always the case in Oriental countries, not many months had elapsed
before it was completely forgotten. When I visited Constantinople four
years later no traces of it were to be seen except certain tracts of
bare ground at the far end of Pera, below the heights of Tataola, and
the fire was referred to by the inhabitants as something which had
occurred in the remote past. For some little time--that is, as long as
the ruins were still warm--the papers were filled with demands that the
government should be made to take some precautions against a recurrence
of the same thing. They suggested the reorganization of the fire
department, the purchase of new pumps, increase of the water-supply,
and that regulations should be enacted controlling the manner in which
houses were to be built in the future; but, finding that the government
turned a deaf ear to these proposals, the Europeans soon ceased to make
them, and continued to live in the Turkish fashion; that is, trusting a
little to the good God and a little to good luck.
And so, as nothing or next to nothing has been done to improve the
conditions, we may assume pretty confidently that the fire of 1870 was
not the last of those great conflagrations which, “it is written,”
are in the course of every few years or so to devastate the City
of the Sultans. It is true that many of the houses in Pera are now
built of masonry, but most of these are wretchedly constructed by
architects without either knowledge or experience, sometimes by any
one who happens to come along; and, the authorities not attempting
to exercise any sort of supervision in the matter, it is not unusual
for them to fall down before being completed, while those which
remain standing are not in any way fitted to resist fire. Water, too,
is always scarce, especially in Pera, and is everywhere subjected
to the most shameful monopoly, and, being mainly derived from the
reservoirs built by the Romans in the village of Belgrâd, the supply
fails altogether unless abundant rains fall in both spring and autumn;
then the rich pay its weight in gold to get it, while the poor people
drink mud. The fire-brigade might be likened more to an army of
malefactors than an organized corps of employés: it is composed of
men of every nationality, accountable, more in name than in actual
fact, to the Seraskerat, from which they receive nothing but a ration
of bread--untaught, undisciplined, dishonest, feared and dreaded by
the people quite as much as the flames which they do not know how to
extinguish, and suspected, not without cause, of hoping for fires
as affording opportunities for pillage. As for the pumps, while there
seems to be plenty of them, and the Turks pride themselves upon these
wonderful machines, they are in reality absurd playthings, holding
about a dozen quarts of water, which they throw out in gentle little
rivulets more suitable for watering flower-beds than extinguishing
fires.
[Illustration: Aqueduct of Valens.]
And yet the inhabitants of Constantinople might consider themselves
fortunate were these the only evils existing in this connection. There
is doubtless no foundation for the reports--credited, however, by
some--that the government instigates many of the fires with a view to
widening the streets: the dangers and inconveniences of such a method
would be too great in comparison with the advantages; nor does it
now happen, as it has sometimes in the past, that the “opposition”
sets fire to a certain quarter in order to intimidate the sultans,
or the army to enforce its demands for higher pay; but the general
suspicion that many fires are started deliberately by persons who have
something to gain thereby has but too often been verified, and hence
the people of Constantinople live in a continual state of dread. They
are afraid of the water-carriers, porters, architects, lumber- and
lime-merchants, and, more than all the rest, of their servants, who are
the evil geniuses of Constantinople: these people are all in league
with organized bands of thieves, they in turn being in communication
with various other secret organizations which manage the sale of
every kind of stolen property and facilitate the commission of all
manner of crimes, while the local police treat them all alike with a
leniency which savors strongly of complicity. No incendiary was ever
known to be punished, and thieves are rarely arraigned after a fire;
more rarely still are the stolen goods restored to their rightful
owners. Moreover, Constantinople being a rendezvous for miscreants
from all over the world, the course of justice is constantly being
blocked by international complications: consuls demand the surrender
of criminals of their own countries; trials drag on for centuries; and
so many delinquents escape altogether that the fear of punishment as a
restraining influence upon the criminal class is almost _nil_, and they
have come to look upon the plundering of houses during a fire much in
the light of a privilege tacitly acknowledged by the authorities to be
theirs, just as soldiers were formerly allowed to sack and plunder a
vanquished city. And so the word “Fire” still means for the inhabitants
of Constantinople “every misfortune,” and the cry _Yanghen Vahr_ is
charged with a dread meaning, terrible, fateful, carrying with it
dismay--a cry at which the entire city is moved to its very depths, and
pours forth as at the announcement of a scourge from God. And who can
tell how often yet the great metropolis is doomed to fall before the
flames and rise again ere European civilization shall have planted its
triumphant ensign upon the imperial palace of Dolmabâghcheh?
