and romances and intrigues without number. From the dawn of history the Bosphorus has been constantly a bone of contention among rival and conflicting interests and an important factor in many of the great wars that have convulsed Asia and Europe. And until a plan shall be elaborated for eliminating international jealousies and harmonizing the antagonistic policies and aspirations of many peoples of divers races and creeds, it is not probable that the future history of this unique waterway will be materially different from that of the past. Altruism among nations has so far been confined to words and, from present indications, the day is far distant when it will be revealed in deeds.

It is not, however, through its legendary and storied past that the Bosphorus makes its strongest appeal to the ordinary traveler. It is rather through its scenic beauty—the enchanting vistas it everywhere offers on both the Asiatic and the European shore. These have for ages been celebrated in song and story and few who have been privileged to gaze on them will say that their praises have been exaggerated. From whatever point the Strait is viewed it is picturesque in the highest degree and exhibits all along its course countless objects of exhaustless interest.

Almost the entire distance from the Euxine to the Golden Horn one sees bordering the Bosphorus an almost continuous succession of kiosks, palaces, chalets, bungalows, mosques, and minarets. There are the imposing homes of ambassadors accredited to the Sublime Porte, the luxurious residences of the wealthy pashas and merchant princes of Stamboul, the superb marble palaces of sultans and sultanas, all surrounded by inviting groves and artistically laid-out parks rich in flowers and trees from many climes. Here and there in shaded glens and verdant dales are picturesque villages and hamlets whose quaint wooden houses form a striking contrast to the magnificent structures which are in their immediate vicinity.

Of the many beautiful valleys that debouch into the Bosphorus is that of the Great Geuk Su—Sweet Water—on the Asiatic side which appealed to me most strongly. Its clumps of balmy pines, somber cypresses, and graceful mimosas and its romantic groves of wide-spreading planes, sycamores, magnolias, and beech trees whose pendent branches dip into the crystal stream present rarest pictures of sylvan charm and loveliness. They forcibly reminded me of similar spots of scenic beauty which, years before, had so fascinated me in the far-famed Vale of Tempe in northern Thessaly. Emptying into the same bay as the Great Sweet Water is the Little Sweet Water and the valleys of these two enchanting streams together with their common bay constitute the so-called “Sweet Waters of Asia.”[35] Their attractive groves and greenswards have long been a favorite pleasance for Ottomans and Greeks as well as for foreign residents of Constantinople.

But what most interested me in this heart-gladdening spot was the countless groups of merry and beautiful children who had been brought here by their mothers and nurses for an outing. They seemed to be everywhere. Running and leaping, laughing and shouting, singing and dancing, vanishing among the bushes and suddenly reappearing in the broad greensward, their little forms were perfect pictures of restless energy and unalloyed happiness. Many of the boys and girls were dressed like children one sees in the Bois de Boulogne and their features were just as fair. Nowhere in the East did I see a more animated or a more charming scene except, perhaps, on the embowered banks of the Sweet Waters of Europe on the upper reaches of the Golden Horn.

And the mothers seemed to enjoy themselves fully as much as their children. Some sat quietly conversing under the umbrageous trees while others were enjoying a pleasant row in their light and gaily decked caiques. Most of them were garbed in the tcharchaff, a cloak and veil of somber color, but a few still retained the graceful feridgi and yashmak which were formerly in almost universal use among the Ottoman women of the well-to-do classes.

To eastern poets the Sweet Waters of Asia are quite as dear as was the Vale of Tempe to the ancient Greeks. For to the poets of the East this spot is a veritable paradise on earth and far surpasses the vaunted attractions of the celebrated groves of Damascus and the sun-kissed meadows of Shaab Beram in Southern Persia. It supplies, in fullest measure, three of the Moslem’s chiefest delights—umbrageous trees, flowing water, and sweet repose.

The poet must have had some such an enchanting spot in mind when he sang:

The land of the cedar and the vine,

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;

Where citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;

Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky,

In color though varied in beauty may vie.

Space precludes more than a passing reference to the sumptuous palaces which adorn the bay-indented shores of the Bosphorus. Of these magnificent edifices Yildiz Kiosk—Palace of the Star—is noted as having been the favorite place of residence of the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. It is a large structure of white marble and from its commanding site on a grove-clad hill it affords one of the most gorgeous panoramas to be seen anywhere along the matchless Bosphorus.

At the foot of the hill on which stands the palace of Yildiz Kiosk is seen what is undoubtedly one of the most grandiose palaces in the world. It is known as the Serai of Dolma Baghtcheh and was built by the Sultan Abdul-Medjid. His Armenian architect, Balian, was given carte blanche in the matter of expenditure and style of architecture. Only one condition was imposed on him by the Sultan and that was that the completed structure should surpass in magnificence every other imperial palace in the world. Architecturally it is a strange combination of Greek, Roman, Moorish, Turkish, Persian, and Renaissance styles and exhibits both interiorly and exteriorly what is most admirable in the noted palaces of the Louvre, Versailles, the Schönbrunn in Vienna, the Winter Palace in Petrograd, and the imperial palace of the Kremlin in Moscow. With the Ionian-blue Bosphorus as a foreground and the Imperial Park clad in perennial green as a background the snow-white palace of Dolma Baghtcheh, with its delicate lace-like carvings, is, indeed, in the words of an enthusiastic writer, “a pearl placed between a turquoise and an emerald, each jewel multiplied in size and loveliness many million-fold.”[36]

CHAPTER III
ROMA NOVA

The City of the Constantines,

The rising city of the billow-side,

The City of the Cross—great ocean’s bride,

Crowned with her birth she sprung long ages past,

And still she looked in glory o’er the tide

Which at her feet barbaric riches cast,

Pour’d by the burning East, all joyously and fast.

Our journey through the park and palace-fringed Bosphorus had duly prepared us for the culmination of these beauties and wonders, when, as we neared Seraglio Point, the Imperial Capital of the Byzantine Cæsars burst upon our view in all its glory and magnificence.

From the time of Tournefort travelers have vied with one another in their attempts to convey in words their impressions on their first view of the superb capital of the Ottoman Empire. Poets and artists have essayed to depict the splendors of what they regarded as the queen city of the world. There are pen-pictures of innumerable writers who came under the spell of this city of the Cæsars and who were unable to find language which would adequately express their sensations of ecstatic trance and rapturous delight. Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Edmondo De Amicis, Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Edmond About, the Countess de Gasparm, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Robert Hichens, and Pierre Loti all are overcome with wonder at the marvelous spectacle and despair of finding language to express their surprise and emotion in the presence of such an enchanting spot.

It is at Constantinople [writes Lamartine], that God and man, nature and art have created and placed the most marvelous point of view which the human eye can contemplate on earth.[37]

Chateaubriand expresses almost the same sentiment when he declares “On n’ exagère point quand on dit que Constantinople offre le plus beau point de vue de 1’univers.”[38] But notwithstanding this almost extravagant statement, the distinguished littérateur does not hesitate to add in a footnote, “I, however, prefer the bay of Naples.”

Like Lamartine and Chauteaubriand, I, too, was greatly impressed by my first view of Constantinople when seen from the deck of our steamer as it glided towards the mast-thronged harbor of the Golden Horn, but, as I have stated elsewhere,[39] the prize, for the World’s City Beautiful, must, me judice, be awarded to Rio de Janeiro, the incomparable capital of Brazil.

It is not within the scope of this chapter to give even a brief description of Constantinople. That is rendered quite unnecessary by the scores of valuable books which have been written on this fascinating subject. This, however, does not mean that I was not intensely interested in its countless attractions or that they did not make deep impressions on me and give rise to serious reflections. Far from it. I spent every available hour in visiting its churches, mosques, schools, museums and in contemplating its hoary, lichen-covered ruins, its battlemented walls and ivy-festooned towers which, for long ages, cast their trembling shadows on the glimmering waters of the Sea of Marmora and served, for more than eleven hundred years, as effective bulwarks against the fierce assaults of Avars and Goths, Arabs and Persians, Slavonians and Bulgarians and Mongols. And, as I threaded my way through its narrow and devious streets and inspected the picturesque and tumble-down houses, I found special pleasure in scrutinizing the letters and inscriptions and epitaphs engraved on slabs of marble or on blocks of granite, some of which were in their original position while others had been used in the construction of some now crumbling wall or building. If they could speak, what stories could not these disconnected letters and incomplete inscriptions tell of the shadowy past—stories of dark and strange events connected with sieges and conquests—stories of intrigue and deeds of violence and tyranny in which ambitious eunuchs, heartless pashas, and bloodthirsty sultans were the chief actors—stories, too, of exalted virtue and heroism displayed by noble men and women that time the fanatic followers of Mohammed boastfully announced their intention to plant the Crescent over the Cross and to remove from the devoted city of Constantine the last vestiges of Christian art and culture.

The first object to claim my attention after arriving in Constantinople was the majestic and solemn church, now a mosque, of Santa Sophia. To the Greeks it is known as the church of Hagia Sophia—Divine Wisdom. More frequently, however, it is called ’Η Μεγάλη Εκκλησία—“The Great Church—the church par excellence.”

Exteriorly this masterpiece of Byzantine basilicas has the aspect of a massive, irregular time-worn fortress. Surrounded by all kinds of low, unsymmetrical buildings—shops, storehouses, baths, schools, turbehs—one can have no idea of its original design or external appearance as it came from the hands of its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus.

The beauty of Santa Sophia, like that of so many of the famous churches of the Old World, is within. But even within, the first impression of the ordinary visitor is one of disappointment. But its surpassing beauty and grandeur quickly reveal themselves and then one stands in awe and amazement. Its marvelous harmony of design, its wealth of ornamentation, its lavish display of the finest marbles, porphyries, jaspers, serpentines, granites, alabasters, gold mosaics are bewildering in their effect and one can easily realize what must have been the splendor and magnificence of this august temple when, on the day of consecration, the emperor Justinian exultantly exclaimed: Glory be to God, who has deemed me worthy to accomplish such an undertaking. Σολομὼν, νενíκησá σε—Solomon, I have conquered thee!

And his exclamation of triumph was justified. For never before had the spoils of paganism’s great sanctuaries contributed so much towards the erection and embellishment of any single Christian edifice. Among the massive columns which support the great arches of the basilica are eight of verdantique which were brought from the celebrated Temple of Diana at Ephesus. There are eight of porphyry which belonged to the Temple of the Sun in Baalbek. These were the gifts of the noble Roman lady, Marcia, who, with characteristic piety, offered them, as she expressed it—Υφὲρ τῆς ψυχíκῆς μον σωτηρíας—for the salvation of my soul.

In addition to these splendid monoliths there are columns from the Temple of the Sun, at Palmyra; from the Temple of Jupiter at Cyzicus; from temples in Greece and Italy, Egypt, and the Cyclades. Its floor, walls, piers, arcades are overlaid with precious marbles of every hue—snow-white marble from Paros and Pentelicus, azure marble from Lybia, green marble from Laconia, flecked, rose, yellow, and golden marbles from Marmora, Synnada, Phrygia, and Mauritania. On all sides is a magnificent display of wonderful shafts, capitals, cornices, lintels, and panels of colors as variegated as their provenience is manifold. In them we see grayish marbles from sea-girt Proconnesus, verdantique from Thessaly, cipollino from Eubœa, Pavonazzetto from Synnada, lumachelle from Chios, Brocatel from Spain, Fior di Persico from Dalmatia, Bardiglio from the Apennines, giallo antico from distant Numidia and bianco and nero-antico from the far-off Pyrenees, while from the still-worked quarries of Egypt are marbles of emerald green and imperial purple.

Nor is this all. Besides marbles of every hue and from every clime there are borders of green serpentine, columns and panels of jasper of every shade, bands of oriental alabaster of clear honey color from the land of the Nile, exedras of porphyry from the Thebes of the Pharaohs—all arranged so as to produce the most perfect harmony of color and the most impressive effect on the beholders.[40]

When, even in its present defaced and despoiled condition, Santa Sophia is still one of the greatest, if not the greatest, triumphs of Church architecture, what must it not have been when “its domes and vaultings resplendent with gold mosaic interspersed with solemn figures” made it, what is in many respects the most magnificent temple of worship that the world has yet known.

The Grand Opera House of Paris boasts of the beauty of its interior which is adorned with thirty-three varieties of marble and other ornamental stones. It is indeed beautiful, but it cannot compare with the matchless interior of the Church of Holy Wisdom which is embellished by the spoil of the most superb temples of antiquity and the treasures of the richest quarries of the civilized world.

No other monarch has ever had at his disposition such rare and precious building materials as had Justinian for the construction of Santa Sophia and it is safe to say that no one will ever again have materials of such uniqueness and value. When one, therefore, considers all their richness and the admirable manner in which they have been utilized, we can easily understand how the legend soon arose which declares that while the Church of Holy Wisdom was building, the workmen were specially instructed by an angel from heaven. Nor need we go far for the origin of the story according to which Justinian set up a statue “representing Solomon as looking at the Great Church and gnashing his teeth with envy.” And one is not surprised at the rapturous expressions of Corippus, a poet-bishop of the sixth century, when he declares, “Praise of the temple of Solomon is now silenced and the Wonders of the World have to yield the preëminence. Two shrines founded by the wisdom of God have rivaled Heaven, one the Sacred Temple, the other the splendid fane of Santa Sophia, the vestibule of the Divine Presence.”[41]

But the most striking feature of this magnificent structure is its dome. As viewed from below, it seems, as Madame de Staël says of the dome of St. Peter’s, “like an abyss suspended over one’s head,” or as the Byzantian historian, Nicetas Acominatus, declares “an image of the firmament created by the Almighty.”

The eminent architectural authority, Fergusson, speaking of Justinian’s masterpiece, avers, “Internally, at least, the verdict seems inevitable that Santa Sophia is the most perfect and most beautiful church which has yet been erected by any Christian people. When its furniture was complete the verdict would have been still more strongly in its favor.”[42]

But the Ottomans, in taking possession of this unique sanctuary, removed or destroyed its priceless furniture and decorations and concealed its matchless mosaic pictures—pictures which Ghirlandajo declares are “the only paintings for eternity”—with a layer of white-wash! And although in its present condition, it is still, despite Moslem desecration, the delight of the artists and architects of the world, its interior is as far from exhibiting the glories of its pristine state as is the exterior of the Parthenon, since its mutilation by Lord Elgin—an act of vandalism denounced by Byron as “a triple sacrilege”—from displaying the peerless beauty of the sublime creation of Ictinus and Phidias.

Is it then any wonder that Saint Sophia was, from its completion, regarded as the very heart of the Byzantine Empire—that it has ever held the same place in the affections of the Greeks as St. Peter’s, the Cathedral of Rheims, and Westminster Abbey occupy in the hearts of the peoples of Italy, France, and England? And is it a matter of surprise that,

Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine

the Greeks of to-day still cherish the hope that it will, in the designs of Providence, eventually be returned to them and that Christian worship, with all the pomp of the Grecian liturgy, will again be restored under Santa Sophia’s wondrous dome?

It is related that when Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, took possession of Santa Sophia, he observed an Ottoman soldier destroying the mosaics of the church with his mace. “Let those things be,” Mohammed cried, and with a single blow he stretched the fanatical vandal at his feet. And then, in a lower tone, he added, so the historian avers, “Who knows but in another age they may serve another religion than that of Islam?” God grant it!

Nor have the Greeks ever abandoned the hope of one day regaining possession of the City of Constantinople. They claim it as their heritage, which was lost to them by the fortunes of war, and they patiently await the turn in fortune’s wheel when

The city won for Allah from the Giaour,

The Giaour from Othman’s race again may wrest.[43]

After leaving Santa Sophia, I spent some time in the extensive grounds of the Seraglio,[44] which, since the young Turks have come into power, have been used as a public park. About the buildings and the occupants of the Seraglio much has been written—the greater part of it based on imagination rather than on fact. But I have no desire to dwell on

That spacious seat

Of Wealth and Wantonness,

which, for three centuries, was “the heart of Ottoman history” and which for ten generations was the home of palled votaries of pleasure, but too often, alas! the hated prison of innocent victims who were condemned to pander to the basest passions of heartless minotaurs of lust and crime.

To the south of Santa Sophia is all that remains of the Hippodrome which, in its heyday of splendor, was regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Modeled after the Circus Maximus of Rome, it served as a forum, as a race course, and a museum in which were collected the choicest sculptures of Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. Here were statues of Phidias and Praxiteles and other master sculptors of the ancient world. Among them were an exquisite statue of Helen of Troy, “whose beauty of form and feature drove brave men distraught,” and the famed bronze horses of Lysippus—which were carried off by Dandolo to Venice, where they now adorn the cathedral of San Marco—and countless other masterpieces of scarcely less value and beauty.

Besides serving as a race course the Hippodrome, which had, it is estimated, a seating capacity of a hundred and twenty thousand people, was used for every purpose that could attract a large multitude of people. The Spina—a low wall dividing the Hippodrome into two sections—was, in common parlance, “the axis around which the Byzantine world revolved.” It was the favorite place for athletic sports and for the exhibition of wild animals. It was here that distinguished emperors and generals, like Heraclius and Nicephorus and Belisarius, celebrated their victories over the enemies of the empire. It was here that were witnessed not only the pride, the power, and the glories of New Rome, but also its tragedies, its massacres, its decadence, and ruin. In the acme of its magnificence this historic circus, with its forty tiers of marble seats and its superb promenade which surmounted all, was resplendent with the most beautiful works of Greek and Roman art—spoils from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Mauritania.

Of this marvelous Hippodrome only a part of the site is now visible, while of its ornaments but three are still extant. These are a bare column of masonry once covered with bronze plates which caused it “to gleam like a column of light”; an Egyptian obelisk that antedates the time of Moses, and one of the most ancient relics of Greece. This is the Serpent column from Delphi which, with the bronze Wolf of the Capitol in Rome, “may count as the most precious metal relic which remains from the ancient world.” It bears witness to the final defeat of Xerxes at Platæa, the first great triumph of the West over the East. For eight centuries it served as a pedestal for the golden tripod of the priestess of the god, and during long centuries it was for the Greeks an object of pilgrimage. When, nearly two thousand years later, the East, under Mohammed the Conqueror, was victorious over the West, this secular monument was permitted to remain on the base which has supported it for sixteen centuries that it might continue “to bear witness to the link of New Rome with Old Greece” and endure as a vivid reminder of the pomp of Byzantine rule and of the continuity of civilization.

Scarcely less interesting to me than the age-old remnants of the Hippodrome were the massive and crumbling walls that for a thousand years were the city’s palladium against the barbarian hordes of Asia and Europe. What visions crowd upon the memory as one stands upon this hoary rampart and surveys the scene around one! It was thanks to the impregnable walls of Constantinople no less than to the unique strategic position of the city that Roma Nova was able so long to hold her place as the home of art and letters, history and philosophy; that, in spite of desolating wars which everywhere raged in the rest of the world, and which at times carried their ravaging effects to her very gates, she continued to be the world’s one sure refuge of law, justice, and freedom; that, notwithstanding internecine strife, and changes of dynasties, her government was the one that for centuries afforded the greatest security for life and property; the one under which commerce and civilization were most fostered and most flourishing.

If the walls of Constantinople could speak, what thrilling stories could they not relate of the score of sieges to which they were exposed! For vivid color and breathless interest they surpass the siege of Tyre by Alexander, the siege of Carthage by Scipio, the siege of Jerusalem by Godfrey de Bouillon as described in the glowing epic of Tasso. Unlike the last-named sieges, those directed against the city on the Bosphorus “stand out on the canvas of history by the magnitude of the issues involved to religion, to nations, to civilization.” This is particularly true of the sieges by Saracens, Turks, and Mongols, for, if these barbarians and sworn enemies of the Christian name had succeeded in piercing the walls of this greatest bulwark of civilization before the dawn of the reconstructive work of the fifteenth century, the results to learning, art, Christendom would have been disastrous beyond conception, while progress and social order would have been retarded for untold centuries.

Never, probably, in the history of our race has the possession of any city led to more devastating and longer continued wars, to greater international rivalries and contentions than has the fair capital on the Golden Horn. It was in 673—but little more than a generation after Mohammed’s death—when the Moslems under the Saracen Moawiah laid siege to Constantinople, which was then the greatest and the richest city of the known world. They were defeated but not crushed. Knowing the incalculable treasures the city contained and realizing fully its supreme importance as the center of a world empire, they determined never to desist from their purpose until Constantinople was the capital and sovereign seat of Islam. Not until 1453, after eight centuries of deferred hopes, were their aspirations realized.

For a much longer period has Russia had her longing eyes on what she was wont to call “The Sacred City”—the city which had so long been the goal of the nations of Asia and Europe. From the days of Rurik, the reputed founder of the Russian monarchy, the Muscovites have never ceased to look forward to the time when the peerless city of Constantine would be in the possession of Holy Russia, and when the strategic channel which links the Euxine with the Mediterranean would be under her absolute control.

For a thousand years the forces of Russia continued irresistibly to move toward the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. When Catherine II, “The Semiramis of the North,” in 1787, made her magnificent progress through Southern Russia she entered the city of Kherson under a triumphal arch which bore the inscription “The Way to Byzantium.” As still further expressive of her faith in Russia’s ultimate destiny there was a gate in Moscow named “The Way to Constantinople.”

But this was not all. With the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, she worked out a scheme for a restored Greek Empire, with Constantinople as its capital, the throne of which was to be given to her second grandson. And so sure was she of effectuating her plan that “the boy with sagacious prescience had been christened Constantine; he was always dressed in the Greek mode, surrounded by Greek nurses and instructed in the tongue of his future subjects. That no detail might be lacking which foresight could devise, a medal had already been struck, on one side of which was a representation of the young prince’s head and on the other an allegorical device indicating the coming triumph of the Cross over the Crescent.”[45]

At the famous conference on the raft anchored in the river Nieman, when Napoleon and Alexander I discussed plans for the division of the world’s sovereignty, the Russian monarch demanded, as his share of the partition, the City of Constantinople together with the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. For this he was willing to concede to the French Emperor the most valuable regions on the Mediterranean littoral and to aid him with money and men in his projected conquest of India. But this the ambitious dictator of Europe would not grant. Placing his finger on the map where Constantinople was indicated, he exclaimed with passionate emphasis, “Constantinople! Constantinople! Never. That would mean the empire of the world!” At St. Helena he again gave clear expression to his estimate of the value of Constantinople when he declared “Constantinople est placée pour être le centre et le siege de la dominion universelle.”[46]

Almost exactly a thousand years after the death of Rurik, Russia’s victorious army was at San Stephano within sight of the domes and minarets of the City of Constantine. “At last,” shouted the jubilant soldiers, “we have reached our goal and Czargrad”—their name for Constantinople—“is ours!” Only a few hours more, they fondly believed, and they would see the Greek cross supplanting the Crescent at the dome of Santa Sophia and the dreams of ten centuries finally realized.

But it was not to be. Russia had indeed advanced nearer the goal on which her eyes had been fixed for a thousand years, but the coveted prize, though seemingly so near, was yet far from her grasp. The Treaty of San Stephano had, it is true, established a dominant Slav state in the Balkans which it was intended should be but a simple dependency of Russia and a stepping stone to Constantinople, but the treaty was scarcely signed before England and others of the Great Powers insisted on its revision. This was done at the Congress of Berlin. Here Beaconsfield, in order “to check Russian influence in the Balkans” and to safeguard “the vital requirements of Britain’s Eastern policy,” insisted on the restoration of “the position of Turkey as a European state”—a position which had been practically lost by the treaty of San Stephano.[47]

The Turk is still in Constantinople and is there notwithstanding the loud and reiterated declarations of statesmen from Gladstone to Lloyd George that he was to be cast “bag and baggage” out of Europe for evermore, but, when one remembers that, since the days of Solyman the Magnificent, the imminent downfall of Turkey as a European power has been confidently predicted scores of times; that, since the Osmanlis reached the Bosphorus nearly six centuries ago, no fewer than a hundred plans have been made for the partition of their territory[48] and that recently the English premier, Lloyd George, made the evacuation of Constantinople by Turkey an essential condition of peace—at least until he could have time to change his opportunist mind—one asks oneself how much longer the Sultan will successfully pursue his time-honored policy of divide et impera and how much longer diplomats will continue to insist that the maintenance of the City of Constantine as the capital of the Ottoman Empire is a political necessity, and when, if ever, Russia’s persistent ambition of a thousand years will at last be realized.[49] From present indications there is little likelihood that the jealousies of the more powerful nations of Europe respecting the matchless capital of the Golden Horn will abate or that the traditional ability of Turkey’s astute rulers to play off the Great Powers one against the other will be less marked in the future than in the past.

If, however, there is to be a transfer of Constantinople to some other power than that of the Ottoman Empire, poetic justice seems to require that the aspirations of Greece should receive first consideration. Greek in language and nationality from the days of Byzas until it was lost by the fortunes of war to the followers of Mohammed, this city is claimed by the people that counts among its own a Belisarius, a Pulcheria, a Tribonian, an Anthemius, a Chrysostom, a Gregory Nazienzus—men and women who in eminence and achievement were surpassed by none of their contemporaries west of the Adriatic and who were the glories of the greatest home of art and literature and culture when Russia was yet a land of wild nomads and ignorant barbarians. And this same people claims Constantinople as theirs “by origin and by long possession, a possession which has in some sort gone on both under Frankish and under Turkish rule.”[50]

One of the most interesting and picturesque sights in Constantinople, but of a far different character from those of which I have been speaking, is to be seen on the lower bridge over the Golden Horn. Connecting Galata, the part of the city which is chiefly inhabited by non-Mussulmans, with Stamboul, which is occupied almost entirely by Turks and Moslems of various nationalities, this bridge is frequently crowded with people of every color and from every clime. But what a noisy, jostling, struggling, wrangling, cosmopolitan throng one here encounters! Here one sees representatives from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa—bright-turbaned Turks, supple and chattering Greeks, jauntily attired dragomans, gorgeously uniformed kavasses, heavily burdened hamals, round-browed Montenegrins, white-kirtled Albanians, bronzed and sun-dried Bedouins from Arabia, shuffling and high-voiced eunuchs from Nubia and Abyssinia, and high-capped Tartars from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia—all vociferating in a score of languages and dialects, all utterly regardless of those who are round about them.

And such a variety of garbs and partial garbs! And yet they attract no attention in this motley crowd who here, as elsewhere in the East, are accustomed to seeing people appareled in garments of every conceivable style and color. “A man,” as has been observed by one who knows the Orient well, “may go about in public veiled up to the eyes, or clad, if he please, only in a girdle; he is merely obeying his own law”[51]—following a custom which has prevailed among his ancestors through countless generations.

After a tiresome climb I once found myself on the highest platform of the lofty Galata tower. From this point one has probably the best obtainable view of Constantinople and its environment. The panorama which is disclosed is certainly beautiful, superb; but I am not prepared to agree with the enthusiastic writer who declares that “nothing on this globe can surpass it—that it is incomparable in its panoramic variety and sublimity!”[52] I still contend that the palm for enchanting scenic beauty and for magnificent natural panoramas belongs to Rio de Janeiro.

I readily grant, however, that in wealth of legend, romance, and historic associations of every kind New Rome far surpasses the fascinating capital of Brazil. And I am inclined to think that most of those who descant so enthusiastically on the marvelous beauty of Constantinople unconsciously allow their judgments of the city’s present beauties to be colored by the magic and the glamour of the historic past.

Considering the Byzantine capital as the theater of thrilling deeds and notable achievements, it is probably unsurpassed in human interest except by Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. And the views one may have from the height of Galata’s tower are, historically considered, inferior only to those that so impress the spectator who stands on the ruin-crowned summit of the Palatine, the majestic portico of the Parthenon, and the sanctified heights of the Mount of Olives.

As I stood on the dizzy balcony which surmounts the lofty tower and beheld the magnificent vistas that opened up before me on every side, I realized as never before what a unique site was occupied by the City of Constantine. On the north are the cypress and palace-crowned hills of the winding Bosphorus and the delightful Sweet Waters of Europe, which are even more attractive than the rival Sweet Waters of Asia. On the south gleams the silver expanse of the Marmora, in which are mirrored the picturesque Islands of the Princes, over which hover so many morbid and voluptuous memories of the past. On the east across the Strait stand out in bold relief the Maiden’s Tower and the Golden City of Scutari, both wrapped in an atmosphere of heavy and exotic passion and “holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe.” On the hills laved by the glimmering waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, and bounded on the west by the historic plain of Thrace, proudly sits, half veiled by a tremulous amethystine haze, the peerless Queen of the East in all her majesty and shedding on the fascinated beholder a strange sense of mystery—seeming not a living, palpable thing, but rather a brilliant phantasm, or a rainbow dream of mystic remoteness.

Almost within a stone’s throw of where I stood was the Golden Horn sprinkled with hundreds of delicate, pointed caiques and bearing on its sapphire bosom ships of all sizes and flying the flags of all nations. It was up this famous stream that Byzas, the reputed son of Neptune, steered his frail craft nearly seven centuries before our era. And it was on the southern bank of this sheltered haven that the daring navigator, with his doughty Megarans, laid the foundation of Byzantium—named after himself—which was to play such a remarkable rôle in the world’s great drama.

A thousand years later—almost to a day—Constantine the Great abandons the city of Romulus and selects that of Byzas as the capital of the great Roman empire. On foot, with a lance in hand, the Emperor leads a solemn procession, and, under divine command—jubente Deo, as he phrased it—traces the boundary of the future metropolis. His assistants, astonished at the over-growing circumference of the destined capital, ventured to observe that the contemplated area of a great city had already been exceeded. “I shall continue to advance,” replied the Emperor, “until the Invisible Guide who precedes me bids me halt.”

It was across the Golden Horn that “blind old Dandolo”—that marvelous doge of ninety-seven years—led the Venetian forces against Constantinople and awakened the degenerate Greeks from “a dream of nine centuries—from the vain presumption that the capital of the Roman Empire was impregnable to foreign arms.” The marble mausoleum of this remarkable man—whose physical and mental powers were vigorous to the last—occupied a place in Santa Sophia until it was transformed into a mosque, and, even to-day, one may see in one of the galleries of the venerable fane a marble slab bearing in almost illegible characters the name of Henricus Dandolo.

And it was across the Golden Horn that Mohammed II passed when he entered the breached walls through New Rome as conqueror. But he was not able to effect an entrance into the ill-fated city without passing over the lifeless body of its noble defender, the valiant Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Byzantine Cæsars.[53]

For six centuries Constantinople had been an impregnable bulwark against the forces of Islam. For nearly twice that space of time she had successfully resisted the menaces and attacks of the barbarians of the north—Goths, Huns, Avars, Russians, Bulgarians, Chazars—and had proudly defied the power of Chosroes, Timur, Bayazid, Harun-al-Rashid, and other leaders of savage hordes from Persia, Arabia, and Central Asia. Unlike Old Rome, which frequently opened her gates to invaders from the north of the Danube, New Rome never once yielded to her Teutonic and Slavonian foes. Although besieged more than a score of times between the fourth and the thirteenth century[54] she was able to withstand every assault however furious or long continued. And this she did after the vast empire which once extended from the Tigris to the Guadilquivir had been so reduced that little was left of it but the capital itself, which, at the time of its capture by the Turks under Mohammed II, was scarcely more than a besieged fortress.

How the occupation of Constantinople by Mohammed the Conqueror, has complicated the political, military, and economic conditions of Europe for nearly five centuries is a matter of gloomy history. Owing to its matchless position it was long the natural center of the world’s commerce, the clearing house between Europe and Asia. Destined by nature itself to be the seat of two worlds, Constantinople must, as Freeman well observes, “remain the seat of imperial rule as long as Europe and Asia, as long as land and sea keep their places.”[55]

The transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, the foundation of Constantinople in 330 A. D., was one of the master-strokes in the history of civilization—indeed from the material and strategic point of view, I hold it to be the greatest. Rome, Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Berlin, Washington, became capital cities by the gradual acts of the rulers in the course of years. But in ten years Constantinople remade the center of the civilized world. Nothing so stupendous in civic origins has ever been accomplished before or since, for its effects have been maintained with rare and partial breaks for eleven, nay, for fifteen centuries. The foundation of Alexandria by Alexander, of Antioch by Seleucus have some parallels. Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, Delhi have had fluctuating histories. Peter’s creation of Petrograd was a splendid mistake, which has ended in hideous failure. But the creation of Constantinople marks Constantine as one of the truly great, beside Julius, Trajan, Charles and Washington.[56]

But more remarkable than anything that has yet been said of the Queen City of the Bosphorus is her marvelous continuity of imperial rule. From the time when Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, when, in the works of Dante,

Per cedere al Pastor si fece Greco,[57]

New Rome—notwithstanding all its wars and vicissitudes, all its changes of race and religion, all its changes of laws and customs and institutions—has been the continuous seat of empire for sixteen centuries. This is something that is without parallel in the history of our race.

Rome was the local center of empire for barely four centuries.... The royal cities that once flourished in the valleys of the Ganges, the Euphrates or the Nile were all abandoned after some centuries of splendor, and have long lost their imperial rank. Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, Athens, had periods of glory but no great continuity of empire. London and Paris have been great capitals for at most a few centuries; and Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg are things of yesterday in the long roll of human civilization.[58]

This exceptional continuity in Constantinople may, it has been asserted, “be ultimately traced to its incomparable physical and geographical capabilities.”

But while I contemplated the capital of Constantine as it lay bathed in the tremulous and ethereal atmosphere of an autumn afternoon and recalled its past history, enveloped in the mist of years—a history which then seemed more like a confused and troubled dream than a veritable record of stirring and vivid actualities—I presently lost sight of the wars and sieges and conquests of which this Castle of the Cæsars has so frequently been the theater and thought of its rather as the erstwhile home of art and literature, as the renowned center of religion and culture.

Among its ecclesiastical rulers were some of the brightest luminaries of the Eastern Church. There was the scholarly St. John Chrysostom, “the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit.”[59] There was the illustrious St. Gregory Nazienzus, whom Villeman calls the greatest Oriental poet of Christendom. There was Photius, “whose learning and width of culture was astonishing and whose library-catalogue is the envy of modern scholars.” And there were those two learned women, the Empress Eudocia and the Princess Anna Comnena, who, as Gibbon phrases it, “cultivated in the purple, the arts of rhetoric and philosophy.”[60]

It was in Constantinople that, at the command of Justinian, was framed the famous Code that bears his name—the most important of all monuments of jurisprudence and which, notwithstanding subsequent modifications, is still the basis of all legislation throughout the civilized world.

It was here that Byzantine art took its highest flights. Santa Sophia was but one of the churches of New Rome from which western artists and architects drew their inspiration. We see this in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto and in the countless Italian edifices which exhibit the evidence of Byzantine influence.

And it was here, in the libraries and monasteries, that was preserved that precious heritage of Greek thought and Greek genius, which, at a later age, was to be transferred to Western Europe, and which, through the activity of Byzantine scholars, was to be the foundation of the Renaissance. During the period immediately preceding the Conquest of Constantinople there was, declares Gibbon, “more books and more knowledge within the walls of Constantinople than could be dispersed over the extensive countries of the West.”[61]

“When the arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses” from the Queen City of the East, Greek learning sought an asylum on the banks of the Arno and the Tiber. Among the first of Greek scholars to find a congenial home in the land of Dante and Petrarch were Janon Lascaris and Manuel Chrysoloras. They were received with open arms in the universities of the Peninsula and lectured with signal success to vast numbers of eager and enthusiastic students of every age and condition. But nowhere were they and others of their countrymen of a later date[62] accorded a more cordial welcome than in the palaces of the Medici and at the courts of Leo X and Nicholas V. Under such illustrious patrons, Greek letters flourished amazingly and quickly prepared the way for the great humanistic movement that culminated in the literary triumphs of Politian, Reuchlin, and Erasmus.

But the fall of Constantinople was epoch-making not only in its relation to the Humanistic Renaissance but also in its effect on the economic and commercial development of Europe. Before the Ottomans achieved the conquest of the Græco-Roman Empire of the East, this region constituted what has happily been designated as “the nerve-center of the world’s commerce.” But no sooner had it passed into the hands of the Ottomans than the great trade routes between the Orient and Europe were completely blocked “by a power inimical to commerce and still more inimical to those Christian nations for whose benefit intercourse between the East and West was mainly carried on.”

It was then imperative for Europe, unless it was prepared to forego its trade with the East, to discover a new route to the Orient, which would be beyond the interference of Ottoman power. This much desired result was accomplished by two of the most decisive events in the world’s history—“the rounding by Vasco da Gama of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of the New World.” By these far-reaching achievements “the center of gravity, commercial, political and intellectual, rapidly shifted from the south-east of Europe to the northwest; from the cities of the Mediterranean littoral to those of the Atlantic. Constantinople, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, Marseilles were deprived at one fell swoop of the economic and political preëminence which had for centuries belonged to them” ... and the Mediterranean, which for ages had “been the greatest of commercial highways, was reduced almost to the position of a backwater.”[63]

Among the many names given to the Ottoman capital by the peoples of the East is that bestowed upon it by the Arabs, namely, El Farruch—the Earth-Divider. In view of what has been said in the preceding pages no epithet could be more expressive of the truth. For, since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, together with its two appanages, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, has constituted the chief line of demarcation between the East and the West, between the Cross and the Crescent.

One of the most difficult and delicate problems which diplomacy has yet to solve—war has been impotent to bring about a solution—is the future status of the historic city of the Bosphorus and the relations between the powers of Islam and the Christian nations of Europe.

As the solution of the problem cannot, apparently, be effected by conquest or by a sordid exploitation of the lands of the East, it seems that the time has now arrived when more unselfish and more Christian methods should be applied than those based on force and international rivalries.

We owe much, very much, to the East. From her, through Greece and Rome, have come our civilization and culture, our art and literature. From her has come the religion that molds the mind and purifies the heart of Christendom. To her, therefore, we owe an immense debt of gratitude, a debt that can be paid only by helping her in her present lethargic state and by aiding her to return to her former condition of vigor and progress. We should, consequently, endeavor to understand the needs of the East in order that we may the more intelligently contribute towards her resuscitation—moral and intellectual, as well as material—and that we may more rationally coöperate with her in regaining, at least in a measure, that position of preëminence which she occupied when she was acclaimed the cradle of civilization and the mother of culture; when Bagdad and Damascus were famed centers of learning; when Saracen scholars made known to the nations of the West the treasures of Greek science and philosophy; when it was said, “In all other parts of the world light descends upon earth, from Holy Bokhara it ascends.”

Is this an impossible task? It is certainly not unworthy of being essayed by the lovers of humanity, who are beholden to the East for the greatest blessings they now enjoy. The welfare of our race and the peace of the world demand the removal of the impassable barriers which have so long separated the Orient from the Occident. Of all the plans now engaging the minds of men for securing permanent peace in the Near East and achieving, at the same time, its spiritual and social regeneration, this seems to be the only one that is likely to have a successful issue—the only one which has a real basis in genuine altruism and Christian righteousness.

CHAPTER IV
THE HELLESPONT AND HOMER’S TROY

Now let

Us fly to Asia’s cities of renown!

Already through each nerve a flutter runs

Of eager hope, that longs to be away;

Already ’neath the light of other suns

My feet, new-winged for travel, yearn to stray.

Catullus, XLVI.

After awaking from a protracted reverie on the summit of Galata’s lofty tower I found, to my surprise, that I had spent much more time there than I had originally intended. Twilight, delicate and ethereal, was beginning to fall and to veil the mosques and minarets and cypress-crowned heights of solemn, crafty, mysterious Stamboul. An animated pageant was slowly wending its way through the Grand Rue de Pera—part of it on its way to popular resorts of amusement and relaxation; part returning from the cares of office and counting-room to the repose of homes on the tranquil banks of the palace-fringed Bosphorus.

But I could linger no longer in the contemplation of such fascinating scenes. The previous day I had made arrangements with a friend to take the steamer that very evening for Chanak Kalesi, on the Dardanelles. One of my long unrealized dreams had been to visit the site of ancient Troy. Several times I had been near it, but pressing engagements had always prevented me from gazing on the spot

Where stood old Troy, a venerable name,

Forever consecrated to deathless fame.

A few moments after our steamer left her moorings in the Golden Horn, she began to round Seraglio Point. Galata and Pera twinkle in the gathering gloom. The domes and minarets of Stamboul rise like dark, shadowy monsters above the somber groups of low, wooden houses by which they are surrounded. Broken stars quiver in the swift-flowing waters of the Bosphorus and, while we are still gazing at the venerable, ivy-mantled walls and towers that so long guarded the City of Constantine, we enter the Sea of Marmora—known to the ancients as the Propontis—the sea before the Pontus or the Euxine of which Herodotus says “there is not in the world any other sea so wonderful.”

Early the following morning we were in the storied channel of the Thracian Hellespont—now more familiarly known as the Dardanelles. Like the Bosphorus, the Hellespont is replete with human and historic interest, and, as I contemplated its rugged cliffs, I recalled Lucan’s words that here

Each rock and every tree recording tales adorn.

This is particularly true of that section of the channel at Fort Nagara, formerly known as the Strait of Abydos. For it was

Here young Leander perished in the flood,

And here the tower of mournful Hero stood.

It was here that the venture-loving Byron swam across the Hellespont. And it was here that Xerxes spanned the Straits with the famous double bridge that enabled his vast army to cross over to the Thracian shore on his way to Greece, where “the barbarian despot sought to repress in the deadly bonds of Persian thralldom the intellect and the freedom of the world.” But the epoch-making victory of Salamis frustrated all his plans of conquest. Accompanied by his counted myriads the Persian invader, sure of his prey, entered Greece with all the wantonness and deadly hostility of barbaric pride; after his defeat by Themistocles, when army, fleet, and treasure were gone, he was forced to flee like the meanest fugitive. The Italian poet, Luigi Alemanni, tells in a single line the fate of the proud organizer of this widely heralded campaign when he writes:

More than a god he came, less than a man he fled.

