LIFE IN CONSTANTINOPLE
To a man who had passed the better part of his life in the elegant
cities of Italy--cities like Florence, famous for its neat streets
and palaces of sculptured stone--Constantinople assuredly was no
paradise. Its streets were narrow, crooked, and dirty. The houses,
built of timber and sun-dried brick, soon fell into decay. Nor was
there the least attempt to make up in style what these ephemeral
habitations wanted in solidity. In the whole of the Ottoman capital
you would not have found one stately house. Western visitors,
impressed by this phenomenon, endeavoured to account for it, each
according to his lights. Some saw in it a manifestation of Turkish
other-worldliness; making the Turk say to himself: “’Tis a sign of
a proud, lofty and aspiring mind, to covet sumptuous houses, as if
so frail a creature as man did promise a kind of immortality and
an everlasting habitation to himself in this life, when alas! we
are but as pilgrims here. Therefore we ought to use our dwellings
as travellers do their inns, wherein if they are secured from
thieves, from cold, from heat, and from rain, they seek not for
any other conveniences.”[42] But this pretty theory was refuted
by the fact that not only the Turks, but the Greeks, the Jews,
and the Armenians manifested the same studious avoidance of any
approach to architectural display. The true explanation was much
more prosaic: a fine dwelling would have been a proof of wealth,
and wealth, in a country where all men were slaves except one, was
a dangerous thing. A trumped-up charge, on the sworn testimony of
two incredible witnesses, was enough to bring about the ruin of the
man who had the misfortune to be rich. So, while the interior of
an Eastern home might teem with all the luxury that vanity could
prompt and money procure, outwardly it presented to the onlooker
a picture of abject meanness.[43] The picture had its charm; but
it was a charm too subtle for ordinary seventeenth-century eyes.
Judged by contemporary aesthetic standards, the metropolis of the
Ottoman Empire was, as a predecessor of Sir John’s had described
it, “a sink of men and sluttishness.”[44] Sir John must have often
wondered what his cousin Winchilsea could have meant when in years
gone by he had written to him: “This city I hold much better worth
seeing then all Italy.”[45]
On the other hand, there were the magnificent relics of Greco-Roman
antiquity, brought into strong relief by their paltry surroundings:
towers and arches, aqueducts and temples, that had defied the havoc
of the ages. For such antiquarian treasures seventeenth-century
Europeans had an eye, and they lavished upon the past all the
enthusiasm which the Orient of their day failed to evoke in them.
There were also the public buildings added by the Turks--superb
mosques, vaulted baths, and bazaars resplendent with the fabrics
and redolent of the spices of the East. Above all, there was the
matchless beauty of the situation--a natural privilege which
rendered the capital of the Sultans beyond comparison the most
wonderful city on the face of the earth; and of all parts of that
capital not the least advantageously situated were the suburbs of
Galata and Pera in which the Franks had their residence, separated
from Stambul by the harbour of the Golden Horn.
Galata, the business quarter, occupying the lower slopes of a
hill, and Pera, where the Embassies stood, the higher, formed an
amphitheatre which commanded a panoramic view of the circumjacent
seas with all their bays and islands. Down below gleamed the
Golden Horn: a scene of ceaseless animation: merchant ships of all
nations riding at anchor; light caïcks flitting to and fro with
the grace and the swiftness of swallows; enormous, heavily gilded
galleys sailing in and out, some bound north for the Black Sea,
others south for the Aegean. From behind this ever-moving panorama,
the city of Stambul surged up in all its majesty; a sierra of
seven hills broken by the massive domes and slender minarets of
innumerable mosques, it glittered in the sunlight and moonlight of
the East like a jewel in a silver setting. The most precious gem
in this regal jewel was the Grand Signor’s Seraglio--a gorgeous
assemblage of palaces, mosques, baths, and kiosks scattered
amidst gardens and groves. It covered a walled space four miles
in circumference, with the Golden Horn on one side, the Sea of
Marmara on the other, while round the third side, blue and limpid
as the sky itself, swept the rapid stream of the Bosphorus. Across
the Bosphorus, on the coast of Asia, rose the bold promontory of
Scutari, its slopes encrusted with kiosks and grottos, thickets and
hanging gardens, its summit crowned with the domes and minarets of
a stately mosque. And close by, in striking contrast, were seen the
dark cypress-groves of Scutari--a procession of mourners watching
over a city of the dead. In these congenially solemn groves the
Turks loved to sleep their last sleep, permitting the infidels to
plant their cemeteries with other trees, but reserving the cypress
jealously to themselves. Hither, to the soil of Asia, whence he had
come, the Turk loved to return at the last, as if he considered
himself a stranger and a sojourner in Europe, as if he felt that
here alone his remains would not be disturbed by the revengeful
Giaour, when the day of reckoning dawned.
