the road which skirts the walls, still lonely and deserted and still
winding between ruins and cemeteries, passing before the ancient
military Gate of Pempti, now walled up, and again crossing the Lycus,
which enters the city at this point, I found myself in front of the
Cannon Gate, so called from the circumstance of Orbano’s great gun
having been stationed opposite it; here Muhammad II. made his last
and successful assault upon the fortifications. Raising my eyes to
the top of the wall, I was startled at encountering the gaze of two
or three dark, unprepossessing-looking individuals with wild, matted
hair, who peered down at me from behind the battlements with an
expression of astonishment, and then remembered to have heard that a
band of gypsies had established themselves in the ruined towers and
more habitable parts of the fortification. The traces left at this
point of the fearful conflict are grand and awe-inspiring beyond
expression--crumbling, dismantled walls, towers knocked to pieces or
battered out of shape, bastions buried beneath huge masses of rubbish,
loopholes burst open, the earth ploughed up, and the moat filled with
colossal fragments which look like masses detached from the side of a
rugged mountain. It is as though the terrific battle had been waged
only the preceding day, and these ruins speak more eloquently than
could any human voice of the frightful disaster of which they are the
witnesses. It was the same, with but slight modification, before every
gate in the whole line of the defences. The battle began at daybreak,
with the Ottoman forces divided into four enormous columns preceded
by a hundred thousand volunteers, who formed an immense vanguard
predestined to death. All of this food for the cannon, this reckless,
undisciplined horde of Tartars, Caucasians, Arabs, and negroes,
directed by sheikhs spurred on by dervishes, driven and lashed from
behind by furious bands of sciaus, hurled itself forward to the attack
laden with earth and faggots, forming one unbroken line and raising one
unearthly yell from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. On reaching
the edge of the moat they are momentarily checked by a hailstorm of
stone and iron missiles, beating hundreds upon hundreds to the ground,
pierced with arrows, blown to pieces by the cannonballs, set fire to by
_springals_, beaten, crushed, and torn asunder--old men, boys, slaves,
thieves, shepherds, brigands, hewn down by the thousand, until before
long the moat and banks are filled with dead bodies, heaps of quivering
flesh, blood-stained turbans, bows, and cimeters, across which still
other hordes, driven forward by those behind, rush to the attack,
only to be beaten back, overturned, repulsed, decimated by a still
more furious storm of stones and arrows from the walls; while a dense
cloud of smoke and dust envelops alike besiegers and besieged, living
and dead, until at length a shrill, wild call from a thousand Ottoman
trumpets, heard above the din of battle, sounds the retreat, and the
great vanguard, bleeding, exhausted, and reduced to half its number,
draws off from the entire length of the walls in an unsteady, wavering
line. Then Muhammad gives the signal for a general assault, and at that
sign three mighty armies, three great rivers of men, start into motion,
advance, spread out, cover the heights, overflow the valleys, and amid
the flashing of swords and waving of banners, the din and clangor of
drums and trumpets, sweep against those doomed walls with a shock like
that of a tempestuous ocean beating against a rock-bound shore, while
the savage cry, uttered as with one voice from all that vast multitude
of powerful throats, “_La Ilah illa lah!_” echoes like a thunder-clap
from the Golden Horn to the Castle of the Seven Towers. Then the
great battle really begins, or rather a hundred different battles,
carried on before every gate, at every breach, in the ditches, from
the bastions, at the foot of the curtains. From one end to the other
of Constantinople’s mighty ramparts ten thousand bastions pour down
death and destruction upon two hundred thousand human beings; rocks,
beams, casks filled with earth, and burning faggots are hurled from
tower and curtain. Ladders laden with men give way, the high bridges
of the attacking towers fall in, catapults take fire; host after host
hurls itself forward, wavers, and falls back upon heaps of stone,
piles of human bodies, the drawn weapons of comrades, the dying and
wounded; here and there the thick clouds of smoke are lighted up by
vivid flames of Greek fire, while the air is rent with the shrieks of
the injured, whistles of cannon-balls, explosions from the mines, and
the forbidding roar of Muhammad’s eighteen batteries, which command the
city from the neighboring heights. Occasionally there comes a momentary
hush, as though the opposing forces had paused for breath: as the
smoke clears away glimpses can be caught through the great breach near
the San Romano Gate of Constantine’s crimson mantle, or the flashing
