¦ ;.;.;¦;; : YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Mosque of Sultan Ahmed — Egyptian Obelisk and Serpent Column IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN BV ANNA BOWMAN DODD Author of "Three Normandy Inns," "Cathedral Days," etc. NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1903 Copyright, sgoj, By Dodd, Mead and Company ylll rights reser-ved First edition published September, 1903 UNIVERSITY PRESS, JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. To His Excellency GENERAL HORACE PORTER and to THE MEMORY OF MRS. PORTER PREFACE IN my previous attempts to transcribe impressions of English and French people and places there were no difficulties to surmount such as have presented themselves in the present volume. There were no barriers of language in either the country of our mother tongue, or in the land in which the larger part of mv childhood was passed. In Turkey there was not only an unknown tongue barring my way to a better, truer insight into the life of its people, there were also those limitations inseparable from observa tions confined to a few months of travel. If to the very unusual opportunities presented by the honour accorded us of being of our Ambassador's party were due the greatly prized privileges of being received at Yildiz Court, as well as His Majesty the Sultan's gracious permission to transcribe my impres sions of our reception, these exceptional advantages and favours necessarily brought in their train many restrictions. For such observations and impressions as are re corded in the " Notes and Impressions " I must beg vii PREFACE to be allowed to assume full and entire responsibility. It was after the departure of our Ambassador and Mrs. Porter from Constantinople, — after the whirl of court and diplomatic gaieties was ended, — that I was enabled to make a closer study of the life and people of that most interesting citv. For innumerable facts to support and to illustrate certain of my own views I am immeasurably indebted, not only to all of the better known authorities on Turkey and Turkish history, but particularly to "Women ot Turkey" by Miss Garnett and Mr. Stuart-Glennie, to " Justinian et La Civilization Byzantine" by Charles Diehl, to "L'Histoire d'lslam," Bruxelles, 1897, and to Mr. Baker's "Turkey in Europe." ANNA BOWMAN DODD. New York, Oct. 5, 1902. CONTENTS Chapter pAGE I Within the Gates i II The Messengers from the Palace 14 III The Selamlik — from the Palace of Yildiz Kiosk . 27 ' I\ The Private Audience .... 54 V Tea in His Majesty's Stables 69 VI The Banquet in the Palace . . .... 80 VII In the Palace Theatre 101 VIII The Court of the Osmanlis. To Stamboul . . . 112 IX The Imperial Treasury and Library 128 X The Harem and Court of the Seraglio . . . . 140 XI Some Ambassadors at the Court of the Osmanlis . 151 XII To Top-Khaneh .... 166 XIII In the Royal Caiques 176 XIV A Turkish Coup d'Etat 190 XV A Chain of Royal Palaces 205 XVI The Dancing Dervishes . . . 221- XVII All in a Day ... 235 XVIII The Cities of Severus, Constantine, and Justinian 270 XIX Constantinople and Santa Sophia . .... 30 1 XX The Moslem Ci-by ... 335 XXI Pera and Galata 379 XXII Scutari and Brusa . 396 COX TEXTS NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS Page I Two Old Travellers . . 413 II " The Unspeakable Turk " .... ... 421 ]II " Are there no Harem-- ? " . . . 429 IV Harems and the " Kaif" . . . . . 433 V The Common People and the Religion of Mahomet . 440 VI Women's Richts in Turkey .... . . 447 VII Slaves and Slavery in Turkey . . ... 452 VIII The Imperial Harem .... .... 457 IX Harem Distractions and Turkish Households . .461 X Turkish Reforms and European Influences . . . 471 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Mosque of Sultan Ahmed — Egyptian Obelisk and Page Serpent Column. (Photogravure) . Frontispiece A Butcher's Shop in Stamboul ... .5 The Fountain of Sultan Ahmed . . 7 New Bridge Valideh Sultan Keuprisi . . .... 9 Galata Tower and Step Street — Pera. (Photogravure) . Facing 14 The French Quais in Pera ... ... 18 Pera^nd Galata Docks . .... 21 Croatians and Albanians . . . . . . 29 A Street Scene in Orta Keui . ... . .32 A Wing of Yildiz Kiosk . 33 A Turkish Cafe. (Photogravure) Facing 40 The Troops and Court facing Hamidieh Mosque . . 47 A Eunuch of the Palace . . 72 A Corner ofthe Banqueting Hall — Yildiz Kiosk. {Photogra vure) . . . ... . . Facing 92 Street Pedlers of Simites . . . ..113 Jewish Beggars ... 119 A Turkish Lady wearing Yashmak . . . . 121 A Street View in Stamboul ... .... 125 Fountain of Ahmed III (Photogravure) Facing 126 Gate of Felicity within the Seraglio . . 129 A Wall-Surface in Baghdad Kiosk ... ... 137 A Greek in Turkish Costume .... . . ..141 The Great Plane in the Court of the Janissaries . . . 145 Pera from the Caiques Landing in Stamboul. (Photogra vure) ... Facing 148 The Grand Divan . . . 153 xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A Hamal — A Turkish Porter . . . • • Fountain of Top-Khaneh .... A Turkish Cemetery on the Bosphorus The Palace of Beylerbey ... ... . . ¦ Turkish Houses near Anadoli Hissar — The Bosphorus. {Pho togravure) Facing The Palace and Mosque of Dolma Baghcheh The Seraskerat The Bosphorus . The Gateway ofthe Palace of Dolma Baghcheh A Dancing Dervish and his Son . The Palace of Belisarius (Photogravure ) Jewish Houses in Stamboul The Greek Patriarch The Cemetery at Eyoub .... Entrance to the Black Sea The Fortress Rumili-Hissar Bazaar, Washing Fountain, and Mosque The Obelisk of Theodosius Obelisk in Hippodrome Justinian .... The Empress Theodora and her Court . Gipsies' Houses in old Stamboul Justinian and his Court Underground Cisterns built by Justinian The Walls of Justinian Yeni Djam — Mosque by Moonlight An Hungarian Gipsy In Stamboul . . A Fellahine — An Egyptian . Interior of Santa Sophia Gallery and Arcade in Santa Sophia A Softa with Pupils .... Mihrab and Minber in Suleyman the Magniiicent's Mosque Portal of Green Mosque — Brusa Facing Page 167 169i;1«79188 191 199 209213224 236 241245 249 256265271 275277283291 ?973°33°5309 3'1 3'5 3'73-i323 327 339 343 349 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page Fore-Court of the Bayezidiyeh Mosque, or " The Pigeon Mosque" . . . . . 365 Fountain in Great Mosque — Brusa . . . 369 Interior of a Tiirbeh .... . 371 Tiirbeh of Mahmoud II and Abdul Aziz . . . -373 Laleli Djami — Als Serai Quarter . .... 387 Cemetery in Scutari .... . . . 397 Gipsy Sorceresses ... . .401 Mosque and Tiirbeh in Brusa . . . . 405 Brusa . 407 Tomb of Mahomet I — The Turquoise Tomb 409 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Chapter I WITHIN THE GATES A TOWERING mass of wall flanked by grey bastions, a stretch of beach on whose amber sands lay a dozen or more gaily painted caiques, and a veiled shape pink from head cover ing to skirt edge, shuffling waterwards in canary- coloured slippers, — such were the signs, pregnant in meaning, that announced to the passengers of the Orient express they had come to their long journey's end. We were at the gates of Stamboul. The walls and gates Constantine had built were quickly passed. The hills beyond — warm and amber- toned as the cheek of a Turkish bride — were lost in the blur of thickly built streets. One last final spurt of speed, and we were swept beneath the iron roof of the Stamboul railway station. White, brown, dusky-hued were the faces that looked eagerly, questioningly into our own. The cry " Excellency ! " " Excellence ! " came quick and soft from upturned lips. The next instant the little group had moved, as one man, upon the carriage step of our compartment. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The first to welcome our ambassador to France, General Horace Porter, on this his unofficial visit to the Sultan's city, was the voung charge-d'affaires of the American Legation at Constantinople. The pale blue eves, athletic figure, and the Western energy conveyed through the speech and gesture of our first secretary, presented an interesting contrast to the intel lectual melancholy stamped upon the subtle Italian countenance of the American Legation's accomplished official interpreter. Behind these two gentlemen the mobile Greek face of our future guide, and the sombre eyes and glittering uniform of the kavass, lit up the smoky corridor with a touch of Eastern colour. It was on the kavass the eye fell and lingered. He was the embodiment ot that which we had trav elled a thousand miles to see. From his swarthy brow to his swift and willing feet, he was the true Oriental. His eyes, of a liquid brown, had the Moslem outlook upon life and men — a great pa tience streamed forth from their bronze depths. His manners were of the gentlest ; yet he was, so to speak, most agreeably armed to the very teeth. Besides his sword there gleamed at his belt a waist ornament chiefly associated with those Riders we have christened Rough and with their Western brothers, the reckless, devil-may-care cow-boys. A pistol, the size of which was a warrant of its usefulness for quick handling, was worn at the belt, in a richly chased holster. What further weapons the kavass may have had concealed about the privacy of side pockets, I know not. One made responsible for the lives and persons IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN confided to his care, whose own life is forfeit should harm befall them, had taken, presumably, all the necessary precautions. The kavass's salute had riveted the eye. Once again, on this, the threshold of our Eastern experi ences, it was the humble official who proffered us the looked-for Eastern salutation. " I prostrate myself before your mightiness — I lay myself in the dust at your feet — I carry the dust to my heart, to my lips, and to my forehead. All I have is yours." This, the deep bow — to the level of the glittering waist-belt — and the flight of the supple Eastern fingers from lips to forehead, had quickly, courteously signalled. Having thus salaamed, being a man of action, the kavass promptly proceeded to take possession of our hand-luggage. A moment later and we had passed beyond the yellow dimness of the station. We stood on the doorstep of Stamboul. The first outlook was amazing, bewildering, astound ing. Could this indeed be Stamboul, old Byzantium, the splendid city of the Roman Emperors, the capital of the Padishahs, of Sultans whose state and magnificence had equalled if they had not surpassed, in their regal extravagance of mosque and palace building, the splendour of this city of the Eastern Caesars ? Constantinople, Byzantium, Seraglio Point! — surely each of these words holds, within their syllabled grace, the secret, to Western ears, of an enduring, immeasurable fascination. From the moment when IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN as children, to each of us in turn have been opened the magical pages ofthe "Thousand and One Nights," -pages that have spirited us away into that enchanted country where Scheherazade holds her perpetual sway, to the soberer time when history has conjured up for us the scarcely less fabulously beauti ful city captured by the "terrible Turk," — there is no time or season in the life of the reasonable yet excitable, of the practical yet imaginative American when the great Eastern city does not rise above all others as fairest, as rarest, — the dream-city come true. The noise that filled the streets of the "dream- citv " brought a rude awakening. Cries, yells, screams, yelping dogs, the harsh crunching of bullock carts over loose-jointed stones, shouts from cab- drivers to the sea of foot-passengers filling the narrow streets, answering groans from the tightly wedged mass of pedestrians, — this was the first impression. The second was no less disillusioning. Stamboul was in the last stages of decay. Of that fact there could be no doubt whatsoever. Stained, defiled, decrepit, the low, wooden, unpainted houses seemed on the verge of a hopeless ruin. Those houses that stood fairly upright, whose doors fitted, whose upper win dows, latticed, announced the looked-for haremlik seclusion, — these appeared as palaces among hovels. Beneath the rows of these toppling buildings innumerable were the open shops, the tented booths, and the portable shops of street venders that lined the pavements. Beneath certain of these tents, from huge i IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN hooks, hung the severed carcasses of kids, hares, and steers, — thick as peas within their pod. About these open-air butcher's shops groups of buyers clustered close, fingering the meats, testing their freshness as they might that of perfumed flowers. Live goats, turkeys, and a stray kid or two wandered in and out A Butcher' ' s Shop in Stamboul about the myriad-coloured feridjehs of the women slave- buyers and the men's baggy trousers, as freely as upon a village common. This part of the ancient city had, indeed, the air of a village ; it had neither the life nor the character of a great city. Squalor, filth, and a suburban indefiniteness of outline, — such were the aspects presented by this, the back-door of Stamboul. Gradually, insensibly, squalor and the poverty of things and houses were left behind. As over the S IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN rough, ill-paved streets our carriages were tossed, were jolted — now riven in a deep crevasse of mud, now tip- tilted to the verge of imminent upsetting, a fairer, finer city lined our way. Streets converged upon squares. Nobler house facades rose up, and mysteri ously, hermetically latticed windows. At a certain street-corner a group of horsemen had come to a standstill about a fairy-like structure. The marble walls of this building were rose-green-blue. Niches were carved into interlacing arabesques, fine as priceless lace. Into the great, deep basin, — yellow as topaz — the small, clean-eared Arabian horses had plunged their heads ; one could hear their lusty lapping of the water. In their brilliant Anatolian costumes, with their swarthy faces rising above the rich blues and the gold braiding, these horsemen had the haughty, arrogant look of tribal kings. To complete the picture, a garden close by, as crowded with tombs (turbehs) as with trees, had swept the fountain eaves with the offshoots of its green bloom. This was the East at last ! the true East, with its colour and its sharp contrasts, with its splendours set in a frame of ruins. The streets through which we were presently swept were filled with as strange and wonderful a world of men. The faces of these men were the faces of brown men, of white men, of black men. No two faces seemed to belong to the same race ; and no one garb or costume appeared to have been the model chosen for repetition. The colours draping the crowd of men that closed in about our carriage wheels like an engulfing- tide, were colours such as the Western eve chiefly asso- 6 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ciates with the iridescence of bird plumage. Yet the vivid greens, the deep blues, the crimsons, pinks, and The Fountain of Sultan Ahmed yellows, melted and fused as only the vats of the Orient yield the secret of such blending. Some of 7 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN men in among the swarm of walkers, strollers, wan derers, were seen to be more richly clad than others. Yet the very poorest wore princely colours. Eddies of these men were gathered about the open booths. Thinner streams were seen entering tiny shops. Coiled on low divans, close to open windows, with the tube of the narghile in their thick lips, rows of Turks eyed us as we did them, curiously, inquir ingly — with, however, far more languor in their semi- indifferent glance. Suddenly this tide of men thickened about a wide open space. There flashed upon the sight bright, sun- flooded waters, quiveringly alive with river-craft, with moving ships, and with the white sheets of spread can vas. Beyond the bridge lay a long, thickly built shore line. And above the crowded shores there rose a white and shining city. The breath then came quick and short. For as our wheels swept the rude planks of the bridge, the reality of that splendour we call Constantinople lav before us. The squalid streets, the filth of the dim alleyways of Stamboul were forgotten, were as if they had never been. The glory and the beauty before us filled eyes and sense, obliterating all else, as they also dimmed the very memory of other sights and cities. Three cities, each dazzling to the eye in its sunlit, high-noon radiance, were seen to sweep downwards from low heights, to the level of blue-tinted, craft- crowded waters. Below the bridge, at our left, there curved the blue stem of the Golden Horn. Densely thick was the 8 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN depth of colour upon the famous stream ; the darting caiques seemed rather cutting their way through some solid substance than afloat in moving waters. Two cities came to their finish upon the blue won der. The one facing us was a wide-waisted city. Its pink, white, and cream-faced houses rose tier upon tier to centre about a tower whose yellow surface pro claimed it to be the famous Genoese " Christ's Tower." To the right this City of Pera widened to untraceable distance. Its shore line carried the eye on and on, to the glistening whites of the royal palaces upon the Bosphorus. At the point where the Bosphorus turned to lose its sparkling colours in a misty sea, — the Sea of Mar mora, — still another city rose, shimmering and glitter ing, across the water-worlds. This was Scutari. The " Golden City " upon its Asian shores, that had charmed the eyes of Justinian, was golden still at this brilliant moment of high noon. Queen or beggar, Scutari still could lift its shield to the sun, that his lance might strike its antique surface into that shiver of sparkling light that made its mosques and minarets seem unreal, fantastic, — a city of wondrous outlines in luminous mosaic against the Eastern sky. It was behind, rather than before our eyes, that, patterned in splendour, lay the city of all these cities. Above the squalor and filth of its streets, Stamboul, upon its seven hills, stood forth amazing, stupendous, triumphant. In terraces and gardens it began its ascent from the low shores fringing the fabled Seraglio Point. Bulb-shaped kiosks rose from among plane- IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN trees and cypresses to cluster about the monster dome of Santa Sophia. Along the crest of the hills stately minarets leaped skyward, their silvery marbles ethere ally translucent in the glow of the noon sun. Mosque after mosque took up the lines of curving beauty. Minaret followed minaret like living shapes abroad upon the crested slope. Far out along the hills the silvery spirals proceeded, as in line of processional march. The eye followed, in enchanted obedience, till the blues of the glittering Horn were lost in the green depths we knew later to be the cypresses of Eyoub. Out upon the great bridge, as below it, — in caiques, in Maltese boats, in lateen-rigged yawls, in feluccas, — as if to present themselves, grouped and in costume, were the many men of the many races, of the many creeds, of the many colours, that made the beating pulse of these three wondrous cities. The dervish in his brown mantle and his sugar- coned hat ; the gaudily garbed Croatian, with his flow ing blue sleeves, and his gold-embroidered trousers and jackets ; the Greek priest, stately, imposing, majestic in his trailing black robe, tall hat, and with the gossa mer of his woman's veil held in the crook of his bent elbow; the Jew in his gaberdine; the bent shapes of the Khurdish porters ; myriads of shapeless women figures in their all-enveloping feridjehs ; negresses, veiled and unveiled ; gypsies in gossamer vests, loose, baggy trousers, and superbly embroidered jackets, with a rose in among their oily tresses, — these, to gether with hundreds upon hundreds of hurrying IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN shapes wearing the more universal, latter-day Turkish dress — trousers, side-spring boots, coloured vest, and the scarlet fez — such was the motley world crowding "The Bridge of All Nations." Out from this living throng, up through the thickly built Galata streets, up to the Pera heights, we were swept with remorseless swiftness. There was a great cracking of whips, a final scrunching of the carriage wheels, and before us stood a waiting, expectant group. We were come to the door of our Pera Hotel. Chapter II THE MESSENGERS FROM THE PALACE THAT the Sultan was disposed to tender to General Porter an altogether exceptionally friendly welcome, was soon made manifest. Munir Bey, the Turkish ambassador to France, had been among the first to greet his distinguished colleague on his arrival in Constantinople. It was as envoy from the palace — as His Majesty's chosen messenger — that Munir Bey presented him self on the occasion of his second visit. He was the bearer of several most gracious messages. His Majesty, he made known, was desirous of receiving His Excellency, and at the earliest possible moment. On the Moslem Sunday — on Friday — directly after the Selamlik, the religious ceremonial of His Majesty's going to mosque, — this had been the hour and time chosen by Sultans for several years to grant audiences to distinguished visitors or to resident ambassadors. Sultan Abdul Hamid II had continued this time-honoured custom. On the coming Friday, therefore, His Excellency smilingly announced, " His Imperial Majesty" would be pleased to "receive" General Porter; while to 14 Galata Tower and Step Street — Pera f-J IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN view the ceremony of the Selamlik, His Majesty would also " be pleased " to have as his guests in the palace, in the diplomats' reception-room, our ambassador and ambassadress, as well as their two friends. The royal palaces upon the Bosphorus and the imperial treasury at Seraglio Point were to be opened for our inspection. His Majesty also placed at our ambassador's disposal the royal carriages and caiques. A further distinguishing proof of the Sultan's cour tesy was Munir Bey's last and final announcement. Mustafa Hilmi Bey, Captain in His Majesty's Navy, now serving as aide-de-camp on His Majesty's staff, had been appointed as escort to the person of General Porter during his sojourn on Turkish soil. The royal message once delivered, the talk turned, with the brief interchange of question and answer, upon the person and character ofthe Sultan himself. His Majesty, it appears, is the simplest as well as the most gracious of sovereigns. He is also one of the hardest worked among modern rulers, giving indeed all his time and thought to " affairs." He rarely or never came into the city. His weekly drive from his palace to Hamidieh Mosque — a two minutes' drive from his palace gates to the mosque he had built close to the walls of Yildiz — was his sole public appear ance, save two. On the occasions of the two great religious ceremonies, — the Kissing ofthe Prophet's Mantle at Seraglio Point, and the Baisemains, held at the Palace of Dolma Baghcheh at Bairam, the Moslem Easter — for these two sacred festivals the T5 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Sultan passes beyond the walls and Palace of Yildiz. The remainder ofthe year and the whole of his life — of his busv, administrative, toilful life — is wholly passed within the palaces and grounds ofthe "Star Kiosk." Such were the interesting if somewhat scanty details vouchsafed our eager ears, from the lips of one ofthe Sultan's most trusted and well-beloved subjects and servants. The conversation, almost immediately, was then tactfully turned into channels less personal. Nothing strikes the Western mind more forcibly than this reticent discretion and tactful avoidance of the most interesting of all subjects and topics in Turkey — the Sultan. The " Hamidian Methods," as his enemies phrase the Sultan's system of government touching the more intimate lives of his subjects, may have had their inevitable effect in making prudence and caution second nature. But there is a religious base beneath the autocratic system peculiar to the reign of Abdul Hamid II which alone can account, to the Western, more irreverent mind, for the attitude main tained by Turks toward their ruler. In our Western world the Sultan's acts and doings, -the innermost secrets of his life within his Palace of Yildiz, his imperial failings and shortcomings, as well as a full and complete understanding of the intimate springs moving both his home and foreign policy, — each and all of these topics form the staple of diurnal journalist treatment. There is no European writer so poor in fancy that he is found unequal to x6 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the telling of a Thousand and One Tales concerning one of the cleverest and most astute of living rulers. It is also equally true that once within the Sultan's realm this somewhat unreal, fictional figure vanishes, like the mirage upon the sandy seas of the desert, into nothingness. Out of the vague and nebulous East arises a still more mythical figure. In the land of Mahomet, this his Khalifa, the Padishah, the Son of the Faithful, Shadow of God, king, ruler, father of his people, earthly representative of God's holy prophet, — this mighty being is still hedged about with much of that divinity that, from the Eastern standpoint, should screen a king. The Oriental is among the last of the great wor shippers. The soul of the true Turk is still the soul of the believer. Five times a day he prostrates him self before his Lord God ; his King is the shadow of his Maker in the flesh. To discuss, to question the doings or the commands of either God, Prophet, or King is accounted sacrilege. That which is a cult among the common Moslem people, is still the creed of good taste, immutably fixed in the world of conven tion, among the courtiers of the palace and the mem bers of the old Turkish party. The talk on that brilliant October afternoon touched on themes fraught with no dangerous potentialities. Diplomats, I have noticed, are masters in the art of skilfully guiding their discourses in and out and away from dangerous eddies. The theory, indeed, that diplomats, in their idlest conversational moments, 2 17 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN are busily weaving elaborate webs wherein to entrap the brightest chosen minds of Europe, to their own future discomfiture and to their country's hurt, — what popular theory is at once more wide-spread or more absurdly improbable? Into what a tangle, for example, would the two The French Quais in Pera accomplished ambassadors sitting in the sunlit Pera Hotel drawing-room have contrived to twist their mutual personal and professional relations had certain strictly professional topics been indiscreetly touched upon ? The diplomatic relations between Turkey and France, at the moment of our descent upon Constan tinople, might best have been characterised bv nega- 18 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN tion. Monsieur Constant, a few weeks before our descent upon the Sultan's city, for reasons all the world was to know later on, had acted upon his con viction that it was in Paris rather than from a near proximity to the Sublime Porte that the interests of France in Turkey could best be furthered. His charming colleague, Munir Bey, in his turn, had found on the shores ofthe Bosphorus the most delectable of residences in which to pass the somewhat indeterminate length of his own " leave." The situation between America and the northern boundaries of Turkey were of a like critical complexion. On the person of Miss Ellen Stone, the American missionary, the eyes of both the diplomatic and religious worlds in America and Turkey, as well as those in the Bulgarian capital, had been focussed for some weeks. That lady's wandering away from Sophia, the windy city in the plains, into the savage-looking coun try we ourselves had but recently passed, the last in the world to have been chosen for the engendering of an agreeable feeling of security, as we had all agreed, — this lady's recent capture, in high brigandish fashion, was the " burning" question upon our own particular square ofthe diplomatic chess-board. Yet think you it was in the making of any such grave moves, or the touching on such delicate matters of state, wise and witty diplomats talk when they meet ? The brightly lighted, flower-scented drawing- room resounded to gayer notes, to reminiscent echoes of London, Viennese, St. Petersburg, and Parisian gaieties. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The golden afternoon light that flooded the draw ing-room had caught the expressive American face of General Porter in its happiest, most genial aspect. The amber light suffused the face, as it did the room, with a broad sweep of colour. The firmly muscled features, with their accent of concentrated earnestness, were harmonised and softened. The style and dis tinction of General Porter's face and figure in any place or pose are noticeable and impressive. The erect, soldierly poise is one never lost, whether in the saddle or in the drawing-room. The gestures are those ofthe trained orator — few but expressive. As the talk had warmed, the ripple of a quiet inward laughter had turned the steel of the general's determined eyes into bluish tints. The wit and humourist in this many-sided man of action, man of affairs, soldier, diplomat, and orator had asserted their natural, irresistible rights, as the conversation had winged its way into the regions where epigram and neat rejoinder played the part of glancing shuttle in and out of graver themes. Munir Bey's conversational touch was as light and sure. On the subtle Eastern base, the Parisian super structure defined itself with definite, graceful charm. The Turkish ambassador presented, indeed, rather the European than the typically Turkish physical aspect. Of medium size, slight, alert, Munir Bey's vivacity, both of speech and gesture, proved the plastic nature of the true Cosmopolitan. His earlier training for his high post as representative of the Sublime Porte to France, had been, however, of an essentially Eastern Pera and Galata Docks IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN character. The Sultan had seen in him, in the earlier years of his training as courtier in the palace, the promise of those traits and distinguishing qualities which, later, were to place Munir Bey in the highest rank of the diplomatic service. It was with the metallic clink of a sword, in the sober yet rich uniform of the Turkish navy, that the next messenger from the palace presented himself. Though somewhat short of stature, Mustafa Bey's bearing was eminently soldierly. The large, finely moulded features were distinctly Oriental. The eyes were serious, brown, and liquid ; they moved beneath almond-shaped lids. What the brow was like, one must rather divine than know. In all the weeks of our meeting no such disaster as to be caught uncapped by his fez was a possible mishap to so adroit a master of circumstance as was the Sultan's aide-de-camp. In the intervals of his duty at the palace, Mustafa Bey has devoted his time to the study of modern languages. He has also kept in touch with the intel lectual, literary, and scientific progress in Europe and America. His English, first learned in the Turkish schools in Constantinople, had been perfected by years of patient study and practice. Those self-complacent Anglo-Saxons, Germans, or Frenchmen who, pityingly, would generously wield the schoolmaster's rule or ferule for the " enlighten ment" of Turks and Turkey, in the meeting of such men as the Mustafa Beys would receive a rude shock to their egoism. The "Young Turkey" party are supposed to have absorbed all the intellect and culture 23 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN among the more modernised Turks. It is rather in such strong men as the present Grand Vizier, Said Pasha, and of the more obscure but equally progres sive Mustafa Hilmi Beys that the true hope and promise of Turkish development lie. A singular clarity of mental outlook upon the irresistible encroachments of European advancement, in the domain of thought and science, has been main tained by the more enlightened Turks. The preser vation of certain inrooted Moslem traditions, and at least an outward observance of a creed, founded on the religious base of a devout, superstitious people has, perhaps, greatly helped towards the support of this intellectual poise. The soul of a nation, as also that soul which may be said to animate both armies and machines, lies in its dormant strength. The more silently the work of enlightenment goes on, the more pervasive will be its influence. The wordy, bitter, impatient revolutionists would precipitate tragedies in government, they must ask a Napoleon to resolve into order. One cannot be a month in Turkey without the conviction being well in-riveted that a Grand Vizier of the Said Pasha type, and subjects modelled after the mind and patient intel lectual outlook of Mustafa Hilmi Bev, are rulers and subjects safest alike for Sultans and for the people of Turkey. There was still another figure prominent in the group that centred about our ambassador. The position of official dragoman in any Eastern lega tion or embassy is one demanding a combination of ii\ iS. I yy '- XX,. y i ? /~~ - - vm'' { X' IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN qualities as rare as they are, as a rule, taken for granted. All the secrets of the diplomatic relations between the various countries, as well as the two between whom the linguistic accomplishment of the interpreter serves as the sole method of commu nication, such are the familiars of dragomen. In all Eastern countries the corridors of palaces, as well as the ante-chambers of ministers, are whis pering galleries where rumour is as prolific as spies are omnipresent. In and out of galleries and ante chambers the dragoman moves, as charged with facts as are the ignorant with falsehoods. Yet must his lips be as the stone sealing a tomb. The drago man must, in a word, be as discreet as a Jesuit, as wise as the unpleasant but astute serpent, clever and subtle enough to supply any needed mental material in an emergency, should his chief be found in want of efficient aid ; while, added to these above-named qualities and gifts, the dragoman should be possessed of the self-obliterating capacity of a woman or of a devotee. The position of official dragoman is in no sense in ferior or subordinate. Mr. G 's diplomatic rank is that of third secretary. For thirty years his place has been as that of a fixed star in the sphere of the Turko-American diplomatic world. He has seen His Majesty come to the throne a young man, to be young still, in point of intellectual grasp and power, after his six and twenty years' reign, and in spite of his sixty years of life. For that the intellect is the best of cosmetics is proved anew by Abdul Hamid II. 25 IN THE PAIACES OF THE SULTAN The American Presidents under whose rule Mr. G has served, whose Ministers have as a rule succeeded each other with the regularity of their own election to their high office, began with General Grant. What changes, crises, dangers, wars, and international wranglings have gone to the making of these thirty years of history ! In the very latest of these inter national episodes, Mr. G has played an impor tant part. At this moment of writing, our clever and accomplished dragoman is on his appointed mission for the ransoming and recapture of Miss Stone. As this wary gentleman moves in the company of the American consul, in the midst of the mounted guard detailed as their escort, along the rugged slopes of the Bulgarian mountains, the secrets of Miss Stone's captivity, as well as her ransom, will be carried as Mr. G has carried, for over a quarter of a century, innumerable state secrets. He will bring to his task the reserve of the Jesuit, the wisdom of a philosopher, and the self-obliteration of the ideal dragoman. Chapter III THE SELAMLIK — FROM THE PALACE OF YILDIZ KIOSK THE ceremony of the Selamlik, we were to find, was an early one. At precisely high- noon the Sultan leaves his palace for his two minutes' drive to the Hamidieh Mosque. The setting of the great scene of the religious ceremonial, however, begins some hours before midday. Quite early in the morning, the tramp of soldiers came up through the open windows. Companies of marines were filling the streets, on their way from the Admiralty to the palace heights. The exhilarat ing crash of military music followed, — its measure quick and brisk. The rhythmic fall of hundreds of feet in tune was as an accompaniment to the more sonorous " Sultan's March." One felt the quickened stir of life abroad upon the streets. The moving regi ments, the crash and din of street traffic congested into narrow spaces, the rustle of restive crowds, — such were the sounds that were swept upward through the open casements. Our own start for the palace was both early and animated. Mustafa Bey's sword clicked across the 27 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN corridor with an unusual energy. The charge-d'af- faires and Mr. G , the third secretary and official dragoman, were announced at an unwontedly matu tinal hour, as it seemed to us. The kavass, in his scarcely disguised ardour of executive zeal, seemed multiplied into a dozen of his order, his appearances, disappearances, and re-appearances being effected with such amazing celerity. Once out upon the Grande Rue, the fact of a strict keeping of the Moslem Sunday was quickly borne in upon us. The shops were, for the most part, closed. The shriek of venders was unheard. Yet there was noise, and plenty of it, although it was neither the din of yelling street pedlers, nor was it the rush and roar of traffic that filled the thoroughfare. A living stream of mounted horsemen, of stately broughams, of wide, open victorias, pressing toward the common centre of La Grande Rue, issued from side streets, from Le Petit Champs des Morts, and from every Pera thor oughfare. More and more troops swept up from the arsenal and other barracks. Mounted aides dashed in and out of the carriages, of the street carts, and of the moving regiments. Colour, motion, sound, these filled the Pera streets. Ministers and high officials were seen to be in semi- full dress. Their court-uniforms, though ablaze with gold embroidery, were not as gorgeous as those in which, later on, we were to see them. One must not go into the presence of God in costly raiment, says the Koran. The soberer uniforms of the soldiers made a rising 2S Croatians and Albanians IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN and falling line of grey-blue below the sun-splashed houses. The early noon light beat out more and more colour from the gold-and-silver threaded officers' breasts, from the thousands and thousands of the scarlet fezes (in the distance these were bright as poppy fields drenched in sunshine), and from the gay, motley hued house-fronts. Never had the Eastern autumnal light been clearer, brighter, more richly luminous ; never before had it seemed to possess such a miraculous quality of blending, fusing, trans forming every object, tint, and creature into ravishing, harmonious beauty. Yet, it would never have been the East, and assuredly not Constantinople, had not our progress onwards up to the Sultan's palace been one starred with sharp contrasts. At a sudden upward rise in the thoroughfare, a cemetery on one side, and a huge, ungainly structure on the other, — before whose walls and portals there flashed the Prussian eagles from Prussian helmets, — these announced the German embassy winter palace overlooking a magnificent outlook over the Bosphorus, Scutari, the Asiatic shore, and Le Grand Champs des Morts. For a certain distance, the long high walls of the palace of Dolma Baghcheh lined the dusty streets. Through their splendid portals glimpses of the palms and brilliant garden-beds within the gates shone like fairy realms. Sentry-boxes and saluting sentinels were hereabouts as thick, and thicker, than were the tree- trunks along the thoroughfare. 31 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN From embassies and palatial royal gardens we were precipitated suddenly, with characteristic Eastern brusqueness, into a wretched, squalid village. The village lay at the foot of two hills. Both are palace- A Street Scene in Orta Keui crowned. But Orta Keui has remained immovable and unalterable; its Asiatic ways and customs are unchanged alike by the coming of German ambassadors or by the building of palace after palace by its own Sultan. Its shops, houses, streets, were the shops, the houses, and streets of remote antiquity. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN In wretched cafes, upon rotting divans, lay the coiled shapes of Turks. Already, at eleven in the morning, they were seeking the comforting anaesthetic ofthe narghile. Squads of mangy dogs eyed, indolently, the marching squads of the trim soldiers. Groups of Khurds and Persians with their bullock carts and A Wing of Yildiz Kiosk strings of pack mules, moved toward the side walls, to let the train ofthe ministers go by. Two Arab horsemen whose open breasts were like bronze shields in the same sun that was beating into a shimmer of light the silver helmets of a regiment of lancers, — these were watering their steeds at a corner fountain. From the antique pool of this village filth we were 3 33 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN swept upward to the heights of Yildiz Kiosk. The air freshened sensibly. Well-kept strips of lawn and finely foliaged trees lined the broad road-way filled with troops, with stately victorias, and with mounted cavaliers. The white marble facade of a glistening structure topped the hill-slope. This, we were told, was the western wing of the palace. As we swept across an open space, upon which companies of troops were already in line, there came the click and rustle of hundreds of muskets quickly handled. The salute was a masterly proof of perfection of drill. The royal carriages came to a stop at a wrought-iron garden-gate. Beyond the gate a tiny square of garden plot was thick with tropical palms and strange-leaved plants. Mustafa Bey, as he held out his gloved hand, was heard to say, "We are to go by the garden, through the gate, into the palace." As he led us onward, through the cool greens, the aide-de-camp, as well as the diplomats forming our ambassador's cortege, showed, by the accession of a certain tense energy in their bearing and their smiles, that this passing into the precincts of the palace, through this private way, was an unusual, an especial honour. Directly before the palace wing, a projecting pavilion, known as the diplomats' reception-room in the palace, confronted us. Up the short flight of steps leading to this pavilion we were led. That this room was splendidly lighted, that was the first impression. That it was aglow with rich and 34 X x .,• x Z>i IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN contrasting colours, was the second. The crimsons of satin-hung walls set forth the brighter reds of the gold and brocade-upholstered great sofas, divans, and deep- seated chairs. The palace attendants flashed the more vivid scarlets oftheir richly embroidered coats, in their swift and noiseless service. Once they had divested the little company of their wraps, the great doors leading into the palace ante-chamber were noiselessly closed. We were left to take possession of the bril liant sun-flooded room. We were also left to wait. The subsequent half hour or more of waiting was, perhaps, as interesting a period, save one, as any in the splendid ceremony of the Selamlik. Through any one of the four windows there was such a prospect before our eves as Europe can scarcely hope to outrival. In the foreground of the great outlook a snowy marble mosque, ribboned with carvings, carried up ward its light dome and lighter lace-worked minaret. To the right a garden, green, and larger than the one we had traversed, was set against the sky-spaces. Be yond the sword-leaved cacti and the palm fringes, for miles upon miles, like a green and moving meadow, ran the water stretches of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora. Between the sea and the blue vault there swam the misty outlines, astonishingly clear at certain points, dim and nebulous at others, of Seraglio Point, of Stamboul, and the paling line of the Asiatic hills. Under the magical Eastern sunlight the great pros pect glittered and shimmered. It was surely some 3S IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN celestial region, suddenly revealed to mortal eye, — this fair and wondrous spectacle of great cities set upon the glistening water spaces, rimmed about with their great frame of mountains. The beauty and splendour of the outlook thrilled the frame; one felt the breath held ; for very rapture one could hardly breathe. Immediately beneath our windows the scene of the brilliant military pageant was presently seen to be entirely set. Thousands upon thousands of troops were in line. Their arms were at rest. Far as the eye could reach it was carried onward by the lines of massed blues, of reds, of whites ; by the sun-sparkle rippling upon officers' gold or silver embroidered caps and breasts ; it was carried on and onward to distant hill-tops, where the high-held pennants ofthe companies of mounted lancers dulled the livid greens. Through the open windows, the impatient chasten ing of stone pavements by hundreds of iron hoofs, the murmurous rustle of masses of men fingering swords and muskets, the sharp crunching of the wheels of some belated Pasha's victoria, the rhythmic beat of soldiers marching into position, and the rattling thud of their ground arms, — such were the sounds that came up to us, confused yet softened, that were full of a nervous, stimulating excitement. Such is the spectacle, and such the scene that, week after week, year after year, is spread before the eyes of ministers, of ambassadors, of the diplomats of living, thinking, calculating, intriguing, modern Europe. Like unto those shields mediaeval warriors 36 ¦': '" X'*X 7. ... ". ¦' 7JV THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN danced before the eyes of their enemies, — shields whereon the chisel of a Cellini had carved fair cities and strong towers set above moving waters, with ramparts and citadels filled with armed warriors, — it is like unto such a shield, but one glistening with the sheen of living waters, peopled by cities pulsating with human life, sparkling beneath a sun whose radiant splendour no silver disc could ever hope to show, — such a marvel it is that His Majesty the Sultan holds up to the envious gaze of Europe. Does the so-called " sick man " smile, at times, behind the shield, as he thinks of some of those strange discords in the Concert of the Nations which, among several other facts, enable him, alone and unaided, still to hold, with firm and resolute grasp, this fair and shining prospect as his very own. Some of those who are supposed to find this out look over "The Queen of Cities" and the water- gates leading from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean of peculiar interest, had already entered the room. The Russian ambassador, Monsieur Z , was the first among his colleagues to make his appearance at the Selamlik. The First Secretary of the Greek legation presently followed. In the course ofthe half hour of waiting, several other diplomats made their appearance. For any one of the members of the diplomatic corps to be seen at the windows of the diplomats' reception-room, is accepted by the Sultan in lieu of a visit. It is, indeed, the sole chance afforded diplomats for the making of an informal official call upon His Majesty. Should the Sultan's quick eye fail to discern a visitor, as he passes below 37 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the window, the presence of the visitor would be an nounced by the Grand Master of Ceremonies. It is the habit of the present Sultan, after the reli gious ceremony at the mosque, to retire to the palace audience chamber. It is in this apartment, in close proximity to the pavilion, that those of his visitors whom His Majesty may see fit to receive, are con ducted after the Selamlik. Of late years, the Sultan has become, it is affirmed, more and more difficult of access. Foreigners particu larly have been less and less acceptable as guests at Yildiz Kiosk. Even resident ambassadors encounter repeatedly, it is said, difficulties in obtaining audiences. Such foreign guests of distinction as are received, however, become the recipients of a hospitality as royal and cordial as it is rare. The visit of the German Emperor and Empress, four years ago, was the last royal visit paid by foreign sovereigns to the Sultan and his city. Their entertainment, as all the world read, was on a scale commensurate with the event ful importance of their Majesties' visit. They and their suite viewed the Selamlik from the windows of the diplomats' room, as, a week or so later, their young sailor-son and his shipmates were to be our own successors at the four deep windows. Meanwhile, as the room had been filling, the talk became more and more animated. Some of it touched, with a delicate reserve, upon the Sultan. In all of the twenty-six years of his reign, it appeared, in winter or in summer, Abdul Hamid II had never been known once to miss the Selamlik. 38 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN " 111 or well, he comes. If he is ill, he postpones the illness until after the ceremony," said one of the younger diplomats, with the glib wit of youth. " But it is well known that, frail as he looks, His Majesty is really never seriously ill." And then, quite suddenly, the room was still. The conversation came to an end, for the ceremony of the Selamlik was, literally, sounding forth its first notes. An exquisite musical cry rang out. Soaring up ward, its notes filled the air. Above the murmurous confusion of the speech, the stir, and the motion of thousands of human beings, it rose aloft like the voice of a silver-tongued lark. " It is the Muezzin, he is calling to prayer. Do you see him, upon the parapet? He has the most beautiful voice in Constantinople." The most beautiful voice in Constantinople held the spaces of the sky, and our ears, for all too short a time. His musical chant was soon lost in the more puissant notes of a trumpet. On a low rise of ground, to the left, a single trum peter stood, alone, quite close to the palace. He was announcing to the Sultan's cortege that the great moment was come. At the sound of the clear notes, the troops, as if electrified, shouldered arms. They stood as one man, rigid as statues. In front of their companies the officers showed their erect, alert figures. There was a moment of strained, of breathless expectancy. High up against the blue, the black shape of the Muezzin was still visible. But his lark-like voice was now entirely 39 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN silent. The soldiers below our windows were so still, they scarcely seemed to move. Our own voices within the room were softened to a murmur. Suddenly there was a visible quiver along the line of the troops. A quick, simultaneous slanting of hundreds of eyes upward towards the hill-slope at the left and as swift a resettling into an almost inani mate rigidity, and we needed no further sign as an announcement that the procession from the palace was already in sight. In lieu of a gorgeous military guard, as outposts to the pageant, a number of smart coupes slowly defiled down the palace slope. On either side of each of these coupes rode black men, in long black coats, fez-capped. Each was mounted on a superb Arabian steed. The faces of these men had the unmistakable look of eunuchs, the blighted look of mutilated men who were yet unnaturally shrewd and acute, both of feature and expression. Some of the ladies of the harem were seated, two and two, within the carriages. First of all came the Valideh-Sultan, the Sultan's stepmother, the princess who has devoted her life to her adopted son, Abdul Hamid II. This princess, an old lady now, was heavily veiled. The slave beside her, her favourite slave, was costumed like unto a queen. As the carriage passed, there was a swift vision of a mass of pink satin filling the coupe enclosure. A lovely, unveiled face rose above the lace-trimmed mantle. There was a luxurious sweep of dark lids, a glimpse of a pair of superb black eyes framed in carnation tints and snow, 40 A Turkish Cafe IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN and the lady and her slave, like a vision in a dream, were gone. The princesses, the wives and the daughters ofthe Sultan, who followed the Valideh-Sultan, wore each the impenetrable fall of thick lace lately come into fashion. Through the dense meshes of this veil no single feature was discernible. The faces behind the veils might have been black, white, or yellow ; none among those hundreds of onlookers would ever know their colour, save those who are permitted to look upon them within their harem walls. For the more ordinary popular feridjeh these ladies of the palace had sub stituted richly trimmed Parisian opera cloaks. Within these silken mantles the secret of the shape or outline, even to the very colour of the skin of favourite wife, daughter, or Khadine, were secrets as closely guarded as though these ladies had never emerged from harem walls. Behind the harem cortege, like an ugly monster guarding a troop of mysterious fairies, rode the Chief Eunuch. His Highness, , was stout, awkward, clumsy. He sat his enormous steed, a superb black Arabian stallion, with an uneasy restlessness. His unwieldy frame wobbled upon, rather than sat the gorgeously wrought saddle. The Abyssinian's face betrayed his low-caste origin. Neither his long experience at court, nor the late refining influences of his exalted position have had their effect upon the still half-savage African face. Its clever, unscrupulous expression, sufficiently explained, however, the power said to be wielded at court and within the imperial harem by this high and mighty personage. 4' s&. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The group of youthful, boyish figures who followed immediately after the harem carriages, was a pleasanter sight than this huge African. The three young lads composing this group were the Sultan's younger sons. Each of the three wore an officer's uniform. They carried their swords with an easy grace. The elder of the princes, a pale, somewhat heavily moulded youth of fourteen is, it appears, the Sultan's favourite. The youngest, a little lad of seven, riveted the eyes. Alert, vivacious, bright of eye, the child had a natural dignity which, coupled with his sprightliness, made every motion or gesture significant. The cavalry officers, the group of fine, distinguished- looking, elderly visaged officers attendant on these young princes, quickly followed after their youthful charges. The brisk step and the silver beards, the lat ter shining in the sun, of these officers made an inter esting contrast to the extreme youth ofthe princes. The mounted escort ofthe imperial suite next swept into line. These men and their horses made a fine effect. The eye was divided between the desire to look solely at the supple, muscular frames and at the tensely knit, bronzed faces ofthe soldiers, or to let the eye rest upon the glossy skinned coats ofthe restive, small-eared horses. Four or five Arabian saddle-horses of purest breed, blanketed to their blinders, led by grooms, came next into view. These were the Sultan's own saddle-horses, those used by His Majesty in his rides through the great grounds and forests of Yildiz, on his said-to-be frequent hunting cr shooting expeditions. 42 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN After the horses' passing, there came a brief pause in the procession. Presently a long, swelling cry burst forth. The cry rose and gathered in volume until the air throbbed with the thunderous roar, " Long live our Sultan ! " The huzza, thrice repeated, burst from hundreds of soldier lips beneath and beyond our windows, to be carried, like a mighty wave, swelling as it passed, up to the heights of the hill-slope. Into the midst of his acclaiming soldiers the Sultan, seated within the imperial carriage, was seen to be slowly descending from the palace gateway. Upon the very middle of his wide-seated victoria, erect, the whole figure slightly thrust forward, the poise somewhat rigid from the sustained effort necessary to preserve a perfect equilibrium, — slow as was the pace at which the grey stallions were driven, — Abdul Hamid II was seen to present a very kingly aspect. His Majesty's bearing, for the long minutes in which his cloak-clad figure was the focal, pivotal point of the whole of the splendid scene and pageant which framed it, was conspicuous for its impressive dignity. Alone, unaided by the trappings of state splendour in dress, or by the advantages to be gained by being seen in the saddle, as had been his own custom in former years, as well as that of all his predecessors on their public appearances, — as this solitary figure sat, im movably erect upon his great cushions, the presence of majesty having entered the scene was sensibly, instantaneously felt. As the imperial carriage passed below the palace 43 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN windows, a great hush had succeeded the cheering. Every eye was riveted upon the Sultan, as every lip was stilled and silent. Into the midst of this awed silence the Sultan rode, as unmoved by the great, sudden quiet as he had been by the shouts of his soldiers. 