* * * * *
In the old days, when a fire broke out in Constantinople, if the Sultan
happened to be at that moment in the harem, news of the disaster was
sent to him in the person of an odalisque dressed in scarlet from
head to foot, with orders to present herself before him wherever he
might be, were it even in the embraces of the favorite. She had only
to appear upon the threshold: the flaming color of her attire would
do the rest and be the mute announcement of her errand. Will any one
believe that among all the striking and terrible pictures which my
mind conjures up at the thought of a Constantinople fire the figure
of that odalisque moves my artistic sense the most, and makes me long
to be a painter that I might depict the scene as it rises before me?
At all events, I shall go on begging every artist I meet to do it for
me, until I come across one whose fancy will be struck with the idea,
and who will earn my undying gratitude. The picture will represent an
apartment in the imperial harem flooded with soft light. Seated upon
a broad divan by the side of a fair young pearl-bedecked Circassian,
Selim I., the mighty Sultan, suddenly disengages himself from the arms
of his companion, and fixes his great black eyes upon the scarlet-clad
odalisque standing in the doorway, mute, erect, immovable as a statue,
one hand holding back the curtain beyond which is seen the open
terrace, and in the blue distance the great smoking city, while her
pallid, terror-stricken face would seem to say, “King of kings, Allah
summons you to go to the relief of your unhappy people.”
THE WALLS.
I determined to make the circuit of the ancient walls of Stambul
entirely alone, and this plan I recommend to all Italians visiting
Constantinople, as the sight of those majestic and beautiful ruins
cannot make a profound and lasting impression upon the mind unless one
is altogether intent upon receiving it and can freely follow his own
train of thought. It is a question of tramping about fifteen Italian
miles through deserted streets and exposed to the full blaze of the
sun. “Very possibly,” said I to my friend, “when I have gone halfway I
shall be seized with such a desperate attack of loneliness that I will
invoke you like one of the saints, but, all the same, I want to go by
myself.” And so, having first lightened my purse for fear some suburban
pick-pocket might do it for me, and thrown something to the “eager
dogs within,” so that I might say to myself later on, “Be still, then,
accursed wolf!” I set forth in the direction of the Validêh Sultan
bridge at eight in the morning, beneath a sky washed clean and bright
by a shower which had fallen during the night.
My plan was to leave Stambul by the gate in the Blachernæ, to follow
the line of the walls from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven
Towers, and to return along the shore of the Sea of Marmora, thus
completing the triangle of the Mussulman city.
Crossing the bridge, I turned to the right and plunged into that vast
district known as _Istambul disciaré_, or Outer Stambul, a long strip
of the city shut in between the walls and the harbor, composed of
miserable little houses and wood and oil-shops, and more than once
destroyed by fire; flights of stairs lead from the banks down to little
inlets crowded with boats and shipping, and in the space between these
on the one hand, and the narrow lanes and alleyways of the city on
the other, there is a constant passing back and forth of porters,
asses, and camels, the same mixture of strange people and dirty things
which, as well as the unintelligible clamor of tongues, is to be found
in those wonderful ports of the Chinese and Indian seas where the
people and merchandise of two hemispheres meet and mingle. Those walls
which are still standing on this side are five times a man’s height,
castellated, strengthened every hundred paces by small quadrangular
towers, and in many places falling into ruins. They are, from an
historic or artistic standpoint, however, the least noteworthy of any
of the fortifications of Stambul.
Traversing the Greek quarters, I skirted the bank among the various
pastry-cook, fruit, and fritter stalls, passing by groups of handsome
Greek sailors standing in the attitudes of their own ancient gods
around some cook carrying on his avocation in the open; then, making
a circuit around the vast Ghetto of Balata and threading the silent
Blachernæ quarter, I finally quitted the city by the gate called _Egri
Kapou_, not far from the banks of the Golden Horn. While all this
may be said in a few words, to do it requires an hour and a half,
now mounting, now descending, passing around lakes of mud and over
heaps of stones, through an endless maze of narrow streets and dark
passage-ways, across vast desolate wastes, with nothing to guide you
but the points on the minarets of the Selim mosque: at a certain place
you begin to notice fewer and fewer European faces and costumes; then
European houses disappear, then pavements, then the signs on the shops,
then names on the streets, then every indication of labor; and the
farther you go the more surly the dogs become, the more impudently do
the Turkish ragamuffins stare you in the eye, and the common women take
pains to conceal their faces; until at last you find yourself in the
heart of barbarous Asia, and, instead of a two hours’ walk, you seem to
have made a two days’ journey.
On issuing from the _Egri Kapou_ I turned to the left, and came quite
unexpectedly upon a long stretch of those famous walls which formed
Stambul’s defences upon the land side. Three years have elapsed since
that moment, but to this day I can never recall it without a fresh
sensation of wonder. There is no other spot in the East, so far as
I know, which presents so vividly before the mind the memories of
the past, the grandeur of human achievement, the majesty of power,
the glory of the centuries, the mystery of decay, and the beauties
of nature. You are filled with awe and terror and admiration at
this sight, worthy of a canto of Homer, and involuntarily uncover,
exclaiming “All honor!” as though called upon to salute the mutilated
ranks of some mighty band of heroes.
