[39] E.g. Sir Thomas Glover to Salisbury, March 3, 1606-7; Winchilsea to Nicholas, Nov. 11-21, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 5 and 17.
[40] Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674; the Same to Coventry, Sept. 9, 1675, Coventry Papers.
[41] Finch to Arlington, July 27, S.N., 1674, Coventry Papers.
CHAPTER III
LIFE IN CONSTANTINOPLE
To a man who had passed the better part of his life in the elegant cities of Italy—cities like Florence, famous for its neat streets and palaces of sculptured stone—Constantinople assuredly was no paradise. Its streets were narrow, crooked, and dirty. The houses, built of timber and sun-dried brick, soon fell into decay. Nor was there the least attempt to make up in style what these ephemeral habitations wanted in solidity. In the whole of the Ottoman capital you would not have found one stately house. Western visitors, impressed by this phenomenon, endeavoured to account for it, each according to his lights. Some saw in it a manifestation of Turkish other-worldliness; making the Turk say to himself: “’Tis a sign of a proud, lofty and aspiring mind, to covet sumptuous houses, as if so frail a creature as man did promise a kind of immortality and an everlasting habitation to himself in this life, when alas! we are but as pilgrims here. Therefore we ought to use our dwellings as travellers do their inns, wherein if they are secured from thieves, from cold, from heat, and from rain, they seek not for any other conveniences.”[42] But this pretty theory was refuted by the fact that not only the Turks, but the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians manifested the same studious avoidance of any approach to architectural display. The true explanation was much more prosaic: a fine dwelling would have been a proof of wealth, and wealth, in a country where all men were slaves except one, was a dangerous thing. A trumped-up charge, on the sworn testimony of two incredible witnesses, was enough to bring about the ruin of the man who had the misfortune to be rich. So, while the interior of an Eastern home might teem with all the luxury that vanity could prompt and money procure, outwardly it presented to the onlooker a picture of abject meanness.[43] The picture had its charm; but it was a charm too subtle for ordinary seventeenth-century eyes. Judged by contemporary aesthetic standards, the metropolis of the Ottoman Empire was, as a predecessor of Sir John’s had described it, “a sink of men and sluttishness.”[44] Sir John must have often wondered what his cousin Winchilsea could have meant when in years gone by he had written to him: “This city I hold much better worth seeing then all Italy.”[45]
On the other hand, there were the magnificent relics of Greco-Roman antiquity, brought into strong relief by their paltry surroundings: towers and arches, aqueducts and temples, that had defied the havoc of the ages. For such antiquarian treasures seventeenth-century Europeans had an eye, and they lavished upon the past all the enthusiasm which the Orient of their day failed to evoke in them. There were also the public buildings added by the Turks—superb mosques, vaulted baths, and bazaars resplendent with the fabrics and redolent of the spices of the East. Above all, there was the matchless beauty of the situation—a natural privilege which rendered the capital of the Sultans beyond comparison the most wonderful city on the face of the earth; and of all parts of that capital not the least advantageously situated were the suburbs of Galata and Pera in which the Franks had their residence, separated from Stambul by the harbour of the Golden Horn.
Galata, the business quarter, occupying the lower slopes of a hill, and Pera, where the Embassies stood, the higher, formed an amphitheatre which commanded a panoramic view of the circumjacent seas with all their bays and islands. Down below gleamed the Golden Horn: a scene of ceaseless animation: merchant ships of all nations riding at anchor; light caïcks flitting to and fro with the grace and the swiftness of swallows; enormous, heavily gilded galleys sailing in and out, some bound north for the Black Sea, others south for the Aegean. From behind this ever-moving panorama, the city of Stambul surged up in all its majesty; a sierra of seven hills broken by the massive domes and slender minarets of innumerable mosques, it glittered in the sunlight and moonlight of the East like a jewel in a silver setting. The most precious gem in this regal jewel was the Grand Signor’s Seraglio—a gorgeous assemblage of palaces, mosques, baths, and kiosks scattered amidst gardens and groves. It covered a walled space four miles in circumference, with the Golden Horn on one side, the Sea of Marmara on the other, while round the third side, blue and limpid as the sky itself, swept the rapid stream of the Bosphorus. Across the Bosphorus, on the coast of Asia, rose the bold promontory of Scutari, its slopes encrusted with kiosks and grottos, thickets and hanging gardens, its summit crowned with the domes and minarets of a stately mosque. And close by, in striking contrast, were seen the dark cypress-groves of Scutari—a procession of mourners watching over a city of the dead. In these congenially solemn groves the Turks loved to sleep their last sleep, permitting the infidels to plant their cemeteries with other trees, but reserving the cypress jealously to themselves. Hither, to the soil of Asia, whence he had come, the Turk loved to return at the last, as if he considered himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe, as if he felt that here alone his remains would not be disturbed by the revengeful Giaour, when the day of reckoning dawned.
Amidst these exotic scenes, the witchery of which no artist has yet found means to represent on canvas, our countrymen dwelt in spacious and commodious, if unpretentious, houses, with many servants and slaves to minister to their wants. His rank naturally imposed upon the Ambassador proportionate magnificence, and before leaving England he had laid out no less than £2500 on clothes and plate: he knew that his foreign colleagues tried to outshine each other, and he was resolved not to be eclipsed by any of them.[46] The merchants also, though free from such onerous obligations, lived on a scale which at the present day would be pronounced extravagant. Every self-respecting factor kept horses, dogs, and hawks; dressed, drank, gambled—led in the East the existence his contemporaries led at home: we are dealing with English gentlemen of the Restoration, a period when the excessive austerity of the Puritan regime had yielded to a reaction of debauchery.[47] Only in the East the opportunities for self-indulgence were more ample.