Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire

by William Holden Hutton

No troops ever more powerfully affected the imagination of friends and foes. Among the Turks they were always the leaders, the forlorn hope. Among Christians the terror of their name spread over Europe. In every war they gained new laurels, and from the moment when they stormed the walls of Constantinople they began to be, slowly but certainly, the sole strength of the Ottoman power. At first the absolute servants of the Sultan, before two centuries were over they became his masters. Their numbers increased rapidly. Within a few years their numbers reached twelve thousand, and in the seventeenth century they were more than three times as numerous. The description of the English traveller Sandys shows perhaps better than any other record what impression they made upon Christians at the height of their power.

"The Janissaries," he says,[34] "are those that bear great sway in Constantinople: in so much that the Sultans themselves have been sometimes subject to their insolencies. They are divided into severall companies under severall Captaines; but all commanded by their Aga: a place of high trust, and the third in repute through the Empire: howbeit, their too much love is to him an assured destruction. These are the flower of the Turkish infantery, by whom such wonderfull victories have been atchieved. They call the Emperour father (for none other is there for them to depend on), to whose valour and faith in the time of warre he committeth his person: they having their stations about the royal pavillion. They serve with harquebushes, armed besides with cymiters and hatchets. They weare on their heads a bonnet of white felt, with a flap hanging downe behind to their shoulders; adorned about the browes with a wreathe of metall, gilt, and set with stones of small value; having a kind of sheathe or rocket of the same erected before, wherein such are suffered to sticke plumes of feathers as have behaved themselves extraordinarie bravely. They tucke up the skirts of their coates when they fight, or march: and carry certaine dayes provision of victuals about with them. Nor is it a cumber: it being no more than a small portion of rice, and a little sugar and hony. When the Emperor is not in the field, the most of them reside with him in the Citie: ever at hand upon any occasion to secure his person, and are as were the Pretorian cohorts with the Romanes. They are in number about forty thousand: whereof the greater part (I meane of those that attend on the Court) have their being in three large Serraglios; where the juniors do reverence their seniors, and all obey their severall commanders (as they their Aga) with much silence and humility. Many of them that are married (a breach of their first institution) have their private dwellings: and those that are busied in forreine employments, are for the most part placed in such garrison townes as do greatly concerne the safetie of the Empire. Some are appointed to attend on Embassadors; others to guard such particular Christians as will be at the charge, both about the City, and in their travels, from incivilities and violences, to whom they are in themselves most faithfull: wary and cruell, in preventing and revenging their dangers and injuries; and so patient in bearing abuses, that one of them of late being strucken by an Englishman (whose humorous swaggering would permit him never to review his countrey) as they travelled along through Morea, did not onely not revenge it, nor abandon him to the pillage and outrages of others, in so unknowne and savage a country; but conducted him unto Zant in safety, saying, God forbid that the villany of another should make him betray the charge that was committed to his trust. They are al of one trade or other. The pay that they have from the Grand Signior is but five aspers a day: yet their eldest sons as soone as borne are inrolled, and received into pension; but his bounty extendeth no further unto his progeny (the rest reputed as natural Turks), nor is a Janizary capable of other preferments than the command of ten, of twenty, or of an hundred. They have yeerly given them two gowns apiece, the one of violet cloth, and the other of stanmell, which they weare in the City: carrying in their hands a great tough reede, some seven feet long, and tipped with silver; the weight whereof is not seldome felt by such as displease them. Who are indeed so awefull, that Justice dare not proceed publikely against them (they being only to be judged by their Aga), but being privately attached, are as privately throwne into the sea in the night time. But then are they most tumultuous (whereto they do give the name of affection) upon the dangerous sicknesses of their Emperours; and upon their deaths commit many outrages. Which is the cause that the great Bassas as well as they can, do conceale it from them, untill all things be provided for the presentment of the next for them to salute. Whereupon (besides the present larges) they have an Asper a day increase of pension: so that the longer they live, and the more Emperours they outlive, the greater is their allowance. But it is to be considered, that all these beforenamed, are not onely of that tribute of children. For not a few of them are captives taken in their child-hood; with divers Renegados, that have most wickedly quitted their religion and countrey, to fight against both: who are to the Christians the most terrible adversaries. And withall they have of late infringed their ancient customes, by the admitting of those into these orders, that are neither the sons nor grandsons of Christians; a naturall Turke borne in Constantinople, before never knowne, being now a Barsa of the Port."

To the English traveller's record may be added information of the Venetian ambassador's relazioni, which speak of the severe military training which the lads underwent, the strict asceticism in food, drill, garb, and tell that at night they all lay in a long room, lighted, and patrolled all night by a watchman, who walked up and down that they might learn thus to sleep in the midst of alarms.

