Adrianople was the Turkish capital for nearly a hundred years; it was abandoned in 1453 when Constantinople came into Turkish control. The ruins of the palaces of the Sultans yet grace the ancient capital.
Adrianople is the faithful Moslem city of forty mosques. The mosque Selim II. is a close rival to Santa Sofia.
Greek and Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine, Christian and Moslem, Turk and Bulgarian, influences have in turn dominated the city of three rivers; each re-baptizing it with blood: and the end is not yet.
In 1713, Charles XII. of Sweden was a guest in the castle of Tumurtish. Little then did the valiant Madman of the North dream how ignominiously his own meteoric career would close: little did he see himself as fixed in fame, not by his combats and victories, not even by his gallant defeat at Pultowa, but by being the inspiration in the moralizing mind of Dr. Samuel Johnson of the following lines:
“He left a name—at which the world grew pale—
To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
The Vanity of Human Wishes is indeed exemplified not only in Charles XII. of Sweden, but also in many other favorites of fortune: not one of whom, perhaps, but would add to or alter his own peculiar setting in fame—if perchance he should be able to recognize himself at all in the historic figure masquerading under his name. How seldom does it chance that the world honors a man for what that man feels to be his best title to honor?
Would Julius Cæsar, red-hand conqueror of Gaul, know himself as the Shakespearean hero? And Nero, Louis XI., Wallenstein, Henry VIII., Roderick Borgia—would they claim even passing acquaintance with themselves as fame has fixed them? If these men took any of their fighting qualities with them into the Spirit Land, there must have been some flamy duelling when they met their respective biographers.
And so the blood of battle bathed Adrianople one thousand five hundred and thirty-five years ago and—last year (1913). And we talk learnedly about the defeat and death of the Roman Emperor Valens, and of the effect of that victory upon our respected barbarian ancestors with consequent doings of destiny, etc., etc.—because we don’t know: and we say little about the Servian-Bulgarian-Turkish capture of Adrianople last year, because it is too near and—we know. Then, too, who can poetize or moralize or even sentimentally scribble over the yet hideously bleeding wounds of war? When they are healed, when the moaning is still, the mangled forms moveless, the cripples on crutches gone, the lamentations silenced, the last-lingering heartache soothed in Death—why, then, perhaps; but not now. Battle in the real is a human butchering: and there is no other delusion under the sun more diabolically sardonic than that which makes animal savagery seem patriotism and the red-hand slaughter-man a hero. From the Homeric Hector-Achilles, deliver the world, O Lord.
Strange, indeed, is the contrariety between the real of War and the ideal, the far away hero and the near Huerta, the blood spilled and stilled and the bright life-blood spilling, the sorrow silenced and the agonized cries that arise, the battle of Adrianople, 378 A. D., and the siege and capture and re-capture of Adrianople (1912-1913).