A century and a half after the flight of Xerxes, Alexander’s army, under Parmenio, crossed the Hellespont at the place where it had been bridged by the ambitious and vainglorious Persian despot. It was at, or near, this spot that Frederick Barbarossa crossed at the head of the Third Crusade. And it was at this same spot that Solyman Pasha, the warlike son of Orkhan, passed from Asia to Europe, where, in 1354, he planted the Osmanli standard and where it has ever since flown as a sign of Moslem faith and of Moslem victory over the hated Giaour.

We disembarked at the town of Chanak Kalesi, which Europeans usually call the Dardanelles. It is noted as being at the narrowest point of the Hellespont—the channel here is about fourteen hundred yards in width—and was until recently the headquarters of the general in command of the Turkish troops in the many forts which defended the Strait.

In the long-discussed plans of Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia, for joint dominion of the world, the Russian monarch always insisted on securing possession not only of the Bosphorus and Constantinople but also of the Strait of the Dardanelles. But the French emperor just as persistently refused to acquiesce in the Czar’s demands. For a while Napoleon seemed disposed to yield the Bosphorus and even Constantinople, but nothing could induce him to consider for a moment the granting to his ally of control of the Dardanelles—the key to the Mediterranean.

Alexander insisted that, owing to its geographical position, the Dardanelles should belong to Russia; that, having Constantinople, he should also hold the key to the Ægean. But Napoleon retorted that, if Russia possessed this important waterway, she would at once become mistress not only of the commerce of the Levant and of India, but she would also be a constant menace to Toulon, to Corfu, and to the commerce of the world.

But the Czar and his advisers would not take a refusal. They realized that they would never again have so good an opportunity of gaining possession of the long-coveted capital on the Bosphorus and of the channel connecting the Euxine with the Mediterranean as when Napoleon was counting on their coöperation with him in his great schemes of conquest in Asia. Negotiations continued without interruption from the conference of Tilsit to that of Erfurt, and nothing stood in the way of their successful issue except the possession by Russia of the narrow strait between the Marmora and the Ægean. In return for this Alexander was prepared to accede to Napoleon’s every wish.

In a letter of Caulaincourt, the French Ambassador at St. Petersburg, written to Napoleon in 1808, the envoy declares that Russia, “once mistress of Constantinople and its geographical dependencies, will go with us not only to India, but to Syria, to Egypt, wherever we may judge it useful to employ her fleets and draw her armies. Besides this, she will leave the French Emperor free to organize the south and the middle of Europe as he may elect. Reserving for herself only the affairs of the north, she will abandon to him the direction of all the others, will not interfere with his gigantic operations, will renounce all jealousy and will consent that the partition of the Orient shall in fact become the partition of the world.”

Concluding his letter to Napoleon, Caulaincourt writes:

Let your majesty reunite Italy, perhaps even Spain to France; change dynasties, found kingdoms; demand the coöperation of the Black Sea fleet and a land army for the conquest of Egypt; demand any guarantees whatsoever; make with Austria any exchanges that may be expedient; in one word, let the world change place, if Russia obtains Constantinople and the Dardanelles, we shall, I believe, be able to have her consider everything without uneasiness.[64]

Could anything evince more clearly than this remarkable statement the supreme value which Alexander placed on the Dardanelles as a Russian outlet to the Mediterranean? And could a more tempting offer have been made to Napoleon, who was then the arbiter of Europe and seemed on the point of becoming the dictator of the world, than that which was dangled before his eyes by his ambitious ally? But the compact that Russia so eagerly desired was not to be made. For when both the Czar and the Emperor appeared to be near an agreement on their long-discussed plans of world domination, Spanish valor and patriotism and Austrian diplomacy were concerting to check the Corsican’s vaulting ambition and to prepare for his ultimate downfall at Waterloo.

In a preceding page reference has been made to the Arab name—El Farruch—Earth-Divider—of Constantinople. The same can with equal reason be applied to the Dardanelles. For during long centuries it, with the Bosphorus, has been an effective barrier between the East and the West and has constantly held in check Russia’s aspirations towards the Mediterranean. How much longer will El Farruch continue to keep apart the nations of the earth, and how long will it prove to be the paramount crux of the Near Eastern Question and the occasion of long and sanguinary wars? This is a question that only the future—and, apparently, the very distant future—can answer.

After inspecting the fortifications of Chanak Kalesi and Kilid Bahr and making a visit to the site of ancient Abydos, whence Xerxes is supposed to have surveyed his vast army as it crossed the Hellespont, and whence one has a splendid view of the narrowest part of the Strait, we prepared to continue our journey to the site of ancient Troy.

Our first objective was Eren Keui, a flourishing Greek village, where we purposed stopping over night. This short trip of about three hours we made on horseback. Our road lay along the edge of the Strait over wooded hills, well-cultivated valleys, and picturesque villages surrounded by numerous vineyards and olive groves. From the hills we had splendid views of the Dardanelles, the Thracian Chersonese, the distant Ægean, and “many-fountained Ida” beyond the Trojan plain.

On our way we passed the site of Dardanus—a town also known as Teucris—from which the Dardanelles takes its name. The epithet Hellespont, Sea of Helle—which has also been given to the Strait—is derived from the mythical Helle, who is said to have been drowned near the southern entrance of the channel that bears her name.

From an eminence near Eren Keui, which we reached under an overclouded sky, we were captivated by the fascinating prospect that burst upon our view. For some miles ahead of us, lying in a tremulous azure haze,

We saw the dark outline of the Trojan plain,

Misty and dim, as things at distance seem

Through the fast waning light of summer eve.

We lost no time in reaching the spot which, for me at least, had been one of peculiar and ever-growing interest since, as a youth, I had fallen under the magic spell of the immortal author of the Iliad and Odyssey. And I was not long on the plain of Troy when I realized the full force of Byron’s words when he declares:

It is one thing to read the Iliad at Sigeum and on the tumuli, or by the springs with Mount Ida above and the plain and the rivers of the Archipelago around you, and another thing to trim your taper over it in a snug library—this I know.[65]

But there is nothing in this historic region that will appeal to the ordinary tourist. It is a circumscribed plain about eight miles long by four broad, on which he will see little beyond a few bare hillocks and tumuli and occasional hunts or villages of the poor people who here have their home,[66] and hear little as he treads his way through the scattered brakes that cover much of the ground except the voice of a solitary bird which at intervals bursts into song and then is still.

Nor is there anything here to attract those self-satisfied iconoclasts who not only deny that Homer wrote the Iliad but also deny his very existence. Neither is there anything here to impress the followers of Wolf and other so-called atomists who insist that the Iliad is but a collection of ballads composed by a number of rhapsodists.[67] Still less is there here aught to interest those who not only maintain that Homer and his authorship of the Iliad are myths but who also contend that there is no evidence whatever for believing that there was such a place as Troy or for supposing that the traditional Troy was located in this place, or that there ever was such a conflict as the Trojan War, which is so graphically described in the Iliad.

No. To be thrilled by a visit to the well-fought field of Ilium, one must share the sentiments which animated Byron when he contemplated what Catullus so well denominated:

Troia (nefas) commune sepulchrum Asiæ Europæque,

Troia virum et virtutum omnium acerba cinis.[68]

He must share the sentiments of thousands of others—-poets, artists, historians, kings, statesmen, commanders of vast armies—-who, during the past twenty-five centuries, have found on the site of Ilium, once the

City of unconquered men

an inspiration in their work and an incentive to high achievement which they could not find in the same degree in any other place in the wide world.

When Xerxes, with his army, was on the way from Sardis to Greece he stopped at Troy, and “when he had seen everything and inquired into all particulars, he made an offering of ten thousand oxen to the Trojan Minerva, while the Magians poured libations to the heroes who were slain at Troy.”[69]

And the first thing Alexander the Great did on arriving in Asia, previously to beginning his stupendous campaign against the Persians, was to make a pilgrimage to what was once the city of Priam. The famous Macedonian was a credit to his master, Aristotle, both as a scholar and as a philosopher. He was, moreover, a great admirer of Homer and slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. Ascending the acropolis of New Ilium, he, like Xerxes, sacrificed to Minerva and also to the shade of Priam, which he wished to propitiate before starting on his expedition into the heart of Asia. And, as an assumed descendant, through his mother, of Achilles, he offered an oblation on the tumulus of Achilles, beneath which, it was believed, the ashes of the hero, together with those of his friend Patroclus, were preserved in a golden urn. After this he made a careful topographical survey of the Trojan plain. And so convinced was he of all that tradition claimed for it that he promised to enrich and fortify the New Ilium,[70] but was prevented by premature death from carrying his project into execution.

Similarly Julius Cæsar, of the gens Julia, which traced its origin to Iulus, son of Æneas, and was proud of its legendary descent from Trojan stock, lavished honors on Troy,[71] as did also the Consul Livius, who offered sacrifice on the acropolis of Ilium, in the name of Rome, and not only exempted it from tribute but also gave it jurisdiction over that part of the surrounding country known as the Troad.

If then, one would come under the spell of Troy, if one would experience the magic influence of its spiritus loci, one must visit it as did Byron and Cæsar and Alexander—free from the withering doubts raised by modern atomistic criticism and with a reasonable belief not only in the existence of Priam’s city but also in the personality of Homer and in his authorship of the marvelous epic on the Trojan war. And we must remember that for nearly three thousand years there was no question regarding the identity of that Greek whom Dante calls poeta sovrano, the one, he tells us, who was

Of mortals the most cherished by the nine.[72]

We must recall the estimation in which he was held by the ancients, who never wavered respecting the identity of

The blind old man who dwelt on Scio’s rocky isle.

So paramount, indeed, were the reputation and influence of the immortal poet “whose genius had breathed inspiration into the national life of Greece” that it was said, when tradition respecting his sublime achievements was still fresh,

Seven cities now contend for Homer dead

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

The genius of Homer [declares a recent writer] was worshiped as god-like and temples were erected to his honor at Chios, Alexandria, Smyrna, and elsewhere; games were also instituted in his memory; Apollo and Homer were actually worshiped together at Argos, the one as the god of song, the other of minstrelsy.[73]

Filled with these thoughts and with a life-long love of the poet’s masterpieces, I visited every nook and corner of the Trojan plain and with unrestrained rapture contemplated the places which had so haunted my youthful imagination when I first became acquainted with the sublime pages of the Iliad. For the time being I forgot all about Wolf, Lachman, Hermann, and other advocates of the atomistic theory respecting Homer’s matchless epic and, like a child reading a fairy tale, I loved to picture before my eyes the wonderful events which Homer so vividly describes and which seemed to me almost as real as they were to the actual spectators three thousand years ago.

Still in our ears Andromache complains,

And still in sight the fate of Troy remains;

Still Ajax fights, still Hector’s dragged along,—

Such strange enchantment dwells in Homer’s song.

Fancy was animated as I strolled along the storied Simois, which “sprouted ambrosia-like pasture” for the horses of Hera and Athena, and the serpentine Scamander—“fair-flowing with silver eddies”—which formerly entered a bay upon the shores of which the Greeks hauled up their ships, and as I stood before the reputed tumuli of Achilles and Patroclus, Ajax and Antilochus. But it was more vivacious far when I ascended the hill of Hissarlik, which Schliemann has identified as the site of Homer’s Troy. From the highest point of this elevation one has a view that is truly entrancing. On the north is the Hellespont—the road, as the ancients conceived, to the Cimmerians and the Hyperboreans—with all its myth and legend. To the west are the murmurous waters of the island-studded Ægean. Near the coast line is vine-clad Tenedos, whither the Greek fleet withdrew while the wooden horse was being taken into Troy. Further beyond is Lemnos, where Hephæstus is said to have fallen when he was hurled from Olympus. To the northwest is rock-ribbed Imbros, and further afield is Samothrace, from the towering peak of which Poseidon looked down upon Troy during its investment by the Greeks. To the northeast is the eminence of Callicolone, whence Apollo and Mars, the protectors of Ilium, watched the operations of the contending Greek and Trojan armies. To the eastward is snow-crested Ida—whence Zeus observed the combatants—whose lofty pines and valonas

Wave aloft

Their tuneful, scented, dove-embowering shade,

And ’neath twilight broods as gray and soft

As when of yore the shepherd Paris strayed

With glad Œnone; while their bleating flocks

Grazed the wild thyme bright with ambrosial dew;

And lovers piping ’neath the o’ershadowing rocks

Laded with love the breezes as they flew.

It was on such panoramas that Helen was wont to fix her wistful gaze—fair Helen, who

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars

*****

... launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.

Yes, I dreamed as I had previously dreamed in Sparta, the famed abode of Menelaus and his faithless Helen; as I had dreamed in “gold-abounding” Mycenæ, the home of Agamemnon, “King of men”; as I had dreamed when contemplating desolate Delphi, Corinth, and Olympia, their glory gone and their temples in ruins; as I had dreamed on the summit of cloud-capped Parnassus, haunt of the Muses, and on the banks of the rippling Cephisus, where Plato taught and where

Girls and boys, women and bearded men

Crowded to hear and treasure in their hearts

Matter to make their lives a happiness.

At all these places, as on the site of Troy’s citadel, I loved to recall the Greeks’ love of beauty and the marvelous mythopœic faculty of their poets, and it required no spur to fancy to imagine that I was, for the moment, in actual communion with the thoughts and feelings of the world’s masters of beauty in art and literature.

The plain of Troy [it has been said] has been a battlefield not only of heroes, but of scholars and geographers, and the works which have been written on the subject form a literature to themselves.[74]

This is true. But, however much students of the Iliad may have disagreed about the location of the city of Priam, about the courses of the Simois and Scamander and certain minor details, all have been compelled to recognize the accuracy of the poet’s topographical descriptions and the appropriateness of the epithets which he applies to the most striking features of the enchanting landscape which he so graphically depicts. He does not, of course, give the numbers and distances, as some of his critics would seem to demand, that a civil engineer would require for a contour-line map. This would violate entirely the most elementary canons of poetical treatment. But he does use numbers and distances so far as they are necessary to give reality to the action of the poem. And though his realities are in the highest degree idealized, nevertheless, so fully do they meet the general exigencies of time and place that they prove almost to demonstration that Homer was thoroughly familiar not only with Troy but also with all the surrounding region.[75]

The epithets applied by the poet to the mountains, islands, rivers, and other natural features described in his matchless work show that he must have been intimately acquainted with them, not by hearsay but by personal inspection. Thus when he speaks of the “rapid current” of the Hellespont, of the “broad-flowing” and “eddying” Scamander, of “the peak of lofty Samothrace appearing over the intervening mass of Imbros,” thus enabling Poseidon to look down from its summit on the plain of Troy, we are convinced that the author of the Iliad had carefully examined on the spot the objects he so vividly brings before our view. And so it is in his graphic delineations of “lofty,” “many-fountained” Ida, of “many-crested,” “dazzling”

Olympus, the reputed seat

Eternal of the gods, which never storms

Disturb, rains drench, or snow invades, but calm.

So graphic and exact indeed are the epithets and descriptions of Homer that they far surpass those of the later poets of Greece. In this respect he constantly reminds one of Dante, that consummate master of epithet and of brief but most exact description, who had the rare faculty of expressing the import of a whole sentence in a single word. I was then more than ever before impressed with the truth of Gœthe’s words:

Wer den Dichter will verstehen

Muss in Dichter’s Lande gehen.[76]

As we wandered along the willow-lined Mendere—the “divine” and “flower-fringed” Scamander—and threaded our way through clumps of tamarisk, agnus castus, and odoriferous Artemisia, frequently stopping in our course to admire a beautiful lotus or asphodel and to gaze on “spring-abounding” Ida’s heights, whence swift-footed Iris sped to sacred Ilium at the command of ægis-bearing Jove, the question arose as to the location of the Olympus, whence the “king of gods and men”

Surveyed the walls of Troy, the ships of Greece,

The flash of arms, the slayers and the slain.[77]

The doubt was raised by the fact there are in Greece the islands of the Ægean and in Asia Minor nearly a score of peaks and mountain ranges that bear the name of Olympus, and the further fact that Olympus is almost a generic name in this part of the world for a lofty mountain or chain of mountains. On the confines of Mysia and Bithynia and visible from the summit of Ida, which overlooks the Trojan plain, there is a high mountain which is called Olympus, which many writers have declared to be the one on whose summit mythology placed the home of the gods,

Where Jove convened the senate of the skies.[78]

But a single quotation produced by the Hellenist of our party sufficed to prove that the Olympus which Homer had in view was that located in northern Thessaly—the Olympus on which Hesiod placed the battle of the gods and Titans and on which mythology from the earliest time located “the residence of the dynasty of the gods of which Zeus was the head.” The quotation in question refers to the visit of Here to Zeus, who was then on Mt. Ida observing the belligerents on the Trojan plain, and reads:

But Juno down from high Olympus sped;

O’er sweet Emathia and Pieria’s range,

O’er snowy mountains of horse-breeding Thrace,

Their topmost heights she soared, nor touch’d the earth.

From Athos then she cross’d the swelling sea,

Until to Lemnos, God-like Thoas’ seat

She came.[79]

From Lemnos and Imbros, veiled in cloud,[80] skimming her airy way she passes, to “spring-abounding Ida.” Could anything indicate more clearly than this the relative positions of Olympus and Troy and fix more definitely the position of the home of the Olympian gods as conceived by the sovereign poet of Greece?

Although I had always been specially interested in Greek archæology I felt no inclination, during my short visit to Troy, to indulge my taste for archæological pursuits. I was satisfied to accept the conclusions of Schliemann and Dorpfeld and Virchow respecting the location of Ilium and the bearing of their discoveries on the reality of Homer and the Trojan war. And, as I roamed the plain on which the Greek army was encamped, I could not help hoping that further investigation would prove that the startling discoveries of Schliemann at Mycenæ would remove the last vestiges of doubt regarding the actual existence of Agamemnon and Cassandra.[81] This would be a tangible proof of the reality of at least one of Homer’s heroes. It would, too, be a most interesting contribution to the Homeric question and would be specially gratifying to those who, in spite of certain modern critics, have unfalteringly clung to the views concerning Homer, Troy, and the Iliad which have universally prevailed since the days of Aristarchus and the Homeridæ.

The blind bard of Chios then is to-day, as he always has been, as he always will be so long as men shall love supreme excellence in letters, a living personality whose wonderful epics have exercised a wider and a more potent influence on the intellectual progress of our race than all other epics combined. No books, except perhaps those of the Bible, have been more frequently quoted nor have any received more attention from poets, orators, dramatists, and lovers of the noblest models of literary style.

Another remarkable fact is the gift of immortality which Homer, with Jovelike power, has conferred upon his heroes. Although but the creations of the poet’s genius, they stand forth to-day, men of flesh and blood, in all the vigor and freshness which characterized them thirty centuries ago. And there never have been among the children of men any who are better known, or whose names more frequently occur in song and story than the undying characters of the Odyssey and the Iliad. These facts impress every lover of Homer as he surveys the plain of Troy from the spot on which stood the Pergamus and recollects the achievements of the blind bard’s heroes during the ten long years of the Trojan war.

And, like Achilles and Agamemnon, Priam and Hector, the Troy of Homer also is immortal. Notwithstanding the efforts of a jealous Demetrius or an ill-informed Le Chevalier to transfer the glory of Troy to some other locality, its claims, as Schliemann has shown, still stand on as firm a basis as ever. Yes, of a truth,

Thou livest, O Troy, forever unto men.

*****

All to the magic of that world-sung song,

That god-breathed legend dost thou owe thy fame;

The golden weft the blind man wove so long,

Hath linked to immortality thy name.

His tale to many another’s lyre hath given

Its stirring echoes; and in every age

What story more than of thy woes hath riven

Their hearts who dream upon the poet’s page.

And though for long thou in the dust hast lain,

Still, still the visions of the mighty past,

The memory of thy struggle, and thy pain,

Thy god-built turrets,—these forever last.

CHAPTER V
THE CRADLE OF THE OSMANLIS

Have Time’s stern scythe, man’s rage and flood and fire

Left naught for curious pilgrims to admire?

A few poor footsteps may now cross the shrine,

Cell, long arcade, high altar, all supine;

Bound with thick ivy broken columns lie,

Through low rent circles winds of evening sigh,

Rough brambles choke the vaults where gold was stored,

And toads spit venom forth where priests adored.

Nicolas Michel.

Our next side trip, after visiting Troy, was a short excursion to Brusa which—partly by steamer and partly by rail—is easily accessible from Constantinople. I was especially eager to see this famous place, for its historic associations are numerous and varied. It was to Brusa—anciently Prusa—that Hannibal fled after his defeat by the Romans. There are indeed, some authorities who maintain that the great Carthaginian general was the founder of Brusa. It was from this city, which was once large and prosperous, that Pliny the Younger, while governor of Bithynia, wrote his celebrated letter to Trajan, in which he asked for instructions concerning the policy to be pursued regarding “the stubborn sect of Christians” who were then rapidly increasing in numbers and who, by refusing to offer sacrifices to the gods and by persistently avoiding all pagan rites and observances, had made themselves specially obnoxious to Roman officialdom. This letter[82] is remarkable as being one of the first notices in Roman writers respecting the members of that incipient Church which was eventually to become mistress of the capital of Cæsars.

In Ottoman history Brusa is notable for having been the capital of Orkhan, the second ruler of the Osmanlis and for having long been the favorite resort of Moslem scholars, artists, poets, and dervishes who enjoyed a great reputation among their coreligionists for their reputed sanctity. And even after the transfer of the Ottoman capital to Adrianople and subsequently to Constantinople, Brusa continued to be one of the sacred cities of the Mohammedans. For here were buried the first six Osmanli sovereigns besides more than a score of Ottoman princes and here “more than five hundred pashas, theologians, teachers, and poets sleep their last sleep around their first Padishas.” Among the turbehs which particularly impressed me was that of the Serbian princess who, although the wife of a Sultan, was able to preserve untainted the religion of her Christian parents. Here were erected numerous medresses—colleges—mosques and public buildings whose size and grandeur were for centuries a favorite theme of Moslem poets and historians. In beauty of design, richness of material, and exquisite finish some of the mosques—especially the renowned Green Mosque—are even to-day regarded as the most perfect specimens of Osmanli architecture.

Our visit to Brusa was most enjoyable and was an ideal introduction to our long journey through the Ottoman possessions in Asia. For in this old capital of the sultans we find more strikingly exhibited than in noisy, metropolitan Constantinople those dominant characteristics of most Asiatic cities—apathetic immobility, undisturbed quietude, and dreamy repose.

But before taking the train at Haidar Pasha we spent a day in wandering through Scutari and Kadi Keui which are just across the Bosphorus from Stamboul. Like Brusa both of these places—especially Scutari—are distinctively Oriental in character and are well worthy of a visit. Both of them, too, have played prominent roles in the long, historic past and, although they are now so overshadowed by the great city of Constantine, they, nevertheless, offer many attractions that are well worthy of the attention of the student and the historian.

Scutari was formerly known as Chrysopolis—the Golden City. Its special attractions for tourists are the Howling Dervishes, whose peculiar devotional exercises take place every Thursday, and the Great Cemetery which is celebrated as the largest and most beautiful Moslem of burying places. It is a great forest of cypress trees, more than three miles in length. Each grave has its tombstone, usually a very modest one. Some of the epitaphs I observed were very touching, especially those that terminated with a prayer that a Fatihah—the first chapter of the Koran—might be said for the soul of the deceased.

This chapter [writes Sale, the learned translator of the Koran] is a prayer and held in great veneration by the Mohammedans.... They esteem it as the quintessence of the whole Koran, and often repeat it in their devotions, both public and private, as the Christians do the Lord’s Prayer.[83]

It is an integral part of each of the five daily prayers which are said by every good Mussulman. It is, moreover, recited over the sick, at the conclusion of an action of importance, but it is, above all, the favorite prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed taking, in this respect, the place of the Catholic requiescat. As translated by Rodwell it reads:

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds!

The compassionate, the merciful!

King on the day of reckoning!

Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help.

Guide Thou us on the straight path,

The path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;—with

Whom Thou art not angry, and who go not astray.

As we wandered along the pathways of this last resting place of so many myriads of Mohammedans—from Constantinople[84] as well as from Scutari—I was impressed by the number of men and women who were here absorbed in prayer for their dear departed,[85] or in tending the flowers which adorned the graves. These quiet mourners, with the countless turtledoves, which make their home in the branches of the funereal cypress trees and which seem to keep up continuously their subdued moan, give to this gloomy necropolis a solemnity and an impressiveness that are almost lacking in such ostentatious cities of the dead as Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo of Genoa.

A short drive from the Great Cemetery brings us to the modern town of Kadi Keui which, like Scutari, is also a part of the municipality of Constantinople. It was formerly known as Chalcedon and was founded seventeen years before Byzantium. By the oracle of Delphi it was designated as “the city of the blind,” because its founders were blind to the superior position of the tongue of land on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, on which the City of Constantinople now stands.

Like most other cities in this part of the world it has witnessed many vicissitudes and has been repeatedly captured and sacked by invading armies from both Asia and Europe. Famed in antiquity for its temple of Apollo and for having been the birthplace of Xenocrates, the most distinguished of Plato’s disciples, its temples and palaces, after its capture by the Ottomans, served the sultans as a stone quarry when they required building material for their mosques in Constantinople.

But, although not a vestige of Chalcedon’s former grandeur now remains, it will always be remembered as the city in which was held in 451 the fourth œcumenical council of the Church, in which was condemned the teaching of Eutyches and the Monophysites respecting the human and the divine nature in Christ. When I recalled the fact that this council, including the representatives of the absent bishops, was attended by six hundred and thirty bishops; that more than six hundred of these belonged to the Eastern Church, and remembered the very small number of the episcopate that is now found in this part of the world, it was easy to understand the present backward condition of civilization and culture in Asia Minor and Syria. What a change, indeed, since the days of those great doctors of the Oriental Church—the Cyrils, the Gregories, the Basils, the Ephrems, the Chrysostoms—whose learning and eloquence have from their time been the admiration and edification of the whole of Christendom.

A short distance to the north of Kadi Keui is the Haidar Pasha military hospital which was the scene of Florence Nightingale’s heroic labors during the Crimean War. The rooms which she occupied while here are still preserved intact and as I passed through them, I recalled Longfellow’s beautiful tribute to her in the verses:

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand

In the great history of the land,

A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here

The palm, the lily and the spear,

The symbols that of yore

Saint Philomena bore.[86]

It is but a few minutes’ walk from Florence Nightingale’s hospital to the Haidar Pasha railway station. On the way thither we passed through the well-kept British Cemetery where rest eight thousand British soldiers who died of wounds and disease during the Crimean War. The large granite obelisk here by Marochetti is a conspicuous object and is visible at a great distance. The Haidar Pasha station, the north-western terminus of the Anatolia[87] Railway was, before its partial destruction during the war, a most imposing building and compared favorably with the best of similar structures in Europe.

Shortly after we take a seat in a cozy corridor car our train swings towards the picturesque shore of the Marmora. From the window of our compartment we have the most lovely views of the Princes Islands, and of the quaint little fishing villages which sprinkle the eastern shore of the Marmora and which are so perfectly mirrored in its placid waters. For hours, as our train moves alternately along the verge of lofty cliffs and near the level of the emerald expanse of the Propontis, we have a succession of panoramas that are scarcely less fascinating than those seen along the famous driveway between Sorrento and Amalfi.

The dancing waves of the Marmora, as they gently lap along its curving shore, are as soothing as a lullaby to a cradled child. And all the while they are murmuring the same old story that greeted the ears of the seafaring Megarians as they passed by nearly three thousand years ago and which reached the crews of the trim Venetian argosies whose arms proudly floated on their flags and pennants as they conveyed the treasures of India and China from the ports of the Euxine to the gem-blue haven of the peerless Queen of the Adriatic. The noonday sun, playing over the rippling waters, changes them in rapid succession from the delicate color of the lapis lazuli to the scintillating iridescence of the opal.

Along the coast line one contemplates with ever-increasing delight countless views of entrancing beauty and interest—gray moss-covered rocks which are ever of tender loveliness and reposeful silence; trembling vines and waving figs and olives and oranges; picturesque adobe cottages adorned with graceful creepers; romping children who make the air ring with their joyous shouts; men and women in the most colorful garbs quietly performing their daily tasks and all the while completely immune from the feverish haste that so distracts the toiling millions of Europe and America and converts their life into a long and troubled nightmare. The secret is that the normal Osmanli peasant is satisfied with little. Permit him to cultivate his small plot of ground in peace and to remain undisturbed in the bosom of his family and he is perfectly happy. Under such conditions he would find nothing to envy even in the lot of the denizens of the Happy Valley.

On our arrival at Ismid we were reminded that we were traveling over classic ground. For this small Turkish town was under the Roman Empire one of the largest cities in Asia Minor. It was here that Diocletian had his seat of Government; it was here that he began his sanguinary persecutions against the Christians and it was here that he abdicated the throne. It was in his imperial villa near here that death claimed Constantine the Great and it was in a neighboring castle that Hannibal committed suicide. And Nicomedia was the birthplace of Arrian, the illustrious disciple of Epictetus, who, from notes of his master’s lectures, prepared the famed Discourses of Epictetus. He also wrote the scarcely less celebrated Anabasis of Alexander the Great.

Our first stop, however, was at the little town of Lefke where we found waiting for us an araba which we had ordered the day previously to take us to Isnik—about four hours’ drive from the railroad—which is but a small village of mud houses, but which during Roman and Byzantine times was, under the name of Nicæa, the rival of Nicomedia. Even while in the possession of the Sultans of Rum it was as a center of art, poetry, and science scarcely less renowned than Cordova and Bagdad. And while Constantinople was in the possession of the Latins, after its capture by the Crusaders, Nicæa served as the temporary capital of the Byzantine Empire.

There are few places in Anatolia which make a stronger appeal to the student than the ancient city of Nicæa. Its ivy and fern-covered ruins, walls, baths, theaters, churches, mosques, towers, gates, aqueducts, sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions of all kinds are in the highest degree interesting and offer a mine of most precious material for the antiquary or the historian.

To us Nicæa was a

Relic of nobler days and noblest arts,

and, as we wandered among the ruin-covered streets of the once famous city, we seemed to hear the monitory words

Lightly tread, ’tis hallowed ground.

But my object in visiting this famous place was not knowledge so much as impressions. I was attracted thither by the same magnet that drew me to Troy and Chalcedon. I wished to get the local color and secure a local picture of a place which has filled an important page in history and which for centuries was the goal of contending armies—Asiatics and Europeans, Moslems and Christians. But the predominant reason for my visit to this scene of ruins was the fact that it had been a witness of two of the Church’s most noted œcumenical councils.

The first council which was held here in 325 was likewise the first General Council of the Church. It is noted for its condemnation of Arianism and for the formation of the Nicene Creed which, as subsequently amplified by the Council of Constantinople, has ever since been the symbol of faith used not only by the Catholic Church but also by those Eastern Churches which are no longer in communion with Rome and by many of the Protestant Churches as well.

In the second council of Nicæa, which was the seventh of the Church’s general councils and which convened in 787, was condemned the doctrine of the Iconoclasts, which so long agitated the Eastern Church and which was the cause of so many relentless persecutions throughout the whole of the Byzantine Empire. Even Moslems, who regard every kind of representation of the human form as an execrable idol, could not have been more fanatical and pitiless in their dealings with anti-Iconoclasts than were Leo the Isaurian, who was suspected of favoring Islamism, and his son Constantine Copronymus. During their reigns, not to speak of those of several of their successors, the churches of the Byzantine Empire were as bare of images and statues as were the mosques of Medina and Damascus.[88]

By a peculiar combination of events it fell to the lot of two women—the Empresses Irene and Theodora—to undo the work of the Iconoclastic emperors and to put a stop to the persecutions which had caused the exile, the imprisonment, or the death of countless numbers of the noblest men and women of the empire, whose only offense was fidelity to the faith of their fathers.

Few things in Anatolia are more competent to awaken memories of the past glories of Asia Minor than a visit to the spot that on two momentous occasions witnessed the assemblage of hundreds of bishops from both the Orient and the Occident. What a contrast between the present condition of Nicæa and that at the time when the assembled fathers subscribed to that creed which has ever since been accepted as the symbol of faith of nearly the whole of Christendom!

In Asia Minor alone there were, in the fifth century, no fewer than four hundred and fifty episcopal sees. And an imperial law was enacted that every city should have its own bishop—unaquœque civitas proprium episcopum habeto.[89] But what a change has come over this once flourishing portion of the Christian Church. The famous cities—Nicæa, Chalcedon, and Ephesus—in which four general councils were held and which in Roman times were all capitals of provinces—have long since been reduced to ruins. So completely, indeed, had Ephesus disappeared from sight that little was known even about its topography until the Austrian Archæological Institute began its excavations there but little more than two decades ago.

And so it is throughout the length and the breadth of Anatolia.[90] Great and popular cities, which, in the heyday of the Roman Empire were noted for their splendid temples, baths, gymnasia, colonnades, Greek theaters, and Roman amphitheaters, which were all graced by masterpieces of art in marble and bronze—frequently replicas of matchless Greek originals—are now either entirely deserted or tenanted by a few nomadic shepherds or poor tillers of the soil whose only homes are small mud hovels that barely protect them from the elements.

Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia. In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that galaxy of philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has ever known.[91]

In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society which a French writer has happily named le printemps de la Grèce.

For even in the face of recent discoveries in Sparta [writes a distinguished Orientalist], it may be said without hesitation that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first full-bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is a Greek civilization come to full consciousness of itself and destined to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius. Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however, the Ionian section of the Hellenic race from the accident of geographical position served more than any other for a vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole Greek people. All who follow the development of free social institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where the city-State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence. Students not only of literature, but of all the means of communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia that the alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were to carry it about the civilized world. And who that belongs to, or cares for, the republic of art would ignore that “bel elan de génie duquel est né la statuaire attique”?[92]

Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,” first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets, while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”

But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon, long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world.

How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past?

And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns—marbles which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which they formed a part.

But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters, they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic—Græcia barbariæ lento collisa duello—Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela; the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is embraced in the term “Ancient History.”

The cradle of the Osmanlis was the small village of Sugut about a day’s ride on horseback to the south of Nicæa and about the same distance to the east of the Mysian Olympus. For it was here that Osman, the founder of the Osmanli dynasty, first saw in 1258 the light of day. The first thirty years of his life was that of a village chieftain of a pastoral community, who lived in peace among his neighbors and whose fighting men did not number more than four hundred. He was then fired with the ambition to extend his boundaries and at the end of ten years he found himself at the head of four thousand warriors and in direct contact with the decadent and moribund Byzantine Empire.

When Osman died in 1326 his emirate of Sugut had been extended to the Marmora and the Euxine and included in the conquered territory the important cities of Brusa, Nicomedia, and Nicæa. This was the beginning of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. The same emir of Sugut was also the founder of a dynasty whose male succession has endured uninterruptedly for more than six centuries and the first ruler of a people in which there is so complete a blending of Asiatic and European blood that they have been called a distinct race.

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No other dynasty can boast such a succession of brilliant sovereigns as those who conducted the Ottomans to the height of renown in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. First there was Osman, the originator of a race, next came his son Orkhan, the founder of a state, and then Osman’s grandson, the creator of an empire. These founders of an empire were succeeded by Bayazid who, on account of his rapid movements, was called Ilderim—lightning; Mohammed, who retrieved the losses inflicted by Timur; Murad II, the antagonist of Hunyady and Skanderberg; Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople; Selim I, who annexed Kurdistan, Syria, and Egypt, and Solyman the Magnificent, the victor on the field of Mohacs and the besieger of Vienna. Never did eight such sovereigns succeed one another—save for the feeble Bayazid II—in unbroken succession in any other country; never was an empire founded and extended during two so splendid centuries by such a series of great rulers. In the hour of dismay, as well as in the moment of triumph, the Turkish Sultan was master of the situation.[93]

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But not only were the Ottoman Emirs and Sultans of this period eminent as rulers and empire builders. With few exceptions, they, as well as many of their successors, possessed, like Napoleon, the rare faculty of choosing the right men for the right place. This is especially noteworthy in their choice of generals, admirals, and grand viziers who were selected for the high positions, which they filled with such distinction, without regard to their nationality or accidents of birth. Among them were Jews and eunuchs, Greek and Italian, German and Polish renegades.[94] There was the Italian Cicala, the victor of Karestes; the German Mehemet Sli, son of a Magdeburg musician, who commanded the main army in Bulgaria; Omar who from a Croatian clerk became the leader of the Turkish army in the Crimea. Chief among the great admirals were the Italian Ululj Ali, the Greeks Kheyr-ed-din and Urug Barbarossa from the island of Lesbos; Piali Pasha, from Croatia. It was chiefly through the aid of the last three that Solyman the Magnificent, was able to secure control of the Mediterranean and the Arab states of Northern Africa and to extend his devastating raids not only to the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain but even beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, to waylay the argosies which were returning to Cadix laden with the gold and jewels of the Indians.[95]

But more distinguished than the Sultan’s noted generals and his corsair admirals was the long series of men who occupied the Grand Vizierate. The most famous of these were the Abyssinian eunuch Bashir; the renegade Jew, Kiamil Pasha; the Herzegovinan, Mohammed Sokalovich; the Albanian, Mohammed, Kiuprili, who, from a kitchen-boy in the Sultan’s palace, became the most noted grand vizier that ever ruled the great Ottoman Empire. He was succeeded in the Grand Vizierate by his son Ahmed who, as a statesman, was scarcely less celebrated than his father. A short interval after Ahmed’s death, Mustafa Kiuprili, a second son of Mohammed became grand vizier and his rule was marked by the same consummate statesmanship that so distinguished the rule of his father and brother. Their rise is especially interesting for, as observes Von Hammer, “the history of the empires of the Orient offers only four instances of members of the same family succeeding one another in the dignity of the Grand Vizierate.”[96]

In this brief reference to the men who achieved such distinction in building up and extending the Ottoman Empire, we must not forget the women who played so important a rôle in the history of Turkish politics and statecraft. Three of the most notable of these were the Muscovite Roxalana, who passed from a public slave market to the imperial harem to become the wife of Solyman the Magnificent, the greatest of the Ottoman Sultans; the Venetian Safia who at an early age was abducted from her home on the Grand Canal, taken to Constantinople and sold to the Sultan Murad III, by whom she had a son who, after his father’s death, became Sultan Mohammed III; Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, who, like the Empress Josephine, was born in the little island of Martinique and who, in her youth, was an intimate of the future consort of Napoleon Bonaparte, but who eventually fell into the hands of Algerian pirates by whom she was sold in the slave market of Algiers. Thence she was conveyed to Constantinople as a present to the Sultan, Abdul Hamid I, to whom she bore a son who became Mahmud II, the grandfather of the late Abdul Hamid II.

By their beauty, wit, and fascinating manners these three women gained an unbounded influence over the Sultans with whom their lives were cast and, what is more remarkable, they were able, notwithstanding their numerous antagonists in the harem, to retain their ascendancy in the affections of their lords long after the season of youth and beauty had passed. In overweening ambition, diplomatic finesse, unfailing resourcefulness in high resolve, in achieving success in the face of the greatest obstacles, these three Christian captives were worthy rivals of their more fortunate sisters of the West—Bianca Capello, Catherine de’ Medici, and the Marquise de Pompadour.

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From the preceding pages, it is clear, as Freeman points out that,[97]

the institution of the tribute children was the very keystone of the Ottoman dominion. They won the empire for the Turk and they kept it for him.... During the most brilliant days of Ottoman greatness the native Turks were well-nigh brought down to the condition of a subject caste. Manumitted bondmen from the East, voluntary renegades from the West, Greek and Slavonic tribute-children directed the councils and commanded the armies of the Sultans. A Grand Vizier or a Captain Pasha born in the faith of Islam was indeed noted as a portent. Never did the craft and subtlety of devil or man devise such a tremendous engine of tyranny. The chains of the conquered nations were riveted by their own hands. Their best blood was drawn away to provide against any degeneracy in the blood of their conquerors. Their strongest and fairest children, the most vigorous frames and the most precocious intellects, those whom nature had marked out as chiefs and liberators of their own race, were carried off to become the special instruments of their degradation. This fearful institution, combined with the possession of Constantinople, and with the marvelous hereditary greatness of the ruling family, preserved the House of Othman from the common fate of Oriental dynasties.

According to a long prevalent opinion, the Osmanlis are a Turkish race who achieved the conquest of Asia Minor before they invaded Europe and before they became masters of the Byzantine Empire. The fact is they had subjugated the entire Balkan peninsula before they obtained possession of more than the northwest corner of Anatolia, and had maintained Adrianople as the Ottoman capital eighty-seven years before Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, transferred it to its present location on the Bosphorus.

Nor were the Osmanlis, even in their earliest days, composed entirely, as is so often asserted, of Turkish nomads from the East. Far from it. They were welded from the heterogeneous elements—Greeks, Carians, Phrygians, Galatians, the followers of Osman, and other peoples who then inhabited the north-western part of Asia Minor. And, as early as the reign of Orkhan, the son and successor of Osman, this complex blending of peoples became not only a distinct race but a race with a national consciousness.

So far are the Osmanlis from regarding themselves as heirs of the Seljukian Turks or as transformed Turkomans that they have always endeavored to remove this erroneous impression which has so long prevailed concerning their people. The distinguished historian, Mouradja d’ Ohsson, declares:

The Osmanlis employ the word “Turk” when referring to a coarse and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the epithet Turk belongs only to the peoples of Turkestan and to those vagabond hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of Khorassan. All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the collective name of Osmanlis from Osman I, the founder of the Monarchy, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.[98]

The Osmanlis, as we have seen, were of mixed blood, even while still confined to Asia Minor. But after their conquests in Europe and further expansion in Asia they “became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis, who, under Solyman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.”[99] It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire.[100]

Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have been classed as raiders like the devastating hordes of Timur and Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists and empire builders. This was the secret of their success and the explanation of the marvelous development of the Empire of the Sultans, which, as the eminent Austrian historian, Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall, has declared “was more rapid in its rise than Rome, more enduring than that of Alexander.”

