Constantinople, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

What associations are connected with the trees of those gardens and the walls of those little white kiosks! How many beautiful daughters of the Caucasus, the Archipelago, the mountains of Albania and Ethiopia, the desert and the sea, Mussulman, Nazarene, idolator, conquered by pashas, bought by merchants, presented by princes, stolen by corsairs, have passed like shadows beneath those silver domes! Can these be the selfsame walls and gardens amid which Ibrahim, his head crowned with flowers, his beard glittering with jewels, committed his mad acts of folly—he who raised the price of slaves in every market in Asia, and caused Arabian perfumes to increase to double their usual value; which witnessed the frantic orgies of the third Murad, father of a hundred sons, and of Murad IV., worn out by excesses at the age of thirty-one, and which re-echoed to the delirious ravings of Selim II.? Here were celebrated those strange nocturnal revels when ships and vases of flowers were traced in fiery outlines upon the domes and trees and roofs, their dancing flames reflected in innumerable little mirrors like a great burning flower-garden. Crowds of women pressed around the bazârs overflowing with precious objects, while eunuchs and slaves went through the swaying measures of the dance half hidden in clouds of burning spices and perfumes, which the breezes from the Black Sea wafted over the entire Seraglio, and accompanied by strains of barbaric and warlike music.

Let us try to bring it all to life again, just as it appeared on some soft April day during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent or the third Ahmed.

The sky is clear, the atmosphere heavy with the odors of spring, the gardens a mass of bloom. Through the network of paths still wet with dew black eunuchs wearing gold-colored tunics and slaves clad in garments of every hue carry baskets and dishes covered with green cloths back and forth between the kitchens and the various kiosks. Ustàs of the validéh, coming hurriedly out of the little Moorish doorways, run against the Sultan’s gheduclùs, passing by with haughty mien and followed by novice slaves carrying the imperial linen. All eyes follow the youngest of all the gheduclùs, the cup-bearer, a Syrian child, singled out by Allah, since she has found such favor in the eyes of the Grand Seignior that he has bestowed upon her the title of “daughter of felicity,” and the sable mantle will follow so soon as she shall have given signs of approaching maternity. In the distance the Sultan’s jesters are playing in the shade of the sycamores dressed in harlequin costumes, and with them a number of dwarfs with huge turbans on their heads, while beyond them, again, half concealed by a hedge, a gigantic eunuch with a slight movement of head and hand directs five mutes charged with the duty of carrying out punishments to present themselves before Kizlar-aghàsi, who needs them for a secret affair. Youths of an ambiguous beauty and clad in rich feminine-looking garments run and chase one another among the borders of a garden shaded by a single huge plane tree. At another place a troop of slaves suddenly pause, and, separating in two lines, bow low before the khasnadâr, superintendent of the harem, who returns their greetings with a stately wave of her staff adorned with tiny silver blades and terminating in the imperial seal. At the same moment a door opens, and out comes one of the kadyns, dressed in pale blue and enveloped in a thick white veil. She is followed by her slaves, and is on her way to take advantage of the permission obtained from the superintendent on the previous day to play at battledore and shuttlecock with another kadyn. Turning down a shady alley, she meets and exchanges soft greetings with one of the Sultan’s sisters going to the bath accompanied by her children and maid-servants. At the end of a sequestered path a eunuch stands before the kiosk of another kadyn, awaiting permission to admit a Hebrew woman with her wares consisting, though not entirely, of precious stones. She has only obtained the right of entrance to the imperial harem after endless wirepulling and scheming, and now carries concealed among her jewels more than one secret missive from an ambitious pasha or daring lover. At the extreme end of the harem enclosure the hanum charged with the duty of examining slaves for admission is looking for the superintendent to inform her that the young Abyssinian brought in the day before is, in her opinion, worthy of being admitted among the gheduclùs, if a tiny lump on the left shoulder-blade may be overlooked. In the mean time, the twenty nurses of the little princes born in the course of the current year are assembled beneath a high arbor in a pasture planted with myrtles; a group of slaves play upon flutes and guitars surrounded by a party of children, dressed in blue velvet and crimson satin, who jump and dance about or scramble merrily for the sugarplums which the validéh sultan throws from a neighboring terrace. Up and down the shady avenues pass teachers of music, dancing, and embroidery, on their way to give instruction to the shaghirds; eunuchs carrying great platters heaped with sugar parrots and lions and sweetmeats of various fantastic shapes; slaves clasping vases of flowers or rugs in their arms, the gifts of a kadyn to a sultana or the validéh, or from the validéh to a granddaughter. Presently the treasurer of the harem arrives, accompanied by three slaves, and wearing the look of one who has welcome news to communicate. Sure enough, word has been received that the imperial ships sent to intercept a fleet of Genoese and Venetian galleys came up with them twenty miles from the port of Sira, and succeeded in buying up the entire cargo of silk and velvet for the Pâdishah’s harem. A eunuch, arriving breathless to announce to a trembling sultana that her son’s circumcision has been successfully accomplished, is followed by two others bearing upon silver and gold dishes to the mother and validéh respectively the instruments used by the surgeon. There is a continual opening and shutting of doors and windows, a raising and dropping again of curtains, that messages, letters, news, gossip may pass in and out.