arms of Gustinian and Francesco di Toledo, or the terrible forms of
the three hundred Genoese archers; and at that sight the battle is
resumed with renewed fury. The smoke, rolling down in thick clouds,
again conceals the breach, ladders are flung against the walls, fresh
torrents of missiles pour from the defences, and the dead are piled
in heaps before the Adrianopolis and Golden, the Selymbria, the Tou
Tritou, the Pempton, Rusion, Blachernæ, and Heptapyrgion gates, while
legion after legion of armed men, rising as it were out of the very
earth, beat against the walls, pour over the moat, surmount the outer
ramparts, fall, rise again, dragging themselves up by loosened stones,
climbing over dead bodies, through clouds of arrows, beneath hailstorms
of stones, in girdles of flame, until at length, decimated and spent,
the besiegers draw off, while a wild cry of victory mingled with solemn
chants of thanksgiving is heard from the city’s walls. From the height
facing the San Romano Gate, Muhammad II. has followed the battle’s
course surrounded by his fourteen thousand Janissaries, and now for a
moment he seems in doubt whether to continue the assault or abandon the
undertaking altogether; but, turning his glance upon that throng of
eager upturned faces, those ranks of sinewy giants, whose mighty frames
are trembling with fierce and wrathful impatience, only awaiting the
word to throw themselves furiously into the breach, his mind is made
up, and, rising in his stirrups with a gesture of haughty disdain, he
once more raises the battle-cry. Then is the vengeance of the Almighty
let loose upon that doomed city. The fourteen thousand, responding
with one terrible cry as from a single throat, sweep forward; throngs
of dervishes speed in all directions, threatening and collecting the
scattered forces; sciaus beat back the fugitives; the pashas again
form their men in line; and the Sultan, brandishing his iron mace
and surrounded by a cloud of flashing cimeters and drawn bows, a sea
of turbans and helmets, dashes forward to take the field in person.
From the San Romano Gate there pours a fresh shower of missiles;
Gustinian is wounded and drops; the Italians fall back discouraged; a
gigantic Janissary, Hassan d’Olubad, is the first to scale the walls;
Constantine, fighting amid the remnant of his Morean heroes, is thrown
from the battlements, fights on below outside the gate, until at last,
overpowered by numbers, he sinks among the heaps of the slain. And with
him falls the Empire of the East.
Tradition says that a mighty tree marks the spot where the emperor’s
body was found, but I failed to discover any trace of it. Between the
huge blocks of stone, where streams of blood once flowed, the ground
is all white with marguerites, and clouds of butterflies hover above.
Plucking a flower by way of remembrance, to the great bewilderment of
the watching gypsies, I resumed my walk. Before me the walls still
stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could reach,
completely hiding the city at those points where the ground rose, so
that one would never have dreamed that just beyond those deserted ruins
there could be a great metropolis, crowned with mighty buildings and
inhabited by a teeming population; in the hollows, however, above the
battlements, points of minarets flashed in the light, and the summits
of cupolas, roofs of Greek churches, and tops of cypress trees stood
out against the sky, while here and there, through a gap, fleeting
views of the city would be obtained, as through a door hastily opened
and closed again--groups of houses seemingly abandoned, deserted
villages, kitchen-gardens, pleasure-grounds, and still farther away
the fantastic outlines of Stambul palpitating in the white heat of the
mid-day sun.
I next came to the Tetarte Gate, now only distinguished by means of its
two towers standing close together. All this part of the walls is in a
much better state of preservation than the rest; long portions of the
bastions of Theodosius are still standing almost intact, as well as
the charming towers erected by the prefect Anthemius and emperor Ciro
Constantine, whose invincible summits, crowned by fifteen centuries,
seem to defy the ravages of time and fury of man. At some points
peasants have erected upon the curtains huts whose slight construction
offers a strange contrast to the massive masonry around them, like
birds’-nests built upon the side of some beetling cliff. And to the
right are the same interminable, unbroken succession of cypress groves
and cemeteries, rising and falling with the rise and fall of the earth,
the little valleys all gray with tombstones: here a dervish convent is
half hidden by a circle of plane trees; there a solitary café stands
with its fountain and willow, and beyond the trees white footpaths wind
away and are lost to view in the rising ground of the bare and arid
plain, beneath the brilliant sky, against which vultures may be seen
slowly circling upward.