The causes which contributed to the rapid development of the Osmanlis from the four hundred warriors of Osman into the vast armies of his successors and to the achievement of such extraordinary results in so short a period of time were, as the historian Finlay points out, “in some degree similar to those which had enabled small tribes of Goths and Germans to occupy and subdue the Western Roman Empire.”[101]

But there were other contributory causes which enabled the Osmanlis so quickly to become masters of the Byzantine Empire and to make themselves a menace to the whole of Europe. Chief among these were the conflicting ambitions of numerous aspirants to the Byzantine throne and the rivalries of the petty chieftains of the Balkan Peninsula and the commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa. All these purely secular aims made anything like joint action against the followers of the Crescent quite impossible.

It was Cantacuzenos, a traitor to his empress, the widow of Andronicus II, who introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. After usurping the Byzantine throne, he gave his daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the emir Orkhan in exchange for six thousand soldiers to aid him in his struggle against his legitimate sovereign. By his infamous betrayal of his empress and country he contributed more than any single factor to the ultimate downfall of the Byzantine Empire.

It was the despot Theodore Paleologus who invited the Osmanlis into Greece to support him in his contest with the Greeks and the Franks. It was the Serbian prince Stephen Bukcovitz who formed an alliance with the emir Bayazid to whom he gave his sister as wife and for whom he commanded a contingent in the Ottoman Army—even against his coreligionists. When the Osmanli forces, after their signal defeat by Timur at Angora, were faced with annihilation at the hands of the victorious Tartars, it was the Greeks, Genoese, and Venetians who saved them from destruction by transporting them across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to Europe where their relentless pursuers were unable to follow them.

But these are only a few instances of the aid which the Ottoman conquerors received from the Christian nations of Europe. “In their conquest of the Balkan peninsula it is remarkable,” declares a recent writer, “that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke.”[102] The victories of Bayazid in the region of the Danube were largely due to the coöperation of his Christian vassals. And in his invasion of Hungary he was more beholden to the Wallachians than to his famed corps of Janissaries.[103]

Yet more. For, contrary to a common opinion, he received no assistance whatever from Saracens or Persians, for the simple reason that these peoples did not join forces with the Ottomans until a much later date.

The Osmanlis did not cross the Taurus until more than a century after they had passed the Balkans and did not become “masters of Asia Minor until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded in Europe as a fait accompli.”[104]

And it is equally true that “whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.”[105]

Besides the causes just enumerated, there were others of quite a different nature that made for the phenomenal military achievements of Osmanlis in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. They were the same causes which had so greatly favored the ready submission of the peoples of Syria and northern Africa and which had so potently contributed towards the rapid diffusion of Islam in all countries which bordered the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Byzantine Empire had long been afflicted by incompetent and decadent rulers. The tyranny and the vexations of exarchs had become intolerable. The people were overburdened with taxes and their property was in a large measure confiscated. Under such conditions the Saracens and the Ottomans came as liberators to the long-suffering, down-trodden populations. By embracing Islam, the Christians of the Orient were relieved from the oppressive taxes of Byzantium and entered again into the possession of their sequestrated property. Even when they refused to accept the Koran they recovered their lands by the payment of a moderate capitation tax and were thus enabled to live under the protection of Moslem law which took no notice of the religious controversies of rival Christian sects. This liberal policy of Islam towards its Christian subjects—a policy which safeguarded their persons and property—following as it did on the heels of the odious tyranny of the Lower Empire—was an important factor in the marvelously rapid extension of Islam and in the easy domination of the conquering Ottomans and Saracens. In Asia Minor, particularly, Mohammedanism achieved an easy triumph because it was opposed to Byzantine despotism which was the object of universal execration.

But nothing, probably, contributed more towards the rapid conquest of the Osmanlis than their spirit of tolerance in matters of religion. This will, I know, seem strange to those who, from their youth, have listened to the story of the atrocities of that mythical personage, “the Moslem warrior with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other.”

But [writes one who has made a special study of the subject], whether their tolerance was actuated by policy, by genuine kindly feeling, or by indifference, the fact cannot be gainsaid that the Osmanlis were the first nation in modern history to lay down the principle of religious freedom as the cornerstone in the building up of their nation. During the centuries that bear the stain of unremitting persecution of the Jew [in western Europe] the Christian and the Moslem lived together in harmony under the Osmanlis.[106]

To one who is familiar with the teachings of the Koran and the policy of Islam since the days of Mohammed there is nothing surprising in this tolerance and religious freedom which Osmanlis and Moslems have always accorded their Christian subjects. “Let there be no compulsion in religion,”[107] declares the Prophet, and again it is written, “Wilt thou compel men to become believers? No soul can believe but by the permission of God.”[108]

Nor were these and numerous other declarations of the Koran of similar import ever ignored by the leaders of Islam in their dealings with their non-Moslem subjects. There have been, it is true, frequent outbursts of fanaticism, even of persecution among Mohammedans, which resulted in much suffering on the part of the Christian population and in putting in force against them very intolerant measures. But the persecutions and harsh ordinances were not so much the result of religious antagonism as of political conditions at the time. Not a few of them are traceable to a distrust of the loyalty of Christians towards their Moslem rulers or to the intrigues of Christian nations like Russia whose secret emissaries have been responsible for so much of the agitation in Asia Minor for generations past. Others again may be traced to the bad faith of certain European powers in their dealings with Moslem rulers, or to the “harsh and insolent behavior of Christian officials” in the service of Mohammedan sovereigns.[109]

Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out their Christian subjects or banished them from their dominions as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the English the Jews, for nearly four centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Selim I (in 1514) or Ibrahim (in 1646) to have put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred forty thousand Shiahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious belief among his Mohammedan subjects. The muftis who turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose did so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.[110]

“The very survival,” therefore, “of the Christian Churches to the present day, is,” as the same author pertinently observes, “a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Mohammedan governments towards them.”[111]

Ecclesiastical writers of the epoch of the Mohammedan conquest give still another explanation of the rapid progress of Moslem armies, which was quite in accord with the spirit of the time. God wished, they declared, to chastize the Christians for their infidelity and to compel them to do penance for their manifold heresies. In their view it was not the astounding conquests of the Mussulmans that led to the apostasy of such vast numbers of Christians. It was rather the numerous and widespread defections of heretical churches which rendered the conquest of Islam so easy that it surprised the victors as much as the vanquished. Moslem arms, then, according to these writers were but an instrument of divine vengeance, or, as one of them expressed it, peccatis exigentibus victi sunt Christiani.[112]

As one traverses the small territory which was the cradle of the Osmanlis and reflects that the people to whom the insignificant emir of Sugut gave his name were, from their first appearance in history, almost within sight of the City of Constantine, one cannot help admiring their marvelous transformation from retainers of a village chieftain to heirs of the empire of the Cæsars, to masters of vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe.[113] From the humblest beginnings they gradually became a people who can boast of the longest continued dynasty in Europe; and who can point in their early history to a rare series of brilliant rulers and a line of sovereigns who have occupied a throne which has been immovable from the days of Mohammed the Conqueror, nearly five centuries ago, and which, notwithstanding menaces from many quarters, seems destined to remain immovable for many long generations to come.

CHAPTER VI
HOME LIFE OF THE OSMANLIS IN ANATOLIA

Truths can never be confirmed enough,

Though doubts did ever sleep.

Shakespeare “Pericles” V. I.

No part of Asia Minor possesses greater interest for the traveler of a studious turn than that which borders the Anatolian Railroads. And this, as the historian well knows, is saying much indeed. For from time immemorial the peninsula of Asia Minor has been the great battlefield between the Orient and the Occident. Topographically it is like a great bridge over which, as has been well said, “the religion, art and civilization of the East found their way into Greece; and the civilization of Greece, under the guidance of Alexander the Macedonian, passed back again across the same bridge to conquer the East and revolutionize Asia as far as the heart of India. Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, have all followed the same route in the many attempts that Asia has made to subdue the West.”[114]

It is the bridge over which passed the famed “Royal Road,” so graphically described by Herodotus, which extended from Ephesus on the Ægean Sea to far-off Susa in southern Persia. To make the journey between these two cities required, according to the same historian, no less than ninety days. And it was the bridge over which the Christian pilgrims were wont to pass on their way from Europe to the Holy Land, and the bridge also which was crossed by the Crusaders under Godefroy de Bouillon, Louis VII of France, and Frederic Barbarossa when they sought to recover Jerusalem from the Mohammedans.

The course of the Anatolian Railroad is, for the most part, the same as that of a great military highway in Roman and Byzantine times from Nicæa to Dorylæum. And the scenery along it, especially between Ismid and Eski-Shehr, is often of rare beauty and grandeur. In places it is much like that of southern Colorado and northern California. There is the same succession of smiling landscapes—emerald valleys dotted with modest homesteads, broad stretches of meadow land sprinkled with sleek herds and happy flocks, noble forests of oak and pine, walnut and sycamore. In some localities the vegetation is almost of tropical luxuriance and the road is fringed by a wild tangle of bramble and brushwood tapestried with clematis and ivy and woodbine in a flaming setting of dog-rose and azalea.

As we approach Bilejik eastward of the snow-capped Mysian Olympus the character of the scenery completely changes. The grade of the road rapidly increases and as we pass along gorges and cañyons, through tunnels and over bridges and describe innumerable curves we realize that we are ascending the famed table-land of Anatolia and are nearing Sugut, the earliest home of the Ottoman Turks.

Eski-Shehr, from which a branch of the Anatolian Railroad runs to Angora, the ancient Ancyra, is a flourishing town and, thanks to its finely equipped railway shops, is the home of a large number of railway employees and their families. Before the world war an excellent school for the benefit of the children of the employees was established here and was well attended. It was conducted on the German system and instruction was given in German. Among the languages taught, besides German, were Greek, French, Turkish, and Armenian. The town is noted for being the chief center of the world’s supply of meerschaum, a commodity from which the Turkish Government derives a handsome revenue. From Eski-Shehr we went to Afium-Kara-Hissar, from which great quantities of opium are annually shipped, and thence to Konia, anciently Iconium, which is the western terminus of the Bagdad Railway.

But more interesting far than its scenic attractions and its historic ruins, its railroads and various industries, are the people of Anatolia. And by the people I mean not the foreign element—the Greeks, Armenians, Circassians, and others, so conspicuous in Smyrna and Constantinople—but the Osmanlis. For it is not in the large cities of Turkey, where there is always such a heterogeneous population, that the Ottoman is found at his best but in the small towns and villages of the interior of the country and particularly in that portion of the Ottoman Empire which formerly constituted the emirates of Osman and Orkhan.

No people in the world, it is safe to say, have ever been more misunderstood or more misrepresented than the Osmanlis. For generations they have been regarded as a nation guilty of every crime and steeped in every vice. But since the Bulgarian agitation, in 1876, when Carlyle wrote “the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question, and the country left to honest European guidance,” the Osmanlis have been treated as a nation of pariahs who had not to their credit a single redeeming feature.

They have been denounced as cruel, bloodthirsty, treacherous, dishonest, intolerant, and fanatical in the extreme. They have been pilloried as a nation of gross voluptuaries totally devoid of all moral sense and incapable of any noble sentiment and generous action. They have been stigmatized as a cancer on the body of humanity that should be dealt with in the most drastic manner by the Great Powers of Europe. Gladstone expressed public opinion when, speaking on the Eastern Question, he said, “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying away themselves.... One and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.”

But what is the truth about the Osmanlis? Are they the vile and abominable people which Carlyle’s epithet would indicate? And are the Christian nations of Europe justified in adopting towards them what the English Conservatives aptly termed “Gladstone’s bag and baggage policy”?

Let us see.

First of all it may be premised that most of the above indictments against the Turks have been made by people who have little or no personal knowledge of them, or by people who have been governed by passion or prejudice or have been actuated by selfish or political motives. And, secondly, it may be asserted as a fact that cannot be gainsaid that those who have lived among the Turks any length of time and have had an opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted with them find them to be thoroughly good, gentle, brave, and loyal to the core. And the longer one lives among them and the better one knows them the greater is one’s admiration for them. This is especially true of the real Turk—the Osmanli—particularly those of the peasant and bourgeois class in Anatolia. These are as honest and upright as they are temperate, pious, and religious.

The piety and the devotion of the Moslems, their gravity and solemnity and reverential attitude during prayer, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, are of such character as to make a deep impression on even the least religious. “I have never entered a mosque,” writes Renan, “without a deep emotion, and—shall I say it?—without a certain regret at not being a Mussulman.”[115]

This devout character of the Mohammedans which so profoundly impressed Renan, appealed with equal force to the poet who wrote:

Most honor to the men of prayer,

Whose mosque is in them everywhere!

Who amid revel’s wildest din,

In war’s severest discipline,

On rolling deck, in thronged bazaar,

In stranger land, however far,

However different in their reach

Of thought, in manners, dress or speech,—

Will quietly their carpet spread,

To Mekkeh turn the humble head,

As if blind to all around,

And deaf to each resounding sound

In ritual language God adore,

In spirit to His presence soar,

And in the pauses of the prayer,

Rest, as if rapt in glory there.

Many, if not most of the erroneous notions which have been obtained respecting the Osmanlis have had their origin, at least in the minds of the great majority of people, in the ludicrous conceptions which have long been current regarding the harem life of these much maligned people. When a harem is referred to in Europe or America it is pictured as consisting of a swarthy, fierce, and sensual pasha, seated on a broad divan, garbed in richly embroidered robes, armed with a highly ornate scimitar, and contentedly smoking his narghile while his ever-youthful wives are entertaining him with music and dance and song.

Nothing could be more preposterous, or further from the reality. For monogamy and not polygamy is the rule in the Ottoman Empire especially in Anatolia, and always has been. The Koran does, indeed, permit polygamy but under such restrictions that a plurality of wives is confined to those who are able to make due provision for their support. And even among the wealthy monogamy is daily becoming more prevalent. Thus the late Sultan, Mohammed V, unlike some of his polygamous predecessors, had but a single wife and to her, also unlike his predecessors, he was legally married.

Indeed, so unpopular has polygamy become among enlightened Mussulmans that an eminent authority on the subject declares that “if Mohammedanism had a Pope and a Church, in a word, an authority always living and invested with the right to modify the precepts of the Koran, in order to adapt them to the needs of the age, it is almost certain that polygamy would already have disappeared.”[116]

Much of the prevailing misconception concerning the harem life in the Orient arises from the lamentable ignorance in our western lands regarding the true meaning of the word harem. To many who should know better it is synonymous with a place of debauchery, whereas, it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of this. Derived from the Arabic word harim, Turkish harem, it signifies anything forbidden or a sacred thing or place. Thus the part of a Moslem’s home which is assigned for the exclusive use of his wife and children, for their female servants and friends is called the harem. It is their sanctuary to which no males are admitted except the immediate members of the family. It may be but the half of a Bedouin “House of hair,” or the wing of a marble palace on the Bosphorus but it is still the harem—the sacred abode, the sanctum sanctorum, of the feminine members of the household and women visitors.[117]

In ordinary Ottoman houses the harem occupies the upper story and is the best and most commodious part of the building. The usual term employed to designate the wife’s apartment is haremlik, while that occupied by the husband—his reception room where he receives his male friends—is known as selamlik, and is generally on the ground floor. The women’s apartment is always recognized by its screened windows. The occupants of the haremlik can thus see everything in the immediate vicinity without being seen.

The name harem applies not only to the wife’s part of the home but also to the sections reserved for women on tram cars and steamers, and to the women’s waiting rooms in railway stations and women’s compartments on railway trains. The harem, thus understood, is an institution that has very much to recommend it. It secures its occupants a privacy which, in the estimation of Oriental women, more than counterbalances their apparent loss of liberty.

But, contrary to what is usually thought, the harem is not a Mohammedan institution. It long antedates Islam for, as archæological investigations in the Orient clearly evince, there were separate apartments for women in the buildings of ancient Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia.[118]

Nor do the inmates of the harem consider themselves as imprisoned in their houses like birds in a cage. Far from it. Mrs. Meer Ali, an English lady who married a Mohammedan gentleman and resided twelve years in Lucknow, India, clearly states the Oriental women’s view of harem life when she writes:

To ladies accustomed from infancy to confinement, this kind of life is by no means irksome. They have their employments and their amusements, and though these are not exactly to our tastes, nor suited to our mode of education, they are not the less relished by those for whom they were invented. They, perhaps, wonder equally at some of our modes of dissipating time and fancy we might spend it more profitably. Be that as it may, the Muslim ladies, with whom I have been long intimate, appear to me always happy, contented and satisfied with the seclusion to which they were born; they desire no other, and I have ceased to regret that they cannot be made partakers of that freedom of intercourse with the world we deem so essential to our happiness, since their health suffers nothing from that confinement by which they are preserved from a variety of snares and temptations; besides which they would deem it disgraceful in the highest degree to mix indiscriminately with men who are not relations. They are educated from infancy for retirement and they can have no wish that the custom should be changed which keeps them apart from the society of men who are not very nearly related to them. Female society is unlimited and they enjoy it without restraint.[119]

What has been said of the harem may also be asserted of the yashmak—the veil worn by most Oriental women, irrespective of race or creed. When women appear in public,—and they have great liberty in this respect, if properly veiled—this garb or the tcharchaff, possesses many advantages which Christian as well as Moslem women would be loath to forego. For like the latticed window of the harem it enables them to see without being seen and like the caliph of the story, they can freely move through a crowd without having their identity known. Furthermore, when enveloped in her ferijee—cloak—and yashmak, the person of the Oriental woman is as secure as in the harem and she is thus safeguarded against all the annoyances and insults to which her western sisters, especially those in the larger cities, are so frequently exposed. Some of the Ottoman suffragettes of Stamboul may envy the European women their gorgeous Parisian hats and gowns, but I am quite convinced that many western women would gladly exchange the creations of Worth and Redfern for the tcharchaff or for the ferijee and the yashmak, or for the bash-oordoo and the yeldirmee—which serve the same purpose—and all the immunities and privileges which these kinds of apparel secure to the wearer.

Again much has been said about the cruel treatment which Ottoman women have to endure from their husbands. To judge by the accounts of certain writers who substitute fancy for fact, the average Turkish husband is a Bluebeard who makes his wife’s life one continuous martyrdom. Such reports are as ill-founded as all the fantastic tales that have so long obtained credence respecting the harem and other matters pertaining to the everyday life of the Ottoman Turk. But, as in these things it is impossible for a man to obtain first-hand information, I shall quote from a woman who had exceptional opportunities of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the home life of the Osmanlis of Anatolia and whose conclusions, therefore, are of preponderant value.

This woman is Lady Ramsay, the gifted wife of Sir W. M. Ramsay, the distinguished archæologist of Aberdeen. Professor Ramsay whose investigations in Anatolia extend over a period of thirty-five years is probably the greatest living authority on the history of this part of Asia and on the manners and customs of its inhabitants. As Lady Ramsay frequently accompanied her husband on his expeditions which led him to very nook and corner of the country, she had absolutely unique opportunities for studying the home life of the Ottoman women of Asia Minor. As a result of her observations she does not hesitate to declare that “cases of brutality on the part of a man towards his wife are a hundred times commoner among the lower classes of this country”—Great Britain—“than they are in Turkey.”[120]

Such testimony coming from a witness so competent and so impartial should be conclusive. The reports to the contrary of men who have traveled in Anatolia are of no value whatever, for the simple reason that these men could not possibly get information at first hand. For the harem is everywhere absolutely barred to them, and what information they might get would necessarily be based on idle rumor and therefore quite valueless. Women, however, even when total strangers, are always hospitably received by their Ottoman sisters. And if they are able to speak the language of the country, they have little difficulty in becoming quite familiar with the everyday life of the people. But men, no matter how extensive their travels in Anatolia, will all be forced to confess with a noted English traveler—“throughout our journey, the female sex may be said not to have existed for us at all.”[121]

Much has been said about the divorce evil in Turkey. No doubt this does constitute a foul blot on the social system of Islam but it is not so bad as it is usually represented. The Koran safeguards the rights of the wife in many ways and public opinion is daily becoming more opposed to a man’s arbitrary repudiation of his wife. In spite, however, of the present facile dissolution of the marriage bond the frequency of divorce in Anatolia is far less than in many parts of the United States.

The Turkish wife [writes another English traveler who had spent many years in the Ottoman Empire] has been called a slave and a chattel. She is neither. Indeed her legal status is preferable to that of the majority of the wives in Europe and, until enactments of a comparatively recent date, the English was far more of a chattel than the Turkish wife who has always had absolute control of her property. The law allows her the free use and disposal of anything she may possess at the time of her marriage, or that she may inherit afterwards. She may distribute it during her life, or she may bequeath it to whom she chooses. In the eyes of the law she is a free agent. She may act independently of her husband, may sue in the courts or may be proceeded against without regard to him.[122]

The same author, in referring to the attachment of husband and wife for each other, declares that among the Turkish peasantry “one meets with Darby and Joan as frequently as in England.”[123]

“How far removed are we then,” asks an Ottoman gentleman, “from the seductive odalisques whose pictures, in the East, are only to be seen on biscuit tins.”[124]

But a stranger error than any yet referred to is that which asserts that the Ottomans and Mohammedans generally deny to women the possession of a soul as well as a future existence. How such an opinion originated or gained such wide acceptance is impossible to say. I have never known an Ottoman to hold such a view, and there is certainly no warrant for it in the Koran. And yet in an article on “Woman’s Place in the World,” written but a few years ago by a noted duchess in England, it is explicitly stated that Mohammedanism “consigns woman, as far as psychic qualities are concerned, to the level of beasts, forbidding her forever the hope of salvation.”[125]

A few quotations from the Koran will suffice to show how groundless is this statement. In the twentieth sura—chapter—we read:

O my servants—enter ye into Paradise, ye and your wives, with great joy.

Again the Koran declares:

But he who doeth good works—be it male or female—and believes, they shall enter into Paradise.

In the thirty-third sura it is written:

Verily the Moslems of either sex, and the true believers of either sex, and the devout men and the devout women, and the men of veracity and the women of veracity, and the patient men and the patient women, and the humble men and the humble women, and the almsgivers of either sex, and the men who fast and women who fast, and the chaste men and the chaste women, and those of either sex who remember God frequently, for them hath God prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

According to the teaching of Mohammed, all true Moslems are enjoined to pray for the dead—for the women as well as for the men. This, of itself, is sufficient evidence of Islamic belief in the future life for all mankind, irrespective of sex. There are, doubtless, in Turkey as elsewhere, men who deny immortality to women, but these are confined to that class of Moslems “who, having made shipwreck of their faith,” prefer to class themselves with the beasts of the field by denying that they themselves have souls.

Surprising as it may seem to some, no more beautiful tributes to women can be found than those given in the Koran, or in the Hadith which contains the traditional teachings of Mohammed. In one place the Prophet declares “the world and all things in it are valuable but more valuable than all is a virtuous woman”; in another he asserts that “women are the twin-halves of men.” Again, he tells his followers that “the son gains Paradise at the feet of the mother”; and yet again we have his truly remarkable statement that “Paradise is beneath the ground on which mothers walk.” Are not these amazing words to proceed from the lips of a seventh century Arabian?

One need spend but little time in Anatolia to find that the men among the Osmanlis are a most lovable people. What first impresses one is their good manners. Whether they live in a palace or a hovel they are always self-respecting, courteous, and dignified. In this respect they continually remind one of the people of Spain where courtesy is a national heritage. It was this striking characteristic of the Osmanli that led Bismarck to declare:

In the Orient the only gentleman is the Turk.[126]

Another national characteristic of the Osmanlis is cleanliness. Their homes, however humble, are as scrupulously swept and scrubbed as a Dutch dwelling place.[127] And the same may be said of their coffeehouses and restaurants. In this respect they are in marked contrast with those of the Greeks and Arabs.

Many writers have endeavored to account for the exceptional courtesy and cleanliness of the Osmanlis, but the reasons usually advanced are far from satisfactory. “Their religion,” writes Sir Edwin Pears, “inculcates cleanliness and sobriety; ... it has helped to diffuse courtesy and self-respect among its adherents.”[128]

If this were true it should hold good for the Moslems of Egypt and Morocco which, as all travelers in these countries know, is very often far from the case. When we shall be able to assign a reason for the matchless courtesy of the Castilian hidalgo or for the Dutch hausfrau’s singular love of cleanliness, we shall probably find an acceptable explanation of the seemingly innate courtesy and cleanliness of the Osmanlis of Anatolia.

And contrary to almost universal belief, the Osmanlis, both men and women are a people of very industrious habits. This is particularly true of those who make their living by tilling the soil and by tending their flocks and herds. So far as the men are concerned the traveler has ample evidence of their toilsome lives from the time he leaves the swift-flowing Bosphorus until he arrives at the foothills of the picturesque Taurus. As to the women they are, according to those who know them best, as laborious as the men. A competent witness, one who is himself an Ottoman, who was born and bred in Anatolia and whose testimony regarding the domestic life of his countrymen bears the clearest impress of truth, is the clever and entertaining Halil Halid who, having spent many years in England, writes English as a native.

Speaking of his countrywomen he declares:

No qualities are so much sought after in average marriageable women as the domestic ones. In the provinces the peasant women, besides managing their humble domestic affairs, have to work in the fields, more especially when their brothers and husbands are away discharging their compulsory military service. The daughters of well-to-do people, besides attending to the business of their households, are indefatigable with their needles and are always busy with needle work or embroidery.[129]

It will be understood from the details I have given [he continues], that the popular notion prevailing in this country of the harem and the life of the harem is much mistaken. Women in Turkish harems do not really pass their time in lying on sofas or couches eating sweetmeats and smoking water-pipes all the day long. Of course, they are as fond of sweet-stuffs as most ladies of this country. But to lie down on a couch in the presence of others is considered by Turkish women vulgarity of the most disgraceful kind.

The representations of harem life given in books and on the stage or shown in exhibitions, is either the work of Turkey’s detractors or simply the work of imaginative persons who know nothing about it and whose object is to attract the curiosity of English people by exhibiting grotesque sights and thus to make money.

Many Europeans [writes the same author] who pay a flying visit to the Levant and hasten to sit down and write a book about their experiences, derive all their information from their cicerones and interpreters [worthless and unscrupulous fellows whom our author justly denounces as ignorant and shameless cheats] who are, as a class, of the worst products of non-Mussulman natives of the Levant. Probably it is on account of this that a countryman of mine once remarked: “When we read such books, especially those written in English, about ourselves, we always learn something from them which we never knew or heard of before.”[130]

“But,” it will be asked, “what about the morality of the Turks”? This is a question that is continually asked and about which as many erroneous notions prevail as about the harem. One might answer by saying that, where passion is given free rein, poor human nature is about the same in all parts of the world. I shall, however, reply in the words of the witty and vivacious Lady Mary Montague who, writing from Constantinople where her husband was ambassador, to a friend in England, declares:

As to their morality or good conduct, I can say, like Harlequin, that it is just as it is with you; and the Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians. Now that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring, either the exemplary discretion, or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them.[131]

As to “the infamous vices” of which the Mussulman Orient is said to be the chief theater, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to quote the words of one who has spent many years among the Moslems and who has, probably, as thorough a knowledge of them as any recent writer. “Is it, then, true,” demands the distinguished Count Henri de Castries, “that these vices are more numerous in the Orient than in the Occident? This reputation given to Islam is the result of superficial generalizations without which travelers would have scarcely anything to write. These vices of mature age are, unfortunately, common to all countries. More of them are indulged in Paris, London, and Berlin than in the entire Orient.”

It would be difficult to find people who are more distinguished for natural virtues than are the Osmanlis who have not been debased by oppression or corrupted by power. Their love of the simple life is remarkable. Often their only fare is bread and water. To this they may add a little cheese and fruit and some vegetables. The majority are vegetarians. Of those who are not, their meat diet consists chiefly of mutton and fowl which is usually prepared with rice or with vegetables. Beef they rarely eat and pork never, for its use as an article of food is strictly proscribed by the Koran.

And yet, notwithstanding their frugal fare, they are noted for their health and strength. “As strong as a Turk” has long been a proverb. And when one sees the amazing burdens which the hamals of Stamboul frequently carry, one is ready to admit that the proverb is more than justified.

The chief beverage of the Osmanlis is water, for the Koran absolutely forbids the use of intoxicating drinks of any kind whatsoever. For the Osmanli, therefore, the dramshop does not exist. He does, however, love his little cup of black coffee. Although the Moslem doctors of the law originally interdicted its use as the invention of the devil, the drinking of coffee in Mohammedan countries is now universal.

I know of only one prettier picture of contentment than an Osmanli peasant taking his cup of coffee before going to work in the morning or after the labors of the day, and that is when he indulges in his favorite pastime of Kaif—which is perhaps best expressed by the Italian phrase, dolce far niente. Garbed in his brown shalvar—baggy trousers—blue jacket, red sash, and white stockings, and sitting before his home under a tentlike plane tree, quietly smoking his narghile, with drooped eyelids and rapt countenance, he is the personification of comfort and happiness. Tranquil, immobile, absorbed in an enchanting reverie, how far is he not removed from the unbridled desires and malignant envy of the restless populace of our large cities of the West!

Ah! qu’il est doux de ne rien faire

Quand tout s’agite autour de nous!

What a subject for the brush of a Villegas or a Fortuny![132]

And then the honesty of this quiet peasant of simple tastes and harmless pleasures. He would never cheat you. Even if he be but a poor fruit seller, gaining but a pittance for a day’s labor, he will always add something to the amount called for, for fear of having made a mistake in the amount due the purchaser. If you should be his guest, you may sleep in his home with open doors. Nobody will molest you and your belongings will be as safe as if under lock and key. So great, indeed, is the reputation of the Osmanli for probity and sterling honesty that:

Among men, who do not concern themselves with politics, but whose fortune and interests are bound up in the country, the vast majority prefer the Turk to any other denizen of the land for his integrity and trustworthiness.

The proof of it is that it is to him they confide the care of their property. There are English families that have existed in Turkey for generations, and generations of Turks have served them in positions of trust. These are invariably Turks of the old school, good Mussulmans and simple in their thoughts and lives. A finer type of men no land can show, and happily they are not yet rare.[133]

Nor does one find elsewhere such humane treatment of dumb animals. “Fear God with regard to animals,” enjoined Mohammed, “ride them when they are fit to be ridden and get off when they are tired. Verily there are rewards for our doing good to dumb animals and giving them water to drink.” No Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is needed among the Osmanlis for so strong a sympathy exists between this gentle and tender-hearted people and all domestic animals that anything like cruel treatment would be impossible. Even the dog, which is considered as an unclean animal, is always treated with kindness. An Osmanli will gather together the folds of his garments to prevent his coming in contact with the impure brute but will at the same time gladly divide with it his last morsel of food.

There are few writers who are more familiar with the real Ottomans than the distinguished Academician, Pierre Loti. And this is what he says of them:

Nowhere, so much as among the Turks—the real Turks—does one find solicitude for the poor, the helpless, the aged and for children; such respect for parents, such tender veneration for the mother. If a man, even of mature years, should be seated in one of those innocent little cafés, where alcohol has always been unknown, and his father should unexpectedly enter, he rises, lowers his voice, extinguishes his cigarette, and humbly takes a seat behind him.[134]

Elsewhere the same sympathetic and magnanimous author writes:

Their little towns located in the interior, their villages, their country homes, are the last refuges not only of the calm but also of the patriarchal virtues which are more and more disappearing from our modern world: loyalty and honesty without blemish; veneration of children for parents of a kind that is not longer known to us; inexhaustible hospitality and chivalrous respect for guests; moral elegance and native delicacy, even among the most humble; kindness towards all—even towards animals; unbounded religious tolerance for whomsoever is not their enemy; serene faith and prayer. When arriving among them after leaving our Occident of doubt and cynicism, of noise and scrap-iron, one feels as if suffused with peace and confidence and believes he has remounted the course of time towards some indeterminate epoch, near, perhaps, to the Golden Age.[135]

In Anatolia particularly are applicable the words of the English traveler, Walpole, who, when speaking of the hospitability of the people of Turkey, tells us that “in the East alone now do we find in the Oda Nessafer of the village the guest-chamber of Plato. A sum is set apart by the government for supplying these; though usually the more wealthy traveler repays what he receives, adding a small gratuity.”[136]

In hospitality the Osmanlis of to-day are heirs of the best traditions of the Greeks of old who, as Homer informs us, were wont to say:

For Jove unfolds our hospitable door:

’Tis Jove that sends the stranger and the poor.[137]

One of the most striking instances of Osmanli hospitality of which I have recently heard is an experience of my good Franciscan friend, the Reverend Paschal Robinson, Professor of History in the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. Some years ago he had occasion to travel through the greater part of Asia Minor. During the seven months of his journey he was always the guest of the Turks, who were all Moslems. And yet, although he was an entire stranger among them, the generous and courteous Osmanlis everywhere received him with the most cordial hospitality. Not only did they supply him gratis with food and shelter, but they also provided him with the necessary means of transportation from one place to another. And never would they accept the slightest compensation for their services.

My actual traveling expenses during these seven months [Father Paschal assures me] were the equivalent of only seven American dollars. And, although the passport requirements in Turkey have always been exceedingly strict, I never carried a passport and nobody ever asked me for one. My habit which I always wore in Anatolia was my passport.

But for members of his order, Father Paschal’s case is not exceptional. In Moslem lands the Sons of St. Francis are always shown similar kindness and consideration and have been ever since the famous interview of the Poverello of Assisi with the Sultan of Egypt at Damietta eight hundred years ago. Can greater hospitality be found in other lands?

By the hammering reiteration of a tradition which, for most part, had its origin in the reports of imaginative travelers and which has, in recent years, been greatly fostered by a subsidized press bent on forcing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Osmanlis have been pictured as monsters of cruelty. To judge by certain propaganda articles and brochures which, within recent years, have been given world-wide currency, the average Ottoman is like the viceroy described in Don Quixote, who “every day hanged a slave; impaled one; cut off the ears of another; and this upon so little animus, or so entirely without cause, that the Turks would own he did it merely for the sake of doing it, and because it was his nature.”[138] People who have lived among the Osmanlis and have learned to admire their gentleness and sense of justice would denounce such a characterization as absurd.

“During the two years I have traversed the country,” writes a French Colonel from Asia Minor, “I have never heard of a murder or a theft.” This is not the evidence of a solitary witness. Innumerable foreigners who have resided in Anatolia could give similar testimony.[139]

Nor does it apply only to the Osmanlis of the present time. History abounds in like testimony regarding them in every century of their history.

It is surprising [writes the historian Finlay] how well the Ottoman government preserved tranquillity in its extensive dominions, and established a greater degree of security for property among the middle classes, than generally prevailed in European states during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This end was obtained by a regular police, and by the prompt execution of a rude species of justice in cases of flagrant abuses and crimes. In the populous cities of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly in Constantinople, which contained more inhabitants than any three Christian capitals, the order which reigned in the midst of a great social corruption, caused by extreme wealth, the conflux of many different nations, and the bigotry of several hostile religions, excited the wonder and admiration of every observant stranger. Perfect self-reliance, imperturbable equanimity, superiority to the vicissitudes of fortune, and a calm temper, compensated among the Ottomans for laws which were notoriously defective and tribunals which were infamously venal.

Knolles says, “You seldom see a murder or a theft committed by any Turk.” European gentlemen accustomed to the barbarous custom of wearing swords on all occasions, were surprised to see Turks of the highest rank, distinguished for their valor and military exploits, walking about even in provincial towns, unarmed, secure in the power of public order and the protection of the executive authority in the State.[140]

But, it is asked, do not the reported atrocities of the Turks in Armenia and the Balkans prove that their reputation for the most frightful deeds of savagery is established beyond peradventure? An adequate answer to this question would lead us too far afield, for the Osmanlis, unlike their enemies, have few champions or political knights-errant, and our information, therefore, respecting the atrocities in question is almost entirely one-sided. To those, however, who are desirous of reading the Ottoman side of the question I would recommend the thoroughly documented work of Pierre Loti entitled Turquie Agonisante.[141] A careful perusal of this work will convince any impartial reader that in this, as in every other question, “the unspeakable Turk” is far from being “the homicide of all human kind” he is so frequently pictured to be.

I would not, however, have it inferred from the foregoing pages that I ignore the corruption and organized bribery and the extent to which the government is made to subserve the interests of those who govern rather than those who are governed. This condition has existed in Turkey from time immemorial, not only in the administration of governmental affairs but in the administration of justice as well. But it is, unfortunately, a condition that exists in all parts of the Orient from Constantinople to Peking.[142]

Nor am I blind to the incalculable miseries to which the peasantry of Anatolia are exposed by the ravenous tax-gatherers who rob them of their little savings and keep many of them in constant penury. The exactions and cruelties of these soulless agents of Turkish misrule are almost incredible. It is these oppressive measures of Turkish maladministration, coupled with the opening of the Suez Canal, which have done much to close the overland trade routes to which Anatolia owed much of its former prosperity. It is to be hoped that the reorganized Ottoman government will succeed in eliminating the crying evils here indicated, but they are of so long standing that statesmanship of the highest order will be required to deal with a situation which is now almost desperate.

In marked contrast to the administrative bribery and corruption which have so long been the bane of Turkey, as well as of so many Eastern countries, is the remarkable spirit of tolerance which distinguishes the Ottoman government. Thus when the members of religious orders—priests and nuns—were cruelly driven from France they were cordially welcomed by Turkey—the reputed home of intolerance and fanaticism—where they were guaranteed full liberty to continue their apostolate of education and charity.[143]

The opposition raised a few years ago by an uncontrollable mob to the passing of a procession in honor of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of London is still fresh in the memory of all. Contrast this with the attitude of the people of Constantinople to a similar ceremony. The following account of the procession is translated from the Turkish newspaper, the Stamboul:

On Sunday last took place the annual procession—I underscore the word annual—of Corpus Christi. The brilliance of the fête was heightened by the presence of Monsignor Nardi, and all the Catholic colony of the neighborhood assembled in the pretty church to see and hear its first pastor. Towards five o’clock the procession emerged amid a vast concourse of spectators who lined the way on either hand, the sacred cortège marching to the music of liturgical chants and the band of the Salesian Fathers. In front walked the school children, after them the faithful, then the clergy and notables of Makri Keui, while in the rear Monsignor Nardi, surrounded by the clergy, bore the Blessed Sacrament. Perfect order was maintained by the police with a degree of tact which did honor to the force. And for the space of an hour the procession traversed the gayly decorated streets of the quarter, which had been newly graveled for the occasion by the orders of the worthy and ever-courteous president of the municipality, Sherif Effendi. Such ceremonies leave a pleasant impression in a country like Turkey where everyone is free to practice his religion according to the dictates of his conscience.[144]

The same freedom of worship, notwithstanding reports to the contrary, is enjoyed by the Armenians. They are, besides, left perfectly free to have their own schools and to retain their own language. They have not had such liberty in Russia. “For six hundred years the Armenians were contented under the dominion of the Turks,” declared one of their bishops a few years ago, and they would, doubtless, be still living in peace with their old masters were it not for the machination of Russian propagandists and Armenian revolutionists. The proof of this is that “the highroad from Trebizond to Erzeroum ... is dotted with Christian monasteries and churches unmolested for centuries.”[145]

Napoleon I was wont to say that a lie, given twenty-four hours’ start, becomes immortal. But, when lies about the Turks have been repeated for generations in spite of the official denials of the Ottoman government and in spite of the contradictions of men who have long lived among these much misunderstood and greatly misrepresented people, what hope, one may ask, can there be for the final triumph of truth? What can be done to counteract shameless calumnies and official dementis when the greater part of the press is either muzzled or avowedly hostile and when public opinion has been so utterly poisoned by long and constant reiteration of all kinds of vilification and slander that the unfortunate victims are everywhere prejudiced and denied the right of a hearing which the law—not to speak of Christian charity—of all civilized nations accords to even the worst of criminals?

“Professional scribblers,” writes Pierre Loti, “who have never set foot in Turkey, expectorate ‘great historical romances’ on the ‘Tigers of the Bosphorus’ and the ‘Monsters of Stamboul.’”[146] “And they go so far even as to confound the true Turks with that aggregation of sharpers from all the Balkan and Levantine races who put on a fez in order to live among the Anatolians as gnawing parasites, parasites to the bone, whose depredations and usury, ruining entire villages, would almost excuse the worst vengeance of the rude and upright laborers of Anatolia who finally revolted.”[147]

Sidney Whitman, the distinguished English author who knows Turkey so well, is at one with the illustrious Academician when he writes:

In the course of my many visits to Constantinople I have repeatedly been made acquainted with instances of questionable newspaper correspondents who came to the Palace with the scarcely veiled intimation that it was to be a case of pay or slander. During the Armenian disturbances in 1896 a French female journalist went up to the Palace and openly declared that she intended to be paid or write up “atrocities.”[148]

But, notwithstanding the lurid tales that have so long been circulated about the Osmanlis, they have, nevertheless, loyal friends where one would least expect to find them. I have adduced in their favor the testimony of those who from long association among them have learned to know them and admire them for their splendid human qualities. Among these witnesses to the virtues of the Osmanlis are French, English, and American men whose competence is as incontrovertible as their authority is unimpeachable. It were easy to add to the number and among them we should find French, Italian, and German priests and bishops, Sisters of Charity and religieuses of the various teaching orders who have spent long years among the Osmanlis in all parts of the Ottoman Empire and their testimony would confirm that already introduced.