Any one whose gaze could have pierced through those different roofs and domes would have looked upon many a contrasting scene. In one apartment a sultana, leaning against the window, gazes mournfully between the satin curtains at the blue mountains of Asia, thinking, possibly, of her husband, a handsome young pasha, governor of a distant province, who, in accordance with a certain practice, had been torn from her arms after six short months of happiness, so that he might have no sons. In another small room, entirely lined with marble and looking-glasses, a pretty fifteen-year-old kadyn, who expects to receive a visit from the Pâdishah during the day, is frolicking with the slaves who are engaged in perfuming and anointing her, setting off her charms to the very best advantage, and raising little flattering choruses of delight and surprise at every fresh revelation of her beauty. Youthful sultanas run up and down the walled gardens, chasing each other around gleaming marble basins filled with goldfish, and making the shells with which the paths are laid rattle beneath their tiny flying feet encased in white satin slippers; others, shrinking back in the farthest corner of darkened rooms with pale set faces and averted looks, seem to be brooding over some act of despair or revenge. In one apartment, hung with rich brocades, children who from the hour of their birth have been condemned to death nestle upon satin cushions striped with gold beneath walls of mother-of-pearl; beautiful princesses lave their shapely limbs in baths of Paros marble; gheduclùs lie stretched full length upon rugs fast asleep; groups of slaves and servants and eunuchs pass back and forth through covered galleries and dim corridors and secret stairways and passages; and everywhere curious faces peering from behind grated windows, mute signs interchanged between terrace and garden, furtive signals from behind half-drawn curtains, low conversations carried on in monosyllables in the shadow of a wall or archway, broken by a ripple of half-suppressed laughter, followed by the swish of feminine garments and patter of flying slippers dying away among those cloister-like walls.

But lovers’ intrigues and childish escapades were not the only pursuits which occupied the time and attention of the occupants of that labyrinth of gardens and temples. Politics crept in through the cracks of doors and between window-bars, and the power exercised there by beautiful eyes over affairs of state was not one whit less far-reaching than in any other royal palace of Europe; indeed, the very monotony and seclusion of the life led by the inmates gave an added force to their jealousies and ambitions. Those little jewel-crowned heads from their perfumed and luxurious prisons bent the court, the Divân, the entire Seraglio, to their will. By means of the eunuchs they were enabled to hold direct communication with the muftis, viziers, and the aghas of the Janissaries, and, as they were allowed to have interviews with the administrators of their personal property from behind a curtain or through a grating, they had opportunities of keeping themselves thoroughly informed as to every minutest detail of the court and city, knew what especial dangers threatened them, and were perfectly familiar with the name and character of every official from whom they had anything to hope or fear. Thus equipped, they move with a sure hand and infinite patience all the tangled threads of those conspiracies by which they compassed the overthrow of their enemies and the elevation of their especial favorites. Every department of the court, every corner of the empire, had a root, a hundred roots, in the harem, nourished in the hearts of the validéh sultan, the sisters of the Pâdishah, the kadyns and odalisques. There was a continual plotting and scheming for the education of this one’s son, the marriage of that one’s daughter, to secure a dowry, to obtain precedence at the fêtes, or the royal succession for one of the princes—to bring about war or peace. The whims of these spoiled beauties sent armies of thirty thousand Janissaries and forty thousand spahis to strew the banks of the Danube with dead bodies, and fleets numbering a hundred sails to dye the blue waters of the Archipelago and Black Sea with blood. European princes provided themselves with letters to the harem in order to ensure the success of their missions. Little white hands assigned the government of provinces and positions of rank in the army. It was the caresses of Roxalana which drew the noose about the necks of the viziers Ahmed and Ibrahim, and the kisses of Saffié, the beautiful Venetian, “pearl and shell of the khalifate,” that maintained for so many years friendly relations between the Porte and the Venetian republic. Murad III.’s seven kadyns ruled the empire for the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, while the beautiful Makpeiker, “image of the moon,” the kadyn of the two thousand seven hundred shawls, held undisputed sway over two seas and two worlds from the reign of Ahmed I. to the accession of the fourth Muhammad. Rebia Gulnuz, the odalisque of the hundred silver carriages, ruled the imperial Divân for the first ten years of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and Shekerbuli, the “little lump of sugar,” kept the sanguinary Ibrahim travelling back and forth between Stambul and Adrianople like an automaton to suit her own ends.