'The lined, stern, somewhat forbidding face wore a mask-like impenetrability. The keen, swiftly glancing eyes were, however, seen to be sweeping the men and the scene of which he was the centre, with cool, collected, all-seeing gaze. Seated though he was, the Sultan was seen to be short of stature. The frame beneath the loose mili tary cloak was obviously slight. Yet that there was a store of nervous as well as muscular strength within the frame was announced by certain unmistakable signs. The lines of the figure were pronounced, accusative ; the eye-glance was quick, authoritative ; in the bearing of the torso, as in the poise and carriage of the head, there was the accent of an energetic determination. The beard was dyed black, according to the law ofthe Koran, which forbids the head of the State and its religion to show the betraying signs of age. "The Shadow of God," like the immortal gods of Greece, must be immortally young. To Western eyes the dyeing of the beard is uncomely, a hardening of the features and a deadening of the skin being its inev itable' betrayal. It was later, when the Sultan's inter esting physiognomy could be watched and studied at closer range, that the distinction and the peculiar finesse of certain ofthe imperial features were revealed. As His Majesty passed below the open windows of 44 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the diplomats' room, he had lifted, for the briefest of sec onds, his all-seeing eyes to the bowed heads above his own. The lids fell almost as soon as they were raised. Yet, so all-embracing had been their flashing glance, each one of us gravely assured the other we alone had been the sole object within the swift vision. " His Majesty sees everything and every one. Nothing escapes him. He knows quite well, now, who each one of you are, and what you are like," smilingly murmured, close to my ear, one of the younger diplomats. The imperial carriage had now turned within the gates of the garden enclosing the mosque. It pres ently came to its final stop at the steps of the temple. The darkly costumed figure of the Sultan was seen to mount the carpeted steps. The vigour of his tread was plainly discernible, as was the authoritative accent of his whole bearing. As he had sat alone in his carriage, so alone the Sul tan entered the sacred edifice. As soon as the white marbles of the glistening portal had swallowed up the slight, dark figure, His Majesty's ministers and his court followed, filling the steps and crowding the some what narrow mosque entrance. The rich uniforms, a continuous line of light, made an effective contrast to the striking simplicity ofthe monarch's own garb. Infantry and marines, the scarlet-turbaned zouaves farther on, the lancers, as well as the cavalry, far as one could trace the flash of gold or the fluttering pennant, — all of the troops in line had, meanwhile, performed a strange manoeuvre. As sunflowers turn 45 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN to the sun, the faces and figures of the troops, wherever massed, had moved slowly, gradually mosquewards. Yet it was not the mosque, it was their king and ruler they were thus facing. As the imperial carriage had turned to enter the sacred gates, the marines and infan try immediately below our windows had presented a side line to our own view. During the half hour of worship within the mosque, it was the backs of the men, and no longer their dark, sunburnt faces we looked upon. Every Turkish, Khurdish, Albanian, and Anatolian face thus fronted the white mosque. For it is ever the faces, and never the backs, among the thousands of his troops and the millions of his subjects, His Majesty must see. During the half hour of waiting for the Sultan to finish his devotions, the soldiers stood thus, facing the mosque. Horses as well as men were wheeled right about face. Every aide-de-camp and courtier filling the mosque garden had his face and his horse, were he astride of one, turned towards the curving steps where the black carpet, the sacred Arabian carpet, awaited the return of the Khalifa. The ladies of the harem, still within their coupes, were also facing the temple. They, also, were waiting. Each and every one of the horses of the several car riages had been, according to usage, unharnessed and led away. The horseless vehicles stood immobile, ex pectant. The eyes of the fair occupants within the carriages, presumably, were not wholly engaged in a study of the garden trees and shrubs. This weekly drive, of two minutes, from the harem of Yildiz Kiosk 46 The Troops and Court facing Hamidieh Mosque IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN to the Hamidieh Mosque, is the chief, the one great outing of these fair prisoners. Their master and ruler, who, within the white mosque, in the upper gallery sacred to the prostra tions of majesty, was even then offering up his prayers to the sole Being, save Mahomet, greater than this King of Kings, this mighty being who held within his hand literally the life and death of every veiled shape within the royal vehicles, had seemed, as he had passed his stepmother, his wives, his latest favourite, as obli vious of their presence as he had shown himself sub limely unconscious of any commonest soldier among his massed troops. The half hour of prayer and ritual composing the simple Moslem service was quickly passed. Those of us within the palace pavilion, meanwhile, were engaged in looking out upon the wonderful scene, in watching the long lines of the backs of the troops, in having pointed out to us the various officers, ministers, and Pashas grouped within the mosque garden enclosure, prominent in office or at court, and in noting the fine effect of the splendid Eastern sunlight on as brilliant a massing of men and troops. The meaning and import of certain of the other details of the ceremonial began to present themselves, also, for the sifting process. The sovereign who goes thus, week after week, to worship his Maker, proceeds to his mosque between a wall of steel. During the short length of that drive no subject can approach him. No human hand or 4 49 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN arm can thrust forward the written petition, that last resort of the subject governed by an autocrat. Between his poor and his sacred person, the Sultan has placed a fence of glistening muskets. The anar chist assassin's knife and the bombs of the nihilist have had their effect on Eastern as well as on Western rulers. The Sultan has reduced the chances of assas sination by the dagger, or death by dynamite, to a minimum. He moves from his palace to his prayer- rug between a living hedge of soldiers whose shoulders touch. It also occurred to me that the popular present ment of His Majesty on this weekly exhibition of his sacred person, had been replaced by one as far as possible removed from the one conveyed through certain Western books of travel. Where was the familiar figure of frightened majesty, huddled in the remotest corner of his royal carriage ? Where were the terrified glances, shot out in all directions on the outlook for the assassin's knife or for the deadly mis sile ? The Sultan who had filled the great scene but a few moments before, whose majestic aspect had made his appearance seem the fitting climax of the splendid pageantry, had nothing whatever in common with that pitiful figure. Meanwhile, in the crowd below, signs were not wanting that another scene in the interesting spectacle was about to begin. A perceptible rustle passed along the line of the waiting troops. One knew, rather than saw them to be fingering their muskets. At the sharp, short words 5° IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN of command, the muskets were shouldered. Every soldier's back was as rigid as though made of iron. All eyes were centred upon the open portal of the mosque. The childish figure of the young prince, of the youngest, was the first to appear. He had walked from the open porch to the side of the stairs with perfect, princely dignity. His boy's shape against the shimmering, radiant marbles might have been carved out of stone as he stood, erect, immobile, awaiting his imperial father. His tiny raised hand lifted in salute to his fez rim, this, apparently, was the signal for which troops, officers, ministers, and mounted guards had been waiting. Instantly there was a great movement and stir. The mounted guard wheeled into position ; broken groups reformed; open spaces were suddenly full of uniforms ablaze in the sun ; and the serried, solid ranks of the soldiers were made still more compact. With the same vigorous, imperious tread as that with which he had mounted the steps a half hour before, the Sultan quickly descended the short flight of steps. For a single short instant he stood in front of his waiting carriage; he stopped to address the generals, who, in double line, were bent to their waists as they salaamed. After a brief word or two His Majesty entered his phaeton, with its two superb white stallions harnessed a la Daumont. This vehicle, low, with high overhanging hood half opened, is, it appears, the one always chosen by the Sultan for the return drive to his palace hill-slope. The monarch's grasp ofthe reins showed the whip's sure touch. The mettlesome stallions' impetuous 51 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN dancing towards the mosque gates was checked to a quiet trot long before they passed below the palace windows. As the white reins were lightly held, no apparent effort was shown in the masterly handling of the two splendid Arabians before him. Once more the swift imperial glance was shot upward .with light ning swiftness, once again it swept the groups at the windows with its keen, flashing brilliance, and once more the lids were dropped, as it seemed, almost as soon as raised. The next instant the great hood had engulfed the slight figure of the Turkish sovereign. Behind this hood and beside it, close to the low phaeton wheels, was gathered a strange, an unlooked- for group. Courtiers, Pashas, household aids, officials, eunuchs, — such were the figures that ran panting, press ing, hustling each the other, alongside and behind their Sultan's carriage. The swarm at the back pressed the vehicle onwards, with eager hands and straining backs. Those nearest the august presence ran alongside, sweating, panting. The great drops fell downward from brows that were soon rivers of sweat, to splash the bright gold of their flashing breasts. Thus it is that these Eastern courtiers hope to prove to their great ruler their zeal in his service, or thus to pre dispose him to listen to some special favour or petition. Oriental obsequiousness, obviously, had not died out in this Eastern court. In the hot-house gardens of palace interiors the soul of courtiers is ever the same, in whatever age, in whatever clime. Once the Sultan's carriage with its living swarm had turned eastward within the palace gates, and the 52 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN mounted aides, the princesses' coupes, with their black guards, together with the rest of the imperial cortege swept past to disappear beyond the hill-top. The troops, in their turn, had begun their own retreat. Like braiding ribbons, the colours and uniforms ofthe contrasting costumed regiments made fascinating lines for the eyes to follow. Certain of the effects produced by the marching, wheeling troops were brilliantly pic turesque. Companies of marines and zouaves marched side by side upon the broad road-bed, to part, at the first foot-hill, as a lady's silken skein might be spread upon a broad sloping surface. The cool whites of the marines' snowy jackets were lost in a bend of trees. The greens of the zouaves held the eye till the greens were one with the distant cypress shades. Up upon the farther hills the pennants of the mounted lancers fluttered their scarlet streamlets till the red and green banners were grey in the dim perspective. Beating drums and tooting fifes grew fainter and fainter. The iron hoofs upon the hard road-bed were deadening — were gone. Suddenly, before us, the great open sunlit spaces were as empty, as void of life, as before they had been filled with living shapes. Like ghouls come to take possession of a deserted palace, three or four shabbily veiled shapes had crept up from the lower hill-slopes. Their fluttering figures were pressed close to the mosque railings. They had come to look upon the skeleton of the feast, whose living splendour they might not see. 53 Chapter IV THE PRIVATE AUDIENCE BEFORE the stage of the Selamlik ceremony was entirely emptied, the inner palace doors had been once more noiselessly opened. A smiling gentleman, in a long frock-coat, tighdy but toned, with a jewelled order upon his breast, and wearing his fez somewhat pronouncedly upon the back of his head, advanced quickly into the centre of the room. An immediate hush in the talk made his appearance the more impressive. The smiling gentle man was the Grand Master of Ceremonies. An almost visible tremor of expectancy lit the faces of the waiting diplomats. The trained impassiveness of the older notabilities made their own flicker of hope less visible than was the transparent eagerness of the younger secretaries. The Grand Master of Ceremonies, after a bow, which included all those filling the room, still smiling, still rubbing his hands one within the other with quick nervous movement, passed all other groups to make his way to the party circling about General Porter. After courteous greetings and compliments, in all of which, in turn, each member ofthe American group felt him- 54 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN self or herself personally included, Pasha turned swiftly to our ambassador. With a manner and a smile that imparted to his message a special grace and distinc tion, the Grand Master announced His Imperial Majesty's desire to receive not solely His Excellency, but Madame Porter and also " their friends." In a short half hour or so he himself would have the very great pleasure of leading us into the audience-chamber. A low bow, and a final, more purely perfunctory smile, and the Grand Master had passed on to the little group of whom Monsieur Z , the Russian ambas sador, was the centre. That the coming audience of General Porter's little party with His Majesty was an unusual honour, was quickly, instantaneously made known to us. With a grace and a gaiety as charming as they were spon taneous, the younger diplomats flocked about us, tendering their congratulations, seasoning them with a pinch of attic salt. The Sultan's instinct for reading faces, his almost feminine attraction towards certain faces, his quick dislike for others, — this imperial trait was lightly mentioned. " Oh, he passed you all in review ; you were all well inspected, each one of you," was the laughing comment of one young dip lomat. Mustafa Bey and the Master of Ceremonies exchanged an amused smile, impossible to fathom, as impenetrable as had been the lightning glance shot upwards from the royal carriage, a half hour before. Between the announcement of our own coming audi ence and our actual entering into the royal presence 55 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN there was a longish interval. The Russian ambassador, Monsieur Z , was awarded the first audience. As the clear, almost supernaturally penetrative gaze of the distinguished Russian swept the groups assembled in the sun-flooded rooms ; as the tall, lean figure bent in graceful parting salute, and the door closed behind the swift alert frame, unbowed, unbent beneath its sixty odd years of life and hard intellectual toil, it was impossible not to follow, in imagination, this clever, brilliant personality beyond the door, into the very audience-chamber itself. An interview, a full hour's long talk between His Majesty the Sultan and Rus sia's ambassador ! What move was now being played in the great game of the Eastern question, between two of the keenest, subtlest minds in Europe? What were the royal lips saving to those dagger-like eyes ? Behind the mask of fair words, what web of high state intrigue was the most courteous of Rus sian statesmen insinuating, repressing, revealing, hid ing ? It was impossible to stop the flow of conjecture, of curious questioning, even though both questions and conjectures must take the outward form of pass ing, casual interest. "Do you suppose it is of France — of the French fleet they say is shortly to enter Turkish waters, or of Miss Stone they are talking ? " I somewhat naively asked of the nearest secretary. " Ah-h, madame, who ever knows what passes be tween His Majesty and Monsieur Z ? " was the guarded reply. " If the French fleet does steam into the Darda- 56 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN nelles, it will certainly prove a precedent, in the scoring of international accounts. If the Sultan has a high sense of humour, I should think the situation might, at least, yield him a certain entertainment." " One's sense of humour is apt to desert one before the guns of an enemy who demands your purse or your life," was the spirited rejoinder. " It is to be hoped it is all about Miss Stone, and not about France," broke in one of the younger men. " If they are touching upon the French question, I pity you ! The Sultan may then, quite possibly, be in a bad humour. He will be gracious, — he is always the most courteous of sovereigns ; but it will not be gay. Oh, no, it will not be gay ! " The dark eyes of the youthful diplomat danced beneath the wide, olive-tinted brow with a boyish, gleeful spirit of fun. Once more the great doors were opened. Once again there was an instant of perfect stillness. The Master of Ceremonies had come to conduct our am bassador and his party into the audience-chamber. With a quick and perfect tact, with supple Eastern adroitness, each was given his or her respective place in the little procession. We were swiftly led onward through the open doors, past antechambers, and a long passage-way leading up to a low flight of steps. Along this hall-way, at certain fixed intervals, guards with gleaming muskets saluted as we passed. " You will begin, please, to bow as soon as you reach the top ofthe steps; His Imperial Majesty will be within the inner room," was the Master of Cere monies' swift aside. 57 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN One had scarcely time for the breathing of the in ward prayer that the erect republican back might be equal to the length and requirements of the Oriental method of prostration, when, as we swept up the stair way, a sudden quick flutter of excitement visibly stirred the Master of Ceremonies, as well as our own charge-d'affaires and third secretary. Even the household guards, standing erect and splendid in their trappings of gold lace at the entrance of the palace door, were seen to move from their statue like pose. The circumstance that had created this fluttering tremor was none other than the presence of majesty itself. At the top of the landing, within the wide doors, stood His Majesty the Sultan ! " Bow ! Please bow ! " was the half terrified, quite tremulous aside heard from the visibly disturbed Master of Ceremonies. Gracefully to perform con tinuous prostrations while in the act of mounting stairs, is an art reserved, I fear, for Eastern ease and Oriental habitude. We did our best, and even kings could do no more. With genial dignity, smiling, with eyes brightened as if with inward enjoyment at the surprise and slight confusion his wholly unexpected appearance had brought with it, the Sultan bent forward to proffer, as quickly as possible, his arm to our ambassadress. Be hind me, I could hear the gentlemen of our legation murmuring, "Extraordinary ! simply extraordinary!" For His Majesty, it appeared, had done our ambas sador, and incidentally our nation, the unprecedentedly 5s IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN high honour of receiving an ambassador as royalty alone is received. It is in his throne-room he awaits his usual visitors ; there he receives them, and there he stands or sits, according to the rank of the person ages, as the latter make the three deep bows, in their courteous progress toward the presence. To receive General and Mrs. Porter, His Majesty had advanced beyond both the inner audience-chamber and the outer ante-chamber. His standing, awaiting their upward progress, upon the threshold of his palace door, was a greeting emphasised by all the honour and condescension His Majesty could have tendered to any brother sovereign. In a certain smaller outer room, meanwhile, the Sultan had stopped. He turned to extend his out stretched hand to General Porter. As the personal representative of the head of our nation, our ambas sador received the greeting tendered to reigning monarchs, or to chiefs of state. All sovereigns, in high state etiquette, are brothers ; all are known to each other as are the members of a common family. When they meet, the greeting is that of brothers. As their personal representatives, ambassadors are received on the same footing of accepted relationship, without, however, the more demonstrative salute exchanged between royalties. Each of us in turn, after our presentation, as we bent before His Majesty with the best reverence de cour at our command, was the recipient of a cordial, imperial handshake and of a kindly, beaming smile. The grip of His Majesty's noticeably small, gloved 59 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN hand was muscular, — it was instinct with a nervous vitality. The vigour of the grasp was a revelation of a strength of muscle and organisation for which the slight, spare frame had not prepared one. The presentations over, the Sultan led our ambas sadress towards the audience-chamber. At the top of the sun-flooded room stood two large gilt arm-chairs, with a huge mirror between them and two long French windows. After seating Mrs. Porter in the one at the left, His Majesty stood beside the other. He re mained standing until most of those composing the little cortege had entered the room. Then, and then only, did he take his own seat. At some distance beyond His Majesty, nearer to the middle of the room, stood a vacant chair. It was placed exactly between the Sultan's throne-chair and the one occupied by our ambassador. In this the Master of Ceremonies took his seat, once every one else had been shown their respective place. Denuded of all state ceremony, simple, unostentatious, of an almost democratic freedom from pomp as had been the form of our reception at this Eastern Court, one was made sensible at every turning of a rigid etiquette ruling each progressive stage of the ceremonies. The audience-chamber was a comparatively small room. It had the air of a sumptuously furnished European drawing-room, one in which the style and taste of the last of the Napoleons still reigned in the heavy gilt mouldings of window cornices and mirror frames. One was conscious of a prevailing crimson tone bordering upon the magenta tint so dear to the 60 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Oriental eye. This tint, under the brilliant, luminous, beautifying tone of the Eastern sunlight does not offend the eye as it does when seen under colder Northern skies. This palace-room, with its crimson-magenta satin- hung walls, with the rich brocaded coverings of the great deep sofas, its wide-seated arm-chairs, and gilt tables, presented a not inappropriate background for the setting forth, and to his advantage, of the central figure of the Sultan. Seen at this nearer, close range, the face and the personality of His Majesty were revealingly presented. One was first of all struck by the impress of an immense fatigue limned upon the eager, sensitive face. The true character of this weariness was made quite plain to the seeing eye. There were deep hollows in the ridged temples, the cheeks were sunken, the woman's skin, fine, of a delicate texture, was webbed with wrinkles. But it was toil, not dissipation ; it was the wear and tear of thought, of long years of pro tracted intellectual labour, of a deep anxiety, of the cares, in a word, of carrying almost single-handed the weight of perhaps the most difficult of all European states to rule, to govern, and to maintain, both at home and abroad, that had carved this accent of fatigue upon the Eastern ruler's worn face. The look of race in the face was clearly revealed as one saw it in profile. The line from forehead to upper lip was the accusative Osmanli line familiarised to us through the old sixteenth-century prints. There was the same accent of power above the eye-brows, 61 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the same aquiline nose, with its arch and droop as we see in the pictured presentment of Suleyman the Magnificent. The look of the conqueror, imprinted on Suleyman's ardent, heroic face, three hundred years later has been replaced by one of anxious, thought- worn care, in the countenance of this later descendant of the Ottoman rulers. In the figure and poise of the slight frame, there was, in marked contrast, an almost boyish energy and vigour. That it was impossible for this energy to be held long or continuously in restraint, was quickly made obvious, as perhaps the most persistent, recur rent proof of the Sultan's inner nature. Trained from his earliest boyhood's days in the exact, difficult harem school of manners to the requirements of his princely station, the Sultan's dignity, which, in all the several occasions of our visits to the palace, was never once lost or relaxed, even in certain later, gayer moments of a genial abandonment to laughter or of amused exhilara tion, — this dignity, apparently, was become second nature. Yet through the mantle of Imperial majesty the human inner nature moved in irrepressible, exuberant life. The gestures of the small, sinewy hands were full of charm, for they were sufficiently frequent to be expres sively illustrative. No one who has heard the Sultan talk, and has watched the play of his graceful, supple hands, but knows the man behind and within the physical envelope. High-wrought, sensitive, endowed or cursed with a degree of sensitiveness almost touch ing the point of irritability, or possibly of hysteria, 62 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN under undue provocation ; proud, beyond and above all pomp of power, with the pride of conscious intel lectual superiority; arrogant, both from inheritance and a natural love of dominance ; subtle, possessing in a pre-eminent degree the quality our French makers of delicate shadings in language call finesse, — to which quality should be added a superabundant endowment of the intuitive faculties, — one feels His Majesty to be a reader of men and of their thoughts — add to these a genial delight in pleasantries, an unex pectedly keen sense and enjoyment of humour and of humorous situations ; thrill such a nature with the intoxicating consciousness of supreme power ; set its sensibilities quivering with the daily, hourly fear of possible poison hidden within every morsel of food, or of assassins lurking behind the folds of every silken drapery ; fire as ardent, exuberant, intense, an intellectual and physical frame with the puissant pulsations of ambition and a determination to hold and to keep his throne in the teeth of all Europe, — and you have before you the complex, the many-sided master-mind of one of the most brilliant intellects Europe has produced within our century. Those who know, will tell you the proof of the power and supremacy of this Eastern monarch's intellectual force may be conclusively demonstrated in one single sentence. Alone and single-handed, with no European ally to help him, he has fought Europe, and he has also kept this, his throne. With the forces he has had to fight, both at home and abroad, could any other reigning monarch have done as much? 63 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Such were some of the swift impressions, thoughts, and conclusions that swept the mind as the conversa tion between His Majesty and General Porter became more and more animated. The Sultan, meanwhile, had tendered to Mrs. Porter and to His Excellency each a cigarette, having risen from his seat to perform the courteous act. The wax match lighted by the Master of Ceremonies was made to touch the point of the cigarette somewhat timidly held between our ambassadress's unaccustomed lips. Twice the match failed to perform its expected mission. Twice it was tendered, for this among the last of non-smoking ladies had each time blown through her cigarette instead of drawing in the breath. The laughter that followed this amusing incident was succeeded by quick, swift talk. The rapidity with which question and answer were interchanged between the Sultan and General Porter was the more amazing since it was carried on through the medium of translation. Etiquette requires the observance of this rule. " The Shadow of God" may not be irrev erently, intimately addressed, least of all by giaours. A certain veil of distance must hang between the presence and common mortals. The Grand Master of Ceremonies proved his knowledge of both his own and the French tongue in masterly fashion. His Majesty's enunciation and intonation of the Turkish language, with its sonorous, musical mixture of Arabic and Persian, made it a pleasure to hear this peculiar tongue. As spoken by His Majesty it was a melodious speech. The sen- 64 IN THE PALACES OF 'THE SULTAN tences had barely dropped from His Majesty's lips before their translation had been instantaneously trans mitted in French to General Porter. With such an interpreter, the conversation lost nothing in point of compressed vigour or lightness of touch. The com monly devitalising medium of translation would, in any case, have been impotent to quench the vital flame communicated by two such masters of point and epi gram. The Sultan led the talk with consummate, easy tact. While no topic was left until it had been as fully developed as diplomatic etiquette would permit, many subjects were touched on. After a slight pause, with significant gesture, His Majesty had summoned the official Interpreter of the American Embassy to his side. The Sultan's smile, as the third secretary made his profound bow, was the one habitual to such a greeting, it appears, Mr. G being high in the Sultan's favour. In a soft voice, lower than the one he had used when in conversation with the General, the Sultan bade the secretary announce to General Porter his desire to bestow upon him, as a mark of personal es teem, and as a reminder of his visit, a decoration of the higher order. With deep regret our ambassador was forced to decline the honour, no republican repre sentative being allowed to receive such gifts while in office. In a still lower voice, with a manner, if anything, almost engagingly persuasive, His Majesty bade the dragoman ask Mrs. Porter if a similar rule was im posed upon her. Upon a smiling and quite emphatic 5 65 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN answer that it was not, His Majesty, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, announced his intention of be stowing upon our ambassadress the Grand Order of the Shefakat. This order — established by the Sul tan shortly after the Crimean War as a special order for those ladies who, under the leadership of Florence Nightingale, had heroically devoted themselves to English and Turk alike — has since been specially reserved for ladies of distinction. His Majesty's bounty did not end with the bestowal of this highest mark of his esteem upon Mrs. Porter. Were we not in the East, in the presence ofthe great giver of gifts? After a smiling acceptance of our bows and thanks, there came another pause. These pauses were designed to mark, apparently, with expressive emphasis, the as cending degrees of the royal favours. Resuming his low, musical speech, the Sultan made known to Gen eral and Mrs. Porter his Imperial desire to welcome them and their " friends " at the palace. On the com ing Tuesday His Majesty would be pleased to have us for dinner. Once more a pause came ; and a moment after, to this gracious invitation still another was added. After dinner, His Majesty smilingly murmured, although Constantinople was not Paris, he would hope to have a play to divert us, in the Palace Theatre. " No, it is not Paris, but we shall do our best," was smilingly reiterated. With these words the interview was brought to a close. As the Sultan rose to his feet to extend to our am bassadress his arm, and to lead her toward the outer 66 ¦¦*&- -S' IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN door, the change in His Majesty's mien and appear ance, since our first view of him, a half hour before, was too marked not to be distinctly noticeable. A faint colour had spread itself above the tinted beard. The dark eyes were gleaming; they were full of dancing energy and light. The deep ridges in the slightly hollowed cheeks and thought-worn brow were, also, less pathetically noticeable. The small, perfectly arched feet were instinct with a spirited buoyancy- The whole man was a new, a fresher human being. The half hour's talk had restrung the somewhat re laxed chords of this sensitive, responsive, human instrument. If it may be permissible in a mere mor tal to describe royalty as one does common clay, I should be tempted to state that General Porter's inter view with His Majesty had had the pleasing and bene ficial effect of leaving this weary monarch almost gay. Once more within the inner antechamber His Im perial Majesty stood to receive our bows, to extend his hand in farewell, and to send us forth from the royal presence with the memory of his parting, genial smile. Also once again, as we made our way down the crimson-lined passage-way, was a slightly sensational occurrence to mark our progress. A quickened stir, followed by a muffled cry, a guard calling softly to the Master of Ceremonies, and the little cortege was brought to a halt ; we turned to find the figure of His Majesty once more filling the doorway. With his brightest smile, as if pleased at his courteous impulse, the Sultan stood waving a bit of black in his hand. General Porter sprang forward 67 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN to receive the glove our ambassadress had dropped at the side of her chair. This, the sign of a month's mourning worn by the ambassadress of a free repub lic for her assassinated President, found and returned by the Autocrat of the East, was not one of the least significant features of our altogether unique reception at the Court ofthe Osmanlis. 68 Chapter V TEA IX HIS MAJESTY'S STABLES IN the antechamber our wraps and umbrellas were courteously tendered us by the attendants in charge. These noiseless palace mutes had mem ories. To each was presented his or her particular property. The scarlet-clad line quickly broke to open the great doors and as silently to close them. These simple acts were performed with the same precision and perfection of drill that had marked the service of all the army of the palace attendants. The Sultan, obviously, has the same instinct of orderly perfection for the minutiae of court service as characterises his Christian brother sovereign, Emperor William II of Germany. Once more we passed through the stunted shrub bery of the little garden fronting the pavilion. The roads beyond the railings stared white and vacant. They were as bare as, an hour before, they had been resplendent in colour, bristling with the life and move ment of thousands of human beings. To enter the palace grounds, we were swept up the same low incline whence had descended, two hours or more before, the Imperial cortege. Once within the 69 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN tall gateway, and we were in a new world. This fair world was full of bloom. To the right of the fine, level road over which our wheels rolled as if over vel vet, there rose a high wall. From its base to its cor nice stone — some forty feet — the breadth of the stones was to be guessed at, for the wall was tapestried in a glossy-leaved vine whose scarlet flowers were like, and yet unlike, to our own familiar trumpet creeper. On the other side lay miles upon miles of a hillside laid out in a veritable fairy realm, according to the most per fect principles of landscape gardening. There were great stretches of beautifully kept lawn. Elms, plane-trees, palms, firs, and pines were inter spersed with the grace of the willow and the medlar- tree. There was the shining mimosa, and the lavender-tinted trunks of the eucalyptus, and any number of the wide-spreading cypresses. Below the boughs and branches of this great family of trees inter minable stretches of geraniums, begonias, and stranger petalled flowers bordered the carriage road. The transition into this new world had been almost instantaneous. The change from the outside of a great palace to the privacy of the sovereign's own particular domain was never more sharply accentuated than it had been in this drive from the dusty highroads sur rounding Yildiz into the cool, green parklands within the gates. It is a more or less universal Western conviction that the Sultan's gardens will be found different from all and any other gardens. In thinking of such the imagination conjures up visions of Eastern splendour, 70 :" x xx-f Palace of Beylerbey IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN " Clear the way! " A flotilla of seedy, down-at-heels caiques parted, swept deftly to right and to left, to make way for His Majesty's boats. Once more the cry, " Clear the way ! " filled the air. A lateen-rigged yawl turned to windward. A smart yacht, as it dipped its colours in salute, gave us a wide berth. A barcas with bright awnings, beneath whose shade four or five brilliantly clad shapes huddled close, crossed our bows with frightened, scurrying speed. A long marble quai, clean and white, with a gleam ing, marble palace set below green terraces, presently rose above our gunwales. There was a short, quick word from our bow. The ten great oars were deftly lifted and as skilfully brought to rest. Simul taneously each one of the ten oarsmen sought the re cesses of his waist belt, producing therefrom ten coarse, but brilliantly coloured handkerchiefs. The men then proceeded to mop their brows with great thorough ness and finish. The instant of our landing a gate between the glistening marble walls was swung open. As we passed within the garden enclosure two or more palace attendants made their appearance. In their long, black coats, closely buttoned — a sort of civic uniform that made them look half groom, half cleric, — these servants of His Majesty gave a solemn aspect to the otherwise gay notes struck by the snowy walls, by the golden-tinted gates, by the brilliant flowery garden-beds, and by the pearl of a palace that was set within walls and gardens. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN It would be impossible to imagine a more festal structure than the Palace of Beylerbey. Its marbles are set so close to the water's edge, they seem a part of the bright surface. For summer and gladness, for delicate moonlight raptures, for music and poetry and dances, it is surely solely for such delights as these Beylerbey was built. Whoever the architect, he was assuredly a true poet. He must have looked at the green hills behind, and have said, " Behold ! my palace shall not shame them ! " Beneath the hills the lines of his structure rise simple, pure, and strong. He must have looked, also, at the rippling water, and said, " Their brightness shall not be shadowed ! " for walls, kiosks, gateways, and palace surface glistened as white as a bride's robe. In the golden lattices of the kiosk windows, in the carved parapet of his roof edge, he seemed to have netted the sunbeams he saw webbed across the moving blue. Arches upon arches, — simple pillars, foliaged, rippled with webbed carvings, — arcaded windows, recessed porticoes, and, along the water's edge, kiosks, the roofs of which lay crinkled beneath the sun like leaves unfolding, — touches of gold in these, touches of gold along the long interminable water walls, and, for all the rest, pure glistening marbles that were set against the living frame of green hills and blossoming terraces, — wherever the eye strayed or rested, it was to see a perfect palace splendidly set. Symmetry, simplicity, colour, proportion — all the standards of architectural laws and requirements have been trium phantly met by this builder of Beylerbey. 182 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN A short flight of steps led us into an entrance hall. There were more marble steps within, then the main hall was reached. It was here enchantment began ; for the hall, like the palace exterior, seemed to have captured the festal secret. Four monster crystal can delabra stood in the middle of the great room. Their huge prisms and pendants were emeralds, topazes, and amethysts, in glass. This prismatic shower of light seemed to set the keynote of festivity for the whole ofthe room. Its decorated walls and tessellated floors, its myriad faucetted fire-places, and its bright furnishings repeated this gay note. Once more one said to one's self, " It is a hall made for gauze draperies, for the lighting of delicate flesh tints, for fluttering scarves and for the music of tripping footsteps." And, save for our voices, the great hall was as silent as a tomb. Presently we were led onward into the state chambers. Along the water front one luxuriously upholstered room followed another. Eastern em broideries covered silken curtains and chair coverings. The looms of the East had furnished the silk and satins. It was Eastern fingers, also, that had cunningly worked Oriental patterns and designs on the superb satin and brocaded surfaces ; but it was Paris, it was Parisian models that had inspired the hanging of the gorgeous draperies, as well as the cut and shape of chairs and tables. For ornaments there were innumerable clocks, and a few, lamentably few, porcelain vases. The charming bric-a-brac ornaments, the thousand and one bibelots, 183 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the works of art in bronze or marble or terra-cotta, the pictures, sketches, drawings, that make a French salon or an American drawing-room both a home and a museum, of all such adornments these rooms were as destitute as a soldier's barrack. Alone in a single re mote room — small and almost cosily upholstered — hung a few Scherers, Fromentins, and a Delacroix. Sultan Abdul Aziz had brought from Paris a taste for French art. He had violated all Moslem traditions in this display of his taste. The marble baths and the cooling rooms were felt to be more distinctly Eastern. These luxurious in teriors, small, dainty, complete, with their radiant marbles, coloured glass domes, low divans, and horse shoe arched little tables again stirred the imagination. One could seem to see phantasmal, gracious forms flitting thither for the cool of the bath. The satin of white Circassian skins could have been no whiter than was the milk of the marbled walls ; henna-tipped fingers would have had at close hand the scented cigarette, for the couches and tables were still cosily set side by side, as if awaiting the coming of the Sultan's favourite. The true decoration of these great rooms lay in the glittering, moving water-world beyond the win dow ledges, and in the terraces and gardens above and below them. The blue waters of the Bosphorus seemed fairly tumbling into the great interiors, so closely set over the river surface was the palace. Wherever one looked it was to see water moving, glistening, glittering. Tall ships were to be seen rid- 184 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ing by between the satin of curtains. Forests of masts were set between the spirals of a minaret, shining from across the opposite shore, and the nearer needles of a towering fir tree. Roses, palms, and strange-leaved plants bloomed and leaved, as it were, within finger- range. Never, surely, had a summer palace captured and framed as successfully the green and blue world of water and bloom set beyond its window ledges. In one of the lower stories was a room none but an Eastern potentate would have built. The chamber was as vast as was the upper main hall. It was cool, dark, and airy. In the very middle ofthe great room was a huge marble fountain. The innumerable pillars supporting the roof gave to this fountain retreat the look of a mysterious, subterranean promenade. The fountain " was for fish — Sultan Abdul Aziz was fond of animals," we were told. For the enjoyment of looking upon fish swimming in water, why all this care taken to have the fountain in so secret and remote a place ? The pillars through which, in warm days, one might imagine one's self wandering as through a cool forest, this deep and beautiful fountain, was it indeed only the shining of fishy scales the Sultan saw as he looked ? It was a room to make one ponder. Beylerbey has had its history, as have most of the palaces upon the Bosphorus. On its completion, with its occupancy by Sulta Abdul Aziz, a change came over the face of Turkish life. Beylerbey may be said to stand as the signpost at the crossroad of modern Turkish history. Another writing has gone 185 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN into its lines and curves and traceried capitals than that seen by the casual eve. Its tables and chairs, even its curtain hangings, will tell you a story as event ful and tragic, — as to what the introduction of these Parisian models stand for, and that to which their choice led, — as any in all the moving tragedies ofthe world's history. Alone of all the Sultans since the days of Mahomet the Conqueror, Abdul Aziz had the courage to turn traveller. As conquerors, fighters, warriors, Sultans had travelled from Persia to Austria, from Egypt to Hungary. In glancing splendour, the travelling impedimenta of their gold-tipped tent pinnacles had swept, for centuries, half Europe. But to travel for travel's sake, to see, not to conquer, the world, — this was a new madness come upon the mind of the Son of the Faithful. To deliberate upon Sultan Abdul Aziz's avowed intention of breaking with the old sacred traditions, a great council of ministers, lay and ecclesiastical, was assembled in the year 1867. The clerical party felt the coming departure of the sovereign to be fraught with tragic consequences both to the state and to Islamism. Behind the priests and the mollahs were grouped the powers of the harem, the Sultan's favourite wives, and his mother, the Valideh-Sultan. Women and priests stood together then, as they always stand, arrayed in their armour of conservatism, draped in superstition, and brandishing the spear of prophecy, for the foe of the weak is everywhere the new, the adventurous, and the untried. 186 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Abdul Aziz, whose beneficent reign of six short years had made him the idol of his people, had the courage to oppose his will to the priests, to his harem, and to the older conservative party. He listened to his own impulse, for behind that impulse he felt the hot pulse of the younger, newly awakened Turkish party beat ing in response to his own more modern ambitions. The Sultan set forth, therefore, on his long journey. In the summer of 1867, the first of all his race, he turned traveller. It is from that date that the division is said to have become distinctly marked between the Old and the Young Turkey Party. What hopes, fears, desires, and wild dreams of change, of reform, and of a new dispensation, hung upon the results ofthe Sultan's journey ! The old conservative party trembled lest a change should be brought about, detrimental alike to Turkish progress and Turkish interests. The more fanatical mollahs, behind whom shivered with fear the favourites of the harem, looked for nothing less than a veritable whirlwind, one which should destroy utterly both state and religion. In the bosoms of the younger, more modernised Turks there leapt the quiver of hope, that, possibly with the return of their beloved and courageous Sultan, a new dawn would illumine their land. With eyes fresh from the achievements of modern Europe, Abdul Aziz must see, as they thought, the path of progress along which Turkey must be led, if she was to keep her place before the nations of the world. With the return of their Sultan from his foreign adventures Turkey was to learn that Abdul Aziz was 187 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN as conservative a traveller as he had proved himself heroic in his setting forth upon his journey. After a review of the countries and courts of France, England, and Austria, he returned to announce to his subjects that in them he found a people far in advance of all others in point of civilisation. Two objects, one of them no object, indeed, but a being most distinctly, humanely alive, he had discovered in all his wander ings as worthy of rapturous admiration. In the lovely Empress of the French, in Eugenie, this con noisseur of women had found the most beautiful of women. In the review of England's fleet, the Turk ish ruler and owner of the ports of the Black Sea and the Dardanelles had seen the perfect, the ideal fleet. On his oath as Sultan, he vowed, it is said, to find a woman for his wife as lovely as Eugenie, and to con struct a navy equal to England's. Beylerbey was but recently finished. It served as the idyllic retreat for the Sultan's honeymoon, for in a Circassian slave named Mihri, his difficult eye had discerned the model of beauty his Europeanised taste coveted. Henceforth the favourite Mihri was to play as impor tant a role in the history of Turkish finance as had the unfortunate Empress of the French with the politics of France. Dolma Baghcheh, across the water, splen did as it was, was not splendid enough. Beylerbey was pronounced to be but a costly toy. The Palace of Tcheragan was begun, to prove that the budget of the already exhausted treasury could be made to 188 Turkish Houses near Anadoli Hissar — The Bosphorus IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN bleed millions, when millions must be had for the jewelled palace of a favourite wife. Into the ports of Mitylene, within this present year, there steamed a portion of the French fleet. They had come to enforce, at the points of their great guns, the payment to certain French merchants, among others more important, of certain costly " articles de Paris." Three thousand and odd francs figured as one of the items for a single pair of stockings, the gift, it is said, of the doting Sultan Abdul Aziz to his beloved Mihri. To add to the burden of the overtaxed people, the visit to Constantinople of the throned lady of the French came, the year following this Sultan's visit to the French capital, to swell Turkish debts and further to impoverish the poor. When Eugenie arrived, in 1869, she was to find Beylerbey turned into a French palace. The very hangings of her room in the Tuileries had been copied. Balls, fetes, illuminations, festivities, turned Constanti nople and the palaces upon the Bosphorus into one vast pleasure ground, over whose tournament of beauty jousting splendour she was queen. Some years later the wealth squandered upon the two women his wearied eyes had gloried in, brought, together with his many other extravagances, a tragic ending to fetes and festivals. The great act of this tragedy was set in the splendid mise-en-scene of the Palace of Dolma Baghcheh. 189 Chapter XIV A TURKISH COUP D'ETAT THE Palace of Dolma Baghcheh stood on the opposite, the European side, of the Bos phorus. Once more, therefore, we found the brown and gold caiques tossing beneath wet marble quais. As we entered the boats the sombre group of palace attendants, clustered within the gates, again seemed to put into mourning the fairy gardens, Ihe glistening walls, and the shining palace. As we were swept amid-stream the gilded gates were closed with a click. The enchanted palace was locked, tight and fast. Silent, deserted, tenantless, its empty chambers would wait on and on, for whom ? for what royal guest ? for what new page in the mar vellous book of Turkish history ? " Turkish history ! " The words held me spell bound. Above all the gathering beauty of the bril liant scene about, above, beyond us ; stronger than the witchery of colour and Eastern life abroad upon the fluid turquoise stream ; more compellingly insis tent than the stir and rush of crafts moving across the waters, did the tragic story of the Sultan, inseparably 1 90 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN associated with Beylerbey, pursue me, pull me, haunt me. To lay its ghost, there was but one way. I must piece out the story bit by bit. Here it is : In the long stretch of thirteen centuries, Khalifs and Sultans had come to strange and mysterious ends. If the imperial harem has been the walled prison of The Palace and Mosque of Dolma Baghcheh thousands upon thousands of beauties, whose loveli ness was to flower and ripen solely for a single monarch's eye, the harem isolation and seclusion has also offered the seal of a mysterious silence upon many a ghastly deed. Sultans, as well as their treacherous or intriguing wives, have gone smiling to harem alcoves, to smile on still, in distort grimace, as poison, or the supple fingers of African eunuchs, did their hideous work. It was from the harem of Dolma Baghcheh — the great palace yonder — that Sultan Abdul Aziz was to 191 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN come forth on a certain eventful midnight, startled, outraged, — in a fury of Jovian anger. In the pitiful scantiness of night raiment, this Sul tan was to confront neither the dagger-thrust, nor was he even politely to be shown the bowstring. A new instrument of torture, the unheard-of, unprecedented act of his own deposition, was to be courteously, tragically tendered him. This Turkish coup d'etat, considering it was a first and unique performance, was enacted in a masterly manner. All the greater qualities of the Turks, their long-sung bravery, their heroism and patriotism, were brilliantly displayed. Their high capacity, also, for quick and effective unity and action, in a perilous crisis, was conspicuously manifested. This act of revolt among the Sultan's ministers and certain other high religious and military officers, had been induced by a long chapter of civic and political disasters. These disasters had culminated in a grave financial crisis. Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Mon tenegro, — each of these vassal states had won their virtual freedom, after long and bloody years of wars. Internal disorder had succeeded the loss of territory. The extravagances and extortions of the Sultan had surpassed the limit of even Turkish submission. Six thousand servants and petty officials are not kept, even in an Imperial palace, for nothing. Three hun dred cooks, four hundred grooms, four hundred boat men, four hundred musicians, special and particular attendants, each with his recognised perquisites — to attend to His Majesty's pipe, to his coffee, to his 192 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN wardrobe, and to the perfumes of his morning hath — such an army of menials make a monarch's people sweat. " Somebody must see to the Imperial back gammon board, another to the august chin ; f 1 6,000 a year must be spent on sugar " ; for such absolute neces sities as these, in a court and palace that considered its budget of expenses " reformed " to a pitiable degree of economy, since the "grand days" of the mediaeval splendour of the Ottoman Court — for such meagre, palatial necessities surely loyal courtiers and a loving people should gladly toil, should consent to be taxed and despoiled till utmost labour could not be made to yield the barest living. What are a loyal people born for, if not to support their king and ruler? "The Shadow of God" can not be expected to work. Somebody must pay for his being born, as well as for his condescending to rule and to govern ; for his tastes and his passions, and for his few — his lamentably few — luxuries, just a matter of twelve hundred odalisks in a harem, a mere handful compared to the lovely army that had crowded the harems of his ancestors. Ah me ! the good, the grand, the royally sensuous days of old ! — just six hundred horses in his stables, no more, and only one hundred and fifty coachmen and foot men ; surely for the furnishing of such a pitiful array of Imperial tastes, and of passions curbed to the re quirements of modern economical restraint, a people numbering eighteen millions of subjects ought to find easy ways and lavish means ! Yet, economise as he would, Sultan Abdul Aziz 13 193 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN found himself, year after year, deeper and deeper in debt. In his private expenditure alone he was always three quarters of a million behindhand. A critical, European-trained taste for pictures and jewels made jewels and pictures come, it was true, to a pretty figure. The pretty figure touched a quarter of a mil lion per annum. The acquirements of such tastes came, however, as the reward of travel, and of enlarged views. The Young Turkey party, — the more advanced ministers who had urged His Majesty's setting forth on his European travels — surely these among his court and people at least would understand, would glory, even, in their ruler's growth in educated taste and in aesthetic development. Such is the inconsistency of human nature, it was this very party, the so-called Young Turkey, that deposed him. It was neither that he should acquire a taste for foreign pictures and cut gems ; nor vet was it that he might bring back a preference for Parisian ways of hanging curtains and draping bedchambers ; nor was it that he should learn the secret of giving splendid balls a la cour de Napoleon III in newly built Turco-Franco palaces, that either ministers or the revolutionary youth of Turkey had advocated the going forth of their sovereign to European capitals. Not one among either these younger or older Turkish innovators had imagined along and expensive journey by land and sea, would have, for its most conspicuous result, the search after and the finding of Mihri, of a Circassian slave ! Or that, the right, perfected pattern 194 IT ¦< < : < - " ; XX? <:, v: IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN of a Circassian once found, she would presently be worshipped as if she were really, fully a human being, as indeed might one who had a soul, whose longings and desires were to be respected and gratified. That this worship of and deference for a mere woman should be tendered by their travelled, their presumably exceptionally enlightened Sultan, in the name of Allah and of his Prophet! — who could have foreseen such a monstrous absurdity ? Assuredly not one among his ministers, not even one among the thousands of voung, eager conspirators calling themselves the Young Turkey Party. Yet was every man among them thoroughly harem broken ! State councils are not always composed of reasoning men, gifted with insight into the relation between cause and effect. In the state councils sitting solemnly in the mysterious chambers ofthe Sublime Porte, in that year, there were several factions, two of which alone had a definite plan. The Grand Vizier Mahmoud had his work quite perfectly laid before him. Russia stood behind him, directing every snip of the Grand Vizieral political shears. To oppose every act or effort which could help or aid the Young Turkey Party, this was the order from Russia. This latter party was young chiefly in name. Its leaders were young in their hopes, yet were they wise with the wisdom of experience, and armed with a caution as remarkable as was their pru dence brilliantly directed. The ministers, Midhat, Hussein Avri, and Redif Pasha made a formidable triumvirate. These felt, they knew themselves to be infinitely stronger than any Grand Vizier, even though '95 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN he had the strength of all the Russias behind him. For the ministers and their faction had the strongest power in Turkey as their bulwark. The mollahs and the priests were with them. A strange union, — that of a band of revolutionaries and the Sect, — wedded above all others to creeds and traditions. The union had been brought about by even stranger causes. Once the pact made, action, and instantaneous action, was determined upon. European methods were to be resorted to. Others besides their misguided ruler might copy French and English fashions. It was decided to depose the Sultan ! So courageous, startling, unheard-of an act on the part of loyal, patient, submissive Turks ! Surely the mere inception of so stupendous a plan must have made the brains of the conspirators reel with self- wonder. The leaders of this most daring of all the political upheavals ever planned in Turkey were, however, as cool and collected as they were united in mind and purpose. The Moslem law required the signature of the Sheikh-ul-Islam, head priest of Islam, for the deposi tion of a sovereign. The following letter was there fore addressed to Hairoullah Effendi : — When a Sultan dissipates the finances, and ruins his people to provide for his own amusements, without care or thought of the good of his people, can he be deposed ? When a Sultan becomes incapable of guiding his King dom by reason of deficient intellectual capacity, can he be deposed ? 