It may, however, be urged that the testimony in question is that of friends and sympathizers. It affords me, therefore, special pleasure to reproduce here the generous appreciation of “The Terrible Turk” which has recently appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette[149] from the pen of a Serbian gentleman who has had an opportunity of knowing him in war as well as in peace. It fully corroborates all that has been stated in the preceding pages and is as great an evidence of the writer’s nobility of soul, as it is a splendid tribute to the character of a whilom foe:

We Serbians are fighting against the Turks with all our might, but we do not wish to be unjust to them. I am perfectly certain that every Serbian soldier, marching now victoriously through Macedonia and Albania, and every wounded Serbian lying somewhere in a hospital, and every Serbian mother, sister, wife, sweetheart, who has lost her son, or her brother, or her husband, or her lover, on one of the many bloody battlefields, would applaud my effort to do justice to our enemy. And, therefore, I do not hesitate to say a good word for the Turk. I do homage not to the Turk, but to truth.

An average Turk—or shall I perhaps call him a normal Turk?—is an excellent man. He believes in God, and prays to God more earnestly and more intensely than an average or normal Christian does. And he persistently and honestly tries to conform his everyday life to the commandments of his great Prophet. He is charitable, honest, trustworthy; he is modest, yet dignified; he is proud, but not vain; he is brave, but not boastful; he is sober, clean, polite; he is generally poor, but always hospitable; and he is patriotic, ready to starve and suffer and die, without a murmur, for his faith and the honor of his country. But this excellent, virtuous, and God-fearing brave man is heavy, slow and somewhat stupid, and in the electrical and aeroplanic twentieth century cannot stand against scientific organizations and quick-firing guns of the clever, sharp-witted Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgars.

The Turk was master of the Balkan nations for nearly five centuries. During all those centuries he consistently refrained from interfering with our national churches and with our village municipal life. From the liberty which the Turk left to our Church and our municipal life in the country, our political liberty was re-born. But, notwithstanding his religious tolerance and his non-interference with our village life, we hated him as long as, and just because he was our master. But now, when our victories have deprived him of his position as master of our countries, we will be pleased to have him for our friend, because—although he is not exactly a “jolly”—he is certainly a good fellow.

How different is this portrait of “The Unspeakable Turk,” painted by one who knew him by life-long association from that of the atrabilious author of Sartor Resartus, whose delineation of him was based on fancy and prejudice, if not on pathetic ignorance!

The great trouble in Asia Minor to-day is an economic one. This is the verdict of those who are most competent to judge—of those who have lived among the Osmanlis for years and have only words of praise for their many natural virtues and their abounding goodness of heart. It is the verdict of men and women to whom the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God are not empty words, of those who believe that the precepts of Christian charity are as obligatory for nations as for individuals, and that it behooves the Great Powers to assist in its economic stress at least this part of the Ottoman Empire and to help it to develop its marvelous natural resources. Were they to do this, Anatolia would again blossom as the rose and flourish once more as it did in the heyday of Greek and Roman splendor. But such altruism is quite alien to the self-seeking policy of the dominant nations of Europe. Acting on the theory that might makes right they coolly proceed to the dismemberment of the empire and endeavor to justify it by alleging, in French diplomatic phrase, the requirements of the action civilisatrice of Western as against Eastern civilization while every one who thinks knows that the real reason is the lust of conquest.

Although I do not hold a brief for the Osmanlis, I would make a plea for more tolerance for a people who have so long exhibited such tolerance toward others. Having myself been among the number of those who unconsciously did grave injustice to them before I came to know them as they are, I feel that I am fully warranted in urging a change of attitude towards them. Equitable statesmanship, as well as Christian charity, demands such a change. We can never hope to remove the barrier between the East and the West, between Islam and Christianity, so long as the age-long misunderstandings and misrepresentations above referred to continue to separate peoples who should live in union and harmony.

CHAPTER VII
THE BAGDAD RAILWAY

In its political and military, not to speak of its commercial, consequences, the securing by Germany of the Bagdad Railway is perhaps the most important event which has occurred in the Old World since the Franco-Prussian War.[150]

André Chéradame.

At Konia, anciently Iconium, we reached the junction of the Anatolia and the Bagdad Railways. From an economic and military standpoint, both roads are of supreme importance to the Ottoman Empire. They supply commerce with long needed means of communication between the interior and the seaboard, and enable the Sultan to conduct the administration of his extensive territory with far more efficiency and despatch than was before possible. Politically, however, the Bagdad Railway is incomparably still more important. No great railroad has ever attracted more attention; none has ever owed so much to its name; none has ever so fired the imagination of Germans and Ottomans; and none has ever so exhausted the resources of diplomacy or provoked greater struggles for its control. Historically both roads have a special interest to the student and the historian not only on account of the classic lands through which they pass but also on account of the long and strenuous efforts which several rival nations made to obtain from the Sublime Porte the authorization to build and operate the great road which was to unite the West and the East.

So greatly has the Bagdad Railway modified the Near Eastern Question, so completely has it changed the data and the consequent solution of the problem, and so perfectly does its history dovetail into the narrative of our journey, that a brief account of the origin and struggling beginnings of the road is necessary to a clear conception of many things that shall be said in subsequent chapters.

Many and diverse, as the ambitions of those who gave them birth, have been the projects to unite by rail the superb capital on the Bosphorus with the mysterious city of Harun-al-Rashid on the distant Tigris.

Two-thirds of a century ago there were few projects which were proposed with more insistence to the British Cabinet and to the House of Commons as well as to English capitalists than that which had for its object the construction of a railway which, starting from a point on the Mediterranean, should cross Mesopotamia in the direction of India.

The original plan called for an overland route which would connect the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. It was based on an elaborate survey of the Euphrates valley, which had been made by an English officer, Colonel Chesney, in 1835–1837. The primary object was to shorten the journey from England to India, which was then made across the Isthmus of Suez, or round the Cape of Good Hope.

The preliminary survey of this contemplated line was made by order of the British Government which voted £20,000 for expenses. Materials for two armed steamers were, under the direction of Colonel Chesney, transported with almost insuperable difficulties from the mouth of the Orontes to the Euphrates. This gallant officer had under his command a well-equipped staff of engineers and men of science, and the work which the expedition set out to execute was performed, as the official reports show, in the most thorough manner. More than two years were devoted to the task of exploring the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the region through which they flowed, and the enthusiastic commander felt sure his labors were to issue “in the consolidation and perfection of the overland communications between Great Britain and India.”[151]

But how quickly and completely his illusions were dispelled!

When I returned from the East in 1837 [he wrote long after] it was with the full belief that a question of such vast importance to Great Britain—nationally, politically and commercially—would be at once taken up warmly by the Government and the public. The way had been opened—difficulties which at one time had looked formidable had been overcome; the Arabs and the Turkish Government were favorable to the projected line to India. But thirty-one years have since passed, and nothing has been done.[152]

In 1851 a company was organized in England for realizing Colonel Chesney’s plan for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. A firman was obtained from the Porte and everything was ready for beginning work—except cash. As the enterprise was not supported by the government, English capitalists considered participation in it too hazardous to justify investment. The company’s concession lapsed for lack of the necessary funds.

The question was again taken up in 1872 and referred to a Parliamentary commission. But, although Colonel Chesney’s plan of building a road along the Euphrates was favorably received, it was again abandoned—this time in favor of the Suez Canal, a large interest in which had been purchased for England by her astute premier, Disraeli, who was quick to perceive the paramount value of this passageway between England and her possessions in the Orient.[153]

During many years thereafter this new route between Asia and Europe so absorbed public attention that the Euphrates Railway was almost forgotten. But towards the end of the century numerous projects for constructing the road were taken up by several groups of promoters and financiers of different nationalities.

Among these was the project of an Italian, Sig. A. Tonietti, who, acting in behalf of a company of Italian and English financiers, sought a concession for the construction of a line which should start from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean and which, following the Euphrates to Bagdad and Basra, should terminate at a point on the Persian Gulf. He also sought a concession for building a number of branch lines, one of which was to extend to Khanikin on the Persian frontier. In addition to this he asked for authorization to cultivate the unoccupied government lands along the course of the railroad during the term of the concession. In return for this authorization he agreed to establish an irrigation system which should restore the Euphrates valley to its pristine fertility.

There was also a French group of financiers who, headed by M. Cottard, a distinguished railroad engineer in Turkey, endeavored by all means in their power to secure a concession for building a railway which was to be a prolongation of the Anatolian line to Bagdad and Basra and to follow essentially the same course along the Euphrates as the projected road of Sig. Tonietti.

In addition to the two projects just mentioned was that of the Russian Count Kapist, who proposed to build a line which should start from Tripoli, in Syria, and, passing Bagdad, should terminate at Koweit on the Persian Gulf. Count Kapist and his associates pretended that they were assured of the eventual coöperation not only of English capitalists but also of the British Government.[154]

The applicants for these divers concessions were, however, all doomed to disappointment. Never before had so many, so antagonistic, and so powerful interests made so long and so strenuous efforts to secure the coveted privilege of building a railroad in foreign territory. Never were diplomats more active in Constantinople, never was intrigue more complicated, and never was greater pressure brought to bear upon the Sublime Porte by the rival nations of Europe. France wished to safeguard her interests in the Levant and extend her sphere of influence in the Near East. Russia desired to tighten her hold on Transcaucasia and to prepare for the eventual dismemberment of the Turkish Empire of which she fondly hoped to secure the lion’s share. England, although she had control of the Suez Canal, saw in the Bagdad Railway a menace to her Indian possessions and determined to nullify the danger before it was too late.

France had been on the friendliest terms with the Ottoman Government since the time of Francis I and her financiers naturally felt that the much coveted concession should be awarded to them as citizens of the most favored nation. English capitalists put forward claims which they regarded as deserving greater consideration than those of their competitors.

But French and English as well as Italian and Russian claims were ignored, their projects for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf were rejected and the long and eagerly sought concession was awarded to a group of German capitalists, alias the Deutsche Bank, alias, their opponents contend, the German Government.

What the Germans call Drang nach Osten—Trend towards the East—dates from the time of Alexander the Great. It drove the legions of the Cæsars to the Euphrates and the Tigris and impelled the hosts of the Crusaders to seek glory on the desert wastes of Syria and Mesopotamia. It urged Napoleon to undertake his famous campaign in Egypt and was at the bottom of his alliance with the Czar Alexander I—an alliance that was to carry the combined armies of France and Russia to the heart of India.

As to the Germans, they have never ceased “to dream of the Morgenland since the epic of Barbarossa’s crusade and the legendary disappearance of that great figure of Teutonic battle and romance in the Cilician stream.” When von Moltke, 1835–1839, was assisting the Sultan Mahmud II to reorganize the Ottoman army on the German plan he was greatly impressed with the possibilities offered by Asia Minor as a field for German commerce and enterprise. Others of his countrymen thought it would be good policy to divert the current of German emigration from America to Asia Minor. And, although the Porte had always been opposed to all schemes of German colonization in Turkey, there was reason to believe that the Ottoman Government, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, would consent to German colonists settling in certain places in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. For, several decades before the Germans had secured the concession to build the Bagdad Railroad, the friendliest relations had existed between Constantinople and Berlin. This was particularly true after the defeat of France in 1870, when Germany was reorganized as the first military power in the world. For thenceforward Turkey not only maintained a goodly number of military students in Germany, but also had many German officers in her army, among whom was the distinguished Field Marshal Goltz Pasha.

It was, however, more than a half century before von Moltke’s idea of developing Anatolia and Mesopotamia was given practical consideration. It was then taken up by Dr. George von Siemens, the distinguished president of the Deutsche Bank, who, like so many of his countrymen, had come under the spell of Germany’s Weltpolitik and, like them, had been caught in the current of the Drang nach Osten.

Dr. von Siemens was not only one of the ablest of the group of eminent men whom the Kaiser had gathered about him, but was also a great favorite of the German War Lord. He not only shared von Moltke’s views regarding the development of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, but, with rare clearness of vision, saw that this development could be achieved only by the construction of a railway through the broad wastes which lay between the Bosphorus and the Persian Gulf. To reclaim for civilization the long-neglected valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and to restore to their ancient splendor the broad and fertile plains of Anatolia and Mesopotamia—so long the favored home of humanity—became his dominant ambition, and to the achievement of his cherished project he directed for years, with marvelous address and persistency, his indomitable energy and savoir faire. Slowly but surely his dream began to be realized.

Before the Anatolian Railway was completed the Turkish Army was eating bread made from Russian flour; now it is using grain grown in the fertile acres of Asia Minor. And before the advent of the railroad the communications between the interior of Asia Minor and the seaboard were so wretched that the freight on domestic grain was greater than on that imported from Russia or the United States. The result was that the Anatolian peasants then grew only enough wheat for their own needs. Before the advent of the railroad not a single ton of grain from the region traversed by the Anatolian Railroad reached the seacoast for export. After the road was completed the export of wheat and other cereals became, in a very short time, an important item of commerce. The peasantry received “for their harvests from twice to four times the prices formerly paid and the railways brought revenue to the (Ottoman) treasury.”[155]

The cost of the railway was great, indeed, but greater far was its value to Turkey, for it was not only the best but also the only practical means of “bringing the disjointed members of that large empire within reach of control,” and of “bringing security and cultivation, order and civilization, to a country that once had been the most fertile on earth.”[156]

That Germany should have received the concession for building the Bagdad Railway in the face of such strong competitors as Russia, France, and England was a great surprise to those who were not familiar with the relations among the Great Powers and who were not well informed respecting the diplomatic game as it was then played in Constantinople. To those, however, who had an accurate knowledge of the strained relations which existed between the Porte and certain of the western nations and who knew how suspicious Abdul-Hamid II was of all schemes affecting Turkey, which were engineered in Russia or Great Britain, or in behalf of Russian or British interests, the outcome of the long diplomatic game at the Porte was looked upon as a foregone conclusion.

A brilliant French publicist attributes the success of the Germans in securing the concession for the Bagdad Railway to the fact that the era of great ambassadors from France and England at the Sublime Porte was closed at the period in question—that in the year immediately preceding “the publication of the irade of the concession in 1899,” there was then “an utter bankruptcy of great men” at Constantinople from these two countries.[157]

Opposed to the English, French, and Russian Ambassadors, and almost isolated from his colleagues, was the alert and sagacious Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the noted ambassador from Germany who, according to an anonymous writer in the National Review, “was the most influential of the ambassadors at Yildiz, and, in accordance with the thoroughly sensible and practical cast of German ideas as to the functions of diplomacy, had used his position more actively and successfully than any minister had done before to promote the business interest of his nationals in Turkey.”[158]

Not to speak of the failure of France and Russia to secure the concession for building the Bagdad Railway, it may here be declared that England’s hopes of securing it were doomed from the very beginning. Her control of the Suez Canal and her occupation of Egypt, which was the territory of a Turkish vassal, not to speak of Gladstone’s denunciation of the Sultan as the “Great Assassin,” all predisposed Abdul-Hamid in favor of Germany and as strongly predisposed him against Great Britain.

A writer in the National Review, referring to this subject, declares:

For many years the immobile Turk had never been so likely to go out of his way for any purpose in the world as when an opportunity to do the English Government a discourtesy or English influence a disservice; and it may almost be said that even a bribe worthy of the fabulous wealth of the detested island would not have induced Abdul-Hamid to give to an Englishman what he could give to any one else.[159]

When it was officially announced that the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway had been granted to a German syndicate, there was great jubilation from the Rhine to the Vistula over what was regarded as a great victory for Teutonic diplomacy and enterprise. The enthusiastic sons of the Fatherland fancied that they already saw the well-equipped trains of the Bagdad Railway “running in the track of Alexander” from the Dardanelles to the embouchure of the Shatt-el-Arab, and exulted in the thought that “where the Mermnadæ, the Achæmenidæ, and the Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Turkish conquerors failed, there Germany had a good prospect of success.”[160]

In Turkey the diplomatic victory of the Germans meant a great exaltation of Teutonic prestige and a corresponding diminution of the credit and influence of the defeated Powers.

In France, the predominant position of power and influence acquired by Germany was interpreted as a complete subversion of the Eastern Question and as an event which made the solution of this long-standing question correspondingly difficult—“ce qui boulverse complètment les données du problème et par consequent sa solution possible.”[161]

France [writes M. Aublé] had long been the disinterested protector of a nation whose moral and material elevation she had constantly sought and had spent in all branches of human activity of that unfortunate country many milliards of francs. What she loved to regard as a second France, she saw with sorrow was about to escape her and come under the influence of a hated rival.[162]

Russia’s attitude toward the Bagdad Railway was no less hostile. It had, for obvious reasons, been her policy since the time of Peter the Great to weaken and eventually dismember the Ottoman Empire. Her objection to the road was that it contributed immeasurably to the financial, political, and strategical strength of Turkey, and that this would completely foil all her well-laid plans for her ultimate partition. She also regarded the road as a menace to Transcaucasia, but, more than this, she feared that it would, in the possession of Germany, halt her further advance into Western Asia and prove, mayhap, a stepping-stone to Germany’s annexation of Asia Minor.

But the resentment of Great Britain was far greater than that of either France or Russia. She had more at stake and greater reasons for serious apprehension for the future. So long as she controlled the Suez Canal and there was no competing line towards India she felt secure. But when, in 1888, Baron Hirsch’s Railroad through the Balkan Peninsula was completed to the Bosphorus and connected Constantinople with Western Europe, and steps were taken to extend this line through Anatolia and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, alarm, bordering on dismay, took possession of her publicists and statesmen.

The political and military importance of an overland railway from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf which could not be reached by a hostile fleet could not be overestimated.

Indeed [as a noted English authority wrote in 1917] so long as the forts of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus remain intact the Sultan and his allies enjoy the advantages of a naval power in a limited area—the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles—without the possession of a fleet. This enables the Sultan and his Germanic allies rapidly to convey troops or foodstuffs from Europe to Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia and vice versa, in the very face of the Allied Fleets, which are powerless to interfere in areas protected by defences which had proved, as one had to expect they would prove, impregnable.[163]

Another English writer saw in German control of the Bagdad Railway the doom of English trade and French enterprise in the Near East.

Is the same fate [he asks] to be meted out to the French railways in Syria as that which has overtaken the non-German railways in Asia Minor? Are they to be absorbed into the Bagdad Railway, or be cut off from any prospects of development? On the further side of the area, are the British communications up the Tigris to be starved into submission, and is the trade of Manchester and our great industrial centers to be placed at the mercy of variable by-laws in the statutes of railway companies owned or largely controlled by Germany? In the present temper of British diplomacy, a German victory of this kind is, I am sorry to say, not outside the bounds of possibility, however momentous may be the consequences, not only to our trade but also to our whole political future. If it be achieved, German enterprise will dominate the countries west of India and will extend along two great arms to the frontiers of Egypt and to the head of the Persian Gulf. Regions lying upon the main line of the maritime communications of the British Empire will gradually, but none the less irrevocably, become invested with a political complexion and bias out of harmony with our vital interests.[164]

But this was not all. Judging by the articles that filled the English press after the concession for building the Bagdad Railway had been granted to Germany, the great fear of many in England was that this concession would lead to a protectorate over Turkey by the Teutonic Powers;[165] that it “would permanently diminish English credit in the East and throughout all Islam” and exalt German prestige at Britain’s expense; that it involved the ousting of England from their “former political and commercial primacy in the Ottoman Empire”; that, to quote a British writer, it would “squeeze us out of Asiatic Turkey,” as the diplomacy of Germany had “succeeded in squeezing us out of East Africa where we surrendered to her territory which was ours by virtue of having been explored by Speke, Grant and Stanley.”[166]

In the meantime the Teutonic Powers were trying to secure the necessary capital for their stupendous enterprise. From the very beginning of their vast undertaking they, under the lead of Dr. Siemens, president of the Administrative Board of the Anatolian Railway, fully realized the difficulties they would encounter in securing the funds requisite to cover the enormous cost of their colossal work. But to achieve success they had recourse to all the methods of shrewd business and sane diplomacy. And they were quick to perceive that the wisest and safest policy would be to work along the line of least resistance. Instead, therefore, of antagonizing their defeated competitors they would invite them to coöperate with them in the construction and operation of the great steel highway. They would, in a word, internationalize it and make it a purely commercial enterprise, whose sole object would be the expansion of western trade and the development of the fabulous resources of the mysterious East.

But, as the concessionaires soon discovered to their surprise and disappointment, this was more easily said than done. The story of their many and long negotiations with foreign capitalists and statesmen is a long one and reveals, as few other things have done, national jealousies, distrusts, and ambitions. Each of the nations concerned desired to have the lion’s share in the building and management of the road, and, when this was impossible, those who had perforce to accept minor parts, or none at all, strove by every means in their power, covertly or openly, to misrepresent the object of the undertaking and damn it in the estimation of those who were counted on to coöperate in carrying the enterprise to a successful conclusion.

Neither the French nor the English government was willing to give the Bagdad Railway project official recommendation. This attitude of the two governments deterred many capitalists from investing in an enterprise which they had been disposed to view most favorably. The French Government went so far as to forbid the securities to be listed on the Bourse.[167]

But the chief opposition to the project came not so much from the governments in question as from the press. This was particularly the case in England.

A letter written in 1903 by the late Sir Clinton Dawkins—one of a group of English capitalists who were eager to coöperate with the Germans in the building of the Bagdad Railway—to Herr Arthur von Gwinner, the successor of Dr. von Siemens as director of the road, leaves no doubt about this whatever.

The fact is [Sir Clinton writes] that the business has become involved in politics here, and has been sacrificed to the very violent and bitter feeling against Germany exhibited by the majority of our newspapers and shared in by a large number of people.

This is a feeling which, as the history of recent events will show you, is not shared by the Government or reflected in official circles. But of its intensity outside those circles, for the moment, there can be no doubt; at the present moment coöperation in any enterprise which could be represented, or, I might more justly say, misrepresented, as German will meet with a violent hostility which our government has to consider.... The anti-German feeling prevailed with the majority; London having really gone into a frenzy on the matter, owing to the newspaper campaign which it would have been quite impossible to counteract or influence.[168]

As a result of an important meeting of Potsdam between the Czar and the Kaiser in November 1910, Russia waived all share in the Bagdad Railway. The reason for this withdrawal was, it is asserted, the willingness of Germany to allow Russia to build a railway in the north of Persia which should eventually connect with a branch of the Bagdad Railway at Khanakin on the Persian frontier.

The reason, therefore, why the Bagdad Railway was not internationalized, as was the desire of Dr. Siemens and his associates, is manifest. The nations constituting the Entente Cordiale were unwilling to accept the offer of the concessionaires, who thereafter proceeded to construct the line without outside assistance.[169]

When the statesmen and financiers of France and England found that internationalization of the Bagdad Railway was impossible and that the Germans were preparing to build it without their coöperation they bethought themselves of killing the enterprise by creating a financial vacuum:

“Let a vacuum of capital be created around the Bagdad Railway,” ironically writes M. André Geraud, who had no sympathy with the methods his countrymen and their English allies had adopted in their dealings with the German concessionaires, “let the Anglo-French air-pump be set in action, and then, as soon as the pecuniary oxygen becomes rarefied, the Bagdad Railway will be seen to languish and die.”[170]

But this method, it was soon discovered, utterly failed to have the desired effect. It neither deprived the railway company of resources nor checked its activity. “The air-pump,” as M. Geraud wittily remarks, “broke down as soon as it was started.”[171]

The time had passed when it could be truthfully said that the Bagdad Railway could not be built by a single power. The same statement had been made regarding the Suez Canal, but France, under the lead of De Lesseps, showed what the enterprise and the genius of her people were capable of accomplishing when they were united in an undertaking that was to reflect on them imperishable glory and redound at the same time to the welfare of humanity.

Confident in their ability to construct the Bagdad Railway unaided, the Germans, under the guidance of able financiers, were not long in demonstrating to the world that their enterprise was in no wise inferior to that which led to the magnificent achievement of the French in the Land of the Pharaohs.

The hostile attitude of the Anglo-French press towards the Bagdad Railway was not allowed to pass unnoticed by the publicists of Germany. From the day that the irade authorizing the building of the great railroad was issued they had been enthusiastic about the enterprise that was, they felt sure, to be of inestimable advantage to the Fatherland. They descanted especially on it as an agency for developing German trade in the Near East, whose commerce hitherto had been almost entirely in the hands of their rivals. They fondly pointed to the day, in the not distant future, when they would be able to exploit the vast mineral riches of Asia Minor, and when Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, as a result of intensive culture under German direction, would be able to supply them with untold stores of grain, wool, cotton, fruit, petroleum, and other commodities; when, thanks to their control of the Bagdad Railway and its branches, they would enjoy a virtual monopoly of near eastern commerce.

The eminent German engineer, Wilhelm von Pressel, who had served the Fatherland so long and so well in the Ottoman Empire,[172] prepared plans for connecting Europe with Asia by a tunnel under the Bosphorus. But his fellow countryman, Siegmund Schneider, insisted that the two continents should be connected by a bridge, which he describes in a dithyrambic fashion which most vividly exhibits the exaltation of the promoters of the great Berlin to Bagdad Railway.

The architectural effect [Herr Schneider writes] of the metallic mass richly gilded, suspended from massive piers, crowned by glittering cupolas and minarets, brilliantly illuminated at night would be fantastic. This bridge would constitute a formidable closure of the enfilade of fortified works with which the Turkish coasts bristle. Its debouches in Asia and Europe would be defended by powerful bridge-heads, its piers would be armed with armored rotary batteries whose long range would infallibly sink any squadron that would venture into the Strait.... The express trains of the future will go directly from Berlin to Babylonia in five days.[173]

German engineers confidently asserted that the day was not far distant when trains de luxe equal to any in Europe or America would cover the distance between Constantinople and Bagdad in sixty-five hours. The time formerly required to make the journey between these two cities by caravan was from fifty to fifty-five days.[174]

Nor was this an empty boast. No road has ever been more carefully or more solidly built than is the Bagdad Railway. Roadbed, culverts, revetments, bridges are of the strongest and most durable materials. The sleepers are of metal, while the steel rails are specially made for sharp curves and fast and heavy trains. German engineers declare that they are the heaviest in existence. At a time when the heaviest rails used in the United States weighed one hundred pounds per lineal yard, those selected for the Bagdad Railroad weighed twenty per cent more. And so it is with the warehouses, the offices, and especially the stations all along the line. So massive are the last-named structures that they are called “German Castles.” Indeed, it is the firm conviction of many that these buildings were so designed that they might serve as strongholds in emergencies, such as sudden uprisings of lawless nomads or fanatical Moslems. Nothing was left to chance. So far as experience and engineering science could forecast the necessities of the future, provision was made for all eventualities—save only such a cataclysm as a world war, which threatened to interrupt the continuity of civilization.

As to the end and aim of the Bagdad Railway we are left in no doubt.

We must [writes Professor Diering] be true to ourselves by emphasizing and cultivating everything German. In all undertakings engineered by German diplomacy and financed with German money the official language must be German. Hence French, which has been the official language on Turkish Railways, must disappear. There must be a German school near every large railway station; and in these schools both the German and Turkish languages must be employed in giving instruction; any other language will be merely taught. Only specially selected and well-educated teachers should be sent to Turkey. Above all, German medical men must be introduced into Turkey’s railway system. They are the best medium for spreading German influence and for awakening esteem and affection for Germany.

On broad lines it is now quite clear what form the future Turkish Empire will assume. From Tripolis across to Persia and on to the ridges of the Caucasus, German energy—without injury to the sovereignty of the Osmanic State—will coöperate in Turkey’s renaissance and in the development of her treasures. But our enemies, together with their money, languages and schools will disappear from the territories which they hoped to divide among themselves.[175]

Equally explicit is another German writer, Herr Trampe, respecting the ulterior object of the Bagdad Railway.

The ancient highroad of the world [he declares] is the one which leads from Europe to India—the road used by Alexander—the highway which leads from the Danube via Constantinople to the valley of the Euphrates, and by northern Persia, Herat, and Kabul to the Ganges. Every yard of the Bagdad Railway which is laid brings the owner of the railway nearer to India. What Alexander performed and Napoleon undoubtedly planned can be achieved by a third treading in their footsteps. England views the Bagdad Railway as a very real and threatening danger to herself—and rightly so. She can never undo or annul its effects.[176]

The increasingly hostile attitude of the Entente Cordiale toward the Bagdad Railway, the violent ebullitions of the press of the rival powers portended trouble. No sooner had the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway been officially announced than it began to weigh as a nightmare on a great part of Europe. The chancelleries of the Old World began then to realize more clearly than ever before the boundless possibilities of the great oriental highway. English statesmen saw in it the virtual doubling of the German fleet at the head of the Persian Gulf, and then the cry was heard throughout Britain, “Let us have the Russians at Constantinople rather than a great power on the Persian Gulf.”

The Bagdad Railway [declares an English writer] was a damnosa hæreditas, which was due as much to a lack of imagination and effective organization on the part of our business community in the eighties and nineties of the last century, as it undoubtedly was to a mistaken policy in those critical years on the part of the British Government.[177]

Small wonder, then, is it that the Bagdad Railway was from the very beginning of the great World War considered as one of the chief contributing causes of the terrific cataclysm of the second decade of the twentieth century and that, whatever political, economic, and social adjustments may be entailed as a result of the most stupendous struggle of history, it is destined to modify even more profoundly the relations between the Orient and the Occident than did the far-reaching campaigns of Alexander the Great, which introduced Greek people and Greek culture to the East and made known to the West the riches and the wonders of Persia and India and Babylonia.

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE CRUSADERS

Nations melt

From power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt

The sunshine for a while, and downward go

Like lauwine loosened from the mountain’s belt.

Byron “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV, 12.

Aside from the interest which attaches to it as the north-western terminus of the Bagdad Railway, Konia, the ancient Iconium, like so many other places in Anatolia, is extremely rich in legendary and historic lore. According to a local myth it was the first spot to emerge from the waters of the Deluge. It is mentioned in the legend of Perseus and the Gorgons. A local legend has it that the name was derived from the Greek word eikon—figure or image—referring to the mud figures, which, when breathed upon by the wind, were converted into living men and women. This is evidently a variant of the old myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha. It was doubtless this pride in their great antiquity and a belief that Phrygian was the primitive language of our race that led the inhabitants of Iconium to claim a Phrygian origin. That Phrygian was really the oldest language they had no doubt. For, it was averred, the Egyptian King, Psametik, had conclusively proved this by showing that “infants brought up out of hearing of human speech spoke the Phrygian language.”

The Ten Thousand Greeks, in the army of Cyrus, halted here on their famous expedition to southern Mesopotamia. Cicero reviewed his troops here when he was proconsul of Cilicia. It was one of the important missionary centers of the early evangelizing activity of St. Paul. It was to this city that, accompanied by Barnabas, he directed his steps after he had been expelled by the Jews from Antioch.

In Roman times Iconium stood at the intersection of several important highways and was designated by Pliny urbs celeberrima—a most celebrated city. According to a venerable tradition, Iconium had for its first bishop Sosipatros, one of the seventy-two disciples, who was succeeded in the episcopal chair by Terentius, likewise one of this chosen body of disciples. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Iconium was the birthplace of St. Thecla, who is said to have been converted to Christianity by the Apostle St. Paul. She is the heroine of the Acta Pauli et Theclæ. From the earliest ages of the Church she was greatly venerated in Asia Minor, where she was known as the “Apostle and Proto-martyr among Women.” In the Greek Church her feast is celebrated on the twenty-fourth of September under the title of “Proto-martyr among Women and the Equal of the Apostles.”

And here, according to a venerable tradition on which oriental geographers set much store, is the tomb of “Plato the Divine,” who, under the name of Eflat, is revered by the local population as a thaumaturgus. The origin of this singular tradition in this part of Anatolia—so distant from the real burying place of the immortal philosopher—is one of the curiosities of Ottoman folklore.[178]

During two centuries—from 1099 to 1307—Iconium was the capital of the Seljuk Sultans of Rum[179] and is still regarded as one of the holy places of Islam. Many of its sultans were patrons of art and literature, and, during the zenith of its splendor, this Seljukian metropolis could boast of nearly as many colleges and students as Bagdad—the far-famed capital of the Abbasside Caliphate.

Its present chiefest title to fame is the tomb of the noted Jelal-ed-din-Rumi, usually known as Mevlana. He was famed for knowledge and wisdom and was the founder of the Dancing Dervishes and the author of the “Mesnevi,” a celebrated poem in Persian verse, in which is instilled the Sufi system of pantheism. His successors, as heads of the Dancing Dervishes, have their residence in Iconium and theirs is the right and the privilege to gird each Ottoman Sultan, on his accession to the throne, with the historic sword of Osman. This imposing function, which is performed in the Mosque of Eyub in Stamboul, has been likened to the coronation by the Pope of the Holy Roman Emperor.

By those who know them best the better class of Dancing, or, more properly, the Whirling Dervishes, are described as being a very tolerant and large-minded people. Thus it is said that “in the dangerous period in the winter of 1895–1896, when religious and national feeling ran high in Turkey, it was mainly owing to the Mevlevis that the softas of Konia were prevented from attacking the Christian population of the town.”[180]

But the orthodox Moslems, as represented by the softas and mollahs, do not regard with sympathy the peculiar ceremonial practices of the various orders of dervishes, especially their use of incense, music, and lighted candles in public worship. To the strict followers of the Koran the characteristic forms of worship of the Mevlevis and Rufais, more commonly known as the Dancing and Howling Dervishes, are as distasteful as are the ritualistic services of certain modern Anglicans to the conservative members of the Church of England. As to the esoteric doctrines of the dervishes, especially those based on the Mesnevi, they are declared by the doctors of Islam to be quite irreconcilable with both the Koran and the Hadith—the accepted traditions of Mohammedanism. It must be said that the bizarre performances of the Dancing and Howling Dervishes—performances which are resorted to as a means of detaching the minds of the devotees from all things earthly and attaining a state of spiritual ecstasy—are to the casual spectator but little different in kind from certain revivals of our southern negroes. The solemn dervishes, however, exhibit far more dignity and reverence in their devotions than do the excitable and noisy Africans in their camp-meetings and revivalistic gatherings.

Surrounded by a barren and desolate country, Konia, when seen from afar, looks like an oasis in the desert. It is situated on an elevated plateau well-watered by mountain streams and blessed with a salubrious climate. It was these attractive features that led the Seljukian Turks to choose it for their capital. Its luxuriant gardens and orchards have long been famous and add much to the city’s picturesqueness—especially when viewed from a distance. For when one enters the old Seljukian capital there is little to attract attention except a few mosques. Of the old Greek city practically nothing remains aside from the fragments of friezes, cornices, bas-reliefs, and ancient inscriptions which are found in the walls which surround the erstwhile Seljukian capital. Here, as in so many other places in Anatolia, the Turks, when requiring material for their mosques and palaces, converted the imposing temples of the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines into quarries for stone, and lime. As in Nicæa, a great part of the space within the walls of Konia is covered with crumbling ruins overgrown with weeds and bushes. The poet must have had such a scene in his mind’s eye when he penned the lines:

There a temple in ruin stands

Fashioned by long-forgotten hands;

Two or three columns and many a stone,

Marble and granite with grass overgrown

Out upon time! It will leave no more

Of the things to come than the things before.

Modern Konia, a good part of which lies outside of the walls of the Seljuk capital of the thirteenth century, is composed of one-story buildings, constructed chiefly of wood and sun-dried bricks. But amid all the squalor and decay that distinguishes this historic city there are several mosques and medresses—colleges—which will well repay careful inspection.

Among the buildings deserving particular attention is the splendid tekke of the Dancing Dervishes, in which is the tomb of Hazret Mevlana, the founder of this peculiar order. It is popularly known as the “Blue Mosque” from the exquisite sapphire and turquoise blue tiles which until recently covered the cupola that rises above the great turbeh of the founder. There is nothing in Brusa, Stamboul, or Cairo that can surpass its rich and delicate traceries and arabesques, its profusion of jeweled lamps, its wealth, precious tapestries, wondrous faïence, its magic glories of color from the looms and kilns of Persia and India. But over and above all this wealth of ornamentation there is a religious atmosphere that does not exist in the ordinary mosque. For the dervishes, unlike the orthodox Moslems, make a special appeal to the emotions of their followers, and hence their widespread influence and popularity throughout the Mohammedan world.

There is, however, no attempt made here to affect the emotions through any of the plastic or pictorial arts. In this respect the Blue Mosque, like every other mosque in Islam, is absolutely devoid of paintings and statues. The reason is that Moslem law proscribes all representations of the human form, either in painting or statuary, as impious, because they are regarded “as encouragements to idolatry and as profanations of God’s chief handiwork.”[181]

According to one of the traditional sayings of Mohammed, “Whoever draws a picture will at the day of resurrection be punished by being ordered to blow a spirit into it; and this he can never do; and so he will be punished as long as God wills.” Nor does the Prophet leave any doubt as to the nature of the punishment, for he declares explicitly, “Every painter is in hell-fire.” In another saying, however, he greatly modifies this pitiless statement and tells the painter, “If you must make pictures, make them of trees and of things without souls.” It is because of this concession to artists that one may frequently see in Mohammedan houses pictures of flowers and trees and even of landscapes, provided there be in them no delineation of “the human form divine.” But in the homes of the strict adherents of Moslemism all images are rigorously tabooed, for, according to another saying of the Prophet, “Angels do not enter into the house in which is a dog, nor into that in which are pictures.”[182]

Konia is now a flourishing city of about sixty thousand souls. Most of its inhabitants, like those of Brusa, are pure Turks, who rigidly adhere not only to the religion but also to the manners and customs of their fathers. There is here, however, a goodly number of Greeks, Armenians, and Germans, besides whom there is also, among the employees of the Bagdad Railway, a sprinkling of Swiss, French, and Italians. Among the various institutions we visited, none gave us more agreeable surprise than those established here some decades ago by the Priests and Sisters of the Assumption from France, which are in a very prosperous condition. The Sisters have a school and dispensary, and their devoted care of the poor and sick has made them greatly beloved by all classes, irrespective of creed. Nowhere is the zeal of the ardent French nun seen to better advantage than in foreign missions, where her enthusiasm, notwithstanding the great difficulties she frequently encounters, never abates and where she exhibits a happiness that communicates itself to all who come in contact with her.

Nowhere in Anatolia, except probably in Brusa, has one a better opportunity to study the manners and customs and simple pastimes of the genuine Turk than in Konia. Theaters and operas, as we know them, they have not. From all social assemblages, like those in the western world, which are frequented by men and women alike, they are debarred by a custom that is more binding than the laws of the Medes and Persians.

But notwithstanding the total absence of all the entertainments that contribute so much to the pleasure of the people of Europe and America, the Anatolian has a way of spending his leisure hours that quite satisfies him. His amusements are simple indeed, but with them he is content.

Most of these center in the coffeehouse, which, to a great extent, takes the place of the restaurant in France and the club in the United States. Like the club and restaurant the Turkish coffeehouse

Is the resort of public men; the haunt

Of wealthy idlers and the trysting-place

Of such as have no home to indicate—

A place where each may come and go at will,

Think his own thoughts, pursue his own affairs,

Or fling his ore of feeling and of sense

Into the common crucible.

Unlike the club and restaurant, the coffeehouse serves no food or alcoholic liquors of any kind. Aside from the people who congregate there, and it is usually well-patronized, its attractions are as limited as they are simple. In the less pretentious places these are confined to coffee, tobacco, and, occasionally, the Medak, or story-teller. In the more sumptuous places of the larger cities there is also music, but it is generally of a very inferior quality, for the instruments employed are for the most part limited to a drum, a tambourine, and two or three rude guitars.

In Anatolia, as in all Moslem countries, the Medak is a most popular character. Not infrequently his ability is so marked that he attains the rank of a personage, and his services on festive occasions are in great demand and for them he is liberally remunerated. The admirable manner in which he can, unaided, fill the rôle of entire casts of the most diverse characters, his marvelous versatility in personating the people of different nations, and in imitating the tones, phraseologies, and even the facial expression of the multitudinous races of the Turkish empire are really astonishing and are to his audience a source of unending delight. Not a few of the Medaks, in addition to histrionic talent that would do honor to the best European stage, have a gift of expression and a facility of invention that make them the rivals of the most eminent Italian improvisatori. With such entertainers the Turks can readily forego our more elaborate forms of amusement, even if they were available.[183]

---

But the stories and drolleries of the Medak—although always a perennial source of pleasure—are not the chief attractions of the coffeehouse. These are partly supplied, as Lowell so playfully puts it, by

The kind nymph to Bacchus born

By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems

Gifted on her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams—

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grapes’ bewildering juice.

Although the use of tobacco was long forbidden in the Mohammedan world[184] and although its lawfulness is still disputed by a large number of Moslems, especially the Wahabis, the “scented weed” is now used almost universally from Morocco to Delhi and from Stamboul to Mecca. It is, however, well for the Moslems of to-day that tobacco and coffee were unknown in the time of Mohammed, as he would most likely have put them under the same ban as intoxicating liquors and games of chance.

Nothing more perfectly harmonizes with the temperament of the Oriental than the smoking habit, and it is doubtless this practice that contributes not a little to that remarkable patience and that wonderful repose which so distinguishes the Turk and the Arab from the nervous and overwrought American or European. An Oriental reclining on his cushioned divan with his bubbling narghile supplied with the rose-scented tobacco from Shiraz or Salonica is a matchless picture of contentment, and nothing that the hurry-scurry West can offer will excite his envy or disturb his peaceful reverie.

