The safest place for her was, after all, with the maidens who were known to be the choice of the Sultan, and thus beyond insult by any except the imperial debauchee.
Mahomet II. gave orders for the immediate transformation of the Christian temple of St. Sophia into a Mosque. In a few hours desolation reigned in those "Courts of the Lord's House," which, when first completed, ages ago, drew from the imperial founder, the remark: "Oh, Solomon! I have surpassed thee!" and which, though the poverty of later monarchs had allowed it to become sadly impaired, was yet regarded by the Greek Christians as worthy of being the vestibule of heaven.
The command of the Sultan: "Take away every trace of the idolatry of the infidel!" was obeyed in demolishing the rarest gems of Christian art to which attached the least symbolism of the now abolished worship. The arms were chiseled off the marble crosses which stood out in relief from the side walls, and from the bases of the gigantic pillars. The rare mosaics which lined the church as if it were a vast casket—the fitting gift of the princes of the earth to the King of Kings—were plastered or painted over. The altar, that marvellous combination of gold and silver and bronze, conglomerate with a thousand precious stones, was torn away, that the red slab of the Mihrab might point the prayers of the new devotees toward Mecca. The furniture, from that upon the grand altar to the banners and mementoes of a thousand years, the donations of Greek emperors and sovereigns of other lands, was broken or torn into pieces. There remained only the grand proportions of the building—its chief glory—enriched by polished surfaces of marble and porphyry slabs; the superb pillars brought by the reverent cupidity of earlier ages from the ruined temple of Diana at Ephesus, the temple of the Sun at Palmyra, the temple on the Acro-Corinthus, and the mythologic urn from Pergamus, which latter, having been used as a baptismal font by the followers of Jesus, was now devoted to the ablutions of the Moslems.
From St. Sophia the Sultan passed to the palace of the Greek Cæsars.
"Truly! truly!" said he "The spider's web is the royal curtain; the owl sounds the watch cry on the towers of Afrasiab," quoting from the Persian poet Firdusi, as he gazed about the deserted halls. He issued his mandate which should summon architects and decorators, not only from his dominions, but from Christian nations, to adorn the splendid headland with the palatial motley of walls and kiosks which were to constitute his new seraglio.
The considerateness of Ballaban led him to select the house of Phranza as the place to which Morsinia was taken. The noble site and substantial structure of the mansion of the late chamberlain commended it to the Sultan for the temporary haremlik; and the familiar rooms alleviated, like the faces of mute friends, the wildness of the grief of their only familiar captive.
CHAPTER XLII.
Constantine, after his escape from the Sultan's tent, where he had been taken for the demented Ballaban, was unable to enter Constantinople before it fell. His heart was torn with agonizing solicitude for the fate of Morsinia. He knew too well the determination of the dauntless girl in the event of her falling into the hands of the Turks. Filling his dreams at night, and rising before him as a terrible apparition by day, was that loved form, a suicide empurpled with its own gore. Yet love and duty led him to seek her, or at least to seek the certainty of her fate. He therefore disguised himself as a Moslem and mingled with the throng of soldiers and adventurers who entered the city under its new possessors. He wandered for hours about the familiar streets, that, perchance, he might come upon some memorial of her. The secrets of the royal harem he could not explore, even if suspicion led his thought thither. The proximity of the residence of Phranza was guarded by the immediate servants of the Sultan, so that he was deprived of even the fond misery of visiting the scenes so associated with his former joy.
In passing through one of the narrowest and foulest streets—the only ones that had been left undisturbed by the Vandalism of the conquerors—he came upon an old woman, hideous in face and decrepit, whom he remembered as a beggar at the gate of Phranza. From her he learned many stories of the last hours of the siege.