These are some of the strange scenes which the Hippodrome has witnessed ere the Turk crowned his conquests by the taking of Constantinople. Here overlooking one end of At-meïdan, where the Janissaries used to exercise their horses, is the building which contains many relics of that famous corps; the Janissaries are no more, for, like the Prætorian guard, they became a danger to their sovereign. Here on At-meïdan the Ottoman Exhibition was held in 1863. How many changes have taken place in Europe since those days when Abdul Aziz was Sultan! The uncalled-for Crimean War was scarcely at an end and Turkey’s European possessions showed a tendency towards disruption, but things went very well for all that, and no one among the general public noticed the rise of a great Power in the north. The year following saw Prussia master of Schleswig-Holstein, two years from then Austria had been beaten and the southern German States forced into union by the same Power. Then by the time another four or five years had passed, the French Empire fell, and the German Empire became an accomplished fact. Roumania, Servia, Bulgaria have become kingdoms independent of the Sublime Porte; Bosnia and Herzegovina are no longer Turkish provinces, neither does Tripolitana form part of the Ottoman Empire any longer. Over Macedonia and Thrace the Slav enemies of Turkey, formerly that country’s vassals, fly their victorious colours. Montenegro has occupied part of the Adriatic coast, the Hellenes have seized Saloniki, and foreign warships have landed their contingents in Constantinople. Beyond the walls of the City which Mohammed conquered Bulgarians and Slavs are clamouring for admittance; within the walls the beaten Osmanli troops fill the hospitals, crowd the enclosures of mosques erected by conquering Sultans, and die daily by hundreds from neglected wounds, from sickness, above all from that dread Asiatic scourge, cholera.
CHAPTER V
The modern crusade, and that of Johann Capistran—Christians in the ranks of the Ottoman Army—The religious life of Constantinople—Theodosius I and his creed—St. John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia—The piety of Theodosius II—The Armenian Church—The Greek Patriarchate and the Phanar—The Teutons and Rome—Papal interference in Constantinople—The advance of the Balkan nations: Bulgars, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Greeks.
AT the outbreak of hostilities in the Balkan Peninsula we had it from the lips of a king that this is a crusade, a holy war, a war against the Pagan intruder into Europe, which must end in his subjection and eviction from our Christian continent.
Such sentiments from a monarch who, brought up in one Christian dogma, has chosen another variant of our Faith for his children, can have no other effect than to raise the present war to a much higher level than the wars of former days, which were waged unblushingly to gain some national advantage, to acquire territory, or even merely to flatter national vanity. No, this is a very different war, and informed of the same spirit, so we are told, which moved the Crusaders in their thousands down the Danube to the Holy Land. Those pious warriors passed through Constantinople, honoured the place with a lengthy stay, and, I regret to say, were not sufficiently appreciated by the Eastern Emperors and their people. The same spirit, called forth by Johann Capistran, led noble Hungarians, the chivalry of Servia, and hosts of Bulgarians to meet the Crescent on the Amselfeld at Kossovo, and Eastern Europe went under in a sea of blood. Now this latest crusade is drawing to a close, and the rejuvenated nations of the Balkans have in their turn humbled the Crescent and brought the Cross back to before the walls of Constantinople. What matter that there are numbers of Christians in the ranks of the Ottoman Army? The war is a crusade—we have it on the best authority.
Those Christians in the ranks of the Ottoman Army have also suffered for their faith, for invidious Moslems have been inclined to attribute the disaster which overtook the Sultan’s Army to the fact that he had been induced to make soldiers of them, whereas, as every true follower of the Prophet knows, Islam is the only creed for a warrior. Again and again those Christian soldiers of the Sultan have been accused of cowardice, of deserting to the enemy in great numbers; no ingenious calumny has been spared to prove that they gave the reason for the debacle, and that but for their presence the Crescent would be gleaming over Sofia again, and again facing Austria-Hungary across Danube and Save. As a matter of fact, reliable informants have told me, the Christian soldiers of the Sultan did uncommonly well, and were even from time to time deserted by their Moslem comrades. If religious matters had to do with the defeats sustained by the Turkish Army, it is more probably the case that pious Moslems felt the authority of the Sultan, the head of their faith, undermined by recent changes, by the admission of non-believers into offices of state, and this led to a despondency which from time to time broke out in panic. One night, it was told me, a Turkish soldier awoke from a nightmare and fled, crying, “The Bulgars are on us!” though there were none in the immediate neighbourhood. The men of his section took alarm and followed him; the company followed—the battalion—brigade, till the whole division was running away in nameless terror before a purely imaginary enemy.
Religion has ever played a leading part in the history of Constantinople, may even be said to have been responsible for its existence, for Byzas, in carrying out the Oracle’s dark instructions, merely followed his religious instincts. Of Constantine the Great it is not necessary to say much; the beautiful story of his conversion to Christianity is one of the earliest of such apocryphal addenda to the story of the Church of Christ as taught us in our infancy.