Gateway of the Imperial Palace at the Sweet Waters of Asia.

What opposing interests, what an intricate web of jealousy, suspicion, intrigue, and petty ambition, must have been drawn close about that omnipotent and voluptuous little city! Wandering up and down those paths and alley-ways, I seemed to hear all about me the murmur of female voices, now rising high and shrill, now dying away in the distance—expostulations, questionings, explanations, supplications—the entire secret chronicle of the Seraglio; and a varied and curious one it must have been, treating of such questions as—which of the kadyns had been chosen by the Sultan to accompany him in the summer to his kiosk at the Sweet Waters; what dot the Pâdishah’s third daughter, who was to marry the grand admiral, would have; if it were really true that the herbs procured by the superintendent Raazgié from the magician Sciugaa for the third kadyn, childless these five years, had been the cause of her having a son; if it were settled that the favorite, Giamfeda, was to have the governorship of Caramania for the governor of Anatoli. From one kiosk to another the news flew that the first kadyn had a child, and that the new grand vizier, in order to outshine his predecessor, had presented her with a cradle of solid silver set with emeralds; that the Sultan’s favorite was not the slave sent by the governor of Caramania at all, but the one presented by the Kiaya-harem: that the chief of the white eunuchs was about to die, and that in order to obtain the long-coveted position the young page Mehemet was to sacrifice his manhood: it was whispered about that the plan proposed by the grand vizier Sinau for a canal in Asia Minor was to be abandoned, so that the progress of the work on the new kiosk building for Baffo Sultan might not be kept back; that kadyn Saharai, who was thirty-five years old, had been crying her eyes out for the past forty-eight hours for fear she was going to be put in the Old Seraglio; that the buffoon Ahmed had sent the Sultan off into such a hearty fit of laughter that he had made him an agha of Janissaries on the spur of the moment. And then there would be thousands of choice bits of gossip and news to exchange in connection with the approaching nuptials of Otman Pasha with Ummetulla Sultan, when a bronze dragon was to vomit fire in the At-Meidan; and about the validéh sultan’s sable robe, whose every button was a jewel valued at a hundred golden scudis; or the new carriage of kadyn Kamarigé, “moon of beauty;” or the tribute from Wallachia; or the little blood-colored rose found on the neck of the Shamas-hirusta, care-taker of the Sultan’s linen; or the pretty, curly, golden hair of the Genoese ambassadress; or the wonderful letter written with her own hand by the first wife of the Shah of Persia in reply to one sent her by Sultana Khurrem, “the joyous one.” All the news received in the city, every topic discussed by the Divân, every rumor afloat in the Seraglio, was talked over and commented upon in each individual kiosk and garden among groups of busy, inquisitive little heads. Anonymous madrigals written by pâdishahs were passed about from mouth to mouth—the independent and melancholy verses of Abdul-Baki, the immortal; the sparkling poems of Abu-Sud, whose “every word was a diamond;” Fuzuli’s songs, redolent of wine and opium; and the licentious verses of Gazali. The whole character and life of the place, however, would change according to the tastes of the reigning Pâdishah. Now a current of tenderness and melancholy would creep across the face of that little world, leaving the imprint of a certain gentle dignity upon every brow; the passion for ease and luxury would subside; morals and customs undergo a process of reformation; language become purified; a taste for devotional reading, meditation, and religious exercises come into fashion; the very fêtes themselves, although conducted upon the same scale of