The invariable accompaniment of the narghile or chibouk with their aromatic and sedative narcotic is the zarf, with its small cup of foaming black coffee made from the prized Mocha berries of Arabic Felix.[185] Only in the East is this grateful and refreshing beverage properly prepared.[186] Let those who doubt this statement read of its virtues as celebrated by the Arabic poet, Abd-el-Kader Anazari Djezeri Hanbali. Only those will find his eulogy a wild extravagance who have never experienced the revivifying effects of the dark ambrosia that so gladdens the Bedouin’s tent and the pasha’s palace.

O Coffee! thou dispellest the cares of the great; thou bringest back those who wander from the paths of knowledge. Coffee is the beverage of the people of God and the cordial of His servants who thirst for wisdom. When coffee is infused into the bowl it exhales the odor of musk and is of the color of ink. The truth is not known except to the wise who drink it from the foaming coffeecup. God has deprived fools of coffee, who, with invincible obstinacy condemn it as injurious.

Coffee is our gold and in the place of its libations we are in the enjoyment of the best and noblest society. Coffee is as innocent a drink as the purest milk from which it is distinguished only by its color. Tarry with thy coffee in the place of its preparation and the good God will hover over thee and participate in His feast. There the graces of the salon, the luxury of life, the society of friends, all furnish a picture of the abode of happiness.

Every care vanishes when the cup-bearer presents the delicious chalice. It will circulate freely through thy veins and will not rankle there. If thou doubtest this, contemplate the youth and beauty of those who drink it. Grief cannot exist where it grows; sorrow humbles itself in obedience before its powers.

Coffee is the drink of God’s people; in it is health. Let this be the answer to those who doubt its qualities. In it we will drown our adversities and in its fire consume our sorrows. Whoever has once seen the blissful chalice will scorn the wine-cup. Glorious drink! Thy color is the seal of purity and reason proclaims it genuine. Drink with confidence and regard not the prattle of fools who condemn without foundation.[187]

So much for the oriental coffeehouse and the pleasure and surcease of care and sorrow which it offers its listless, dream-loving habitués. What are the amusements of the women of the Orient? Let the distinguished English writer, Julia Pardoe, whose knowledge of Turkish life and manners was not surpassed even by that of the well-informed Lady Mary Wortley Montague, give a reply to this interesting but ill-understood question. In the quotation given she is writing about the women of Constantinople, but what she says of them can, ceteris paribus, be asserted of their sisters in other parts of the Ottoman Empire:

It is a great fallacy [she declares] to imagine that Turkish females are like birds in a cage or captives in a cell;—far from it; there is not a public festival, be it Turk, Frank, Armenian or Greek, where they are not to be seen in numbers sitting upon their carpets or in their carriages, surrounded by slaves and attendants, eager and delighted spectators of the revel. Then they have their gilded and glittering caiques on the Bosphorus, where, protected by their veils, their ample mantles and their negro guard, they spend long hours in passing from house to house, visiting their acquaintances and gathering and dispensing the gossip of the city.

All this may and indeed must appear startling to persons who have accustomed themselves to believe that Turkish wives were morally manacled slaves. There are, probably, no women so little trammelled in the world; so free to come and go unquestioned, provided that they are suitably attended, while it is equally certain that they enjoy this privilege like innocent and happy children, making their pleasures of the flowers and the sunshine and revelling, like the birds and bees in the summer brightness, profiting by the enjoyment of the passing hour and reckless or thoughtless of the future.[188]

Since these lines were written, the liberty of the Turkish woman has been greatly extended, as have also her opportunities of obtaining a higher education, which were so long denied her.

From the foregoing it seems that the peoples of the Orient—both men and women—get quite as much pleasure out of life—in their own way, of course—as do our luxury-loving people of the Occident at the expenditure of far greater effort and wealth. But in this, as in other things—every one to his taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.

But much as one may be interested in the mosques and medresses and the customs of the people of Konia, the traveler of a practical turn of mind will find more to engage his attention in the splendid barrage which was constructed about a decade ago, some twenty odd miles to the south-east of the city, for the irrigation of the broad plain of Konia. It is the work of a German company, which, by utilizing the waters of two neighboring lakes—the Beushehr and the Sogla Geul—has enabled its enterprising managers to irrigate nearly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of valuable land which would otherwise remain arid and unproductive. It is notable as being the first undertaking of the kind in Asia Minor, and has already been of untold value to the inhabitants of Konia Plain. The success of this important work is sure to lead to the construction of similar reservoirs in other parts of Anatolia, with the happy result that many broad stretches of this long-neglected and deserted country will eventually be restored to their former fertility and populousness.

Time was, as history informs me, when Asia Minor, which has long been presented in many parts by pictures of utter barrenness and desolation, was one of the most fertile and productive and flourishing in the world. It was from this land, as DeCandolle[189] has shown, that Europe received many of its most important fruits and cereals, as well as many of its most valuable shrubs and trees. From Asia Minor came the peach, the plum, the cherry, and the apricot, the quince and the mulberry, and probably also the apple and the olive. From it also came wheat, barley, oats and lucerne and numerous other useful cultivated plants. It was doubtless for these reasons that an old legend located in this region the cradle of our race.

Before leaving Konia it may be noted that it was on the route of the Crusades led by Godfrey de Bouillon and Frederic Barbarossa. Godfrey’s forces found the city abandoned by the enemy, but the army of Barbarossa was forced to take the city by storm and compel the Sultan to sue for peace.

After leaving the old Seljukian capital we found little worthy of note until we reached the famous chain of the Taurus Mountains. For a great part of the distance our train passed over a level plain, sparsely populated. Here and there were small villages with mud-built houses surrounded by diminutive tracts of land under cultivation, not unlike those that are everywhere visible in northern Mexico.

What impressed us here, as in other parts of Anatolia, was the paucity of its inhabitants and their total failure to utilize the marvelous natural resources of the country. Although the area of Asia Minor is equal to that of France, its population is but one-fifth of that of the French Republic. And yet the natural resources of the country are enormous, and if properly conserved would suffice to support several times its present population. Rich in valuable minerals of all kinds, its untold treasures of ore are left unmined. Its flora, too, is as varied as it is valuable. The oak, for instance, counts more varieties here than in any other part of the world. Fifty-two species occur in Anatolia, twenty-six of which are not known to exist elsewhere. But in this part of the world, forestry is an unknown science. Worse still. Not only is arboriculture practically unknown, but thousands of valuable trees are every year wantonly destroyed. If the water, mineral, and forest resources were properly conserved and developed, Asia Minor would again be as it was in the long ago—one of the most populous and flourishing regions of the globe.

No country perhaps has seen such a succession of prosperous states and had such a host of historical reminiscences, under such distinct eras and such various distributions of territory. It is memorable in the beginning of history for its barbarian kings and nobles whose names stand as commonplaces and proverbs of wealth and luxury. The magnificence of Pelops imparts lustre even to the brilliant dreams of the mythologist. The name of Crœsus, King of Lydia ... goes as a proverb for his enormous riches. Midas, King of Phrygia, had such abundance of the precious metals that he was said by the poets to have the power of turning whatever he touched into gold. The tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, was one of the seven wonders of the world.[190]

But as it is now, this country, once so famed for its wealth and its splendid cities, for its “powerful and opulent kingdoms, Greek or Barbarian, of Pontus and Bithynia and Pergamus—Pergamus[191] with its two hundred thousand choice volumes”—is so poor and neglected that its people frequently suffer from famine and from all the miseries consequent on improvidence and failure to utilize the vast treasures within their reach. It is to be hoped that the advent of the railroad and the introduction of irrigation and the promised establishment of an efficient forestry will ere long materially improve the present sad economic condition of the country, and that fair Anatolia will once more be covered, as of yore, with flourishing marts of commerce and magnificent cities where there are now crumbling columns of Greek temples and scattered fragments of Roman palaces and amphitheaters—a veritable “sepulchre of the past.”

The plain which we now traversed was for a considerable distance gravelly land, alternately marshy and dry and not infrequently very saline. Rocks of a volcanic character were often visible. There were little evidences of life except here and there long droves of heavily burdened donkeys and camels and occasional flocks and herds of wandering Turkomans.

Trains of camels in the deserts of Asia and Africa have always had a peculiar fascination for me. Like the llama trains of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes they seem to be specially adapted to their environment and to the work which they are called upon to perform. Before the invention of the steam engine both, in their sphere, were all but indispensable—the sure-footed llama on dizzy mountain heights, the thirst-resisting camel in torrid, interminable deserts. Even since the appearance of the locomotive these useful animals are apparently as much in demand as ever. For, in addition to transporting merchandise, as formerly, where railroads do not exist, they are still in constant use in delivering goods to such roads as are already in operation.

In the region of which I am now speaking, one, at times, sees only three or four camels at most; at others there are a hundred or more, all loaded to the limit of endurance. But whenever they appear in the gray, barren, undulating plain, they, with their drivers, at once give life and color to the landscape which is else but a dull study in monochrome. Their leader is usually a dirty, unkempt, diminutive donkey—in marked contrast to the stately animals that submissively follow him—which is frequently bestridden by a somnolent Turk wearing a faded old fez and voluminous red trousers, with his legs reaching almost to the ground. As the caravan gradually approaches one hears the jingling of the bells of the light-stepping donkey and the clanging of the larger bells of the heavy, lurching camel. But we also presently discover that both donkey and camels are decked with gaudy trappings adorned with beads and cowrie shells. These, however, are not solely for ornament, as one might suppose, but rather to avert the evil eye which, in the Near East, is even more dreaded than it is in any part of southern Italy.

How the camel carries one back to patriarchal times, to times even when the domesticated horse was known only in warfare! As a long line of betasselled camels came near our train one day, they seemed by their sneers and the lofty manner in which they held up their heads to be conscious of their ancient lineage and to resent the trespassing by the Bagdad Railway on what was long their exclusive domain. But to judge by the general appearance of the country—the old patched tents, the reed huts, the hovels of unbaked mud, the peculiar garb of the people, the primitive methods of agriculture, the simple manners and customs of the people—this part of Anatolia, notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, is in almost the same condition as it was when Joseph and his brethren tended their father’s flocks in the land of Canaan.

If this part of Asia Minor was as arid and desolate in the days of Godfrey de Bouillon and Barbarossa—and we have no reason to believe it was materially different—we can easily realize what must have been the trials and sufferings of the Crusaders during their long march through “burning Phrygia” and inhospitable Lycaonia. Their route was through a dry, sterile, and salty desert, a land of tribulation and horror.[192] It was then, no wonder that, in view of the perils and sufferings entailed by an inland expedition, the later Crusaders preferred to make the journey from Europe to the Holy Land by sea.

Terror [writes Michaud] opened to the pilgrims all the passages of Mount Taurus. Throughout their triumphant march the Christians had nothing to dread but famine, the heat of the climate and the badness of the roads. They had particularly much to suffer in crossing a mountain situated between Coxon and Marash which their historians denominate, “The Mountain of the Devil.”[193]

So great, indeed, were the toils and dangers and disasters experienced by the Crusaders before they reached the Holy City of Jerusalem, that the brilliant French historian is moved to declare, “If great national remembrances inspire us with the same enthusiasm, if we entertain as strong a respect for the memory of our ancestors, the Conquest of the Holy Land must be for us as glorious and memorable an epoch as the war of Troy was for the people of Greece.”[194] Again he avers, “When comparing these two memorable wars and the poetical masterpieces that have celebrated them, we cannot but think the subject of the Jerusalem Delivered is more wonderful than that of the Iliad.”[195]

There are several passes through the Taurus, but by far the most important of them is the famous one long known as the Pylæ Ciliciæ, or Cilician Gates.[196] From time immemorial this celebrated pass has been the gateway between Syria and Asia Minor, between southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe. Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Crusaders passed through them. Asurbanipal, Cyrus the Great, and Sapor I led their armies through their narrow defiles. Cyrus the Younger and Xenophon pushed their way through them on their way to fateful Cunaxa. Alexander, Cicero, Harun-al-Rashid led their armies through this narrow passage. It was also traversed by St. Paul, by hosts of the Crusaders and by pilgrims innumerable from the earliest ages of the Church.

On our way across the Taurus we followed in the footsteps of Alexander and the Crusaders as far as the Vale of Bozanti. Here the Bagdad Railway diverges slightly eastward from the old military and trade route which passes through the Cilician Gates. As we preferred to follow the old historic route to passing through nearly eleven miles of railway tunnels, we left the train at Bozanti Khan and proceeded by carriage through the Cilician Gates to Tarsus.

We were well repaid for so doing, for we had, in consequence, one of the most delightful mountain drives in the world. On each side of the road were towering heights clothed with forests of pine and other evergreens, while rising far above these was the sky-piercing summit of Bulgar Dagh covered with a mantle of snow of dazzling whiteness. Further on our way

The pass expands

Its strong jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,

And seems with its accumulated crags,

To overhang the world.

And, as if to give life and variety to the majestic scene, we saw circling the fantastic peaks and hovering above the beetling crags in quest of prey, a number of great bare-necked vultures, which seemed to be fully as large as the lammergeier of the Alps and no mean rivals of the condor of the Andes.

The narrow gorge known as the Cilician Gates answers perfectly to Cicero’s appellation of Pylæ-Tauri, gateway of the Taurus. And it corresponds almost equally well with Xenophon’s description of it when he declares it “but broad enough for a chariot to pass with great difficulty.” On both sides of the mountain torrent which rushes along the historic roadway are lofty and almost vertical precipices that could easily be so fortified as to convert it into a Thermopylæ, where a handful of men could hold a large army at bay. It was indeed by fortressing this pass that Mehemet Ali was long able, in defiance of the power of the Turkish Sultan, to retain control of Syria.

Shortly after emerging from the Pylæ Ciliciæ we catch our first view of the famed Cilician Plain, the Cilicia Campestris, which occupies so large a page in the history of this part of the world. Through it we see coursing like silver bands the distant rivers of familiar names—the Sarus, the Pyramus, and the Cydnus. The road in the vicinity of the pass is fringed with forests of pine and plane trees, under whose outstretched branches flows a leaping, laughing, tuneful stream which is ever making the same gladsome music as it did when St. Paul passed this way bearing the joyful tidings of the Gospel to the receptive peoples of Asia Minor. But as we near the plain we note a marked change in climate. Vegetation is not only more luxuriant but is almost semi-tropical in character. The road is bordered with laurel, bay, cedar, evergreen oak, wild fig, and wild olive. There are thickets of myrtle and oleander draped with wild vines and creepers, which greatly enhance the picturesqueness of the enchanting scene.

It was along this road, embowered in all the verdure and bloom of a semi-tropical climate, that the weary and footsore Crusaders passed after their long and toilsome march through the burning desert of Phrygia. Now that they had crossed the formidable Taurus, the greatest barrier athwart their long line of march, and were at last about to tread the sacred soil of the Holy Land, we can easily imagine the joy with which they chanted their favorite hymns, the enthusiasm with which they filled the air with their war cry, Dieu le veult. Clad in polished armor, shining brightly in the Syrian sun, and exultantly marching under their great banners, they form a magnificent pageant, worthy of the chivalry of the Ages of Faith and of the noble cause in which they have magnanimously pledged fortune and life. And as the Christian host moves onward towards its goal, “one pictures, above the lines of steel, the English leopards, the lilies of France, the great sable eagle of the Empire and then the other coats of the great houses of Europe—chevrons and fesses and pales”—ever triumphantly approaching the Holy City until at last they are privileged to “plant above the Holy Sepulchre the banner with the five potent crosses, argent and or, unearthly, wonderful as should be the arms of the heavenly Jerusalem.”

Still following in the footsteps of the Crusaders we finally, after the most delightful of drives, arrived at the old city of Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul the Apostle. This was the first city in which Baldwin and Bohemond and the Tancred the Brave flew their colors after crossing the Taurus. We had followed in their footsteps a great part of the way from the legend-wrapped Bosphorus to the romantic Cydnus—the Cydnus in which Alexander so imprudently bathed, where Cleopatra met Anthony and where legend long had it that Barbarossa lost his life. But the truth of history bids us declare that this great German hero—in whose footsteps we had so closely followed from his embarkation on the far-off Danube—perished not in the waters of the Cydnus but in those of the Calycadnus, several score miles to the northwest of the more famed Cilician stream. It was then in the Calycadnus—the modern Gieuk Gu—that “perished the noblest type of German kingship, the Kaiser Redbeard, of whom history and legend have so much to tell.” The spot where he met his fate was fabled to have been indicated long ages before by a rock near the river’s source, which was said to bear the portentous words Hic hominum maximus peribit—here shall perish the greatest of men.

But although history had declared that the heroic Römischer Kaiser was no more, his admiring subjects knew better. Like Charlemagne, Desmond of Kilmallock, Sebastian I of Brazil, Napoleon Bonaparte, and other worthies,[197] he still lives, but has retired into strict seclusion till, in the fulness of time, “he shall come again full twice as fair and rule over his people.” According to one legend the monarch is fast asleep in the castle of Bordenstein, or in the vaults of the old palace of Kaiserslautern. But according to another legend, he is held by enchanted slumber under the Kyffhauser mountain. All, however, agree that he sits

Taciturn, sombre, sedate and grave,

before a stone table “through which his fiery-red beard has grown nearly to the floor, or around which it has coiled itself nearly three times.” Here, like King Arthur, of whom it is written, “Arturus rex quondam rexque futurus,” he rests until

In some dark day when Germany

Hath need of warriors such as he,

A voice to tell of her distress

Shall pierce the mountain’s deep recess—

Shall ring through the dim vaults and scare

The spectral ravens round his chair,

And from his trance the sleeper wake.

The solid mountain shall dispart,

The granite slab in splinters start,

(Responsive to those accents weird)

And loose the Kaiser’s shaggy beard.

Through all the startled air shall rise

The old Teutonic battle cries;

The horns of war that once could stir

The wild blood of the Berserker,

Shall fling their blare abroad, and then

The champion of his own Almain,

Shall Barbarossa come again.

CHAPTER IX
IN HISTORIC CILICIA CAMPESTRIS

Domes, minarets, their spiry heads that rear,

Mocking with gaudy hues the ruins near;

Dim crumbling colonnades and marble walls,

Rich columns, broken statutes, roofless halls;

Beauty, deformity, together thrown,

A maze of ruins, date, design unknown—

Such is the scene, the conquest Time hath won.

Nicolas Michel.

It is doubtful whether, in any part of the world, more history has been condensed in less area than in the picturesque region formerly called Cilicia. Roughly speaking, it comprised the triangle bordered by the Mediterranean and the lofty ranges of the Taurus and Amanus Mountains. Its rich alluvial plains, watered by the celebrated Cydnus and Pyramus, Sarus, and Pinarus, early attracted a large population, who found there not only a mild and serene climate but also a soil that yielded in rare abundance the plants and fruits most useful to their sustenance and comfort. But, although the economical value of the Cilician Plain—called by Strabo Cilicia Campestris—was great, it was rather the political and military importance of this country that made it the prize of contending nations from the earliest dawn of history.

In the days when Hittite and Assyrian fiercely contended for universal empire—long

Ere Rome was built or smiled fair Athen’s charms

it was the highway between Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. It was the royal road between Persia and Greece on which was heard the martial tread of the armies of Xerxes, Cyrus, and Alexander. Rameses II—the Napoleon of Egypt—and Asurbanipal—the Napoleon of Assyria—led their victorious hosts along this road and, like the warriors who had preceded them, found subsistence for their men in the fertile valleys of the Pyramus and the Cydnus. It was also a field of frequent sanguinary conflicts during the days of Pompey and Cicero, of Mark Anthony and Zenobia, the rarely gifted but ill-fated “Queen of the East.” It was a continued arena of strife during protracted wars between the Byzantine Emperors and the Sassanian Kings, between the Osmanlis and Timur and Jenghiz Khan, and, in recent times, between the Sultan of Constantinople and his ambitious and rebellious viceroy, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.

Three of the decisive battles of the world war were fought on the Cilician Plain. It was on the banks of the Pinarus that Alexander won his memorable victory over Darius—a victory that gave the irresistible Macedonian the control of the vast region between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates and paved the way for the brilliant triumph at Arbela, which made him the master of the world’s greatest continent. It was here that more than five hundred years later Septimus Severus crushed his rival Pescennius Niger, when “the troops of Europe asserted their usual ascendant over the effeminate natives of Asia.” And it was on this same historic spot that Heraclius defeated Chosroes and once more, in a most signal manner, showed the superiority of the West over the East.

But in addition to its celebrity as the theater of contests for world supremacy, Cilicia, like so many other regions we have described in the preceding pages, is noted as a field of romance, of myths, and legends innumerable.

Among the strange romances that still await the pen of novelist and historian is that connected with the extraordinary life and deeds of the Turkoman freebooter, Kutchuk Ali Uglu, who a century ago had his stronghold in the mountain fastnesses near Issus. Here, during forty years, he openly defied the authority of the Porte and the Great Powers of Europe. With the audacity of a Fra Diavolo and the cruelty and relentlessness of a Barbary corsair he ravaged the surrounding country and plundered traveling merchants and the grand annual caravan of pilgrims from Constantinople to Mecca whenever they came within his reach.

I am not [he was wont to say] as other Darah Beys are—fellows without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the King’s highway;—I am content with what God sends me. I await his good pleasure, and—Alhumlillah—God be praised—He never leaves me long in want of anything.[198]

Among some of the most daring performances of this desperado was the seizure of the master of an English vessel with a part of its crew, who were cast into prison. A large ransom was demanded for their release, but before this was forthcoming all but one perished. Strange as it may now seem, the English government with all its power was never able to obtain any satisfaction for this atrocious act of violence.

Shortly afterwards, the dauntless robber took possession of a richly laden French merchantman—which, through ignorance of the locality, came too near his fortress—and after appropriating its cargo, sank the vessel and sent the captain and crew to the French Consul at Alexandretta. Protests against these high-handed proceedings were made by all the consular authorities at Aleppo, but without avail. To the vigorous remonstrance of the Dutch Consul, Kutchuk Ali coolly and blandly replied:

My dear Friend, I am threatened with attacks from the four quarters of the earth; I am without money; I am without means; and the ever watchful providence of the Almighty sends me a vessel laden with merchandise. Say, would you not in my place lay hold of it, or not?

It was only a few months later that this same consul was arrested and imprisoned by the audacious freebooter. And, notwithstanding the cordial friendship which had long existed between the two men, the ruthless marauder did not liberate his prisoner until he had extorted from him a very large ransom.

And during the eight months’ incarceration of the hapless consul, Kutchuk Ali—was it from shame for ill-treating an old friend?—never once visited his hapless victim or admitted him to his presence. But, to show the character of this singular brigand, he did not fail, through his lieutenant, to send to his prisoner words of sympathy and consolation.

Tell him [the captor said] that unfortunately my coffers were empty when fate brought him into this territory; but let him not despair, God is great and mindful of us. Such misfortunes are inseparable from the fate of men of renown, and from the lot of all born to fill high stations. Bid him be of good cheer; a similar doom has twice been mine, and once during nine months in the condemned cell of Abdul Rahman Pasha; but I never despaired of God’s mercy, and all came right at last,—Alla Karim—God is bountiful.[199]

When one is told that Kutchuk Ali, during his forty years of a desperado’s life, never had more than two hundred men, and frequently a far less number, it seems incredible that he was so long able to defy not only the Porte but even the greatest powers of Europe. But we forget that the notorious Calabian bandit, Fra Diavolo, during the same period and with a much smaller band of outlaws, was wantonly perpetrating similar atrocities in southern Italy. And it was only a few generations earlier that the notorious Captain Kidd was roving the high seas in open defiance of the naval power of the civilized world.

One of the most popular legends in Cilicia is that of the Seven Sleepers. According to the Christian version they were seven brothers who fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus during the persecution of the Emperor Decius, and did not awake until the time of Theodosius II—nearly two hundred years later. The Mohammedans, however, contend that the cave in which this preternatural event occurred was about ten miles northwest of Tarsus. Because of the prominence the Prophet gives the legend in the Koran, the Cilician cave has become among the Moslems a favorite place of pilgrimage. Mohammed has, however, elaborated the story by introducing the dog—Al Rakim—of the Seven Sleepers and descanting on the care that Allah took of the bodies of the sleepers during their long, miraculous sleep.[200]

But it is in classical legend and myth that Cilicia is specially rich. It was near the mouth of the Pyramus, according to Homer, that Bellerophon, after his fall from Pegasus,

Forsook by heaven, forsaking humankind,

Wide o’er the Aleian field he chose to stray,

A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way.

Mopsuestia, which was formerly one of the largest and most flourishing cities of Cilicia, was fabled to have been founded during the Trojan war by Mopsus, the son of Manto and Apollo, while Adana, the most important commercial center on the Sarus and the Bagdad Railway, owes its name, legend has it, to Adam, its fabulous founder.

A notable feature of the history of Cilicia is the number of crowned heads who died or found their last resting place within its borders. Constantius, the son of Constantine, died of fever at Mopsucrene, near Tarsus, while marching against his nephew and rival, Julian the Apostate. It was to Tarsus that the embalmed body of the Apostate Emperor, who had been transfixed by a Persian javelin beyond the Tigris, was brought for burial. It was in Tarsus that Maximinus, the last of the great persecutors of the Church, preceding Constantine the Great, died in the greatest agony of a frightful disease—a visitation, according to many, for his barbarous persecutions of the Christians and for his horrible blasphemies against their Lord and Savior. It was, we are informed by Strabo, at Anchiale, the port of Tarsus, where were entombed the mortal remains of the celebrated Assyrian ruler known to the Greeks as Sardanapalus. On his monument was a stone statue beneath which was the famous epitaph—attributed to the Assyrian monarch himself—which, as rendered by Byron in his tragedy “Sardanapalus,” ran:

Sardanapalus,

The King and son of Ancyndaraxes

In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus.

Eat, drink and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.[201]

Asurbanipal, according to this inscription which was supposed to express in a few words the guiding principles of this life, evidently belonged to that class of Europeans who are seemingly becoming daily more numerous of whom the poet speaks in the words:

Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna

Vix pueri credunt.[202]

The population of Cilicia, as might be expected from its having been from time immemorial the great arena of the nations of the Orient and the Occident, has always been of the most cosmopolitan character. In ancient times Medes and Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Scythians and Hittites foregathered here, sometimes bent on the purpose of commerce but more frequently on the prosecution of war and conquest. To-day we find here Syrians and Arabians, Greeks and Armenians, Kurds and Ansaryii, Turkomans and Osmanlis, and representatives from divers parts of Africa and Europe. Was it this heterogeneous character of the Cilicians which gave rise to their widespread reputation for perfidy and untruthfulness and that led to the proverb Cilix haud facile verum dicet?

Knowing the complex character of its inhabitants, one is not surprised to learn that the gods and idols of the Cilicians were as manifold as the people themselves and that their worship exhibited all the promiscuity of the divers nations from whence they came. Baal and Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, and Osiris had their altars alongside those of Mars and Mercury, Zeus and Aphrodite. There was, indeed, a time—just before the advent of the world’s Redeemer—when it could be said that Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was, in very truth, the pantheon of paganism.

During the zenith of its glory, Cilicia was one of the most densely populated countries in the world. But it has long since so fallen from its high estate that, like the lands of the Nile and the Euphrates, it is a region of ruins. So great indeed have been the ravages of time and warring mortals that “ruins of cities, evidently of an age after Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day, astonish the adventurous traveler by their magnificence and elegance.”[203]

Mopsuestia, which once counted two hundred thousand inhabitants, was an archbishopric and for a time the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, now numbers less than a thousand. Anazarbas, which was the home of the poet Oppian and Dioscorides who, “during fifteen centuries was an undisputed authority in botany and materia medica, has long since been level with the ground.” Nor is this all. Of many places mentioned by Cicero, when he was proconsul of Cilicia, even the sites are unknown.

Because of the strong appeal made by its legendary and historic lore we lingered longer in Tarsus than in any other spot in the Cilician plain. Like many other places we visited during our journey, Tarsus is as rich in myth and legend as it is in literary and historical associations. According to one myth, Tarsus was founded by Perseus, the son of Jupiter and Danæ, while on his fabled expedition against the Gorgons. Another has it that the city was so named because Pegasus, the winged horse of Olympus, dropped there one of his pinions.[204] Josephus, however, identifies it with the Tarshish of the Old Testament, whence the ships of Hiram and Solomon brought their treasures of tin, silver, and gold.[205]

From an inscription on the Black Obelisk of Salmanasar II, we learn that Tarsus was captured by the Assyrians under Salmanasar about the middle of the ninth century, B. C. It was thus in existence several centuries before the mythical Romulus and Remus erected on the Capitoline their sanctuary for homicides and runaway slaves, and its foundation was probably laid before the legendary introduction into Greece of the Phœnician alphabet by Cadmus when he went in quest of Europa.

Centuries passed by and Tarsus became a great and flourishing center of commerce and literary activity. While Paris—La Ville Lumière—was as yet only a collection of mud huts on a little island in the Seine, inhabited by the Gallic Parisii, and London was but “a thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart”[206] and occupied by half-savage, woad-stained Britons, Tarsus ranked as a center of Greek thought and knowledge with the world-famed cities, Athens and Alexandria.[207] Its schools and lecture rooms were frequented by vast numbers of students from far and near, while its agora and gymnasium, as in Athens in the days of Socrates, drew large concourses of people, young and old, who assembled to discuss not only the current news of the day, but also questions of literature, science, and philosophy.

Although famed throughout the Roman Empire as a civitas libera et mimunis—a capital and a free city—and as a great emporium of eastern trade, its proudest boast was that it was a city of schools and scholars. Here were found poets and orators of marked eminence. Here were philosophers of many schools, Stoics and Peripatetics, Platonists and Epicureans—all with their enthusiastic followers and all seriously discussing the same problems which have engaged the attention of thoughtful men from their time to our own.

In the long list of men produced by Tarsus, or who added luster to its name as teacher of students, were the two Athenodori, one of whom had been the tutor of Julius Cæsar and the other the friend of Cato and the instructor of Augustus. These were Stoics. Among the Academicians was Nestor, who was the preceptor of Marcellus, the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus. Other eminent men of Tarsus, mentioned by Strabo, were the philosophers, Archimedes and Antipater, the latter of whom was highly praised by Cicero, and who, next to Zeno, was considered as the most eminent of the Stoics. There were also Strabo, the great geographer, the grammarians Diodorus and Artemidorus, and the poets Dionysides and Aratus, from whose poem, “Phænomena,” St. Paul quoted the pregnant words, “For we too are His offspring,” in his epochal address to the Athenians on the Areopagus.

According to Strabo, Rome was full of learned men from Tarsus, in whose schools, as has been well said, was taught in its completeness the whole circle of instruction, the systematic course from which we get our word “encyclopædia.”[208]

But the flowering of so many ages of preparation in philosophy and religion was the great “Apostle of the Gentiles.” The selection of his birthplace seems to have been providential. Sir William Ramsay is so convinced of this that he writes “that it was the one suitable place that has been borne in on the present writer during long study of the conditions of society and geographical environment of the Cilician lands and cities.... Its peculiar suitability to educate and mould the mind of him who should in due time make the religion of the Jewish race intelligible to the Græco-Roman world, and raise that world up to the moral level of the Hebrew people and the spiritual level of ability to sympathize with the Hebrew religion in its perfected stage, lay in the fact that Tarsus was the city whose institutions best and most completely united the oriental and the western character.... Not that even in Tarsus the union was perfect; that was impossible so long as the religion of the two elements were inharmonious and mutually hostile. But the Tarsian state was more successful than any of the other of the great cities of that time in producing an amalgamated society, in which the oriental and the occidental spirit in union attained in some degree to a higher plain of thought and action. In others the Greek spirit, which was always anti-Semitic, was too strong and too resolutely bent on attaining supremacy and crushing out all opposition. In Tarsus the Greek qualities and powers were used and guided by a society which was on the whole more Asiatic in character.”[209]

In Tarsus the future apostle came into close contact with the greatest teachers and scholars of his time, and was thus prepared to enter the intellectual arena with the keenest minds of Greece and Rome. Being, as he could proudly boast, “a Roman of no mean city,” as well as a disciple of Gamaliel, one of the seven wise men of the Jews, he was peculiarly fitted to preach the truths of the Gospel not only to his own people but also to the much greater world of the Gentiles.

Never was a more important or a more far-reaching mission entrusted to mortal man. It is not too much to say that no one of his time was better equipped for it than the tent maker of Tarsus. Wherever he could secure a hearing for his marvelous message he was sure to go—to the synagogue, to the agora, to the courts of governors and consuls. Learned in the Law and the Prophets, he was a match for the ablest teachers of Israel. Familiar with the literature and philosophy of the pagan world, he spoke as one having authority before the “Men of Athens” and the representatives of the Cæsars. Thanks to the opportunities which he enjoyed in his youth of associating with the wise and learned men of Tarsus and to his thorough acquaintance with the highest forms of Greek culture, he was able, through his quick intelligence and his ardent love of souls, “to recognize and sympathize with the strivings of those who, living in the times of ignorance, were yet seeking after God, ‘if haply they might feel after Him and find Him,’ and to read in their aspirations after a higher life the work of the law written in the hearts of all men.”[210]

As one wanders through the narrow and squalid streets of modern Tarsus—a city of less than twenty thousand inhabitants—one finds no vestige whatever of its former splendor. But few ruins remain, the most conspicuous of which is the concrete foundation of a Roman structure popularly regarded as the tomb of the cynical voluptuary, Sardanapalus. No tradition indicates the house of the Apostle of the Gentiles or points to any church dedicated to his memory. The banks of the silt-filled Cydnus are lonely and desolate. Owing to the neglected condition of the river channel, no white-winged ships are here visible, as of yore, laden with the treasures of foreign lands. And yet it was up this now abandoned stream that Cleopatra sailed in her gorgeous barge when she came to answer the challenge of Mark Anthony. How, by her surpassing address, she led captive the great triumvir is admirably described by Shakespeare, who, following Plutarch, paints the famous picture of her entrance into Tarsus, which was then in the dazzling splendor of oriental magnificence:

The barge she sat in, like a burnisht throne,

Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick.

With them the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke

And made the water which they beat, to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person

It beggared all description, she did lie

In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue,

O’erpicturing that Venus, where we see

The fancy outwork nature. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-colored fans whose wind did seem,

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did.

The old capital of Cilicia is, of truth, a city of a wonderful historic past. But among all her proud memories those which have made her best known throughout the ages and which will endure the longest are not those of her abounding wealth and luxury, her superb monuments and palaces and temples, long in ruins; not those that clustered around her poets and philosophers and made her a favored sanctuary of the Muses; not those of her schools and gymnasia and her one-time eminence as the rival of Athens and Alexandria as the home of learning and culture; not those of Persian satraps and Roman proconsuls who here lived as the famed representatives of imperial authority; not those awakened by the presence within her gates of an Asurbanipal, an Alexander, or a Cicero; not those associated with the love-enmeshed Mark Anthony and the fateful “Siren of the Nile,” who both perished the ignoble victims of a debasing passion and a foiled ambition. No; that which has rendered her immortal is that she was the birthplace of a poor tent maker who was disowned by his own family because he became the bond servant of the Crucified, to whom he bore witness from Jerusalem to Rome; of one who, while preaching the good tidings of the Gospel, toiled night and day lest he should “be chargeable to any one”; one who, while preaching the Kingdom of God, was accused by the Thessalonian Jews of “turning the world upside down”;[211] one who, during his long and fruitful apostolate and his almost superhuman labors in the service of his Master, gloried in persecution and was the frequent victim of stripes and chains and imprisonment; one who was the fearless teacher and the strong supporter of the infant Church, and whose matchless Epistles have, during nineteen centuries, been the guide of doctors and professors; one who wrote his own epitaph when he declared “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” and who, in the capital of the Cæsars, won an Apostle’s exceeding great reward—a martyr’s crown; one whom his contemporaries knew as Saul, otherwise Paul,[212] of Tarsus.

While in Cilicia I made a special effort to ascertain the truth regarding the Armenian massacre that so stirred Europe and America to horror in 1909. I had long been convinced that most of the reports circulated respecting Turkish atrocities in Cilicia, like the reports disseminated throughout the world regarding other similar atrocities so frequently ascribed to the Turks, were ex parte accounts of what had actually occurred and that most, if not all, of them were greatly exaggerated. And recalling the activities since 1885 of Armenian revolutionists, many of them inspired by Russian Nihilist propaganda, the conviction grew that in probably the majority of massacres in Asia Minor, as well as in that of Constantinople in 1896, “the Armenian revolutionaries, by their riotous action, had put themselves and their innocent countrymen outside the law.” As the result of my investigations I am now satisfied that my previous views were not without foundation.

The massacre in Cilicia—organized, it was averred, by the Moslem Jews of Salonica—surpassed in frightfulness any that had taken place during Abdul-Hamid’s long and troubled reign. When, therefore, one understands the origin of the Cilician massacre, one may safely conjecture the cause of most, if not all, of the others in Turkey which have so shocked the world during the last four decades.

But, in a matter of such import as the one under consideration, I prefer to give the views of those who visited Cilicia when the terrors of the great massacre in Adana were still fresh in the memory of everyone, or who by long residence in Armenia are well acquainted with its people and are thoroughly familiar with the measures to which Armenians resort in order to achieve their independence of the Ottoman Empire.

Many influences [writes an English traveler who had exceptional opportunities for studying the question and who is well disposed towards the Armenians] went to the making of the (Cilician) massacre, some more or less, obscure, as the part taken in planning it by the Turkish Jews of Salonika and others belonging to the deeper causes of faith and race which ever underlie these horrible affairs. But some were local and exhibited the inconceivable unwisdom which Armenians so often display in their larger dealings with Moslems.

Cilicia [known during the Crusades as Lesser Armenia] is a district closely connected with Armenian history and independence; and here, in the sudden period of liberty which followed the downfall of Abdul-Hamid, Armenians gave unrestrained vent to their aspirations. Their clubs and meeting-places were loud with boastings of what was soon to follow. Post cards were printed showing a map of the future Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and circulated through the Ottoman post. Armenian nationalists marched in procession in the streets bearing flags purporting to be the flag of Lesser Armenia come to life again. The name of the future king was bandied about, no aloof nebulous personage, but, it is said, a well-known Armenian land owner of the Cilician plain, held in peculiar disfavor by the Moslems. Giving a fuller meaning to these matters was the steady assertion that an Armenian army gathering in the mountains by Hajin and Zeitun—an army of rumor like the legendary Royalist Army of Jales which terrorized revolutionary France—would presently march upon Adana and set up an Armenian kingdom again.

Sober Armenians of Cilicia tell you now that these proceedings were folly, the work of revolutionary societies and hot-heads and that the mass of the Armenian population held aloof. But there can be no doubt that the movement was approved and supported by many, and intended to involve the whole race; that it had in fact, got beyond the control both of those who desired to go more slowly and those who disapproved of it altogether.[213]

What is here said of the hot-brained revolutionaries of Lesser Armenia can with even greater truth be affirmed of their seditious compatriots of Greater Armenia. For those who know them best do not hesitate to declare that their lurid accounts of frequent and inevitably recurrent atrocities in certain parts of Asia Minor are to be interpreted in the same way as those which were first published regarding the horrors of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909, and of Constantinople in 1896.[214] We get only one-sided reports respecting them, which reports, if not glaringly exaggerated, are in nearly all instances in severest condemnation of the “bloodthirsty” Turk.

No one probably has a more accurate knowledge of Turkey and her people or has made a more thoughtful study of the Armenian Question than has the noted traveler and Orientalist, David G. Hogarth, sometime fellow in the University of Oxford. With an experience of several years in Armenia, he frankly declares, writing of the Armenian Question:

So far as I understand this vexed matter, the source of the graver trouble is the presence in the heart of Armenia of the defiant Kurdish race which raids the villages where the flocks are fattest and the women most fair, now cutting an Armenian’s throat, now leaguing with him in a war on a hostile tribe and resisting in common the troops sent up to restore the Sultan’s peace. Whatever the Kurd does is done for the sake neither of Crescent nor Cross, for he bears neither one emblem nor the other in his heart, but just because he is Ishmael, his hand is against every man who has aught to lose.

The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone ... but behind the Armenian secret societies—and there are few Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies at some period of their lives—it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or, looking west, it espies, through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the agitators, Exeter Hall and the Armenian Committees. The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize the more because he represses, and so the vicious circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as administrator, oppress? So far we have heard one version only, one party to this suit with its stories of outrage and echoing through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the Moslem.

If the Kurdish Question could be settled by a vigorous Marshal, and the Porte secured against irresponsible European support of sedition, I believe that the Armenians would not have much more to complain of, like the Athenian allies of old, than the fact of subjection—a fact, be it noted, of very long standing; for the Turk rules by right of five hundred years’ possession, and before his day the Kurd, the Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman, preceded each other as over-lords of Greater Armenia to the misty days of the first Tigranes. The Turk claims certain rights in this matter—the right to safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets’ nests as Zeitun which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of the Eastern Taurus, the right to remain dominant by all means not outrageous.

I see no question at issue but this of outrage. For the rest there is but academic sympathy with aspiring nationalisms or subject religion, sympathy not over cogent in the mouths of those who have won and kept so much of the world as we: Arria must draw the dagger reeking from her own breast before she can hand it with any conviction to Pætus.[215]

To speak in this fashion of the Armenians is more painful to me than I can express. From my youth I have sympathized with them in their great sufferings and, like most other people who depended on one-sided information, I attributed all their misfortunes to the much maligned and much calumniated Turks. Were the Armenians raided and maltreated by the lawless and murderous Kurds, who have been responsible for the greater part of the crimes which have been imputed to the Osmanlis? A sensational report was at once flashed over the world of a great massacre in Asia Minor perpetrated by the fanatical and fiendish Turk. Were they victims of Russian intrigue and aggression, driven from their homes and forcibly separated from their families? Again it was the Turk that was at the bottom of it all. Did they suffer reprisals for seditious outbreaks of plotting Huntchagists and revolutionary Armenians of foreign extraction? Still again the hue and cry was raised in Europe and America that the soulless Turk, always the Turk, only the Turk, was the guilty one. Armenian agitators, Armenian jacks-in-office, Armenian revolutionary committees provoking the Turks to retaliate on their offenders in order to force the intervention of the Great Powers[216]—these political mischief-makers go scot-free while the ever vilified Osmanli is pilloried before the world as a monster of iniquity and a demon incarnate.

