Constantinople old and new

by H. G. Dwight

Now you may know that those who had never before seen Constantinople looked upon it very earnestly, for they never thought there could be in all the world so rich a city; and they marked the high walls and strong towers that enclosed it round about, and the rich palaces, and mighty churches—of which there were so many that no one would have believed it who had not seen it with his eyes—and the height and length of that city which above all others was sovereign. And be it known to you, that no man there was of such hardihood but his flesh trembled; and it was no wonder, for never was so great an enterprise undertaken by any people since the creation of the world.—Marzials’ G. de Villehardouin: “De la Conqueste de Constantinople.”

To many people the colour of Stamboul looks purely Turkish—at first sight. The simplest peasant of Asia Minor could not look at it often, however, without noticing things of an order strange to him—a sculptured capital lying in the street, bits of flowered marble set into a wall, a column as high as a minaret standing by itself, a dome of unfamiliar shape, and mosque walls mysterious with unreadable letters and the sacrilegious picturing of human forms, and ruined masonry or dark subterranean vaultings leading off into myth. For other newcomers it may become a game of the most engrossing kind to track out these old things, and mark how Stamboul has fitted into the ruts of Byzantium, and hunt for some lost piece of antiquity that no one else has found. And there are men for whom Stamboul does not exist. Through it they walk as in some inner city of the mind, seeing only the vanished capital of the Cæsars. Divan Yolou is for them the Mese of old. In the Hippodrome they still hear the thunder of Roman chariots. And many a Turkish monument has interest for them only because its marbles are anagrams that spell anew the glory of the ancient world.

Need I say that I am no such man? The essential colour of Constantinople is for me, who am neither Byzantinist nor Orientalist, a composite one, and the richer for being so. I confess I do not like the minarets of St. Sophia, but it is only because they are ugly. I am sorry that the palace of Constantine has so completely disappeared, but I am Philistine enough to suspect that the mosque built on its site may lift quite as imposing a mass against the sky. I like to remember that the most important street of Stamboul was the Triumphal Way of the Byzantine emperors—and earlier still the home-stretch of a famous Roman road, the Via Egnatia, which continued from Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic, the Durazzo of Balkan squabbles, the line of the Appian Way; but it seems to me that the sultans added interest to that historic thoroughfare. Nevertheless, I am inconsistent enough to be sorry that Byzantinists are so rare, and to be a little jealous of

the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

I do not pretend to set up Constantinople against Rome or Athens. Without them, of course, she would not have been—what she was. But I do maintain that her history was as long, that she played a rôle no less important in her later day, and that without her our modern world could never have been quite what it is. We are unjustly inclined to forget that link in the chain. Different from Rome and Athens, as they differed from each other, Constantinople fused in her own crucible, with others of Oriental origin, the elements of civilisation which they furnished. Out of these elements she formulated a new religion, created the architecture to embody it, codified a system of law. Having thus collected and enriched the learning of antiquity, she bequeathed it to the adolescent Europe of the Renaissance. We are accustomed to speak of the dark ages that followed the fall of Rome. There was, properly speaking, no darker age than had been. The centre of light had merely moved eastward, and such miserable frontier villages as London, Paris, and Vienna were merely, for the time being, the darker. To them Constantinople was what Paris is to us, the ville lumière, and far more. She was the centre of a civilisation whose splendour and refinement were the legend of the West. She contained such treasures of ancient art as are now scattered in a thousand museums. Under her shadow Athens became a sort of present-day Oxford or Venice and Rome not much more than a vociferous Berlin. Entirely new races—Slavs, Huns, Turks—began to be drawn into her orbit, as the Gauls, the Britons, and the Teutons had been drawn by Rome. If the far-away cities of Bagdad and Cordova felt her influence, how much more was it so in countries with which she had more immediate relations? Italy in particular, and Venice above all other Italian towns, owe more to Constantinople than has ever been appraised. Venice would always have been Venice, but a Venice without the St. Mark’s we know, without the stolen horses of bronze, without the pillars of the Piazzetta, without many of the palaces of the Grand Canal, without the lion, even, which is as Byzantine as Byzantine can be. Several other Italian cities contain notable examples of Byzantine architecture or decoration, while in half the collections of Europe are ivories, reliquaries, bits of painting and mosaic and goldsmiths’ work that came out of Byzantium. That jewel of Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle, is not Byzantine, but it was built to house the church treasures from Constantinople which were a part of the loot of the fourth crusade, and some of them may still be seen in Notre Dame. In indirect ways the account is harder to reckon. Some authorities find a Byzantine origin for so remote an architectural language as Romanesque building, while few now deny that the Italian school of painting was derived directly from the mosaics of Constantinople. All admit, at any rate, that the prodigious movement of the Renaissance was fed by the humanists who took refuge in Italy from the invading Turk.

St. Sophia

From an etching by Frank Brangwyn

Reproduced by permission of C. W. Kraushaar, N. Y.