Children of every nation, Poles, Bohemians, Russians, Italians, Germans, as well as tribute slaves from Greece and the Balkan lands, they knew no home but that narrow court in the Seraglio, no master but the Sultan, no hope but the hope of plunder and the paradise of Islam. So great was the power of the training, the comradeship, the fanaticism, that but one of all the Christians forcibly made Moslem and brought up among the Janissaries is known to have taken the opportunity to escape and return to Christendom. The single hero was Scanderbeg, who alone arrested the triumphant progress of Mohammed II.

One of the most curious memorials of the old Turkish State is that which is preserved to-day in the museum at the end of the At-meidan. There a hundred and thirty-six figures, huge painted dolls, represent the terrible troops in their habits as they lived. On the stairs are figures in chain armour, in the hall above the representations of the different ranks, and the officers named after the kitchen duties they were supposed to perform. It was one great family, in idea, with the Sultan as father. He gave the food, and their great kettles in which it was cooked were also their drums, with spoons for drumsticks. A strange grotesque sight are these bright figures in their long robes, with here and there, for contrast, an example of the new uniform introduced by Mohammed II. The museum is almost deserted; but there is no more characteristic memorial of the great days of the Turks. Let the visitor not imagine that he may sketch or take notes or look at the book of drawings which he may find in the room. He will hear the familiar Turkish word Yasak! and the book will be snatched from his hands.

But this by the way. When Mohammed II. took Constantinople and settled the Janissaries in the outer court of the Seraglio, once the Acropolis, they were only beginning to be the centre of power. Yet even then they were the most characteristic institution of the Osmanlis. While Constantinople was assuming the aspect which it was to bear for centuries, of an entirely eastern town, with minarets everywhere, khans, shrouded women, the strange solemn social life of the East, Mohammed the Conqueror was adding everywhere to his empire. Servia and Bosnia were annexed, Albania and Cyprus subdued; the whole of Asia Minor was under his rule. He died on May 2, 1481, and left the name of the greatest of the Turkish rulers. His laws, his organisation of the judicial and religious class of the Ulemas, the teachers of the people, were more permanent than his victories. But when he died the power that he had founded rested securely on the great maxim which his successors were, from his practice, to develop till it became a fixed theory of government—that the children of Christians were alone those who should enjoy the highest dignities of the empire.

The visitor to Constantinople remembers Mohammed most of all by the magnificent mosque which towers over the city and is seen in such striking effects of light from the heights of Pera. With the name of his successor is associated a mosque as beautiful and as famous. Bayezid succeeded his father in spite of a plot of the Grand Vizier to give the throne to his younger brother Djem, whose romantic adventures fill so large a space in the French and papal diplomacy of the end of the fifteenth century. His reign (1481-1512) was marked like his father's by great victories, and the once famous Turkish fleet owes its origin to him. In him first appears the contemplative lethargic character which was to become marked in some of the later Sultans. Eastern writers called him a philosopher; and when he had ceased even to pretend to be a warrior his troops insisted on his giving up the throne to his son Selim.

Three weeks after his resignation he died. Rarely has he who has once been Sultan lived long in retirement. Selim, with ferocious zest, carried out, though he did not inaugurate, another custom of the Ottoman monarchy. He swept away all possible claimants to his throne, strangling his two brothers and five of his nephews. He followed the victorious course of his predecessors; he fought in Persia, he seized Egypt and occupied Jerusalem, and Mecca, the centre of Mohammedan reverence, passed under his power. Savage and relentless as he was—it became a proverb of hatred, "Would that thou wast the Vizier of Sultan Selim"—he was yet, like so many of his race, a poet, and the friend and patron of learned men. He died near Adrianople on the 22nd of September 1520, and left the throne to his son Suleiman, one of the greatest of the Sultans.

Suleiman began with mercy. Justice and benevolence, he declared that he took for the principles of his government. He freed prisoners, he declared that he would rule in accordance with the precepts of the Koran. From the first his reign was a succession of victories. In 1521 Belgrade surrendered; in 1522 he conquered the isle of Rhodes, so long the gallantly defended outpost of Christendom in the Mediterranean. For a time after these great successes he turned to pleasure, but threatened insubordination among the Janissaries awoke the barbarity which was never far below the surface in the great Turkish Sovereigns, and Mustafa the aga with several of the officers paid for their independence with their lives.

It was necessary, Suleiman saw, to continue war, to find employment for his turbulent force; and in 1526 he marched against Hungary with a force of a hundred thousand men. At Mohacz the Christian army was utterly defeated after a gallant fight, in which Suleiman himself was for a time in great danger, and in which at the end the flower of Hungarian chivalry with their King at their head perished by the sword or in the river through which they tried to escape. Buda Pesth fell into the hands of the conqueror. All the prisoners taken at Mohacz were massacred, and over a hundred thousand slaves were led back to Turkey. The spoils were enormous. The library of the old Seraglio and the treasury still hold some of the choicest manuscripts of the famous library of Mathias Corvinus. Suleiman returned in triumph to Constantinople.