Constantinople, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

Mosque of the Chora.

In the centre of the Janissaries’ camp rose the many-colored tents of the court, and high above them all the crimson pavilion of Muhammad II. At daybreak he would appear in his doorway pale from the anxious vigil of the night, wearing a great turban to which was affixed a yellow plume, and a long blood-colored caftan. There he would stand, his eagle glance fixed upon the still unconquered city lying before him, one hand toying with his thick black beard, while with the other he fingered uneasily the silver handle of his curved dagger: around him would be gathered a group of his officers—Orbano, inventor of that huge cannon which was destined before many days to explode and scatter his own bones upon the esplanade of the Hippodrome; Admiral Balta-Ogli, already filled with uneasy presentiments concerning his future and the disgrace which the golden sceptre of his mighty lord was to bring about his ears; the hardy governor of the Epepolin, that great movable castle, surmounted by a tower and braced with iron, which was finally burned to the ground in front of the gate of San Romano; and a circle of poets and legislators bronzed by the suns of a hundred battlefields; a retinue of pashas, whose bodies were covered with wounds and their long caftans riddled with arrow-holes; a throng of gigantic Janissaries, with naked blades clasped in their hands, and sciaus armed with great steel clubs, ready to strike off the head or pound the flesh of rebel or coward alike; the flower of that boundless multitude of Asiatics, overflowing with youth, energy, and ferocity, only awaiting the signal to hurl themselves like a mighty torrent of fire and sword upon the feeble remnant of the Byzantine Empire. There they would stand, silent, motionless, in the rosy beams of the rising sun, looking with rapt gaze where, against the horizon, the thousand cupolas of the great city promised to them by the Prophet rose above the sobs and lamentations of its cowardly inhabitants. I saw them thus before me, their very postures, their arms, the folds of their long cloaks and caftans, their gigantic shadows falling athwart the earth seamed and scarred with the passage of heavy cannon and ponderous cars, when all at once, my eye chancing to fall upon a large stone half buried in the ground, I mechanically read the worn inscription upon its face. In a twinkling the imposing warlike scene disappeared, and in its stead the wide barren plain was peopled with a light-hearted multitude of Vincennes soldiers in their red breeches; I heard the cheerful songs of Normandy and Provence, saw Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, Canrobert, Forey, Espinasse, Pelissier, and recognized a thousand faces and brilliant uniforms, alive in my memory and dear to my heart ever since childhood, and read again, with an inexpressible sensation of surprise and delight, that meagre inscription: “Eugène Saccard, Caporal dans le 22° léger, 16 Juin, 1854.”