196 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The following was the answer : — With the help of Allah, 29 May, 1293 of the Hegira. Yes, a Sultan can be deposed if he ruins his country by his obstinacy and his foolish expenditures, for a Sultan must be the father of his people and not their tyrant. May Allah forgive him. He alone is great and merciful. (Signed) Hairoullah. Armed with this religious sanction, the ministers lost not a moment in the performance of their stupen dously daring act. An instant's hesitation or delay might mean the massacre of thousands of patriots. The first stroke of the conspirators was a master piece of finesse. The Imperial Guard, devoted body and soul to the Sultan, must first of all be captured. Captured they were. Two men-of-war lay at anchor in the Golden Horn. These were ordered to light their fires and come to anchor below the arsenal, close to Top-Khaneh. Their commander was furnished with sealed orders not to be opened until he found himself twenty miles at sea. Meanwhile the Minister of War had sent to the general of the Imperial Guard an order to ship his troops immediately aboard of these men-of-war. The trick worked to perfection. The Sultan's body-guard could not get aboard quickly enough since their general believed himself called upon to execute as quickly as possible an Imperial mandate ! From the windows of Dolma Baghcheh, meanwhile, there looked forth into the night, at first idly, then wonderingly, and finally startled to fearstruck amaze- 197 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ment, a keen pair of eyes. The eyes belonged to none other than the Sultan. Among the pillows of a divan placed close to the windows of the palace, Abdul Aziz had been idling away a few after-dinner moments. His quick eye, as it swept the familiar lights gleaming amid the darkness, upon and across the Bosphorus, had discerned the sailing forth from below the arsenal, of two of his own men-of-war ! Yet no Imperial Irade (order) had been given ! Abdul Aziz was not as wholly wanting in those capacities for governing which his ministers had so complacently signed away into desuetude. On the wings of the wind he sniffed treason. Furious, yet inwardly trembling, he despatched an aide-de-camp in hottest haste to the Minister of War. The latter must come, and at once, to the palace. The sovereign's aide-de-camp, flying across Galata, across the silent Stamboul streets, up to the lighted chambers of the Seraskerat, was the precipitant that resolved the waiting daring of the conspirators into instant action. The coup d'etat that was to have been enacted on the morrow, in full daylight, must be con summated there and then, in the dark fastnesses of the night ! A traitor might, perhaps, have sold the great secret ! Who could tell ? Otherwise how came the Sultan to know of the going to sea of the men- of-war ? There was not an instant of time to be lost. The Imperial aide-de-camp was given some plaus ible answer. He was despatched to the palace and to his waiting master, as speedily as possible. In their turn, and even more quickly, the little body 198 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN of ministers, followed by a company of sure and tried officers and their soldiers, made their way to the palace. Besides the precious edict of Hairoullah Effendi, the high priest, each one of these men knew he was carrying his life, and that of thousands of others, in his hand. The Seraskerat The road from the Seraskerat to the arsenal, and from the arsenal to Dolma Baghcheh in full daylight, is not short. Stamboul, the Long Bridge, the Galata quais, the Barrack heights, and then, finally, the downward descent to the palace — the journey is a long one. Midnight made it no shorter. At the arsenal there was a most unpleasant stratagem to be worked — the substitution of the companies of soldiers in league with the revolutionary pashas for those doing 199 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN duty, loyally, to their ruler. The plan of this substi tution worked as perfectly as had the removal of the Imperial Guard. Once the conspirators had gained the palace portals the great act of the tragic night began in earnest. At the golden green and white gates there was a sentinel to pass. A pistol at his throat turned the " Qui vive " into a throttled silence. The windows of the palace were as dark as night. All within, apparently, were asleep or were appearing to sleep. At each one of the palace doors the pistol act was repeated, with the same silencing effect. His Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, was well guarded, but the pistol of conspirators, handled by state ministers, had not been anticipated as a palace danger. The minister who had been chosen to conduct, almost single-handed, the greatest of all the acts of this brilliant revolutionary scene, was Redif Pasha. His courage, in moments of peril, was known to be surpassed only by his calm. Followed solely by three armed officers, Redif Pasha led the way on wards, past halls and chambers to the salon of the eunuchs. The door of this room he opened with a pass-key. The black men, startled from their first heavy sleep, sprang almost automatically, nevertheless, to their feet, their hands upon their drawn swords. With imper turbable calm Redif Pasha informed the savage house guard he had come on a matter of utmost state im portance ; he must speak, and at once, to His Imperial Majesty. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The chief eunuch, hastily summoned, replied his own head would be forfeit, were he to deliver any such message. Redif Pasha's quiet answer was, he himself would follow him, and to the Imperial alcove, did he not proceed, and quickly, to obey the command. This threat decided the awe-struck eunuch. The torch that was flaring feebly, in his trembling hands, all but fell from his terror-stricken grasp. From the slaves who had rescued the falling torch, Redif Pasha silently took the flaming stick. With the calm of one quite at home, performing mechanically a simple, homely act, the minister proceeded to light the many lustres within the palace chamber. An instant later, and what a scene the hundreds of lights played upon ! Within the threshold of the door stood the Sultan scantily clad, dishevelled, his face as terrible as it was pallid with apprehensive fear. Grovelling almost at his feet, gallantly placing themselves between their master's sacred presence and the intrusive minis ter and his military escort, the group of terrorised eunuchs had swept. Their bronzed faces were bronze no longer ; their dark skins were streaked with white. And for the setting of this dramatic scene there was the gaily upholstered, gorgeously decorated palace chamber. In a voice terrible to hear, the Sultan demanded an explanation of the minister's appearance, at such an hour, with as daring and imperious a front of insistance. Bowing profoundly, Redif Pasha, with a perfect courtesy, assured His Majesty he had only dared thus IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN to intrude, and at such a moment, in order that he might himself have the honour of presenting to His Majesty the following missive from his nephew. The letter tendered the Sultan by Redif Pasha was signed " Mourad." In it the latter announced, most courteously, yet firmly, his own accession to the Turkish throne ! " Since when has there been another sovereign than me in Turkey ? " cried Abdul Aziz, in an access of uncontrollable rage, after reading the document. " Since, Sire, the people have shaken off the yoke of tyranny. Since the clergy have denied their Lord. Since other nations have abandoned their ally, and since the army no longer obey their King. Since this same night in which Turkey has proclaimed Mourad for its Sultan, King, and Ruler!" Without ceasing to smile, with quiet yet dramatic gesture, Redif Pasha lifted the curtain draping the window. Below, dressed in line, stood the massed troops, waiting to salute their new sovereign. Scarcely had the Imperial back been turned on that convincing spectacle, when a great cry rose up. In shrill crescendo, its echoing accents pierced the ear. The rush and flutter of a moving form followed the cry. Mihri — distractingly beautiful in the envelop ing mists of her hastily adjusted veils and mantle — stood, in her turn, within the doors. For a single breathless instant her fluttering garments and her piercing shrieks were stilled. With a wide, wild glance, her great eyes swept the room, and the scene within it. Then, with a sudden passionate bound, IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN she had flung herself at the feet of the King — of the King she had ruined. " Sire," she sobbed, " we are lost ! " Lost indeed were both. Five short days after this tragic midnight, Shakes pearian in its dramatic completeness, the sad-eyed Mihri and her royal lover were seated side by side in one of the lovely kiosks of the Palace of Tcheragan. It was in this palace, that had cost him so dear, the deposed Sultan had asked permission to pass the time of his virtual imprisonment. For already, installed as Sultan, in yonder Dolma Baghcheh, his nephew Mou rad, reigning over a happy, hoping people, held his uncle's fate in his young hands. The two state prisoners were mournfully reviewing their sorrows and disasters. Soon the Valideh-Sultan, the former Sultan's mother, joined them. After a brief talk, Abdul Aziz suddenly asked his wife for a pair of scissors. To trim his beard, he said, smiling sadly, would distract him. The two women rose, after presenting their master with the asked-for objects. Together they moved slowly toward the harem. Loud cries, shrieks for help, and the sounds of a scuffle chained their feet, for an instant of wondering anguish, spellbound. On their reaching the kiosk, it was to find Abdul Aziz bleeding to death. He had severed the arteries of both arms and wrists. Such, at least, was the statement wrung from the lips ofthe at tendant left beside His Majesty, as the two women had turned away. The veracity of this statement, confirmed 203 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN under torture, is denied, as will every one of the fore going facts be also denied, contested, and disproved by every narrator of this dramatic story. Those who know, say nothing. That is an epitome of all the facts, stories, tragedies, and conspiracies that take place or have taken place in this land of closed lips. 204 Chapter XV A CHAIN OF ROYAL PALACES " TTT is the Palace of Tcheragan," murmured Mus- I tafa Bey. As we had floated on and on, a sudden blanch ing of the blue and violet water-bed had arrested the gaze. Before us uprose a glittering mass of radiant marbles. To know this mass to be Tcheragan made the eyes wide with looking. What would this palace be like — one which had at once delighted the eye of a cultivated, fastidious monarch, and yet had satisfied the untrained taste of his beautiful Circassian — one which, above all else, to entirely content the ambitious, extravagant Mihri must, in point of beauty and elabo rate ornamentation, have surpassed both Beylerbey and Dolma Baghcheh ? Tcheragan rose above the purples and violets of the glistening water surface, white, snow-white ; its marbles were laced here and there with carvings, yet was there rfeither gem nor paint, nor hint of colour to mar its fair, clear, and perfect surface. There were traceries, arabesques, curves, rosettes, foliaged cornices, flowery canopies, and lace-worked capitals ; but such orna mentation was subordinated to the rich, flowing struc- 205 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN tural lines, as ornament should be. Space, form, and proportion, — these had been the chief essentials held in view, as in the building of Beylerbey. And again we looked forth on a palace that, though neither strictly Saracenic nor Gothic, nor ofthe Renaissance, nor even flamboyant nor rococo, was yet a pure, lovely, and wondrous work of art. Have these Armenian -archi tects — for most of these later royal palaces have been built by Armenians — have these architects, in their skilful mingling of certain beautiful Saracenic and European building modes, produced the looked- for, the longed-for new architectural masterpiece ? Hundreds of tongues in Constantinople will tell you, that besides being the most original in point of architectural beauty of all the palaces upon the Bos phorus, Tcheragan is in reality Mourad's prison. When, in his famous European journey, Abdul Aziz went forth to visit foreign courts, two of his young nephews accompanied him. One was Mourad V, and the other the young Abdul Hamid II. Both of these youthful princes were to reign over Turkey. One was to depose his uncle, the other, in his turn, was to take possession of Mourad's throne and of the great Eastern Empire. Mourad Vs reign was of short duration. His uncle's tragic end, it is said, produced a nervous shock, the effects of which were to be ap parent in a gradual, but sensible unseating of the men tal faculties. Once more the Sheikh-ul-Islam was to prepare the " fetfa " of deposition. In his turn, the doomed young Sultan was to find in the fated palace of Tcheragan his prison-house. 206 -X -¦"" ' y ¦- ¦ * IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN To look upon as radiant and festal a structure as this glittering marble palace, and to think of it as a prison seemed demanding too much of the imagination. The green wealth of bloom and verdure that flowered above the gilded garden walls, — these were surely the gardens of beatified beings, not of poor mortals with wandering wits. The guards and the sentry boxes lining the wrought-iron railing below the walls would- appear to prove any story, for the Palace of Tchera gan was more rigidly sentinelled than was Beylerbey. Its forests and gardens, however, adjoin those of Yildiz Kiosk. They make, indeed, one vast pleasure park with the royal domains. Whether any one of the hundred and one stories of Mourad's long captivity of twenty-eight years be true or not ; whether he has been ill or well treated ; whether innumerable or none have been the Georgian and Circassian virgins sacrificed to lightening the tedium of his so-called " imprisonment ; " whether the deposed Sultan has passed these slow years of over a quarter of a century within the sadly festal halls of Tcheragan ; or whether, as is more probable, he is carefully looked after, in the acute state of mania those best advised assert to be the true condition of the former Sultan's mental state, in some one of the kiosks within the triple-walled palace-town of Yildiz, neither you nor I can, at the present moment, actually prove. The secrets of Yildiz Palace are well kept. The remarkable monarch who reigns over Turkey and his palace, and whose grasp is outstretched to guide and direct every tiniest thread of his country's 207 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN destiny, is most marvellous, perhaps, in this : he knows all the world says of him, and yet he is strong enough to keep silent. Meanwhile the life upon the famous stream held the eyes — dazzled, delighted them. Better than the streets of Stamboul, of Pera, or of Galata, was this watery highway, where men of high and low degree filled yachts, yawls, ferry-boats, and hundreds and hundreds of caiques, — these latter darting in and out of the larger craft like flying minnows. The Bosphorus was at its best, its gayest hour. The work of the short Turkish day was over. The quais of Pera, of Stamboul, and of Scutari were send ing forth officials and merchants to their houses along the bright river shores. Ambassadors and palace officials were steaming up to Bebek or to Therapia. Greek and Armenian merchants, their merchandise piled high in the boat's stern, leant back luxuriously against the high cushioned seats. Between the puffs of their scented cigarettes, the bargains of the day's sales in the Stamboul bazaars were obviously being talked over in leisurely fashion. Richer Turks swept past in steam-launches, or in their four-oared caiques. From the boat-houses along the shores brightly painted boats shot forth filled with veiled shapes. There were hundreds of pinkj^ofyellow, of cream and black parasols held tightly over these en veloped heads. So fiercely clutched were the snort- handled head coverings, their/ holders seemed to be, one and all, under some mysterious vow for self extinguishment. 208 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN This Turkish crowd, afloat, revealed in certain un mistakable ways their sensuous indulgence in the beauty about them. The older Turks were grave, calm, and stately. There was no unbending of the proud, Turkish carriage. Yet as they swept past in their brilliantly painted caiques, in the deep eyes there was a languorous swimming. The Bosphorus The younger dandies carried their enjoyment with a lighter abandonment. They curved their young backs into the deep cushions with a flaunting air ; they sent their eyes abroad in search of a European face, un veiled, fresh, and fair. Greek, Armenian, Euro pean — such women are the legitimate prey for Turk ish glances. For their own women they had no eyes, at least from the Giaour standpoint. What coquetry goes on between a Turk and a woman or an r4 209 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN unmarried girl of his own people, is conducted on principles come down to them from mysterious harem methods. These are as old as those, doubtless, in vogue in Solomon's time. For what, indeed, were that accomplished gentleman of letter's three hundred or more concubines but the ladies of his harem ? Slaves, now as then, are found to be a safer medium of communication between lovers than the betraying speech, touch, or glance. If slaves fail, there are said to be still the gipsy sorceress or the merchant of the bazaar for hire, who can penetrate into the rooms of haremliks closed to all but one master's eye. The keen, bitter air of the dark night has, in earlier cen turies, surprised many a fair form as, muffled and shrouded, it has found the unexpected punishment, for the reading of certain billets-doux, to lie in the watery grave of the Bosphorus. The Westerner properly shudders over such horrors. I am not over persuaded as to the genuiness of the moral shiver. If we Americans could prove the bed of the Bosphorus to be as empty of dead men, and of murdered women, as is presumably our own unsullied Hudson, since, at least, our period of its ownership, this Turkish stream would, I fear, lose its chief secret of attraction. The barbarian is still alive, and is more or less actively kicking, in the most saintly of us. Only, for decency's sake, we prefer it should be the Turk who commits the worst of the modern crimes ; it is so gratifyingly picturesque to shudder over them, and him, at a distance of four thousand miles. 1 1 is neither on crimes of love nor vengeance one dwells IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN as one floats and floats. The Bosphorus may be, in deed, paved with dead men ; it is not of its bed, it is of its wondrous, luminous surface one thinks. The colours of the famous stream were at once inex pressibly delicate and yet sparkling with light. Wher ever you turned the ordinary and the commonplace had been changed into marvels of beauty. The tinted houses along the shore had taken on the tones of faded jewels. Above them the densely leaved trees were soaked in gold. Garden walls flickered upon the water bed long lines of dissolving, glowing tints. Everywhere the cypresses were black ; the hills were greener than sea-tones ; the cities shining far beyond, toward which our bows were now turned, were become unreal ; they were fantastic realms, already part ofthe sky splendour, dazzling, aerial, phantasmal. As we floated on and on, between the palace-lined shores, a stealthy, exquisite languor seemed to creep up from the bright water-world. An all-enveloping warmth — at once ardent and sensuous — as pervasive as though physically communicated, enwrapped the body and sense. This rapturous ecstasy was as deli cate as it was complete. Sound, colour, vibration, the human life abroad upon the purpling waters — all ministered to the delectable moment. The ca denced plunge of the great oars was one rhythm ; the sibilant swish of the falling drops along the oar- blades was still another. The rush of the waters upon the low shores, their rustle and licking and kissing was a more distant music. There was nothing to break the bright dream. LN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Not a whisper of discord was abroad upon either water or shore. Squalor, filth, contradictions, con trasts grotesque or revolting — these were apart of another dream, one dreamed long since and forgotten. God and Nature had recaptured their world. With the unbroken dome of blue above ; with this vast water-bed below ; with hills rising and falling along the long, unending shore line, earth, sky, and water presented the old, the ever new miracle of the great, the elemental picture. What man had done in the way of adorning or framing the splendid spectacle could not alter the essential features of its beauty. Neither Sultan nor beggars, neither crimes nor the death rattle of dying cities, neither quarrels over one or over many gods, have had power to rob of one acre of its loveliness, or radically to change the divine outlines of this hyacinthine stream the world calls the Bosphorus. The hills that lipped its shore, on Europe's side, rose to lose their outlines in verdant slopes. The slopes spread out to forest depths, to long mountain swells and to deep gorges. Asia, on the opposite shore, from this vantage of distance, began its life in verdure, to end it in sterility. The Asian shore was green and thick and dense with foliage, gardens, and tree-peopled terraces that rose tier on tier till palms and cypresses touched the lean breasts of the hills. Then the green line stopped. Its roots, apparently, could suck no more moisture, for the mother of the world is grown weary and worn. But, since the curse of toil is laid upon all, IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the Asian hills grew on and up till their blues met the fleece ofthe moving cloud flocks. You could see the Bithynian Olympus shepherding his white flocks, as you floated on and on, far, far below, miles below, out upon the cool ofthe blue water world. X^ ^ , The Gateway ofthe Palace of Dolma Baghcheh Suddenly, as in a dream, you heard the cadenced plunge of the great oars come to a stop. You waked to find your steps slipping on water-splashed quais. Then you were quite fully awake, for twenty dark hands were playing the grace of their Eastern salute upon heart, and lip, and forehead ; twenty heads bent low, as once more twenty brilliant cotton handker chiefs covered the purpling, sweating countenances of His Majesty's crew. For this voyage in the royal caiques had come to an end. We were led onward, past saluting sentries to a side 213 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN path. The path took us to an open square, at the end of which was a splendid stately gateway. On lofty Corinthian columns a richly carved cornice and parapet rose against the intense blue of the skies. There was a cascade of wreaths and garlands about white urns and rosettes. Above, on a green disc, shone in gold the Imperial cypher. Below, on a paler green background, verses of the Koran were traced in the delicate chirographical characters of which Turkish sign-writers appear to have the secret. The portal of the great palace was exactly what such a portal should be. It was stately, ornate, majestic, with a floridity of decorative features suit able to an Eastern sky and to the Oriental love of the luxurious. Guards and soldiers were thick about the great gateway. As they presented arms the ear caught the rustle of other muskets handled at more distant sentry boxes. Through the velvet bunches of the ilex trees, in the gardens fronting the palace steps, wherever the eye went, it was to light upon the glint of steel, or upon the gold of a soldier's uniform. Dolma Bagh cheh is already the beginning of the present Imperial residence. Its gardens join those ofthe " Star " Kiosk. Its marbles, quais, gardens, and terraces are the true water front to the hill-fortress wherein the Sultan keeps his state and court. Once within the great palace, was to be lost in a maze of great halls, of long passage-ways, of vast drawing- rooms, and of state apartments. There were several miles, it seemed to my own, in time, lagging feet, of 214 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN more or less grand, bare, gaudy, inexpressive rooms. One looked for the traces of Eastern taste, of Eastern colours, ofthe riches and depth of Eastern dyes or tiles in vain. The trail of Europe, and of a tasteless, ex pressionless Europe, was over the entire interior. Here and there a Persian frieze, or a richly decorated ceiling, or a carved mantel, after some Saracenic de sign, would tease the eye with a promise of a broader, fuller, Oriental splendour. It was beneath one's feet one could find the sole, sure sign of the East. The Turkish carpets — and there must have been miles of them — were magnificent products of the Turkish loom. Dolma Baghcheh was not one palace, it seemed, rather a dozen. Its creamy surfaces, softer to the eye than the later palace facades, gave to its inter minable lengths a unified appearance. Yet the palace has no true unity. Portions of it were built at differ ent periods. Between five or six lower buildings, of a bastard Neo-Grec order, there towers a central structure modern enough to fit into any New York or Parisian street. This latter structure was erected by Sultan Mejid. It was the first of the royal palaces built upon the Bosphorus. The hegira of the Sultans from Seraglio Point to the shores of the Bosphorus was a bold move planned by one of the gentlest of Sultans. Abdul Medjid, father of the present Sultan, abandoned the palace city ofthe Osmanlis. On that famous point of land, where tiled and gilded kiosks arose like enchanted palaces, set in the midst of gardens of fabulous beauty, 2IS IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN there were also grim memories, noisome horrors, and a stench even orange blossoms could not deaden — that of the decaying streets of Stamboul. On the bright, clean shores of the Bosphorus there was a chance for the breathing of fresh air, and for the enjoyment of cleanliness — two novelties ushered in by the nine teenth century, as compellingly attractive to Eastern Sultans as they have proved to Western sovereigns. Abdul Aziz II added building after building to the great palace. In time it became in itself a little city, wherein the sovereign, the court, certain ministers, and the thousands and thousands of human beings necessary to the state of an Oriental monarch, as well as his city of women, could each and all be suitably lodged — where each, also, could find distraction and amusement. The hundreds of the rooms shown us, empty, deserted, yet exquisitely, beautifully clean, proved the number of the multitudes that had formed the court of this luxurious monarch. A single picture-gallery recalled once again, with startling vividness, the departure in taste and the courageous breaking with Moslem traditions of which Abdul Aziz had proved himself capable. In these vast, tasteless apartments suddenly to be confronted with Fromentin's Arab horsemen, with their chromatic intensities of colour ; to look upon Schreyer's magnifi cent Bedouins, filling the desert with their flutter ing motion and matchless draperies ; to find witch ing Parisiennes in scanty clouds of tulle, figuring as Cabanal delighted to pose his Aphrodites, — these pictured types of men, women, and horses were a 216 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN startling change from yards and yards of heavy costly upholstery. The room of rooms in all this chain of palaces was the throne room of Dolma Baghcheh. There may be halls larger and other state apartments more im posing than this sumptuously decorated interior. If so, I, for one, know them not. Beside the lofty mar ble pillars and columns supporting the great central dome of this room, one experiences the same sense of shrinking to midget size that half oppresses, half delights, one in measuring one's insignificance against the lofty, soaring spaces of St. Peters. This throne room recalled, both in its construction and decoration, rather the Byzantine character of the Justinian architectural masterpiece of St. Sophia than the more austere Christian temple. The mosque motive had obviously been the architect's inspiration. Dome, roofs, tribunes, and side aisles had, however, all been ingeniously adapted to the grand gala necessities of a magnificent court setting. The central dome, though lofty, was beautifully set above the variegated marble pillars. The flat surfaces were decorated with a pro fusion of brilliant Oriental designs. Gold was every where lavishly used. As if to mark, with peculiar emphasis, the festal character of the great room, there hung from the richly tinted dome a monster crystal chandelier. Its innumerable green, red and tulip- hued cup-shaped glass globes were splendidly effective. One could fancy the great shower of light rained upon bared shoulders and glittering uniforms by the many thousands of gas jets. 217 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN One of the balls given by Abdul Aziz in honour of the Empress Eugenie had for its festal centre this truly magnificent state room. What a commingling of dainty French grace and Oriental splendour was then set in this semi-Saracenic frame ! Jewelled orders flashed their lights to find their radiance reflected back by a thousand prisms. Parisian tulle ball-gowns and sweeping embroidered satins were scarcely less airy or cunningly patterned than were the dantily ornamented walls. The present Sultan has given to the throne room a more lasting instance of historic interest than the ruinous festivities of his predecessor. It is the custom of the Sultans to come to the throne room on the morning of the Bairam cere mony. The Bairam is held at the termination of the long fast (the Eastern Lent) of Ramadan. The ceremonial in the palace consists of the Sultan, accom panied by his court, proceeding to the throne room, there to receive the congratulatory visits of his min isters, of other high officials, and of the diplomatic corps. Last year, in the year 1901, an unwonted, tragic occurrence interrupted the ceremonial visits before the Sultan's throne. The startling tremors of an earth quake were felt. Fright and panic seized upon the multitude of assembled courtiers and guests. In an instant stately dignity and courteous homage were for gotten in the stronger instinct of self-preservation. The foreign guests and diplomatic bodies hurried to open doors. The court was gradually, insensibly 218 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN melting awav. Two Imperial aides-de-camp were sufficiently ill-inspired — by their frantic dash through a near window — to preserve their lives for the later penalty of immediate banishment. The Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, alone stood firm, as, for the briefest of seconds, he also stood literally alone. "I also — I was about to fly like the others. One acts by instinct as well as by imitation in such mo ments. I was in the tribune, among the ladies of the Diplomatic Corps. Suddenly I saw the great chandelier go rocking, as it were. And I felt the solid marble rocking also beneath my feet. Well, when every one cried out, ' It is an earthquake,' I too did as every one did. I turned to fly, anywhere, everywhere, away from the rocking chandelier. Then the earth quaked no more. It stopped. And so did I. "It occurred to me to step back, and see what the Sultan was doing. Yes, I was curious — as a wo man — if you will. I was alone in the tribune then, the only man, with my curious woman's eyes. The Sultan also, as I saw, stood alone. At first, as I had turned to fly, I had seen him start up from his throne. His ministers, they were not slow, I can tell you, in following. But now, when I was back at my old place, the Sultan, he also had returned to his. "He stood quite still, and suddenly he seemed also quite tall. He was standing alone on the great carpet before his throne. Every one was with his back turned until, like a booming cannon, — the court and his 219 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ministers — they heard the Sultan's deep, great voice: " Stand back — back, I say ! " And like sheep they all came and stood about. But some were very white. The Sultan was not white. He looked better than I ever saw him. He stood like a general facing battle. " It was all the braver, for the chandelier, it was still rocking. And it was just over the Sultan's head." Such was the story Mr. G , the clever, accom plished dragoman of our Embassy, told us, with the graphic vividness of his Italian grasp of picturesque detail. Chapter XVI THE DANCING DERVISHES IT was to no palace, it was to the Hall of the Dancing Dervishes we were driven on the after noon of the following day. To gain the monastery of this strange Brotherhood of the Mevlevi, there was a long drive through the Pera streets. As we stepped from the carriages to enter the gateway of the Dervish convent, the con trasts that had lined our way thither seemed to have crossed the conventual threshold. Weedy gardens made the gorgeous blue, green, and gold tablet above the gateway seem the record of some noble ruin. A child in the arms of a fat, elderly Dervish, seated close to a carved circular fountain, and a babe in the arms of its nurse, made a group as far as possible re moved from one's ideas of monastic asceticism. The monastery of the Dancing Dervishes is a series of low, unpretentious buildings. Of these the hall in which the bi-weekly so-called dancing ceremonies are performed, is the chief. The group crowding about the doorway, within the building, announced the services to have been already begun. Our entrance and progress toward IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the upper gallery, reserved for our party, made a visible stir. Heads were impatiently raised and some hundreds of eyes were uplifted in semi-reproachful, semi-respectful gaze. The appearance of Mustafa Bey's naval uniform was the signal for a more inter ested curiosity. There was, however, something better worth watching than even His Majesty's aide-de camp, an unveiled foreign lady, and several Europeans in the dress of their country. For the dancing, or rather the preliminaries of the famous exercises, had already begun. The scene that was set directly below our eyes was as strange as it was simple. Within an octagon hall, a low balustrade, some ten feet from the outer wall, described a perfect circle. This circle lay almost exactly within the centre of the room. The floor of this enclosed circle was of wood. It had been polished by the feet of generations of dancers to a satiny finish. Within this enclosed space there stood, close to the railing, a living wall of mantle-draped figures. With eyes bent, with hands folded upon their breasts, this human circle seemed turned to stone. For they moved not, nor indeed did they seem to breathe, so motionless upon the lean high shoulders lay the long, blue mantles. Around the sacred enclosure the audience, gathered to view these strange ceremonies, sat on the seats fur nished by Allah to rich and poor alike. Turks in fezes ; some mollahs in their white and green turbans ; a group of marines in their cool blues and whites, topped by the ever-present scarlet fez ; some soldiers IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN and clusters of strangers whose white pallor, dark tweeds, and tall hats were notes of discord in groups where Eastern complexions and the innumer able spots of reds and greens made masses of colour wherever the eve fell — these male groups were seen to be packed thick and close. Here and there the pale oval of a woman's face loomed out of this masculine medley of foreign and Eastern faces and costumes. Directly across the hall the pure outlines of a Greek face were easily recognisable ; the inheritance of the woman's straight brows, and her full-lipped, classic mouth, centuries of Levantine inter mixtures of blood and race had not obliterated. An Armenian, of meaner physical equipment but gaudier of yashmak, poured the liquid fire of her great eyes above the whites of her cotton veil. Within a certain latticed box, nearly opposite to our own seats, the vague outlines of other veiled shapes announced the presence of grander ladies. These also had come to look upon the strange sight of men in petticoats whirl and whirl themselves into an ecstatic stupour. In the very middle of the upper balcony sat, upon deep cushions, cross-legged, a band of four musicians. Two of these were singing in shrieking discord, if the sounds were to be judged by European taste in musical intervals, in sweetest, most enrapturing harmony, to Oriental ears, a monotonous, endless chant. Like a high, fierce, and angry wind scolding at the house cor ners, in tempest weather, the chant rose to tattered shrieking at certain given measures ; when it sank to quieter tones, the rasp ofthe harsh nasal twang, in which 223 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the tones were emitted, made the melody only a milder form of torture to our ears. The flute and tambou rine players, who beat and fifed their droning mechan ical accompaniment to this unmelodious chant, seemed equally possessed by the very devils of discord. A Dancing Dervish and his Son This music, hoarse-voiced, unlovely to ears attuned to the heaven-born strains of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Wagner, was as prolific of sensation as the music of " The Magic Flute," or as the exquisite orchestral complexities of a Wagnerian crescendo, to these Eastern listeners. Its minor, softer notes had already harmonised this strange, ill-assorted crowd of men and women into subdued quiet. Its semi-barbaric 224 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN primitive beat and measure spoke, apparently, to these ears in ways and meanings forever lost to our more complex organisations. As the chant rose and fell, the influence of the weird music upon the auditors became more and more perceptible. Eyes grew fixed and dreamy ; the luxurious surrender of sense and soul to that rapt state of bliss music alone has the power to evoke, were the signs patent to every seeing eye, to be read in these hundreds of voluptuous, dreamy, Oriental orbs. The larger part of the audi ence indeed, had come, obviously, to pass a delectable hour at an afternoon concert. It was the character and excellence of the music, quite as much as the dancing ofthe Dervishes, that crowded this monastery hall twice a week. Meanwhile, as the music had gathered in shrill, harsh volume, the immobile line of the Dervishes had broken. In single file, with slightly bent heads, and hands lost in the long sleeves of their cloaks, the Brotherhood was seen to be slowly, majestically follow ing one the other. With that peculiar distinction and composed dignity the practice in religious ceremonies seems to develop everywhere among celebrants, the monks circled about the inner side of the railing with perfect step and rhythm. Two quite young boys broke the symmetry of a line whose exact proportion as to height proclaimed the choice of these tall, lean young Dervishes to have been one of careful selection. In step and tread the two boys imitated their elders with marvellous ease. Upon their rounded, boyish faces there was an almost comical solemnity. Though neither 15 225 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN of the lads could count more than ten or eleven years of life or of religious experience, their gravity and self-possession were as complete as though they had been born in long blue mantles and with tall cone- shaped hats. Slowly, majestically, keeping due distance one from the other, in perfect measure with the tum-tum ! tum tum ! of the beat upon the tambourine, did the seven teen blue, green, and brown-mantled figures continue their processional march, as round and round the inner side of the low balustrade they bent their steps. Had some quaint Assyrian frieze adorning an archaic temple been suddenly endowed with life, thus would the figures have walked, thus would they have trod the floor, with the same vague abstracted air of beings no longer in touch with earth. A priest was seen to make his way noiselessly, im perceptibly, through the crowd ofthe squatting Turks. His long brown coat and his tall green turban caught the light, as he moved onwards. The rich colours were presently merged in the mass of brighter hues beneath him, out of which, when the sun rays caught him anew, he emerged as some monster insect moving hither and thither above a dun-coloured parterre. Directly opposite to the entrance and the space sacred to the musicians, stood the midrab of this Der vish temple. Towards this niche the priest made his quick, stealthy way. Once within its carved concave, the supple figure relaxed into immobility. A graven image he stood, for the long hour or more ofthe cere monies, as impassive as a Hindoo Buddha. 226 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN With the priest's advent, the marching Dervishes came each, as he approached before the midrab, to a slow,, dignified halt. A single rug lay upon the satiny floor. The rug was parallel with the steps of the mid rab. The Dervish heading the procession, as he neared the carpet, was seen to stop before it. He stood for a brief second, entirely motionless. Then he bowed to the waist, with hands folded upon the breast. After the bow, with an amazing grace and agility, the mantle-clad, petticoated figure stepped across the carpet at a single spring. Once upon its opposite end, the Dervish turned to salute, with the same profound salutation, his brother, who now faced him. Once the two bows interchanged, the first Dervish continued to head the line of march. Each monk bowed, and turned to rejoin, after the simple rite, the already onward moving procession. Suddenly a high, shrill quaver of song, hoarsely sung by the tenor of the choir, produced a magical effect. The Dervishes stopped their walk on the in stant. Each stood to face the priest and the midrab, for a single second of time, rigid and still. Then with widely distended arms, each spread forth the great sleeves of his wide mantle. The grace of the gesture, in thus opening to view their inner garments, had in it the same professional, apparent artlessness as that with which a premiere danseuse en seine throws off the dark cloak which covers her gauze draperies. It was a gesture that announced a great perfection of drill. Once the arms widely distended, and simultaneously, seventeen blue and green mantles lay at the feet of the 227 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN seventeen Dervishes. The trick had been done with the sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur. With equal ease and agility, each mantle was seen to disap pear. They had been quickly, noiselessly kicked be hind the long skirts of the brethren. The motion was as dexterous as the more familiar one of a woman administering the corrective backward thrust to her train. As the figures of the Dervishes stood thus un- mantled, each was seen to be clad in white. Their long skirts, very full at the waist, reached to the floor. The jacket, covering arms and the upper portion of the body, was also white. This garment had long ends. These ends were found to require a certain nicety of ad justment. For several seconds preparatory to the taking of the first steps in the coming dance, each Dervish was seen busily engaged in confining, securely, the two ends of his jacket within the folds ofthe broad blue belt folded about the lean waist. Throats and breasts were thus left bare. The nudity of this part of the body was doubly wise. The heat generated by the swift dance was thus somewhat diminished. The rapt ecstasy upon the faces of the Dervishes was also more effectively made plain, thus thrown into relief above the bared throat and open, heaving breast. Like unto strange birds opening wide wings, pre paratory to taking an upward flight, the seventeen white-sleeved arms were once more distended. One hand was held downwards, — this was to signify the earthly ties. The other, the right, was opened heaven ward, palm uppermost. This gesture was to typify 228 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the coming union with the celestial spirits. The head was slightly bent over the right shoulder, and all was now in readiness. Another high shriek of sound from the singers sent a visible thrill through the silent, motionless dancers. The moment of flight heavenward had come. The long lashes closed on the dark, dreamy orbs. With a motion as light as that of a flower petal lifted by a pass ing zephyr, each Dervish began to turn and turn upon his bared feet. As they whirled and whirled, each preserving his own place, yet one and all waltzing in the prescribed, enclosed circle, each revolving, as it were, on his own axis, yet each circling round and round the sacred enclosure, a visible, wondrous change came over the faces of the dancers. As the wide skirts filled with air, as the rotary motion be came faster and faster, as the seventeen whirling figures seemed scarcely to touch the glassy floor, so light was their tread, upon each face there came a strange, mysterious expression. The dark lids were glued to the now paling cheeks. The muscles of the faces had lost all trace of manly energy. The features of these grown men had taken on the formlessness of babes. An inner, growing beatitude gave to the re laxed mouths, the drooping lids, and the etherealised foreheads an extraordinary look of elation. As the dance grew swifter and swifter, and the music more piercingly shrill, this look of elation passed into one of complete abstraction. A supreme expression, one of rapt ecstasy, finally settled upon the faces of men and boys. 229 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN When the white skirts had reached the point of infla tion where their edges were parallel with the waists of their wearers, the longed-for state of beatitude, appar ently, had been attained. The whirling, rotary figures were lost, apparently, to all consciousness of action. Their souls were in flight. They were in exquisite communion with that paradise of feeling, sensation, and celestial rapture, unattainable save by such mystic, trance-producing motion. A similar change had swept over the countenances of the men, the women, and upon the faces of the children brought to view this strange union of men with their God ; even the little boys who sat close to the balustrade winked and blinked. Their child ish lids were tremulous. As if in answer to the beat and rhythm of the barbaric medley of flute, and song, and tambourine, the baby lids rose and fell and rose and fell. The women's veiled heads were moving from side to side, languidly, in sensuous, voluptuous response to the tum-tum ! of the twanging tambou rine. One negress's eyes, a late comer, looked poppy- drugged. She finally sank to her couch, upon, her wide haunches, with a grunt of ecstatic stupour. Even the men's eyes, beneath their fezes, were drowsy, were half closed, as though nearly lulled to slumber. Presently the music struck a minor note. The dancers stopped. But not on the instant could the wandering spirits be recalled from their paradisaical journey. Lids were only slowly opened. The dis tended arms came gracefully to their droop upon the now lifeless skirts. The brown, bared breasts heaved, 230 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN but only slightly. The beads of perspiration made the bronze surfaces shine as though freshly polished. And presently once again the faces of the Dervishes had regained their more human look of expressionless calm. Within the inner circle of this now motionless band a group of older Dervishes had silently taken their places. After the same march in processional line as had opened the ceremonies, — a march obviously de signed to furnish a rest and change to the more tiring rotary motion, — after a few turns about the balus trade, once more the dance began. This time the whirling was fast and furious. The little boys turned like swiftly spun tops. The youth ful, ascetic monks abandoned themselves to the volup tuous rhythm of the dance as might a lovesick maiden to the arms of her lover. Louder and louder shrieked the music. Faster and faster whirled the waltzers. Indescribable was the lightness of tread. Amazing their power of endurance ! Paler and paler grew the wan cheeks; more and more sunken were the eyes within the deep sockets ; yet upon pallid cheeks and brow the light of an exquisite and rapturous ecstasy grew brighter and brighter. Upon the face of one of the younger, more wan-looking brethren, as he whirled past us, swift and ever swifter, with his skirts stiffly distended, his hands lifted as if up-borne by some unseen celestial strength, — upon his face there shone, through the waxen pallor of his relaxed features, the look of those in presence of some celestial vision. Was he already united to the celestial element? Had 231 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the paradisaic odours and perfumes, imperceptible to our coarser senses, — had these already impregnated his soul, lifting him into regions of beatitude ? Within the inner circle, the little group of older brethren were doing their whirling with slower, more measured pace. Age, and the effects of that over indulgence of the appetites and passions, said to be the inevitable results of this sensuous cult, held these older monks in the leash of lessened activity. The skirts of these sybaritic brethren were barely distended. Upon their faces one searched in vain for the expected look of ecstatic abstraction. The pleasures of the body had barred the way to trance-like raptures. One Dervish there was among these elder monks, however, whose dancing and whose apparent power of sense-obliteration were marvellous. His first whirl proclaimed him as the most exquisite of all the dancers. The perfect rhythm of his step communicated an inde scribable grace to his somewhat heavily moulded frame. As he swept onward, such was the charm emanating from his perfectly modulated movements, so singular a harmony did he communicate to the sweep of his person, to the billowy undulations of his skirts and to the poise of his bent head, with its huge cone- shaped cap, that all other dancers within the room seemed, by contrast, machine-impelled. With the very first of his circling motions, his face had changed from the countenance of commonplace to one touched with a heaven-born light. The whirling groups, the music with its poundings, the pipings and hoarse singing, went on and on. 232 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN The lifted faces were growing ominously pale ; the lips were the lips of those about to swoon. But faster and ever faster swirled the great skirts. And louder and ever louder dinned the barbarous music upon the ear. Would it go on and on, without end ? A shout, a cry as of one caught up into some supernatural ecstasy, made the heart jump ; one's breath come thick and fast. One of the monks had fallen to the ground. The shout was one of triumph. As he swooned, his union with God had been con summated. When his brethren stooped to bear him away, the face was seen to be that ofthe wan ascetic. He looked the picture of that beautiful Death the mediae val painters reserved to typify the peace of mar tyred saints. The soul of the Dervish seemed indeed to have taken its flight upward. The wings of the trance-dance, — had it swept him to an eternity of bliss ? His brethren knew better. He was borne slowly forth, the dancers making way for the group and its burden. How did holy men, in closest union with celestial forces, with their human lids hermeti cally sealed, how did such know just the exact limit of room to give to let that group of bearers pass safely through their wondrous circle ? The circle reclosed as though there had never been a wan ascetic among them. The dancers presently lifted their voices. They and the priest, as they came to their second rest, all joined in the chant of the choristers. The voices rose and fell, and shrieked and moaned, filling the temple with the cries of men 233 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN calling upon their God to come nearer and ever nearer. The voices of those who had borne away their swoon ing brother were now joined to the strong, discordant male chorus. And after the singing, the dancing began anew. It was thus we left them. The vision ofthe whirl ing white figures ; the memory of the pale ecstatic faces ; the recurrent sounds of the barbaric songs ; the motionless figure of the priest, grave as a carven statue in his sculptured midrab, — these were the sounds and memories that pursued us into the open streets. The clamour of the fruit venders seemed less harsh than the music that had held — thrilled, and breath less — that company of silent men and women. Even as the circle of the dancers closed in, obliterat ing all trace of their missing brother, thus on and on — and for how many a century, who knows ? — may the white skirts of rapture-faced Dervishes continue to whirl and whirl. Because to us the secret of their musical rhythm is lost ; because the mystery of that most antique and classical of unions — religious ecstasy and the dance — is a cult and a mystery no longer, other ears than ours may yet find in such music the old ecstatic stupour; and millions of unborn, wan- faced men may continue to turn on their heels till they shout and swoon. 