The Anatolian Halil Halid, who was born and bred in Asia Minor and who spent many years in England, commenting on the matters under consideration, pertinently asks, “Did the humanitarian British public know these things? No; it does not care to know anything which might be favorable to the Turks. Have the political journals of this country—Britain—mentioned the facts I have stated? Of course not, because—to speak plainly—they know that in the Armenian pie there were the fingers of some of their own politicians.”[217] And those that are well informed know the reason of Britain’s attitude toward Turkey, for they know that “since 1829, when the Greeks obtained their independence, England’s Near East policy has been remorselessly aimed at the demolition of the Turkish Empire and the destruction of Ottoman sovereignty.”

Does France, the first nation of Europe to form an alliance with the sublime Porte, know these things? She does, but, at the present time, it suits her purpose to feign ignorance of them and to follow the policy of England in her dealings with those whom she has professed to be her friends and allies since the days of Francis I. With a volte-face worthy of a politician she does not even allow a favorite Academician, Pierre Loti—who knows the Turks better probably than any man in France—to make a statement in their favor, without censoring it, for fear he will reflect on the course of the present government.

Does our own country, whose people are supposed to be always on the side of justice and fair play, know the truth about the Turks and Armenians in Asia Minor? Not one in a hundred; not one in a thousand. The reason is simple. They have heard only one side of the Armenian question, and, in most cases, are quite unwilling even to hear anything to the advantage of the long-defamed Turks. With most of our people the case of the Turks has been prejudged and thrown out of court. And when one who has made a thorough study of conditions in Asia Minor writes that “the most part of the peasantry are men of peace, needing no military force to coerce them, giving little occasion to the scanty police and observing a Pax Anatolica for religion’s sake,”[218] he gives most of our people, who should have an open mind, a distinct shock, but does not change in the least their life-long prejudices. And when the same well-informed writer declares that “Aliens, Greek, Armenian, Circassian thrust him”—the Turk—“on one side and take his little parcel of land by fraud or force”[219] he is suspected of being a special pleader and his testimony is rejected as worthless.

But it may be said that I too am a special pleader for the Turk. Nothing is farther from my intention. My sole desire is to make known the truth as I have found it, and I have found that it is not all on the side of the Armenians. “The Turk’s patience is almost inexhaustible, but when you attack his women and children his anger is aroused and nothing on earth can control it.”[220] Then, like all other races of mankind, when stirred by religious or political fanaticism or goaded on by domestic sedition and foreign intrigue, the Turks also resort to reprisals and massacres that startle the world. It may, however, be questioned whether in all their history the Turks have perpetrated such refined atrocities as characterized the Reign of Terror in France, Russia dragonades in Poland, Serbian and Bulgarian savagery in the Balkans, unprovoked deeds of violence instigated by Armenian revolutionists in Asia Minor. But of all the people involved in these unspeakable outrages the Turk is the only one who is not pardoned. Why not? He has never been granted a fair hearing before the great tribunal of humanity.

From the foregoing it is evident that the Armenian Question will not be settled so long as Armenian agitators are allowed to sow with impunity the seeds of sedition in Asia Minor, or so long as they are abetted by European nations whose manifest goal is the partition of the Turkish Empire.[221] It is also evident that, so long as present conditions persist, sporadic massacres like those provoked by the Armenians in Cilicia and Constantinople are inevitable. These conditions involve also the greater and more important Turkish Question, or, speaking broadly, the Mussulman Question. The Great Powers cannot, without grave consequences, treat Turkey as a pariah nation. This the ever-increasing number of adherents of the Prophet will not tolerate. The two hundred millions of the Faithful are, be it remembered, the chief factors in the Near Eastern Question, which can never be settled so long as the Moslems are not accorded fair play in the arena of nations. The present schemes of exploitation and conquest in Mohammedan lands now being executed by the Great Powers can, in the long run, have but one result—and that in spite of all peace treaties and leagues of nations—the result of still farther separating the Cross and the Crescent and of strengthening the barriers that have existed between the East and the West since Greek battled with Trojan on the Plain of Troy.

As we wandered through the suburbs of Tarsus, made fragrant by the inviting gardens and orchards of lemon and orange, we were deeply impressed with the possibilities of the exceptionally rich alluvial soil of the Cilician Plain. Having all the fertility of the Nile it should, if drained, irrigated, and scientifically farmed, sustain a population even greater than that which inhabited it in the days of Pompey and Trajan. In soil and climate it is as favorable for the production of cotton and sugar cane as Texas or Louisiana, while in cereals and fruits of many kinds it yields as large crops as the most favored districts of France or Germany.

But irrigation is needed near the foothills of the surrounding mountains and adequate drainage is required near the mouths of the four chief rivers that bring fertility to the plain. For, as it is now, a great part of the land bordering the Mediterranean is covered with swamps like that described by Ovid in his beautiful story of Philemon and Baucis:

Haud procul hinc stagnum, tellus habitabilis olim,

Nunc celebres mergis fulicisque palustribus undæ.[222]

During the past few decades a great change has been made for the better, as is attested by the large number of American agricultural implements which are now found throughout the plain and the hundreds of ginning machines, looms, and thousands of spindles—mostly from England—which are seen in the cotton factories of Tarsus and Adana. But, although a great advance has been made over the condition which obtained a third of a century ago, there is yet vast room for improvement. When the Ottoman Government shall awaken to the necessity of conserving its natural resources, when it shall systematically reforest the territory whose once precious woodlands have been so sadly despoiled, and shall duly drain the vast swamps which have been formed by the neglect of its treasure-giving rivers, Cilicia Campestris will again be worthy of the name which legend tells us it once bore—Garden of Eden.

As it is now, the whole extent of Cilicia from the Taurus to the Amanus and from the mouth of the Cydnus to the headwaters of the Pyramus is chiefly remarkable for ruins of cities and the sites of towns whose very names are forgotten. Everywhere on the plain and on the girdling foothills, one will see crumbling fortresses built by Genoese and Venetians; moss-covered strongholds of Saracens and Crusaders; Corinthian columns and marble colonnades, arches, and vaulted roofs of Christian churches; reminders of mediæval warfare and of days when this historic land was swept by inundations of barbarian hordes, who destroyed by fire and sword the arts and labors which were once the pride of western Asia. Everywhere one observes fragmentary remains of Roman bridges and arches, of aqueducts and causeways, of Greek altars attributed to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians; dilapidated walls and towers and sepulchral grottoes with an occasional Greek or Arabic inscription to mark the sites of Corycus, Pompeiopolis, and Anazarba—those cities of renown, where their inhabitants could quietly rest under their vines and fig trees free from the incursions of predatory Cliteans and Tibareni and barbarians of Hun and Scithian savagery, who spread terror and devastation wherever they could gratify their lust of cruelty or plunder. It was the boast of the Mongols that so complete was their work of “extirpation and erasure” of certain cities, where they had wreaked their full fury of rapine and murder, “that horses might run without stumbling over the ground where they had once stood.”[223] Judging by the calamities that have been inflicted on the once populous cities of Cilicia one would say that they were, in the expressive words of St. Prosper of Aquitaine, depredatione vastatœ—ravaged by depredations as ruthless as those that ever characterized the frightful irruptions of Timur or Jenghiz Khan.

This indiscriminate destruction of centers of culture and marts of commerce is often attributed to the Turks. But, as we have already seen, the Turks—I refer especially to the Osmanlis—who have been the rulers of the Ottoman Empire for more than five hundred years, were not like the Mongols and Tartars, a nation of raiders, but a nation of colonizers and empire builders. Their object, therefore, was not to destroy but to construct and develop. Those who make this charge, which is in great measure gratuitous, forget the wholesale destruction of the hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan, not to speak of other raiders, and lose sight of the fact that some of the most famous cities of the East were reduced to ashes by the armies of Greece and Rome more than a thousand years before the appearance of the armies of the Ottoman conquerors in Syria, Greece, and Ionia. Thus, to mention only a few instances, it was Alexander the Great who destroyed Halicarnasus, the birthplace of the historians Herodotus and Dionysius. Here stood the magnificent tomb of Mausolus, classed by the ancients among the seven wonders of the world, the ruins of which were in 1402 used by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem as a quarry for building their castles. It was the Roman general Mummius who brought ruin to the famous city of Corinth. This was, in truth, rebuilt by Julius Cæsar, but only to be destroyed again, at a much later period, by the Greeks themselves. It was the Emperor Aurelian who doomed to destruction Palmyra, the magnificent capital of Zenobia, almost during the heyday of its architectural splendor and commercial prosperity. It was the Goths who demolished the temple of Diana at Ephesus, another of the world’s wonders, while the city itself was in ruins even before the advent of the devastating Timur. But it was Timur who razed Sardis, the capital of Crœsus, whose name has ever been a synonym of untold wealth. It was Malik al-Ashraf, ruler of Egypt and Syria, who destroyed the famed city of Tyre after its long and eventful history which antedated the reigns of Hiram and Solomon.

Moreover, for thousands of years before the advent of the Osmanlis in western Asia there was at work an agency of destruction that is usually quite disregarded by those who are so propense to impute to the “Unspeakable Turk” the heaps of ruins which overspread a large part of the great Ottoman Empire—an agency whose power of annihilation is incomparably greater than ever was that of Hun or Mongol. This is the earthquake. From the dawn of history this irresistible power has been in action in nearly all the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and has, times without number, exhibited its relentless fury from Cilicia to Sicily and from Egypt to Dalmatia. In Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor,[224] and Greece whole cities were subverted. In the reign of Valens and Valentinian the greater part of the Roman world was shaken by seismic disturbances of the most appalling violence. Time and again the massive walls of Constantinople, its palaces, churches, and monasteries crumbled under the earth’s paroxysmal movements, and the extent of the disaster inflicted was beyond computation. At Cyzicus a temple which its builders fondly hoped would be as stable and as durable as the pyramids was, in an instant, leveled with the ground by one of those periodical earth shocks that have visited Asia Minor from time immemorial.

In the destructive earthquake of 365 A. D., no fewer than fifty thousand persons lost their lives in Alexandria. But probably no city in the world has suffered more from seismic vibrations than Antioch, which is near the southern border of Cilicia. Here in the terrific earthquake of 526 A. D., the loss of life totaled a full quarter of a million people. During the celebration of a public festival in Greece, at which a vast multitude had assembled, “the whole population was swallowed up in the midst of the ceremonies.” It was during this period of widespread catastrophe in Greece that “the ravages of earthquakes began to figure in history as an important cause of the impoverished and declining condition of the country.”[225]

The same causes that led to the economic and social decline of Greece operated with equally dire results in Asia Minor and Syria and Palestine. When, therefore, we contemplate the countless ruins of once famous cities, that are so conspicuous in a great part of Greece and Turkey in Asia, let us assign them to their real causes—not “the ravaging Turks,” but the devastating Huns and Goths, Tartars and Mongols, Persians and Saracens, and the blind and convulsive forces of nature.

It is far from my purpose to excuse the Osmanlis from any of the crimes they have perpetrated against civilization. But the foregoing paragraphs evince that their part in the destruction of the proud cities and monuments—magnificent centers of culture and commerce—of the ancient world has been greatly exaggerated. Their great sin against humanity, at least for generations past, has been one of omission rather than commission.[226] It has consisted—I speak of the ruling classes—in their inefficient government, which has given little or no encouragement to trade or industry; which has neglected roads and bridges, making interior communication difficult and often impossible; which has failed to develop the vast resources of a country to which a beneficent nature has been rarely prodigal; which has oppressed and trodden down a laborious and long-suffering peasantry, than which there is no better in the world; which has failed to provide for the education of the masses, ever eager for knowledge and improvement; which has permitted systematic bribery in high places and allowed crying malfeasance in office to go unpunished; which, by its unexampled apathy, has been responsible for one of the richest countries in the world degenerating into one of the most desolate, and for a great mass of its people—although innocent—becoming the most execrated.

Surely this indictment is damning enough without cumbering it with counts which are irrelevant or of which the Sultan’s government is not guilty. But, fortunately for those who are able to read the signs of the times, there are well-grounded hopes for a change for the better—for a return to the position among nations which the Ottoman Empire occupied when its schools and scholars were as famed as were its achievements on land and sea—when the followers of Osman shall be as far in the van of civilization as they are now in the rear.

CHAPTER X
ISLAM, PAST AND PRESENT

Properly to appreciate Mohammed we must discard our religious and national prejudices and see in his work only what he has put in it, independently of the consequences which this work has entailed and which may more or less wound us even to-day.

J. Barthélemy St. Hilairé.[227]

No one can travel through the Near East with an intelligent appreciation of the manners and customs of its people without an accurate knowledge of the religion professed by the majority of them and an adequate familiarity with the life and times of the one whom they revere as their Founder and Prophet. The reason is obvious. The inhabitants—Osmanlis, Arabs, Turkomans—of this part of the once great Ottoman Empire have so long lived under the theocracy established by Mohammed and his successors that every detail of their religion and civil life is regulated for them with a thoroughness that, outside of Islam, is quite unknown. The Sultan as well as the Mollah is both a religious and a civil functionary, and theocratic government prevails everywhere from the palace of the Padishah on the Bosphorus to the tent of the Bedouin in the Syrian and Arabian Deserts. What is not prescribed by the Koran is ordered by the Hadith, that body of legislative traditions which is based on the reputed sayings or acts of the Prophet of Mecca, and which, in the eyes of loyal adherents of Islam, has the force of prescriptions emanating directly or indirectly from Allah, and which are, consequently, immutable.

It is evident, therefore, that one who is ignorant of the history of Islam will not only seriously misunderstand the people of Moslem countries but will also be compelled, before he shall be long in their midst, greatly to revise his previous notions respecting them. For he will soon discover, as have many others before him, that while he knew all about their defects, he had little or no knowledge of their many and very great virtues.

As his sojourn among the Moslems is prolonged and he becomes better acquainted with them, he will find that most of his views concerning them were based on ungrounded prejudice or age-old stories that had no other basis than crass ignorance or un-Christian hatred. Not only this; he will gradually learn to admire those whom he had been taught to despise and, if he be of a deeply religious nature, he may find himself endorsing the statement of the late General Gordon: “I love the Moslems because they are not ashamed of God.”

To the student of history it seems incredible that so many and so egregious errors regarding Islam should have so long prevailed among men who are otherwise well informed and disposed to be fair in their judgments of all peoples, regardless of creed or color. For “although Islam has been described in so many books, there are yet educated people who,” in the words of the learned Padre Marracci,[228] “believe that Moslems are idolaters who adore Mohammed and the moon,”[229] and who, as the scholarly Sprenger writes, “have not gotten much further in the knowledge of Islam than that the Turks allow polygamy.”

If it were a question of the inhabitants of Central Africa, who were practically unknown until the explorations of Speke, Stanley, and Livingstone, we should not be surprised that even geographers should know next to nothing about them. But it seems difficult to explain the widespread ignorance which has everywhere obtained regarding a people who have played so important a rôle in history as the Moslems, and who during more than twelve centuries have been in constant relations with the Christian nations of Europe.

But, although the contact between the East and the West has been uninterrupted since the time Moslemism essayed

To plant the Crescent o’er the Cross,

the misrepresentations of Mohammed and his followers have continued without intermission from the days of the Crusaders to the present time. And the strangest thing is that the most extravagant tales about Mohammedans and their religion were put in circulation when their originators must have known that they had no foundation in fact.

Many of the stories—as false as they were ridiculous—that were long current respecting the Arabian Prophet and the religion which he founded were due to the Trouvères and the Troubadours. A great majority of the Chansons de Geste exhibit a pitiful ignorance of the tenets of the Saracens, and not a few of them contributed to give vogue to the most revolting fables respecting Mohammed and Islam. Although neither Leo the Isaurian nor Oliver Cromwell, both the sworn enemies of images, were more opposed to idolatry or to the worship of images than Mohammed, nevertheless, in La Chanson de Roland,[230] the Franks are represented under the walls of Saragossa as avenging their defeat at Roncesvelles by mutilating and destroying the idols of their enemies.

In the Chanson d’Antioche—declared to be “a very beautiful chanson which does not contain any fables but only the unadulterated truth”—the author, Richard le Pelerin, in the beginning of his poem, asks God to put to dire confusion the followers of Mohammed—especially those

Qui croient et adorent la figure Mahom.

In the Roman de Beaudouin de Sebourc, the author goes to still greater lengths. By a strange aberration he makes the idol of Mohammed the emblem of Islam, as the Cross is the emblem of Christianity. For, in this chanson the Comtesse de Porthieu is represented as wishing to abjure her faith before the Sultan Saladin and expressing her readiness to adore the effigy of the Prophet:

Mahom voel aourer; aportez-le-moi-cha.

And Saladin, on his part, is pictured as ordering the idol to be brought for the adoration of the newly made convert to Mohammedanism:

Qu’ on aportast Mahom, et celle l’aoura.

When it is remembered that Mohammed was all his life the relentless enemy of images of all kinds and that he absolutely proscribed the representation of animated creatures; when it is recalled that images of all kinds have been studiously excluded from every mosque in the world from the time of the Prophet until the present, one would think that such misrepresentations as those spread broadcast by the trouvères would have found little acceptance, or have been as short-lived as they were false. Had the object of the trouvères been to perpetuate animosity among Christians toward Moslems they could not have devised a more effective method of achieving their purpose.

But Mohammed and his followers had to be discredited and recourse was had to foul means as well as fair. Not satisfied with making them favor what they always consistently denounced, trouvères and chroniclers invented a most cruel legend regarding the death of the Prophet. Notwithstanding the concordant and unquestioned verdict of history respecting the demise of Mohammed, the pilgrim Richard, author of the chanson La Conquête de Jerusalem, fabricates the odious fable that the founder of Islam was devoured by swine while helplessly inebriated.[231] And this, despite the well-known fact that Mohammed was during his entire reforming career as much opposed to the use of intoxicating drinks as he was to the use of images! Nevertheless this alleged disgraceful end of the Prophet is assigned by the pilgrim Richard and by Guibert de Nogent in his “Dei Gesta per Francos” as the reason why Mohammedans never eat pork![232]

I call special attention to the erroneous notions regarding Mohammed and Islam which pervade the pages of the chansons de geste, as they are samples of other errors equally preposterous regarding a people who should have been better understood, and as they help to explain the origin of many similar misconceptions which, notwithstanding all that has been said and written to the contrary, still persist, among large masses of people, in all their original force and crudeness.

Even long after the time of the trouvères there were not wanting historians and divines who were willing to repeat the silly legends of the chansons de geste whenever they thought they would thereby give point to their attacks on the Koran or the Prophet. Thus, among the leaders of the Reformation, the distinguished Orientalist, Bibliander, seriously institutes a comparison between Mohammed and the Devil. Melancthon declared him to be either Gog or Magog, if not both together.[233]

Voltaire, in writing of the Koran, of which he had as superficial an acquaintance as of many other things which engaged his flippant and caustic pen, declared it to be “Ce livre unintelligible qui fait fremir le sens commun à chaque page”—that unintelligible book which makes common sense shudder at every page. And, like many writers before and since his time, he was fully aware that his fictions were totally at variance with history. But, as has been well expressed by Hurgronje, “he wanted to put before the public an armed Tartuffe and thought he might lay the part upon Mohammed.”[234]

Others again, like many writers of our own day, had a political as well as a religious object in their attacks upon Islam. For, under pretense of waging war against the nefarious tenets and practices of Moslemism, they secretly had in view an assault on the Turkish Empire, or, as a noted Swiss Orientalist long ago declared, all their efforts were really directed in oppugnationem Mahometanæ perfidiæ et Turcici regni.[235]

From the days of the Crusaders until the present there has been no cessation of the campaign of vilification of everything Mohammedan as there has for long been no abatement in political hostility on the part of certain nations of Europe against everything Ottoman. Centuries ago the cry was “Pestem hanc ferro et flamma ab orbe depellendam esse”—the pest of Islam must be driven from the earth by fire and sword. To-day the war cry is in Gladstonian phrase, “The Turk must, bag and baggage, get out of Europe.” How much of truth and how much of falsehood there have been in the most recent outcries against the Moslems, especially against those living in the Ottoman Empire, will be determined only when the historian shall be free from the violent passions and the selfish interests and the age-long antipathies which blind the writers of the present as they have blinded those of the past.

In the preface to his monumental work on the Koran, the erudite Padre Lodovico Marracci laments the prevailing ignorance of his time regarding everything Mohammedan and the paucity of books of value respecting the religion and practices of so large a part of mankind as the adherents of Islam.

Although [he writes] some have written learnedly and solidly on these subjects, there is nevertheless no concealing the fact that others, through ignorance of things Saracen, often omit the truth and publish fictitious and fabulous things, which excite the laughter of the Mohammedans and cause them to become more obstinate in their error.[236]

But, notwithstanding Marracci’s eloquent plea for a more thorough study of Islam, his words fell, for the most part, on deaf ears.[237] It was not until our own epoch that a critical investigation of the Koran was begun and that a really impartial inquiry into the life of Mohammed was seriously undertaken. Men were still in doubt as to the true character of the Arabian reformer and were still undecided as to whether he was

Hero, impostor, fanatic, priest or sage.

All, however, were forced to admit that he must have been a man of extraordinary power and influence to set in motion that mighty human current which only a little more than a century after his death had founded an empire which extended from the Tigris to the Gaudilquivir and from the burning sands of Yemen to the chilly steppes of Turkestan. Yet, although the scholarly works of Sprenger, Margoliouth, Prince Caetani, and Noldeke-Schwally have thrown a flood of light on many formerly obscure points in the life of the Prophet and elucidated many previously disputed passages of the Koran, there is still as much discussion as ever regarding the nature of Mohammed’s religious vocation. Some contend that it was the result of hallucination, others of epilepsy, others of psychopathic abnormality, others of auto-hypnosis, while, as a result of long researches, Aloys Sprenger is quite sure that the Prophet was a victim of muscular hysteria.[238]

But however much controversy there may be respecting the origin of Mohammed’s self-styled mission or the nature of the mental disease from which he is said to have suffered, there can be no doubt whatever about the essence of his teaching as incorporated in the Koran. For the creed of Islam is so simple that, as has been said, “it can be written on a fingernail.”

The five duties of Islam, which means resignation to the will of God, as declared by Mohammed, are as follows:

1. Bearing witness that there is but one God;

2. Reciting the daily prayers;

3. Giving the legal alms;

4. Observing the Ramazan or the month’s fast;

5. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime.

In view of the clearness and simplicity of this creed, it is difficult to understand how the Western World has so signally failed to comprehend the real nature of Mohammed’s teaching. It is equally difficult to conceive how the authors of the countless books on the Prophet and his religion could have been honest and sincere when they penned their diatribes against Mohammed or pronounced their bitter and ludicrous invectives against his followers and the religion to which they were so ardently attached. Had they been actuated by a spirit of fairness and Christian charity they could so easily have ascertained the truth about the doctrine which they so strangely misrepresented and the people whom they so pitilessly maligned. For there never was a time since the day Saladin entered the Holy City of Jerusalem accompanied by its bishop, who had gone out to greet the humane conqueror; never a time since the Poverello of Assisi went as a missionary to the Sultan of Egypt, when men of good will, seeking the truth and nothing but the truth, might not have had all the information desired both about the doctrines of Islam and the practices of the millions who looked upon Mohammed as directly commissioned by God to teach them the way to Heaven.

Those who always exhibited such readiness to defame Islam and its followers should have recalled the words of St. Augustine when he declares that “there is no false doctrine which does not contain something of truth.”[239] They should have given heed to the counsels of the learned and zealous Father Marracci, who, guided by the experiences among the Mohammedans of his brothers in religion, taught them how they might bring the followers of Islam to a knowledge of the Gospel and to a love of the Crucified. Had they done so there would not be that inveterate hatred that now exists between the Cross and the Crescent, and there would not be that separation into two hostile camps of so many hundred millions of people who normally should be in the same fold and under the same Shepherd.

For, contrary to what has been so often said and written during the last thousand years and more, there is much, very much good in Islam. No less an authority than the illustrious Cardinal Hergenrœther declares:

Islamism ought to prepare for civilization the peoples most advanced in barbarism, notably those of Africa. Those peoples whom it is necessary to lead from fetishism to monotheism are in their low degree of culture and brutal sensualism materially aided by such a stepping-stone in their transition to Christianity.[240]

When Mohammed began his marvelous career of religious reform his countrymen in Arabia were, in many respects, as deeply sunk in vice as the most debased tribes of Central Africa. They were idolaters who were addicted to the grossest and most absurd fetishism. Trees, stones, shapeless masses of dough and the most trivial things in nature were objects of adoration. There was a special divinity for each of the countless tribes of the peninsula. In Beit-Alia—House of God—in Mecca, there was a different idol for each day of the year. Here also was the most jealously guarded object of worship—a black stone that was reputed to have fallen from heaven in the days of Adam—a stone which, it was averred, was originally of immaculate whiteness, but which was subsequently blackened by the myriad osculations of its sinful worshipers.

Nor was this all. Not only were the Arabians noted for their loathsome idolatry but also for their inhuman practice of disposing of female children at their birth by burying them alive. And so great was their superstition that it was not an infrequent occurrence for a father to sacrifice his child to appease the fancied anger of an offended deity. Besides this, blood feuds, sensuality of the vilest kind, drunkenness, and utter disregard of even the natural rights of women were as rampant as their general results were widespread and fatal.

When Mohammed set out to preach monotheism to these people who were so steeped in every vice—people who had heard the Gospel but had long abandoned its sublime teachings for the abominable practices of idolatry, he encountered the strongest opposition from all quarters. So relentless was the hostility displayed by friend and foe that his projected reform seemed foredoomed. But, notwithstanding the jeers which greeted him on every side and the persecutions which he endured for years, he was eventually successful beyond his most sanguine expectations.

Here we have the spectacle of a man that could neither read nor write who, after twenty years of incessant struggle, had succeeded in extirpating a system of idolatry which, by fostering morals the most depraved and practices the most hideous, had for centuries made the fairest parts of Arabia reeking sinks of iniquity. In place of a blighting and debasing fetishism he substituted the worship of one God, the Greater of heaven and earth—a God who is eternal, omnipotent, merciful; who presides over the destinies of all His creatures; who sees all their actions, even the most secret; who punishes the wicked in another world and rewards the good, and who never abandons them for a single instant either in this life or in the one to come. He preaches submission, the most humble and the most confiding submission, to the holy will of Him who is not only the Author of their existence but also their unfailing support and their just and omniscient judge. And the sole worship which the Mussulman is required to give to this one God is prayer at stated periods of the day and an annual fast during the month of Ramadan—a fast which is designed to direct his thoughts to Him who has created him, who sustains him during life and who, for weal or for woe, will be his Sovereign Lord after death.

Such essentially is Islam in all its simplicity as preached to the Arabian world by the unlettered camel driver of Mecca; such the doctrine which was destined to be adopted by many races and nations in every clime. There is nothing new in it. Mohammed never pretended to introduce anything new. He simply proclaimed to his benighted countrymen not a new revelation, but, as he always insisted, the long-forgotten faith of Abraham and Moses and Christ, as he understood it.

With the exception, therefore, of Christianity, based on the Old and New Testaments, with all its marvelous and beneficent consequences, there is no religion in the world which can justly be compared with Islam or which even remotely deserves to be placed in the same category.[241]

And, with the exception of Christianity and Judaism, it is the only religion in the world which has recognized and consecrated monotheism. It is, therefore, far superior to the debasing paganism of Greece and Rome. It is loftier and nobler than the repugnant dualism of Zoroaster and the selfish and materialistic utilitarianism of Confucius. It is incomparably more elevating than the fantastic metempsychosis and the atheistic Nirvana of Gautama Buddha, which, with Confucianism, holds in spiritual bondage a great majority of the teeming millions of Central and Eastern Asia.

The eminent doctor of the Church, St. John of Damascus, shows how near he considers Islam to Christianity when, in his account of the creed of Mohammed, he treats it as a heresy analogous to Arianism.[242] Peter the Venerable, the illustrious Abbot of Cluny, the first one to have a translation made of the Koran, was of a similar opinion, as is evinced in his work against Mohammedanism—a work which treats not of the paganism but of the heresy of the Saracens, as its title—Adversus Nefandam Hæresim sive Sectam Saracenorum—conclusively indicates.[243] In like manner Dante, who was almost as distinguished as a theologian as he was as a poet, places Mohammed in hell not as a heathen but as a sower of “scandal and schism.”[244]

Arius, by denying the divinity of Christ, had prepared the way for Islam, which saw in the Son of God only a prophet who, as Moslems subsequently claimed, was but the precursor of Mohammed. St. Jerome, in his memorable words—Igemuit totus orbis et Arianum se esse miratus est—the world uttered a sigh and was astonished to find itself Arian—expressed the one-time prevalence of the errors of the Alexandrine heresiarch. The grave dissensions in the churches of Asia and Africa that followed close upon dissemination of the heresy of Arius immensely assisted Islam in its lightning career of conquest. For the divided and degenerate Christians of these two continents were easily persuaded that Moslemism was but one of the various Christian sects and not a new religion.

The followers of Mohammed were formerly the victims of calumny on account of their alleged beliefs and practices. Now it is the organization of Islam and the character of its religious services that seem to give rise to the most misunderstandings.

Thus, according to many modern writers, the Sultan of Turkey is to Islam what the Pope is to Christendom. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. That the caliphate, whether of the Ottoman, Ommiad, or Abbassid dynasties, is in no way comparable with the Papacy is clearly evidenced by the fact that Islam has never in all its history regarded the Caliph as its spiritual head.[245]

Again the same writers, as well as many modern travelers, constantly refer to the priests and the clergy of Mohammedanism. The fact is that Islam has not and never has had anything like a clerical body as it is understood in the Christian world. There is no ordination, no priesthood with powers to bind and loose, no confessional, no baptismal font, no altar, no sacrifice, no mediator between man and God. There is in fact no one possessing any special powers through ordination to perform any act that any adherent of Islam could not as rightfully perform. For, Islam, as has been well said, is and has always been “the lay religion par excellence.” There are, it is true, the Khatib—preacher—and the imam—leader in prayer—but neither the one nor the other possesses anything whatever of the sacerdotal character of the Christian priesthood or of the hereditary Levites of ancient Judaism.[246] They are usually selected on account of their grave deportment and their knowledge of the Koran and of the traditions of Islam, but otherwise they might be replaced by a mufti or kadi whose occupations are analogous to our lawyer or judge. The chief purpose of the imam, whose function closely resembles that of a precentor, is to preserve order in public worship. But whether the religious functions of the Moslems be performed by imams, khatibs, mollas, or any of that large class of functionaries known as ulema, there are no gradational distinctions among the worshipers themselves. The ulema may act like priests and may sometimes be considered as priests by uninformed people, but the ulema themselves, who ought to know, strongly and consistently insist on their non-priestly character. So alien, indeed, is all classification to Moslemism, so abhorrent to Islam is the very idea of an ecclesiastical organization as distinct from the laity, that Palgrave, whose long and intimate intercourse with the Mohammedans made him thoroughly familiar with all the details of their creed, did not hesitate when referring to their religious organization, to declare, “‘Each one for himself and God for us all’ is an almost literal translation of what the Koran sums up and a hundred traditions confirm.”[247]

The erroneous notions that so generally prevail respecting the real object of mosques are as numerous as those respecting its khatibs and imams. The primary use of a mosque is to indicate the direction of Mecca. Originally it was a simple platform with a wall at the end facing Mecca. In facing this wall the worshiper looked towards what was to him the holiest city in the world. In southern climates this primitive type of mosque[248] sufficiently answered the chief purpose contemplated. But the more rigorous climates of the north required roofed places of worship, which eventually developed into the magnificent structures which one now finds in Brusa, and Constantinople, as well as in cities much farther south, such as Damascus and Cairo and Jerusalem.

But the reverence which a Mussulman entertains for his mosque and that which a Roman Catholic feels for his church are entirely different in character. There is, in the eyes of a Catholic, a sanctity attaching to a church that does not and cannot attach to a mosque. This is shown by the names given to the two places of worship. A common name for mosque is Jami, which means a meeting house, while the word church, derived from the Greek, signifies the house of God—Τὸ κνριακὸν. In a Moslem’s view God is present in the jami or mosque, but only as he is present everywhere else—in the field, on the mountain. But in the church, according to Catholic teaching, God is really and truly present under the veil of the Blessed Sacrament. Hence all the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic ritual, all the gorgeousness of decoration which so distinguishes the Catholic house of God from the Mussulman meeting house. Because of the Sacramental Presence every Catholic church is called the house of God. But among Mohammedans there is only one specifically recognized Beith Allah—house of God. This is the Kaaba at Mecca, which contains the Black Stone which was for ages an object of idolatrous worship and which is even to-day the chiefest object of Mohammedan veneration, if not also of downright superstition. It is because of the presence of this old pagan fetish in the Kaaba,[249] as well as on account of the fantastic legends which are associated with the Kaaba itself, that the Moslem, when praying, always turns toward Mecca. It is this Kebla—the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca—that is carefully indicated by the niche or mihrab in the interior wall of every mosque. For a time the Kebla was changed from Mecca to the rock in Jerusalem, on which Solomon’s temple was erected, but, whether from policy or atavism, Mohammed changed it back again to its original location. By so doing he virtually reduced Islam to a national religion—the religion of Arabia—instead of making it, as he had dreamed, the religion of the world.

Again, the mosque, unlike the church, is never the center of that kind of religious organization which we know as a parish. There is no congregation comprising those who worship in a particular mosque. Nor have the imams and khatibs any jurisdiction, like that of a Catholic pastor, over those who assemble in the mosque for prayer. Worship in the mosque may be called congregational only in so far as certain individuals, who happen to gather there, unite in prayer to Allah under the direction of the imam, but it is nevertheless individual, as no Moslem has closer affiliations with one mosque than with another. Wherever he happens to be when the muezzin calls for prayer, there is his mosque and there he joins with his fellows in worship.

In the Ottoman Empire the imam, so far as he is charged with special functions, is no more than a paid servant. Outside of acting as precentor, or fugleman, at prayer his chief duties are to officiate at marriages and funerals. There is none of that spiritual relationship which exists between the Catholic priest and his parishioners; none of that love of a father for his children, and none of that affection of children for their father, which exists in every Catholic parish; no one who is in any sense the shepherd of his flock—to assist the weak, to direct the erring, to admonish the remiss, to upbraid the sinner, and lead those aspiring to holiness to higher degrees of perfection in the spiritual life. Far from feeling the need of such a guide and superior, the Moslem prides himself on his ability to dispense with such aids which he would regard as curtailing his religious liberty and circumscribing his independence of action. He prefers to lead his own life, without let or hindrance, without monitors or directors, and to be free, if so disposed, to follow those votaries of pleasure in other parts of the world, who

Compound for sins that they’re inclined to

By damning those they have no mind to.

But one cannot fully understand the religious spirit of the Mussulman without knowing something of the prayers which he is wont to address to the Deity. No class of men, probably, have the name of God—Allah—more frequently on their lips than the Moslems. This is particularly true of those devotees—and their number is legion—known as dervishes.

Prayer five times a day is the second of the five pillars of Islam. At dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, evening and night the Muezzin ascends the minaret and repeats in a loud voice:

God is great. I bear witness that there is no god but God. I bear witness that Mohammed is the apostle of God. Come to prayers! Come to salvation!

But prayer may be said only when the clothes and body of the worshiper as well as the place of prayer are free from all impurity. Moreover, the prayers, whether said privately or in common, must be recited according to a prescribed form and in specified postures from which there can be no deviation. There are constant repetitions of the words “God is great,” “I extol the holiness of my Lord, the Most High.”

Holiness to Thee, O God!

And praise be to Thee!

Great is Thy name!

Great is Thy greatness!

There is no deity but Thee!

A devout Mussulman will recite these and similar forms of prayer no less than seventy-five times a day. But these words, which admit of no variety or change, become, after ceaseless repetition, rather a mechanical than a mental act and are frequently more in the nature of lip service than the prayer of the Christian, which consists not only in acts of praise, as in the above words of the Moslem worshiper, but also in acts of impetration and thanksgiving. The Moslem’s nearest approach to a Christian prayer is the first sura of the Koran, called the Fatihah, which reads:

Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds,

The compassionate, the merciful.

King of the day of reckoning!

Thee only do we worship, and to Thee

only do we cry for help.

Guide thou us in the straight path,

The path of those to whom Thou hast

been gracious,

With whom Thou art not angry,

And who go not astray, Amen.

But we have only to compare this prayer—which has been called “the quintessence of the whole Koran”—with the “Our Father” to see the vast difference between the prayer of the Christian and that of the Mohammedan. It is manifest in the very first word of the Pater Noster, which shows that there is no comparison between the Christian and the Moslem conception of God. Mohammed believed in God, feared and obeyed Him according to his light, but, not recognizing His Fatherhood, he did not and, from his view of the Deity, could not love Him. It is so with his followers. Their God is a God of fear, not a God of love, because not known as God Our Father. How different is this from the relationship—sonship—of the Christian to his Creator, who enjoys the blessed privilege of calling God Abba—Father.

Denying the Fathership of God, Moslem theologians maintain that it is impossible for men to love Him. Man and God, they contend, are of different natures, and where there is a difference of genus there can be no love. The nearest approach to love, they contend, is man’s perseverance in obedience to Allah.

Again, according to the same theologians, there can be no love of God for man, for love, say they, implies change, which, as God is infinitely perfect, is impossible. When God therefore is said to love man, all that is meant, according to Al-Gazali, one of the most eminent of Moslem theologians and philosophers, is that “God so affects man that man comes to God.”[250]

But in this case, as in so many others, the common sense—or shall we call it a special divine illumination?—of many in Islam has enabled them to arrive at a truer conception of God and of their relations to Him than was ever attained by Moslem philosophers and casuists and incomparably superior to anything found in the Koran or in the traditional teachings of Mohammed.

As a proof of this assertion, I need only adduce the beautiful prayer of the Persian imam, El Kachiri, who, discarding the cold and formal acts of praise prescribed in Moslem worship, pours forth his soul to God in these touching and heart-felt words:

Thou, O Lord, threatenest me, with a bitter separation which will forever deprive me of Thy presence! O Lord, do with me as Thou wilt, provided that I be not forever separated from Thee! There is no more bitter nor fatal poison than this separation. For what can a soul separated from God do except be in a state of inquietude and agitation which will be a continual torment? One would rather suffer a hundred thousand deaths; for, after all, they would not offer anything so terrible as the privation of the vision of Thy divine face. All the evils of the world, all the most acute and painful diseases joined together, seem to me incomparably easier to bear than this removal from Thee. It is this transitory removal which renders our lands sterile; which dries up and infects our waters. What would it be if it were eternal? Without it, the fire of hell would not burn; it is through it that it becomes so hot. In a word, it is only Thy presence which sustains us and showers upon us all kinds of good things and Thy absence, it is, which causes all the evils of hell.[251]

This prayer is fully in keeping with the teaching of many other Moslem mystics of non-Semitic origin, who, contrary to the vulgar notions so widely entertained respecting the Mohammedan paradise, explicitly declare that the infinite happiness of the elect in heaven consists in the enjoyment of the beatific vision. This ineffable happiness, they aver, so far transcends all the other joys of paradise that they completely disappear before it. “Paradise, O Lord,” exclaims the Sheik el Alem, “is desirable only because one there sees Thee; because, without the light of Thy beauty, it would pall on us.”[252]

These two quotations are remarkable but no less so than the words of a Mussulman poet of Persia who, in addressing himself to Isa—Arabic for Jesus—says:

The heart of the afflicted man draws all his consolation from Thy words. The soul resumes life and vigor simply by hearing Thy name pronounced. If the mind of man is ever able to raise itself to the contemplation of the mysteries of the Divinity, it is from Thee that it draws the light to know them and it is Thou that givest him the attraction by which he is penetrated.[253]

How like the language of a Christian speaking of the grace of our Saviour, Jesus Christ!

Far less excusable than ignorance of Moslem doctrine and practices, is the disposition everywhere manifested in Europe and America to regard Islam not only as a disintegrating organization but also as a decaying power. Those who thus minimize the ever-growing strength of one of the largest religious bodies in the world exhibit the fatuity of the ostrich which imagines danger does not exist because it is unseen.

For generations past the western world has been periodically informed that Mohammedanism as a religion is moribund and that Christendom has nothing more to apprehend from it. It has been assured that the mosques are unfrequented and crumbling into ruins; that schools and colleges of Moslem law are neglected or languishing for lack of financial support; that the precepts of the Koran are generally disregarded and frequently openly flouted; and that Islam is under an eclipse which portends disaster and extinction.

But what are the facts? I can best answer them in the words of Palgrave whose sixteen years of investigations of Mohammedan conditions from the shores of the Euxine to the interior of Arabia makes his words on the question authoritative. Writing in 1872, he declares:

Were I to attempt the catalogue of mosques, colleges, schools, chapels and the like, repaired or wholly fresh—built within the circle of my own personal inspection alone—several pages would hardly suffice to contain it. Trebizond, Batoom, Samsoon, Sivas, Keysareeyah, Chorum, Amasia, and fifty other towns of names unknown, or barely known in Europe, each can boast its new and renovated places of Mahometan worship; new schools, some of law, others of grammar, others primary, have sprung up on every side; new works of charity and public bequest adorn the highways.... Meanwhile, year after year sees a steady increase in the number of pilgrims to the holy places of Islam; and, although the greater facilitation consequent on steam has undoubtedly contributed not a little to this result, much must also be put down to the growing eagerness manifested by all, high and low, to visit the sacred soil, the birthplace of their religion and Prophet; while the pride that each village takes in its “hajjees” is manifested in the all-engrossing sympathy that accompanies their departure, and the triumphant exultation of the entire populace that welcomes them home. It may not have been less a thousand years ago: it certainly could not have been more.[254]

Although it is nearly half a century since the noted author of the Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia penned the paragraph just quoted, there is no evidence, so far as I have been able to gather in my travels in Asia and Africa, that the current of Moslem revival is running lower than it was fifty years ago, nor is the rejuvenescence of Islam less marked nor its power less resistant or less persistent.