royal magnificence, assume more the character of gay but dignified ceremonials. And then a prince ascends the throne trained from infancy in every form of vice and dissipation, and immediately the scene changes: the god of self-indulgence regains his kingdom; veils are thrown back, noisy laughter, free language, and shameless immodesty prevail; messengers travel the length and width of Georgia and Circassia in search of beauty; a hundred slaves boast of the Grand Seignior’s preference; the kiosks are crowded, the gardens overrun with children; the public treasury pours out rivers of gold; the wines of Cyprus and Hungary sparkle on flower-bedecked tables; Sodom raises its head, Lesbos is triumphant; faces lit up by great black eyes become paler and more wasted; the entire harem—mad, fevered, glutted with self-indulgence, intoxicated with the fumes of that heavy, sensual perfumed air, awakes one night dazed and helpless to find itself confronted by the vengeance of God under the form of the flashing cimeters of the Janissaries. It was indeed too true that those nights of horror fell upon the little flower-imbedded Babylon as well. Revolt respected that sacred third enclosure no more than it did the other two, and, beating down the Gate of Felicity, poured even into the harem itself. A hundred armed eunuchs, fighting desperately with daggers at the doors of the kiosks, beheld the Janissaries climb upon the roofs and break open the cupolas, from whence, leaping into the rooms below, they tore the infant princes from their mothers’ arms; validéhs were dragged feet foremost from their hiding-places, fighting furiously with teeth and nails, to be overpowered finally, pinned to the floor by a baltagi’s knee, and strangled with the silken cords of the window-curtains. Sultanas returning to their apartments would utter a piercing shriek at sight of the empty cradle, and, turning wildly to interrogate their slaves, read the answer in an ominous silence, which meant, “Go seek your son at the foot of the throne.” Terrified eunuchs would bring word to a favorite, whom the sound of distant tumult had already rendered uneasy, that her head was demanded by the mob, and she must at once prepare for death. The third Selim’s three kadyns, condemned to the noose and sack, were aroused one after another in the dead of night and heard each other’s screams, dying in the darkness in the convulsive grasp of the mutes. Vindictive jealousy and bitter revenge filled the kiosks with tragedies and spread terror and dismay throughout the entire harem. The Circassian mother of Mustafa tore Roxalana’s face; rival favorites cuffed and boxed Shekerbuli; Tarkan Sultan beheld the dagger of Muhammad IV. flash above the head of her offspring; the first kadyn of Ahmed I. strangled the slave who dared to be her rival with her own hands, and in her turn fell at the Pâdishah’s feet stabbed in the face and uttering shriek on shriek of rage and pain. Jealous kadyns lay in wait for one another in dark passage-ways, flinging out the insulting words “bought flesh” as they pounced like tigresses and tore their victims’ skin or buried poisoned stilettos in their backs. Who can form any idea of the number of secret unrecorded tragedies?—slaves held in the fountains until they were drowned, struck down by a blow on the temple from a dagger-hilt, beaten to death by the eunuch’s colbac, or crushed in the deadly embrace and arms of steel of a dozen jealous furies. Veils choke the cries of the dying, flowers cover up the blood-stains, and two dusky figures, moving down the dimly-lighted path, carry a sinister something between them. The sentinels pacing up and down upon the battlements which overlook the Sea of Marmora are startled for a moment by the sound of a heavy splash; then all is still, and the dawn, awakening the harem to another day of laughter and pleasure, whispers no tales of that one among its thousand rooms found empty.