Another quarter of an hour’s walk brought me to the gate called _Yeni
Mevlevi_, from a famous dervish monastery opposite it. The gateway is
low, with four marble columns built into it, and a square lower on
either side, bearing an inscription of Ciro Constantine dated 447, and
another of Justinian II. and Sophia, in which the imperial names are
incorrectly spelled--a rather striking proof of the barbaric ignorance
of the fifth century. I peered through the gateway up at the walls,
into the monastery, and the cemetery, but there was not a living soul
to be seen anywhere, so, after resting a while with my back against
the parapet of a little bridge thrown across the moat, I resumed my
pilgrimage.
[Illustration: Dervish.]
I would give my memories of the most beautiful view in Constantinople
if in exchange I could transfer to my readers any of the profound and
singular impressions made upon me by my slow progress between those two
interminable chains of ruins and sepulchres, beneath that eastern sun,
amid that profound solitude, that utter peacefulness. Often, at some
troubled period of my life, I had wished that I might find myself one
of a great silent caravan of mysterious persons ever travelling through
strange, unfamiliar lands to an unknown goal. Well, that road seemed to
answer to this fanciful longing. I wanted it to continue for ever. Far
from oppressing me with any feeling of melancholy, I was conscious of
a sensation of exhilaration and excitement: the brilliant vegetation,
the cyclopean dimensions of the walls, the great rolling surface of
the earth like the waves of a mighty ocean, the crowding memories of
emperors and armies, of fierce warfare, dead and gone generations,
whole nations who had passed away, the great city so near at hand, the
mortal stillness, broken only by the beat of an eagle’s wings taking
its solitary flight from the summit of a ruined tower,--all flooded
my soul, and bore me out of myself on a rushing tide of unutterable
desires and longings, which my mortal body seemed too small to contain.
I felt as though I ought to be two feet taller, clad in that colossal
armor of the grand elector of Saxony which hangs in the Madrid armory,
that my tread should resound through the stillness like the measured
beat of a troop of mediæval halberdiers, and my arms be endued with
titanic strength, that I might lift and heave into place the overturned
masses of those superb walls; and, walking thus, with head aloft,
with bent brows and clenched hands apostrophizing in heroic verse
Constantine and Muhammad, rapt in a sort of warlike delirium, my whole
soul in the past, and the blood coursing through my veins with all the
heat and fire of first youth, I felt so unutterably happy at being
alone, so jealous of that solitude surcharged with life, that, had I
suddenly encountered the best friend I have in the world, I am afraid
the coolness of my welcome would have estranged him for ever.
I next came to the ancient military gate called Tou Tritou, now closed.
The shattered condition of towers and curtains show that some of
Orbano’s mighty cannon must have been directed against this portion
of the defences. It is thought, indeed, that here was one of those
three breaches which Muhammad II. pointed out to his army on the first
day of the assault, saying, “You can ride into Constantinople on
horseback through the three openings I have made for you.” Next I came
to an open gate flanked by two octagonal towers, which, from its small
bridge supported on three charming arches of a beautiful golden color,
I identified as the _Silivri_ Gate, leading to ancient _Selymbria_,
corrupted by the Turks into _Silivri_. During the siege this gate was
defended by a Genoese, Maurizio Cottaneo. Some of the paving laid
by Justinian can still be seen. Facing it is an enormous cemetery,
beyond which stands the celebrated Balukli monastery. On entering
the cemetery I found without difficulty the solitary spot where are
interred the heads of the famous Ali of Tepelen, pasha of Janina, his
sons Veli, governor of Trikala; Muctar, administrator of Arlonia,
Saalih, administrator of Lepanto, and of his nephew, Mehemed, son of
Veli, administrator of Delvino. There are five small stone columns,
surmounted by turbans, bearing the date 1827,[B] and an inscription of
the simplest kind. They were erected by the poor Soliman dervish, Ali’s
boyhood’s friend, who bought the heads after they were removed from the
Seraglio walls, and interred them with his own hands. The inscription
upon Ali’s tombstone, which stands in the middle, reads as follows:
“Here lies the head of the celebrated Ali Pasha of Tepelen, governor
of the sanjak of Janina, who for upward of fifty years labored for the
independence of Albania;” which proves that pious lies may be found
even upon Mussulman gravestones. Pausing for a few moments to muse
over the little corner of earth covering that once formidable head,
Hamlet’s interrogations addressed to Yorick’s skull came into my mind:
“Where now are your klephtis, lion of Epirus? where are your brave
Arnaouts, your castles bristling with guns, your charming pavilions
reflected in the still waters of Janina’s lake, your buried treasures?