234 Chapter XVII ALL IN A DAY I AN October sun as warm as June, with lights and an air to make the illusion complete — this summer in mid-October had borne a message to every open-air idler in Constantinople. Others besides an American ambassador and his suite had listened to the voices, — to that choir invis ible, — raining their song down from the pure sky- spaces. The crowd, in a word, that had gathered about the steamboat landing to buy tickets for Eyoub, we found unpleasantly numerous. There was that other crowd — that living bridge of human shapes that links together all the live-long day the shores of Pera and Stamboul — this one was massed behind our backs. Its rustle and motion were repeated below our feet, wherever the waters of the Horn rolled, adorably blue and fathomless. Out of the hundreds of throats shouting upward from the crinkled waters their persuasive appeals, one there was that caught both ear and eye. " I take you in caique, as quick as light to Scutari, to Seven Towers, to Prince's Islands." This particular boat man's violet shirt went uncommonly well with his 235 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Greek blue eyes and his lacquer-coloured skin. These well-arranged contrasts provoked an instant's conflict. Was this our plan for the day, the best of all plans ? If so, why did this brilliant little picture dancing be low jostle my serenity ? Why did scarlet cushions, set upon shining yellow seats — why did pink and blue and purple traceried ornamentation on a boat's sides — why did a violet, blue-eyed boatman in a well-chosen shirt, — suddenly look supremely attractive ? A pro phet's mosque and the sacred sword of the Prophet ; a Christian college ; a breakfast of diplomats set amid the gardens of Therapia ; even the promised howl of wild Dervishes as a finish to the day's entertain ment — what were these as weighed against the rap ture of being afloat in an open boat between the two wondrous blues ? On such a day, the air breathed upon the face of conviction, to mock it with the light scorn of con tempt for all fixed conclusions, moral or otherwise. Beneath such a sky, enfolded thus in such exquisite, caressive warmth, there seemed to be one thing of supreme importance. Live ! live to the uttermost ! open every pore and sense, and fill both body and soul with the wine of life ! Earth, air, sky, water shouted these things in your ears. That which was determining the character of the answer was the crowd about us. The close, dense, packed crowd of Turks in loose, ill-fitting coats and scarlet fezes ; of negresses with filthy white veils above whose tattered edges the glowing African eyes roamed wide and far, every turn showing the ivory-whites of 236 The Palace of Belisarius IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN their setting; of groups of showy Albanians in their blues and gold ; of tattered vendors, carrying their wares to inland markets; and of the group, above all others, that riveted the eye, — the group centring about the correctly attired figure of the American ambassador, whose simple morning coat and black tie, whose col lected repose and air of command, were the dress and the bearing of one of the ruling race. All of this crowd must wait, must stand wedged in, upon rickety stairs and treacherously loose planks. For the Constantinople steamboat companies are not, as yet, consumed with that pride to surpass their com petitors, which might be a warrantable virtue, you think, as your feet slip and turn on the worm-eaten landing. You are pushed along, up still another tilting stair, by the rags behind you, wrapping the human shapes ; again you stand and wait, hot now, yet uncomplaining, — hot and uncomplaining as the crowds that have gathered here, and those that will continue to gather until some day, when rags and decorations, fezes and veils, will be precipitated below into the laugh ing waters. After due time the same loose-jointed stair way and landing will be negligently rebuilt ; for that which has been good enough for travelling Mussul mans, for some fifty years, will surely be found of equal efficiency for a century or more to come ; such will be the laissez-aller system of reasoning, born of these delicious Eastern skies and of the lazy Oriental busi ness methods. Suddenly, out of the crowd aslant upon the steps, a voice caught the ear. 237 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN " Have mercy ! Oh, have mercy ! A piastre ! " The voice was soft. It was one that had seductive notes in its rich gamut. Its sweetness was the more appealing because of the surprising nearness of the speaker. The owner of the voice, a girl, had known how to crowd her way in toward the foreign group ; she stood at our elbows. Her single garment, a ragged calico slip, was gathered about her with an Eastern grace. She fronted our glance with a beggar's effrontery. The slim, lissome outlines of a perfectly modelled figure, meanwhile, were all but fully revealed. As she slid, worming herself in and out of the crowd, several quite inconvenient disclosures were made. But the proprieties, it appeared, were being most cor rectly respected. Across her mouth and chin, the beggar maid held the tattered remnant of a smudgy white yaskmak. Her henna-tipped fingers — dyed to the very extreme of fashion, as far as the second finger-joint — further made up for all other deficiencies in costume. The henna-tipped fingers had at their command a variety of illustrative gestures. With a motion whose deft grace had been caught from thousands of dead- and-gone Eastern ancestors, this spawn of the Galata docks made known to at least one head of a Christian household his duty toward those in all countries whom we have ever with us. "Ah! You — you have plenty — plenty money, you should give a little, only a little ! " Then she waited, for she had caught her audience. Her climax was to complete its capture. " You give something, 238 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN little, and may vour princess wife go to Paradise ! " The lips that thus framed the chief of all Moslem blessings meted out to women, smiled triumphantly over black teeth. The henna-tipped fingers were then waved caressingly toward the wrong wife. Palm upper most the hand was outspread for the expected eleemosy nary shower. The child's mistake in correct conjugal assortment was the finishing coup that made every male hand, amid the laughter, seek his store of pennies. The laughter was echoed, from the water below, by an old man and a lad. The two had taken in the scene, along with a leisurely eating of a leek and a fig. Lying flat upon their open boat, they were par taking of their classic meal under the conviction it was breakfast. A quick, sudden splashing of the water made the wide boat rock. The two lying on their hands, pillowed thus, were content to be rocked, along with their craft. The swirl of a falling body whizzing its way downward was watched by both loungers with imperturbable calm. The falling body was that of the beggar-maid who had slipped from the bridge to her mates' sides. Into the hand of the older man all her pennies were poured. The laughter — as these were counted — came silently, the shoulders shook with inward joy. The leek and the fig were abandoned, on the instant. Both the man and the boy were presently at their oars. The girl, meanwhile, re-adjusted her draperies with the air of one who had made a public success. " On that they will live for a week, if the old man does not drink too much rakif murmured our guide, with an unmistak- 239 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN able accent of regret in his tone. " Why waste good money on such as these ? " was the unuttered ending of his sentence. No act of life seemed mistaken under a. sun that was turning a world into gold. Once we were amid- stream, the glory of the day burst as a fresh wonder upon the eye. The mosques aloft upon the hills were white as snow. Their minarets were crystal spirals, luminous as torches of light. The blues ofthe Horn goaded the shores to do their utmost, and apt classical quotations came to the lips the easier, since even Baedeker has learned to quote Procopius. " The Horn," the grave Greek tells you, " is indeed always calm, and never crested into waves, as though a bar rier were placed there to the billows, and all storms were shut out from thence, through reverence of the city ; and the whole of it is a harbour so that when a ship is moored there the stern rests on the sea, and the bows on the land, as though the two ele ments contended with one another, to see which of them could be of greater service to the city." Of those other human barriers that have been raised again and again, against the Greek, Roman, Italian, Moslem, Russian, and English foes, of those who have coveted or captured this wondrous harbour and its shores, — of the long history of these, the guide books give you the usual unenlivening record. As you slip along, across your glorious, watery path way, over the liquid, turquoise floor, you will do your own thinking out of the scenes set before and above you. 240 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Gradually, insensibly, the great forces that have been massed on the hilltops will reform before your mental vision. The light puffs of the caressive winds will seem to be full of spirits, of the gallant, ad venturous human spirits, incarnate once in bone and muscle. All those millions of dead-and-gone heroes, Jewish Houses in Stamboul born of Athenian, Roman, Jewish, French, English, and Italian mothers, will gather thick as the motes in the sunbeams, and the- shores will be starred with story of gallant strife and of wonder-moving adventure. The two shores of the Horn, like the strophe and antistrophe of a Greek chorus, voice the long, historic tragedy fought out across the blue inlet. More truth fully than the banks and hillslopes of its more splendid 16 241 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN rival, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn has retained its earlier Eastern character. The cities and villages that come to a finish, along its blue rim, have the cas ual, improvised air of those who live in their wooden houses as they did, centuries ago, in their tents. The brown and grey masses aslope upon the hill sides — masses of grey roofs and tinted wall surfaces — have the look of as many encampments. Separate, detached, these suburban dwellings seem rather pitched between the tree-boughs than builded for a long to morrow. Yet certain of the loose, rootless-looking buildings have been here, lining the Horn, for long centuries. Yonder, across the Stamboul shore, to the right of the outer bridge, beyond the dancing boats of the fishermen's quarter, rises the Jewish quarter of Stam boul. This particular quarter has been Jewish since before the time Constantine decided the city should be Christian. Its few stone-built Byzantine houses are still there to tell you, with their strong, incrustable look of tenacity, that when the Crusaders stormed the great tower across the way — the Genoese Tower — they were there, erect on their stone foundations. Jewish eyes looked out upon the Crusaders, when the chain was quickly lowered — the chain that was always dropped across the channel in time of war. When that famous crusading feat was performed, those tooth- worked cornices and round arched windows were filled with trembling house-owners. These Jewish houses have outlived that attack and how many others ! The millions of Jews that have peopled those houses have 242 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN not been idle, even when dead. They have created a city oftheir own. Yonder, on the heights adjoining Ok-Meidan, there lies a vast and desolate Golgotha, — a cemetery whose glistening marble tombstones spread far and wide. Even in death, the Jew must strive to. oust the heathen, be he Turk or Christian. As on and on the boat glides, the sights upon the two shores will grow and thicken. As you sit at your ease, letting the warm sun rays clothe you, with the light puffs of winds wafting the perfumes of near gardens — and other perfumes not of gardens — across the brightly lit decks ; as you listen to the voice of Greek and Turk, of Christian and Russian, all inextric ably mixed in the chorus of tongues going up from the deck of the ship ; as in a semi-dream, you will find yourself listening to those other voices from the shores it has taken the long centuries to deaden, many of which are even now insistently alive. When, on Phanar Hill, on the heights of Stamboul, the Greek quarter is outlined to your asking eyes, and you look forth on more brown and grey-brown masses, — dwellings that droop from Phanar Hill — these will tell you the Greeks, their owners, were here before the Jews. They were here to watch the great Roman build a city from out of the ruins of that other one, left as a warning to those who had failed to call Severus emperor. The Greeks are here still to smile at the staring into the blue sky spaces of the miles upon miles of the monster yellow walls Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian built to guard their mil lions of subjects. 243 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Alone of all the Greeks their gods have disap peared. And yet not wholly dead are all of these. The paganism of the Greek ritual embalms many of the older Greek myths ; and that lovely divinity who roamed from Egypt to Greece might still recognise some of her mysterious rites in the worship paid to the Holy Mother with the child Jesus in her arms. Still active, puissant, sinister, is that side of the Greek spirit that lost Greece to the world. Within the grey and brown masses above us — masses the sun is turning into mansions of beauty — this restless Greek spirit still lives, still moves in its dark ways, still goes abroad to spin about its hated ruler, the Turk, its en tangling web of intrigue and conspiracy. The in defatigable spinner of all Greek plots, the Greek patriach, lives securely within his Episcopal palace. Up yonder, upon the hillslope, Russia's busiest agent and closer friend keeps his semi-royal state. Will the Levantine Greek be here to watch other conquerors enter the blue waters ? Or will the Sons of the Faith ful have a renascence oftheir old warlike spirit? Will they learn a lesson from their Russian foe, and mete out to Jew and Greek alike the harsh yet life-saving sentence Russia, with remorseless rigour, but re cently read out to every Jew within her empire ? Across the wonder of the blue Horn the drama and tragedy of contending political forces are as rife, as when in Justinian's ears there rang the threatening shouts of " The Blues " from the Hippodrome. Twenty-six years ago when the magnificence of the Ceremony of Investiture swept these waters, 244 The Greek Patriarch IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN did the spinner of webs, in his Patriarchate upon the hillslope, already see in his mind's eye the havoc and loss his clever spinning, out among the hills of Bul garia, the plains of Servia, the fastnesses of Monte negro, and the slopes of Armenia, would bring to the young ruler going up to receive the sword of the Prophet? In his white and gold boat, with its twenty-eight oarsmen, the young Abdul Hamid II went forth, in 1876, from the green and gold portals ofthe Palace of Dolma Baghcheh. On a raised dais of cloth-of-gold the new Sultan sat immobile as an Egyptian King engraven on marble. Behind him, his ministers and court, in their flashing uniforms, filled the long flotilla of royal caiques that made a continuous line of gold from palace to bridge. Upon the shores, millions of throats, in nineteen different tongues, acclaimed the seated figure on its throne-like dais : " Vicar of God; " " Successor to the Prophet ; " A lem Penah, " Refuge of the World ; " Zil-ullah, " Shadow of God ; " and Padishah, " Father of all the Sovereigns of Earth." This thirty-fourth sovereign of the House of Osman — twenty-eighth in direct descent since the Conquest of Constantine's City — went up to the green vale of Eyoub, through the dark cypress-boughs, to the Prophet's mosque, there to be girded with the sword of Osman. The chief of the Mevlevi Dervishes clasped about the slim waist of the youthful ruler the sacred sword-belt, and with that investiture, anointed him Imam-ul-Muslemin — Pontiff of Mussulmans as well as Supreme Ruler. 247 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN None of the great multitude who hoarsened their glad throats with their reiterated acclamations ; none of the ministers who looked to the " King of Kings " for the performance of the usual miracles con fidently expected of those mounting new thrones ; and assuredly least of all, did the newly made ruler him self dream that in the stately Greek Patriarch, Tur key was to find her most unrelenting foe. The Prophet's mosque, at the far end of the stream, amid its grove of plane trees and cypresses, presently uprose white and silent. A thousand green boughs drank in the soft sunshine ; and a thousand lights played on the mosque's glittering wall-surfaces. The air was full of dancing midgets, sun-dusted. The song birds circled about the twin minarets as though wooing their rival, the Muezzin, to a trial of lark music. As no Giaour may enter the sacred enclosure, you must be content to watch the swirling birds, as you will be forced to limit your inspection to the contrasts pre sented by the pure, snowy wall-surfaces of the mosque and the living green of country trees. This mosque of the Prophet Mahomet elsewhere, in more incongruous surroundings, would please the eye with its noble glit tering squares, surmounted by the well-proportioned central domes and the encircling smaller semi-domes. The isolation of the temple, set in the midst of the sombre cypress groves, gives to the building an im mense distinction. One is sensibly impressed by the solemnity, by the grave majesty, with which nature and natural surroundings invest God's temples, when human utilitarian or desecrating contact is withheld. 248 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN To pass beyond the mosque to its cemetery was to enter a riant enclosure. The cemetery, in dreariest weather, must always, we thought, be gay. These festal tombs, set in their gilded railings, with their gorgeous, gold arabesques The Cemetery at Eyoub on blue, green, and pink coloured marble back grounds, were like unto jewels in rich settings. As brilliantly gold-decked a cemetery as this of Eyoub seemed to offer a premium on burial, and to make the fact of existence itself, indeed, appear to be but the necessary detail inevitable to the attainment of carnal extinction as festally commemorated. Each one of the white and gold, and of the blue and gold head stones turned its head with a semi-conscious, reassur- 249 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ing air, as if to announce to you it was in the losing of life alone one might hope to find an eternal gaiety. Year after year the grass grows bright and brighter about these brilliant tombs. More and more Pashas, Effendis, and Beys relax their hold on their varied lives lived out in musk-scented haremliks, or in sad, vast provincial wildernesses, or in the crowded, intrigue- webbed corridors of the Court Palace, to come here, within Death's Acre, to lie still for ever more beneath the fez-cut marble slabs. Even in death, the last final sweets of conscious distinction is theirs ; for it is not given to all to mingle bones and dust with those of chief eunuchs, of Grand Viziers, of Sheikhs-ul-Islams, and with the royal remains of Sultans' wives and their sons. Beneath their bloom, tombs and mosque wait on. Year after year the spring floods the wide, open coun try with its riot of bud and blossom. The looming hills yonder grow green only to turn once more to brown. The lark, singing as he soars, shivering for very joy as he mounts zenithwards, presages summer and gladness to all the beauteous outlook as his folded wings will as surely herald the frosty breath of winter. Yet season after season, tombs and mosque wait on. For to these marbles, time brings all things. More white and gold caiques will swim the blue Horn ; other Sultans will walk between the plane trees to go up to the girding of the sword ; and with the dawn of new reigns, the pulsing hopes of more millions of subjects will leap hot and tremulous, even as the bones and dust beneath the gilded tombs hope to leap at the 250 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN sounding blast of resurrection, blown from Israfil's trumpet. II It was at the turning ofthe boat that the splendour of the vernal state, in which was set this saints' mosque, was completely revealed. The piling up of the green hills had a royal swing, one that carried the eye on and on to the sweep ofthe paling blues ofthe Horn. Could we have followed the curve, rounding beneath the droop of the hills, in time we should have come to the waters of the two famous streams that feed it, — to the Ali Bey Su, and to that yet more delectable river, Kiat Khaneh Su. These now innocent- featured rivers were the two whelps ofthe oracle, Cydaris and Barbysus. Classic sites or their associated terrors bring, apparently, no meaning to modern Turkish femininity ; for it is upon the shores of one of these fearsome streams all the lovely woman- world of Stamboul, of Scutari, of Pera, and of all the Bosphorus, gather, Friday after Friday, to woo new experience, to sit apart or in groups, to taste the rap ture of fresh blowing airs, the cool of green bloom, and to feel the sweet, fierce heat of love reblown upon the soul through the strains of the love-songs of wan dering Persian players. Of these Sweet Waters of Europe, presumably, no one of the thousands of veiled beauties who haunt those famous meadows, or those who gaze at the rival whiteness of the swans' necks, — as the snowy argosies float from shore to shore, — no one of these open-air loungers have ever 251 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN heard, doubtless, that their al fresco pleasure-ground was once a symbol of terror; as no one of the rude grape-growers or simple farmers tilling the vineyards and gardens across the hills to the West, on the plains of Troy, not so very far away, where four cities lie buried, are given to thinking over-much of the unsuspected fact that the chief riches of their soil lie in its being mingled with the dust of Achilles. The white turbans of fishermen, in tossing caiques, brought our eyes back to our own waters. Above the darting boats, what a frieze was that against the sky line ! Justinian's walls carved their yellow stretches across the blue with as endless lines as the hills they girdled. The blue eyes of the sky looked, also, through the arched windows of Belisarius's Palace, as though a Byzantine Palace in ruins were the setting they had waited for, knowing Time and Eternity were their trusty servants. The exceeding quiet about us seemed to woo time to do its worst. And the worst all the havoc of succeeding empires had wrought was to hang aloft sun-dusted bastions ; to make brown ruins glorious with blue sky mosaics ; to crown the seven hills Constantine had sealed as his with his Christian temples, magnificent anew with the great Mosques of the Prophet ; and what neither tottering thrones nor lost empires had power to stop was the puissant, renascent life of nature that quivered in the near tree boughs, that twinkled in the light of a woman's eye, as she swept her babe to shoulder height ere she boarded the boat, and that throbbed and soared in wild barbaric African song from the tuneful throat of 252 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN a negro oarsman, as he bent now forward, now back ward, over his long oar. Both shores and water were aswarm with life. The country quiet about us made the human stir the more poignantly significant. It became a matter of per sonal gain or loss whether the tall, cone-turbaned, Howling Dervish, seated below the gang-plank, as mute and unexplosive as any well-behaved Christian, was to leave us at the next village, or whether he would push on as far as the Bridge, and further yet, on to Scutari, — whether, in a word, he would be among those who were to howl for us, and to their own complete satisfaction, some four or five hours later, at the end of our long day. As we swung amid-stream, from the worm-eaten docks of the brown villages, veiled shapes continued their incessant staggering from the curtained recess, sacred to women, to the gang-plank, there to crouch and clutch, to be in readiness a good half-hour before any possible stopping. Other pink, yellow, green and cinnamon draped figures crowded past the male groups on deck ; each in turn lifted, unsteadily, the sail-cloth curtain that separated one and all — women-born — from the defilement of promiscuity. Along with the stumbling women shapes, went the huge bundles grasped by slaves' arms. All things feminine, ne- gresses and veiled ladies, babies and their nurses, shuffled toward the curtain. These seemed indeed no less marketable as bundles, than those enwrapping grapes, apples, pears, the coffee bags, and the market baskets that were passed in and under, and again were 253 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN passed out of the sacred protection yielded by a bit of soiled canvas. One passenger was making her way toward the cur tain with infinite difficulty. To stumble across a crowded deck, when heavily veiled, may not bring a worse disaster than to collide with the inanimate. To pick one's way through the maze of a deck filled with merchants, with officer's swords, and with a party of Giaours who, sitting wide, and in much space, are yet protected by a Some One from the Palace in uniform, — to pick one's way, I say, past such a crowd, when one is blind, and one must substitute a stick for eyes, this is indeed not easy. The woman was very old. She had the skin and wrinkles witches grow. Her rags were shreds and patches only a witch could have forced, magically, to hang together upon such a collection of bones. Such was the filth of the ragged outfit, one needed no optical proof to assure one the withered shape was not the only creature alive within the rags. Yet the blind old hag might have been beauty in choicest raiment. For there came to her, in her moment of trouble, the timely courtesy old age in filth and vermin-covered rags receives, as a rule, only in fairy-tales. As she passed between the scant pas sage-way made by our seated figures, her stick played her false. It slipped on a bit of the deck's iron ; the old hands trembled as they were locked in a helpless clasp. She need not have troubled, for beneath the shaking elbow there was instantly swept a firm hand. Mustafa Bey happened to be in the midst of some 254 u IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN talk with His Excellency, but he finished his sentence, he even began another, altogether unconscious, all the while, that elsewhere, even in certain Christian coun tries, blind old age, when vermin-covered and ragged- clothed, is not always escorted to its appointed place of safety by smart officers in trig uniforms. The curtain was lifted till the hag was safely beyond it. Then her stick was quietly placed in her outstretched hand. And neither beggar nor Imperial aide-de camp seemed in the least aware of any unusual act of life having transpired. According to Moslem rules of life indeed, the incident was as commonplace as any other act prompted by polite breeding. It is such traits as these that win you to take fresh views of the Turk as he is at home and among his people, and not as we Westerners accept him — through the snapshot presentments offered us by the hand of ignorance or of prejudice. Ill An hour later the government launch, we found, was making merry with that part of the Bosphorus that never is still — close to the Top-Khaneh quais. The swift roll of the wheels of the Imperial carriages had told every passer-by, even the slowest of bullocks along the Pera thoroughfares, that they were late for some particular function. Yet the breakfast that was being spread for us at Therapia must continue to wait, and for a good hour or more. There was the usual crowd of loafing marines 255 sx IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN enrolled in the corps of the professional marine leisure class, to see the la,unch make her start. The attitudes assumed by this squad of idlers were those common to such the world over. Tattered turbans or fezes, and ragged trousers with baggy seats, fail to impart to a Moslem water-rat an air superior to his brother who lounges away his existence on the quais of Bou- Entrance to the Black Sea logne or Havre, in a ragged jersey, and in a beret in mourning for its lost colour. The " launch " slipped out of its moorings with no help from the Moslem on-lookers. As His Excellency took his seat in the wicker chair on the white deck, the manners of these professional idlers were proved, however, to be above reproach. They salaamed to the most distant fez. And that was the beginning of much salaaming. Amid-stream, the surprises of our noon-day be- 256 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN gan at the very beginning. The rulings of a strin gent etiquette confronted us ere we had made good headway. " There goes the Russian ambassador, " gravely announced the charge-d'affaires. He as gravely arose, bowed to the empty air and to the spaces of the opposite shore. After his low bow he presently re seated himself. The Russian launch passed us, a good bit to the westward, on its way to Stamboul. "Ah — h! It is the Swedish First Secretary." A swift yawl-rigged yacht swung close to our gunwales. Its colours were dipped. From its deck and its crim son circle of chairs a gentleman arose, faced our ambassador and charge-d'affaires, bowed with a great emphasis of civility, waiting, hat in hand, until the bows from our own deck had been delivered, and then as quietly reseated himself. To other trig crafts — to launches, yachts, yawls, and also to gunboats innumer able — were our own colours dipped, and were hats raised. Again and again certain other silent figures saluted, from distant decks, with equal grace and courtesy. This was the beginning of going back to the little " great world " as it is to be seen at Therapia. These solemn social rites made the trip up the Bos phorus seem no mere pleasure expedition, but rather a ceremony of some sort, one of semi-state impor tance. One unconsciously took the attitude of the conventional social parade, of its rigidity and correct ness, and of its listless indifference to things and ob jects outside its own particular world. The shores 17 257 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN were surveyed with a lessened pressure of interest ; for the talk of those seated within the wicker chairs was of one's own nearer world, or of worlds that touched it. From a critical survey of kings and kingdoms, we had returned to the criticism of that with which we felt ourselves to be intimately familiar — to review ing the successes and the mistakes that crowd the re mote and nearer historic shores of our own land and people, and to the more interesting personal inter change of that harmless gossip without which society would die of inanition. For, indeed, how could we endure existence unless we could announce to each other the over-prolonged absence of certain husbands, or the altogether scandalous, but extraordinary at tractions ofthe wives thus deserted ; of those hearts that had been broken last year, to be wondrously healed by the oldest of all cures, that of substitution, only yester day ; of who had snubbed and been snubbed ; of who was most in social demand and those least desired ; of what women were de la derniere volee, and who would never be of any winged flight, morally or socially ; who promised to " go far " in the great worlds of un crowned queens or of diplomacy, and who had already suffered the fate of surviving themselves, and been " dropped " into the bottomless abyss reserved for lost society souls. Without such a review of our own world, and our own wise arrangement of its irregular ities, life would lack its most delectable ingredient. The deck of a yacht, or of a steam-launch, with a fine air blowing straight from the Black Sea; with the pleasing but not disturbing accessories of 258 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN curiously old Turkish houses set amid great gardens and trees ; of pomegranates suddenly bursting, red, in tense, upon the eye, to colour the deeper one's out raged sense of sin, committed by one's dearest and nearest; with the slow moving trail of pack-mules crossing hillslopes, to make one turn insensibly to pastoral imagery ; and with magnificent marble palaces, set against sky and mountain distances, to lure one to an occasional breadth of sympathetic ad miring outlook, of either a Turkish or of a Christian world, — the deck of a boat, steaming past such shores proved as well adapted to such familiar innocuous conversation as have innumerable French salons and American drawing-rooms. The oldest of worlds drops its years when a new world makes it its own. That is precisely what the diplomatic corps have done with Therapia. Here the Turkish frontier is passed ; one enters a new old-world, — the world as it has been made by diplomats. Therapia, we found as we neared its shores, was a bit of Europe set in a Turkish frame. The water-life announced this change of social conditions before our landing. Smart gigs, brilliantly upholstered caiques and modern row-boats, as they darted in among tidy yachts and speckless government launches, were seen to be graced with shapes more familiar at Henley, and " on the river " at Cookham, than in a Turkish classic strait. The fair, fresh skin, and an aureole of blond tresses beneath a picture-hat with many feathers, was the first embodiment presented to our eyes of this far-away world. The lady had brought her English 259 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN art of reclining, with finished, provocative grace amid carefully selected pillows, along with her Gains borough hat and her polished speech. "Shall you be at the Tomb this evening ? " was called across our bows, from the boat scudding away to the left. " Yes, I '11 call at four," was the answer from a caique rower in tennis flannels, with a stroke that sent his boat flying, as the muscular English oarsman rose to give us a fuller view of his limpid blue eyes, of his clipped curls, of his shapely head, and of his nobly modelled shoulders. "It's a picnic that's on for to-night, at Joshua's Tomb, by moonlight. It 's great up there — when the moon is out — quite the best spot anywheres about," was the information contributed by our charge- d'affaires, as his own blue eyes went wandering back ward, not to rounded mountain slope, but to the blond head beneath the great hat rising above purple cushions. Joshua's entrance upon the scene had been, to phrase our surprise politely, altogether unexpected. To learn that the tomb of as venerable a prophet should be the chosen site by the beau monde for its nocturnal gatherings seemed to mock the exquisite gallantry of a certain grand Seigneur of the eighteenth century. " Ne la regardez pas tant, ma chere, je ne puis vous la donner," was that most touching of lover's speeches made by Lord Albemarle when he caught his Lolotte looking fixedly at a star. The world of Therapia, however, denies itself nothing. As one heard the recital of the water fetes, the 260 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN picnics, the garden-parties, cotillions, flower-parades, tennis and polo matches, one learned the interesting fact that all Constantinople, all the hills and slopes of the Bosphorus, as well as the bright beaches and deep forest glades of Prince's Islands, all these, it was made quite clear, were the peculiar and entirely private pos sessions of this Therapian world. As we listened to the passing in review of the various picnics, and to the cotillions given by every sort of light — by candle, electric, lantern, and moonlight or dawn light ; to the excursions, to the innumerable garden-parties and the dinners whose mets put the climates of the whole world to outrage the seasons — parties and dinners given and eaten in every picturesque setting from the shores of the Black Sea to the Dardanelles — the true import and meaning of time's preservation of the beauty and antiquity decking these classic shores was made entirely obvious. This world that felt itself to be in exile must have its games, both of diplomacy as well as of the heart and muscles, at least perfectly set. Infinite variety of background must be a substitute for the wonted changeful excitements of a circle that, in Hobart Pasha's classic phrase knows itself to be " Sacred," and yet dreads the full knowledge of its elect exclusive- ness and isolation. Ashore, the villas and " Embassy palaces " were found to be the dwellings of cosmopolitans. The roofs and walls that sheltered these kings of diplo macy in the faraway exile of Therapia, were roofs and wall surfaces one may see on the banks of the Thames, the Rhine, the Danube, or the Hudson. 261 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Across the tiny bay the white marbles of the Russian Embassy made the rococo villas nesting in the nearer gardens seem the more flauntingly tasteless. Wicker chairs and English tea-tables were exotics amid Eas tern veranda draperies, and the dulled gorgeousness of immense Turkish carpets. The gardens surrounding the Embassy and ministerial dwellings told you, in their flower language of Dutch tulips, of homely flock and marigold patches, the taste of those who either now, or formerly, had thus set before them reminders oftheir Dutch or English homes. Paradise though Therapia seems to eyes unsated with its beauty, it is a paradise from which, apparently, its world willingly enough flees. At breakfast, to mention a well-known ambassador or minister was only to learn of his absence. All the diplomatic world it appeared, or a large part of it, was " on leave." Aix-les-Bains, Vichy, Ostend, Wiesbaden — the favourite European watering-places — were per forming the miracle of their cures, medicinal as well as social, to worn or wearied diplomats. The fate of nations was in abeyance ; the rulers of their destinies were taking the waters. Diminished in point of numbers, as is this " Sacred circle " at Therapia, in the summer and early autum nal season, other intensities than those of diplomacy were kept alive among certain of those who remained at their posts. "Vous y etes?" were the words that announced, after the long breakfast, the opening of a more or less familiar scene. The lady's voice was as cosmopolitan 262 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN in tone as the character of her beauty was betraying. There was no mistaking the nationality of one whose complexion was as exquisite as her hands and feet were models of delicate perfection. The lady was standing close to a strange-featured vine. The vines were clinging to the great columns of a veranda. The arms ot the human flower, in virginal muslins, were clasped about both vines and columns. The spark ling blue orbs were bent to a man's shape, standing immediately below, on the greensward. And the man was looking at the eyes above him as he might at an image of fate. " You 're not in it ? You 're not going? Then the thing will be a failure. Je n' irais pas, non plus ! " And neither of the figures stirred. They were saying all the rest, all that neither needed to say, through their eyes. That particular flirtation, I concluded, as we passed rapidly onward, needed no help whatever from either the picturesque setting of a Prophet's Tomb, or the tender light of an October moon ; it had reached the stage of drama. IV A cool, high sitting-room, set above an immense outlook ; the ruins of Mahomet the Conqueror's great towers of Rumili-Hissar as the setting to one prospect, above which, to the left, towered the walls of the American College ; the walls of the latter, as intact as the stones of the Moslem Fortress, were seen to be picturesquely ragged and torn ; and, within this high- hung drawing-room the low bookcases, the prints, 263 i IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN and tender-toned engravings, the flower-vases set against snowy window-curtains, — these were here to tell you that in the home of the President of Robert College you would be in a world as far removed from the world of Therapia as was this room itself; for the room was a bit of American home-life, set within the immensity of its Turkish outlook. From out the green cool of the cosey interior, we picked our way across shiney gravel paths, between brilliant, symmetrically laid flower beds, to mount the College steps. His Excellency had his duty before him, as he gravely went onward. All those hurrying shapes and eager faces, pressing through hall-ways and lecture- rooms, — faces whose young, curious eyes shot swift side glances at the tall central figure, moving compos edly upward, docilely following their President, — each and every one of these Montenegrins, Servians, Bul garians, Albanians, Armenians, Syrians, Jews, and Greeks, whose diverse nationalities make Robert Col lege a veritable Babel of tongues, — these hurrying students were in haste to get to their places, in the great Hall. The audience that faced our Ambassador, when his time came to speak, was such a gathering as other generals have had before them, from Darius and Alexander to Napoleon, when, to win great battles among mixed Eastern peoples, they were forced to recruit their armies with the material the East offered. The bright, the piercing Jewish and Armenian eyes were fixed with a great intensity of interest upon the 264 g .xi yy - K ^s :- 'rCf :'.". X ig 4 : X : 7JV T#£ PALACES OF THE SULTAN standing figure of His Excellency ; the passionate gaze of the Bulgarian was rained upon this figure ; the Montenegrin fixed it with his glowing depth of glance, as the sadder-eyed Syrian seemed to ask of it to yield up its secret of power and success. Each and all of these ardent-browed students had the question that filled their young souls written upon the full crimson of their half-open lips. Was it indeed in colleges such as this, in such courses of study, through the speak ing of the English tongue, that one alone may grow to be the general of an army, a true captain of in dustry, a distinguished ambassador, and an orator whose words came as easily as though they were read from a book ? Was the incomparable ease and the finish ofthe polished sentences, — were these arts that could be learned when one became truly skilled in the use of English, and learned through foreign tongues ? Eager-eyed, intent, with bent bodies and devouring gaze, these hundreds of students hung upon the words of His Excellency as though these were to furnish the clue to the great problems oftheir lives. Their quick humour was ripe, also, for the point of the apt story, with its American appositeness ; their knowledge ofthe English classics was triumphantly tested by their round of applause at the completion of a Shakesperian quo tation ; and the demonstration of their rapture was unmistakable as, the climax reached, the part America and American philanthropy had played in the greatest of all problems, that of education, was ringingly voiced. The little speech had been short. It was a model for such speeches to those of us who have suffered 267 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN from others that were not short. The American brevity of wit, the aptness of quotation, and the forceful, practical common-sense, — the speech ofthe day had had all of these qualities. The students had answered it as students do when their hot young souls have been reached and thrilled. Their cheers shook the polished rafters, and they rang on and on, as down between their lines, between shouting throats and flashing eyes, the now entirely composed figure of His Excellency moved toward the open door. The fire of the orator was gone out of him ; he had returned to the calm manner of the rulers across the seas. "And the Turks? are there as many Turks as there are Armenians and Greeks ? " I had ventured the question, almost at the last. We had swept down wards to the narrow spaces of the garden beds. The talk had been of the sixteen nationalities ofthe students assembled, of all save one. " We have a few, a very few Turks," the President slowly replied. " But they rarely or ever graduate," was the answer of this man of truth. Of the true causes of this absence not one of the Turks in all Constantinople will tell you, any more than, a half-hour later, the bronze depths of the fathomless Turkish eyes, lifted from row-boats — as these latter parted to let us slip onward — revealed the least interest or curiosity in the solemn social rites once again interchanged between the foreign yachts. The Turks, Persians, Greeks, and Armenians, seated in their swift caiques, looked upon the strange saluta tions as they might upon the antics of an inferior race. 26S ZJV 777 £ PALACES OF THE SULTAN Their dark eyes expressed nothing, not even the desire to understand. The Bosphorus is full of strange sights, as it is of strange people and strange temples. Why trouble to ask one's mind questions about things that make no manner of difference ? To-day it is the for eign ways of Franks, Americans, English, Swedes, or Germans. To-morrow it may be the less strange ways ofthe Russian — and at closer quarters. Let us sleep and forget. Only Allah is great ! The great brown eyes reflect nothing of all this ; only the purple waters reflect their colours and the bright hues of the painted caiques. Upon the faces of the unveiled not a sign of what the lips were saying, or what the calm, thinking mind was meditating, was written. The face of a Turk is no mirror. It will tell you nothing — least of all what it thinks of your Giaour way of bowing and salaaming, or of your colleges or churches or schools called " The Missions." Another mysterious Eastern secret was to be with held from us. We were late. The gorgeous purple and orange sunset that was playing its chromatic in tensities of colour upon Stamboul told how much too late we were for the promised howling of the Der vishes at Scutari. The Dervishes were, indeed, long since done with their shouting. They were dining. Another week must roll by ere we might hope to look upon the ecstasies of their more spiritual trans ports. 269 Chapter XVIII THE CITIES OF SEVERUS, CONSTANTINE, AND JUSTINIAN I THE day will come when you will go forth to peer eagerly into the squalid, ill-smelling streets of the city, that again and again, across the Golden Horn, will rise resplendent as a torch of flame in the sunset hues. You will cross the great Bridge to Stamboul. You will push through thronged streets ; past strange sights already grown half familiar ; you will be oblivious to the dirt you know now to be inseparable from this Eastern beauty ; and you will be equally indifferent to the allurements of open mosque doors or bazaar- crowded shops. That which you have come to see is none of these. Your search is for the cities that are dead, for sites and stones once bristling with the life of millions, where now the living can muster but some thousands. Presently, after leaving the great mosque that stands at the head of the Bridge -- the Valideh-Sultan Mosque — you will be driven through the packed streets to a high, open, dusty space. The open space, 270 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN — wide as it is — you perceive, has but three objects standing within its long ellipse. Slowly you will be driven round and round each of these ; and it will be only after a certain time — only after a more or less assiduous study of the obelisk and the two columns, Bazaar; Washing Fountain, and Mosque and after measuring the shape and length of the space within which these three stand — that the true, the stupendous meaning of this site and of its upright, though defaced, obelisk and the rusty columns will be apprehended. Phantom-like, a great city will grow out of the dust in which you stand inch-thick. Although its outlines will melt more or less into pure conjecture, yet will its face take on at least something of its old beauty and 271 IN T77£ PALACES OF THE SULTAN colouring ; and more and more clearly will the en chantment of its gold-wrought draperies begin to float . before the mental vision. For such a reincarnation one must breathe upon the dust of ruins ; one must work the miracle of resur rection upon crumbling stones and the worn face of weather-stained sculptures. In this more or less shapeless, torn, and mangled city, a single column must reconstruct an epoch ; out of the dusty spaces of an open oblong one must recreate breathless mil lions ; through ruined arches one must imagine the watchful glitter in the eyes of dead Roman sentries, and in the sad forlornness of roofless palaces place the magnificence of Justinian and the dauntless, god-like heroism of Belisarius. The Byzantium Constantine and Justinian built, and that Procopius paints with such marvellous real ism, — any one of us may relive the life of that Byzan tine world and feel it, know it, indeed, as we read those illumined pages, to be no phantom world, but a world as near, as intimately familiar as the one in which we live out our own brief lives, — this city lies scattered far beyond the seven hills of Stamboul. To measure its vast limits you will wander far afield into country lanes, through grassy meadows, along deserted sea-beaches ; you must face miles and miles of cypress forests; and must pass from the shining Marmora shores to the liquid sapphires of the Golden Horn. When Constantine looked forth, in his turn, upon the beauty of this Thracian promontory, his clear mind saw that if Roman Eagles were to rule an Asian 272 IN T77£ PALACES OF THE SULTAN world, it was here the conquering standards must be planted. Yet this city of Constantine and of Justinian — one of whose chief centres lav here where your feet are standing — this city, old as it now seems to our eyes and sense, was modern to the Graeco-Roman world of Procopius. For beneath and within the roar and tumult of that excitable, busy, thronged By zantium, there lay hidden, ruined, the traces of yet another city, one that also had throbbed with fever ish life, had pulsed with adventure, and had tasted the bitter waters of adversity. Ofthe Acropolis, walls, town limits, of even the principal gates of this older Greek city Severus de stroyed in a fit of temper, — only to rebuild it when in cooler, saner mood — of this most ancient of all the cities of Byzantium, archaeologists talk with as serene and assured a tone as they will be quite certain to dis agree concerning all of the more important details. Out and beyond the walls of this Greek Byzantium there still lives, however, peopling the airy sky-spaces, a host of beautiful, of god-like shapes. The deeds and adventures of these unreal, yet very living shapes, have passed into your blood and into mine. We of this twentieth century are different from the people we should have been had none of those wondrous, half-real, half-mythical Greek heroes and heroines lived, loved, or wandered forth to these distant, semi- mythic seas and lands they had made classic before they became historic. Better than following sunken wall-surfaces is it to 18 273 IN T77£ PALACES OF THE SULTAN trace the fierce and flashing splendour of the Fleet of the Argonauts as they swept the seas below us ; as they sped their boats, through brightening weather, to the straits yonder that rolled before them like a meadow. On and on, far up beyond the stream we call the Bosphorus, the victorious Jason led his hero- laden vessels, past the rocking Symplegades, those treacherous, bluish rocks that smite and clash when the sea is all high in the wind. Closer to Grecian shores, those other Greeks are as immemorially alive, who, suitors of golden-haired Helen, wooed immortal fame and death also as the penalty of their lover's vow. Patroclus and Hector, as did Priam — as did Achilles — looked forth from the now marshy plains of Troy to the bleak Thracian coast ; above them towered, as it still soars aloft, the snowy-crested summit of Mont Ida. Love, like a " dancing psaltress," passes from the tent of Achilles, and his passion for the captive maiden Briseis, to the mad waters of the Hellespont yonder. Those waiting lips of Hero, that passion-pulsing frame of Leander, — how many millions of dead and gone women have likened their luckless fate to that immortal shape, to that embodiment of waiting, widowed maidenhood ? With such shapes and phantoms — with these the better-tempered, more realisable spirits of great poets' fancies, — with such are the shores and seas of that lost Trojan world peopled. The spirits — as spirits will — have loosened their hold in this the land of their imaginary exploits. They have flown abroad to 274 IN 7777i PALACES OF THE SULTAN work mysterious change in millions of dead and in vet unborn millions of men. The dim, mysterious truths, lisped as poems by the singing voice of genius, The Obelisk of Theodosius — these truths sing on. Homer, Hesiod, those im mortal bards have peopled our sky and filled our lives with god-like divinities. This distant glory, in our 275 IN' THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN day, is in nearer view. The achievements of gods are become the deeds of men. But it was those flashing fig ures in the sky that made men long to do their best, to climb to them, to bring the distant glory nearer. This mighty host it is, I for one must ever choose, when, in attempting to rebuild for you the phantom city, I strive to people it with those still living heroes, and all that host of lovely women on whose glorious breasts the world has " based its head," and gone forth comforted and stirred anew to fresh endeavour. II " In Constantinople, God had Santa Sophia, the Emperor the Sacred Palace, and the people had the Hippodrome." From the time of the rebuilding of the Greek city by Severus, to the epoch when the Greek gods were banished from their temples to be replaced by the worship of Jesus, there had swept the tidal changes of two centuries. Constantine touched his new capital with the magic-working hand of a great builder who was also a great emperor. His prophetic genius saw clearly that if his Byzantium — his own city of Con stantinople — was to be truly a great capital, one to strike with awe as well as to awaken the admiration of an Asiatic world, the new city must be as well equipped with impressive cast distinctions as with the classic masterpieces of art with which he filled his palaces, churches, hippodromes, baths and streets. Even a royal capital may be plebeian, if it be too new. 276 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN To give to the New Rome the last finishing touch of completeness, Constantine imported enough Roman aristocrats, and the aristocrats, in their turn, brought enough of their vices and tastes to take the new look from off the splendid, freshly glittering city. Obelisk in Hippodrome A forty days' continuous festivity was the baptism of the Eastern Rome. Of this city Constantine and his immediate successors built, there are still left frag ments of his great walls and their monster bastions ; there is the open ellipse of his Hippodrome, there are the great obelisk and the two columns to mark still the spina of its vast arena ; and there are also the Chifte-Hamman, the baths more recently discovered by Monsieur Texier. 277 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN You will pass a certain time in deciphering the mar vellously preserved features of the hundreds of faces looking out at you from the base of the obelisk. With this obelisk Thothmes III had seen fit to em bellish his own capital of Heliopolis. The Emperor Theodosius, in an African campaign, brought the trophy back with him, to see carved upon its base his own Imperial features, together with rows upon rows of dancers, courtiers, and guards. The dusty, greenish column beyond the obelisk, is begrimed with the dirt and dust of five-and-twenty centuries. As you begin to examine this column, you perceive its spirals take on the serpentine twists peculiar to ophidians. Then, presently, your pulse is stirred ; for you wonder if these three serpents' bodies can be indeed that famous serpent column whose lost bronzed heads formed the base for the golden tripod on which sat the priestesses of Apollo at the Delphic Oracle, when the sacred fumes mounted ! Then, though the heads are gone, and you see only a dull greenish column, your breath comes very quick indeed. You learn your conjecture was truth ; and you know and realise, as vour pulse bounds, you stand before one of the most extraordinarily interest ing of all human monuments. Just how the Delphic Column happened to stand on this the open At Meidan — "the horse market" of Stamboul — this mystery will be solved later by the greatest of all novels of adventure, by the plain facts of history. It is enough for you now, in search ofthe stir com municated by that delicate sensation coarsened by the 27S IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN name of sight-seeing — it is enough to stand thus, face-to-face, with as wondrous a monument. For antique Greece and its history are suddenly, miracu lously rescued, as from the land of myths ; Delphic priestesses in their white robes and golden fillets, swooning in prophetic trance, seem real as the woman shapes flitting noiselessly about in the bright sunlight, in the wide and dusty space. The other column, standing below, more to the southwestern end, marks still another epoch in this magic-working ellipse. This now disjointed, semi- crumbling column, was once the wonder that rivalled Rhodes. It marked, together with the other two marvels, the axle of that gigantic Hippodrome where the throng of 30,000 living spectators was scarcely more numerous than was the population in stone, of the thousands and thousands of statues adorning this colossal circus. Now you know indeed the truth con cerning this dusty oblong space ; it was the vast arena whereon were played those scenes and dramas that have changed the face of the world's history. Ill In the Constantinople of our own day, you will find God still owns Santa Sophia ; the great Emperor, dust though he be, still holds a shadowy rule over the Sacred Palace that is only a magnificent memory; and the people still own the Hippodrome; for the Hippodrome is as bare as your hand, save for its three wonder-moving monuments. 279 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Through the pages of Procopius these, the three chief centres of the Eastern Rome — of Justinian's Byzantium — become intensely real. One may look with the eyes of the author of his " Secret History," into the most hidden places of this antique world. Its acts, motives, ambitions, habits, dress, and its most secret thoughts — you may know the very heart and soul of that Byzantine society, from the ruling master minds of its two immortal parvenus, of Justinian and his Theodora, and also that of the great general, Beli sarius, down to the quarrelsome dregs of the plebs — all these mindS and souls will be as open a page as is the history of the later Bourbon Louis. To know this vanished world the better — even though the present recital must be of the briefest out line — let me sketch for you the career of three of its greatest, most influential rulers. The re-casting of that older mould of society becomes possible only as one learns something of its shaping forces. You realise its amazing nearness to your own life and period as you come the closer to its curious form of freedom, to its untamable spirit of adventure, and to the immense chances offered the individual whose courage and genius were equal to his opportunities. In the last years of the fifth century, three young Macedonian peasants left their home-mountains to seek their fortune. Their kit consisted of the classical sack of the wanderer, with its meagre store of pro visions. Thus equipped they set forth for Constanti nople. The three lads were fine fellows — vigorous and robust. Once within the capital they found no 280 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN difficulty in the world in enrolling themselves in the Imperial guard. In the Byzantine world of that day, there was prevalent a democratic spirit which we in our day would fain believe has been of our own in genious elaboration. The army in the Roman world — whether that world held its capital on the seven hills of Rome or on the seven hills of Constantino ple — for the man who enrolled himself in this army there was as great a chance for ruling that army, and through the army the great world of his time, as in our day a common workman may hope to rise to princely fortune. It is not the nature of men who change, nor is it opportunity, in the world's so-called progress. New names are given to new conditions — these but repeat the old experiments under more modern forms. One of the three lads was to test to the utmost the democratic spirit of his great Byzantine day. Justin's military courage and talent rushed him from officer to general, from general to senator. Commander-in- chief of the Imperial guard, when the Emperor Anastasius died in 518 — it needed only the accidental precipitation of a feeble intrigue to put Justin on the throne ofthe Caesars. The lad from the mountains of Macedonia had indeed done well. Justin did well, in his turn, for his family. Emperor though he was, he was still a big enough human being to be true to his earlier plebeian instincts. He was an aristocrat of feeling ; he was as loyal and kind to his own people as he was to his new subjects. There was a son of one of his sisters, living in an obscure Macedonian village, by name Flavius Petrus IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Sabbatius Justinianus, he whom the world has con tinued to call familiarly Justinian for some fourteen centuries. This youth was summoned by the uncle, then a general, to Constantinople. In that most magnificent city of that luxury-loving era of human development, Justinian found every door open to him. The peasant uncle had the adoration for learning common to intelligence and talent that has won a great place, and yet must blush before his inferiors, for want of an early training in the merest rudiment of knowledge. Justinian, the nephew, was to be edu cated on lines that should make others blush. Constantinople in the fifth century was what Rome had been in the second, what she was still, in all save her one lost glory of being the capital of the Roman Empire. The Constantinople ofthe youthful days of Justinian, as Charles Diehl so brilliantly depicts, was already an immense, a stupendously beautiful city. A million men and women filled its gay and gracious streets. Palaces, monasteries, gorgeous Pagan temples changed into Christian churches, new chapels and churches springing up in every street, colonnades crowded with statues almost as numerous as that of the living tide that ebbed and flowed about their base, houses blaz ing with mosaics, streets crowded with chariots, lictors, slaves, and visitors, — such was the city where the lux urious tastes of two luxury loving worlds, the East and the West, had met to be fused into such a spectacle ot splendour as has since remained the synonym of all magnificence. 