Not only has Mohammedanism long been declared to be moribund but it has also, from time immemorial, been represented as changeless in doctrine as are the agricultural implements of the East—which are the same to-day as “when Proserpine went a-Maying through Enna”—and “the difficulty of bringing Islam and its ways into harmony with modern society as comparable to squaring the circle.”

Again, what are the facts? So far is Moslemism from being what it was when it came from the hands of the Prophet, or from what it is as exhibited in the Koran, that it has been constantly undergoing modification in religious doctrine and practice since the days of the first caliphs. Not to speak of the countless changes which have insensibly been effected by the quiet but continuous action of Christianity, innumerable others have been brought about by the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, by Roman law, Neo-Platonism, and other similar but persistent and irresistible influences. This is practically manifest in the hadith as modified and developed by canonists, dogmatists, and mystics to enable Islam “to shape religious ordinances of old customs” or “to adapt itself to the peculiar characteristics and stages of development of the people whose allegiance it wishes to win.”

For not only have law and custom, religious teachings and political doctrines clothed themselves in Hadith form [writes one of the most eminent authorities on Mohammedanism], but everything in Islam, both that which has worked itself out through its own strength, as well as that which has been appropriated from without. In this work foreign elements have been so assimilated that one has lost sight of their origin. Sentences from the Old and New Testaments, rabbinical sayings as well as those from the apochryphal gospels, the teaching of Greek philosophers, sayings of Persian and Indian wisdom have found room in this garb among the sayings of the prophet of Islam. Even the Lord’s prayer is not lacking in well confirmed Hadith-form.[255]

To say, then, that Islam has always been inflexibly opposed to the influence of foreign science, or law, or philosophy, or theology when these elements enabled it “to mould its intellectual heritage” and adjust itself to an alien spirit or a new environment is not in consonance with the facts of history. So far, indeed, is this from the truth that “it may safely be said that there is nothing more extraordinary in the whole history of Islam than the way in which the theory of the verbal inspiration of the Koran and the consequent stereotyped and unalterable nature of its precepts have, by ingenuity, by legal fictions, by the ‘Sunna,’ or traditional sayings of Mohammed or by responsa prudentum been accommodated to the changing circumstances and the various degrees of civilization of the nations which profess it.”[256] Such being the case, one is not surprised in finding so distinguished a writer as Stanley Lane-Poole making the categorical assertion that “the faith of Islam has passed through more phases and experienced greater revolutions than perhaps any other of the religions of the world.”[257]

No less misleading and mischievous are the continuously repeated statements that the days of Mussulman missionary activity have long since passed; that Mussulman zeal for propagating the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet no longer exists; that Pan-Islamism, as a religious force with which Christianity must reckon, was long ago dealt its death blow in the Gulf of Lepanto by Don Juan of Austria and under the walls of Vienna by the immortal Sobieski.

But still, again, what are the facts? It is true that Moslem canon law still divides the world into Dar al-Islam—Abode of Islam—and Dar al-harb—Abode of war, according as these two parts are in the possession of Mohammedanism or are yet to be won to it by the sword, yet it is, nevertheless, equally true that this distinction is now practically a dead letter and that the Christian Powers of the world are now able to curtail Islam’s schemes of territorial expansion and render forever impossible all hopes of world conquest. But, although Islam as a political and military power is no longer to be apprehended—at least for the present—it is not true that she has discontinued her missionary activities or that her propaganda in behalf of the religion of the Prophet is less determined than it was in the days of Saladin or Solyman the Magnificent. We have only to scan the authentic tokens that come to us from every quarter of the globe to be convinced that Pan-Islamism is to-day a greater missionary force—peacefully aggressive but fanatically persistent—than it has perhaps ever been in any period of her history.[258]

Let us see. According to the most reliable statistics there are now about two hundred and fifty million Mohammedans in the world,[259] and this number, stupendous as it is, is rapidly increasing. The strongest agency in their phenomenal development is the annual hadj or pilgrimage to Mecca which every free Mussulman is required to make at least once in his lifetime. During the period of the hadj, the Sacred City of Moslemism sees gathered around and within its walls a vast, surging throng of devotees, which ranges from two to three hundred thousand strong. They come from every part of Asia and Africa—from the snow-swept steppes of Siberia, from the coral-fringed islands of the Indian Archipelago, and from the tangled jungles of Senegambia and Abyssinia. Turks, Kurds, Persians, Tartars, Chinese, Malays, Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians—men of all colors and of countless tribes and tongues—they all foregather in the Sacred City of Arabia to get inspiration and strength to win proselytes to the creed of Mohammed.

From Mecca where every one is thrilled by the peculiar half-pagan ceremonies which Mohammed incorporated into his religion, every hadji returns to his home, imbued with the surpassing greatness of Moslemism and exulting in the thought that his is the blessed privilege of being numbered among the followers of the Prophet. Each one is a zealous agent of Moslemism and is prepared, if need be, to give his life, in disseminating its principles and in contributing, so far as in him lies, towards the realization of the hopes of every true Mohammedan—the final world triumph of Pan-Islamism.

Such a determined army of missionaries, stirred to a frenzy of enthusiasm by their experience in what is to them the holiest spot on earth, has during the last few decades achieved results that are positively startling. Not in centuries has Islam so defiantly thrown the gauntlet down to Christendom. And never before was it so incumbent, as at present, on the followers of Christ to use every effort to counteract their well-directed campaign of Mohammedan proselytism.

No agency is overlooked by the Moslems that will contribute towards their success in their world-wide propaganda—traders, shepherds, soldiers, husbandmen, shop-keepers, mollahs, muftis, marabouts—all are engaged in the same ubiquitous, unceasing work of winning converts to the religion of Mohammed.

But more active and persistent—were that possible—than the proselytizers just mentioned, are the legions of zealots known as dervishes who now count nearly a hundred different orders and millions of members. Among them are all classes of people from the humblest hamal to the proudest shah and sultan. They count untold thousands of such ardent reformers as the Wahabis and Sanusiyahs who are undoubtedly the most powerful propagators of Islam that the world has yet known. The last named order has zawivas or lodges with six million oath-bound members in northern Africa alone. These are all sworn to labor unceasingly for the extension of Pan-Islamism and for the propagation of the revelation of Allah as contained in the Koran. So unexampled has been their proselyting activity between Egypt and Cape Colony during the last few decades that millions have been brought under the banner of the prophet. Frequently in equatorial Africa whole tribes have, in a short period of time, been won to Moslemism by the unflagging zeal and resistless enthusiasm of its missionaries.

Every instrumentality that promises success is unhesitatingly brought into requisition. With the view of confirming the wavering in their own ranks and continuously increasing the number of converts, they have everywhere established schools, orphan asylums, and printing presses, and in Christian countries they have erected mosques. Only lately a great mosque was completed at Petrograd. Converts to Islam are found in Japan, Jamaica, British Guiana, and Brazil. The number of immigrant Moslems in the New World was recently estimated at more than one hundred and fifty thousand, most, if not all, of them fired with the same zeal for the propagation of Mohammedanism as their brethren in Asia and Africa. In the various parts of India, where according to the most available statistics, there are more than sixty million adherents of the Prophet, the annual number of converts to Moslemism is variously estimated from ten thousand to six hundred thousand.

These facts prove conclusively that Islam is very far from being either tottering or moribund. In the vigorous prosecution of the campaign which is to make Pan-Islamism not only a dominant religious power but a dominant political power as well, it exhibits all the pertinacious activity of its palmiest days. It is everywhere winning victories and ceaselessly planning new and greater victories. It is the most vigorous and the most resolute anti-Christian force that confronts the Church to-day. Those who think that Islam is approaching dissolution or extinction should ponder the words of the Arab poet:

Dead and buried had they seen me, so their ready tale they spread;

Yet I lived to see the tellers buried all themselves and dead.

In the preceding pages I have endeavored in the limited space available to give an honest statement regarding the actual tenets and status of Moslemism in the past as well as in the present. While, on the one hand, I have studiously eschewed everything like detraction, I have, on the other, as carefully avoided anything that could reasonably be construed as an apology either for Mohammed or for Mohammedanism. It has never entered my mind, God forbid! to compare Moslemism with Christianity as a means for attaining to a true knowledge of our Creator or for realizing the highest spiritual ideals of which our race is capable. No, Christianity, especially that form of it which has sanctified and crowned the lives of a St. Jerome, a St. Francis of Assisi, a St. Theresa, a Joan of Arc; which presided at the sublime meditations of an Augustine of Hippo, or a Thomas of Aquin, of a Dante Alighieri, of a Christopher Columbus; which has given to the world such matchless heroes and heroines of charity and self-sacrifice as a St. Vincent de Paul, a Father Damien, a Sister of Charity, or a Little Sister of the Poor; that for us is the truest, the holiest, the most beneficent of all religions; the one that contains in all its fullness the revealed word of God, the one which must be our guide to a world of happiness eternal in the life beyond the tomb.

Truth and justice, however, compel us to admit that there are many, very many, things in Islam to extort our admiration. Nor can there be any doubt that Mohammed achieved many things for the improvement of his idolatrous, drink-sodden, vice-steeped, feud-wrecked countrymen. The Koran, we must confess, contains many beautiful things regarding one’s duties towards God and one’s neighbor; but all of them are directly or indirectly derived from the New or the Old Testament, or from the doctrines of the early Church. Notwithstanding all this, however, the teachings of Islam are as far beneath the saving and incomparable truths of Christianity as is the gross and sensual Prophet of Mecca beneath the all-pure and all-perfect Son of God.

But, to recur again to the previously quoted opinion of Cardinal Hergenrœther, Islam can serve as a stepping-stone from fetishism to Christianity and as such is worthy of our sympathetic study and appreciation.

Among the countless amiable, honest, hospitable, deeply religious Mussulmans that every traveler finds in Moslem lands there is a large number who yearn for union with God and who would make any sacrifice to conform with His holy will were it but clearly and unmistakably made known to them. They are but awaiting the arrival of the Savior’s messenger and will receive the word of salvation with joy and thanksgiving. The spiritual unrest among Moslems; the ever-increasing attempts at social and doctrinal reform; even the very zeal which loyal Moslems exhibit in extending the creed of the Prophet—the only form of religion with which they are really acquainted—attest their eagerness in seeking the truth and explain their ardor in propagating what they deem to be the only revelation of the Most High.

Add to all this a widespread feeling among Mussulman leaders as well as among Christian missionaries that the time has finally come when a serious effort should be made towards effecting some kind of a rapprochement between the Cross and the Crescent; when the vast organizations of Islam and Christianity should endeavor to arrive at a better understanding of one another’s doctrines and practices; when, rising superior to that age-long antipathy and that mischievous odium theologicum which has so long kept them in a state of implacable hostility, they should strive to meet one another as brothers in one Lord and as children of the same Father.

More than sixty years ago Abd-el-Kader, the gifted Algerian ruler and patriot, wrote: “If the Mussulmans and Christians would give ear to me, I should cause their divergence to cease and they would become brothers.”[260]

The number of Moslems who entertain a view similar to that of the distinguished emir is daily increasing. They feel that the moral and religious ideas of the various races of mankind are not so irreconcilable as they are ordinarily supposed to be. The greatest barrier towards a nearer communion of sentiments between Christians and Mohammedans has been erected by ignorance and prejudice. Remove this barrier and the way, they contend, will be prepared for intellectual sympathy and, eventually, for religious union.

Notwithstanding the long centuries of wars between the Cross and the Crescent, Mohammedans are so far from regarding our Savior, as is commonly supposed, with the hatred and contempt which Christians have usually entertained for the Prophet of Mecca, that they have for Him a reverence which is inferior only to that with which He is regarded by Christians themselves. They believe that He will again return to earth and, having slain Antichrist, will establish a reign of peace and justice among men. They believe that truth will at last be triumphant and the sword will be sheathed forevermore. According to the Shiahs of India there will then be an amalgamation of Islam and Christianity and then, finally, will be realized in its truest and highest sense something of Tennyson’s dream of universal peace and charity

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

The spiritual agitation now existing among Moslems, the aspirations of so many of them for a purer and more elevating creed than that of Mohammed would seem to offer a peculiarly favorable opportunity for preaching to them the Gospel of the world’s Redeemer. But there are, unfortunately, almost insuperable difficulties in the way. There are, first and foremost, the selfish diplomacy and the unprincipled aggressions of the European Powers, which nullify in advance all projects of Christian propaganda. The frequent exhibitions of very questionable morality on the part of certain European diplomatists who have manifested a total disregard of the most solemn covenants; the ruthless conquests of Christian nations which have at times displayed an utter disregard of the most elementary rights of humanity and have often had recourse to the most cruel and barbarous methods of warfare—these things have not helped to commend to Moslems the religion of their conquerors. The recent campaigns of Italy in Tripoli, of England on the Gold Coast,[261] of Russia in the Transcaucasia have but intensified the bitterness of Islam toward Christendom and fanned the flame of fanaticism among millions who sullenly await an opportunity for making reprisal.

Then, too, there is among many the pessimistic feeling which is expressed in Kipling’s couplet:

Oh, East is East, and West is West,

And never the twain shall meet—

a feeling that has been engendered among them by a vague notion that there is an impassable chasm between the peoples of Asia and Europe and that any attempt to reconcile them will prove not only illusory but impossible. Starting with such an assumption they still cling to the detestable theory in politics of identifying power and right and of enforcing the inexorable demands of an iniquitous diplomacy by the satanic instrumentality of machine guns and trinitrotoluol.

Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis

Tempus egit....

Christian nations, if actuated by the altruism which they are constantly preaching, if guided by the same law of charity which is binding on individuals, need not such help or such defenders of their prestige or national honor.

No, what is now needed more than ever before is a complete change of attitude of the West towards the East. If we are to make the brotherhood of man anything more than an idle phrase; if we are to bring together in amity and comity the peoples of the Orient and the Occident; if we are to heal the wounds which the followers of Mohammed have suffered from centuries of cruel calumny and still crueler wars; if we are to lead Islam to a knowledge of Christianity and to an eventual acceptance of the Gospel of peace and love; we, the followers of the Crucified, cannot too soon abjure our accursed theory that might makes right nor can we too soon control that abiding lust of conquest which has plunged the weak and the innocent into such untold suffering and which has tended to perpetuate the deep hostility and the fatal misunderstandings which for long centuries have separated the God-created souls of the East from the God-created souls of the West.

The time has come for a new Crusade but a Crusade in which fire and sword shall, in the words of good old Padre Marracci, be replaced by lingua et calamo—by the voice of the evangelist and the pen of the expositor of Christian teaching. It must be a Crusade which shall be inspired by the ardent love of a Francis of Assisi; by the flaming intelligence of a Raymond Lully; by the wisely tempered zeal of a Peter the Venerable.[262] It must be a Crusade to win souls for Christ, our Savior, and to make all men children of the same heavenly Father. And that which in the Crusades of old was the war cry should, in the new Crusade, be the peace cry—Deus lo volt—God wills it.

CHAPTER XI
ALONG THE TRADE ROUTES OF THE NEAR EAST

Beautiful old stories,

Tales of angels, fairy legends,

Stilly histories of martyrs,

Festal songs and words of wisdom;

Hyperboles, most quaint it may be,

Yet replete with strength, and fire,

And faith—how they gleam,

And glow and glitter!

Heine.

Apart from its imposing monuments of the storied past, few things in the Near East are of greater interest or suggest more subjects for reflection to the serious traveler than do its trade routes which, for the most part, follow the same course as they did when Abraham fared forth from Ur of the Chaldees into the land of Canaan and when the messengers of the Great King sped along the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis.

Now as then the roadways follow the lines of least resistance. But, owing to the peculiar topographical conditions of many parts of the Near East, the traveler’s choice of direction is necessarily limited. In the broad and inhospitable desert his course will necessarily depend on the location of the few existing springs and wells and wadis, while in the mountainous regions it will, in great measure, be governed by a few and widely-separated passes. In many cases, too, where broad and deep rivers are to be crossed, the direction taken, especially during the season of rains and floods, will vary with the condition of often-changing and frequently treacherous fords.

The celebrated Royal Road, of which Herodotus gives so graphic an account, is a case in point. The student of ancient history is surprised when he first observes its circuitous course between the one-time capital of Persia and the famous emporium of Crœsus, but the reason of it becomes evident when he learns something of the character of the country through which it passed. He then discovers that the prehistoric travelers—long centuries before the days of Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes—who first selected this long and roundabout route between the plains of Mesopotamia and the shore of the Ægean—a route which took them over high mountains and pitiless deserts and dangerous morasses—did simply what a modern railroad engineer would do under similar circumstances—chose for their venturesome journey the line of least resistance.[263]

It must, however, here be observed that the word “road,” as used in the Orient, rarely has the same meaning which we attach to the term. There a road is rarely anything more than the line of route marked by the footprints of travelers or beasts of burden. Even the Royal Highway between Susa and Sardis was nothing more than this. It was only when the Romans—the great road builders of antiquity—became masters of western Asia that its leading cities were connected by roads in our conception of the word. Now, however, only traces of these splendid highways constructed by the Cæsars exist, and roads available for wheeled vehicles are still almost as rare in most parts of the Near East as they were in the time of Tigranes or Tiglath-Pileser.

But, although the great majority of eastern roads have never felt a spade or pick-ax, and are nothing more than evanescent footprints in spongy swamp or shifting sand, nevertheless there hangs over most of them an air of legend and romance and historic association which stimulates the mind of the traveler in a preëminent degree and affords as much food for thought as he can find in any of the great highways of the more civilized regions of the modern world.

We had wished to go from Tarsus to Antakia, formerly the capital of Syria, which in the days of its greatest splendor was known as “Antioch the Beautiful,” “The Crown of the East,” “The Metropolis and Eye of Christendom.” Here the followers of Christ were first called Christians and here for a long time was one of the most influential seats of the Christian Church. For generations it ranked next to Rome and Alexandria as the most important emporium in the great empire of the Cæsars. During a long period it was also the western terminus of the great trade route over which was borne

The wealth of Ormus and of Ind

for distribution among the marts of Greece and Rome. But lack of time prevented us from visiting the scattered remains of this once famous city and we perforce boarded a train on the Bagdad Railway and started for Aleppo, whose history is in some respects scarcely less eventful than that of the erstwhile capital of the Seleucids.

We left the Cilician Plain by way of the Bagdad Railroad, which took us over several well-constructed steel bridges and through a number of tunnels in the Amanus Range. One of these tunnels, said to be the longest in Turkey, is more than three miles in length. The roadbed, bridges, tunnels, stations, and rolling stock of this noted line compare favorably with those of the best railways in Europe and show, better than words, what great trade development in the Near East its projectors had in contemplation when they put their millions in the Bagdad Railroad. Will they ever receive any return for their stupendous investment? And, if so, when? Echo asks “When”?

The scenery along the railroad in the Amanus Range and in the plain on the way to Aleppo is much like that of the Taurus Mountains and of Cilicia Campestris, where one can truly say with the poet Bryant

There is a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,

And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea.

Everywhere one comes upon places that are famous in history, both sacred and profane. Everywhere one passes through lands that during thousands of years, witnessed the devastations of Assyrians and Hittites, Persians and Greeks, Romans and Parthians, Mongols and Saracens and Turks. And everywhere are ruins of Christian temples and monasteries which recall the glories of the early Church, the triumphs of her martyrs, and which serve as silent reminders of the days when Roman governors persecuted the followers of the Crucified because they were regarded as dangerous to the Empire and when Sassanian satraps demanded their blood on the ground that they were the foes of the religion of Zoroaster. Of many of these houses of worship but little now remains except a few crumbling arches or disintegrating pillars and doorways. Of others all that is left is buried under a brush-covered tell where a half-famished goat is seeking a little sustenance or whence a Turkoman shepherd is watching his nearby flock.

Notwithstanding, however, the fact that most of the churches and monasteries have long ceased to be more than heaps of dusty rubbish, there are still a few edifices of the long ago in a comparatively good state of preservation. Among these one of the most notable is that of Kal’at Sim’an to the northwest of Aleppo and but a short distance from the railway. Kal’at Sim’an—which is the Arabic for the Castle of Simon—is a monastery church which dates from the fifth century and is unquestionably the most admirable group of ruins in northern Syria. According to tradition this magnificent mandra, or monastery, was erected about the pillar on which the noted St. Simeon Stylites spent thirty-six years of his life and where, by his extraordinary austerities and superior holiness of life, he was the edification of countless thousands from far and near. Among these were the Emperor Theodosius II and his consort, the Empress Eudocia, as well as other distinguished personages of the Byzantine capital.

It may here be remarked that the Simeon Stylites here referred to was not—as is often thought—unique in his strange mode of life. He was but the first of the long line of stylitæ, or pillar saints, whose peculiar asceticism and undoubted sanctity made so deep an impression on their pleasure-loving contemporaries not only in Asia but in Europe as well.

But more extraordinary than the ruins of churches and monasteries which greet the traveler in every part of the Levant, are the imposing monuments which are due to the Crusaders and which are found in surprising numbers from southern Palestine to northern Mesopotamia. Crowning precipice-encircled heights and protecting strategic passes, they are marvels of architectural beauty and massive grandeur. Those, particularly, which belonged to the great Military Orders vie in vastness and solidity with the great strongholds which are the glory of the Rhine and the Danube. They were not only highly fortified strongholds with bastions, barbicans, and donjons which served as places of refuge to the surrounding population in times of stress and danger, but were also lordly palaces with spacious halls and noble chapels and chapter houses worthy of the great castles of France and England.

No less remarkable than the massiveness and grandeur of these venerable ruins are the charming locations which they occupy. And then the picturesque names which were given them by their Frankish builders! Among them were such appellations as Blanchegarde, Chateau Pelerin, La Pierre du Desert, and Castle Belvoir, to the last of which the Arabs gave even a more poetical name when they called it Kokab el-Hawa—Star of the Air. Built on the commanding flanks of snow-capped Hermon and cedar-famed Lebanon these lordly strongholds of the Crusaders and of the Knightly Orders of the mediæval times have about them all the glamour and chivalry and romance which envelope the most noted castles of the Tyrolean Alps or the Tuscan Apennines. As I contemplated these fascinating ruins and the superb sites which they so adorn and recalled the stirring scenes which they witnessed and that too, in one of the most romantic epochs of the world, I often wondered that they had not more frequently supplied themes for the poet and the novelist. Tasso in his Jerusalem Delivered gives us some idea of the marvelous richness of material here awaiting the writer of fiction no less than the literary artist in the domain of sober history and archæology. Where, indeed, could a true romanticist find better locations for the plots of his stories than in the wonderful old castles of Kal’at el-Hosn, Kal’at-es-Subebeh, or Burj Safita—grandiose yet fairylike in their lofty aeries—which have been the houses of the bravest Knights who have ever couched a lance and which, despite their present dilapidated condition, for centuries have been the admiration of travelers from all parts of the world. And what land more readily lends itself to tales of romance than that in which are found such famous places as Antioch and Carmel, Tyre and Ascalon and Jerusalem—places which witnessed the most brilliant exploits of the Crusaders and whose names have so long been identified with the most glorious names of Christian chivalry?

It is a long step from the superb monuments of the Crusades to the highly revered tekkehs or mezars which abound in all Moslem countries. In the Near East they are seen everywhere—along the public highway, in the most crowded quarters of large cities and in almost deserted sections of the country. These tekkehs, which frequently serve the purpose of both tombs and shrines, are interesting for two reasons, both of which show how certain religious practices of modern Islam are totally at variance with the teachings of the Koran and with the traditional doctrines of the Prophet.

According to strict Moslem law, the erection of tombs and monuments over the graves of the followers of Islam is strictly forbidden. The orders of the Prophet, as given in the “Traditions,” are “to destroy all pictures and images and not to leave a single lofty tomb without lowering it to within a span from the ground.”[264] And yet, notwithstanding this ordinance which the reforming Wahabis have strenuously endeavored to enforce, the Mohammedans are noted for the magnificent monuments which they have erected to the memory of their distinguished dead. Many of their mosque tombs are the most gorgeous mortuary monuments in existence.

But building tombs over the graves of the dead, contrary as it is to the spirit of Islam, is far less reprehensible than making them shrines or places of pilgrimage. “May Allah’s wrath,” said Mohammed, “fall heavy upon the people who make the tombs of their prophets places of prayer.” This malediction seems, however, to have fallen upon deaf ears for, as Hurgronje declares:

Almost every Moslem village has its patron saint; every country has its national saints; every province of human life has its own human rulers who are intermediate between the Creator and common mortals. In no other particular has Islam more fully accommodated itself to the religions it supplanted. The popular practice was, to a great extent, favored by the theory of the intercession of the pious dead, of whose friendly assistance people might assure themselves by doing good deeds in their names and to their eternal advantage.[265]

In Bagdad, the “City of the Saints,” the number of shrines is particularly large. They are frequented by pilgrims from all parts, who prostrate themselves before the tombs of the saints to whose shrines they often make liberal offerings and where the more devout pray and chant hymns for hours at a time. “The Moslem,” as Kuenen tells us, “seeks what his faith withholds from him and seeks it where the authority which he himself recognized forbids him to look for it.”[266]

According to a widespread opinion the bodies of the departed Moslem saints are not supposed to undergo corruption. For it is a common belief, confirmed by countless traditions, that when the tombs of saints and martyrs are accidentally opened their remains have the appearance of being freshly buried: “their faces are blooming, their eyes are bright and blood would issue from their bodies, if wounded.”[267]

Not only is the Moslem saint not dead, in our acceptation of the term, but his tomb is his house in which he continues to live and in which he receives the petitions of those who have recourse to him in their difficulties. And yet more. According to the implicit belief of his devotees he can leave his tomb, go on long journeys and return again. Firmly believing in a great invisible organization of saints and in the picturesque al-Khader, who is reputed to wander continuously through the lands of Islam performing everywhere the will of Allah, and in the countless deceased but still very active and ubiquitous saints, the life of the pious Mussulman is indeed, as has truly been observed “hedged around everywhere by the Unseen.”

Our journey from Tarsus to Aleppo was a rarely enjoyable one. At every turn of the road we saw something of unique historic or legendary interest. Everything—mountain crags, swirling rivers, foaming torrents, moss-covered castles, crumbling churches, that would have enraptured a Hobbema or a Ruysdael—held so much of glamour and romance that we seemed all the while to be traveling in a veritable fairyland. High above the dark gray crest of Amanus were motionless masses of bright, cumulus clouds which, under some magic influence seemingly, had grouped themselves into the forms of Norman donjons and Saracen strongholds. And hovering near these fantastic shapes, fashioned from the mountain vapor, was the figure of the giant rock of eastern fable. “Verily,” I said to my companion, “we are in the land of the jinn and they are here giving us an exhibition of their power over inanimate nature.” Having the authority of Mohammed for their belief in these supernatural beings of smokeless fire, is it surprising to find the untutored Mussulman ascribing to their agency what he cannot conceive as being done by human means? It is the jinn “riding in the whirlwind,” that cause, he firmly believes, the gyrating pillars of sand to sweep over the desert and the portentous waterspouts to rise from the troubled sea, as it is the jinn that transform clouds into countless forms of animate and inanimate nature, which oriental fancy so readily discerns in a cloud-dappled sky. Should one then be surprised at the exquisite pleasure which the wonder-loving followers of the Prophet find in the recital of the famous stories of “A Thousand Nights and a Night”—stories in which the marvelous is so conspicuous and in which the jinn play so important a rôle?

While traveling this once densely populated region, we recalled a saying of the Arabs that in the triangle comprised between Hama, Antioch, and Aleppo are found the remains of no fewer than three hundred and sixty-five cities. This statement is, doubtless, an exaggeration but we were willing to accept the estimate of Reclus that there are within this area “over a hundred Christian towns dating from the fourth to the seventh century and still almost intact.”[268]

Then there are the countless dome-covered tekkehs which stud the landscape—each with a Kiblah and frequently with a tomb and lighted lamp. Around many of them we note small groups of women who have, presumably, come to make offerings of oil and fruit and coin to the guardian and to implore the aid, if not the intercession, of the local saint.

Besides these ever-interesting objects there are humble homes of the country folk, every one of which rejoices in its fig, plaintain, or mulberry tree. Frequently the scene is sprinkled with nomad tents and enlivened by flocks and herds which dot the green expanse, and by long lines of swaying camels which slowly bear their heavy burdens along the long-neglected highway, still continuing their service of thousands of years, notwithstanding the arrival of their great competitor—the iron horse. The increasing demands of trade and the need of rapid communication make the construction of railways in Asia as necessary as in other parts of the world, but the lover of the picturesque will hope that the time will never come when the locomotive will entirely displace the camel, which seems to be an essential feature in every eastern landscape. This thought comes to me with special insistence as the shriek of the railway whistle announces our arrival at Aleppo, where a train of cars—in place of a caravan of camels—appears to be as incongruous as at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem.

While in Aleppo we were the fortunate guests of the Franciscan friars, the best and most gentle of hosts. They received us with the same cordial hospitality which they had so graciously extended to me in Egypt and the Holy Land a third of a century before. Thanks to their long residence in Aleppo and their thorough knowledge of the manners and customs of its people, they enabled me to see more of the Aleppines during my short sojourn among them than would otherwise have been possible. I shall never forget the extreme kindness of the courteous and learned Padre Agostino, whose knowledge of everything in and about Aleppo continually reminded me of his learned confrère, Frère Lieven de Hamme, who was my constant guide and friend during the happy weeks I spent many years before in the holy city of Jerusalem and its environs.

There is, however, a great difference between the two cities. Jerusalem is a city of sacred monuments and holy memories while Aleppo is noted as Syria’s busiest interior mart. At present its population is about one hundred and thirty thousand but in the heyday of its prosperity it counted no fewer than three hundred thousand souls. It was then the great entrepôt of trade between the Orient and the Occident. Then great caravans brought silks from China, carpets and tapestry from Persia, spices, drugs, pearls, and precious stones from India and the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was then headquarters for a large colony of Venetian, Dutch, French, and English merchants who here exchanged the products of the West for the prized merchandise of the East.

Pietro della Valle, the distinguished Roman traveler who visited Aleppo in 616, was immensely impressed by the magnitude of its commercial transactions. So great was the amount of money involved that, he says, it was never counted but always weighed in boxes. And no one, he assures us, ever spoke of sales or purchases that did not amount to sums which ranged, at the lowest, from forty to a hundred thousand scudi.[269]

For a long time Aleppo was one of the chief trade centers in the East of the Levant and East India companies. During the period of their greatest prosperity the amount of business transacted here was enormous. For, in addition to these two great organizations, the British Factory here counted no fewer than eighty firms, besides which all the leading countries of Europe had here their factories or organizations of factors or agents for the purpose of securing their share of the great trade of the Orient.

At that time a great part of the commerce of the Far East came to Aleppo by way of Basra and Bagdad. Then the population of Basra exceeded two hundred thousand whereas it does not now count more than one-fourth of that number. The number of Bagdad’s inhabitants has diminished in proportion. The great decrease in the commercial importance of these two cities was partly due to war and pestilence. But the great discovery by Vasco da Gama of an all-sea route between the West and the East and the opening of the Suez Canal reduced the overland traffic between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf to a small fraction of what it was in the palmy days of the great European factories of Aleppo, Basra, and Bagdad. According to the plans of its projectors, the Bagdad Railway is to restore this overland trade to its former magnitude and even greatly add to its amount and value.

It is difficult for the modern traveler as he passes along the present overland routes between Aleppo and Basra to form any true conception of the stupendous scale on which the old caravan trade between the two emporia was formerly conducted. Although the distance between the two places is nearly eight hundred miles and most of the road passes through the inhospitable Syrian and Arabian deserts and the difficulties to be encountered, at the time of which we are speaking, were as grave as they were manifold, the number of merchants and capitalists who ventured fortune and life in this forbidding and dangerous part of the world seems almost incredible. And the magnitude of the caravans and the value of the merchandise they transported in a single journey was yet more astonishing.

In the caravan with which Della Valle traveled there were, he informs us,[270] fifteen hundred persons and forty or more large tents. That of the celebrated French traveler, Tavernier, counted six hundred camels and four hundred men. When in 1745 the Englishman, William Beawes, crossed the desert there were two thousand camels! But this was far less than the number that was in the caravan of his countryman, John Eldred, when a century and a half earlier he made the journey from Bagdad to Aleppo with four thousand camels “laden with spices and other rich merchandise.” But the largest of these caravans was much smaller than the one which in 1750 went from Bagdad to Aleppo and which was composed of five thousand camels and eleven hundred men. When trade between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean was most brisk, caravans of from two to five thousand camels crossed the desert twice a year between Aleppo and Bagdad. The Dutch traveler, John Huyghen Van Linschoten, attributes the great prosperity of Ormuz to the fact that it was located on the great trade route to India.[271]

The value of the merchandise carried by these caravans was often very great. Thus we are told of the caravan of an English trader, one Carmichael, which consisted of thirty mules, fifty horses, and twelve hundred camels, “six hundred of which were laden with merchandise valuing nearly 300,000 pounds. The caravans that carried on the trade between Aleppo and Mocha were,” in the words of a writer of the time, “esteemed indifferently rich if they carry less than two million dollars or one hundred thousand ducats of gold either Hungarian, Venetian, or Moorish.”

The foregoing statements are illuminating in the information supplied respecting the size of the caravans and the amount of merchandise they transported, but they give us no idea of the great fatigues and dangers that were incurred in the long journeys through the cheerless deserts which were inhabited for the most part by hostile and plunder-seeking Bedouins. The Venetian traveler, Cæsar Frederick, throws some light on the character of the country which the caravans had to traverse. Returning in 1581 from his long wanderings of eighteen years in India and beyond he tells us that:

From Babilon to Aleppo is forty days’ journey, in which they make thirty-six days over the Wilderness, in which thirty-six days they neither see houses, trees nor people that inhabit it, but only a plaine and no signe of any way in the world.... I say in thirty-six dayes we passe over the wildernesse. For when we depart from Babilon two dayes wee passe by villages inhabited until we have passed the river Euphrates. And then within two dayes of Aleppo we have villages inhabited.[272]

As a precaution against attacks by Arab robbers, Pietro della Valle informs us that it was always necessary to post at night a strong guard around the caravan. “During the entire night this guard runs around the camp shouting—as is their custom—to their friends to be on the alert and their enemies to keep away.”[273] How conducive to sleep was all this to the anxious and way-worn members of the caravan!

But

While beasts and men together o’er the plain

Moved on—a mighty caravan of pain,

they were not entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Although it was long generations before the invention of the telegraph and the telephone, they were able to keep up communication with their friends by means of homing pigeons of which the caravan bashis released one every other day of the journey through the desert. By means of these pigeons, which had been used in the East since the days of the Crusades, the leaders of caravans, Linschoten records, were able to keep up regular communication not only with Bagdad, Basra, and Aleppo but also with far distant Constantinople.

Although the great camel trains which were formerly so indispensable to the merchant of the Levant have long given place to the lines of steamships that now connect the East and the West by way of the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope, the Syrian and Arabian deserts still witness as large caravans as were ever known in the most flourishing period of overland traffic between Aleppo and Bagdad. Such caravans are now, however, but little used for the purpose of commerce but rather for transporting the countless thousands of pious pilgrims who annually visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Doughty in his Travels in Arabia Deserta gives us a most picturesque description of a pilgrim caravan which he was allowed to accompany over what he calls “the old gold and frankincense caravan path to Arabia the Happy.” This, he declares, “is the most considerable desert caravan in the Eastern World.” The caravan with which he journeyed was, he tells us, composed of “a slow-footed multitude” of six thousand persons, ten thousand camels, mules, hackneys, asses, and dromedaries, nearly two miles long with a breadth in the desert of about one hundred yards.[274]

During the last few years, however, the Hedjaz Railroad has in great measure taken the place of the large pilgrim caravans that formerly went from Syria to the two sacred cities of Arabia. The northern terminus of this road is at Aleppo. Although it is planned to extend it to Mecca, it has so far been completed only to Medina. Its construction is chiefly due to the late Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who saw in it a power-means of furthering the projects of Pan-Islamism. The Shah of Persia, the Khedive of Egypt, and the Sherif and Ulema of Mecca cordially joined in this great enterprise. Contribution from rich and poor towards the work came in from all parts of the Moslem world. Lucknow contributed $140,000; Madras and Rangoon, $300,000; while an Indian Prince spent no less than $200,000 on the Medina station alone. No fewer than seven thousand soldiers were engaged in the construction of this railway which was to combine the two most holy cities of the Mohammedan world more closely to the Osmanli Caliphate than ever before and which was to further the cause of Pan-Islamism more effectively than could anything else whatever.

One feature of the Hedjaz Railway trains, which strongly appeals to the devout pilgrims, is its prayer car. For them it is virtually a mosque on wheels. But the majority of the pilgrims appreciate the road still more because it enables them to reach the sacred cities of their heart’s desire without incurring the many fatigues and dangers that are incident to the slow-moving caravans. For what with the plague, the cholera, the treacherous Bedouins, and the exposure to the withering desert sun the mortality of the pilgrims to Mecca is enormous.

To the observant traveler in the East few things are more interesting than to contemplate the pilgrim caravan as it

Winds slowly in one line interminable

Of camel after camel,

or is more suggestive of serious thoughts regarding Moslem belief and practice.

Many there are who account for the wide spread of Islam, which now numbers two hundred and fifty million adherents, by declaring that it is an easy and sensual religion. But even good Padre Marracci, who was one of the first to make an exhaustive study of the religion of Mohammed, saw that this explanation was not satisfactory.[275] The obligation incumbent on every Mussulman to give liberal alms—which is imposed both by the Koran and by tradition; to observe the strict and very trying fast of Ramadan,—abstaining during the day from water and tobacco even though engaged in the severest kinds of manual labor, and to make at least once during his lifetime the arduous and perilous pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, would seem rather to act as an effective deterrent to the acceptance of the religion of the Prophet.

To those who account for the success of Islam on the theory that “it attracts by pandering to the self-indulgence of men,” Voltaire addresses the pertinent question:

Were there imposed upon you a law that you should neither eat nor drink from four in the morning until ten at night through the whole month of July; ... that you should abstain from wine and gaming under penalty of damnation; that you should make a pilgrimage across burning deserts; that you should bestow at least two and a half per cent of your revenue on the poor; and that having been accustomed to eighteen wives, you should suddenly be limited to four—would you call this a sensual religion?[276]

Those who lay such stress on self-indulgence as a factor in the success of Mohammedanism forget that “a motive of sensuality could never, of itself, make the fortune of a religion.” They forget what a strong appeal the very simplicity of the Moslem creed makes to a man naturally religious. For, reduced to its simplest expression, Mohammedanism embraces but two fundamental dogmas—belief in God and belief in a future life. “A creed so precise, so stripped of all theological complexities and consequently so accessible to the ordinary understanding, might be expected to possess and does indeed possess a marvelous power of winning its way into the consciences of men.” They forget that proselytism is to every Mussulman in a certain measure innate; that every follower of Mohammed is by nature a missionary; that in the pursuit of this avocation he spares neither labor nor expense; that so intense is his conviction that one is forced to “notice and admire the kind of chivalrous pride which the average Mohammedan takes in his faith.”[277]

Nor is this all that will impress the candid observer. Leaving out of consideration the lives of the more unworthy followers of Mohammed, he will find much in Islam that he is forced to respect and admire. Whatever he may think of Moslem teaching, he cannot help admire the devotion, the zeal, the earnestness, the spirit of sacrifice which characterize so large a number of Mussulmans. There are, for instance, no poorhouses among them, for the indigent are abundantly provided for otherwise.[278]

But more remarkable still is the importance which they attach to prayer and the fidelity with which they, five times a day, recite the orisons prescribed by their religion. Mohammed is said to have called prayer the key to Paradise and to have declared it to be of more value in the eyes of Allah than fasting, almsgiving, or a pilgrimage to Mecca. When we see his followers regularly saying their daily prayers wherever they may be, even before satisfying their cravings for much needed food and drink, we must conclude that they take the reputed saying of their Prophet very much to heart and have no doubt of its supreme moment and efficacy.[279]

It is because of their profound religious earnestness, their abiding charity towards the poor and suffering and their many natural virtues that those who know them best have such good reports to give of the Mohammedans,[280] and would fain see them better known among our western people, and will welcome the day when the prejudices and animosities of ages shall disappear and when every soul-loving Christian shall constitute himself a missionary to assist the followers of Islam towards becoming members of the One Fold and finding peace and happiness under the One Shepherd.

Outside of her people, I can truthfully say with Della Valle that I found very little in Aleppo that was specially riguardevole—noteworthy. But the people, especially those I was able to visit in their homes, were most charming. And of never-failing interest were the representatives of many lands whom I met in the streets and mosques and bazaars. In the last named places were Asiatics and Africans of every race and sect and costume, “with their expressive hands, with henna-tinted nails, with narrow cunning wrists”—wild Bedouins, lordly Turks, grim-visaged Kurds and Turkomans, handsome and athletic Persians and Circassians, artful Greeks, astute Armenians,[281] crafty Jews—“all with eyes glittering with the yellow fires of greed” and all, as in the days of the city’s former commercial prosperity, bent on trade but in transactions far more limited.