The line of walls and lofty towers extends as far as the eye can reach,
rising and falling according to the natural character of the land, at
some points seeming to sink into the earth, and at others to crown the
summit of a mountain: it is diversified by an endless variety of color,
and ruin in every stage of advancement, in some places nearly black, in
others almost as yellow as gold, and overgrown by a rich, deep-green
vegetation, which, scaling the walls to their very summits, falls back
in waving garlands from the battlements and loopholes, rears itself in
feathery plumes upon the tops of the towers, and overflows in green
cascades from curtain and crumbling breach, its billowy waves filling
the moat and lapping the very roadside.
There are three lines of fortifications, forming as it were three
gigantic ruined steps. The inner one, which is the highest, is
strengthened at short regular intervals by massive square towers;
that in the middle by round ones; the outer wall, much lower than
the others, is protected by a deep, wide moat, formerly filled with
water drawn from the Golden Horn and Sea of Marmora, and now choked
with grass and shrubbery. These walls, as we see them now, are almost
precisely as they were the day after the conquest of Constantinople.
The restorations made by Muhammad and Bayezid II. amount to very
little. There can be still seen the breaches made by Orbano’s powerful
guns, the marks left by the catapults and battering-rams, the great
rents where mines were fired, and all the various indications which
mark those spots where the attack was most furious, the defence most
desperate. Almost all the round towers of the middle wall are ruined
from base to summit, and while those of the inner wall are most of them
still standing, they are broken at the corners, dismantled, dwindling
off to points at the top, like huge tree-trunks sharpened at the end
with blows from some giant axe, or else cracked from top to bottom
or hollowed out at the base like cliffs worn by the sea-waves. Great
masses of masonry detached from the curtains have rolled down upon
the platforms of the middle and outer walls and choke up the moat.
Little footpaths wind in and out amid the heaps of stones and thick
underbrush, lost to view in the deep shadows of the overhanging
vegetation between huge stones and bare patches of earth torn up by
the falling of some heavy mass. Each portion of walls between any
two towers comprises in itself a complete and wonderful example of
ruins and of vegetation, full of power and majesty, wild, colossal,
forbidding, and adorned with a melancholy and imposing beauty which
impels a feeling of reverence. One seems to be looking at the ruins
of an endless chain of feudal castles, or of one of those mighty
girdles of wall which encircled the fabulous empires of Eastern Asia.
Constantinople of to-day disappears, and before us rises the City
of the Constantines; we breathe the air of the fifteenth century,
and as our thoughts become more and more centred upon the day of her
tremendous fall, we find ourselves for a few moments dazed, bewildered,
and turned, as it were, to stone.
The Egri Kapou through which I had come is identical with the famous
Charsian gate used by Justinian when he made his triumphal entry into
the city, and later by Alexius Comnenus when he seized the throne:
before it lies a Mussulman cemetery, and here, during the early days of
the siege, were placed the gigantic cannon of Orbano, which kept four
hundred artillerymen employed and required a hundred oxen to move. The
gate was defended by Teodoro di Caristo and Giovanni Greant against
the attacks of the left wing of the Turkish army, which reached clear
to the Golden Horn. From this point to the Sea of Marmora there are
no longer any hamlets, not so much as a group of houses, and, as the
road consequently runs between the walls and the open country, there
is nothing whatever to distract one’s thoughts from the mighty ruins
themselves. Setting forth on the road, I walked for some time between
two cemeteries, a Christian one on my left, lying directly beneath the
walls, and an enormous Mussulman one on my right, shaded by a forest
of cypress trees; overhead the sun poured down in straight, direct
rays; before me stretched the highway, white, solitary, and rising
by a gentle incline, until on the summit of the opposite heights it
divided the limpid horizon with a sharp, clear-cut line. On one hand
tower succeeded tower, on the other tombstone followed tombstone; not a
sound broke the stillness save my own measured tread and the occasional
rustle of a lizard in the grass by the roadside. After walking thus
for some distance, I suddenly found myself opposite a beautiful
square gateway surmounted by a great arch in an excellent state of
preservation, and flanked by two massive octagonal towers. This was the
Adrianopolis Gate, the Polyandrion of the Greeks, which was made the
principal point of attack when the Avars besieged Constantinople during
the reign of Heraclius in 625. During the attack under Muhammad II. it
was defended by the brothers Paoli and Antonino Troilo Bochiardi, and
later on was the gate through which the Turks made their victorious
exits and entries. Neither ahead nor about me was there a living soul
to be seen: all at once a couple of Turkish cavalrymen came through
the gate and disappeared down the Adrianopolis road at a full gallop,
enveloped in a thick cloud of dust, after which everything returned to