and where, alas! the beautiful eyes of your beloved Vasilik, that
lovely unfortunate who wandered a homeless outcast through the streets
of the capital distracted by the memories of her lost happiness and
high estate?” At this point my reflections were disturbed by a slight
noise behind me, and, turning, I found a tall, emaciated man, clad in
a long dark tunic, gazing at me with a look of interrogation. From his
gestures I understood that he was a monk from the Greek monastery of
Balukli offering to show me the Holy Well, and I accordingly followed
him in the direction of the church. Leading the way across a deserted
courtyard, he opened a small door, and, having lighted a candle,
conducted me down a narrow stair beneath a low damp roof: at the
bottom was a sort of cistern, and my guide, holding the candle so that
its rays fell upon the water, pointed out some red fishes swimming
about, gabbling meanwhile some unintelligible rigmarole, which was no
doubt the famous legend of the miracle of the fish. It seems that at
the moment when the Mussulmans made their final and successful assault
upon Constantinople a Greek monk was engaged in frying fish in the
monastery kitchen. Suddenly another monk appeared in the doorway,
crying that the city had been taken. “Bah!” replied the first; “I will
believe it when I see these fish jump out of the pan;” upon which out
jumped the fish as lively and frisky as you please, half brown and half
red, because only one side was done; and they were religiously picked
up, as any one might suppose, and put back in the water whence they had
been originally taken; and there they are swimming to this very day.
His recital finished, the monk threw some drops of holy water in my
face, and, when these had fallen back in his hand converted into coin,
reconducted me to the entrance, where he stood leaning against the
doorway watching my receding figure with his dull, sleepy little eyes.
[B] Ali Pasha was beheaded on February 5th, 1822.--TRANS.
And ever on the one hand wall after wall, tower succeeding tower,
and on the other shaded cemeteries, sometimes a green field or so, a
vineyard, or a group of deserted houses. Now and then, as I looked
ahead from some depression in the road, I would fancy that I could
see the final outline, but on reaching high ground the same unbroken
succession would again be seen stretching away into the distance,
seemingly without end: at every few steps new towers would come in
sight, far away, one behind the other, two or three at a time, as
though they were pressing forward and peering over one another’s heads
in the effort to see who it could be thus daring to disturb that
silence and solitude.
[Illustration: Interior View of the Seven Towers.]
All along this part of the defences the vegetation is something quite
marvellous. Spreading trees grow from the very summits of the towers,
as though they stood in gigantic vases; garlands of brilliant flowers,
vines, and creepers droop and wave from the battlements; while below,
from the midst of a dense undergrowth of brambles, nettles, wild
strawberries, and lentisks, plane and willow trees cast their dark
shadows across the moat and its banks. Whole sections of the walls
are completely covered with vegetation flung like a green veil over
the brickwork and crumbling masonry, and concealing the cracks and
fissures. The moat is laid out in truck-gardens; on its banks are
flocks of sheep and goats grazing, whose keepers, Greek boys, lie
stretched out at full length under the trees; now and then a flock of
birds flies out from the walls, and the atmosphere is loaded with the
penetrating odor of wild grass; from those hoary ruins there comes
something of the joyous spirit of spring-time, and they look as
though they had been decked and wreathed for the triumphal procession
of a sultana. All at once a salt breath blew across my cheek, and,
raising my eyes, I saw far ahead of me the blue bosom of the Sea of
Marmora; at the same instant a voice seemed to murmur in my ear,
“The Castle of the Seven Towers,” arresting me in the middle of the
road with a vague feeling of inquietude; but, presently resuming my
walk, I passed first the ancient gate of Deuterou, and farther on
the Melandesias Gate,[C] coming at last face to face with the castle
itself. This place of ill omen, erected by Muhammad II. on the site
of the ancient Kyklobion of the Greeks[D] to defend the city at that
point where the sea and land walls join, was later, when further
victories had rendered Stambul secure from danger of attack, and it
was consequently no longer required as a fortress, converted into a
prison. To-day it is merely the skeleton of a castle guarded by a
handful of soldiers--a hated ruin, whose dark and gloomy associations
and sinister history are bywords among the people of Constantinople,
although strangers seldom see more of it than the fleeting glimpse to
be had from the decks of the steamer which bears them to the mouth of
the Golden Horn. By the Turks it is called Yedi Kuleh, and they regard
it much as the French did the Bastile and the English the Tower of
London--a monument recalling the most oppressive days of the tyranny of
the sultans.