282 Justinian IN T77£ PALACES OF THE SULTAN The two focal centres of this great world were the Hippodrome and the Sacred Palace. The Romans and the Byzantines had several pas sions in common. Their love of games drew them, perhaps, in as close touch as did their delight in mag nificence. The plebs ideal of life in Byzantium was reduced to a simple formula. All they asked of their rulers were bread and games. For the former, indeed, if need were, they might obligingly arrange matters with the economies of their dietetics, to delay the insistance of such demands. If the corn-fields of Egypt yielded a poor harvest, if the supply-fleet were unduly delayed, — a delay that made even Justinian tremble when he had succeeded to the throne, — the Byzantine crowds could manage to smile gaily, to laugh, and to shout, though stomachs were starving, provided, always, the great games went on. Justinian, in any age or country, would have played a great role. He possessed that rarest of human qualities in a ruler, — he thoroughly understood the character of his era. When, as the nephew of his peasant uncle, he ascended the throne, from whose steps his treacherous intrigues had removed all other rivals, he displayed, at the very beginning of his reign, those extraordinary qualities that permitted him at once to placate the aristocracy by his imperialism, the church by his zeal as devotee and his love of ecclesi astic grandeur, the army by his limitless desire of empire, and the populace by his knowledge of their longings and tastes. " There must be shows for the amusement of the people," was almost the very first 285 W f «Wi. 7/v~ 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of his Imperial dicta. His psychology went deeper. " That which is rarely seen, excites the greater delight and admiration." Shows, games, even the triumphal processions, whose most imposing effects were reserved for the criticism and admiration ofthe thirty thousand spectators massed in the Hippodrome, all ofthe more savage and brutal sports as well as the more regal magnificence of Imperial displays, — each and all of these were as carefully, as painstakingly arranged and considered, as though this mighty ruler of two worlds were a master stage-manager rather than the reformer and innovator, whose grasp of administration, civic, financial, ecclesiastic and military detail has made his reign as memorable as it was disastrous to Roman supremacy in its final influences. The centre of all the fierce life of that era was the open dusty space you now traverse, called, in the ver nacular ofthe present day, the At Meidan, "the horse show or horse-market" of Stamboul. The vast arena was overlooked by thousands upon thousands of breathless Byzantines, massed upon the converging stone seats of the immense amphitheatre. Gilded chariots have swept the spina of that open wind-blown site ; African lions, panthers, bears, and clowns, pan tomimes, acrobats, and dancing women have made breathing spaces between the fiercer excitements of mimic battles and naval combats that ended only with the close-drawn curtain of night. Seven days in suc cession would Byzantium fill the great amphitheatre, to sate a lust for sport so universal that even Proco- pius himself, no lover of frivolities, confessed that 2 86 \ \ IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN "life without the theatre and the Hippodrome was distinctly devoid of enjoyment." This rapture in shows on as vast a scale as that en joyed by the older worlds, is one we can scarcely hope rightly to estimate. So many of the beauteous acces sories have been lost to us ! The open-air splendour of sky draperies ; the marvellous promenade afforded by the upper stories of a great circus, and the outlook therefrom, such as one may still overlook, indeed, from the grass-grown Graeco-Roman theatre of Taor- mina, where the mountains and gorges of the Sicilian coast droop to give place to the lemon forests that gild the marine blues of the TEgean ; where the eye sweeps from low-lying, antique Greek towns to follow the grand outlines of Mount TEtna rising from deep sea purples to be lost in its soaring silver crown ; — it is only when one has trod so glorious a temple of the winds, that one can relive the sensations experi enced by Procopius, by Justinian, by Theodora or Belisarius, as these, in common with the lowest plebs of the city, thrilled to the glory of the great prospect that lay before them. Through colonnades wherein stood statues, — statues and masterpieces to collect which a whole world had been laid under contribution, — past the divine con tours of that statue of Helen, "whose half open mouth was like unto the calyx of a flower ; " she, " whose smile enraptured, whose deep eyes and whose enchanting body " made the senses swim, — it was through such a collection of gods and goddesses the men of that day took in the vast Thracian outlook, the amphitheatre 287 IN T777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of its hills and Asian coasts, its faery isles, its tur quoise seas and straits, and the glittering Byzantium below clothed, as was its Empress, in shining jewelled robes. All this was but a simple accessory to the pulse- stirring emotions evoked by the games going on with in the arena. IV It was in and out from the Hippodrome world that Justinian — himself the creature of circumstance — found the woman who was to share with him the throne of the Caesars. The story of the Empress Theodora's life places novels of adventure and historical romances in that inferior category works of fiction must accept as their doom, when the great maker of human dramas, when the real and the actual teach imagination its lesson of humility. As keeper of the bears in the great Hippodrome, the father of Theodora saw but one way of making the fortunes of his children : he obtained for them the same chances of showing off their beauty and tricks as were given to his brute beasts. An elder sister having successfully won her place on the boards of the amphi theatre, Theodora's childish cleverness in make-ups, and later, the extreme beauty of her face and form, soon placed the bear keeper's younger daughter among the play-going city's prime favourites. From the publicity of the circus to the more aris tocratic " petits soupers ; " from the furnishing to her 288 IN 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN world of gallants tableaux, whose indecencies we mod erns veil with the sonorous title of " living pictures ;" from a charity so universal, as the grave Gibbon pictu resquely assures us, " that all Byzantium had tasted of her favours ; " it was from these ascending degrees of experience that this extraordinary creature was to pass, at twenty or twenty-five, after an adventurous and disreputable tourney through Africa, in the train of a gubernatorial lover, that Theodora was to return to Byzantium to crown her life of adventure with the one that made her immortal. On her return to her native city, the great courtesan had hidden her momentary weariness of life and men, in a modest house, where, if only for variety, she had decreed her life should be decent and quiet. It was there Justinian met her. What the results of that meeting were to be, all the world knows. After the death of Justin and of his august spouse, Euphemia, when Justinian's firm hand reached forth to grasp the royal sceptre, when he went in all solemnity of state to Santa Sophia to be crowned, beside him stood the woman he loved. Upon her head as upon that of her parvenu spouse, the patriarch placed the crown of two empires. From the golden walls of Santa Sophia to the Im perial Tribune opening upon the vast ellipse of the amphitheatre, the two crowned rulers went forth, there to receive the acclamations of their loyal subjects. In the subsequent history of Theodora as Empress — as joint-ruler in the vast Empire her clever, un scrupulous but undeniably courageous hand helped Justinian to guide and control — it is not the Theo- 19 289 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN dora of Sardou's well-known and misleading tragedy we must accept as the true historic figure. Procopius presents to us an altogether different heroine from the one playing her great role in Sardou's drama. That more popularised figure of the vicious Empress lying in her lover's arms, as the populace sing ribald versions of her former notorious life ; whose hours of chosen relaxation were spent among the low favourites of her old circus days ; and whose tragic death by stran gulation in the arcades of the dungeon was arranged some sixteen years before it actually took place, as it was also prolonged to undue length to afford the greatest of all modern actresses the picturesque oppor tunities of a dramatic death, — this Theodora is the triumphant achievement of an imaginative playwright. The real Empress of Byzantium understood her world and played her great part with a grander art. The actress who had danced before the eyes of her future subjects ; the courtesan whose amours were as well-known as were the names of her lovers ; the woman whose brilliant intellect and whose surpassing beauty had won her a throne in the teeth of such a past, — this Theodora realised how royalty, to be respected even outwardly, must be magnificently housed ; that to strike and to hold the popular imagination, luxury must go hand in hand, in her court, with the rigours of an etiquette before which the proudest must kneel ; and that both to her hus band and ruler, as well as to her subjects, she must prove herself equal to every emergency, she must be brave when others were weak, fertile in invention when 290 The Empress Theodora and her Court ¦<( 7iV 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN the cleverest failed ; she must be always queen and Empress, in a word, and never courtesan or plebeian. To house so splendidly royal an Empress Justinian built the city of the Sacred Palace. The site of this Palace was not, as many suppose, on Seraglio Point. When Constantine built his earlier Palace he chose as its enceinte an immense space of ground between Santa Sophia and the Hippodrome, whose shores touched the Sea of Marmora. This Imperial collection of palaces was destroyed by fire. When Justinian rebuilt the city of palaces he called his own creation the Sacred Palace. Like the Kremlin ofthe Russian Czars, and like unto the Seraglio ofthe Sultans, the latter modelled more or less upon the more ancient Imperial city, the Court of Justinian was an immense collection of buildings, churches, palaces, guard-houses, baths, hippodromes, colonnades, and temples, all more or less detached, yet also connected by galleries, terraces, marble stairways, rose gardens and groves of trees, wherein statues were almost as thick as the tree trunks. In this city of palaces, for whose decoration and adornment the entire known world was laid under contribution — Carthage, Baghdad, Damascus, Rome itself, being despoiled — within this wonder-city three puissant personalities still fill all its stage. Wherever the mental eye roves, whether it be fixed on the Chalce, the world-famous vestibule of the chief palace, whose walls were tapestried with mosaics and marbles; — or whether we strive to reconstruct the glory of those splendours of the Consistorion, the audience chamber 293 7 N 7/77 PALACES OF THE SULTAN whose beauty so dazzled the eyes of barbaric kings and chieftains admitted to the Imperial presence that they thought themselves in paradise ; — or whether we move toward the terraces overhanging the blues ofthe Mar mora, whose sub-structures one may even yet trace behind the mosque of Sultan Achmet — in such golden palace chambers or in the freshness of great gardens, Justinian's plebeian yet masterful face, Theodora in the incomparable grace of her slight, perfectly-modelled figure, and Belisarius, the brave, the mighty saviour- general of Rome, conqueror of Goths, Vandals, Afri cans, Persians, — of all the fighting world of that fighting age, these three figures it is whose complex natures and whose marvellous careers fill the vast, the vanished, yet the still so amazingly real stage of this lost Byzantine world. In your ardour to reconstruct the great scene, you will be willingly tossed and jolted across the upper Turkish quarter of older Stamboul. Above a medley of rotting ruins, live geese, tombs and gipsy's houses, all there is left of Belisarius' Palace, still lifts aloft noble walls and tooth-worked arches to give to the most powerful military spirit of this decadent Roman world a fitting dwelling. As you mount from story to story ; as you peer into curious corners once the shrines of statues or mosaiced niches for gold or silver lamps ; as you trace the still clean-cut outlines of the Byzantine interlacing, along cornice and window-coping, your eyes will, nevertheless, be straying far afield, beyond the perfect arches to the world that is framed below you, in the 294 l - H=\. '^- V\ '. ¦; ; .. " ¦ ¦ -. ,/!^% ^ ^i *:. ' ¦ ,X : vf . -' • H ^' ;" IN 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN greater arch above. Blue hills ripple above shining waters, and cypress groves blacken the tinted landscape only to be dwarfed to nothingness by the interminable heights of walls the great general saw grow and grow, till they engirdled the splendid city. The conqueror of Carthage, the saviour of Rome, he whose conquests spread from shore to shore of the Mediterranean, and from Persia to northern Italy, how much time had Belisarius to ease his eager, hurried, warlike spirit in the walls of his palace-home, or in the glorious outlook below his great windows ? When he came to Byzan tium it was either to drag half a world behind him, as captives to crown his triumphal entry into the Hippo drome, or it was to stand and wait, trembling under the smart of possible disgrace, humble as the very least of her subjects, in the antechamber of his imperi ous, intriguing Empress. Still another palace in ruins lips, with its sweeping grasses, the watery cheek of an open sea. This "Jus tinian's Palace," somewhat to the east of the Church of Sergius and Bacchus, was, it is said, the original palace in which the Emperor held his court before his marriage — one which, when building the Sacred Palace, he incorporated within its vast enceinte. It is only by means of the illuminating pages of history or through the open portals of imaginative fancy, one can place, in those sumptuous palace- chambers, the captivating figure of its wicked yet seductive Empress, and of the relatively more nobly majestic Justinian. You may follow the life and the daily acts of 295 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Theodora from her circus days to her almost virtuous end. You may watch her, as she sweeps across the mosaiced floors, her royal robes stiff with jewels whose barbaric splendour enhances the pale olive skin, the wondrous flame of her expressive eyes, the suave delicacy of her features, and her thoughtful brow across which, like a dark arch, the pencilled eyebrows meet; this ineffably charming, majestic per sonality escapes both from the pages of history, and from the rigidity and solemnity of her counterfeit presentments in the famous mosaics at Ravenna, to drift towards you nearer and ever nearer, as she steps, with grave and stately grace, to pass through the living line of courtiers, suitors, generals, who lip to floor and dare not raise even an eye to scan the royal countenance ; as she prolongs her luxurious repose to ensure the freshness of her skin ; as she re fuses, in a single nod of disdain, to receive those among whom are to be counted the greatest personages in Byzantium yet who, morning after morning, are herded together like " a flock of slaves " in her ante chamber ; as she invents yet more and more stringent laws of etiquette ; and as she leaves all the grandeur and formal splendour of the Sacred Palace to taste the sweets of the ocean breezes in her luxurious villa on the Asian coast. This lover of pomp and sybaritic indulgence becomes still more real when she touches the height of her great heroic moment ; when, with Byzantium in flames, the Imperial palace attacked, when the city was in revolt, and even within the council chamber the mad shouts of the victorious con- 296 4 ¦' xi '<& 'x&3l-: CO^3 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN spirators dulled the trembling voices of his ministers, urging Justinian to instant flight, — in that supreme moment, Theodora proved herself worthy of her great place and post ; for she it was, who, with a courage as sublime as her knowledge of men was profound, cried out to trembling sovereign and to cowardly ministers, " Even though there be no other safety save in flight, I will not fly. Those who have worn the crown must never survive its loss. Never shall I see the day when men cease to salute me as their Empress. If thou wishest to fly, Caesar, it is well ; thou hast money, the ships are ready ; the sea open ; as for me, I stay. I love this stupendous city. What a shroud is the royal purple ! " Such a woman becomes real, as real as she is great indeed, and, like the courtiers who lined her passage, our heads must bow to her. One comprehends the greatness of such a nature holding fast as linked steel the more vacillating soul of a Justinian. During the whole of her life, Theodora was " God's gift " to the man and king who, long years after her death, when he wished to take the most solemn of oaths, swore by the name of Theodora to keep the sacredness of his vow. Dying of cancer in the radiant month of June in 548, this extraordinary woman whose virtues were those of a statesman, and whose vices " were those of her age and her origin," continues to haunt the imag ination as the most contradictory and complex, as she will ever be among the great fascinators, of historic figures. In the phantom city of dead Byzantium her grace and charm, as do also her evil deeds and her 299 IN 7777 PALACES. OF THE SULTAN crimes, continue to re-create the magic of her presence, and so pervasive and persistent is her impress upon the history of her era, that to say Byzantium is to think of Theodora. Justinian's reappearance upon the stage of his long- since dead city, and his later apotheosis are no less wonder moving. Six long centuries after the great Emperor had been laid at rest in his tomb in the Church of the Holy Apostles, he emerged from it, the splendour of his appearance such, in all the glory of his Imperial robes and the fresh glitter of its jewels, as to strike with terror the eyes of those Crusaders who, in their conquest of the Constanti nople of 1204, had come to rifle kings' tombs as they might a beggar's empty grave. Later still, Justinian the Great was swept, let us hope a second time, to that heaven in which his devout soul so fer vently believed, by the immortalising touch of Dante. When the western middle ages relearnt their rights, as men, through Justinian's records of the forgotten Roman laws, the gratitude of his day inspired the poet to place Justinian in his Paradiso. " Cesar e fui, e son Giustiniano . . . A Dio per grazia piacque di spirarmi Talto lavoro." " I was Caesar, and I am Justinian. It pleased God to inspire me in my great work." Great was Justinian himself, for his constructive genius helped to create the state as it is known to modern men, and is ruled over by modern European rulers. 300 Chapter XIX CONSTANTINOPLE AND SANTA SOPHIA " r* MIE most beautiful view there is in the world," was Justinian's own praise of the site of the city his taste and his love of pomp had made so splendid. With not a single building upon it, with not one stone upon another to mark man's instinct to put the seal of his handiwork upon the beautiful in nature, still would Seraglio Point have stood to the world as pre-eminent among the perfect strips of land. Beneath its feet, the liquid floors of three great water-beds are incessantly being laid and re-laid with every changeful hour of the day, and at each fresh touch of the master-colourist, the sun's light. In patterned mosaics the Sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn stretch out beneath this tongue of land that rises slowly, with infinite grace, and with an almost purposeful definiteness, as if the better to view the mountain realm beyond and the jewelled waters below. As the tender slopes of the land lift themselves into the heights that roll upward into hill tops, these latter, like the immemorially beautiful hills on which " the grandeur that was Rome " was built, rise to flow on and on. In their progressive propor- 301 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN tions there is an impressive symmetry that makes us doubly sure of our standards in the more artificial world of art. In decorating and adorning these hills, the successive races of men who have peopled and beautified them, have been but imitators of those greater laws of force and motion that modelled and shaped them. Apart from its strategic position, Seraglio Point would, therefore, have captured eyes less keen and sen sitive than were those of Constantine and Justinian to the charms, as well as to the value, of a decor at once supremely beautiful and grandly spectacular. No city ever had such a world of on-lookers as had the Constantinople that was built by these two master- builders. Nor was there ever a city more admirably placed to be looked at from all sides. Most cities, to be grasped as a whole, must be viewed either from a distance, be looked down upon from a height, or one must be content with near views or sectional vistas. The Constantinople of Justinian's day, and the Stam boul of our own, is like a picture that is set upon an easel exactly right as to distance, and that is also per fectly lighted. One may look at it from any and from all points of view. One may see it from a dozen different distances, place it in perspective, or examine it in detail, at closer range. All the world of the sixth century was eager to look upon this new Rome that was the last sensational wonder of the older world, whose death-throes were faintly to be heard. From the point of view of the visitor and sight-seer, indeed, Constantinople presented 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN better places and easier thoroughfares, for eager eyes and pressing foothold, than did Rome itself. Its near Asiatic and European shores were sharply rising hills offering natural amphitheatrical positions from which to look forth upon the city ; while the passing travel- Justinian and his Court ling and merchant world, on their way from the Euxine to Greece, Africa, Sicily, or Italy, or returning there from, might have long hours for gazing from ships' sides, as they sailed from the Bosphorus into the waters ofthe Sea of Marmora. In the least to hope to realise the greatness of Byzantium as these men and women of the sixth century saw it, we must each one of us do a vast amount of re-building on our own account. To re construct that vanished city one must be architect, 303 /AT THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN painter, decorator, and historian as well as archaeolo gist. For as no architect since the two geniuses of Asiatic extraction, whose brains conceived the con structive grandeur of Santa Sophia, has ever surpassed in any building that stupendous creation, so neither can the most gifted colourist among historians or word- painters hope to set before you Constantinople as any common sailor saw it from the deck of a Mediterra nean coaster, in the century that called Stamboul Byzantium. The Constantinople of that period was a city of gold and marble set in a huge circlet of stone. In those fighting centuries it was not enough for a city to be the wonder ofthe world ; it must be made strong before it was safe to make it beautiful. The eye, therefore, would first of all have been caught and held by the monster walls, bastions, citadels, guard-houses, towers, and by the massive inner and outer gates. These monster fortifications were a city, or rather cities, in themselves ; they were bristling with a vivid, intensely personal life oftheir own, one which was at once a part and was also separate from the city whose splendour was perpetually growing in beauty, only because of this world that was there to protect it. In these interminable lines of wall, the furthest gates and bastions were so distant from the heart of Con stantinople that the officers and garrisons, detailed for duty therein, complained of their exile " to the country where the world seems asleep." Whether you attempt to follow, with the persistent zeal of the ardent archaeologist, the fascinatingly un- 3°4 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN certain lines of Constantine's original great walls, or whether your zest for looking upon defenses and forti fications on a scale of grandeur for which nothing in Europe has prepared you will be appeased by the long stretches of the miles upon miles of Justinian's Underground Cisterns built by Justinian monster structures, — still astonishingly erect for ruins reduced to play no more important a role than to pose as a picturesque, out-worn fashion in fortifications, — in whatsoever direction the ardour of your curiosity may lead you, your search for these walls in ruins will take you, and speedily, out from the crowded Stamboul thoroughfares to suburban streets, and from these to the rough grasses of unfilled fields, to country 20 3°5 ** *;. Si. IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN smells, and to listen to the clear tinkle of sheep's bells. As you walk on and on, beneath the giant shadows cast on the green meadows by tall towers,. by monster bastions aslant, tilting as if still tremblingly awaiting the only force capable of moving their firm foundations, that of the quaking earth itself; as the great cities grow more distant ; as the hum of bees, and the cutting of the birds' wings in the still air be come more and more the sole stir of this quiet world, your sense of companionship with those dead and gone sentinels will quicken within you. You will compre hend what it meant to young hot pulses beating beneath Roman accoutrements to slacken into the monotonous beat induced by the pacing of ramparts ; for stout young hearts and brains to be eternally changing guard when, a few short miles away, one knew the market places to be as crowded with men as it was breathless with news ; when Constantine's Forum was as brilliant as a picture, and more exciting than many another show, with all the great of earth to be met beneath its stately porticoes ; and above all, when in the Hippo drome the games were on, and all Byzantium was shouting, exulting, sweating, swearing, trembling, thrilling, as the varying chances in the races played with the passion-strung audience as wind with grain, — then indeed was it a positive anguish for the officer of the day to be at his post, and for the sentinel to pace his stretch of wall and listen, fretfully, to the dull droning of bees. The sympathies of that common sailor I have imagined, as looking forth from his ship's side upon 306 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the great walls and the wonder city set within them, would have been stirred to quite other feelings than these. Man of the time as such a sailor was bound to be, coasting to and from every port and harbour known to his Mediterranean-bounded world, he would greatly have approved of those walls ; even the glory of the city itself would have come in as an after climax to his com mendation. For the spirit that lurked behind every costly house front and within every jewelled palace chamber of that day, had its abiding place in the breast, also, of the bravest among men, whether they were emperors or commoners. The spirit of a great fear looked out from every Roman and Eastern eye, as it also overleapt the stoutest walls. The exultant cries of the barbarians, shouting across the fortified camps of Illyricum and Thrace, were sounds to make the strongest walls seem thin as a wav ing leaf. " We shall take your palaces, — we come to pillage them," was a menace trembling emperors knew to be the coming, the almost certain horror. For the taunting messages could have been read by the torches the barbarians had lighted along their way ; by the blazing villages burning as if the better to illu mine the routed armies, the captured camps, and the long chain of prisoners already doomed to slavery. Before such forces, Justinian and his successors had as little faith in their walls as would a company of raw recruits in our day see aught to fear in this useless masonry. The genius that could reconstruct and gov ern a practically boundless Empire ; whose military skill could plan campaigns on a scale vast enough to com- 3°7 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN prehend the world of his day ; whose generals brought the spoils of Persia, Africa, Syria, Sicily, Greece, and Italy to his feet ; whose " frontiers stretched from the Danube to Palmyra, to the very limits of the desert; " and the "boulevards of whose ramparts" lined the coasts of Africa as far as the Columns of Hercules, the shores of the Black Sea, and the classic sites of Greece, — such a master-mind could yet hurry to his palace, therein " to barricade " himself with his inti mates on hearing of the descent of the Huns upon the Hellespont. The panic created by the appearance of the barba rians became the greater in the latter years of Justinian's reign. The reasons of this growing terror were to be found in two conditions as clear, each one of them, to the dullest Hun or Scythian in the vandal armies as they were to the shrewdest military genius of the age — to Belisarius. Justinian's overmastering ambi tion, and his quickly acquired love of regal magnificence, had brought about both of these conditions. He who, at the beginning of his reign, " had aspired to conquer the entire world ; " who, after the conquest of Sicily and Africa, could write, " We have the good hope that God will allow us to reconquer the other countries possessed by the old Romans to the very limits of both oceans," — this dream of universal empire had been practically realised. The Roman rule of law, of military and religious order, of limitless commercial inter-trading, and of vast administrative sway had been extended, in very truth, from the sea to sea of that day. The lines of walls and fortifications guarding 308 IN 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN this colossal empire made of manv of Justinian's prov inces an armed camp. " All the country was covered The Walls of Justinian with citadels ; at each strategical point a fortress arose; each city was enclosed in its walls ; every highway and 3°9 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN route bristled with towers." This line of defense stretched from end to end of the Roman Empire. As vast an extent of frontier exposed constantly to hostile invasion, and consequently in perpetual need of re pair as well as of well-armed and disciplined troops, brought about the inevitable results. So colossal a system surpassed human control. The system broke down. Fortresses fell into ruins ; the citadels were captured ; the frontiers of the Empire were left de fenseless ; for their defenders were " forced, for their daily bread, to live on the charity of the pious." Later, Europe, as we now know, was immeasurably the gainer by the magnitude of an ambition that proved to be the opening breach in the Roman world. For out of the ruins and failure of the Roman out posts, mediaeval Europe was born. Every citadel, each abandoned fortress, even the toppling walls — each and all these fortified centres, that towered above desolate and savage wastes, had taught the lawless men beyond or beneath them something of the majesty of Roman power, and the dignity of Roman law. Even as the spirit within each one of us passes forth from our frail bodies either to enrich or to impoverish the world, though the soul itself may have its some times hours of weakness or its lilts of lofty aspiration, in like manner did the masterful, constructive Roman spirit pass beyond the gold-wrought palace chambers screening the momentarily terrorised Justinian, to teach to savage Hun and to bloodthirsty Vandal the merciful rule of law. The second cause that drew the predatory hordes 310 1 I-I C:C< I. 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN southward, nearer and ever nearer to Constantinople, was the same magnetic attraction as draws every rustic of our own day, sweating over spade or plough, to the great centres of our world. Constantinople was the most thoroughly alive, as it was also the most Yeni Djam — Mosque by Moonlight surpassingly beautiful and the richest city of its time. Its beauty was an unknown language to the barbarian. The riches, however, that filled the capital so that even its streets seemed gold-lined, such splendour was a tongue understood by every Hun and Vandal, — and for the delectable smashing, breaking, and looting of such streets the armies from Germany and Upper Hungary would make as light of crossing the Danube and footing the hills and plains of Thrace as do we, when, in the cushioned compartments of the Orient 311 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN express, we cover in minutes the spaces Vandal hordes took weeks to traverse. The city toward which all civilised and savage forces were turned, in that century Justinian made his own, this city of Constantinople rose glittering, not only with colour and gold, but with a marvellous freshness. Justinian had built anew his city, as he had his own fortunes, his kingdom, and as he was to build, later on, the great temple of his era. Even as he had taken happiness from the hand, and counsel from the brain of a common courtesan, whose favours had been as boundless as the Empire she was to help govern, and as Emperor and lover Justinian had made an Empress of this courtesan, setting her, in the majesty of Imperial robes, on the throne beside him, so also did he lift Constantinople from its ruins to deck it and crown it with splendour. The horrors and disasters following Nika's sedition had left Constantinople in ruins. Passionate builder as he was, during the whole of his reign, Justinian saw in Constantine's city, in fragments at his feet, the opportunity to erect such a capital as should outrival Rome itself. As the city was to be built all of a piece, so to speak, the plans for taking every possible advantage of as glorious a site were as closely kept in mind as was lavishly prodigal the wealth to be spent in the adornment ofthe Eastern capital. When, in the later years of Justinian's long reign, the shipping world looked upon the city that rose out of its stone girdle, from the lips of the gentle shores we 312 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN know as Seraglio Point up to the distant heights now crowned by Suleyman the Magnificent's mosque, — the eyes of this world saw two cities, one guarding the land, a bristling mass of masonry, out of which grew, towering, the battlemented ramparts, towers, and guard-houses. From out the sea wall, and upon the Golden Horn, another city uprose. No human eye, at the first outlook, could register all the marvels of beauty before it, as no human pen, since the disappearance of the citv, has been able to reconstruct its lost grandeur. Glittering, dazzling, sparkling in golden- tinted splendour, the very freshness of the city's new marbles and its lately laid-on mosaics and col ours dazed the eye, making clear impressions and accurate registration of its character and buildings the more difficult. After the seeing eye had become used to the dazzle ofthe faery-like spectacle, the features of certain of its great structures defined themselves, with impressive dignity. The delicate pallor of the more intimate dwellings of the Sacred Palace first cast their blanch ing tints upon the Sea of Marmora. Out of the bloom of terraces and tree forests, the more gorgeous roofs and wall-surfaces of the grander halls and state buildings within this Imperial city uprose, in massed magnificence. As a contrast to the pomp of the Em peror's city, there was the more sacred, but scarcely less splendid glory of the thirty and more basilicas Justinian had built. Each one of these basilicas was different in design to the other, showing a fresh 313 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN arrangement of marbled wall-surfaces and precious metals. The lofty Thermes of Arcadius ; Constantine's Forum; the vast ellipse of the Hippodrome; the colonnades and porticoes ; the army of statues whose snowy marbles, tinted surfaces, jewelled eyes, and golden shields made the sky-line as crowded as were the market-places with their human figures, — such were the masses that rolled themselves upward to meet the aerial grace of the Great Aqueduct. To the life of the world of men filling the streets of this wonder city, every historian, from Procopius to Gibbon, and the very latest French authorities, have devoted many pages, their talent and genius preserv ing for us, at the very least, the imaged presentment of a world at once so near, and one yet so immeasura bly far away from our own. The spirit that lived itself out in those mosaiced streets, and in the com pany of that multitude of statues, was so strangely brutal, yet so decadent in its refinements ; it was so lustful of power, yet so rebellious to discipline ; so pagan in its insistent demands of the things of the flesh ; so Roman in its love of pomp, and in its pas sion for shows and games, and yet so humanly timid in its fear of the barbarian hordes, as it was also so very early Christian in its fierce self-flagellations, its austerities, and its renunciations. In thinking of the complex, multiform character of this Byzantine world, one begins to understand and to know the men and women who lived in Constantino ple. The crowds filling the market-places were very like those that crowded the squares and open spaces 3»4 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN of the Italian cities of the Renaissance, — like them in their spirit of unrest, in their turbulant love of a quarrel or a fight ; like them also in their passionate * 4 i^H *X"j - ** •^ m !T^ y^» Hungarian Gipsy keenness for intrigue, and their skill in conspiracy ; unlike them, in their Byzantine unreclaimed savagery in matters of sport. Impressionable as an Italian, the 315 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Byzantine was more frankly brutal ; he could still find the thrill of an exquisite satisfaction in looking upon the burning of human flesh ; the torture of a heretic, in the arena, was to Byzantine eyes what the goading of wild beasts had been to Romans in their Colosseum. Within the colonnades and porticoes the more aris tocratic world of Constantinople sauntered to exchange its critical, fastidious comment on the shape and plan of the last new basilica ; on the news from Belisarius' or Narses' armies, in Africa, Italy, Sicily, or Rome itself. Under the arcades of the Royal Portico every philosophy, heresy, science, theology, political and economic question was as frequently aired, as the disputants proved their own delight in such conver sations already given the seal of classic dignity by their greater predecessors in the groves of Academe. To the eclat of Imperial magnificence the sharp, telling contrasts of human misery were added. As captive kings were led in triumph around the spina of the great Hippodrome, to proclaim what the hero of the reign — what Belisarius had done in bringing fresh kingdoms under Roman sway, so in the streets, swarthy Africans, Nubians, richer-skinned Moors and Arabians knelt or grovelled at the feet of the rich, offering their squalor and the pathos of their hunger- strained eyes to the listless indifference of their cap tors. Never since this sixth century has there been a time when the human spirit, in its multiform capacities and contradictions, has played out to the last limits of its IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN energies, and with as spendthrift a passion, its contrast ing roles of worldling and devotee, of debauchee and ascetic, of warrior and monk, of lusting Maecenas and the man ofthe cell — living on husks and beating his flesh into ribbons. The holy flame of an intense, In Stamboul hand passionate longing for spirituality and for the leading of the life which alone, it was believed, could incite to such unworldliness, this holy flame burnt into the very souls of the men and women of that century so much nearer to Christ than is our own. The lines of the great fortresses were scarcely longer than were the lines of convent walls. From the outermost confines of the Eastern and African deserts, to Byzantium, to Rome, to the most distant Gallic provinces in Normandy, men were forswearing 317 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the lusts of the flesh and the pomps of life, to immure themselves in monasteries as large and as densely peo pled as were the cities from which they had fled. " These citizens of heaven " were to be counted by the millions. Their cries and chants, their vigils and self-punishments, their prayers and austerities were the impressive background, tending heavenwards, against which the gorgeous foreground of civic and court life massed its sumptuously clad worldlings, its architectural splendours, and its brilliant war-like figures. Justinian was himself a living, vivid embodiment of the conflicting dualities of his era. He was its most puissant, as he was its most illustrative representative. The flames of a pious, devout spirit — as spirituality was adjudged in his day — burned beneath the mantle of his royalty. He was a passionate son ofthe " only church," as he was also a precursor of those grander Pontiffs who, in Papal Rome, demonstrated in regal Medicean prodigality, the principle that God's represen tative should surpass all earthly kings in state and pomp. As Justinian's piety led him to demonstrate his fer vour rather by grandeur of acts than by following the loftier examples of those, his brother princes, who sacri ficed temporal power to gain heavenly crowns, the character of his acts of devotion, as well as the form taken by his ecclesiastical ambitions, were in conform ity with his nature. His reign was to be one immor talised by the proofs of his piety, in stone, in solid gold and marble ; by the building of such churches 3«8 ;i: yy ¦: ¦ ,y\ 1 4 "".:-:: . IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN " as none ever saw." The multitude of these, and of the convents he, the Emperor, and Theodora built, was to astonish the world. As in the most minute details of his administrative, diplomatic, and military rule Justinian's constructive genius was apparent, so was also his over-weening ambition to be supreme head and chief of each and all of the departments controlling his vast Empire. We find this same informing passion for detail entering into his Religious Code. From the ceremonies necessary to the proper investiture of a Bishop, to the rules of conduct in the most obscure convent in an African desert, Justinian's laws and dicta traversed the whole ecclesiastical area of his spiri tual kingdom. And over that invisible kingdom, with its visible celebrants and earthly priests' world, Justin ian proposed to be head and front. The first among his subjects to bow the knee to Rome, " Head of all holy churches," the Emperor was also first to crown himself supreme dictator in the religious affairs of his great kingdom. The memory of all this it is well to keep in mind when one enters the holy, golden world of Santa Sophia. For as Justinian was the most completely representa tive figure of his age, so also does Santa Sophia, this greatest and most beautiful of God's Temples, attest, not alone the constructive genius of that long ago cen tury, but it also typifies its grandeur of spirit, as well as its infinite patience in elaboration of detail, and its knowledge of the importance of the apparently insig nificant, both in life and in the art of building. It is the great and peculiar privilege of Santa Sophia 3'9 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN to stand as the sole completely perfect monument of this lost Eastern Roman world. To enter Santa Sophia is to step from our own world and century into the heart of that Eastern Rome. For the very soul of Rome and of the East have passed into the great temple. There is no single worldly or spiritual element that went to the making of the forces that swayed the men of Justinian's Empire we may not find written, in indelible letters of beauty, in "The Great Church." The splendour and the gravity ; the gaiety and the dignity; the pomp of display, and the simplicity of a delicate delight in reticence; the loftiness of a most daring audacity, and the power to hide the effort by the ease genius alone permits, — these and a hundred other qualities passed, with the unconscious grace of com plete self-betrayal, into the one structure that must stand for all Byzantium. For such is the supreme as it is also the most exquisitely satisfying ofthe qualities of a great work of genius ; not only does its beauty and perfection absorb and enrapture us, but through such a masterpiece, be it a book, a statue, or a temple, the life of its day is as clearly to be read as though it were living before you. Therefore it is that, as you pass beyond the intensely bright streets of Stamboul to enter the scarcely less brilliant world of Justinian's Temple, you are instanta neously transported to the great and mighty Byzantine capital. At last as you stand beneath that soaring dome you are truly "seeing" the New Rome — you are thrilling to it ! 320 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN The first, as I think will be also the last, impression one receives from the immensity of space enwalled in A Fellahine — An Egyptian Santa Sophia, is one's instantaneous recognition of its beihg the great masterpiece of creative genius in 21 32I IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ecclesiastical architecture. No other church or temple presents a perfection at once as complete and compre hensive. Vast as are its proportions you are no more critical of its tremendous size than you are of the limitless expanse of sky-spaces. Infinite, exquisite, and inexhaustible as is the wealth of detail everywhere apparent, such elaboration is felt to be as completely and inherently a part ofthe structural whole as are the grasses and leaves of a forest insensibly accepted as the decorative adjuncts of a wood-world. It was indeed from the imperious demand for the new, for the super-sumptuous in decorative splendour, that this new art in temple-building drew its life-breath. When Justinian's decision to erect a church, " such as since Adam has never been seen, and one which hereafter shall never be seen again," the two archi tects to whom he confided the planning and erection of that which was to be the crowning architectural act of his life, as well as his spiritual offering to his God, — these artists had presented to them the most difficult of all tasks set before genius. The new temple must not only surpass all others previously built, it must also be an absolute novelty, both in structural plan and in design. Above all else, it must offer to the Byzantine world, already grown weary of luxurious pomp, and more or less blase in its appreciation of merely sump tuous beauty, entirely original and undreamed-of combinations in colour-effects, in carvings, and. in decorative ensemble. The grandeur of the edifice, in other words, must, when finished, stand unequalled in order to excite to awed rapture eyes fatigued with the splendour and glitter of Constantinople. 322 03 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Justinian's own dream of the magnitude of the pro jected temple was to be gauged by the area of ground he dedicated to this vast undertaking. The site already occupied by a basilica built by Constantine, restored by Theodosius, and finally fired by the torches of the revolting populace in 532, was a site altogether too limited in extent for the colossal temple that was to be dedicated to " the Divine Wisdom." In numerable were the adjacent houses and gardens bought, at fabulous sums, to furnish ground-space for the new church. The two architects chosen for the great work were Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus. Under these masters one hundred lesser architects, with each a hundred workmen as their subordinates, made up the army of ten thousand artisans, masons, carvers, stone-cutters, mosaic-inlayers, and master- supervisors who worked, five thousand on the right side and five thousand on the left side, according to the plan given by an angel, who had appeared to the Emperor in a dream. The supernatural visitations were, indeed, as numerous as they were opportune, dur ing the erection ofthe edifice. An angel took the form of a brilliantly clad eunuch who, with the marvellous directness characteristic of angelic commands, ordered a boy in sole charge of the mason's tools, to betake himself quickly to the workmen and order them back to their toil, to hasten the completion of the building. The white-robed eunuch meanwhile promised faithfully, even taking pains to swear by the Divine Wisdom, he himself would stand guard over the church until the lad 325 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN returned. The gleaming eunuch-angel still stands at his post; Santa Sophia is still under the spirit guard of one of God's angels, for the boy was never permitted to return. Justinian, on hearing ofthe mysterious appa rition, and, on searching for his visible shape and no eunuch in white robes being found, quickly decided on its being a messenger from upper heaven. A more earthly, but equally effective, presence within the edifice during its erection was the portly figure of Justinian himself. Justinian hovered over his church indeed with untiring, unwaning enthusiasm. His coarsely-clad form — for it was his custom to don homely linens on his visitations to the world, where the work of masons and stone-cutters had created a perpetual over-hanging dusty cloud, — the Emperor's somewhat heavily moulded figure was one almost as omnipresent as were those of the two architectural geniuses to whom he ventured, with regal daring, to proffer suggestions. His passion for its quick and speedy completion made him forget the needs of middle age for rest. He gave up his nap of the day to hurry his work men. Outside of the temple, the Emperor's energies were no less inexhaustible. The entire world must be made tributary to the " Great Church." The marble quarries of the whole of the East and West were ran sacked for porphyry, for vert antique, for black, blue, emerald-toned, or indeed any marble that could enhance the polychrome effects that were to be one among the chief elements in producing a wondrous colour com bination. Antiquity itself was to hand over its rich- 326 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN est treasures. The Temple ofthe Sun, in Rome, sent light porphyry columns ; Athens, the Troad, and Gallery and Arcade in Santa Sophia Ephesus were despoiled of others — of marbles no longer procurable, or those to whom age and even 327 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN weather had given a peculiar lustre and polish. The Temples of Isis and Osiris, of Pallas Athene, of Phoebus of Delos, ofthe Sun and the Moon at Heli- opolis, each of these — and how many others? — were despoiled to furnish Phrygian marbles streaked with rose-tints, black Celtic marbles with their snowy veins, Egyptian starred granite, and pillars of Saitic porphyry. The walls and arches of the monstrous edifice were of brick, revetted with marbles. The combinations of colour-effects in the placing of these marbles constitute one of the chief glories of the temple. The artistic grouping and the infinite variety of the marvellous stone in-laying with which the walls and arches of Santa Sophia are covered, is one of the most marvellous works of human taste. These walls still gleam with the lustre of velvet, as they also still present to us a patterning unequalled, save those executed by the same cunning Eastern fingers that weave, upon sombre and rich backgrounds, the delicate colour-effects in the carpets we have christened by the name of those who, living in the intense glare of the sun, have stolen the secrets of the mystery and the gloom of its shadow. For the perfection of this marble panelling we are indebted, as has been the case in so many great artis tic developments, to pure chance. Justinian's own desire was to cover even the walls with gold. Had his wishes been carried out, Santa Sophia would have lost an element of grandeur no glitter of golden mosaics could have replaced. Next in point of novelty to these marble wall pat terns was the infinite variety in polychrome effects, 328 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN yielded by the contrasting colours in the columns and pillars. The architects designed to play a colour- scheme with porphyries, with vert antique, with white and black and all the other known tints in stone, such as had never before been known, and such as has never since been surpassed. Against the depth of the wall tones, each one of these perfectly chosen columns finds its colour-plane in perfect harmony with its back ground. Above the jewel-like shafts, burnished to reflect light as well as to yield up its own inner vein- ings and traceries, the ornate Byzantine capitals were laced with carvings. Into such carvings, ivory, jade, gold, silver, mother-of-pearl, and other precious stones are set with the delicacy and elaboration of the gold smith's art. Gold did, indeed, cover a large portion of this marvellous temple. The ceiling of the eso- narthex, as well as the whole of the upper walls and the great central dome of the church, these are all of golden mosaic. The crowning novelty in Santa Sophia is its gigantic dome. It is now generally admitted that it was in Persia the two Byzantine architects found their inspi ration for this their greatest architectural triumph. From whatever source they may have drawn their model, their method of working the architectural motif made it their own. Once the vast scaffolding removed, and the dome lifted into space by the con structive genius of Anthemius and Isidorus, it was seen to soar to a height almost as vast, and to swing aloft with a grace as light, as the outer fermament itself. In lieu of the sixteen windows which pierced 329 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the base of this original monster dome, we now find forty in the second dome constructed by Isidorus the younger, after the falling in of Anthemius's and Isidorus's earlier masterpiece from the effects of the fatal earthquake of 558. The entire church is, indeed, most gloriously lighted. In its upper galleries, in the four great arches supporting the central dome, groups of upper and lower, of smaller and larger windows let in a flood of light. This lighting was in itself not one of the least original of the inspirations of the two master builders. For with the torrent of sunlight poured upon the glistening marbles and the gold of mosaics, the spaces of air enclosed within the walls of Santa Sophia are as luminous as are those of the outer world. " God's House " seems thus to have its own luminary, " to give birth to light rather than to receive it." Nor was this light permitted to fade with the day. On the great festival nights, the church was as brilliant as a conflagration, signalling with its red, rose, and green lights, to sailors far out at sea, how the nativity of the Virgin or a saint's birth was celebrated in " the most glorious of churches." Below the great dome these rose tinted lights were seen to be swinging in mid-air from clusters of aerial lanterns, from candel abra in the shape of trees from which flames issued as though they were flowers of light, and from lamps that were shaped like ships sailing the seas of space. Upon the high altar, the ciborium, and the tabernacle Justinian lavished the last, final prodigalities of his devotion and the pomp of his taste. The tabernacle was of pure gold; precious stones were strewn as thick as 33° 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN were the costly enamels, and its four silver-gilt columns carried aloft the dome, with its massive gold cross. This cross, huge as it was, seemed insignificant as contrasted with the gigantic cross that stretched its symbolic arms across the summit of the great cupola with its skyey background dusty with stars. When, after its short five years and ten months of building, this masterpiece of human creative genius was pronounced completed ; when, up to the entrance door, opening upon the Augustinian Court, Justinian's triumphal chariot, with its four horses, came to their rest to let the Emperor descend that he might be the first to enter the " Great Church," at the doors of which stood the Patriarch and all the lesser clergy, in the ecclesiastical state of their grand vestments, waiting to receive their Emperor ; and when we follow the cen tral, the royally garbed, but very humanly emotional figure of that son of a Macedonian widow, whose com prehensive genius had grasped not only a vast Empire, but who could also enter into and rule in the more elect domain of art, I think each and every one of us can thrill, as was thrilled to its innermost fibre this mighty Eastern monarch's soul, when, confronted with the stupendous glory of his finished temple, he rushed, with arms widely extended, to fling himself beneath the towering dome, as the great cry of his joy and triumph broke from him : " Glory be to God who has deemed me worthy to accomplish so great a work. O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" Such will be the inner shout of triumph of every soul who bends, in awe and wonder in his or her turn, 33* 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN beneath the soaring cupola. For in such moments of uplifted admiration, in contemplating the grander achievements of man, each mortal proclaims his own heritage in that immortal spark of divinity we call genius. In your closer study of the more minute details of Santa Sophia's peculiarities of structure and ornamen tation, you will spend days. Each column, and the capi tal of each, will bid you linger, will tempt you to delay wandering into the marvel of galleries^ into nearer arcades from whose depths of semi-jewelled gloom endless effects are to be had, under as changeful lights. You will be taken to the upper gallery where Theodora and her ladies crowded to hear the mass of the day ; you will be shown the Sultan's seat or Tribune opposite the Mihrab ; the " Shining Stone," and the " Sweating Column " the latter emitting the miraculous damp said to cure strange and loathsome diseases, — these and the more sacred cradle of Jesus, as well as the basin in which he is said to have been washed — both from Bethlehem — together with the equally sacred relics, from the Moslem standpoint, of a prayer-carpet of the Prophet, and the more bloody seal of the five- fingered hand said to have been the imprint of the Turkish conqueror when, from his horse, he viewed the terror-stricken Christian world at his feet, flown to the refuge of the great sanctuary, — from each and all of these you will turn to fill your eyes and soul, again and again with the glory of the world beneath the golden dome. The " mystical city of God " will seem to have found its earthly dwelling within 332. 