the same death-like stillness. Following their lead, I too took the
Adrianopolis road, and, turning my back for a time upon the walls,
descended into the valley of the Lycus, climbed the opposite ascent,
and found myself looking out over the vast undulating and arid plain
of Dahud-Pasha, where, during the siege of Constantinople, Muhammad
II. established his head-quarters. Here I stood for some time,
shading my eyes with my hand and searching about as if expecting to
find some traces still of the imperial camp to aid me in picturing
to myself the strange and imposing spectacle which that spot must
have presented toward the close of the spring of 1453. Just here the
life of all that mighty army flowed back as to its heart, clasping in
its fatal embrace the great dying metropolis; from this point those
orders were issued which fell on all sides like thunderbolts, set in
motion the arms of a hundred thousand workmen, directed the overland
transportation of two hundred galleys[A] from the Bay of Beshiktash to
the bay of Kassim-Pasha, thrust armies of Armenian miners into
the bowels of the earth, despatched heralds in all directions whose
flags announced the hour of attack, and in the time it would take to
tell the beads of a tespi bent three hundred thousand bows and caused
three hundred thousand cimeters to flash in the air. Here the trembling
envoys of Constantine came face to face with their Genoese countrymen
from Galata selling oil with which to grease Orbano’s mighty cannon,
and Mussulman scouts stationed upon the banks of the Sea of Marmora
in order that they might give warning when the European fleet should
appear upon the horizon bringing the last relief of Christianity to the
last defences of the Constantines. There too were to be found a swarm
of renegade Christians, Asiatic adventurers, old sheikhs, and lean,
ragged dervishes, wasted away by long marches, going restlessly back
and forth among the tents of the fourteen thousand Janissaries; and
interminable troops of horse already harnessed, long files of camels
standing motionless in the midst of catapults and battering-rams, and
cannons lying overturned where they had exploded, and great pyramids
of huge granite balls, among which wound long processions of begrimed
and blackened soldiers bearing two by two from the neighborhood of the
walls to the open country beyond the mutilated bodies of the dead and
groaning forms of the wounded; while over all there hung a perpetual
cloud of smoke.
[A] There were eighty galleys, according to Ducas.--TRANS.
[Illustration: Mosque of the Chora.]
In the centre of the Janissaries’ camp rose the many-colored tents of
the court, and high above them all the crimson pavilion of Muhammad II.
At daybreak he would appear in his doorway pale from the anxious vigil
of the night, wearing a great turban to which was affixed a yellow
plume, and a long blood-colored caftan. There he would stand, his eagle
glance fixed upon the still unconquered city lying before him, one hand
toying with his thick black beard, while with the other he fingered
uneasily the silver handle of his curved dagger: around him would be
gathered a group of his officers--Orbano, inventor of that huge cannon
which was destined before many days to explode and scatter his own
bones upon the esplanade of the Hippodrome; Admiral Balta-Ogli, already
filled with uneasy presentiments concerning his future and the disgrace
which the golden sceptre of his mighty lord was to bring about his
ears; the hardy governor of the Epepolin, that great movable castle,
surmounted by a tower and braced with iron, which was finally burned
to the ground in front of the gate of San Romano; and a circle of
poets and legislators bronzed by the suns of a hundred battlefields; a
retinue of pashas, whose bodies were covered with wounds and their long
caftans riddled with arrow-holes; a throng of gigantic Janissaries,
with naked blades clasped in their hands, and sciaus armed with great
steel clubs, ready to strike off the head or pound the flesh of rebel
or coward alike; the flower of that boundless multitude of Asiatics,
overflowing with youth, energy, and ferocity, only awaiting the signal
to hurl themselves like a mighty torrent of fire and sword upon the
feeble remnant of the Byzantine Empire. There they would stand, silent,
motionless, in the rosy beams of the rising sun, looking with rapt gaze
where, against the horizon, the thousand cupolas of the great city
promised to them by the Prophet rose above the sobs and lamentations
of its cowardly inhabitants. I saw them thus before me, their very
postures, their arms, the folds of their long cloaks and caftans, their
gigantic shadows falling athwart the earth seamed and scarred with
the passage of heavy cannon and ponderous cars, when all at once, my
eye chancing to fall upon a large stone half buried in the ground, I
mechanically read the worn inscription upon its face. In a twinkling
the imposing warlike scene disappeared, and in its stead the wide
barren plain was peopled with a light-hearted multitude of Vincennes
soldiers in their red breeches; I heard the cheerful songs of Normandy
and Provence, saw Maréchal Saint-Arnaud, Canrobert, Forey, Espinasse,
Pelissier, and recognized a thousand faces and brilliant uniforms,
alive in my memory and dear to my heart ever since childhood, and read
again, with an inexpressible sensation of surprise and delight, that
meagre inscription: “Eugène Saccard, Caporal dans le 22° léger, 16
Juin, 1854.”