"On which side soever," says an elegant traveller, "you approach
Constantinople, whether ascending by the Dardanelles and the sea of
Marmora, or descending from the Black Sea by the Bosphorus; whether you
arrive by crossing the plain of Thrace, or come in sight from the
opposite hills of Asia, she presents herself, indeed, like 'the queen of
cities.'"
The history of this city being that of an empire, we shall confine
ourselves to a few particulars, and then pass on to give some account of
its monumental antiquities. We do this the more readily, since those
antiquities are far from being of the first order.
According to Ammianus, Byzantium was founded by the Athenians; according
to Justin, by the Lacedæmonians; according to Paterculus, by the
Milesians; according to others, by a colony of Megara, under the conduct
of Byzas, 658 B.C.
Byzantium received a great accession of inhabitants in consequence of a
decree passed, in gratitude to the Athenians, for having compelled
Philip of Macedon to raise the siege of their city[149].
In subsequent times Constantine the Great (from whom it was called
Constantinople), seeing its proud situation, created it into a capital
jointly with Rome; from which time the Roman empire was distinguished by
the titles Eastern and Western. In this position it stood, till the city
was sacked by the Turks under the guidance of Mahomet the Second.
The manner in which the Turks first gained a footing in Europe is thus
described in Bucke's Harmonies of Nature:--"Orcan having made himself
master of the shore skirting the sea that separated Asia from Europe,
his son Solyman resolved, if possible, to gain the castle of Hanni
(Sestos), then considered the key of Europe: but the Turks had neither
pilot, ships, nor boats. Solyman stood meditating on the beach, one fine
moonlight night, for some time. He had come thither with about eighty
followers on a hunting expedition. Beholding the towers of Hanni rising
over the opposite shore, he resolved to secure them for his father and
himself. He communicated his thoughts to his followers. Wondering at his
resolution, they regarded him as frantic. He persisted;--and they made
three rafts fastened on corks and bladders of oxen. When the party had
finished their task, they committed themselves to the waters; and with
poles instead of oars, succeeded in gaining the opposite shore: the moon
shining brilliantly as they stepped off the rafts, almost immediately
under the walls of Hanni. As they marched along the beach, they met a
peasant going to his work, it being now morning. This man hated his
prince; and being bribed by a sum of money, he told Solyman of a
subterranean passage leading into the castle. The little band availed
themselves of this information, and quietly entered the walls. There was
no regular garrison, and the few inhabitants were still asleep. They
fell an easy prey, therefore, to the adventurers. Having thus gained the
first object of their enterprise, they assembled the pilots and
vessel-owners of the town; and, offering them considerable sums of
money, induced them to steer their vessels to the opposite shore. Some
thousand men were then embarked, and in a few hours they were wafted
under the castle walls. This was the first landing of the Turks in
Europe: they ever after kept possession of this castle: ninety-six years
after, they sacked the city of Constantinople."
Mahomet II.[150], surnamed "the Great," was born at Adrianople in the
year 1430, and was, in the thirteenth year of his age, called to the
throne by the voluntary abdication of his father, Amurath II. On his
accession, Mahomet renewed the peace with the Greek emperor Constantine,
to whom he, at the same time, agreed to pay a pension for the expenses
and safe custody of his uncle Orcan, who had, at a previous period,
withdrawn to the court of Constantinople for safety. The carelessness of
the sultan in the observance of this clause of the treaty excited the
complaints of the emperor, with the imprudent threat that, unless the
pension was regularly paid, he would no longer detain Orcan. This threat
afforded the sultan a pretext for rekindling the war. Mahomet determined
to complete the conquest of the feeble empire by the capture of
Constantinople; and to terminate, by one terrible catastrophe, the
strife of many ages between the Moslems and the Greeks. Every
preliminary measure having been completed, Mahomet at length appeared
before Constantinople, on the 2d of April, 1453, at the head of three
hundred thousand men; supported by a formidable artillery, and by a
fleet of three hundred and twenty sail, mostly store-ships and
transports; but including eighteen galleys of war, while the besieged
could not muster more than ten thousand effective soldiers for the
defence. This vast disparity of force leaves little room for admiring
the prowess and military skill of the victorious party. The besieged
made, however, so obstinate a defence, under the brave emperor,
Constantine Palæologus, that for fifty-three days all the efforts of the
assailants were unavailing. The defenders of the city had drawn strong
iron chains across the entrance of the port; and Mahomet saw, that
unless he could get some of his vessels into the Golden Horn, his
success was doubtful, and that, at best, the defence might be greatly
protracted. He, therefore, contrived to conduct a part of his fleet, for
ten miles, over the land on a sort of railway, from the Bosphorus into
the harbour, and caused a floating battery to be constructed and
occupied with cannon. This sealed the fate of the imperial city.