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN these luminous, soaring arches. The light that pours itself so triumphantly through the hundreds of win dows is no less golden-hued than will be your un- sated rapture. A part at least of the impressive grandeur of Santa Sophia is due to its having copied one of the simplest effects daily produced in nature. In a forest, or even in a grove, we feel ourselves surrounded by a pleasing depth of shade. Even gloom, when tenderly lighted, is felt to be an agreeable element in nature's picture. From the encompassing greens and deeper shade the eye is insensibly carried skyward. And heaven's arch seems doubly blue, and the firmament more gloriously lighted, because of the tender gloom of our forest enclosure. Thus it is in the vast marble world of Santa Sophia. One feels the mystery and the sombre depths of the surrounding marbles to be like unto forest gloom leading the eye upward. Aloft, beneath the great dome, the light is doubly glorious because two great geniuses looked forth upon God's ways of lighting his world, and they but humbly copied Him. The very spirit of Deity seems to be enthroned in this goldenly lighted realm of Santa Sophia. As the whole world was made tributary to the building of the sacred edifice, so all the gods worshipped by men seem resolved into Him we call the One and only God. Diana and Apollo, whose temples were despoiled, would woo the Greek devotee to find them reincar nate in the radiant, dancing air-spaces. The Egyptian Isis, the columns of whose far-away shrine were stolen 333 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN to help the propping of a Christian temple, would smile mysteriously, as she lifted her sphinx's eyes to the dimmed mosaics of her more sacred sister, the Divine Mother with the Christ Child, in lieu of the child Horus, on her arm. And Catholic and Protest ant alike, as well as the kneeling Moslems, whose chanting voices ring in your ear, will continue to find the spirit of their Maker enshrined in the midst of this His House. In so holy a temple the warring of sects is stilled. In very truth, only God is great, and all mankind we feel is wholly kin. For it is the gift of genius to carry, upon its soaring wings, the spirit into the Divine Presence. 334 Chapter XX THE MOSLEM CITY I AS you enter the Porta Basilica through which Justinian and all his successors have passed, you will find a certain number of detached, devout figures kneeling, or sitting, upon prayer-rugs. At your first glance you will feel these worshippers, in their Eastern garb, to be in perfect harmony with the solemnity, as well as with the richness, of their surroundings ; for the marbles and mosaics of the eso- narthex strike the first chords of those polychrome colour effects you are to find increasing in beauty at every step of your onward progress. The heads of these praying Mussulmans bow and bend ; their brows touch the floor. Their lips move, and eyes as well as figures will be found fixed towards a certain point in the great building. Within the vast nave these detached figures will thicken in numbers ; wherever the eye rests, praying figures of men may be seen at any, and at all times, of the day. At certain hours they will rise to move forward, they will form in long lines, silently, in per fect order. And in the nave as in the narthex the line will be found to be aslant, for Santa Sophia not 335 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN having been built for a mosque, the Moslem rule ordains that the invisible geographical, and not the actual architectural direction, shall fix the eyes and place the figures of the faithful at a slight angle from the apsidal centre. An Imam will silently, with swift grace, meanwhile, have appeared to take his place before the slanting line. His voice will presently break forth into high, chanting tones ; and to this chant of prayer the line of worshippers will respond in perfect unison. The aisles and nave of the vast edifice will be filled presently, with the echoing murmur of strong men's voices. For a half-hour the antiphonal chant will rise and fall, will ebb in quavering treble to grow into the strong crescendo of deep male voices, rising to a sudden climax, in resurgent volume. All the while the standing figures of the worshippers will be bend ing, bowing, hands will be clasped across breasts or widely extended, as also at certain intervals, the figures will be seen to drop simultaneously upon their knees, with an astonishing ease and softness, that they may touch the ground with their foreheads. Presently, the half-hour of prayer over, the line breaks as silently as it had formed. The priest, he also has vanished. The praying Mussulmans, — all those strong-featured, dark-eyed, vouthful-browed, and grey-bearded worshippers who have left shop, counting-house, bazaar, or home to meet together in this their worship, which makes of every man a brother, — each of these departs unto his own place. Three times each day, however, the Moslem wor- 336 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN shipper returns to touch elbows with he knows not whom, to face the God of whom he is so very sure. Even when there are no chanting Mussulmans in voking the mercy of their Maker, Santa Sophia, as is also every one of the two hundred and thirty mosques in Constantinople, is full of sound. It is a softened sound, one that is at once pleasing and also peculiar, with its semi-barbaric lilts and its slightly nasal raspiness. From certain corners of the mosques, beneath canopied recesses, as also in the mastaba, — the upper raised platforms, — the green turbans and motley-hued vests and scarfs of the softas may be counted upon as inseparable adjuncts to the glow of Persian glass and to the glint of colored mar bles. These seated figures of the softas communicate a perpetual motion, as their high voices also con tribute an unending song, to the otherwise great peace and quiet of the Turkish mosque-world. Swaying, now forwards, now backwards, quickly, with an aston ishing rhythmic precision, — the more remarkable be cause of its duration, — these softas are seen to be incessant in these their bowings and bendings ; for this peculiar motion, according to Moslem tradition, is supposed to accelerate the action of both mind and memory, as it also precludes the possibility of being overcome by the dreaded stupor so feared by these students during the years devoted to the committal of the Sacred Book to memory. 337 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN II You will insensibly pass from the more purely superficial outlook upon the unfamiliar rites of this peculiar worship, to one which you will find at once suggestive and illuminating. From the spectacular and the picturesque, you will proceed to strive to sur prise the inner, the deeper meaning underlying the outward observances of a religion which has swayed, and that sways still, so many millions of the human race — a third of it, in fact. The simplicity and directness, as well as the indif ference and superiority to all external aids, of this Moslem worship, — this is the first of your deeper read ings. Those bending, bowing figures have thus taught you your first lesson. These Moslem wor shippers approach their God with a straightforward directness as surprising as it is impressive. The pro found sincerity of this faith of Islam is thus affirmed, with tremendous positiveness, by its recognition of the equality of men before their Maker. Even as men must rise from their graves at the last day, to find themselves in strange company on their way to be judged at the Eternal Bar, thus do these Moslems gather from all quarters of their busy Constantinople streets to confront their God ; once beneath the mosque enclosure, they move together beneath its arches, as they might in the presence of Him whose praises they sing, and to whose existence and unity they attest five times a day. Here in Santa 338 A Softa with Pupils 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Sophia, as in all their mosques, these " sons of the faithful" seem to have found their One God, who "is in the midst" ot his great Temple. The entire absence of the spectacular, or of the mystical, in this Moslem worship robs it, to lovers of such, of all emotional effect. But of a certain sort of incense Santa Sophia is full, as it is of gold. The incense of devout souls seems to pervade the vast edifice. Of the uncompromising character of this fierce, intense Moslem belief, the nudity of Santa Sophia proclaims, with impressive insistence. The Turk, as all the world knows, in turning Santa Sophia into a mosque, mercilessly sacrificed his appreciation of certain features of its beauty to his religious con victions. The spectacular splendours of the Greek worship have vanished for ever; gone are the golden tabernacle, the ciborium, the magnificence of the high altar, the mosaic heads of mystical prophet, and the grouped figures of aureoled saints. These are hidden behind disfiguring screens of matting, cov ered with plaster. The light that will still per mit you to trace the paling outlines of the Virgin and Child, of St. John the Baptist, ofthe mosaic por trait busts of Justinian and Theodora, — such a light must be of a great and peculiar brightness, for what Moslem fingers could do to obliterate such sacrile gious presentment of the human form has been done. The carved minber, — the pulpit to which each Friday the priest still mounts, sword in hand, to preach between the two flags, symbols of vic- 34i IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN tory and conquest, — the extension of the faith, ex hortation to good works, and increase in spiritual belief; the mihrab, the deep, richly sculptured re cess, indicating the exact direction of Mecca; the huge green shields in the pendentives, bearing, in mon ster inscriptions — the letters of which are said to be thirty feet high — the names of God, the Prophet, and the four companions of the Prophet — these are the chief Moslem substitutes for the glory ofthe Patriarchal throne, long since the spoils of the conqueror, for the jewelled shrines of saints, and for that marvellous cur tain-screen of gold encrusted with precious gems, for which latter the Crusaders could find no better use than wantonly to tear to shreds. The four famous horses that stood in the apse the Moslems never saw. The Crusaders had taken them, two centuries before, a long journey, one that was to end in Venice. From the facade of St. Mark's these famous steeds seem, in their life-like lightness and grace, to be ever eagerly spring ing forward, as if longing to retrace their steps, that they might find once again their true home under the mosaics of Santa Sophia. It is rather in the exterior, than in the interior of Santa Sophia, that we are to find the most radical changes in the aspect of the great church. The origi nal form of the edifice is almost entirely obscured by annexes, additions, and courts which have gradually transformed this greatest and purest of basilicas into a conglomeration of buildings which have little or no architectural unity, and no beauty save that which is inseparable from imposingness of mass. The four 342 Mihrab and Minber in Suleyman the Magnificent' 's Mosque (Sofia's Cushion and Koran Table) IU SiHE ¦" -: » ¦' Tfl 'fit ¦-. ¦; «; « c 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN minarets erected at the four sides of the great pile are the chief external features, which with the dome, make ot Santa Sophia as a whole, still the most im pressive edifice in Constantinople. These minarets are noticeably solid at their base, soaring, with an almost unequalled grace, into the lofty carved parapets circling below their tapering spirals. Once a year, however, something of that older, lost Byzantine grandeur returns to the glowing interior of Santa Sophia. Hundreds of chandeliers, from whose circular metal rings hang innumerable crystal lamps, — small, oval-shaped, of most dainty shape and of an exceeding lightness, — these chandeliers and their pen dant oil-lamps are found suspended under every arcade, gallery, recessed alcove, and in all the smaller and larger aisles of the church. These tiny lamps commu nicate, even by day, an extraordinary lightness and grace to the entire interior. Such is the delicacy of these crown-shaped chandeliers, they appear rather to have been suspended from their invisible wires for ornamental, than for utilitarian purposes. When, in the Ramazan and in the Seven Holy Nights of Islam, all Constantinople is as bright as day ; when from every mosque ; from sacred, civic, or palatial buildings, the flames of millions upon millions of tapers proclaim the long fast is over and the Bairam is near, then once again does the former splendour of the great temple of temples seem to have returned unto it; for through its countless windows the soft blaze, from its thousands of lighted lamps, carries the mighty grandeur of its outlined proportions to every seeing eye, and 345 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN far out at sea, though the lights are neither now rose- hued nor do they burn in gilded ships nor in silver- hung candelabras, yet does the sailor, making his port, see the awesome majesty of Santa Sophia set in its blazoning aureole of light. Ill The presence of these Moslem worshippers in Santa Sophia, and their proprietary rights therein, are due to three causes, each of which has been as potent a shaping influence in the future history of the Turkish people as though each of them, severally, had been the care fully thought-out project of the greatest of statesmen. These three factors in Turkish history have been a certain admonition — the command indeed — of the Prophet ; the romantic adventures of a band of nomads, and the military daring of a youth of twenty- three. " Seek ye the Seven-hilled City ! " was the command that issued from Mahomet's lips, after he had himself felt the intoxication of conquest. The capture of the whole of Arabia could not suffice to the unquenchable ambition of a religious reformer and warrior who, before his death, began to realise, with the grasp of his great mind, the future possibilities of the spiritual, as well as the earthly sway, that lay before his followers. Man of the interior though he was, Mahomet had that instinct for control of sea-power that seems intuitive in born leaders of men. William of Nor mandy had his love for, and belief in the pre-eminence 346 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN given those who are nearest to the sea, by direct descent. Mahomet was drawn to the waters circling about the Eastern City as irresistibly as has Russia seen in them the one prize, above all others, she chiefly covets. There was no promise rich enough, within the province of this giver of spiritual gifts, to tempt men to jeopardize life that they might win the glory of adding the New Rome to the cities of the new faith. The first Moslem army to enter Constantinople should have absolution en masse. To obtain this coveted remission of sin was the waking dream of every Mos lem soldier for eight hundred long years ! This length of time was to elapse, between the prom ise and its fulfilment. Meanwhile, out of the realm of pure chance a romantic episode took place, on the banks of the river Euphrates. And you and I, and all of our world, are still watching the strange develop ments that have grown out of the spirited adventure that befell a wandering band of Turks who, with their flocks and women, were pushing their nomadic jour neying southward, toward Anatolia. This band of four hundred and forty warriors had been sent forth upon their travels at a quicker pace than common, because of the pressing hordes behind them, of the Mongols. This was about the year a. d. 1250. Near Angora, however, the pastoral band, with their warrior leaders, came to a halt. Women might rest, and the flocks could come to comfortable graz- ings, for the land was good. The four hundred and forty warriors, however, went farther afield. Wander ing thus, they came upon the fairest sight in all the 347 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN world to the eyes of fighters — they looked forth upon a battle-field. Who these fighters were, what the cause of the difference, Ertoghrul, the leader of the Turkish band, neither knew nor cared. In those more primitive days a fight was a fight. Its cause was a detail. Horses and men felt the stirrings of battle. With an inborn, chivalrous gallantry, Er toghrul flew to the rescue of the weaker party. The painter Schrerer will help you to picture the scene of those flying horsemen, their supple figures one with their flying steeds, their arms held high, scarfs and turbans white with the dust of their passionate onrush. The dashing nomads won the day. The unknown horsemen displayed a skill in the use of their weapons, and an intuitive, as well as a disciplined, capacity for military manoeuvres, Turkey's neighbours find as ama zing in our day as did the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium. After the victory, the Sultan turned to learn the names of his rescuers. Ertoghrul presented himself as he who was known as "The Right-Minded Man." The " Right-Minded Man " was to start a long chain in history's coil. To follow the fortunes of this gallant starter of Turkey's destiny throughout his eventful career would be as impossible, within the limitations of a book aiming solely to present certain suggestive sketches of some of the more dramatic and eventful historic episodes, as it would be to attempt to condense six hundred years of Turkish history in as many pages. Even we, however, may hastily follow the im- 348 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN mensely interesting development of Turkey's growth, from the embryonic nucleus of a nomadic tribe, to Portal of Green Mosque — Brusa its gradual attainment to the dignity and power of an independent state and kingdom. The " King's or Sultan's Front," a stretch of territory awarded to 349 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Ertoghrul after a second brilliant military achieve ment — the defence of the Pass of Ermini — was the beginning of the temporal and spiritual sway of the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor. Within this rich land-gift lay Brusa, the enchanting city later to be made the capital of the new-comer's ever-growing kingdom. Through the pages of historians, as upon the maps of the world, you may follow the amazing develop ment of this new Turkish power. Each historian will colour his presentment of this story of Turkish conquest, as do the map-makers, with pigments chosen according to his taste and preference for the intense or the pallid, for the neutral-tinted, or for the more flaming-hued. Knolles will give you a mediaeval illuminated recital, full of quaintly pleasing figures and phrases. From the later, more modern passionate invectives of Freeman you will doubtless turn, if only to gain a fairer estimate, to Gibbon's dispassionately pious presentment of the entrance of the race and the conqueror upon the European stage whom Euro peans still regard as " the scourge of God." Finlay will be calm in his most dramatic pages, as Renan, in his incomparably poetic descriptions, will seem to have caught, not only the essential features of that sacred Syrian soil ruled over by the Turk, but the very soul of all its people. On whatever scene or epoch vour mental eye may chance to dwell, there will be one, however, to which, involuntarily, you will turn again and again. The pathos of that once-glorious city of Justinian at its 35° 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN tragic moment of defeat and capture ; the moving drama that played its last great act out to its finish, in the death of Constantine, and the crowding beneath the golden walls of Santa Sophia of all Constanti nople's Christian world, — where indeed, in all the more moving passages of the world's sad, vet glorious record of courage and heroism, of soaring ambition and hope less despair, may you find another such record ? All the greater elements of tragedy are involved in the fall of Constantinople. In the eight hundred years since Justinian had gone to his rest, in the Church ot the Holy Apostles, his once glorious city had sunk, year by year and century by century, to find but a shadow of its former splendour housing its paltry hundred thousand inhabitants. Yet was the prize worth all a Turk might have to lose in gaining it. Not only were its great churches still mines of gold and jewels, its women adorably fair and delicately nurtured, and the wealth of its citizens still a by-word in men's mouths, but the Turk, swollen with his great extent of captured territory in the West as in the East, felt within him the pressing, gnawing rage for the place. As statesman and warrior he knew neither his newly acquired lands in Hungary, nor along the shores of the Hellespont or the Bosphorus, were safe until the key to the sea was in his hand. Constantinople he must have or die ! He felt the city to be his nat ural capital. To ease his desire, even as men ease a hopeless love of some fair woman by covetous look ing, the Moslem strode up and down the shores of his Asian possessions, to whet his desire with glimpses 35i 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of the fairest of cities shining so close, yet so far be yond his reach. Othman, that son of Ertoghrul who gave his name to the Turks of history, he, at least, had dreamed he touched it. This hero had had a hero's dream. From his loins there had sprung a tree whose boughs overshadowed the earth and seas. From the Nile and the Danube, the Tigris and Euphrates, ships sailed forth to cities and ports from all of whose towers and fortresses shone the golden Crescent. A great wind arose and dashed the Crescent against the crown of Constantine, that "im perial city that stood at the meeting of two seas and two. continents, the centre jewel of the ring of empire." Othman was about to place this priceless ring upon his own finger when, as happens in dreams, he awoke at the most delectable, exciting moment. What Oth man had failed to accomplish, even in a dream, other later Turkish Sultans had attempted to consummate. "Thunderbolt" Bayesid (Bajajet) had indeed actually besieged Constantinople, as certain of his successors har- rassed, and all but captured, the now temptingly en feebled city. It was reserved for the audacious courage of a youth — as we Westerners count a man's years, for that of a full-grown man according to Eastern reckoning — to push on where others had failed and had fallen behind. " Let those who love me follow me ! " was the characteristic shout with which Mahomet II saluted the ears of his new subjects when, on the shores of the Hellespont, he heard of his father's death. Ma homet was then twenty-one. When, two years later, 352 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN he planned the siege of Constantinople, this extraor dinary youth was one year younger than Alexander when he fought at Granicus, and three years less than Napoleon when the latter commanded at Lodi. His plan and directions for the taking of Constanti nople were projected on lines that proved the craft and cunning, as well as a breadth of military genius as com pletely in possession of its powers as was Napoleon, when at the zenith of his fighting capacity. The manual labour of the building of the great for tress Rumeli-Hissar on the European shore, to complete his line of attack, was pushed on with all the ardour of youth and the tyranny of a despot. In three months the monster towers were completed. How many of the thousand workmen and the thou sand masons were victims to the lash, or to overwork, no history records. The same impetuous dash and fury attended each and every one of the more strikingly vivid appearances made by this extraordinary leader. The sky was hid den by the rain of the lances and arrows that were showered, through the clouds of smoke, from the new musketry and cannon ; for Mahomet's siege of Con stantinople is memorable among all other sieges as being one in which both the old and the new war machinery were in use. Battering-rams and wooden turrets found themselves in the strange company of the new cannon, as all were pressed against the great walls. To the known horrors of war was added, there fore, the terror of a power as paralysing as it was destructive. 23 353 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN The impatient, tireless figure of Mahomet was to be seen everywhere throughout the long duration of the siege of fifty-three days. We can seem to catch his gasp of despair, in the ditches at dawn, when he discovers the Tower of Romanus he had overturned the night before rebuilt in a few hours, and to hear his shout that " the word of thirty-seven thousand prophets should not have compelled him to believe that such a work in so short a time could have been accomplished by the infidels." We follow him into the surf, impetuously riding his horse into the foam ing waters up to its neck, that he may look with his own eyes and see his vast, but poorly commanded Turkish fleet let five Genoese vessels sail past it, into smooth waters, to bring their stores of provisions to succour starving Constantinople. The thunder of his maddened oaths rings still, echoing, down the aisles of the centuries. His greatest act of military genius will enchain your interest. For to such powers as lay within the brain-cells of this Moslem youth one's wondering admiration must pay its tribute of applause. Finding the reduction of the city well-nigh hopeless, the genius of the young Sultan devised a plan as origi nal as it was daring. Could he but get his fleet in position, upon the higher part of the harbour, then, with the co-operation of his land forces, he would have Constantinople at last within his grasp. The fleet lay in the waters of the Bosphorus. The entrance to the harbour being inaccessible, with its great chain de fended by eight vessels, twenty smaller ships, and 354 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN numerous galleys and sloops, he must devise some other way of approach. The scheme Mahomet projected, and that was suc cessfully accomplished, was no less a project than to make his ships walk the hills ! Since the fleet could not go by water, it might by land. All the long night the Moslem soldiers worked. A level way was laid upon a platform, strong and broad. To ease the passing of the great ships the boards were greased with the fat of sheep and oxen, and thus " fourscore eight galleys and brigantines of fifty and thirty oars were disembarked on the Bospho rus shore, arrayed successively on rollers, and drawn forwards by the powers of men and pulleys." Ten miles were thus traversed, and in the morning the stunned, dazed inhabitants of Constantinople looked, across their battlements, to find the dreaded fleet of their enemy close beneath them. Against the double cannonading from sea and land even the great walls of Justinian could not stand. Breaches began to be opened. The end was all but accomplished. The night before the actual taking of the city — and what a scene is that painted for us by every historian who has lavished his powers of description on that most pathetic, as it is one of the most moving, of human tragedies ! To the summons of the drum, calling upon all within the city to come forth, to the last final defence of their lives and prop erty, of their wives' and children's liberty, four thou sand Romans alone responded. A few brave Greeks joined the devoted band, accompanying it to the 355 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN palace, where Constantine Palaeologus, in his moving speech, spoke not alone to this scanty remnant of the Roman people, but to the whole of his, and of our world as well ; for, as has been admirably said, " the last speech of Palseologus was the funeral oration of the Roman Empire." With the cries and tears of his devoted followers still before his ears and eyes, Constantine went forth, for a last time, to receive, beneath the dome of Sancta Sophia, the sacrament of the Holy Communion. On the dreadful morrow, after the rushing of the narrow pass of the gate of St. Romanus, the victori ous Turks, on their entering Constantinople, found the city well-nigh deserted. Those who were not lying heaped in the blood-running ditches, or those who were not already stretched in death about the gates, had fled. But where ? The silent mosaiced walls of the beautiful city gave forth no answer. The wondrous towers and domes that startled, with their novel forms of beautv, the eyes alike of conquer ing Sultan and battle-stained soldier — neither from dome nor tower was there sign or sight of fair women's faces or of old men's beards. As on and on the victorious, maddened, shouting army pressed they came at last to a mightv temple. The doors of this temple were barred. Axes did the work in a few seconds that cannon had done upon outer walls, and from the fair and splendid temple the cries of the doomed within told their Turkish captors where all Constantinople had fled. No time was then to be lost in gazing at the greatest 356 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN miracle of beauty these Moslem eyes had as yet be held. Beneath the gold of the wondrous walls there was other booty and a more glorious spoil. In an hour the work of appropriation of these human chattels was completed. The highest Greek nobles were chained to the lowest scourings of the city, prel ates found themselves roped with porters, nuns with debauchees, maidens with grey-bearded priests, and matrons, shrieking, saw their babes tossed to find cradles in the rough arms of terrible Turks. Sixty thousand of these " domestic animals " were driven forth from this sanctuary, through the city's streets, to camp, or to fleet. When finally the Sultan himself, attended by his pashas and guards, in his turn came up to look upon the glory of Santa Sophia, he found the vast interior all but empty. His soldiers, having possessed them selves of the more valuable human spoil, had begun to appropriate the inanimate beauty. One soldier Mahomet's quick eye detected in the desecrating act of breaking part of the marble pavement. With a blow from his scimitar his ruler reminded him that though the spoils and human captives had been prom ised to the soldiers as part of their booty, the public and private buildings belonged to their sovereign. When the Moslem conqueror thus admonished his short-memoried soldier he stood on a level with him, for both Christian and Turkish historians agree in recording the fact that Mahomet dismounted from his horse before entering the sacred edifice. Therefore the fable of the outstretched palm of the conqueror upon 357 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN the marble wall of the basilica, as is also the fiction of attributing its dark colour to its being blood stained, is a part of the legendary equipment with out which no Gothic cathedral or Moslem mosque appears to be considered complete. The despairing cry of the last of the Roman Emperors, in the midst of his devoted nobles, each one of whom proved himself worthy of the names of Palaeologus and Cantacuzene, rings with a more thrilling accent upon the ear than does Mahomet's blow from his scimitar. " Cannot there be found a Christian to cut off my head ? " was Constantine's anguished cry to his faithful band. The Cantacuzenes and Palaeolo- guses knew how to die — they could not murder. Their Emperor's inspired prudence, however, won him the death he coveted. Casting away the betraying pur ple, he fell in the midst of his army, cut down by an unknown hand. Thus fell Rome, casting from it the purple of its defenceless sovereignty, hiding its dignity, even as Caesar hid his face in his mantle, as he fell at the base of Pompey's statue, that it might not suffer outrage in its death agonies. IV During your stay in Constantinople not once, but again and again, will you thrill in quickened sympathy to that part of your own world that fell when this Eastern Rome fell. There will be days when you will follow, with eager interest, along the interminable stretch of walls that you mav seem to come the closer 358 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN to that vanished empire, beneath the battlemented gates and towers whose very names seem to be a part of the history of your own people. For we Anglo- Saxons are Roman as we are also Christian. No part of the amazing record of the history of Europe, since the Christian era, but is vitalised for us all with emotional interest.. Rome and Constantinople have this in common ; in such ruins, monuments, and frag ments as they have preserved unto the present day, the Rome of the Caesars and the New Rome of the Constantines and Justinians are just so much more a part of our actual emotional experience. Several of the military gates in the walls of Con stantinople will furnish a new and startling tremor of interest. Their names record still that strenuous fighting of fifty-three days, when Christians manned these gates, and Moslems stormed and captured them. Far out upon the Seventh Hill of Stamboul the Gate of Jesus, Isa Kapusi, marks, by its name, the first of all the gates of Constantine's city. This, the dis trict of the Outer Column, would have preserved for you, as late as 1507, the column itself on which stood the statue of Constantine, as well as the great gate, that portal of triumph through which conquering armies and their victorious generals first entered the city. The name of the gate was taken from the Chris tian church that once stood beside this fortified entrance. Whether one follows the land-walls, the harbour- walls, or the sea-walls, each of the still standing gates repeat, by their suggestive names, some historic 359 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN page bristling with incident, or with a tragedy, con nected with the drama of this marvel of cities. Customs as homely as the landing of wood for the Imperial seraglio christened the first gate along the harbour, the Odem Kapusi, the Wood-Gate. The stately fare well of Sultans to departing admirals and their fleet was tendered in a kiosk close to the water's edge ; and the nearest gate was called Yali Kiosk Kapusi, its Roman name being "The Beautiful Gate" — Porta Oraio. The Porta Peramatos was that point of land at the Horn where, in Constantine's time, as in our own day, the world that goes by water steps into the ferry-boats plying" between Stamboul and Galata. The gate named after St. Theodosius, now Aya Kapu, has now nothing to fear from the rival Turkish saint who gave his name to the edifice that was changed from a Christian church into a mosque. A certain beacon light that blazed night after night and century after century, from a high promotory, baptised with its title not only the fourteenth city gate, but the more aristocratic Greeks whose chosen residences were within its district. Phanar Kapusi, in Justinian's day Porta Phanarion, was the stately portal through which restive, intriguing, ambitious Greeks passed to serve, and to betray, their Turkish rulers. Along the sea-walls, amid the tangle of blossoming weeds, texts of scripture acclaim the date of portals that are now of a pitiful futility. Great as is still their massive strength, a barbed wire fence would present, in our days, a more obstructive line of defence than these still solid Roman battlemented portals. " Possessing 360 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN thee, O Christ, a firm wall, King Theophilus, the pious Emperor, reared from new foundations this wall, which guard with thy might, O Sovereign Ruler, and display to the end of time, standing unshaken and unmoved," is one inscription still easily to be read. The end of your wanderings will find you at the Seven Towers. Once an imperial castle built by Mahomet II, at one time a state prison, its historic memories make one glad to find so much of the castle a ruin, and so fine a ruin. The view from the battlements could have been but of fleeting comfort to the Sultans or Grand Viziers who, once condemned to this Turkish Bastille, knew their fate as well as the Janissaries who pitilessly decreed their doom. " The Khalif of a thousand prophecies, re served for a juncture ! " The sea seems to lisp the pathos of such destinies, as the massiveness of the towers proclaims man's cruelty to man. A turn past the gate to the left brings one to country roads, and to strange sights to be seen growing out of grass-grown roadsides. The drive onward to regain the heart of Stamboul is of all drives save one, that to the heights above Scutari, the richest in contrasts. For miles the monster city walls and their gigantic bastions line your way. Through the now open gates, Turks riding their horses in the Saracen way, — one you will find still in fashion in Sicily, the saddle-pack placed upon the haunches, and the rider astride of these in lieu of sitting upon the middle of the animal's back, — long lines of Turks and Khurds trotting thus, with full 361 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN sacks, into the interior, will change the clock of time for you from the present to a far-away period of antiquity. Flocks of sheep grazing amid the ruins, and shepherds whose thick cloaks and stout staves tell you they and their flocks know these walls by night as well as their faces by day — these pastoral adjuncts put one in tune for a gayer, more urban enjoyment than the ghostly company upon your left permits. Long as the walls stretch, the great cemetery that runs parallel to them is as long. Death faces death in this weird girdle of grave-stones, cypresses, and the Roman ruins that enwall this upper portion of Stamboul. Even at the brightest hour the scene is impressive and full of a great melancholy. I know no other stretch of country where, for so many continuous miles, the lines of scriptural warn ing, " Dust unto dust," is a text whose mournful pathos is conveyed with a nobler, a more impressive eloquence. Once, as we passed between this vast death's acre and the crumbling yet monster walls, the glow of an amber sunset had transmuted into a startling radiance the brilliantly decorated tomb-stones ; the night of the cypress shades was illumined with delicate rose-tints ; and Justinian's walls were aerial fabrics floating in amber-tinted mists. Out from the tapering cypresses the figures of three gypsies ap peared. Their arms were interlaced ; the gypsy maiden in the centre was locked thus to her two tripping companions. They were making as merry 362 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN in among the grave-stones as though each head stone were a live voung gallant awaiting their approach. Laughter shook the three gold-braided jackets, as it also filled with dancing lights the dark eves that were brighter than their jingling seguins. At sight of the strangers the girl in the middle of the trio, with a gay shout, wrenched herself free. She had leaped across the low grave- mounds ; she was at our carriage-wheels with a single bound of her supple, strong limbs ; and from a face as merry as it was richly hued the laughing eyes were asking would it be worth her while to show us how a gipsy could dance? The answer we gave must have failed of its true mean ing, for the girl threw back her darkly ringletted head and laughed. But the dance-measure was al ready in her pulses. And in the dust of the road, between those aisles of death and decay, the gipsy lifted an arm and hand, and set her yellow-slippered feet to a quick twinkling. The brisk swirl was ended almost as soon as it was begun ; but this dancing gipsy, radiant in youth's light-hearted gaiety, remains as an unfading picture upon the walls of Justinian, as the spirit incarnate of life and youth and beauty sprung from amid the ruins. V Within the city of Stamboul the chief architectural reminders ofthe older city are the Byzantine churches, the cisterns, the Burnt Column, and the monuments within the Hippodrome. 363 { - IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN As Constantine turned the pagan temples into Christian churches, the Turk in his turn changed the innumerable Greek Christian churches, full of gold and incense, which he found in Constantinople, into mosques. You will be taken to almost countless By zantine churches — to St. Irene, to SS. Sergius and Bacchus, to the church of St. John the Baptist, and to the church of Saint Mary, as well as to many others, to trace out those now well-known architectural fea tures which, in Santa Sophia were seen to leap to the full-grown proportions of the new art in building, in a few short years. In the study of these churches, as in the marvellous arcades of the underground cisterns, the daring and novelty of this Byzantine art will furnish continuous delight. In the grace and lightness of the domes in many of the churches, as in their lofty arches and or namental capitals, the freedom, the amazing skill, and the inventive qualities, as well as the prolific variety in conception of plan and design, will prove Justinian's period to have been that decisive moment in an art movement when, after long years of preparation and innumerable trials, art at last had found " its definite formula, and at a single stroke had obtained its apogee." The Turk, in the later period of his occupancy of Constantinople, found in these Byzantine building modes the architectural models needed for his purpose. A whole city, filled with magnificent examples of an art whose beauties appealed to him the more since this inspiration had been due to Oriental as well as to 364 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Roman influences, was before him. Conquerors, how ever, are ever imbued with a desire to build. Ma homet, magnificent as he found the city his prowess and arms had captured, was not content with dwelling in the palaces nor in praying in the churches that were still the wonder of the world. Both palaces and churches had one ineffaceable blemish ; they were Fore- Court of the Bayezidiyeh Mosque, or " The Pigeon Mosque palaces and churches that had been built by Chris tians. He must prove to Europe, in whose alien ter ritory he had won his right to reign, that Moslems also knew how to build. Santa Sophia was the greatest of earthly temples. But it had been built for the worship of Christ. Ma homet proposed to construct a mosque that should rival this wonder. The mosque he erected may pos- 365 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN sibly have proved a worthy rival to Justinian's master piece. The shaking earth in Stamboul has decreed that while the vast size and the basilican form ofthe Conqueror's mosque prove the imitative cleverness of its Greek architect, no part of its tiled wall sur faces, mosaics, or rich glass remains to make good the boast of Mahomet that this mosque should " surpass all others in his kingdom." In this great mosque, however, as in the more beautiful and stately one built by Suleyman the Mag nificent, there are certain features connected with each of these edifices that carry one back to the courts and fountains, to the hospitals and schools, of the once glorious older Eastern cities where charity and learning went hand in hand with religious devotion. If in the Byzantine art the Turk found the models for his building modes, it was to Baghdad and Damas cus his Moslem breadth of charity and veneration for learning turned instinctively to find plans for the group of buildings of the schools, baths, colleges, and hospitals with which he surrounded his temples. In the beautiful fore-courts with which nearly every mosque in Constantinople is adorned, you will find the Moslem has merely copied the atrium that was one of the chief features of the Byzantine churches. For models in which to enshrine his charity and his benevolence the Turk went to Persia and Arabia, to cities where millions of men and women, centuries be fore Christ preached the law of humanity and Ma homet's new faith decreed the fall of Arabian idols — to those Persian and Arabian cities where kings and 366 777 THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN queens had remembered the poor, and where the power and freedom that comes with knowledge had already been acknowledged — to such great capitals the Turk went for his college, school, and hospital plans. In the century immediately succeeding the conquest of Constantinople a vast amount of building was done in Stamboul. New Imperial palaces, gardens, and more and more mosques were begun and finished. To embellish these all the wealth and beauty of the still standing Byzantine city was plundered. Once again, as Justinian had compelled the pagan world to yield up its treasures to beautify and adorn his Sacred Palace and Santa Sophia, so did the Sultans call upon the Christian city to contribute its rich quota to the city of the Padishah. The Turk also, once he had crossed the Bosphorus, began to participate in the great movements that were changing the face and the lives of his neighbours in Europe. Turkey, unlike India or China, has been, indeed, most sensibly affected, not by one, but by all the great movements that have swept over the Western world. The tremendous upheavals in life and society dur ing the Renaissance had their retroactive influences as far east as the mountains of Asia Minor. For it was in 1453 that Mahomet II took Constantinople; and in the next centuries we see the conquering Turks sweeping onward their Cross- and Crescent-worked standards in the north up to the very walls of Vienna,. 367 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN as in the south their conquest went as far as Baghdad, and in Egypt and Syria, from Damascus to Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers. While Giotto, Brunelleschi, and later Michael An gelo were carving their hilly domes in stones and their towers that were to shadow Italian city streets, Persian and Arabian architects and artists were as busily build ing tapering minarets and chiselling palace walls and door-surfaces, upon the shores of the Bosphorus. The kiosks of Seraglio Point; the tombs, fountains, and mosques with which Stamboul is filled, — as well as the fountains and mosques to be seen and studied in Pera, Scutari, and Brusa, — each and all the Persian-Turco buildings erected in the past six hundred years, prove the taste and the ingenuity of their builders. One of the seventeenth-century mosques in Stam boul is an admirable example of the scale of splen dour on which the mother of a Sultan could plan — or could choose from among plans — a temple to her God. To gain the fine Yeni Valideh Jami, the mosque of the Valideh Sultan — completed by the mother of Ma homet IV — at the head of the Long Bridge, you will be led past the rows of the scribes, seated as they have sat for a thousand years, at the doors of temples, pen in hand, at their little tables, transcribing the wishes or desires of their turbaned customers. Out from the whirr and stir of the Stamboul streets you will find yourself moving upward, along an inclined dirt court. This was once a passage sacred to royalty ; for Sultans and the mothers of Sultans rode or were 368 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN driven to the very door of the mosque. Once within the edifice, and you are in a fairy world with whose tints and tones you now have become familiar. The half-dozen rooms, with their richly tiled wall-surfaces, the glowing casements filled with the traceried lines mmm Fountain in Great Mosque — Brusa of the tree of life in the jewelled Persian glass, — such sumptuous interiors the kiosks of Seraglio Point have already prepared you to expect in rooms where majesty must rest on its way to its prayers. It is by way of the Sultan's own tribune that your profane feet may now enter the mosque. For the present Sultan, having abandoned the practice of visiting each mosque in succession once a year, per mits these rooms and the tribunes, once sacred to 24 369 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN royalty, to be now opened to visitors. From no other place could the outlook upon the fair, rich wall- surfaces, the carved platforms, the gold and green frieze, and the exquisite carvings in minber and mirhab be as comprehensive. Should the sunset lights be pouring in through the western windows, a thousand tiny lamps will shine and glow, as though lighted from within rather than from without. Perhaps next to Santa Sophia itself will this rich, golden-lighted inte rior of the Yeni Valideh Jami seem to you, of all mosques in this city of mosques, the one most satisfy ing in point of beauty. In point of originality it is rather in his tombs and fountains, than in his grander mosques, the Turk has displayed his invention. For the origin of the curious Moslem death-chambers, and for the superior beauty of the older tiled ornamentations which were the models of the extraordinary tomb-interiors in which we see Sultans, their wives, and children lie in state, one must go to Brusa, to the old Turkish capital. Without this clue the tiirbehs of Stamboul present themselves as among the most singular of human monuments. In an outer court, one which you will have entered through a garden opening directly upon the street, you will pass between two divans. On one the reclin ing figure of a priest, or of two priests, their beards buried in their Koran, will rise at your approach. Their smile has a sunny cheerfulness that seems bor rowed from the surprising gaiety of their surroundings ; for this outer court might as well have been called a 37° 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN bower, set as it is in clustering vines, with its tiled floral devices and its sun-swept openness. Beautiful cedar doors, inlaid with ivories or seed-pearls, will be pushed open ; and you enter the tomb to find yourself in a gaily furnished drawing-room ! The octagonal Interior of a Turheb enclosure will be domed. The dome will show richly coloured decorations, if it shall have escaped the almost universal destruction by fire that has been the fate of half the tombs in Stamboul. It will be due to these desecrating flames that, in lieu of flawless tiled wall- surfaces, you will be confronted with white-washed walls. In the place of turquoise backgrounds the texts of the Koran furnishing the frieze to the walls will be of a painted green or blue ; and for the superb 37i 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN double windows, where iron is seen to take on the delicacy of lace in screen traceries, with their inlay ing of niello and ivories, you will turn in amazed sur prise to find the draperies of homely worsted damask curtaining the windows of the chamber, for example, wherein lies Mahomet the Conqueror. The bodv of the conqueror lies alone, in the ground below the huge black sanduk that stands in the very middle of what must be considered as the strangest death-chamber human taste has as yet devised. The lower row of windows is curtained, a chandelier de pends from the dome, and four huge silver cande labras stand each at one of the four corners of the coffin. Upon the black velvet pall, inscriptions of the Koran are outlined in massive raised embroid eries. Across the upper head of the sarcophagus two priceless camel's-hair shawls lie, folded length wise. The railings surrounding the pall are seen to be of solid silver, frosted to dulled beauty by time and dust. Were the great spirit beneath that strangely set coffin to rise, in what amazement would his warrior-spirit view his incongruous surroundings, — French curtains, with lacy inner draperies, French clocks, a crystal chandelier, a carpet, and the great candelabras ! One seems to hear the mighty roar of disdain, the shout of anger, and the laughter seasoned with consuming contempt, bursting upon the ear, filling the room as once the mighty voice seemed to fill all Constantinople, as the re-incarnated conqueror awakes to find his royal death-chamber a cosey French drawing-room. 372 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Had Frenchmen imagined such tombs for certain of their great dead, how entirely at home would the gay spirits of those princes of conversation have felt them selves. How Chateaubriand, or Madame de Stael, or Madame du Deffand, or even the grandeur-loving soul Turbeh of Mahmoud II and Abdul Aziz of Bossuet, — how any one of these, had they been re summoned to this earthly sphere, in such a room would have gazed about in surprised, yet pleased recognition of certain familiar details. How quickly would the once mortuary chamber have been transformed into a salon ! Divans would have recalled the seats in the ruelle, the curtains would have been drawn, the clock set to a merry ticking, and conversation with the eager visitors at once would have been systematically begun, 373 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN with the texts of the Koran before them, perhaps, as its most fitting topic. There are other turbehs less suggestive of such mundane associations. In the Mosque of the Princes the tragedy of the Circassian Khasside, wife of Suley man I, perpetuated her grief for her sons in a beauti ful marble tomb set in garden bloom. The Russian beauty, Roxalana, sleeps next to the tiirbeh of her great husband, Suleyman the Magnificent. In the midst of rich tiles and wondrous arabesques " the joyous one," whom Suleyman adored only less for her loveliness than for the gifts of her fine mind, keeps a sad yet beautiful state. The pathos of neglect is beginning to trail its finger of decay across the Koran inscriptions and the breaking wall-surfaces. Of all the royal tombs in Stamboul the tiirbeh of Mahmoud II, " the Reformer," is the newest, as it is also the most completely Eastern in its strange assort ment of the gay, and of the holy and profane. Be tween Corinthian pilasters seven windows, whose iron screens are richly inlaid with silver and ivory, made the chamber as bright as its garden. The boxes — sanduks — of two Sultans, of Mahmoud and of his son Abdul Aziz, are covered with gold embroidered velvets and draped with the usual costly gift shawls. At the head of Sultan Mahmoud's tomb you will discover a strange ornament to be found in a death-chamber. A high fez stands erect, upon which is pinned a diamond aigrette and plume. The fez is to symbolise the work in reform accomplished by this brave Sultan. Not to be outdone by his greater father, his son's tomb is 374 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN decorated with the insignia of the order of Osmanieh, which Abdul Aziz founded; and, that the room itself should furnish its quota of novelty, one of the huge chandeliers adorning the tomb-chamber, you will learn, was a gift to Abdul Aziz from England's queen, as a certain clock on the chimney (for ghosts must not perish for want of heat), — this particularly beautiful clock was presented by Napoleon III. With its carved Koran stands, with its famous illuminated Koran written in ancient Arabic by the daughter of a prophet, with its kneeling priests and the wondrous head-dresses upon the tombs, this tiirbeh of the two Sultans pre sented an interior that robbed death of its two most dreaded conditions, its sad loneliness and its unreach able remoteness. The dead Sultans, their princesses and children, seemed merely waiting, in great state and comfort, the sounds of the clarion-tongued trumpet that was to bring them back to the beautiful room that was kept in readiness to receive them. VI The living Turk continues to abide in crowded Stamboul, in the midst ofthe Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Khurds, as he has lived among them since, with Mahomet the conqueror, he captured Constantinople and these its people to rule over them. He has given hospitality to their gods, and within more recent years a more or less extended security to their temples and forms of beliefs. He has neither sought to prosely tize, nor has he cruelly enforced his own creed on his 375 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN neighbours who are also the co-subjects of his Padishah. " Let there be no violence in religion " is a rule of the Koran the Turk strictly observes. It is with his sword the faith alone is to be extended and Islam glorified. Of all of his neighbours the Greek is the most troublesome and turbulent. The Greek can never forget he was here in Constantinople long before the hated Cross and the Crescent waved over Santa Sophia. The spirit that pervades Stamboul, however, is the spirit of the Moslem, and not of the Greek. Through out the hurry and stir of the packed streets it is Turkish priests and Turkish soldiers, veiled women and protected dogs, who chiefly fill them. The seal ofthe Moslem life and nature is upon the whole city ; and Greek may come and Jew may go, but the Turk is still in the seats ofthe mighty. Upon his rags as upon his barred windows ; in the long, open shop-rows upon certain of the upper streets ; and in the market-places, where cutlers, and harness- makers, and the cobblers of the fine Turkish shoes and slippers work before the eyes of men ; at their fountains, as before their down-at-heels cafes, wherever there is life and movement, it is the Turk and his dignity, the Moslem and his ways and customs, who still make of Stamboul the Moslem city. In the now modernized open shops ofthe bazaar the figure ofthe Turk sits, immobile upon his rug, waiting for buyers, with the patience of those who wait in his sombre eyes, and the reticence upon lips and the restraint imposed on importuning gesture of those whose pride 376 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN is greater than their need. His neighbour the Arme nian is as a chattering magpie at vour elbow, as the Jew is as the sleuth-hound upon your steps, dogging you from silk-shops to the pearl-stands, and to the quarters where the furs of strange beasts from Russia and Asia make the clamour ot the Greek shopkeepers seem the voices ot these re-incarnated. The Turk eves this babel about him with the im perturbable calm with which he has watched, during the long centuries, the many races Fate has decreed should be his neighbours upon the Seven Hills — his neighbours but never his brothers. In the Egyptian Bazaar yonder, amid a thousand aromatic spices, and the overpowering scents of attar of roses and of musk, the European eye will find the looked-for aspects of Orientalism in bazaar-customs ; — its unaccustomed medley of products, grains, chemicals, cottons, human beings, and flocks of driven sheep and goats, or of turkeys and calves — such a mixture, in a word, as the words "Eastern Bazaar" conjure up. In this more Oriental shopping quarter older customs still hold their sway. " O buyers, where are ye ? " or, " Long are the hours that are spent in hoping ! " are outbursts to be heard from grave lips, as sonorously voiced, and with as scriptural a turn to the phrase, as when Solomon or David voiced their deeper needs in immortal verse. Biblical and patriarchal scenes are also still abroad and close to the hills and vales of the city. As near to Constantinople as the hills of Thrace, a few miles away, the shepherd in his goatskin is still to be seen 377 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN tending his flocks by night. His smoking kettle and its glowing fire are the oldest search-light of the hills. When the Grecian heroes were making the plain of Troy a poppy-field of blood, and Abraham's flocks were lapping water at Syrian pools, the Thracian peas ant was then, as now, keeping his lonely watch on the bare Thracian hills, with his near flock and the distant fires of his brethren as the sole companions of the long night's watches. 