"Great part of the houses of Constantinople are built with wooden frames, mostly filled up with unburnt brick; and a great number of houses are made only of such frames covered with boards. They have notwithstanding very good rooms in them; and the streets are tolerable, with a raised footway on each side. The street of Adrianople is broad, and adorned with many public buildings; to the south of it there is a vale which is to the north of the seventh hill. The bazestans or shops of rich goods are such as have been described in other places; and many of the shops for other trades are adorned with pillars, and the streets in which they are, covered over in order to shelter from the sun and rain. There are also several large kanes, where many merchants live, and most of these have apartments in them, where they spend the day, and retire at night to their families in their houses. The bagnios also are to be reckoned another part of the magnificence of Constantinople, some of them being very finely adorned within. The fountains, likewise, are extremely magnificent, being buildings about twenty feet square, with pipes of water on every side; and within at each corner there is an apartment, with an iron gate before it, where cups of water are always ready for the people to drink, a person attending to fill them; these buildings are of marble, the fronts are carved with bas-reliefs of trees and flowers and the eaves projecting six or seven feet; the soffit of them is finely adorned with carved works of flowers, in alto relievo, gilt with gold in a very good taste, so that these buildings make a very fine appearance."
Dr Pococke was certainly a somewhat dull person, and as certainly a thorough Englishman. One feels that he never quite got over his surprise that S. Sophia was not like Westminster Abbey or the Golden Gate like Temple Bar. Happily we have a contrast to him in the literature of his time.
Certainly the most charming, perhaps the most characteristic, account of the city of the Sultan that the eighteenth century has left us, is that of the Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
INTERIOR OF MOSQUE OF AHMED I.
Her husband was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte in 1716, and she accompanied him. The letters which form the records of her journey out, of her life in Constantinople and of her return, serve to show, as the "Lady" who wrote a preface to them when they were published says she is 'malicious enough to desire,' "to how much better purpose the ladies travel than their lords." The skill and point with which she tells the most ordinary incidents of her travels, no less than fixes on the contrasts that are so striking between what she sees and what her correspondents are accustomed to, gives the letter an imperishable charm. But not a little also is due to the position of the writer. Merchants, and ordinary travellers, as she says, had told the world long before a great deal about the marvels of the Turkish Empire; but Lady Mary was a woman, a very clever woman, and an ambassador's wife. She had the entrée where few others could go, and she knew as very few others did how to describe what she had seen.
The position of an European ambassador's household in Pera in the eighteenth century, was by no means entirely pleasant, and indeed it was not wholly without risks, even for an ambassador's wife. Lady Mary, however, went everywhere and saw everything, and, in the midst of a good deal of domestic discomfort, accommodated herself amazingly to the cosmopolitan and polyglot life which she came to delight in. "I live," she wrote, "in a place that very well represents the tower of Babel, in Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Slavonian, Wallachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian, and what is worse, there are ten of these languages spoken in my own family." Children of three years old often speak five languages, she says, a statement that would be as nearly true now as it was then. This she professes to find annoying, it was really delightful, other things were not so pleasant.
Constantinople in earlier times had not been a pleasant resort for ambassadors. The Mémoires sur l'ambassade de France en Turquie, written by M. le Comte de Saint-Priest, at the end of the eighteenth century, show how difficult and dangerous had been the position of the envoys. They are a brilliant sketch of the work of the able French ambassadors who had endeavoured from the time of Francis I. and Suleiman the Magnificent, to confirm an alliance which should secure to France a flourishing trade in the Levant, and a powerful ally against the House of Hapsburg. Their success was considerable, but it was not infrequently interfered with by their own eccentricities. Savari de Lancosme (1585) was so rash that his cousin Savari de Brèves was sent out to supersede him, and he promptly induced the Turks to imprison him in the Seven Towers.
Achille de Harlay Sanay (1611-17) procured the escape of an imprisoned Pole, and was in consequence himself "outragé en sa personne et celle de ses gens" and made to pay 20,000 piastres. The Comte de Marcheville in 1639, found "le logis de l'ambassadeur si infâme, qu'on ne se pouvait imaginer qu'un ambassadeur effectif pût y demeurer." He built, among other additions, two chapels, "one public, the other interior." The Turks were furiously enraged, and after a good deal of acrimonious complaints, in which the people of Galata shared, the unhappy ambassador was expelled the country. De la Haye, a few years later, spent three months in the Seven Towers, and M. de Vautelec also had unpleasant experiences. M. de Ferriol, illuminating his house on the occasion of the birth of a French prince, found himself in danger of expulsion. As late as 1798, a French ambassador, on the declaration of war, was imprisoned as usual in the Seven Towers.