Amidst these exotic scenes, the witchery of which no artist has
yet found means to represent on canvas, our countrymen dwelt in
spacious and commodious, if unpretentious, houses, with many
servants and slaves to minister to their wants. His rank naturally
imposed upon the Ambassador proportionate magnificence, and before
leaving England he had laid out no less than £2500 on clothes and
plate: he knew that his foreign colleagues tried to outshine each
other, and he was resolved not to be eclipsed by any of them.[46]
The merchants also, though free from such onerous obligations,
lived on a scale which at the present day would be pronounced
extravagant. Every self-respecting factor kept horses, dogs, and
hawks; dressed, drank, gambled--led in the East the existence his
contemporaries led at home: we are dealing with English gentlemen
of the Restoration, a period when the excessive austerity of the
Puritan regime had yielded to a reaction of debauchery.[47] Only in
the East the opportunities for self-indulgence were more ample.
No part of the globe has been so liberally blessed with the things
that enter into the mouth as the Levant. Western residents and
travellers grew ecstatic at the abundance of good cheer they
found in Turkey and its amazing cheapness. For a halfpenny it was
possible to buy bread enough for three meals; for little more than
a halfpenny a robust man might get as much mutton as he could
consume; a pheasant could be had for five pence, and a brace of
partridges for nine farthings.[48] The soil there yields its
fruits and the sea its fish in equal profusion and variety; and a
temperate climate imparts to everything an exquisite flavour. Not
less remarkable than the abundance of food was the multiplicity
of forms under which it made its appearance on the table. Greek,
Turkish, and Italian Masters had combined for centuries to bring
the gentle Art of Levantine cooking to a height of perfection that
only the Archimageirus of Zeus could have excelled. It is not hard
to understand the sentiments of mingled pleasure and mystification
with which these succulent dishes were approached by people fresh
from a land where a sirloin of beef or a venison pasty represented
the utmost achievements of the kitchen, and where every meal
was haunted by the unsalted and unsanctified presence of the
tedious boiled potato. Turkey was, indeed, a veritable Academy
for any Englishman who chose to devote himself seriously and
single-mindedly to the cultivation of his stomach.
As for drink--a mighty question!--at home few Englishmen could
afford to intoxicate themselves and their guests properly with
anything less coarse than beer; in the Levant the choicest wines
were common beverages; and those Franks whose palates craved
greater variety supplemented their cellars with the products of the
West. Ambassadors were even privileged to import 7000 measures of
wine a year duty-free. Sir John Finch, who loved the wines of Italy
dearly, but could not consume in his own household more than 2000
measures, was thus able, by selling the surplus, to have his annual
supply for nothing.[49]
Things being so, Britons, on the whole, found life in Turkey
tolerable enough, and in a place like Constantinople well worth
living. To be sure, there were frequent earthquakes and fires,
which always caused inconvenience, often grave trouble, sometimes
severe suffering. But the most vexatious affliction of all--Turkish
oppression--was least felt at Pera. In that suburb Europeans
tasted a snatch of liberty not to be found elsewhere throughout
the Ottoman Empire, except at Smyrna. There hats and wigs might
show themselves abroad with little fear of being struck off the
wearer’s head. In each other’s houses the merchants could indulge
their sociable proclivities without let or hindrance. Those among
them who had more room than they knew what to do with harboured
paying guests, and every now and again there arrived from England
a transient visitor whom the residents entertained with hospitable
prodigality; for the English in the Levant had caught all the
geniality of the Levantine climate, and prided themselves on
nothing more than on their warmth towards strangers.