378 Chapter XXI PERA AND GALATA BEWILDERING, enchanting, repelling are the streets ot Pera and of Galata — across the water. One experiences a dozen sensations or more in the flash of an eye-glance. In a minute, in such streets, one may live fast. Attraction and repulsion succeed each other, as wave follows wave. The same object, person, or spectacle, evokes this dual sensation. There is scarcely a street or a square, scarcely even a house that is found to be all of a piece. The reasons for this duality of sensation, one which, at first, made every impression seem blurred, was obvious. In these streets of Pera, of Galata, the old and the new, the past, the present, and the possible future of the City of Constantinople as a whole, — these vital forces were to be met at every turning. Wherever one wandered one was confronted with this battle of things seen and unseen. The shock of change was in the very air. In this city — for Pera and Galata are practically one — of strange streets, filled with oddly costumed men and women, in this city of innumerable religions, whose gods are as varied as are the temples, where the speech of men differ as widely as do their standards of morality, where, in lieu of men of one nation tightly knit, segregate in their soli- 379 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN darity, there are nineteen nationalities, all under Moslem rule, but each and all pulling away and apart from each other, — in such a city, whose pulses beat, not in unison but in feverish discord, the inrooted, inherent vitality of old Turkish traditions is fighting a daily, hourly battle against the growing susceptibility of the Turk to change and modification. The processes of all evo lution are of compelling interest. But beauty, sym metry, harmony, these are not to be looked for in the larviporous stage. Pera and Galata, as all the world knows, were for merly suburbs of Istamboul. of old Byzantium. In the great days of Justinian, Galata was called Justini- anapolis. It was then already a city, with its walls, citadel, and municipal privileges. Later, that part of the hill and shore directly opposite to Byzantium was called Pera. The Genoese, those adventurous, clever, and mili tant Italians, made, in 1267, an Italian city of Galata. Although they were held in feudal tenure by the Greek Emperor of Constantinople, their city was ruled by their own Podesta. Then trouble came, as trouble will, when subjects are wilful, brave, and daring, and their overlord is overbearing and cruel. The difficulty began about a question of wall-building. In 1348 the Metropolis across the water thought Pera and Galata had walls and towers enough. The citizens and their Podesta, in Galata, held a quite different opinion. The war that followed to settle which view was strongest, ended in the Genoese erecting double walls and innumerable towers, whose central one was 3S0 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Galata tower, even now the most conspicuous object in all Galata. Although the great walls and gates built by these mediaeval Italian conquerors are gone, one or two of their ditches have given their names to certain streets. Hendek " the ditch " is one such street, and still another is Lulu Hendek. In one of the narrowest and dirtiest of all the Galata streets, in the Pershenbe Bazar, — a building with arched windows and elabo rately carved Byzantine ornamentation that seems a pearl hidden in a dunghill, — this fine old building is the old Palazzo del Podesta. The finger of Italian taste and strength in palace and house building is also to be traced in many a noble structure along the Galata shore. Most of these old palaces are now become warehouses. They are as solid and harmonious in their structural beauty as when Italian nobles built them, wherein to live their vivid, strenuous, and luxurious lives. When the Turks conquered Constantinople the Genoese reign across the water came to an end. With out his arms the mediaeval Italian was stripped of his fighting spirit. Little by little the Genoese died out, to let their conquerors, the Turks, and later, in turn, all Europe, come in to make of Pera and Galata the " European City." Galata and Pera are still the most thoroughly alive part of Constantinople. The foreign embassies have in Pera their winter palaces. At the foot of its hill lie the quais France has built. The admiralty fills the hollow of the hill, just above the Golden Horn. 381 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Below Top-Khaneh, with its gun foundry, mosque, and fountain, the chain of royal palaces begins to stretch white lines of glistening splendour along the Bosphorus. For street shows, here were some to be had for the looking. There are trains of pack-horses in all of the streets, narrow or broad ; these are laden with sand, coal, timber, salt, such merchandise as beasts of burden have carried since the time, ages ago, when men found the uses of such, and the gain to be made in transport ing them. A grave company of sedan-chairs, staidly at rest below the windows of your Pera Palace hotel, is another sight worth seeing. It is not as patriarchal a spectacle as is the endless train of moving horses, but it is even more appealing, since the historic period these red-plush upholstered chairs recall is nearer to our own. Old men, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, even Europeans, and a few, a very few, aged ladies make use of these sedan-chairs for their outings. For the streets of Pera, with their crowds and ill-paved road beds, are not kind to old bones. The pack-horses and the sedan-chairs were thickest in a certain dusty back road that ran directly below my balcony windows. This dusty road was the chosen thoroughfare for the bullock carts coming up from the shores of the Golden Horn ; for wandering flocks of sheep who browsed, unwitting it was their last earthly meal, on the scanty grass of Le Petit Champ des Morts, on their way from their hill pastures to the butchers' stalls of Stamboul ; for gay, debonair groups of gipsies, wearing the superb old Turkish costume, 382 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN richly braided in gold and silver, and whose vests, trousers, belt-scarfs, and chemisettes made moving patches of crimsons, greens, pinks, and purples in and out ot the trees; for Greek women, also, in their full Greek costume, whose trousers and vest are all in one garment ; and for hundreds and hundreds of veiled women, their feridjehs intensely brilliant against the blacks of the slanting cypresses, — the road, for all of these, was the road of predilection, as well as for pashas on horseback, with their mounted escort and runners, and for swift, flying shapes of magnificently clad Anatolian soldiers from the palace, taking this country short cut to Stamboul. For those who delight in sharp contrasts, no city in the world can yield such a wealth of amazing opposite- ness as does this part of Constantinople known as "the European quarter." You may go direct from prisons to palaces, from Cafes Chantants to the chanting ofthe Koran in Mos lem mosques. You may gaze on the whirling of the white skirts of the dancing Dervishes in the afternoon, and continue to watch snowy petticoats, beneath Dou- cet gowns, swirling in the waltzes of an embassy ball in the evening, to end your review of the dance move ment later on — quite early in the morning — in looking upon the slower, more mysterious, sensuous evolutions of gauze draperies in the danse du ventre, executed by Persian danseuses in the questionably re spectable quarters of lower Galata Town. The projects — financial, commercial, or industrial — planned in Chicago, New York, Vienna, Buda 383 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Pesth, London, Paris, or Berlin, traverse continents to come to their finish, successful or otherwise, in the tall banking houses, in the stately embassies, in the more mysterious houses of Pashas, — all of which line the narrow, dirty Galata and Pera streets. Pera itself is turning speculator, builder, and im prover. The famous Petit Champ des Morts, the burying-ground running from the top of Pera Hill westward and downward to the Golden Horn, — this cemetery, for centuries the favourite out-of-door play ground for resting, thinking, idling Turks, this place of burial and public parkland in one, has been found too profitable to be given over to the bones of dead men and to the reveries of living ones. Its outlook upon the Golden Horn and the mosques of Stamboul is the sort of outlook that brings gold into the pockets of the shrewd and of the unscrupulous. European apartment houses rise up where formerly a turbaned headstone told the passer-by the rank and state of the deceased. One of these houses was in process of building. I watched it as it grew, day after day. The structure was planned on the familiar lines of such buildings seen everywhere, in Paris, in Vienna, in Denver. That was the sign of Europe, of Amer ica, entering into possession upon Turkish streets. Now note the point where the East comes in, and holds its own, in the very teeth of iron girders, of plate-glass windows, and of Mansard roofs. The bricks, the mortar, the iron, the very planks for this fine, modern mansion will be brought to its door, hour after hour, day after day, as bricks and 384 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN mortar have been brought, in the Asian way, for in numerable centuries. Long, interminable strings of pack-horses, ot asses, come up from the shores where the ships lie with their cargoes, — up through the silent cypress groves to the hill where the house is being builded according to Mansard and to modern re quirements. Khurdish or Persian bricklayers unload the deep baskets. Armenian masons and carpenters sort the bricks, the long planks of timber, and the machine-cut ornamentation. As for the choice of the site of this building, and of all the others beginning to crowd the hill-top, there could be but one verdict, — it was the very best in all Pera ; one of the best and most beautiful in the whole round world. The outlook across the Golden Horn to Stamboul, from any part of this dusty road, was one in ten thou sand. Every mosque and minaret, crowning the seven hills of the famous city, stood out as clear as though their wondrous outlines were etched against a more solid substance than fluid ether. At whatever hour of the day you shot your glance westward, it was to dis cover a new city, one lighted with new tints, one hung in different substances against the vast scroll of sky. Stamboul might be a grey, pale city, rising out of the steely Golden Horn in the morning ; at noon it might be quiveringly alive with colour, every mosque a dome of silver, each minaret a flashing column of light; at sunset the citv would, perchance, turn to amethyst, its houses purple patches, its temples monster garnets, against a blood-red sky. And when the night fell, it 23 385 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN was to see a vast blackness studded with thousands and thousands of lights below the vaster star-lit night, one firmament arched above a lesser. The pictures hung along this dusty highway were in deed among those best worth seeing. Parallel with this country road ran the Pera high street. Europe sat in firmer seat upon this thorough fare. Yet here also the East pressed close against the modern shapes, the modern ways, and the mod ern innovations. Take the very first of all the many strange, sharp contrasts that presents itself as you stroll towards La Grande Rue. At the corner, a Turk in a fez and an overcoat will be heard blowing a thin blast through a small brass horn. A jingling noise, that of innumerable small bells, will follow the thin tooting. The bells hung about the necks of horses lightly harnessed to a narrow horsecar filled with fez-capped passengers, are not trusted, however, to convey their warning message. The horning is the primitive Eastern way of announcing to street traffic that a tramcar is about to turn a corner. Still another set of bells will presently send forth a more silvery jangle. These will be hung in parallel lines inside an immense loop spanning the backs of two noble bullocks. This is the more antique East ern method of warning foot-passengers to make way for a cart carrying stones as large as a house. The bullock driver, a half-naked Arab, who moves along with the supple pride of his race, will presently be seen slanting his untamed barbarian's eyes on two votaries of Venus. The locks of these frail dames, it 386 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN will be noted, are ot the same hyacinthine hue as were those of their dead-and-gone sisters, on whose dyed Laleli Djami — Als Serai Quarter tresses the fond eyes of Greek and Roman nobles were fixed, centuries ago, in the gold and mosaiced streets of Byzantium. 387 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Nearer, quite close at hand, across the street, a mass of daintily held white and pink petticoats will pres ently sweep into view. Beneath the disc of a creamy sunshade a fair fresh face, topping a slender shape that knows how to move beautifully on two tiny high- heeled shoes, will be lifted to the bright sunshine. The pink petticoats will all but sweep the legs of an ass on whose patient sides, nailed to two slanting boards, hang the crimson liver and entrails of dead cats. Such contrasts line every street and alley of Pera and Galata, as from the Galata shores to Pera heights one fine building succeeds another. Noble stone facades rear their state above filthy gutters, above reeking streets, above rickety shanties and hovels we should consider a disgrace to the slums of any modern city. The British Embassy stands in the midst of its great gardens, at the very top of Pera Hill. In its stone solidity it is as majestic as a fortress palace, set in a green wood. Ten steps away from its wrought- iron gates the foot must look well to the sljmy streams oozing from adjacent alleyways. Just behind the embassy are the Pera fish and fruit markets ; you enter the open streets to find yourself in the far, far East, with its smells, with its sickening odours of raw, freshly cut meats, with its entrails of fish gaudily swung before your eves, with ripe fruit surcharging the great baskets, and over-ripe fruit, a pulpy mass on the ground, where mangy dogs, and diseased-looking cats, and half-naked ragamuffins, are tumbling over each other for possession of the fallen, putrid mess. 3™ 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Go where you will, throughout the length and breadth of Constantinople, nostrils and eyes are sickened one instant, to be delighted, entranced, rejoiced with beauty, colour, and splendour, at the very next turning. Along La Grande Rue, the shops, the fashions, the book-stalls, and the foreign newspaper stands, mean while, are doing a quicker, surer work of denational isation, regeneration, and modernisation than colleges or mission schools. The Turkish ladies who come to shop in La Grande Rue, to buy innumerable articles at " Le Bon Marche," are working a silent, unconscious, but none the less amazing revolution in Turkish life. Fashion is the greatest of all subverters. Since Abdul Aziz brought from France French notions about women's dress, and introduced to the women of his harem the intricacies and refinements of Parisian costumes, the tastes and desires of Turkish women, quite insensibly, have begun, in their turn, their retroactive influence upon Turkish life and finance. The passion for splendid raiment is an instinct with the Oriental. With men as well as women the adornment of the person has been, for long ages, a cult, a social rite. Along with the influences wrought upon sensuous, semi-barbaric natures by an Eastern sun and the intense Eastern light, under which the strongest colours pale and fade, the Turks, in common with all Eastern peoples have long asso ciated magnificence in apparel with high rank. Gor geous as were the jewel-studded, lavishly embroidered Turkish costumes worn by the richer classes in former 389 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN days, they had this one inestimable advantage, — they were always in the highest fashion. It took a new reign to bring in a new cut of a pasha's mantle or gem-studded turban. As for the women, the harem of the Mahometan had its own peculiar economies ; for within its mysterious walls it was the women who were changed, or put aside, and not their dress. The busy brains of the men-milliners in the Rue de la Paix have effected a bloodless revolution. The Moslem, rule of centuries, in matter of dress, is at an end. " Nous avons change tout celaf the French men must cry gaily, in a chorus, as they finger the checks signed by strange, undecipherable, but very negotiable, Turkish signatures. Boxes upon boxes of gowns, ball dresses, dinner dresses, tea gowns, shoes, slippers, the finest hosiery, the costliest lace- trimmed underwear — these are sent via the Orient express or steamers from Marseilles, to be deposited at the harem doors of wealthy Turkish signiors. With the coming of these boxes, the wealthy Turkish signior has awakened to an unpleasant discovery. It is now the dresses which change every year, and not, alas ! his odalisques ! The Bey or Pasha who twenty years ago could have had two hundred women in his harem, and still know himself to be a rich man, now feels himself poor with but a single wife and her daughters to clothe, and a mere handful of Jarigas, but these, of course, don't count, for slaves still wear — Allah be thanked ! — the comparatively costless Turk ish dress. For the Turk who continues to indulge in the wan- 39° 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN ton, yet legitimate, extravagance of four wives, and a properly stocked harem, ruin soon begins to peep in at him through the lattices of his closely guarded salamlik. Four wives, not to mention their and his daughters, and the ladies who compose the properly stocked harem, — every one of these must dress according to the financially regulated changes of Parisian modes. With such a household who can wonder at the charges of corruption, of extortion, of dishonest pilfering of all sorts, levelled at the higher Turkish officials ? Paquin, Doucet, Worth — these are the men who have made it well-nigh impossible for a Mahometan courtier or official to be either en tirely honest, or, matrimonially, a properly many- wived man ! It you wish to learn the secret of the changes that are going on in Turkish life, the forces that are at work among the women of Turkey will furnish you with perhaps its truest solution. In the streets, as you pass these ladies, you would not, vou could not, suspect the full nature of their complete transformation in this matter of costume. It is still good form even among the smartest Turkish ladies to wear, when abroad, their feridjeh. But the cloak which is gown and inverted cape in one, the upper part of the garment being drawn over head and ears, this primitive domino cloak, still universally worn by the less wealthy classes, whether walking or in their carriage, has undergone a very sensible amelioration. Instead of the disfiguring drawing-string pattern, the smart feridjeh is now simply a very well cut, long silk 39J IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN cloak, rather loose fitting, but still all-enveloping. The ladies whom you pass in their well-turned-out coupes, with only the black man's face beside the liveried coachman on the box to remind you it is not a strictly European establishment, these ladies have commonly chosen dark sombre shades of silk for their silken cloaks. Their veils are no longer the older fashioned yaskmak, that famous veil that hid all the features save that which is at once most betraying and most seductive in a woman's face, her eyes, — this bewitching mask is now chiefly relegated to the poorer classes and to negro slaves. The fashionable Turkish veil of our own time is a true veil. A large square of lace, black or white, covers completely both head and face. The thickly woven mesh falls below the chin. In such a disguise as that provided by the silken cloak and the veil-wrapper, who could divine the dainty French bodice, with its web-like embroideries, and lace incrustations, or the tight hip-skirt, with its flying base, or the ropes of pearls, or the costly uncut emerald or diamond necklace ? For a shopping tour, the wife of the wealthiest Pasha dons the skirt and shirt (the blouse) that has become as universally the accepted utilitarian feminine costume as has the republican sack-coat and trousers for men, whether sovereign or clerk. This skirt and shirt is worn beneath the cloak. In the European shops of Pera, if you use your eyes and ears, certain other changes and modifications, at work upon the loom of Turkish life, will confront you. The young daughters of matronly ladies whose half- 392 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN open feridjehs betray them as wearing smart Parisian gowns and high-heeled shoes, dames who doubtless began their harem life in gauze chemisettes and sagging Turkish trousers, — the daughters of these ladies you may hear stammering a few words of French or Eng lish. If none but women happen to be within the shop, the girls' fair fresh faces will be, and will remain, unveiled. It is only after marriage the face of a Mahometan woman must be unseen save by one man, her husband, and by the eyes of her own household. One such unveiled Turkish young girl I watched, for a half-hour or more. She was obviously of high rank. The features were large ; they were superbly moulded, the nose drooped with that peculiar curve so distinctly Turkish, a droop which is neither Roman, nor is it Jewish, yet it is one which gives a peculiar distinction to the Turkish face. The mouth was full, luxurious; and the lips were the colour of a damask rose closing over snow. Beautiful as was the face, in its sensuous, youthful fullness, it was the eyes, the wonderful, lus trous, fathomless Eastern eyes, that held your own and would not let them wander. As in the eyes of a maiden one sees the beginning of the woman-life dawn ing, in this girl's superb great eyes I read the breaking lights of a new, half-troubled existence. The girl was translating for her mother some Turkish phrases she was turning into French. The effort to find her words in the difficult foreign tongue had brought a vivid, flash ing light into her face. She was learning the newest of all lessons for a Turkish maiden, — she was learning to think in a foreign language. 393 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN This, the education of its women, is another among the many innovations that is being introduced among the more highly born or highly placed Turks. It is the mothers of a race who alone can educate, can transform its sons and daughters into the higher types of men and women. Meanwhile, among the Turkish men, as every one knows, the transformation of the exclusive Oriental into the accomplished European is already become the universal pattern of a Turkish gentleman. What ever his party, whether he belong to the old or the young Turkey party, the Turk of any pretension to style, or to social state, clothes himself in certain ofthe European modes of thought, as he does, sartorially, in European dress. Wherever you may chance to meet a well-born or highly educated Turk, whether in the salons of Paris, or those of Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, or nearer to their home, in the palace of the Sultan, you will be struck with his completeness, both as a man of the world, and of the great world, and also with his finish. Whatever the laws may be govern ing the standard of manners in Turkish life, their results prove them to be beyond criticism. The Turk has not only perfect manners, but he also has this peculiarity among other Eastern nations : however lowly his birth, once he has " arrived " he is trans formed into an aristocrat of deeply inrooted con servative tendencies, who yet presents, outwardly, a most engaging, sympathetic plasticity. Those whose lineage has ancestral distinction reveal a most engag ing social equipment. " Whenever I want to talk to 394 77V 777-7 PALACES OF THE SULTAN a man who understands everything, I turn to B Bey," said a beautiful woman recently to me in Rome. " He is as clever as a Frenchman, as versatile as our American men, and he has the sympathetic quality of a woman." The wealthy Pasha who drives, in his English brougham or Vienna-marked victoria, from the Stam boul heights to pay his visit to his sovereign, in clothes that are made in Paris or London, holds in his hand Le Temps or the London Times. His fez alone remains as the survival of his former elaborate Turkish costume. His country cousin, richer, perhaps, by many thousands than his town-bred relative, passes him riding high upon his Khurdish saddle. A flash of gold braiding on inner and outer garments, a blaze of colour about neck and belt, high boots, and the gemmed fingers, such are the still lin gering traces of Turkish dress among country gentle men. This rustic Pasha, Ali — governor — perhaps of some near province, is still followed by one or more mounted servants, by his pipe-bearer, and a run ner streaming with sweat. But the country cousin will oftener be found trotting along the country road than along La Grande Rue. 395 Chapter XXII SCUTARI AND BRUSA I IF in Pera and Galata one finds Europe and European customs pressing hard upon Turkish centres of life, in crossing the water one may pass into a city where the East still holds forty-five thousand souls true to their Oriental habits and ways of living. As seen from across the Bosphorus, Scutari appears to hang upon its hillside like a jewel awaiting the touch of the sun to wrench from it its secret of colour. Among the many spectacular effects presented in the ensemble of Constantinople's marvellous decor, Scutari's changeful colour contrasts, next after those of Stam boul, contribute the most effective element of beauty. Its old Turkish palaces and villas ; its great gardens and terraces ; its blanching mosques and their aerial minarets ; the grey and pink toned houses rising with the hillslope, — each and all of these features are fused into an incomparably harmonious ensemble. To enter Scutari, however, is to have this veil of illu sion rent in twain. The brusque surprise of disen chantment confronts one at the first step upon the Asian shore. The rose-hued, fairy world you have spent 396 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN hours in watching from across the water, this fairy world is seen to be a city in decay. About the foun tain, close to the wharf, the roads and the dilapidated hacks, the bullock carts sunk in the mire, the mangy dogs ravenous as wolves, and the toppling houses, — Cemetery in Scutari this is the Scutari you have exchanged for the delicate and exquisite city, sensitive as a richly toned landscape to colour and cloud effects. As one presses farther onward into the heart of the town the spirit of an immense indifference, of a profound despair, seems to pervade this the once "golden city." On your way upward to the Tekkeh ofthe Rufai, to the hall and monastery ofthe Howl ing Dervishes, streets and houses will continue to impress upon you this their character of forlorn miser- 397 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN ableness. That buildings as rootless as the wooden structures that line your way can withstand the winter's boisterous storms ; that human beings who have work ing hands and fingers can willingly abide in streets where offal and other unnamable horrors are left to work with the sun the pestilential vapours that clog the air — these wonderings that fill your mind receive no answering solution from the shabbily costumed men and women who flit like shades, silent and indifferent, beneath the crumbling house-fronts. Behind this Oriental apathy lies a subtler, deeper race- instinct. This city of decay seems perhaps as good a city as any other to these its citizens. For as you yourself wake to the fact that in entering Scutari you have passed the great boundary — that Europe is left behind, — centuries behind, — you wake also to the real ising sense that this city that is the beginning of a con tinent is the presentment of life as it has been lived, in the Asian way, for countless generations. The Orient is before you, with its squalor, its filth, its coarser indifference to mere things of sense, its subtler insight into the deeper, the more hidden realities of being. The Oriental has still the blood ofthe nomad in his veins. His cities are one or more encampments. His houses are his tent. And even as out upon the desert the refuse of house and table, thrown to the winds or cast upon the sandy plain, was the usage of those who " fold their tents and silently steal away," even so, in these their narrower thoroughfares, sights and smells that sicken your nicer sense, the Asiatic, whose senses are not nice, sees and breathes as freely, 398 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN in his tainted air, as you in your drained, plumbed, and sewer-made modern capitals. Where a certain street dipped to take a plunge downward we left our carriages to enter the famous Tekkeh. A weedy garden led to an open door. Be yond, a rectangular hall was seen to be thickly peopled. Once again we were late for this, the spectacle of grown men working their way Godwards through strange rhapsodic trances. The Mosque of the Rufai was small ; above the mihrab hung a number of weapons whose sharp edges and sharper points told you clearly enough their purpose. The dervishes, who were already in the earlier stages of their ecstasy, are not, however, per mitted to indulge in the fiercer delights of those self- inflicted wounds and blows, by means of which both Christian monks and Moslem dervishes have believed they could liberate the spirit the more freely from its hateful carnal tabernacle. The Sheikh was already in his place before the mihrab. The line of dervishes faced him. In white, blouse-like garments, caught about the middle by a leathern belt, lean, athletic dervishes ; stout dervishes of full habit and quiet pulses ; negroes, one a giant, rapt of eye, wild of gesture, already passion-strung, — these one and all were bending, twisting, bowing, now backwards, now forwards, as the shouts, " La ilah ilia 'llah," were shrieked upon the air. The chorus grew wilder and wilder, and the rocking motion became more and more frenzied. The gigantic negro was already lost to sense of place or surrounding ; his hoarse cry of " il " 399 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN and " lah " was a gasp ; the massive frame was passion- locked; beneath the half-closed lids the whites alone of the wild eyes were visible ; the ecstatic possession was at last beginning indeed to work its frenzy. A little white foam was forming a circlet of bright moist ure upon the dulled scarlet of the thick lips. The other figures along the line were only less ve hement, less rapt than was this huge African. The faces of the thinner-faced monks had begun to pale and pale. The blue veins in their transparent temples were turning to violet, there were streaks of scarlet staining the pallor of cheeks and brows, as, rocking, bowing, twisting, the bodies of these callers upon their god ninety-nine times, were hurled into space to give to each shout its accompanying spasmodic, but all the while, systematically directed bow. For the syllables oftheir profession of faith are divided into six; and as at the first " la " they bend forward, at the next " i " they stand erect, so also at the succeeding " lah " do the brethren bend to the left, to swing again into the first position. And thus on and on, faster and faster, and wilder and wilder, swirled the monks, as louder and louder rose their cries. The movement of these wild figures seemed to have passed to their last final limit of savage abandonment. But not vet — there was still a fiercer, a more barbaric degree to be attained. Two singers who had been seated upon a prayer-rug had risen. They had begun to pass cymbals and drums to the brethren. Without stopping their mad motion, in the hands of each wild figure the instruments were soon clashing upon the air in weird, discordant clangour. 400 Gipsy Sorceresses 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN For a brief space the hideous noise of the shouting voices, the metallic cling of the brass cymbals, and the dull roar ofthe beaten drums seemed to ease the tem pest of fury roused in these swaying figures. Then, in an instant, as a wave is seen to curl and curve in ward with swift and silent power before it rises to sweep with inrushing leap upon the shore and there to break in maddened swirl, did the momentarily stilled frenzy ot these wild men gather in strength to loose the demon of passion within. The sheikh had stamped his foot, and in lieu of the holy man he was supposed to be he might have been the son of Lucifer himself, calling on his demon hordes to let their fiendish souls have play, for the circle of shouting, swirling figures, holding each other now loosely by the hand, as they pranced, tossed, and hurled their bodies about, shout ing " Hu ! yu hu ! " (" He! O he! " [is God]), were rather a band of maddened fiends, worked to frenzied intensity, than the mortals we know as men. One round of this mad dance was enough. As we passed into the fresh, cool air the sensation of having come back to a normal, sane world, freed from the cries and prancings of demoniacal fanatics, was a reality even the dirt and filth of Scutari's streets could not dispel. The cool of the air swept keener and purer, as we mounted the heights above the city to gain the famous view from the peak of Bulgurlu. Seen from the mountain top, Scutari resumed its wonted decorative aspect. It lay below, far below, like a diadem set above the blue eyes of the sea. 4°3 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Vast was the world that rolled itself beneath the mountain brow. The billowy earth swept far in land, its undulations ending only with the vaporous wall of sky. Stamboul, Pera, the shores of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, — eastward, west ward, north or south, the great prospect spread itself out with an almost conscious pride in its wondrous beauty. To complete its charm, some Turkish ladies and their suite were abroad upon the summit. They had brought the grace of their languid poses, the soft brilliance of their silken cloaks, and their well-bred laughter to give movement and colour to the scene. Before our advent they had been sitting, in correct picnic posture, about the edges of a Turkey carpet. The remnants of their little banquet lay about, in fragments, upon the grass. The group had already scattered, to wander at will about the mountain-top ; an Anatolian servant, in brilliant blues and silver embroideries was in the act of shaking the carpet, as we neared him. Perched like a bird upon a branch, three of the ladies were already seated, hud dled close upon the rim of the mountain cliff that overlooked the Bosphorus. It was toward a certain figure, — one that stood out with the vivid intensity of a Francesco portrait against the background of pale azure, — that my eyes were drawn and held. The figure was that of a voung, an unveiled maiden. She had taken her seat upon a rock. She was watching, with a musing light in her eyes, a flock of turkeys that, unaffrighted, had circled 404 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN about her, to snap at the crumbs she was lazily toss ing them. Into the girl's face, with its dark, vivid, maidenly glow and beauty, something of the spirit of Mosque and Tiirbeh in Brusa the vast prospect below seemed to have passed — something of its generous breadth and its sweep of power, as the note also of its lustrous colouring seemed focussed in the jewelled necklace that lay upon the 405 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN amber throat, as the emerald waters beneath girded the topaz sands of the shore. II Into this world of mountain silence and peace we were swept, on the following day. For our time had come. We were to pass beyond the conflicting pre sentments of the life and ways of men, in these cities of Constantinople, to the serene peace and calm ofthe ancient Turkish capital. Brusa, as it lay upon the lap of Mount Olympus, was to reveal to us further secrets of the sources of Turkish strength and power. As we boarded our steamer both the shores and the decks of our boat presented, as if in conspiracy, a series of pictures richly illustrative of Turkish life and character. Once again the long lines of victorias and broughams crossing the Long Bridge, with their veiled occupants and ministers in court uniforms, announced the ceremony of the Selamlik was soon to begin. Once again the embassy Kavass was in a whirl of ex ecutive excitement, that no mischance should mar the journey of His Excellency into the interior. And still in our ears, for a few days to come, was the familiar click of the aide-de-camp's sword to beat its metallic music on rough pavements, on boats' decks, and upon polished mosque floors. The idle crowd gathered upon the quays seemed, in its casual, improvised way, to embody the Turk's sway of empire over many races of men, for no two were of one colour ; and the upper quarter-deck, at the mid day hour, was to proclaim to us anew the sincerity of 406 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN the Turk's piety, for gathered there, in a place no larger than a prayer-rug, were Mussulmans upon their knees, praying Mecca-wards. Once out upon the vast blues, and the world of Constantinople's greatest beauties stood before us, as if awaiting the last tribute of our worshipful admira- ^aaaag^- - ¦ : . .:, .JPH f '- -X-* ... ' Brusa tion. Seraglio Point showed its jewelled kiosks above the yellow ' Roman walls, and Santa Sophia lifted its majesty to dwarf the rival heights of the Moslem mosques ; Scutari glowed and blanched, sensitive to the last ; and the grim horrors of the Seven Towers were forgotten in the glory of their sunlit, ruined mass. A little while, and there was only the sea world about. Then the distant blues of tall, shapely moun tains grew to green verdure and the shining of houses within tree-clumps. The beaches of Mudania were 4°7 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN starred with colour, such colour as made the Pera and Stamboul hues and tones seem tawdry as tinsel, for in the wide open spaces of this brilliant sea and mountain world, every tint was intensified to a great glory of brightness. As we rose with the steep hills, to pass into the silence of vineyards and of billowy undulations, this fresh bloom of an unstained brightness was upon all things; it was upon the soft, velvety browns ofthe great mountain steeps, as it was upon the startling yellows and blues of two veiled shapes, emerging from between some hilly uprisings like brilliantly clad appa ritions from an upper sphere ; and the brightness also touched to silver the tender greens of olive groves, as it darkened to rich crimsons the red coats of the mov ing cattle. So very remote was this world among the hills from all stir of sound that a shepherd, calling to his flock in the valley below, could be heard flicking the stones about him, with his stick. The tinkle of the sheeps' bells made the sole music of this vast, still mountain height. Even as Constantinople, at the beginning of our journey, had appeared to group before us her more beautiful features, so was Brusa, at first only a long grey mass perched upon mighty Olympus, seen gradu ally to present the marvels of her loveliness in one complete, comprehensive sweep. One by one the wonder-city yielded up her treasures. The domed baths to whose famous waters Theodora had come, with her royal suite of four thousand attendants ; the 408 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN famous mosques within whose sea-green walls we were to find the soul of Oriental colour ; the turquoise tombs beneath whose jewelled splendour Sultans seemed to lie, dreaming of their earthly conquests ; and the great gardens, where centuries ago, artists, poets, dreamers, philosophers and emperors had anticipated the Medi- Tomb of Mahomet I — The Turquoise Tomb cean better-known reunions, — baths and mosques and gardens lay dreaming upon the knees of Olympus. For the sun was tinting the brows of the city with drowsy twilight hues. From above the city streets, as we drove into them, the chorus of a melodious and rich-voiced chant fell upon the ear. Far out across the valley, and up into the mountain depths, the chorus, in flute-like notes, rang out. The wavings of countless silver plumes, the leaves of the poplars peopling the slopes, seemed 409 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN the only audible response. But the chorus was heard throughout all Brusa. For it was the call to prayer, sung out to the great air-spaces from the high-hung parapets of minarets. You may hear it calling now three times a day, across the breadth of great conti nents. And the souls of the " faithful," like the waving plumes of the poplars in Brusa, will bow as the call rises into the sky-spaces. 410 NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS 411 NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS I TWO OLD TRAVELLERS IT is good, once in a way, to go back instead of hurrying forward ; to see an older, grander world through the more naive eyes of those who were avowedly enthusiasts, and yet were unashamed, who went into foreign countries neither to criticise nor to reform them, but merely to enjoy " the strange sights of strange men." The curtain screening the more intimate life and manners of the Turk was first lifted by the white hand of an English ambassadress. When, in 1717, the brilliant, vivacious Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople to fall in love with everything Turkish, she sent home the pictures of her infatuation painted as she and her sister in letters, Madame de Sevigne, almost alone among women have known how to portray people and places. In the warmth of Lady Mary's ardour she painted the East as the most perfect of countries. The climate, she vowed, was " delightful in the extremest degree." Turkey was the country where she found" women the freest, men the most faithful, religion the purest, and manners the most polite." If its Beys, Pashas, and 413 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Effendis betrayed tendencies to an " amiable atheism," it was only that they might prove themselves the better wits. 'This clever Englishwoman, to whom no subject was dull, was also " charmed with many points of the Tur kish law, to our shame be it spoken, better designed and better executed than ours." Morality, indeed, in that " heathenish " country she found was at so surpris ingly high a level there was even a punishment for con victed liars. The very worst thing Lady Mary could find to say of the Turks of her day, indeed, was that " they were too proud to talk to merchants," merchants being, practically, the only travellers in that century of the early Georges. For over a century and a half Lady Mary's sprightly pictures of the life of Turkish women have remained as the true Western ideals of the mysterious East. No subsequent visits of even the brightest and wittiest of European women to a Turkish harem have ever succeeded in effacing her visit to the lovely Sultana Fatima. Her account of that " adorable creature's beauty, of her sweetness full of majesty that no court breeding could ever give, that surprising harmony of feature, that charming result of the whole ! That exact proportion of body ! . . . the unutterable en chantment of her smile ! " — this is the portrait of the perfect being who swims toward us in her "waistcoat of green and silver, in her caftan of gold brocade, with her lovely arms adorned with jewelled bracelets, and her broad girdle set round with diamonds." This is the vision of enchantment every Western mind prefig- 414 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ures as the beauteous Sultana, who will surely greet our eyes once we are lucky enough to find ourselves within a Turkish harem. The people of Lady Mary's century were not as virtuous as we know ourselves to be. The ambas sadress of England could receive a commission to "buy a Greek slave," and could attempt to execute the order without going through an attack of the moral shivers. She could also bring back to England one of the greatest boons to plague-stricken Europe ever brought out of either the East or the West, and yet loudly bemoan having undertaken the thankless task. The Eastern system of inoculation for smallpox, as practised in Constantinople, furnished the witty nar rator with one of the most amusing of all the scenes described in the letters : " People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox ; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met, com monly fifteen or sixteen together, the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpoxes and asks what vein you please to have opened. Every year thousands undergo this operation ; and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that ' They take the smallpox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.' ' Lady Mary's courageous attempt to introduce this "taking ofthe smallpox" into England was met with the usual persecution that is meted out to all inno vators. Her confession of regret at having turned benefactress is refreshingly human. The time of the 415 « 31 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN self-complacent lady philanthropist had not yet come. Lady Mary's avowal that "she would never have attempted it had she foreseen the vexation, the perse cution, and even the obloquy it brought upon her," is an outburst sounding strange indeed to modern ears ! Lady Mary's resume of the life of the Turks of her time is immensely valuable as contrasted with the changes in that life now to be noted by every foreigner. A hundred and eighty years ago, life, apparently, was worth the living in Turkey. "'Tis true their mag nificence is of a very different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of life. They consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating, while we are con suming our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we cannot attain. Considering what short-lived, weak animals men are, is any study so beneficial as present pleasure ? " Sixty years later a contemplative Dutchman, a student of men and people and yet a soldier, man of action and diplomat, Baron Gelder, gives us an equally rosy view of life in the Constantinople of his time. The diplomatic society Baron Gelder found as sembled in Pera and on the banks of the Bosphorus recalls the fine fleur of the best Parisian salons of the ideal century in which he had the good fortune to be born. It was the century when conversation was accounted an art, and not, as in our day, the sure sign of one mistakingly in love with a dead fashion ; when to be witty was accounted better than being 416 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN virtuous ; when men talked of love as a serious calling, and women held it a disgrace to be single, promptly immuring their disgrace in a convent ; when diplomatists were courtiers, and a lady of qual ity could indulge in an adventure, and no one, not even her own son, throw up horrified hands in amazement. The foreign and diplomatic circles at Pera, at The rapia, and at Buyukdera, led lives that were as gay as they were diversified. On Sundays, at the height of the season, the beautiful valley of Buyukdera, with its wonderful plantain trees, was as crowded with the fash ionable world as is the Longchamps or the Pall Mall of our own day. The embassy houses were miniature palaces ; their terraces and gardens combined Oriental luxuriousness with Christian neatness. Balls and parties succeeded each other with the rapidity and kaleidoscopic change repeated in the political world of the latter end ofthe eighteenth century. France was then on the eve of its Revolution. Venice was still a maritime power ; Poland was singing its swan song; Russia had already begun to push her bear's claws out upon Turkish soil, and Turkey herself was scarcely as yet conscious that her sun of glory was dipping peril ously toward her twilight days. For in those days the events that agitated Europe often found in Con stantinople the centre of their dramatic setting. Baron Gelder congratulates himself on his youth having been passed in this " great world " of the queen of Eastern cities. The Constantinople of his day was the " great world " we must go to a half-dozen 27 417 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN capitals to find in ours. Monsieur de Choiseul, the French Ambassador, had brought with him the insolence and flippant gaiety of the court of Ver sailles. Sir Robert Ainslee, the English Ambassador, had turned his palace into an asylum for artists and men of letters, with the finest collection of antique medals in the world to amuse and interest them. The Venetian Ambassador had brought a more interesting living curiosity — a wife who was a model of virtue quoique belle et orn'ee de talents. The other ministers and ambassadors had wives who, fortunately for the amusement of their circle, were less conspicuously original. The diplomatic corps Was, in a word, very complete indeed. As brilliant a circle would be at no loss for entertain ment. Besides all the sights and splendours ofthe " immense capital," there were days of such advent ures as the following : It occurred to the ambassador from Holland it would be amusing both to his wife and to his young son — the future writer of the " Memoires " — to be present at the farewell audience granted to the diplomatic corps at the camp of the greatest among all Grand Viziers, Ghazi Youssof. " Never shall I forget the coup d'ceil of the camp of Daoud Pasha ! " exclaims the Baron. It was there the full glory of Oriental luxury burst upon the eyes of the Europeans. The tents of the Grand Vizier, of the shape of parasols, were of an enormous circumfer ence. These tents fairly glittered with gold and silken and velvet embroidered stuffs. The gardes were dressed in the greatest splendour; they were 418 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN armed with halberds, pistols, and swords, and formed an imposing mass about the great circle. The Vizier was seated at the very end of the seventh tent, on a large sofa. Before him, in line, stood the ministers. Prince Suzzo was the dragoman, the interpreter of the Porte. He it was who translated the usual com pliments and the conversations. Two ladies dressed as men, formed part of the ministerial suite. Baron Gelder's mother, " who had the curiosity to see the ceremony," and Madame de Heydenstam, the young and pretty wife ofthe Swedish Minister, had no hesitation, once the project formed, of donning the only attire by means of which their curiosity could be satisfied. The Grand Vizier received both ladies with that fine distinction in gradation of attentions and compli ments of which the Turks seemed, then as now, to have the secret. The Dutch ambassadress was politely served with coffee, by express order of His Highness. To the lady from Holland, however, no compliment, save a subtle smile, was sent. But of the beautiful Swede the Grand Vizier remarked aloud to her husband, who had presented her as his secretary, "He wished he might have secretaries like unto her about him ! " Of the Turks as rulers and people, Baron Gel der's enthusiasm was no less ardent than was Lady Mary's. " In all Christian countries we have very false ideas of the Turks." Their men of letters " read a great deal." Their libraries contained very " pro found treatises on Oriental history, on morals, and on 419 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN philosophy." The higher Turks he found very broad indeed, one Pasha giving to his daughter an education that would do honour to a demoiselle de France. Sultan Selim, had he lived, would have been to Turkey " what Peter the Great was to Russia," was the estimate of this keen-sighted Dutchman. And it is interesting to note, as one of the changes a hundred years has brought about, that, according to this Dutch writer, it was at Russian atrocities and barbarities the Europe of the eighteenth century shuddered rather than at Turkish acts of cruelty. The soldier and general who was to follow Napoleon to Moscow, and to give us, in these his "Memoirs," written twenty years after that disastrous retreat, per haps one of the most brilliant, as it is assuredly one of the most vivid accounts of the famous campaign, has also sketched, in his incisive manner, the character of the Greeks and Armenians, living in the Constanti nople of 1793 : " The Greeks " (Levantine) "are to-day what they were in the time of Homer, Demosthenes, and Con stantine : witty, agreeable, but turbulent, false, subtle, insolent, and superstitious ; the race of men, in a word, the most difficult of all others to satisfy, to control, and of all others the least apt at forming a state prom ising happiness to its own nation, or offering guaran tees for the security and calm of its neighbours. . . . " There is nothing a Phanariot (thus are called the descendants of the old Greek ancestral families who have remained in Constantinople) will not do to satisfy his ambition ; corruption, calumny, intrigues, — 420 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN all serve his purpose to destroy a relative, a friend, to obtain in his turn the position of Dragoman to the Porte, or prince (hospodar) of Wallachia or Moldavia. Hardly have they attained their ends, than their hatred against Turkish rule and their religious fervour impel them to form liaisons with Russia, which always end in treason. "The Armenians are less turbulent, but are as in triguing as the Greeks and more skilful speculators. Courtiers ot the Orient, in Turkey, they are what the Copts are in Egypt, the business men ofthe great, and all transactions as well as all speculations pass through their hands." II "THE UNSPEAKABLE TURK" In a hundred years and what changes ! The Turk is now become the "unspeakable." Turkey is the nation above all others at which hands must be up lifted, eyes virtuously rolled, and the political garment withheld from compromising contact. American and European sympathy and interest have gone out, within the past two decades, to the Serbian, to the Bulgarian, and to the Armenian. The Turk, their oppressor, has become the synonym to our sen sitive, benevolent, and philanthropic ears, for all that is cruel, vindictive, and mediaeval, in point of bar barism. Yet when one comes to know him, even a little, the Turk is found to be neither so very terrible nor so 421 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN hardened in his brutality as we had supposed him. The thousand and one tales concerning his thirst for human gore, his delight in cruelty for cruelty's sake, his riotous glee in carnage and massacres are dis covered to be as disappointingly exaggerated as were the numbers of those who suffered in the " Bulgarian atrocities." The " hundreds of thousands " of Bul garians, whose wrongs at the hands of the Turkish soldiery at Batak aroused the indignation of all Europe, when the press had found other sources of sensational news, and Mr. Gladstone had discovered a fresh vent for his wordy crusades, these hundreds of thousands of tortured Bulgarians were reduced to a paltry two thousand. One single Bulgarian who had suffered wrong or hurt, not permitted by the laws governing modern warfare, would have been enough to have made American or European protest allow able. It is, however, well to remember, in these days when the Armenians are currently reported to be going through similar atrocities at the hands of the Turkish soldiers, that the " three hundred thousand martyrs " just now figuring as the ghastly nucleus, around which European indignation is centred, that these are figures drawn from inimical sources. In their turn, after the heat of sensationalism is passed, this appalling line of " martyrs " will doubtless be found to present a comparatively small number of the Armenians in revolt. Whatever may be one's personal conviction con cerning Turkey's deeds or her misdeeds, the interest this curious and fascinating country presents is per- 422 IN IHE PALACES OF THE SULTAN durable. More closely allied to European sympa thies and tastes than the more wholly alien races of China and India, Turkey is also compellingly attractive, and particularly to Americans, as preserv ing still to our eyes and ears certain vanished forms and customs. Along the Bosphorus, in the houses and palaces of Pashas and Effendis, there reigns and lives still a strange and wondrous rule of life. Customs and tra ditions, as old as the earliest nomad tribes that roamed the plains of Sungaria and the desert of Gobi, are still holding millions of men and women in the leash of social law. Persian and Arabian rites, superstitions, and poetry, the justice of Moses, the example of Abraham and Isaac, the luxury and sybaritic sloth of the Byzantine Emperors and peoples, and, of recent years, the modern genius working through reform and invention, — all this strange and marvellous mix ture of hereditary laws, religious influences, and civilisa tions are everywhere traceable in the streets, in the lives, and in the thoughts of the Turkish people. One of the chief reasons, indeed, why Turkey is found perennially interesting, is because of this her almost feminine sensitive quality of nature. The Turk is plastic ; he is responsive to new and reformatory influences. He remains, however, radically and fun damentally a Turk. The mould of his character was formed in remote antiquity. He comes from so very far away, the marvel is the greater, he has become as amazingly modern ! It is in this contradiction, and in the surprise it awakens, that every unprejudiced 423 IN THE PAIACES OF THE SULTAN Westerner finds the true charm of this remarkable people. The Turk is so near to us, indeed so many features of his mind and life seem to mirror ours, he seems almost a brother. To know him better, is to feel him sinking into fathomless depths beyond our reach. From the picturesque point of view, it is these very depths — their strangeness, their unknown nature and character — we find at once irresistibly attractive and also irritatingly annoying. Since he is so very nearly a brother, since he at least appears to comprehend the meaning of our civilisation, laws, and governments, why in the name of all that is enlightened, does he not go farther and take the final reformatory plunge — wash the Turk clean out of him and show himself to be the new, modern, clean man ? Such is the reformer's point of view. The traveller, on the contrary, discovers the Turk's chief charm to lie in the fact that Turkey is, largely, Turkey still. To find the "unspeakable Turk" speaking glibly all our speech of life would be to lose one illusion the more. Some parts of our speech he has, however, learned with an amazing aptness. The prodigious changes and reforms that have swept over Europe and America during the past hundred years have produced almost as great an effect upon Turkey as they have upon Europe itself. As we have seen, the military, warlike, and artistic outbreak that thrilled the centuries of the Renaissance pulsed as far East as the hills that close in about Mt. Olympus, in Asia Minor. The prodigious leaps and bounds taken 424 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN in the past hundred years by the inventive genius of those nations we call civilised, have also, as I have hinted in their turn, overleapt the frontiers of Turkey. The power of steam upon a piston could not be kept from testing its strength to annihilate the distance between Paris and Constantinople. Below the court ofthe Seraglio, the shriek ofthe Orient Express, as it comes to its final rest in the Stamboul Railway Station, brings daily that news of the outside world which is everywhere the doom of fanatical exclusiveness. Newspapers, in twenty languages, are tendered you in any part of the capital, and in all of the larger Turkish cities. There is a more or less strict censorship of the press. But in Turkey, as in equally despotic Russia, the press is an active, living power. The reforms in education have been as remarkable as have the many other changes you will find noted further on. The difficulty in painting the true portrait of this modernised Turk confronts, however, one at the outset of the undertaking. To almost all transatlantic readers of books of travel and of the daily press, the Turk is a comprehensive term including all the diverse species of men living south of Austria and Hungary. Bulgarians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Albanians, and Armenians, — surely these are all more or less Turkish ! This is the swift classification made the easier and the more re-assur- ingly correct because of the difficulty involved in separating these little nations, if nations, indeed, any one of these may, as yet, truthfully be called. 