From this point I recrossed the valley of the Lycus, and again took the road which skirts the walls, still lonely and deserted and still winding between ruins and cemeteries, passing before the ancient military Gate of Pempti, now walled up, and again crossing the Lycus, which enters the city at this point, I found myself in front of the Cannon Gate, so called from the circumstance of Orbano’s great gun having been stationed opposite it; here Muhammad II. made his last and successful assault upon the fortifications. Raising my eyes to the top of the wall, I was startled at encountering the gaze of two or three dark, unprepossessing-looking individuals with wild, matted hair, who peered down at me from behind the battlements with an expression of astonishment, and then remembered to have heard that a band of gypsies had established themselves in the ruined towers and more habitable parts of the fortification. The traces left at this point of the fearful conflict are grand and awe-inspiring beyond expression—crumbling, dismantled walls, towers knocked to pieces or battered out of shape, bastions buried beneath huge masses of rubbish, loopholes burst open, the earth ploughed up, and the moat filled with colossal fragments which look like masses detached from the side of a rugged mountain. It is as though the terrific battle had been waged only the preceding day, and these ruins speak more eloquently than could any human voice of the frightful disaster of which they are the witnesses. It was the same, with but slight modification, before every gate in the whole line of the defences. The battle began at daybreak, with the Ottoman forces divided into four enormous columns preceded by a hundred thousand volunteers, who formed an immense vanguard predestined to death. All of this food for the cannon, this reckless, undisciplined horde of Tartars, Caucasians, Arabs, and negroes, directed by sheikhs spurred on by dervishes, driven and lashed from behind by furious bands of sciaus, hurled itself forward to the attack laden with earth and faggots, forming one unbroken line and raising one unearthly yell from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. On reaching the edge of the moat they are momentarily checked by a hailstorm of stone and iron missiles, beating hundreds upon hundreds to the ground, pierced with arrows, blown to pieces by the cannonballs, set fire to by springals, beaten, crushed, and torn asunder—old men, boys, slaves, thieves, shepherds, brigands, hewn down by the thousand, until before long the moat and banks are filled with dead bodies, heaps of quivering flesh, blood-stained turbans, bows, and cimeters, across which still other hordes, driven forward by those behind, rush to the attack, only to be beaten back, overturned, repulsed, decimated by a still more furious storm of stones and arrows from the walls; while a dense cloud of smoke and dust envelops alike besiegers and besieged, living and dead, until at length a shrill, wild call from a thousand Ottoman trumpets, heard above the din of battle, sounds the retreat, and the great vanguard, bleeding, exhausted, and reduced to half its number, draws off from the entire length of the walls in an unsteady, wavering line. Then Muhammad gives the signal for a general assault, and at that sign three mighty armies, three great rivers of men, start into motion, advance, spread out, cover the heights, overflow the valleys, and amid the flashing of swords and waving of banners, the din and clangor of drums and trumpets, sweep against those doomed walls with a shock like that of a tempestuous ocean beating against a rock-bound shore, while the savage cry, uttered as with one voice from all that vast multitude of powerful throats, “La Ilah illa lah!” echoes like a thunder-clap from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers. Then the great battle really begins, or rather a hundred different battles, carried on before every gate, at every breach, in the ditches, from the bastions, at the foot of the curtains. From one end to the other of Constantinople’s mighty ramparts ten thousand bastions pour down death and destruction upon two hundred thousand human beings; rocks, beams, casks filled with earth, and burning faggots are hurled from tower and curtain. Ladders laden with men give way, the high bridges of the attacking towers fall in, catapults take fire; host after host hurls itself forward, wavers, and falls back upon heaps of stone, piles of human bodies, the drawn weapons of comrades, the dying and wounded; here and there the thick clouds of smoke are lighted up by vivid flames of Greek fire, while the air is rent with the shrieks of the injured, whistles of cannon-balls, explosions from the mines, and the forbidding roar of Muhammad’s eighteen batteries, which command the city from the neighboring heights. Occasionally there comes a momentary hush, as though the opposing forces had paused for breath: as the smoke clears away glimpses can be caught through the great breach near the San Romano Gate of Constantine’s crimson mantle, or the flashing arms of Gustinian and Francesco di Toledo, or the terrible forms of the three hundred Genoese archers; and at that sight the battle is resumed with renewed fury. The smoke, rolling down in thick clouds, again conceals the breach, ladders are flung against the walls, fresh torrents of missiles pour from the defences, and the dead are piled in heaps before the Adrianopolis and Golden, the Selymbria, the Tou Tritou, the Pempton, Rusion, Blachernæ, and Heptapyrgion gates, while legion after legion of armed men, rising as it were out of the very earth, beat against the walls, pour over the moat, surmount the outer ramparts, fall, rise again, dragging themselves up by loosened stones, climbing over dead bodies, through clouds of arrows, beneath hailstorms of stones, in girdles of flame, until at length, decimated and spent, the besiegers draw off, while a wild cry of victory mingled with solemn chants of thanksgiving is heard from the city’s walls. From the height facing the San Romano Gate, Muhammad II. has followed the battle’s course surrounded by his fourteen thousand Janissaries, and now for a moment he seems in doubt whether to continue the assault or abandon the undertaking altogether; but, turning his glance upon that throng of eager upturned faces, those ranks of sinewy giants, whose mighty frames are trembling with fierce and wrathful impatience, only awaiting the word to throw themselves furiously into the breach, his mind is made up, and, rising in his stirrups with a gesture of haughty disdain, he once more raises the battle-cry. Then is the vengeance of the Almighty let loose upon that doomed city. The fourteen thousand, responding with one terrible cry as from a single throat, sweep forward; throngs of dervishes speed in all directions, threatening and collecting the scattered forces; sciaus beat back the fugitives; the pashas again form their men in line; and the Sultan, brandishing his iron mace and surrounded by a cloud of flashing cimeters and drawn bows, a sea of turbans and helmets, dashes forward to take the field in person. From the San Romano Gate there pours a fresh shower of missiles; Gustinian is wounded and drops; the Italians fall back discouraged; a gigantic Janissary, Hassan d’Olubad, is the first to scale the walls; Constantine, fighting amid the remnant of his Morean heroes, is thrown from the battlements, fights on below outside the gate, until at last, overpowered by numbers, he sinks among the heaps of the slain. And with him falls the Empire of the East.