When the summer heats and the Plague, which visited every
Turkish town with devastating regularity, made Pera unendurable,
the English “Nation” resorted to Belgrade--a well-wooded and
well-watered, peaceful little village not more than ten miles
distant, open to the fresh and wholesome breezes of the Black
Sea. Here, in the company of other Franks, they could dine and
dance on the grass near the rivulets and fountains as freely as
in any country-place in Europe. Here the ladies also, who at
Constantinople were obliged to efface themselves, more or less, in
conformity to Oriental notions of decorum, joined in the amusements
of the men. All this served to alleviate the pains of exile for
ordinary Britons.
But alas! the best of these sources of happiness--the happiness
that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse--was sealed
to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette
lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated
to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although
they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only
their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their
houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern
satraps--attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes,
attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by
half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only
to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in
the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul
except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery
they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the
impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common
run of his countrymen--that he stood in the scale of creation as
far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects.
This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very
irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could
not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was;
and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who
could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient
fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant.
Fortunate in this respect also, Sir John Finch had under his own
roof all the society he needed. It consisted of one person--Sir
Thomas Baines, another Doctor of Medicine, some years his senior.
Finch had made Baines’s acquaintance at Christ’s College, and from
that moment the two had become inseparable. Together at Cambridge,
they went together to Padua, where they read the same books and
took the same degrees. When Finch returned to England in 1661, he
saw to it that Baines shared his good fortune. Both were elected
Fellows of the College of Physicians of London on the same day,
and together they were made Doctors of Medicine at Cambridge.
Finch’s devotion knew no bounds. When he was appointed Minister at
Florence, he got his friend appointed physician to the Legation,
interested all his relatives in him, and, through the influence
of his brother-in-law, Lord Conway, procured him the honour of
Knighthood in 1672. After living with Finch in Italy and England,
Baines followed him to Turkey in the character of a comrade and
confidant.
His life-long attachment to this College chum is the one romantic
episode in Sir John Finch’s history. Without wife and children, he
had concentrated all his unused affections on this friend for whom
he entertained an admiration little short of idolatry, to whom he
communicated all his thoughts, and whose advice he sought in all
his difficulties. At Constantinople it soon became a current jest
that there were two Excellencies, and the merchants humorously
distinguished between them, by referring to the one as the
Ambassador, and to the other as the Knight or the Chevalier.[50] It
must be owned that the sight of that eternal pair of middle-aged
physicians turned diplomats, each wrapped up in the other and each
sufficient unto the other, had its comic as well as its romantic
side. They presented to our ribald factors an object lesson in
what the French call _égoïsme à deux_--natural only in the case of
married couples, especially if they have not been married long.
Truly, it was, in Sir John’s own words, “a beautiful and unbroken
marriage of souls”--_suave et irruptum animorum connubium_; and,
like all unions of the kind, it owed its strength to a happy
meeting of opposites. If we may judge from the correspondence
of the pair, their minds belonged to widely different types.
The letters of the younger man are, on the whole, simple,
straightforward, and spontaneous; the writer every now and again
proves himself capable of a picturesque phrase, of a pithy
statement, of a sound, if not very profound, observation. On the
other hand, the elder man’s ponderous and pedantic epistles are
unreadable, often unintelligible; his attempts at pleasantry
painful; his whole style that of a pompous pedagogue. Of the
talents which Sir John attributed to him no trace is visible in
these dissertations. It is impossible to find in any of them a
single remark on philosophy, religion, or society which is not
dreary commonplace. And the same thing applies to the records of
his conversation: they reek of stale school-learning. There can
be no doubt that Finch, though no dazzling genius, had the finer
intellect of the two. But intellect is not everything. As the
portraits of the two friends stand confronting each other, Finch’s
sensitive face with its weak mouth and melancholy eyes contrasts
very suggestively with Baines’s stronger and coarser countenance:
look at those lips still shaped in a firm, superior, benignant
smile--the smile of one sure of his own wisdom and of his power of
guiding weaker mortals! It is easy to guess at a glance to whom, in
this “marriage of souls,” belonged the masculine and to whom the
feminine part.
[Illustration: SIR THOMAS BAINES.
From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.