I found an additional interest here in the reflection that Aleppo is on the linguistic frontier—extending from Alexandretta to Biredjik on the Euphrates—which separate the peoples of the flowery Arabic speech from those of the more laconic but no less vigorous Turkish. South of this line Turkish ceases to be heard except in the offices of the civil and military administrations of the Ottoman government.

The Syrians, like the Arabs, are Semites, but of their ancient tongue, the Aramaic, little now remains except a sort of dialect which is now confined to only a few villages on the eastern declivities of the Anti-Libanus.[282] Syriac, it is true, is still the liturgical tongue of the Maronites and Jacobites as it was for centuries that of other oriental Christians of Semitic origin. But, if a small number of priests still understand Syriac, no one any longer speaks it. For Syrians as well as for Arabs the language of conversation has for a long time been the vulgar Arabic. The Christians, however, speak a less pure form than the Moslems, for the adherents of Mohammed, by their constant reading of the Koran, become familiar with the more literary forms of classical Arabic.

During the Seleucid and Byzantine domination, the predominant language of educated people in Syria and Asia Minor was Greek. But in these, as well as in other regions formerly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, we now find the most extraordinary anomalies of linguistic distribution. Thus there are in Anatolia villages whose sole inhabitants are Greeks who belong to the Orthodox Church and where the Greek language is so little understood that the priests, in order to be understood by their people, are obliged to preach and read the services of the church in Turkish. In Cyprus, on the contrary, there are Turkish villages whose inhabitants speak only Greek. But this is no more singular than to find—a frequent occurrence—Turkish newspapers printed in Greek or Armenian characters. These literary curiosities are, however, eclipsed by a Jewish newspaper in Constantinople which is printed in Hebrew characters although the language is Spanish.[283]

I have said that outside of her people I found very little in Aleppo to attract attention. I, of course, visited the great mediæval castle—called the Citadel—that dominates the city and from the summit of which one has a magnificent view of the surrounding country. But this impressed me far less than a small block of basalt which I saw in the south wall of a mosque near the Citadel and which bears a curious inscription like those which have, during the last few decades, been brought to light in ever-increasing numbers throughout the greater part of both Syria and Anatolia. By the superstitious natives it is held in great veneration, for it is supposed to offer a sovereign remedy for all ophthalmic affections. We were assured that the smoothness of the stone’s surface was due to the frequent practice of the afflicted of rubbing their eyes upon it.[284]

The character of this inscription was not new to me for I had seen many similar ones in the Imperial Museum of Constantinople and elsewhere, but its location in this commercial capital of the Near East transported me in fancy back to a period antedating the time when the Patriarch Abraham, according to tradition, was wont to milk his flocks in a cave of the citadel and distribute the milk in alms among the poor.[285] Then Aleppo was in the possession of a power that ranked with Egypt and Assyria; a power which, nearly two thousand years B. C., overthrew the first Babylonian dynasty and made an alliance, on equal terms, with Rameses II, the greatest of the Pharaohs; a power which, in its palmy days, bore rule over the greater part of Syria and Asia Minor.

Until lately it was believed by scholars that there were only two great civilizations in the ancient East—Egypt and Babylonia. But recent discoveries in Sinjerli, Boghaz-Keui, and many other places have proved conclusively that there was a third civilization which was synchronous with those of the Nile and the Tigris and which, in the days of its splendor, prevailed from Nineveh to Smyrna and Ephesus and from the headwaters of the Orontes to the lower reaches of the Halys. Far back in the Mycenean period, when the Cyclops, according to legend, were building the massive acropolis of Tiryns, and when, as far as “the first pale glimmer of Greek tradition” will enable us to judge, the people of Greece “were awakening to intellectual life,” this third civilization—until a half century ago entirely unsuspected—was erecting monuments which are to-day the amazement of the learned world and which have prepared it for revelations as startling as any of those that followed the decipherment of the Rosetta stone by Champollion or the unlocking of the secrets of the cuneiform inscriptions of Mesopotamia by Grotefend and Rawlinson.

In this extended region lived an extraordinary people whose cultural development may probably, according to Messerchmid,[286] “be dated about the third millennium” before our era, and who were known by the ancient Egyptians as the Kheta and by the Assyrians as the Khatti. They were the same people who are spoken of in the Old Testament as Hittites and who are supposed to have, at an early date, extended their migrations as far south as northern Arabia. It was, in the opinion of many investigators, from a Hittite—Ephron—that Abraham bought “the double cave looking towards Mambre” near Hebron, as a family burial place.[287] Referring, apparently to the foundation of Jerusalem the prophet Ezekiel declares that her “father was an Armorite and her mother a Hittite.”[288] There is also reason to believe that the ill-fated “Uriah the Hittite,” the husband of Bethsabee, the mother of Solomon, belonged to the same race.[289] And it was because she bore a son to King David that Bethsabee, the wife of a Hittite, became an ancestress of the Savior of the world.[290]

But these and other obscure references in Scripture to the Hittites threw practically no light on the wonderful people who, during the past half century have been engaging the attention of many of the ablest archæologists and orientalists of Europe and America. In 1812 the famous Swiss traveler, Burckhardt, discovered in Hamath, Syria, a black basaltic block on which were strange hieroglyphic signs.[291] But it was not until sixty years later, when other similar monuments were found in the same place, that scholars began to realize their importance. Systematic investigations were then instituted by individuals and learned societies and it was not long until their labors were rewarded by the most extraordinary finds. Not only hieroglyphic inscriptions, like those on the blocks found at Hamath, were brought to light but also remains of cities with large palaces and fortresses adorned with sculptures of the most surprising character.

Further research by such eminent orientalists as Halevy, in France; Hrozny of Austria; Jensen and Winckler, in Germany; Sayce and Hogarth, in England, showed that the builders of these forgotten cities and the authors of the strange script which was written in boustrephedon fashion were no other than the people of whom the Bible speaks of as the Hettites or Hittites.[292] All our knowledge of this mysterious people, outside of the brief references to them in the Sacred Text, is what has been gained since the publication in this country of the first Hittite inscriptions in 1872. We now know that as a power “The Land of the Hittites” became a memory of the past when the Assyrians took possession of Carchemish and when, following their capture of this celebrated stronghold, they entered Asia Minor in 718 B. C.—but a few years after the foundation of Rome. Thenceforward the region so long inhabited by the Hittites was ruled in succession by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottoman Turks.

Notwithstanding, however, the fact that scholars now have at their disposition many and valuable Hittite monuments they have, nevertheless, thus far sought in vain for a bilingual inscription that will serve as a key to the Hittite language and which will force the Hittite sphinx to reveal her long-guarded secret. This much desired key may any day be uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. What the results of such a discovery will be can only be conjectured. Many who are competent to judge think they will compare in importance with those that followed the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia—that they will disclose an intimate relation between the culture of the Hittites and the earliest civilizations of Cyprus and Crete, Greece and Italy, and that they will contribute immensely to our knowledge of the earliest connection of the peoples of Western Asia with those of southeastern Europe and of their influences on one another in the divers domains of religion, art, literature, and politics.[293]

As I gazed on the mysterious block of basalt at Aleppo with its soon—one hopes—to-be-deciphered inscription and thought of the wonderful Hittite records that have been unearthed during the last few years and the promise which they hold of priceless contributions to the history of our race, I recalled what the distinguished French savant, the late Vicomte E. M. de Voguë, once said of the East, “L’Orient, qui ne sait plus faire d’histoire, a le noble privilège de conserver intacte celle d’autrefois,” the Orient which no longer makes history has the noble privilege of preserving intact that of former times.

CHAPTER XII
FROM THE EUPHRATES TO THE TIGRIS

We scrutinize the dates

Of long-past human things,

The bounds of effaced states,

The lines of deceased kings!

We search out dead men’s words
and works of dead men’s hands.

Matthew Arnold, “Empedocles on Etna.”

After a delightful but an all-too-short sojourn in Aleppo, made doubly delightful by our amiable Franciscan hosts and by their charming and hospitable friends whose number here, as everywhere else in Syria, is legion, we were once more on the road with our faces turned toward the mysterious and spell-weaving Orient. Although every hour that we had spent under the genial Syrian sun had been replete with its peculiar interest or pleasure, we longed to set foot on the land that is bounded by the famed rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Our feeling, indeed, was somewhat akin to that expressed in Kipling’s Mandalay, “If you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’, why, you won’t ’eed nothin’ else.”

Boarding a train of the Bagdad Railway at the station on the site of the erstwhile camp of the Crusaders under Baldwin, we were soon on our way towards our first objective, Jerablus on the Euphrates. Our course lay through the heart of a fertile country strewn with ruins and dotted with mud-built villages. The puffing locomotive made its way alternately along fruitful valleys and over rolling uplands whose state of cultivation showed that this region well deserved the name of “granary of northern Syria.” And, notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, the winding caravans which we frequently passed or overtook were proof conclusive that the service of the patient camel is likely to continue for a long time to come.

It was but a few hours after leaving Aleppo that we caught the first glimpse of the Euphrates as it flowed through arid wastes and washed barren rocks and hills of sand. Although, like Ulysses, I

Much had seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

I have seen few things that thrilled me more than my first view of this famous waterway. For, notwithstanding the fact that I had spent my early boyhood within a few hundred miles of the Mississippi, I was familiar with the name of the Euphrates before I had heard of that of our great “Father of Waters.” And when, after nearly three score years of waiting, I at length found myself actually walking along the sandy marge of this stately river—a river that my earliest reading told me had its source in Paradise—and felt personal contact with it, it was in very truth an event in my life. It was, indeed, like meeting again a favorite friend of boyhood days. The emotions which I then experienced and the memories that were evoked have been expressed in part in the beautiful apostrophe of the poet Michel:

All hail, Euphrates! stream of hoary time,

Fair as majestic, sacred as sublime!

What thoughts of earth’s young morning dost thou bring!

What hallowed memories to thy bright waves cling!—

The bowers are crushed where Eve in beauty shone,

Ages have whelmed, beneath their ruthless tide,

Assyria’s glory and Chaldæa’s pride:

But thou, exhaustless river! rollest still,

Raising thy lordly voice by vale and hill;

Sparkling through palm-groves, washing empires’ graves;

And gladdening thirsty deserts with thy waves;

Mirroring the heavens, that know no change, like thee,

A glittering dream, a bright-leaved history!

No river in the world has played so prominent a rôle in the annals of our race, and none, not even the Nile, can boast of nobler traditions or a more illustrious history, or is richer in beautiful myths and soul-stirring legends. On its fertile banks, it is believed, was rocked the cradle of mankind and its glistening waters whisper secrets of long-forgotten dynasties and murmurs the names of peoples of whom history has no record. It was long the barrier between the contending powers of the East and the West; between the forces of Persia and Greece, of Parthia and Rome. Eastern poets never tired in singing its praises and Arabian geographers loved to dilate on it as one of the great rivers of the earth.

In the Bible the name of the Euphrates occurs as early as the second chapter of Genesis. According to scholars of repute the patriarch Abraham on his way to the Promised Land crossed it at Birejik, but a few miles north of where it is now spanned by the great steel bridge of the Bagdad Railway. In the Covenant which God had made with him the dominions of his posterity were to extend “from the river of Egypt[294] even to the great river Euphrates.” And, obedient to the command of the Lord to “go forth from kindred and out of his father’s house ... Abraham took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all the substance which they had gathered and all the souls which they had gotten in the land of Haran; and they went out to go into the land of Canaan.”[295] Crossing, then, the Euphrates near the spot where we crossed it ourselves they must, in order to find the necessary sustenance for their flocks and herds, have traversed the same fertile plain that had so engaged our attention on the way from Aleppo to Djerabis and probably by one of the sinuous caravan tracks that we noted from the car window.

But “The River,” “The Great River,” as the Jews called the Euphrates, was more celebrated in profane than in sacred history. This is particularly true of that stretch of the stream between the modern towns of Bir and Rakka. It was at Carchemish, which adjoins Djerabis, where the Hittites had the great capital and the powerful fortress which enabled them so long to control the commerce between Assyria and Babylonia on the east, and Phœnicia and Egypt on the west. It was at the same famous stronghold that Nebuchadnezzar II won a signal victory over Pharaoh-Necho and his Greek and Asiatic allies. It was here also that Chosroes I crossed the river by building a bridge of boats at the time of his third campaign against the Byzantines as he had crossed it at Obbanes in his first expedition against Justinian. It was at Bir, formerly known as Zeugma—the Bridge—that Crassus and Seleucus Nicator passed into Mesopotamia, where the Roman general met such a tragic fate. It was at Thapsacus that Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger crossed the great waterway in the campaign that terminated so disastrously for the Persian Monarch at Cunaxa. It was here also, nearly a hundred years later, that Darius crossed “fleeing headlong eastwards with his broken army after the battle of Issus, with Alexander headlong at his heels.” It was in the waters of the same famed river that Trajan and Julian the Apostate slaked their horses’ thirst. It was the same waters that witnessed the brilliant campaigns of Heraclius, the splendid triumphs of the Caliphs, and the devastating hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan.

Tradition informs us that it was down these tawny waters that a frail craft carried Herodotus in his memorable visit to Babylon. And long before this date it was up the Euphrates, that Gisdhubar, the mythical hero of the great Babylonian epic, proceeded on his homeward voyage after having “by a suitable sacrifice,” secured the good will of heaven for his undertaking.[296] But, what has already been said is more than enough to show that the rolling waters of the Euphrates are, in truth, “charged with the history of the ancient world.” And, judging by the railroads and steamer lines that are planned or in operation, and the great irrigation works that are under construction for restoring to the vast Babylonian plain its old-time fertility, the day is not far distant when “The Great River” of the Jews will witness achievements which shall rival the glories of Babylon and its hanging gardens in the days of the city’s greatest splendor and power.

We had anticipated spending several days in Djerabis in order that we might have an opportunity to examine the remains of Carchemish that have recently been uncovered by the spade of the archæologist. The great number of sculptures, both in relief and in the round, which have been unearthed here are destined to throw a flood of light on the cultural and political histories of the great Hittite empire, and, when they shall have been thoroughly investigated, they will no doubt cause us greatly to modify, if not essentially alter, many of the views we have long entertained respecting one of the most powerful but least known peoples of the ancient world. Excavators here are fondly hoping that they may have the good fortune to turn up among these venerable ruins the long desired bilingual inscription that shall enable them to decipher the strange Hittite script that has so long baffled scholars. Such an inscription would supply them with a key to the history of a nation that was so long a rival of Egypt and Babylonia, and its discovery would truly mark a red-letter day in the annals of oriental research and scholarship.[297]

When I first set foot upon Mesopotamia my emotion was almost as great as when I caught my first view of “The River,” “The Great River,” “The River of the East,” “The River of Asia,” as the Euphrates is variously designated in the Sacred Text. I was at last in the Aram-Naharaim of the Jews—“The Syria of the Two Rivers,” known to the Arabs as Al-Jezireh—The Island—because it is compassed by the Tigris and the Euphrates. I was now actually treading the soil of the first country I had ever read about, and surveying the land which first enchained my youthful fancy. But it was not the Mesopotamia of my boyhood dreams that I now beheld; a land of teeming millions of happy shepherds and contented husbandmen; of smiling fields of grain and attractive gardens of luscious fruits; of splendid cities with imposing temples and magnificent palaces. Far from being, as I once pictured it, the most attractive and flourishing region of the world, it was, as far as the eye could reach, a land entirely bare of trees and almost devoid of even the most humble village—a land of utter desolation which exhibited on every side almost a complete cessation of that exuberant life which was here once so dominant.

As I contemplated the sandy wilderness before me, it required a special effort of the imagination to believe that it was once the home of a powerful race which has long disappeared. It recalled, rather, scenes I had witnessed in the arid Sahara or in the barren wastes of northern Chile and southern Peru. The only traces now left here of their once mighty empire are the numerous tells which dot the wide expanse of the desert plain. Beneath the superincumbent earth of these frequent mounds, are all that remains of the homes of the people who inhabited these parts in the long, long ago. Some of these tells, which rise up everywhere in this region like islands in the sea, may some day, under the well-directed work of the archæologist, yield up long concealed monuments that will be of priceless value to the historian and add immensely to our rapidly increasing knowledge of the former inhabitants of this once famous land. Recent discoveries in so many other parts of Mesopotamia render such a conjecture eminently probable.

We interrupted our journey between the Euphrates and the Tigris by making a short side trip to Urfa, formerly the great city of Edessa. It, like Tarsus, was once a celebrated literary center and for that reason, if for no other, it had, for at least one of our party, a very special attraction.

Like all the old cities of the East, Urfa is rich in myths and legends as well as in historic memories both sacred and profane. According to a Jewish legend which identified it with the Arach of the Bible, it was founded by Nimrod, “the mighty hunter before the Lord.”[298] Another legend attributes the city’s foundation to Enoch, the Hermes Trismegistes of the Orientals. Equally fabulous was the tradition about the tent of the patriarch Jacob, which, it was averred, was preserved in Edessa until it was destroyed by a thunderbolt in the reign of Emperor Antoninus. But these and similar tales regarding the antiquity of Edessa are all based on myths and fables, for its history dates only from the beginning of the little Kingdom of Osrhoene, which was not founded until 132 B. C.

There is, however, a legend—one of the most beautiful of the early Christian Church—which is connected with Edessa and which deserves more than a passing notice. It was supposed for a long time to explain why Edessa became, at an early date, not only the first Christian city of Mesopotamia but also its greatest religious center, and to account for its preponderating influence in the spread of the Gospel throughout the Orient. Humanly speaking, such good fortune could not have befallen so humble a community as that of Osrhoene, which was at first composed of but a small number of Christians, and which, in the natural course of events, would have made but slow progress in a pagan or Jewish environment which, if not openly hostile, was decidedly indifferent.

No, Edessa, it was fondly believed, had been from the beginning marked by the seal of special privileges, and had been destined by Our Lord to receive the saving truths of the Gospel directly from His apostle.[299] This is the meaning of the legend usually known as “The Legend of Abgar,” which was developed at Edessa towards the middle of the third century and which for centuries had an extraordinary vogue in the West as well as in the East, among Mohammedans as well as among Christians.[300]

According to this legend, the report of the miracles of Our Lord, having reached Edessa, Abgar, who was King of certain tribes beyond the Euphrates and was afflicted by an incurable malady, sent to Jerusalem a messenger with a letter addressed to Our Savior, begging Him to come to cure him. But Jesus replied that He could not go to Edessa but that He would, after executing His mission and ascending to heaven, send him one of His disciples who would effect his cure and at the same time announce to him the tidings of salvation.

Eusebius of Cæsarea, “The Father of Church History,” is our chief authority concerning the letters which are said to have passed between Abgar and Our Lord. They were, the historian assures us, long preserved in the archives of Edessa.

The copy of the letter of the King to Our Lord reads:

Abgarus, ruler of Edessa, to Jesus the excellent Savior who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem, greeting. I have heard the reports of thee and of thy cures as performed by thee without medicines or herbs. For it is said that thou makest the blind to see and the lame to walk, that thou cleansest lepers and castest out impure spirits and demons, and that thou healest those afflicted with lingering disease and raisest the dead. And having heard all these things concerning thee I have concluded that one of two things must be true: either thou art God, and having come down from heaven, thou doest these things, or else thou, who doest these things, art the Son of God. I have therefore written to thee to ask thee that thou wouldest take the trouble to come to me and heal the disease which I have. For I have heard that the Jews are murmuring against thee and are plotting to injure thee. But I have a very small yet noble city which is great enough for us both.

To this appealing letter of the King the Savior replied:

Blessed art thou who hast believed in me without having seen me. For it is written concerning me, that they who have seen me will not believe in me and that they who have not seen will believe and be saved. But in regard to what thou hast written me, that I should come to thee, it is necessary for me to fulfill all things here for which I have been sent, and after I have fulfilled them thus to be taken up again to him that sent me. But after I have been taken up I will send to thee one of my disciples, that he may heal thy disease and give salvation to thee and to those who are with thee.[301]

The letter of Our Lord, as given by Eusebius, was subsequently amplified as is seen in an apocryphal work known as “The Doctrine of Addai.” I refer to it because of the concluding sentence of the letter in which Jesus is made to say to Abgar regarding Edessa, “And thy city shall be blessed and the enemy shall not prevail against it for ever.”

It was because of this promise of Our Lord, that His letter to Abgar became doubly precious in the eyes of the King and of his people. For they regarded it thenceforward as a palladium of their beloved city and felt sure that they would never again be at the mercy of their foes.

Chosroes, resolved to show to the Edessenes the futility of the promise on which they so confidently relied, and determined at the same time to prove the falsity of the Savior’s words, proceeded in the year 544 to lay siege to the place. The besieging Persians pushed their work so vigorously that the inhabitants of the beleaguered city were almost in despair. In this extremity, according to the legend, the King of Edessa went to the gate with the letter of Our Lord and, unfolding it and holding it aloft, reminded the Savior of His promise, that no enemy should ever prevail against it. Immediately an impenetrable darkness enveloped the foe and prevented it from advancing further.

During several months Chosroes blockaded the city without, however, being able to effect an entrance. In despair the discomfited and exasperated Chosroes tried to reduce the city to submission by cutting off its water supply. But no sooner did he achieve his purpose than a number of magnificent fountains issued forth within the city and his nefarious design was frustrated. The Persians were thus compelled to raise the siege.

But this was not the only occasion on which the city was thus rescued from its foes. For every time thereafter, the story continues, that the Edessenes were beset by their enemies, it sufficed to produce the letter of the Savior and read it before their enemies to compel them to withdraw.

I have selected this as a type—probably the most beautiful type—of many similar legends that were long current in the Orient. Indeed, not a few of them retain their old-time popularity not only in the East but in the West as well. This is particularly true respecting the legend of Abgar. But what will appear more remarkable to readers of our critical and skeptical age, is that in every century of the Church, from the third to the nineteenth, there have been eminent scholars who have maintained the authenticity of the correspondence between King Abgar and Our Lord. Among them it suffices to mention such distinguished authorities as Tillemont in the seventeenth century, Assemani in the eighteenth and Rinck, Cave, and Cureton in the nineteenth.

It was because of the belief in the genuineness of the letter of Our Lord to King Abgar that it was during the Middle Ages regarded as a panacea for disease and as an amulet or talisman against all kinds of dangers—“against lightning and hail and perils by sea and land, by day and by night, and in dark places.”[302] It was doubtless because of this widespread belief in the phylacteric efficiency of this letter that the custom prevailed in England as late as the last century, and traces of it still exist to-day, for people to hang up a copy of the letter in their homes.[303]

Interesting, however, as is the correspondence in question, it is now pronounced by the general consensus of scholars to be apocryphal and must, therefore, be relegated to the limbo of many similar fictions with which the mythopœic East has in every age supplied the credulous and wonder-loving West.

But fascinating as one may find the myths and legends of Edessa, they must prove but secondary to its long and eventful history. For, in the days of its glory it ranked with Nisibis, Damascus, and Antioch as one of the four great cities of Syria. As a center of trade it was the rival of Palmyra which was then the great emporium of western Asia. Through it passed the highly-prized products of India and China on their way to the marts of Egypt and Rome.[304]

As a literary center, it was, as a recent writer observes, “admirably situated between the Greek world and the Oriental world. Communicating on the one hand with Antioch, on which it depended and on the other with Persia, Greater Armenia, and even with India, the capital of Osrhoene was well placed to profit both by the culture of Greece and the powerful originality of the barbarous countries of the East. It was, as it were, the confluence in which the ideas of two worlds became intimately blended and where the various nationalities of its inhabitants as well as the diversity of religious beliefs brought there by strangers and merchants tended to give the city a physiognomy not unlike that of Alexandria.”[305]

After suffering greatly from a destructive inundation in the early part of the sixth century, Edessa was restored by Justinian on such a magnificent scale that it was reputed to be one of the wonders of the world. According to Arabian writers there were at one time no fewer than three hundred convents and monasteries in and around Edessa. These, like similar institutions in Asia Minor and Europe, were schools of intellectual culture in which the lover of learning could devote himself to the acquisition of knowledge in entire peace and security.

One of the most celebrated of Edessa’s homes of learning and culture was that known as “The School of the Persians,” because its first students and teachers were chiefly Christian refugees from Persia. Its foundation was largely due to St. Ephrem, who so eclipsed all his contemporaries in scholarship that their works soon fell into oblivion. So voluminous were his works, so widely read were they, and so great were their authority that their author was acclaimed the “Column of the Church,” “The Prophet of the Syrians,” “The Harp of the Holy Spirit.” And in so high esteem were his books held, that they were, as St. Jerome informs us, publicly read in some churches after the Holy Scriptures.

It was in the schools of Edessa that the Syriac language and literature reached their highest degree of development. It was in them that Syriac was molded into what subsequently became the classic speech of the Syrians from the Tigris to the Mediterranean and which is seen at its best in the works of Bardesanes and St. Ephrem, in the Peshito and in Tatian’s “Diatesseron.” But neither in Edessa nor elsewhere did the Syrian Church ever produce such eminent scholars and men of so great literary genius as a Basil or a Eusebius, a Chrysostom or a Gregory Nazianzus. We are, however, indebted to Syrian scholars for the translation of many precious Greek works which otherwise would have been lost, and for thus “having passed on the lore of ancient Greece to the Arabs” who in their turn were so greatly instrumental in putting it at the disposal of the scholars of the West.

There is but little in Urfa to-day to show what it was when it was known as Edessa and when students and learned men flocked to it from all parts of the East as to one of the greatest seats of learning in Christendom. There is, it is true, a great castle standing, and walls and towers that date back to the time when Edessa was a Latin principality under Baldwin, and evidences of the city’s former occupation by Romans and Persians and others, but there is little which will long claim the attention of the serious visitor.

Like all travelers we visited the city’s chief lion—the great reservoir which, as Pliny informs us, won for Edessa the name Callirhoe—the city of the beautiful well—spring—Callirhoen a fonte nominatam. From the earliest days to the present, this reservoir has been held in great veneration. In pagan times it was consecrated to the goddess Athagartis. To-day it is known as the Pool of Abraham. The large number of fish with which it is always filled are sacred in the eyes of the Mohammedans, who consider it a very meritorious act to supply them with nourishment. The groups that are sometimes gathered around this pool feeding the sacred fish seem quite as preoccupied as the crowds that so generously distribute their supplies of grain to the pampered pigeons of San Marco, Venice.

The only ecclesiastics in Urfa to-day to devote themselves to the work of the Church which St. Ephrem and his associates served so well, whose convent was our home during our visit to their famous city, are the Capuchins. It is now more than two and a half centuries since these zealous sons of St. Francis inaugurated their missionary labors in Mesopotamia and the adjoining countries, and these have been centuries of trial and sacrifice and persecution which would have forced less heroic men to abandon an undertaking that often seemed impossible. Everywhere they were confronted by the fanaticism of Mohammedanism, which was naturally suspicious, and the jealousy of schism and heresy which were quick to take umbrage at whatever was calculated in any way to affect their age-long belief and practices.

During hundreds of years the torch of the faith which St. Ephrem had preached had been extinct in the broad region which the Capuchins had chosen for the field of their missionary activity. And during an almost equally long period, all vestige of union between the churches of Mesopotamia and those of the adjacent regions had completely disappeared.

It was thus also at Urfa when in 1850 two Spanish Capuchins, Fra Joseph of Burgos and Fra Angel de Villarubbia, took up their abode in this city of noble memories and world-famed achievements. They had to face the same difficulties and fanatical agencies that had been arrayed against their brethren elsewhere. The old schismatic Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians joined forces with the Mussulmans, the Jacobins, and the Nestorians as against a common foe and left nothing undone to render the undertaking of the new missionaries a failure and to compel them to leave the country. But the admirable patience of the good fathers, their great self-abnegation, their abounding charity towards the poor and the distressed soon won all hearts, and churches, schools, and asylums sprang into existence as if by magic. And it was not long until large numbers belonging to the dissident Greek, Syrian, and Armenian churches began to return to the Church of their forefathers and to apply for union with the Church of Rome. Nor were the Mohammedans less impressed than the Christians by the superior virtue of the missionaries. Their veneration for Father Angel was so great that they always called the Latin Church “The Church of Father Angel”—Abuna Angil Kilisesi—a name which it still bears.

But the Capuchins were not the only agents of a new spiritual and intellectual life in Urfa. For in all their works of mercy and reform they were most ably seconded by the zealous Sisters of St. Francis from Lons—le Saunier, France. Forbidden by the iniquitous “Association Laws” from devoting their lives to the poor and the suffering and the illiterate of their own country they, with rare self-denial, generously offered to labor in the vineyard of the Lord in far-off Mesopotamia. As I noted their cheerfulness and enthusiasm in their labors among the poor and afflicted in Urfa, I could but compare them with some of their sisters in religion whom I had seen in the leper hospitals of Hawaii—who, although always in contact with the most repulsive form of disease, were, I thought, the most buoyant and lighthearted beings I had ever met—all enjoying an abounding happiness that could come only from a heroic sacrifice in the service of God and humanity.

On our return to the railway we were greatly impressed by the fertility of the soil in the vicinity of Urfa. Its orchards and gardens, gay with flowers and fruit trees of all kinds—oranges and lemons, apricots and mulberries, figs and pomegranates—were a delight to the eye and formed a garland around the city, which gave it “the smiling appearance of a grandiose villa.”

About an hour after boarding the train we found ourselves crossing the dried-up bed of the Nahr Belikh, one of the most noted streams in Mesopotamia. It was on its banks—and only a short distance to the north of our course—that was located the once famous city of Haran. It has long been in ruins and only a few Arab families now make their home there.

Haran figures in the earliest chronicles of both the Assyrians and the Hebrews. For a long time it was the focus of all the roadways of northern Mesopotamia and a center of great wealth and prosperity. But a single well-attested fact shows the great change that has come over the face of the land round about Haran since its first mention in history. For what is now a sandy desert was then a well-watered region of remarkable fertility, with a rich flora and a notable fauna. This is evidenced by undoubted records according to which this part of Mesopotamia was a favorite hunting ground for the kings of Egypt and Assyria, for here big game was once as varied and as abundant as it is anywhere at present in equatorial Africa. Thus the Assyrian King, Tiglath-Pileser I, 1120 B.C., declares, “Ten powerful bull-elephants in the land of Haran and on the banks of the Habour I killed; four elephants alive I took. Their skins, their tusks, with the living elephants, I brought to my city of Asshur.”[306] To-day no elephants are to be found in the wild state nearer than far-off India. Their disappearance from Western Asia, where they formerly roamed as far westward as the Lebanon range, has long been as complete as is that of the American bison from the region east of the Mississippi.

According to a tradition based on the book of Genesis, this once celebrated city was named after Haran, son of Thare, who was the father of the Patriarch Abraham.

“And Thare took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his son’s son and Sarai his daughter-in-law, the wife of Abram his son and brought them out of Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan: and they came as far as Haran and dwelt there.”[307]

It was here that Abram received from the Lord the command: “Go forth out of the country and from thy kindred and out of thy father’s house.” It was thence he went into the Promised Land which was to be the home of his children and children’s children until the advent of the world’s Redeemer.

It was to his kindred in or about Haran that Abraham sent his servant from Canaan to get a wife for his son Isaac and it was in Haran that he found the fair Rebecca as she was going to a spring with a pitcher on her shoulder. It was this same region that witnessed that idyllic episode in the early life of Jacob so beautifully described in the book of Genesis. It was here that he spent twenty years in the service of his uncle, Laban—six years for the flocks that his uncle gave him, and fourteen years for his two daughters—“the tender-eyed Leah” and “the beautiful and well-favored Rachel.”[308]

What a delight it was in this distant Mesopotamian plain, where countless lambs still skip about their solicitous mothers, as they did when Leah and Rachel tended their father’s flocks in the long ago, to recall the noble fiction of Dante who, in his Terrestrial Paradise, makes these charming women of humanity’s youth the symbols of the active and the contemplative life as are Martha and Mary in the New Testament! And what a pleasure it was to read on this romantic ground in my well-thumbed Divina Commedia the oft-conned verses:

About the hour,

As I believe, when Venus from the east

First lighted on the mountain, she whose orb

Seems always glowing with the fire of love,

A lady young and beautiful, I dreamed,

Was passing o’er a lea and, as she came,

Methought I saw her ever and anon

Bending to cull the flowers; and thus she sang:

Know ye, whoever of my name would ask,

That I am Leah: for my brow to weave

A garland, these fair hands unwearied ply.

To please me at the crystal mirror, here

I deck me. By my sister Rachel, she

Before her glass abides the live-long day,

Her radiant eyes beholding, charmed no less

Than I with this delightful task. Her joy

In contemplation, as in labor mine.[309]

I am loath to leave this patriarchal Arcady—the once happy home of Rachel and Leah and Rebecca and those near and dear to them—without referring to a fable associated with this region, in which oriental fancy attains its loftiest flight. The thirty pieces of silver for which Judas Iscariot betrayed his Master, were, it was fabled, coined by Thare—Terah in the King James Version—and given to his son Abraham, who gave them to Isaac; “Isaac bought a village with them; the owner of the village carried them to Pharaoh; Pharaoh sent them to Solomon, the son of David, for the building of his temple; and Solomon took them and placed them round about the door of the altar.” They were taken thence to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, who gave them to some Persian youths who had been his hostages. These youths then gave the coins to their fathers who were the three Magi. When Christ was born, and they saw His star, they, taking the pieces of silver with them, set out on their journey to Bethlehem. Arriving near Edessa they mislaid the coins, which were found by some traveling merchants, who spent them in the purchase of a seamless tunic which an angel had given to some shepherds. Informed of these extraordinary facts, King Abgar got possession of the tunic and the pieces of silver and sent them to Our Lord in grateful recognition for the good He had done him in healing his sickness. The Savior retained the tunic but sent the pieces of silver to the Jewish treasury. These were the thirty pieces which Judas received for delivering his Master into the hands of the chief priests and which after the traitor had hanged himself, were used for the purchase of a field for a burial place for strangers.[310]

After leaving what was once the home of the Patriarchs we saw little of interest until we reached Nisibis. But Nisibis, like Haran, is interesting rather for what it was in the distant past than for what it is at present. Like Haran, it was once a busy and commanding mart between the East and the West. Now, however, like Haran, it is little more than a mass of ruins which are eloquent witnesses of ancient power and splendor. This is evidenced by the remaining arches of a great bridge across the Gargar on which the city was built and by the crumbling walls and columns of a great cathedral whose florid Corinthian ornaments remind one of those which so distinguish the famous temples of Baalbec and Palmyra.

As I contemplated the three or four hundred hovels which make up modern Nisibis, it seemed difficult to believe that it was once a city of palaces and schools and the great bulwark of Rome in Mesopotamia against Persians and Parthians, and that it was for centuries compelled to endure a constant change of rulers. The Armenians, to begin with, took it from its founders. Lucullus, after a long siege, captured it from Tigranes. After the crushing defeat and death of Crassus at Haran,[311] the Parthians wrested it from the Romans. It next fell into the power of Trajan and under Septimus Severus became a stronghold of the Roman colony established in these parts. Sapor I became master of it in the year 242, but it was soon retaken by the Romans under Gordianus III Diocletian and Maximian, recognizing the importance of this strategic point and foreseeing that it would inevitably be subject to the attacks of the enemy, had it strongly fortified. Ammianus Marcellinus gives us some idea of the formidable character of its fortifications when he declares that Nisibis had served the Orient as a barrier against the invasion of the Persians.[312]

But Nisibis was not only a stronghold of the utmost importance to the nation that controlled it; it was also a literary center whose fame extended to Africa and Italy and whose schools were as celebrated for certain of their courses of study as were those of Rome and Alexandria.[313] When the famous school of Edessa was closed in 489 by Bishop Cyrus and the Emperor Zeno on account of its Nestorian tendencies, its teachers and students repaired to Nisibis, where they became the most zealous advocates of Nestorianism as they subsequently became its most active propagators in Persia.

The ruins of this old metropolis show what an important city Nisibis must have been when it was ranked with Edessa and Antioch and Damascus at the period when they were at the zenith of their power and greatness. And history tells us of what a fertile and densely populated region it was once the capital. In the days of its splendor it was surrounded by marvelously fruitful gardens and grain fields while the valleys of the Gargar and the Khabur were famous for their olive groves and their extensive plantations of cotton. Many cities and towns on the Khabur, which have long been in ruins, were once noted cotton markets whence this valuable staple was shipped to Mosul and Chilat in southeastern Armenia, where it was converted into muslin. The word muslin, as is known, is derived from Mosul because this fabric had its origin there. But both the cultivation of cotton and the manufacture of muslin have long ceased to be the important industries they once were in this part of the Orient.

Another feature of this part of Mesopotamia, noted by historians, was its forests. It was at Nisibis “where good timber was abundant,” that the Emperor Trajan had a large fleet constructed to be used on the Tigris.[314] Now the entire country is so treeless that anything larger than a shrub is rarely seen. So uncommon, indeed, is a tree of any size that when one occurs, it is deemed worthy of a special name, even as was “The Oak of Weeping,” under which was buried Debora, the nurse of Rebecca.[315]

Nor is the desolation which so characterizes the regions round about Haran and Nisibis exceptional in northern Mesopotamia. It is typical of the entire country extending from the Euphrates to the Tigris. But according to the “Peuteringian Table” this vast belt of land was once studded with cities and towns, of which there are now but scattered traces. Crumbling walls, remnants of bridges and churches and reservoirs are all that now remain to attest the prosperity of this land in the days of Roman grandeur and Byzantine splendor.

At Nisibis we reached the present eastern terminus of the Bagdad Railway. Thence to Mosul, about a hundred and fifty miles distant, we journeyed on the backs of dromedaries. I did not, however, regret that this slower means of locomotion necessitated our spending more time in a region that recalled Libya’s solitary waste,

Its barren rocks, parched earth and hills of sand.

Not at all. I have always loved the desert, its solitude, its tranquillity, its restfulness. In it,

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

I have spent many of the most peaceful and enjoyable days of my life. I love its diaphanous skies, which are as limpid as the crystal heaven of Eden. I love its dry, ethereal, stimulating atmosphere which exalts the spirits, restores the zest of youth, intensifies the joy of living. Often, while within its quiet confines, I have exclaimed with St. Bernard and St. Jerome, O sancta solituto! Then I realized, as never before, its attraction for the hermits of the Thebaid and the anchorets of the Syrian Chalcis.

It matters not that the desert is as monotonous as the ocean; that its silence is broken only by the muffled footsteps of our even-paced camels; that there is a total absence of life—there is not a beast or bird or insect visible in the broad expanse; that on all sides one sees nothing but sterility, desolation, and death.

This is all true—very true. But if the desert has the monotony of the ocean, it also holds within its mysterious solitudes all the awe and solemnity; all the grandeur and sublimity of the ocean. This is particularly true at the magic hour of refulgent sunset. Then its shifting sands and fantastically formed rocks—black asphalts, brown sandstones, gray and rose granites which are massed like groups of antediluvian monsters—are illumined by splendors of color and phantasmagorias of light which transform the most ordinary landscape into a veritable fairyland.

The flanks and crest of Jebel Sinjar, a picturesque mountain range on our right, exhibit the same riot of color, the same marvelous contrasts of light and shade. At the base there is the delicate violet of the iris, at the summit the glowing red of the poppy, and above all is the soft, turquoise blue of the deep, steady empyrean.

Then there appears the wonderful, mystic afterglow which completely transfigures everything on mountain and plain, and lights up the scene with a light that rarely shines in our cloudy, mist-enveloped clime. In the clear western sky, the evening star hangs like a solitaire. Presently there flash-out in rapid succession the stars and constellations which, in the long ago, were the wonder and the delight of the shepherds and the priest astronomers of Assyria and Chaldea.

Near our tent the camels, relieved of their burdens, are quietly browsing on the scanty broom and brushwood which in these parts constitute their chief sustenance. Their Bedouin masters, seated in a circle, around an odorous camp fire, entertain one another by recounting past experiences and adventures and by singing their favorite songs, most of which are in a minor key and characterized by the frequent occurrence of the terrible name of Allah, which gives to their doleful chant a note of sadness that once heard one can never forget. Amid such scenes of nomadic life, we welcome the hour of sweet repose, when, beguiled by gentle dreams, we, like the lotus-eaters of old, soon become quite unconscious of the fleeting passage of time and of all the world beside.[316]

On the last day of our journey between Djerabis and Mosul, while contemplating at times the prevailing “abomination of desolation” of a ruin-covered waste, we continually referred to the novel excitement which had been ours as we gazed on the hallowed land of the patriarchs about Haran and viewed in Nisibis the fate of a once splendid home of letters and culture. Traversing a region of hoar antiquity, whose annals and legends so captivate the fancy, where turbaned nomads, happy in their felt tents, enjoy the unrestricted freedom of the desert, ours was a sensation and a pleasure unknown in the rush and turmoil and savage energy of our high-pressure civilization of Europe and America. And while the eye delighted in the marvelous succession of contrasts in the landscapes—where rugged mountains alternate with endless plains and “spots of verdure lie strewn like islets amid shoreless seas of sand”—the mind ever pondered on the whirlpool of vicissitudes which has made Mesopotamia unique among the regions of the earth—where, during its long and eventful history, civilization has been succeeded by barbarism and grandeur by decay and death. But as one surveyed this land of former glory and present desolation, one loved to think that “before his eyes the sands of an expiring epoch were fast running out; and the hour-glass of destiny was once again being turned on its base.” It was with this reflection that we completed another lap of our journey and that, travel-worn, we finally arrived at Mosul, the once famous emporium on the arrow-swift Tigris.[317]

CHAPTER XIII
THE CHURCHES OF THE EAST

Holy Father, keep them in Thy name whom Thou hast given me; that they may be one, as we also are.

St. John, xvii: 11.