Tradition says that a mighty tree marks the spot where the emperor’s body was found, but I failed to discover any trace of it. Between the huge blocks of stone, where streams of blood once flowed, the ground is all white with marguerites, and clouds of butterflies hover above. Plucking a flower by way of remembrance, to the great bewilderment of the watching gypsies, I resumed my walk. Before me the walls still stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could reach, completely hiding the city at those points where the ground rose, so that one would never have dreamed that just beyond those deserted ruins there could be a great metropolis, crowned with mighty buildings and inhabited by a teeming population; in the hollows, however, above the battlements, points of minarets flashed in the light, and the summits of cupolas, roofs of Greek churches, and tops of cypress trees stood out against the sky, while here and there, through a gap, fleeting views of the city would be obtained, as through a door hastily opened and closed again—groups of houses seemingly abandoned, deserted villages, kitchen-gardens, pleasure-grounds, and still farther away the fantastic outlines of Stambul palpitating in the white heat of the mid-day sun.

I next came to the Tetarte Gate, now only distinguished by means of its two towers standing close together. All this part of the walls is in a much better state of preservation than the rest; long portions of the bastions of Theodosius are still standing almost intact, as well as the charming towers erected by the prefect Anthemius and emperor Ciro Constantine, whose invincible summits, crowned by fifteen centuries, seem to defy the ravages of time and fury of man. At some points peasants have erected upon the curtains huts whose slight construction offers a strange contrast to the massive masonry around them, like birds’-nests built upon the side of some beetling cliff. And to the right are the same interminable, unbroken succession of cypress groves and cemeteries, rising and falling with the rise and fall of the earth, the little valleys all gray with tombstones: here a dervish convent is half hidden by a circle of plane trees; there a solitary café stands with its fountain and willow, and beyond the trees white footpaths wind away and are lost to view in the rising ground of the bare and arid plain, beneath the brilliant sky, against which vultures may be seen slowly circling upward.

Another quarter of an hour’s walk brought me to the gate called Yeni Mevlevi, from a famous dervish monastery opposite it. The gateway is low, with four marble columns built into it, and a square lower on either side, bearing an inscription of Ciro Constantine dated 447, and another of Justinian II. and Sophia, in which the imperial names are incorrectly spelled—a rather striking proof of the barbaric ignorance of the fifth century. I peered through the gateway up at the walls, into the monastery, and the cemetery, but there was not a living soul to be seen anywhere, so, after resting a while with my back against the parapet of a little bridge thrown across the moat, I resumed my pilgrimage.

Dervish.

I would give my memories of the most beautiful view in Constantinople if in exchange I could transfer to my readers any of the profound and singular impressions made upon me by my slow progress between those two interminable chains of ruins and sepulchres, beneath that eastern sun, amid that profound solitude, that utter peacefulness. Often, at some troubled period of my life, I had wished that I might find myself one of a great silent caravan of mysterious persons ever travelling through strange, unfamiliar lands to an unknown goal. Well, that road seemed to answer to this fanciful longing. I wanted it to continue for ever. Far from oppressing me with any feeling of melancholy, I was conscious of a sensation of exhilaration and excitement: the brilliant vegetation, the cyclopean dimensions of the walls, the great rolling surface of the earth like the waves of a mighty ocean, the crowding memories of emperors and armies, of fierce warfare, dead and gone generations, whole nations who had passed away, the great city so near at hand, the mortal stillness, broken only by the beat of an eagle’s wings taking its solitary flight from the summit of a ruined tower,—all flooded my soul, and bore me out of myself on a rushing tide of unutterable desires and longings, which my mortal body seemed too small to contain. I felt as though I ought to be two feet taller, clad in that colossal armor of the grand elector of Saxony which hangs in the Madrid armory, that my tread should resound through the stillness like the measured beat of a troop of mediæval halberdiers, and my arms be endued with titanic strength, that I might lift and heave into place the overturned masses of those superb walls; and, walking thus, with head aloft, with bent brows and clenched hands apostrophizing in heroic verse Constantine and Muhammad, rapt in a sort of warlike delirium, my whole soul in the past, and the blood coursing through my veins with all the heat and fire of first youth, I felt so unutterably happy at being alone, so jealous of that solitude surcharged with life, that, had I suddenly encountered the best friend I have in the world, I am afraid the coolness of my welcome would have estranged him for ever.