_To face p. 42._]
Further, Finch’s face reveals vanity, and Baines’s letters a turn
for flattery--gross and inflated beyond even a seventeenth-century
measure. Thomas, clearly, had established over John an ascendancy
by accustoming him to lean upon his strength and to feed upon his
praises. There is also evidence to show that Thomas was not the
man to relax his hold: to surrender or share a domination which
interest and sentiment alike made precious to him. In 1661 Finch
met in Warwickshire a young lady who had the good fortune to please
him. The moment Baines got wind of this matrimonial project, he
set vigorously to work to defeat it. He used many arguments of a
prudential nature, but the one that clinched the matter was this:
Suppose you have children, then you die, and she marries again,
how can you be sure that she will not dispose of her estate to her
second husband and his progeny?[51] The logic of Thomas triumphed
over what John called his love, and he never again caused his
friend any uneasiness upon that score. Thenceforward his whole life
was annexed and welded to the life of Baines in a degree which,
perhaps, has no counterpart in authentic history. As to Baines, he
does not seem to have ever loved anybody except Finch and himself.
Needless to say, Sir Thomas did his best to solace Sir John for
the loneliness which is the penalty of greatness. That he was a
cheerful companion it would be absurd to imagine: he was just as
cheerful as could be expected from one who often lay, as he himself
tells us, “under the torment of gout and stone both in bladder
and rheyns”[52]--common distempers of the times. Not that Finch
enjoyed wild spirits either. Both were of a studious and sedentary
disposition, and their long residence in Italy had confirmed their
constitutional languor: so much so that their friends in England
had found the ways of these “Italians,” as they nicknamed them, a
little hard to understand. As a consequence, they both indulged
rather freely in exercises of a theologico-philosophical character
and in the pleasures of the table. For the rest, their recreations
appear to have been of a strictly conventual innocence. Let us
intrude for an instant upon their domestic privacy.
It is the beginning of summer, 1674, and Sir Thomas is seated at
his escritoire, writing to Lord Conway. After enumerating “my Lord
Ambassadour’s” multitudinous achievements, he descends to matters
of a less exalted and more pleasing nature. His very style loses
much of its rhetorical affectation as he writes:
“As to the House in itself, it affords no great aspect to the eye
without, but truly it is very convenient within, and I think it
gives great content to my Lord, as I am sure it does to me. We both
taking a great delight to set in our chairs and see the birds in
the court lodge upon the cypress tree with as much alacrity and
security as the malefactors fly into a church in Italy or a publick
Minister’s house, upon the foresight of which my Lord from his
first coming gave order to all his servants not only [not] to shoot
a gun at them, but not to throw a stone: insomuch that at this time
we have little wrens which begin to learn to fly first from bough
to bough, then from tree to tree, then from tree to the top of the
house and so back again, and all under safe protection.”[53]
It is a vividly realised picture, sympathetically painted. We see,
across the dead years, that long since vanished courtyard at Pera,
with its tall bird-haunted cypress tree--and on the open gallery
above, behind its wood railing, two clean-shaven, middle-aged
English bachelors in full-bottomed wigs, seated side by side,
watching the young wrens try their wings; while around them lay the
splendour and the havoc of the East: a world in which semi-tones
existed not--in which the dominant note was exaggeration--where
life was a singular, often a sinister, mixture of brilliant light
and deep gloom, and reality partook alternately of the enchantments
of a dream and the horrors of a nightmare.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] _Busbequius_ (Eng. Tr., 1694), p. 18.
[43] Roger North’s _Life of Sir Dudley North_, pp. 118-19; Covel’s
_Diaries_, pp. 178-9.
[44] Sir Thomas Roe to Lord Carew, May 3, 1622, _Negotiations_
(London, 1740), p. 37.
[45] March 30, 1663, _Finch Report_, p. 247.
[46] Malloch’s _Finch and Baines_, p. 58.
[47] See Appendix VI.
[48] Henry Blount’s _Voyage into the Levant_, in Pinkerton’s
Collection, vol. x. p. 263; Thevenot’s _Travels into the Levant_
(Eng. Tr., 1687), Part I. pp. 27, 92; Malloch’s _Finch and Baines_,
p. 58. More than two generations later, the famous French renegade
Comte de Bonneval could keep an establishment including six wives
and twenty horses at less than 20 sequins, or £10, a month. See his
_Mémoires_ (Paris, 1806), vol. ii. p. 339.
[49] Malloch’s _Finch and Baines_, p. 58.
[50] See _Life of Dudley North_, _passim_.
[51] Malloch’s _Finch and Baines_, p. 33.
[52] Baines to Conway, June 1-11, 1677, _S.P. Turkey_, 19.
[53] Baines to Conway, May 25, 1674, _ibid._