On the day of the last assault, Mahomet said to his soldiers:--"I
reserve to myself only the city; the gold and women are yours." The
emperor (Constantine) accomplished all the duties of a general and a
soldier. The nobles, who fought around his person, sustained, till their
last breath, the honourable names of Palæologus and Cantacuzene. His
mournful exclamation was heard--"Cannot there be found a Christian to
cut off my head?" and his last fear was, lest he should fall alive into
the hands of his enemies. He threw away his imperial dress, rushed into
the thickest of the fight, fell by an unknown hand, and his body was
buried under a mountain of the slain: nor was it afterwards recognised.
The houses and convents were deserted; and the trembling inhabitants
flocked together in the streets, like a herd of timid animals. From
every part of the city they rushed into the church of St. Sophia. In the
space of an hour the sanctuary, the choir, the nave, the upper and lower
galleries, were filled with the multitude of fathers and husbands, of
women and children, of priests, monks, and religious virgins; the doors
were barred on the inside, and they sought protection from the sacred
dome, which they had so lately abhorred as a profaned and polluted
edifice.
The doors were, soon after, broken with axes; and the Turks encountering
no resistance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting and
securing the multitude of their prisoners. Youth, beauty, and the
appearance of youth, attracted their choice. In the space of an hour,
the male captives were bound with cords, the females with their veils
and girdles. The senators were linked with their slaves; the prelates
with the porters of their church; and young men of a plebeian class with
noble maids, whose faces had been invisible to the sun and their nearest
kindred.
In this common captivity the ranks of society were confounded; the ties
of nature were cut asunder; and the inexorable soldier was careless of
the father's groan, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the
children. The loudest in their wailings were the nuns, who were torn
from the altars with naked bosoms, outstretched hands, and dishevelled
hair. At a similar hour, a similar rapine was exercised in all the
churches and monasteries; in all the palaces and habitations of the
capital. The male captives were bound with cords, and the females with
their veils and girdles, and driven, to the number of sixty thousand,
from the city to the camp or fleet, where those, who could not obtain
the means of purchasing their ransom, were exchanged, or sold, according
to the caprice or interest of their masters.
The disorder and rapine lasted till the sultan entered in triumph
through the gate of St. Romanus. He was attended by his vizirs, his
bashaws, and guards. As he rode along, he gazed with satisfaction and
wonder on the strange, though splendid, appearance of the domes and
palaces, so dissimilar to the style of oriental architecture. He
proceeded to the church of St. Sophia; where, observing a soldier in the
act of breaking up the marble pavement, he admonished him with his
scymetar, that if the spoil and captives were granted to the soldiers,
the public and private buildings had been reserved for the prince.
From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august, but desolate, mansion of a
hundred successors of the first Constantine; but which, in a few hours,
had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the
vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself upon his mind, and he
repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry:--"The spider has wove his
web in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the
towers of Afrasiel[151]."
"The finest point from which Constantinople can be viewed," says M. de
La Martine, "is from a belvidere, built by M. Truqui, on the terrace
roof of his house. This belvidere commands the entire group of the hills
of Pere-Galata, and the little hillocks which surround the port on the
front side of the water. It is the eagle's flight over Constantinople
and the sea. Europe, Asia, the entrance of the Bosphorus, and the sea of
Marmora, are all under the eye at once. The city lies at the feet of
the spectator. If (continues Mons. de La Martine) we were allowed to
take only one point of the earth, this would be the one to choose.
Whenever I ascend to the belvidere to enjoy this view (and I do so
several times a day, and invariably every evening), I cannot conceive
how, of the many travellers who have visited Constantinople, so few have
felt the beauty which it presents to my eye and to my mind. Why has no
one described it? Is it because words have neither space, horizon, nor
colours, and that painting is only the language of the eye? But painting
itself has never portrayed all that is here. The pictures, I have seen,
are merely detached scenes, consisting of a few lines and colours
without life: none convey any idea of the innumerable gradations of
tint, varying with every change of the atmosphere, and every passing
hour. The harmonious whole, and the colossal grandeur of these lines;
the movements and the intertwinings of the different horizons; the
moving sails, scattered over the three seas; the murmur of the busy
population on the shores; the reports of the cannon on board the
vessels, the flags waving from the mast-heads; the floating caiques; the
vaporous reflection of domes, mosques, steeples, and minarets in the
sea; all this has never been described;"--nor ever can be!