I next came to the ancient military gate called Tou Tritou, now closed. The shattered condition of towers and curtains show that some of Orbano’s mighty cannon must have been directed against this portion of the defences. It is thought, indeed, that here was one of those three breaches which Muhammad II. pointed out to his army on the first day of the assault, saying, “You can ride into Constantinople on horseback through the three openings I have made for you.” Next I came to an open gate flanked by two octagonal towers, which, from its small bridge supported on three charming arches of a beautiful golden color, I identified as the Silivri Gate, leading to ancient Selymbria, corrupted by the Turks into Silivri. During the siege this gate was defended by a Genoese, Maurizio Cottaneo. Some of the paving laid by Justinian can still be seen. Facing it is an enormous cemetery, beyond which stands the celebrated Balukli monastery. On entering the cemetery I found without difficulty the solitary spot where are interred the heads of the famous Ali of Tepelen, pasha of Janina, his sons Veli, governor of Trikala; Muctar, administrator of Arlonia, Saalih, administrator of Lepanto, and of his nephew, Mehemed, son of Veli, administrator of Delvino. There are five small stone columns, surmounted by turbans, bearing the date 1827,[B] and an inscription of the simplest kind. They were erected by the poor Soliman dervish, Ali’s boyhood’s friend, who bought the heads after they were removed from the Seraglio walls, and interred them with his own hands. The inscription upon Ali’s tombstone, which stands in the middle, reads as follows: “Here lies the head of the celebrated Ali Pasha of Tepelen, governor of the sanjak of Janina, who for upward of fifty years labored for the independence of Albania;” which proves that pious lies may be found even upon Mussulman gravestones. Pausing for a few moments to muse over the little corner of earth covering that once formidable head, Hamlet’s interrogations addressed to Yorick’s skull came into my mind: “Where now are your klephtis, lion of Epirus? where are your brave Arnaouts, your castles bristling with guns, your charming pavilions reflected in the still waters of Janina’s lake, your buried treasures? and where, alas! the beautiful eyes of your beloved Vasilik, that lovely unfortunate who wandered a homeless outcast through the streets of the capital distracted by the memories of her lost happiness and high estate?” At this point my reflections were disturbed by a slight noise behind me, and, turning, I found a tall, emaciated man, clad in a long dark tunic, gazing at me with a look of interrogation. From his gestures I understood that he was a monk from the Greek monastery of Balukli offering to show me the Holy Well, and I accordingly followed him in the direction of the church. Leading the way across a deserted courtyard, he opened a small door, and, having lighted a candle, conducted me down a narrow stair beneath a low damp roof: at the bottom was a sort of cistern, and my guide, holding the candle so that its rays fell upon the water, pointed out some red fishes swimming about, gabbling meanwhile some unintelligible rigmarole, which was no doubt the famous legend of the miracle of the fish. It seems that at the moment when the Mussulmans made their final and successful assault upon Constantinople a Greek monk was engaged in frying fish in the monastery kitchen. Suddenly another monk appeared in the doorway, crying that the city had been taken. “Bah!” replied the first; “I will believe it when I see these fish jump out of the pan;” upon which out jumped the fish as lively and frisky as you please, half brown and half red, because only one side was done; and they were religiously picked up, as any one might suppose, and put back in the water whence they had been originally taken; and there they are swimming to this very day. His recital finished, the monk threw some drops of holy water in my face, and, when these had fallen back in his hand converted into coin, reconducted me to the entrance, where he stood leaning against the doorway watching my receding figure with his dull, sleepy little eyes.