[C] The Melandesias Gate is the same as the Silivri Gate,
mentioned above.--TRANS.
[D] Some authorities place the site of the Greek citadel
outside of the walls, on the Sea of Marmora.--TRANS.
Looking at it from the road, the walls hide all but two of the great
towers which gave it its name, only four of which are now standing.
Two Corinthian columns indicate the ancient Golden Gate through which
Heraclius and Narsetes made their triumphal entry: according to a
legend common to Turk and Greek alike, it is through this gate that the
Christians will come on that day when they once more take possession of
the City of Constantine. A postern beneath a small square tower gives
admittance to the interior, and the sentinel in slippers who drowses
without usually permits the simultaneous entry of a visitor into the
castle and a coin into his pocket. This successfully accomplished, I
found myself in a large enclosure combining lugubriously the aspect of
a cemetery with that of a prison. All around rose massive blackened
walls, forming a pentagon crowned by heavy towers, square and round,
high and low, some tottering to pieces, others intact and topped
by high conical roofs, overlaid with lead; innumerable flights of
half-ruined stairs led to the battlements and loopholes. A thick,
tangled growth of vegetation was overshadowed by a group of cypress and
plane trees, above whose summits the minaret of a little mosque could
be seen, and beneath, half hidden by the undergrowth, a group of small
huts occupied by the soldiers; in the centre of the enclosure stood
the tomb of a vizier strangled in the castle; here and there appeared
traces of an ancient redoubt, while beneath the underbrush and along
the walls were fragments of bas-reliefs, shafts of broken columns, and
capitals half buried in the earth and covered with moss and slime--a
strange, melancholy chaos, forbidding and oppressive, which made
me hesitate about exploring farther. After a momentary indecision,
however, I proceeded, circumspectly though, as if afraid that a false
step might land me in a pool of blood. The huts were shut up, the
mosque closed--everything as still and solitary as in some abandoned
ruin. On the walls may still be found traces of Greek crosses, the
Constantinian monogram, the spread wings of the Roman eagle, and
discolored bits of the decorations of the earlier Byzantine building.
Some rough inscriptions on the stones in minute Greek characters bear
witness to the presence of Constantine’s soldiers stationed here under
the command of the Florentine Giuliani to defend the citadel; they were
evidently executed on the day preceding the fall of Constantinople,
and the poor fellows, reconciled to death for themselves, request only
that Heaven may preserve their city from pillage and their families
from slavery. One of the two towers flanking the rear of the Golden
Gate is the dungeon tower, in which the sultan used to confine
ambassadors from those countries with which he was at war: a number
of Latin inscriptions may be seen upon the walls traced by the hands
of the prisoners, the most recent being those of the Venetian envoys
confined during the reign of Ahmed III., when the Morean War broke out.
The other is that far-famed tower around which cluster all the most
horrid traditions of the castle--that tower within whose gloomy walls
were perpetrated countless deeds of blood and treachery, where viziers
and once-powerful ministers raised their last prayers to Heaven for aid
while the steps of the executioner were without the door, or, driven
crazy by loneliness and despair, beat their heads against the stones.
In one of these living sepulchres stood the great mortar in which the
bones and flesh of the ulemas were pounded: on the first floor is the
circular room, called the Bloody Prison, where the condemned were
secretly beheaded and their heads thrown down a well called the Well
of Blood, whose mouth may still be seen in the centre of the uneven
floor covered with two slabs of stone. Beneath is the so-called Rocky
Cavern, lighted by a lantern hung from the roof, where the skin of
those sentenced to be tortured was cut into strips, or boiling pitch
poured into the wounds left by the lash, and their hands and feet
pounded with clubs, the agonized shrieks of these victims rising faint
and muffled to the ears of the prisoners in the tower above. In one
corner of the enclosure portions remain of the inner courtyard, where
common criminals were beheaded by night, near to which there stood
until comparatively recent times a wall of human bones reaching nearly
to the ramparts of the castle. Near the entrance is the prison of Osman
II., the first imperial victim of the vengeance of the Janissaries.
Here the unhappy sultan, only eighteen years of age, his strength
redoubled by despair, held his four executioners at bay until the hand
of one cowardly ruffian, seizing him unawares, elicited a piercing cry,
quickly choked by the fatal noose.