The whole circuit of Constantinople, however, calculated at somewhat
more than twelve miles, present, even to diligent research[152], very
few remains of antiquity. The truth is, the Turks have availed
themselves of the marbles and fragments of the Greeks in the
construction of their own public edifices; and the antiquities of
Constantinople are re-produced to the eye under entirely different forms
and constructions, in the mosques and minarets, the fountains and
cemeteries of the Osmandys. Many a beautiful work, of the ancient Greek
chisel, has thus been embedded in a wall, or cut down and defaced to
make a Turkish tombstone; and many an edifice, constructed in accordance
with the pure styles of architecture, has been levelled and used as a
quarry. But still, it must be confessed that some of the Turkish
buildings, and more particularly some of the imperial mosques which have
risen in their places, are distinguished by grandeur and beauty. Of
these imperial mosques there are fourteen, each lofty, and magnificent
in its general dimensions, and built from base to dome with excellent
and enduring materials; chiefly of white marble, tinged with grey.
Besides these, there are sixty ordinary mosques, varying in size and
beauty, but all considerable edifices; and then two hundred and more
inferior mosques and messdgids[153].
The walls of Byzantium[154] were built of large square stones, so joined
as, apparently, to form one single block. They were much loftier on the
land side than towards the water, being naturally defended by the waves,
and in some places by the rocks they are built on, which project into
the sea.
They were of Cyclopian structure[155]; and of the workmanship, from what
Herodian has said of them, the masonry was greatly superior to any of
the workmanship now visible in the fortifications. It was surrounded by
a wall, made of such immense quadrangular masses of stone, and so
skilfully adjusted, that the marvellous masonry, instead of disclosing
to view the separate parts of which it consisted, seemed like one entire
mass. "The very ruins," says Herodian, "show the wonderful skill, not
only of the persons who built it, but of those, also, by whom it was
dismantled."
The wall of Theodosius begins at the castle of Seven Towers, whence it
traverses the whole western side of the city. This is the only part of
the general wall of the city worth seeing. It is flanked into a double
row of mural towers, and defended by a fosse about eight yards wide. The
same promiscuous mixture of the works of ancient art--columns,
inscriptions, bas-reliefs, &c.--seen in the walls of all the Greek
cities, is here remarkably conspicuous. But the ivy-mantled towers, and
the great height of this wall, added to its crumbling ruinous state,
give it a picturesque appearance, exhibited by no other city in the
Levant: it resembles a series of old ruined castles extending for five
miles from sea to sea[156].
Of the eighteen gates, which once existed on the west side of the city,
only seven now remain. The site of the two temples erected by Justinian,
as _safeguards_ of the city, may still be ascertained by their vestiges;
but these have almost disappeared.
The walls, which are well built, are still standing, and consist of
stone terraces from fifty to sixty feet high, and occasionally from
fifteen to twenty feet thick, covered with freestone of a greyish-white
colour; but sometimes of pure white, and seeming fresh from the chisel
of the mason. At the feet of the walls are the ancient fosses filled
with rubbish and luxuriant loam, in which trees and pellitories have
taken root ages ago, and now form an impenetrable glacis. The summit of
the wall is almost everywhere crowned with vegetation, which overhangs
and forms a sort of coping, surmounted by capital and volute of climbing
plants and ivy. These walls are so noble, that La Martine says that,
next to the Parthenon and Balbec, they are the noblest existing
memorials of ruined empires.
"There is nothing either grand or beautiful in the remains of the
brazen column, consisting of the bodies of three serpents twisted
spirally together. It is about twelve feet in height, and being hollow,
the Turks have filled it with broken tiles, stones, and other relics.
But in the circumstances of its history, no critique of ancient times
can be more interesting. For it once supported the golden tripod at
Delphi, which the Greeks, after the battle of Platæa, found in camp of
Mardonius[157]."
Near the Valide is a COLUMN of PORPHYRY[158], generally supposed to have
supported the statue of CONSTANTINE. It is composed of eight pieces,
surrounded by as many wreaths or garlands of the same marble. Not long
since it gained the name of Colonna Brugiata, or burned pillar, having
been very much defaced by the many conflagrations to which this vast
city has been subject.
Near Mesmer-Kiosch[159] is a view of the summit of the Corinthian pillar
of white marble, fifty feet high, in the gardens of the seraglio, with
the inscription--