Such fancies as these kept crowding through my mind as I wandered about that famous spot, raising my eyes from time to time to the grated windows of one or another of those kiosks, now as mournful and neglected-looking as sepulchres. And yet, notwithstanding all the horrible associations of the place, one is conscious of a thrill of delicious excitement, a throbbing of the pulses, a languid, voluptuous, half-melancholy sense of pleasure, at the thought of all the youth and beauty and loveliness which once had its being here. These little stairways, up and down which I pass, once felt the pressure of their flying feet; these shady alleys, through which I walk, have heard the soft rustle of their garments; the roofs of these little porticoes, against whose pillars I brush in passing, have echoed the sound of their infantile laughter. It seems as though some actual token of their presence must still linger within those walls, hover in the very air, and I long to search for it, to cry aloud those famous names, one after another, over and over again, when surely some voice, faint, distant, ghostly, will reward my efforts, some shadowy white-robed figure flit across a lofty terrace or appear for a moment at the end of a dim, leafy vista. What would I not have given, as I scanned each barred door and grated window, to have known behind which of them the widow of Alexius Comnenus was confined—the most beautiful of all the fair Lesbos prisoners, as well as the most fascinating Grecian of her time—or where the beloved daughter of Errizo, governor of Negropont, had been stabbed for preferring death to the brutal caresses of Muhammad II.! And Khurrem, Suleiman’s favorite, at what window did she linger, graceful, languid, her great black eyes fixed upon the Sea of Marmora beneath their veil of silken lashes? How often must this very path have felt the light pressure of that fascinating Hungarian dancer’s feet who effaced the image of Saffié from the heart of Murad III., slipping like a blade of steel between the imperial arms! Above this flowery bank must Kesem, that beautiful Grecian and jealous fury who beheld the reigns of seven sultans, have bent her pale proud face to pluck a flower in passing. And that gigantic Armenian who drove Ibrahim insane for love of her, has she not plunged her great white arms into the cool depths of this very fountain? And whose feet were the smaller? The fourth Muhammad’s “little favorite,” two of whose slippers together did not measure the length of a stiletto, or Rebia Gulnuz, “she who drank of the roses of spring”? And who had the prettiest blue eyes in the Archipelago? And whose foot left no trace on the white sand of the garden-walk? Was the hair of Marhfiruz, “the favorite of the stars of the night,” thicker and more golden than that of Miliklia, the youthful Russian odalisque, who kept the ferocity of the second Osman in check? And those Persian and Arabian children who lulled Ibrahim to sleep with their fairy-tales, and the forty maidens who drank the third Murad’s blood, is there nothing left of them all—not so much as a tress of hair, a thread from a single veil, an imprint on the walls? For answer I saw a strange, weird vision far off where the great trees grew thickest. Beneath the long shadowy arcades I beheld a mournful procession: one after the other, in ghostly, never-ending succession, they filed by—validéh sultans, sisters of pâdishahs, kadyns, odalisques, slaves, children hardly arrived at womanhood, middle-aged, old and white-haired, timid young maidens, faces contorted with savage jealousy, rulers of an empire, favorites of a single day, playthings of an hour, representatives of ten generations and a hundred peoples—leading their children by the hand or clasping them convulsively to their breasts. Around this one’s neck the noose is still hanging; from that one’s heart sticks a dagger-hilt; the salt waters of the Sea of Marmora drip from another’s clothes. Brilliant with jewels, covered with dagger-thrusts, their faces contorted from the action of poison or the long-drawn-out agonies of the Old Seraglio, on they came, an interminable, mute, but eloquent procession, fading away one after another in the gloom of the cypress trees, leaving behind them a trail of faded flowers, of tears, and of drops of blood, which swept over my heart in a great wave of indescribable horror and pity.

Beyond the third enclosure there extends a long level stretch of ground covered with a luxuriant vegetation and dotted over with pretty little buildings, in the midst of which rises the so-called Column of Theodosius, of gray granite, surmounted by a beautiful Corinthian capital and supported upon a large pedestal, on one side of which may still be traced the last two words of a Latin inscription which ran as follows: “Fortunæ reduci ob devictos Gothos.” Here the elevated plain upon which stands the great central rectangle of the Seraglio buildings comes to an end; beyond, as far as Seraglio Point, and covering the entire space between the walls of the three courts and the outer boundary-walls, rose a great forest of plane trees, cypresses, pines, laurels, and terebinths, all along the hillsides, and poplars draped with vines and creepers, shading a succession of gardens filled with roses and heliotropes, and laid out in the form of terraces, from which wide flights of marble stairs led down to the shore.