425 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Missionaries still further complicate the confusion existing in the popular mind, by their free use of the word "heathen." In their reference to Bulgarians, Serbians, and Montenegrins who are still Mahome tans, this epithet is as indiscriminately applied as it is to the whole of the Turkish people professing the faith of Islam. With the comparatively recent revolt of the Greek Christians in the north several exceptions to this somewhat universal classification have been made. The greatly exaggerated " Bulgarian atrocities " made known the hitherto unsuspected fact that Bulgaria called itself Christian. When Servia and Montenegro joined the Bulgarians in their revolt against the Turkish yoke two more " Christian " nations were born out of the vague and misty Eastern fog of " heathendom." The Armenian made his entrance upon the political stage in similar dramatic fashion. The tribal warfare between the Armenians and Khurds, one that had been going on for centuries, became of European im portance when the extortions of the Armenians upon their neighbour Khurds — extortions similar to those practised by the Jew upon Russian subjects, and for which said practices the Czar banished the Jews from his dominions — when the Khurd retaliated upon their oppressors, massacring them wherever found, thus arousing the Armenians to concerted action, — one directed equally against their infuriated victim and their Turkish rulers, whose rule was hateful to them, — with this triple conflict and its later sinister conse- 426 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN quences still another " Christian " nation was differen tiated from the " heathendom " of Turkey.1 1 The above is one version of the origin of the Armenian uprising. A remarkable statement made by the Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, a few months before the revolt of Sassoun, furnishes still another — and far more grue some — explanation of Armenian methods and practices. On the 23d of December, 1893, the Rev. Mr. Hamlin published the following statement : "An Armenian revolutionary party is causing great evil and suffering to the missionary work and to the whole Christian pop ulation of the Turkish Empire. It is a secret organization and is man aged with skill in deceit only known in the East. In a widely distributed pamphlet the following announcement is made at the close: ' This is the only Armenian party which is leading on the revolutionary party in Armenia. Its centre is Athens, and it has branches in every village and city in Armenia, also in the colonies. . . Nishan Garabidian, one of the founders of the party, is in America. Those desiring to get further information may communicate with him, etc.' " A very intelligent gentleman who speaks fluently and correctly Eng lish as well as Armenian, and who is an eloquent defender of the revolu tion, assured me that they have the strongest hopes of preparing the way for Russia's entrance into Asia Minor to take possession. In answer to the question as to how, he replied, ' These Huntchaguist bands organ ized all over the Empire will watch their opportunities to kill Turks and Khurds, will set fire to their villages, and then make their escape into the villages. The enraged Moslems will then rise and fall upon the defenceless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarities that Russia will enter, in the name of humanity and Christian civilization, to take possession.' " When I denounced the scheme as atrocious and infernal beyond anything ever known, he calmly replied, ' It appears so to you, no doubt, but we Armenians are determined to be free. Europe listened to the Bulgarian, and she is free. She will listen to our cry when it goes up in the shriek of our wives and children.' " Mr. Hamlin goes on to state that these revolutionaries are " canny, unprincipled, and cruel. They terrorize their own people by demanding contributions of money under threats of assassination. I have made the mildest possible disclosures of only a few of the abominations of this Huntchagist revolutionary party. It is of Russian origin, Russian gold and Russian craft govern it. Let all missionaries, home and foreign, denounce it." It is but just to add that at a later period, Mr. Hamlin "explained" away, as far as was possible, the above statements. The 427 7A^ 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN The modern Turk nowadays finds himself in much the same position as did the later Roman Eastern Emperors. His is the ruling race, his the dominant religion, over the millions of mixed races over whom his Padishah and Khalifa is acknowledged sovereign. Although year after year one vassal state after another has been taken from him ; although in Europe Turkey has lost nearly three-fourths of its land and the same proportion of its people in losing Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, Moldavia, Greece, and Bulgaria (for the latter though nominally a vassal state is prac tically independent) ; although the treaty of Berlin in 1878 sounded the death knell of Turkish influence and power in Europe; although the "sick man" is still looked upon as Europe's constitutional political invalid ; although financially Turkey is considered a bankrupt and her state the worst administered in Europe, yet is the Turk still the dominant race south of Austria. Her Sultan still rules over nineteen races of people ; Islamism, the religion of one-third of the human race,, so far from being a dying faith, is making thousands of converts yearly ; and Turkey itself, whether considered from the point of view of its being a mere weight in the European equilibrium, or dreaded because of her known resourceful strength, is still a power to be counted with in European councils. facts remain, however, that the success of the Armenian revolutionary party has, in the interval of the past nine years, verified Mr. Hamlin's most enlightening disclosures. Europe has listened to "the shrieks of Armenian wives and children." And English and American gold has been poured into Armenian pockets. The French writer Se-verine is now exciting fresh interest in the sufferings of the Armenians by her passion ate espousal of their cause. 428 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN To learn something of the sources of Turkey's strength and of the secret of her life, laws, character, and religion becomes, therefore, the more interesting in proportion to the difficulties involved in a study of this strange people. Ill "ARE THERE NO HAREMS?" "Our private life must be walled." This, the Asiatic rule ot life, is the curtain that is rung down before the eager, searching Western gaze. Turkish interiors, both moral and domestic, are hedged about as by a triple wall. In spite of the innovations, changes, and reforms introduced by foreign models, the Turk con tinues to perpetuate more or less unconsciously the traditions of his fathers. To hold tight to the secret of one's inner life, this is in the blood of the Turk. Frankness is as foreign to the Moslem nature as a subtle complexity of thought is to the American. In these more emancipated days Turkish reserve is occasionally seen to lower its visor. On the slightest suspicion of indiscreet intrusion the movable face of the helmet is, however, quickly sealed tight to its clasp. A Turk nowadays may speak, for example, of his wife ; he counts on your discretion to consider his mention of her as unuttered. A hundred years ago no graver social breach could be made than for a foreigner to mention or even to hint at the existence of a Moslem's wife. That clever French ambassadress who, when wishing to send to 429 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the wife of a distinguished Pasha a choice gift, a roll of silk, with delicate reticence remarked, " She was quite sure he would know what to do with the package," was the model of tact the Turk longs instinctively to find reproduced in every foreign man or woman he may chance to meet. A former minister to a foreign court, well known to us, had married an Alsacian. A French woman, accustomed to the brilliant social life of French and German capitals, the lady naturally found the condi tions governing Turkish society as dull as they were irksome. " My wife is always complaining of the want of intellectual interest in Turkish society," M Pasha remarked, on one occasion when the talk had turned on the subject of social life in Constantinople. An innocent query as to whether this deficiency was applicable to the European society of Pera and Therapia, or to the more restricted circles of Turkish ladies, was received in perfect silence. The mere mention of the distinguished gentleman's wife was in itself an implied compliment. That swift glimpse of her should have sufficed. Turkish breeding required the lady's imme diate dismissal as a conversational topic. Although of late years among Turks highly placed, it has come to be considered as far more chic to have only one wife, this laudable increase in the practice of monogamy does not tend to a complete emancipation, however, from certain well-established Moslem tradi tions. The mention of one's wife, to a foreigner, is nowadays made the easier when one may truthfully speak of her in the singular number. A Turk may, 43° 7iV 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN after some months of semi-intimacy, talk somewhat freely indeed ot his domestic life, provided always his household is modelled after the European plan of life. The social line is drawn at the point of asking even a lady to call. Frequent visiting between Europeans and Turkish wives, when these are in the singular number, is only possible after a somewhat prolonged residence and much friendly intercourse. To the casual visitor there is an unexpected embar rassment in finding almost all the Turks one meets, in society, merely married to one wife. The singularity of this singleness is as trying, apparently, to the Turk on certain occasions, as it is eminently disappointing to the European. " I do so hope the Minister of may grant me the honour of visiting his harem," an American lady remarked with the charming aplomb characteristic of the American woman. " F Pasha would be too delighted, I am sure, only, as it happens, His Excellency has no harem in the sense in which, I presume, most foreigners under stand our word," was the courteous reply of the minor official to whom the remark was addressed. " He has but one wife, as, indeed, we mostly all have." "JHas n't any one a haremj " The cry was almost tearful. It had in it the accent of one who felt it to be her right to consider this inconsiderate monogamy) of the Turks as a personal grievance. The lady had travelled so many thousands of miles to look both upon the men who confessed, and unashamed, to polygamy, and also to behold the women who, suffering such an out- 43 T 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN rage, could yet continue to live under the same roof as contentedly with their husband's collection of wives as they might with a collection of cushions ! To trav erse the plains and deserts of Servia that one might experience at least one new thrill at the end of the long journey, and to be thus balked of the promised sensation! It was more than any one of the thirty millions of charming feminine despots in America could be expected to endure without a protest. " F Pasha has a great many children," con tinued this disappointed investigator of Turkish customs. One might almost have suspected a faint accent of malice in the innocent-featured remark : " Yes, he has eleven living. His wife is very fond of children." " Is she Turkish ? " " No, she is a Circassian lady of very good family." " Ah-h, a Circassian ! she must be very beautiful ; the boys are so handsome," the pretty American re marked, in a mollified tone. What the lady did not say was written on her reflective features. She obvi ously felt it was at least something to have run, so to speak, a Circassian to earth. For the " lady " was none, of course ; she had been, without doubt, a slave. From a romantic traveller's point of view, if Turks 1 persist in disappointing the world — and marrying as , virtuously and dully as every one else — at least to find them marrying a Circassian slave was a trifle more solacing than to have found the single wife of correct Turkish descent. Did the clever voung aide-de-camp read the fair 432 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN American's thoughts ? The map of her mind seemed open to him. For he smiled, as if seeing thereon certain lines that pleased him, as he made answer, " Yes, you are quite right ; we mostly marry Circas sians and almost all our children are beautiful." Thus it was the curtain screening Mahometan life was courteously rung down. IV HAREMS AND THE "KAIF" There are still enough harems throughout Turkey sufficiently equipped with a plurality of wives to satisfy the most exacting of travellers in search of sen sation. Even in Constantinople there are Pashas and Effendis rich enough to keep up the old standards of Moslem marital pomp. The majority, however, of the upper ten thousand practise, at least outwardly, the European fashion of monogamy. That this fashion will continue and increase there is little doubt. Fortunes at best are among the most uncertain of possessions in a land where exile and banishment are as likely to happen as birth and death. The most extravagant gift with which a Turk may present himself is, therefore, a properly stocked harem. Each one of his four wives must have their separate establishment. Each establishment must have its own slaves, cooks, and equipage. Each wife or oda- lisk must, if she be in the height of the present 2S 433 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN fashion, have her piano, her French gowns,; and for eign tutors for her sons and daughters ; and she must besides, be able to dispense a large and continuous hospitality, ever ready to return the Gargantuan feasts, the grand luncheon parties, and the al fresco fetes which form the social dissipation of the smart Osmanli feminine world. No one of the wives may be slighted. Each has her legal rights — clearly, ex actly defined by scriptural and accepted law. These rights are many ; so numerous, indeed, that after a review of them it is the European rather than the Osmanli women who seem to be still in bondage. As no Turk can with safety withhold from his wives their enforceable rights, he naturally thinks several times before burdening himself with several wives. Unless his fortune be unusually large he contents himself with the one wife Christian society considers as the essential of an ideal marital state. The rich young Turks also have travelled ; they have seen the young girls, the clever married women of France, Germany, England, and Austria. On their return to their own country they .feel the loss of such stimulating feminine charm, and of such intel lectual comradeship. A whole harem of beautiful women is not as satisfying as is the company of one woman who may be a companion as well as mistress and wife. The young Turk is also in his turn an imitator, a student of foreign ways, of life and of manners. The European, he notes, has, at least, at one and the same time, but one wife. But this single wife is surely 434 IN >y;y y Ay.. ¦ .-¦ .\\ . v :.• r// """ ¦ ' XX X LX'.'. X^ "¦ * V '- IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN better than many, for he may present her, introduce her, she may go everywhere, even do everything, in matter of pleasure or sport, that he does. The European, the American wife is not one wife, she is an hundred. She multiplies herself by her diversity, by her infinite variety. Ergo, to have but one wife is at once more chic and more amusing. But where will the voung Turk find such an one among the young Turkish maidens suggested to him by his parents ? These voung girls will have been well brought up according to the Turkish standards of education. These standards are, however, built upon still more or less harem, not continental, matrimonial modes of life. Will he look among the beautiful Circassians, whose ravishing loveliness is still, as every Turk knows, as easily to be purchased as is his new thoroughbred ? Beautiful, even clever in her own way, as the chosen Circassian may be, still the boughten woman represents the old conditions, the old harem, demoralising, stupefying, unregenerate conditions. For various and excellent reasons, however, beauti ful slaves, Circassians or Georgians, are still often preferred as wives by Turks of good standing, to the free maidens of their own race. Marriage with a Turkish young girl is almost as expensive an affair as the setting up of a harem. There are lavish sums necessary for the giving of the numerous wedding presents. The length and expense of wedding fes tivities themselves might well daunt the stoutest heart. jyjaXage with a slave, on the contrary, entails no greater outlay than the purchase money. If chosen 435 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN from the household of a great lady such a wife stands as good a chance of being well educated and well bred as a high-born Turkish maiden, for the feminine heads of the best households take great pride in the training and education of their slaves, the more beauti ful among them receiving a proportionately higher degree of care. The Turk who marries a slave marries no one else. The dreaded spectre of the mother-in-law is one he need never fear. The bride's family, having been conveniently lost and forgotten many years before, will never present itself at the right moment for making trouble. Once the slave is legally married she takes her place, with all the social rights and privileges of an Osmanli wife. The true family life of the Turk begins when he is thus the legal spouse of one or more wives. Domestic life, our writers would have us believe, is beginning to be one among the lost joys among Western nations. The pace of our feverish, strenuous, excited existence is too rapid to give time for the quieter, duller tread about the family hearth. In Turkey the charms and pleasures of family life are not only enjoyed to the full, they are the more relished and sought for because of the comparative^ dujrij^ljvf all outside pleasures. The life of most Turks may be said to be bounded by the walls of their Selamlik and their Haremlik. Outside of his home, unless he belongs to the court, to the army, to the navy, or to the civil service, a 43 6 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Turk in good standing has few other occupations save that of a man of family. His religion forbids him to drink or to gamble ; to dance is to lower one's- self to the rank of slaves ; theatres, operas, shows of any kind, these are dissipations unknown to the Turkish world. The tew foreign troups seen in Pera in the winter season are so mediocre in point of capacity that even a Mussulman might confess him self bored at their operas sung out of tune and their theatrical representations given without talent, and not be considered as wanting in comprehension or taste of European entertainments. For the man who must live without clubs, golf, or the shooting ot big game (the Turk of to-day is not a natural sportsman) ; who may travel only after having obtained royal permission ; whose taste for art, as we understand the word, is as yet com paratively undeveloped ; one who, by virtue of the peculiarities of his climate and the laws of polite living among his people, can therefore neither drink himself to death nor go to the North or to the South Pole in search of adventure, — what sort of life is there left for such a man to lead ? As it is in the nature of man to kill something, the Turk has made a fine art of killing time. Between his womenkind and his kaif, the Turkish equivalent for dolce far niente, he manages to extract a certain amount of delicate and exquisitely satisfactory enjoy ment out of that act of being we more actively veined races call the game of life. From the point of view of its being a game, life in Turkey, apart from court 437 77V 7/77 PALACES OF THE SULTAN and governmental circles, is a failure. The struggle, the zest, the eager intensity with which life is lived in certain European countries and throughout America stops short of Turkish frontiers. Out of the luxurious Eastern soil the breath of another life seems to pass into the nostrils of man. A delicious, an exquisite languor captures senses and mind. To take one's kaif becomes far more impor- 1 tant than making a stir in life. To choose a beautiful 1 site, one overlooking a wooded grove, a lake, or a stretch of sea, with snow-capped mountains as a finish to the horizon ; to have perfect gardens, a lovely wife, and numbers of handsome children, — such is the longed-for ideal of most well-to-do Turks. To pass his days in a refined and delicately rapturous contemplation of his "view," with the phantasmagoria of life itself as part of the outlook, thus to dream away existence would be occupation enough for the large majority of the subjects under the Sultan's rule. Life becomes a true game in Turkey when ambition enters the mind of the 'Turkish boy or man. Whether he be born the son of a Pasha of three tails or the son of a slave, a Mussulman may aspire to the highest rank or to the greatest official gift in the power of the Sultan to bestow. 'Turkey is as democratic as America. There is no hereditary nobility in Turkey ; there is no ruling class ; there is no aristocracy, in the true sense of the word. A man of low origin, even a slave, by his abilities, good looks, or through the intrigues of some influential friend or relative at court, may become a 43» 7V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN high court official, a minister of the Sublime Porte, even Grand Vi/ier. The history of Turkey teems with sudden, amazing turns in the wheel of fortune. The careers ot some ot her greatest statesmen, gen erals, admirals, and vi/icrs have been as replete with adventure, and as richly coloured with wondrous episodes as any hero Dumas or Victor Hugo ever imagined. In the older days a lad captured in Serbia, Wal- lachia or Hungary as a spoil of war, trained as soldier and Moslem in the corps of the Janissaries, was often seen to rise to the practical dictatorship of Grand Vizier. Selim the Grim, listening to the counsels of a favorite secretary who urged his ruler to make immediate war on the Egyptian Mamluks, raised Mahomet the secretary to the post of Grand Vizier on the spot. It was Mahomet who objected to so sudden a change in his fortunes, and it was found necessary to administer the bastinado to the reluctant secretary before he professed his willingness to execute the dangerous duties of his high office. So democratic a rule of social and political lite has brought about the inevitable results. All Turkish society is more or less in a foment of anxiety, excite ment, and intrigue. Since the lowest may aspire to the highest place, every Turkish youth dreams of being governor over some rich province, minister, or, at the very least, ambassador to some of the great capitals. The court is the centre of this hot-bed of intrigue. All the rays of hope converge toward the central 439 LN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN source of patronage and preferment. The personal history of the more influential members of the present court, of some of the ministers of the Sublime Porte, and of certain of the better known governors of the larger eyalets, or provinces, would be found as full of romance and as thrilling in adventurous episodes as were the lives of those Grand Viziers who practically ruled Turkey between 1640 and 1757. The element of danger entering into Turkish advancement, is perhaps not the least alluring feature in the life of the Turkish soldier of fortune. V THE COMMON PEOPLE AND THE RELIGION OF MAHOMET For the common people throughout Turkey, life has changed but little, during some hundreds of years. The Turkish labourer, artisan, mechanic, farmer, is very much the same Turk he was twelve and a half centuries ago. The greatest change that has come to the poorer classes is that in our day their children are compelled to learn to read and write. The reading of newspapers has, also, brought about a correspond ing change in the monotony of lives absorbed in an earning of daily bread. The hamal — the porters — the ferrymen, the caique- rowers, the bullock drivers, the drivers of pack-horses, the street vendors, — all these shreds and patches of men, as well as the motley sorts and conditions of 440 77V 7/77 PALACES OF THE SULTAN humanity, male and female, whom you see about the streets of Constantinople, these are the brothers and sisters of those whom Mahomet the Conqueror brought with him into the city in the fifteenth century. These workers, toilers, and mechanics are full of the same superstitions, they are controlled by the same traditions, and they are also as deeply religious as when their ancestors swept the Asian plains. Put a sword in their hands, and they would be as miracu lously changed into fighters and soldiers as fanatical and as iconoclastic as are all fighters possessed by a fierce and living faith. The babies of these humbler Turks still wear any number of amulets against the fena guz — the " evil eye." Beneath the shirt of grown men similar strings of beads would be found worn, with the same hope of averting the dreaded nazar. Pilgrimages to the shrines of favourite Dervish saints ; the tying of a rag on the grave of a Dervish to avert a fatal end to some serious illness in the household ; continuous prayers, ablutions, and a rigid adherence to the great Fast of the year, — during the long month of the Ramazan, the Moslem Lent, — throughout the length and breadth of Turkey, the same Arabian and Persian superstitions that have swayed millions of European and Greek Catholics who have known them only as local traditions, under the names of pilgrimages to local saints' shrines, as ex votos or as penance — these are still the comfort and solace of millions of Turks. The religious fervour is as strong as are the practices of religion ; for the people continue with undiminished 441 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN ardour the strict observances of their faith. The common people are, as I have previously stated, among the last of the truly devout believers, and the religion of Mahomet exactly suits the character and taste of the pious, fervent Turk. No other faith can hope to reach every fold of a nature whose base is still pre-eminently at once war-like and sensuous, fierce yet tender, superstitious yet rationable, proud and yet patiently humble. The Koran is all the literature and Bible felt to be necessary to millions upon millions of minds and souls who are still in what may be called a state of high susceptibility to spiritual belief. The millions controlled by this Monotheistic form of reli gion, as revealed by Mahomet, stretch from the interior of western and southern Africa to India, and from Arabia to the confines of Turkey in Europe. The recent amazing spread of Islamism throughout middle and southern Africa is one of the most interesting features of change and development in that agitated Continent. Black races as well as the Persian, Turk ish, Arabian, and the millions among the Indian peoples, have fallen utterly captive to the genii, to the angels, to the peris, to the fates, to the glory of the Mahometan heaven, to the mitigated hell torments, to the awful doom of predestination, to the rapturous certainties of resurrection, and to the assured immor tality which the Koran, to its believers, reveals with so clear and certain a voice. The belief in one God, in the Koran as His abso lute, eternal word, in Mahomet as His sole prophet, the last and best, and in Jesus as supreme over all 442 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN who had come before his time — these four points form the foundation of the Moslem faith. Jesus is known under the name of " Rualh-Ullah," "the Spirit of God." The Mahometan believes this Jesus to have been miraculously conceived, and bv an untainted Virgin. The Moslems were indeed the first to preach this doctrine of " the Spirit of God " as having been born of a virgin. The Koran itself, both in its teachings and in its laws, has been greatly misunderstood. It was written at a time when even Christianity itself was in a state of peril and heretical insecurity. Its harshest decrees were aimed at the idolatrous Arabians, whom as a nation it was the chief object of Mahomet's life to convert to his teachings. Considering the time and period in which the Koran appeared, it is rather a matter of wonderment that its teachings should show the degree of enlightenment which characterise it. The theistic doctrine of Islamism is peculiarly ap pealing to a proud and haughty race. Between the lowliest and the greatest and their God — their one God — there is no human barrier. The true strength of Islamism lies in this one great, profound truth, in God being alone divine, all powerful, the Creator of all things, the Avenger of wrong. The very conception of and belief in so incontro vertible a truth has been found amazingly elevating. As contrasted with the idolatry of the Arabs and the polytheistic worship of former debased systems of the Christian creed, this religion, founded on the funda- 443 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN mental truth of the One God, was enlightenment itself. Nothing can be simpler than the ritual ofthe Mos lem. The reading of the Koran and prayer, these constitute the sole simple ceremonies. The religious ordinances are equally innumerous. Fasting, daily ablutions, pilgrimages, and good works — such are the sole obligatory rules of conduct given to the pious. The clergy and the whole of the complicated eccle siastical system attached to the practice of Catholic and to certain Protestant forms of worship do not exist in the Mahometan religious world. There are no popes, no bishops, no archbishops, no rectors, or high priests, or lower clergy. Imams, the so-called Moslem priests, are not a consecrated order. Thev are merely those who, by reason of special studies, or by proof of greater piety, are chosen by the builders of a mosque or its officers to preside over a particular parish. They must pass a certain examination to prove their capa city for the exercise of their few duties. The cele brating of the marriage service ; the registering of the marriage contract; religious consolation to the dying; funeral services ; the keeping of the primary schools ; the giving of certificates of birth, and a certain amount of police duty over the morals of his parish constitute the somewhat mixed religious and administrative duties of a Moslem parish priest. Such time as he can spare for the exercise of his own trade — most Moslem priests are grocers or druggists — and his own family life, keeps the Imam sufficiently active. His time and chances for interference in the family life of the people 444 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of his parish are necessarily limited. A Mussulman, therefore, preserves his entire personal freedom, as well as that of his household, though he be a very model of piety. The fact that he sees fit to worship his God — and devoutly to serve Him — does not entail an endless procession of priests in and out of his door, or subject his household to outside clerical influence. No one practice in Catholicism strikes the Mahometan with more amazement, than the freedom with which a European woman is allowed to go to the confessional, and the open influence in Catholic households exer cised by Monsieur l'Abbe. Prayer, the "pillar of religion" and the "key of paradise," is a rite so sacred, it is one to be observed publicly, chiefly by men. Women must also pray, but, as their presence is supposed to be disturbing to the minds of the devout, they must pray either at home, or in the mosques when their lords are not bowing to and praising their Maker. Public prayer in the Mahometan mosques, by this simple law of the ex clusion of women, has been invested with a peculiar dignity. It is the privilege of the male members of a family to pray five times a day before the eyes of men. With no woman to belittle his worship the Mahometan still continues to fill the mosques at the appointed hours of prayer. The frequency of his prayers makes every Mahom etan doubly a Mahometan. The habit of devotion once formed becomes second nature. That which he prays for, in due course of time, the pious Moslem more or less becomes. As his Koran teaches him to 445 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN be kind, patient, humane to animals and to his poor, to be hospitable, and to believe solely in One God, in Mahomet his Prophet, and to serve his Khalifa (Sultan) as he would Mahomet, we find throughout Turkey a whole people amazingly kind, courteous, hospitable ; a people needing no society of prevention of cruelty to dumb beasts, no almshouses nor poor rates ; few perverts to other religions ; and toward their great Khalifa and Ruler — be he good or bad, cruel or kind — behold a people submissive and humble, and yet full of the dignity that comes of a great patience, and of a profoundly loyal nature. The Koran has accomplished this and similar results upon widely diverse peoples by means of two systems. Each of these was employed by Mahomet in the elaboration of his new religion. One of these systems was based upon his discovery of the fact that to govern many men of many minds a religion, while it may be a resume of many other religions, as was his, yet must such a religion be one whose very simplicity comes as a novelty. The second of that remarkable man's systems was the building up of his moral and civil laws on the theory that to guide certain races you must make due allowances for the influences of climate and customs. Mahomet, for example, did not invent polygamy. He merely legalised prostitution. He made the wild, the savage men of his time, as well as the more sensu ously refined Arabians, with their loose notions about the sexual tie, conform to a rule of life which should make a man responsible for his acts. By having his 446 /// is. - X ../ ,.'.- IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN wives and slaves under his own roof, the Mahometan jhusband became the protector of the women who ministered unto him. As father, also, the duties and responsibilities ot the husband and master were ex tended to the offspring of both sorts of unions. To such unions very strict limitations were made. No Mahometan legally may have more than four women, whether as wives or as concubines. VI WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN TURKEY The rights of women in Turkey were clearly defined some twelve centuries before Christian Europe or America had seen fit to grant either divorce to women or suitable alimony. While a Mahometan may have one or four wives, as with each or all of his wives, should they be free maidens, he receives a dowry, one-half of such dowry is set aside. In case a husband repudiates his wife, this part of the dowry is returned with her to her father's house. This excellent law is perhaps account able for the fact that, while a Mahometan has the right to divorce his wife for causes which would seem flippant even in Dakota, a Turk thinks twice before he goes to the extreme of repudiation. " No, no, divorce in Turkey is not popular. In all my ac quaintance I do not know one who has divorced!" was gravely stated by a Turkish friend when this most excellent Moslem prohibitive law against impul sive divorces was under discussion. 447 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN For a man to send away his wife that he may be freed from her, perhaps even that he may supplant her, this is not an unknown masculine infirmity even in Christian Europe. To return her clinking to the tune of half of her own dowry, this is an impending calamity to avert which many a Turk turns twice on the hard bed his rueful marriage has laid for him. There has been a vast amount of pity wasted upon the Moslem woman. It may surprise even the woman suffragist to learn that the laws of Mahomet J confer upon women a greater degree of legal protec- , tion than any code of laws since the middle Roman \ law. The more recent liberties and protection granted to married women by the laws of divorce and the exclusive property rights now in force in the United States alone can be properly compared to those in . force in Turkey. Under the Moslem laws the provision for securing to the wife the free and uncontrolled possession of her property is minutely stipulated in the marriage con tract. A suitable sum is also arranged for her main tenance in accordance with her husband's rank. As has been admirably stated by Mr. Stuart-Glennie, Islamism modified the polygamous patriarchal form of marriage as practised among the Semites, greatly to the advantage of women ; infinitely to their disad vantage did Christianity arrange the monogamous system of marriage in force among Aryans. __ Unle- galised prostitution, and of late years, divorce laws in certain countries so loose as to rob marriage itself of all significance, have been among the worst of the 448 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN results_of the Christian system. In Moslem countries, on the contrary, divorce is even nowadays rarely or ever resorted to. Monogamy is also gradually replac ing polygamy, a change due to the great expense entailed in giving to each wife a separate dwelling, equipage, and staff" of servants, to the introduction of the wearing of European garments by women, and to European influences generally. Slaves are no less provided for, under the laws of Mahomet, than are free women. An odalisk, who is always a slave, if she bear a child to her master must be maintained for life, or she must be set free and married. Her children, whether she be bond or free, have equal rights with the children of the legal wife or wives ofthe household. A Moslem, in other words, can practically have no sexual relations with any woman without assuming full responsibilities for such intimacy. Other customs, traditions, and ceremonies give to Moslem woman a fixed and independent position within the walls of her own house. The hanoum, or first head wife, is practically the head of every Turkish household. She is also likely as a rule to remain such, no Turk ish parent willingly consenting to see his daughter subject to a first wife. For a second wife, in the rare cases where such are chosen, the husband desirous of extending his sphere of bondage must, as a rule, either take an odalisk or go without. Such a wife, whether freed or not, remains in a state of semi-servi tude and obedience to the hanoum. Mahomet himself was a great lover of women. In 29 449 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN his choice of those whom he honoured by his changeful affections he appeared to have no fixed standards. Khadijah, the rich and generous widow whom he mar ried, and whose purse and position enabled the prophet to become a notability, was succeeded by beauties of every cast and hue. But Mahomet was among the very rarest of men and lovers ; for most men, when they come to the moment of serious law-making for women, forget the tender nature of those whose very weaknesses have been the source of the happiest hours these stern judges may have known. Mahomet, when he turned law-maker, appears to have remembered the pains and weaknesses of every woman he ever loved. He stole most of his laws from Moses. He added certain humane clauses that place him among the most just and sympathetic of all masculine reformers. For the slave and the free, for the divorced and the wid owed he provided laws securing to woman in every stage of life maintenance and support according to the state and means of her lover or husband. He knew women well enough to know that for a wife to have a rival in the house was not so bitter or so dangerous to the household well-being as to have the husband unfaithful abroad. The rivalries between Moslem wives are trials that may the more easily be borne, since the rights of each wife, even to the point of her marital turn, are fixed by law. Mahomet thought so well of women he could not have enough of them, even in heaven. So far from his denying them the possession of souls, the Koran distinctly asserts that women shall not only be re- 45° IN 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN warded for their good deeds, but that they shall also suffer punishment for their evil ones. The Mahom etan women, it is true, are relegated by the prophet to a separate heaven from that open to their fathers, brothers, and husbands. But as these latter are prom ised the perpetual enjoyment of the paradisiacal women, — a particular species specially manufactured for the reward of the good and brave among men in the celestial regions, — Mahomet's knowledge of the sex may have suggested the inspiring thought that the promise of a continuation of the harem conditions — that of looking at happiness through another woman's eyes — might not be considered as conducive to a satisfactory state of beatitude. All his heavens are most lavishly peopled with the divinest models of the fair sex. It is made perfectly obvious that, perfect lover as he was him self, it was impossible for Mahomet to conceive of a paradise being such without hosts of " black-eyed nymphs of paradise." Not only is the " faithful " to have " eighty thousand servants, seventy-two wives of the girls of paradise," ah enormous tent erected for him of pearls, jacinths, and emeralds, wherein three hundred attendants are to serve him from plates of gold, for the enjoyment of all which the Son of the Faithful is to enjoy perpetual youth, but to the translated Moslem is given two further won drous privileges. In his future state he need only meet and see the wife or wives he knew on earth whom he cares again to have minister unto him. Should he desire children, the laws of nature them- 45 1 77V 7/77 PALACES OF THE SULTAN selves are to be suspended ; the houris, or his wives, will only conceive at his express desire, " and such issue shall be conceived, born, and grow up within the space of an hour." Maternity itself, under such conditions, would be indeed a gift of the gods. VII SLAVES AND SLAVERY IN TURKEY The system of slavery exists in the Imperial harem, as it also exists throughout the whole of the Turkish Empire. The public sale of slaves has been suppressed, in deference to European prejudices. Those rows of human merchandise, whose black and white skins, whose crinkled and blond tresses were formerly as much a part of the colour and shows of the Constan tinople streets as the necklaced buffaloes or the stately camel trains, these groups of Abyssinians, Georgians, Circassians, and Greeks have been removed from the public gaze only to crowd the thicker, more secret places. The institution of slavery is as unjustifiable under Moslem law as was our own slave-trade, in our South ern States, contrary to the spirit and teaching of our constitution. To quote a recent English writer, " Slavery as now practised in Turkey is in direct con travention of the law of Islam, which only recognises as legitimate property non-Moslems who have fallen into the power of true believers during war." Cir cassians are not non-Moslems, nor are they spoils of 45 2 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN war. They are I slams, whose faith is as pure as that oftheir hardened parents who deliberately barter then- children's beauty for dollars, and that of the slave dealers who crowd their fragile, human merchandise into miserable little vessels, in the depth of winter, that they may pass through the Black Sea at the season when Russian men-of-war are not scouring the horizon on the lookout for such as they. The Abyssinians are likewise the greater sufferers because of our human itarian insistence on the suppression of a trade from whose scourge England, America, and Russia have only freed themselves during the past half-century. But the new broom of virtuous reform seeks ever to sweep as clean its neighbour's precincts as it has its own. So long as the harem exists in Turkey, just so long must slaves be procurable. The internal organisation of the harem is as dependent upon the slave as w'as the Greek system of civilisation upon its slave founda tion. For implicit obedience and profitable service there must be a class of beings who will fulfil blindly the commands of the superior. Slaves alone can be forced to carry out, to the utmost letter of the order, the word of command from their master or mistress. The institution of polygamy necessitates a certain amount of authority. The supporting base of the polygamous structure is slavery. The custom that ordains a Moslem woman to veil her face before all mankind save her husband and her nearest male relatives, such a social law alone necessi tates the slave, who does not count, being merely the thing, the property of her own master. The eunuch 453 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN also must be a slave, for did such mutilation cease to bring gold into the pockets of the inhuman parent, as well as into the purse of the dealers in such remnants of men, there would be no eunuchs to guard the harem door. With that note of humanity which characterises most of the laws governing the weak and the unpro tected throughout Turkey, domestic slavery in Turkey is minimised in its tyranny. Slavery throughout the Turkish world is tantamount to an enforced domestic service. Slaves are protected by laws as binding as those that give to Turkish women a legal freedom almost unknown elsewhere. After seven years' servitude the female slave may claim her freedom. This she rarely does, save, of course, in the very exceptional cases where she has been treated with cruelty. The peculiar privileges in matters of education, as well as certain coveted social pleasures, and above all else the gift of a dot and trousseau at her marriage, these advantages make the position of a girl-slave in a good Turkish household superior to the conditions of life possible in the low-caste rank of her parents. To be chosen by a dealer for exportation, to be bought bv a hanoum for her beauty, is as great a boon to a poor Circassian as is the possible grandeur of her future elevation to the position of wife or seraili intoxication itself. The rule of life for the slave in the Imperial harem is practically the same as that in force throughout Turkish households. With that fine discrimination in which dealers in 454 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN human merchandise soon become adepts, the girl- slaves, as they advance in years — for they are brought young to the harem — are apportioned to different sorts of labour. The stronger, more muscular negresses be come cooks, house-maids, scullery maids, laundresses, or bath-women. Others who are destined by their superior physical or mental attractions to lighter em ployments are taught certain graces and accomplish ments. As any one of these may rise to the high position of a gueuzde — "one on whom the Sultan has cast an eve" — each one of these youthful slaves is carefully trained to the refinements of pose, gesture, and good manners ; each must dance, sing, or play some musical instrument ; and each must be an adept in the art of performing the formal routine of the strict court etiquette with grace and charm. When a Kalfa — a lady ofthe household — discovers in a pupil-slave certain peculiar aptitudes, she is spe cially trained to develop her talent ; she becomes reader, or secretary, or dancer, or an artist on the flute or tambourine. Under a late Sultan a certain number ofthe seraili were taught to play on European instru ments, and a women's orchestra played selections from the Italian and French operas. In more recent years it is said certain slaves are taught some of the foreign languages, in order that they may act as governesses to the sons and daughters of the wives or favourites of the Sultan. The training of slaves with a view to making a profit out of their attractions is not an unknown indus try, even among Turkish ladies of rank. Beauty and 455 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN accomplishments are always twin stars in the matri monial firmament. A clever and beautiful girl-slave, well dressed, well mannered, and ambitious, may bring, not only to herself, but to her mistress, a flattering degree of success by marrying and marrying well. Ladies highly placed take great pride in their slaves ; they go about with the more attractive of their house hold much as a monarch likes to see himself sur rounded by officials of handsome and imposing appearance. Slaves richly, sometimes fantastically dressed, the better to show off their points, are a part of every large entertainment, fete, and festivity. The colour and beauty of their garments, their grace, youthful vivacity, and gaiety, add not a little to the splendour of the feasts given by women to women in the Constantinople great world. A certain amount of freedom is admitted between mistress and slave. The mutual love and devotion also, between the girl who owes everything she„ is to the owner who has given her the opportunity to show. her talents and character, and the mistress who in her slave finds confidante, friend, and ally, this love and attachment is sometimes as touching as it is sublime. For women must everywhere cling to women at cer tain moments, whether they be within or without harem walls. In the long life struggle there are times and crises when only a woman can be turned to for full and complete sympathy. 456 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN VIII THE IMPERIAL HAREM Within the walls of the Imperial serai there are hundreds and hundreds of women. Halls, corridors, apartments en suite, salons and huge dining-rooms, or such as are composed of but a single room, — all and every part of the palaces sacred to the harem ofthe Grand Signior, — these are alive with women, with slaves, and with eunuchs. Along certain of the long halls visiting cards, with the name of the occu pant of the rooms within, would be found upon the doors of suite after suite. Within these rooms a nom inal freedom is enjoyed by each one of the gueuzde — or " Eyed" — those on whom the Sultan has cast an eye; but between the host and legion ofthe adjemis or rustics (young, raw slaves), the pupil-slaves (the alaiks), the menials, and the eunuchs, — actual liberty among the lower ranks of the Sultan's favourites is, of course, altogether impossible. A most elaborate and complicated system of court etiquette rules the lives and every action of each inmate ofthe serai. Not only is this system of social law necessary to the guidance and rule of so many thousands of women within the same palace walls, this court etiquette itself has come down as an inheritance of past mediaeval periods, when a grander state and splendour reigned in the court ofthe " Great Turk." The court of men composing the Sultan's present household, as we have tried to prove, has been so 457 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN greatly modified that the court of Yildiz is now prac tically European in its dress and manners. The sur vival of the Oriental forms of prostration and salutation alone remain as the outward reminders of former East ern ceremonies and customs. The modification and change which make that part of His Majesty's court known to foreigners so modern as to seem almost democratic, such radical reforms have apparently stopped short of the serai. The Imperial serai has its own constitution, its own complicated organisation, its discipline, customary laws, and rigid divisions in the matter of rank. It is a world within itself. Its life is as far away and apart from the life and whirl pulsing through the streets, the shops, and the hearts of the men and the women crowding the Constantinople thoroughfares as though no foreigner had ever trod the dusty Pera roads, no press had ever trumpeted the news of the outside world, and the masters of the serai themselves had never listened to the foreign voices. As fixed as are the sumptuary laws governing China are the social ones ruling in this court of women. The last outpost of Orientalism within the Imperial household, the serai is watched and guarded with the greater and more jealous care. At the head of this feminine court, ruling with autocratic despotism, stands the " Crown of Veiled Heads." This virtual queen regnant is the mother of the reigning Sultan. Once her son seated upon the throne of the Ottomans, his mother is raised to Im perial honor. An oath of obedience to her must be 458 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN taken by every member of the serai. No one is exempt from this oath. The wives of the Sultan down to the lowest slave within the palace walls becomes subject to the Valideh-Sultan. The title of this feminine autocrat is " The Crown of the Veiled Heads." All petitions and notes must bear this form of address. The power of the Valideh-Sultan is practically un limited. Except solely her august son no one may rule over her. The deference paid to her person is strictly laid down by law. None may sit in her pres ence. None may even appear before her unless an audience has been previously granted. All who thus present themselves must stand with their hands crossed upon their breasts, in attitudes of most profound rever ence. " Our lady " must preface every sentence. So rigid is the etiquette ruling the deference paid to this the virtual Empress of the Ottoman court, that all must present themselves in full dress when admitted to the royal presence. The word of the Valideh-Sultan throughout the serai is law. Her royal permission is necessary for the going forth beyond the walls of every lady within the palace. No message may be presented to her Imperial son save through her hands. The four legitimate wives of the Sultan are as absolutely subject to their Imperial mother-in-law as is each and every one of the most insignificant gueuzde. For the execution of so vast and uxorious a power " The Crown of Veiled Heads " naturally must have her subordinates. The chief officials of the 459 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN ' palace are the Lady of the Treasury, the Mistress of the Robes, the Keeper ofthe Seals, the Lady Chaplain, i the Lady Coffee Server, the Mistress of the Sher bets, etc. Each of these ladies, in their turn, have their subordinates. These Kalfas (mistresses) have their dairas, their separate establishments. Beyond the walls of the palace the head of this court of women extends her power and influence. Hers is the influence literally behind the throne. Scarcely a wife or even the newest, cleverest, or most beautiful favorite exercises an authority equal to that which emanates from the counsel or suggestion of this "Crown of Veiled Heads." That wisdom which is supposed to be inseparable from age is held to be her gift ; released from the " furious monsters " of the youthful passions of jealousy, love, and the coarser ambitions, in the mother of the " Great Turk " the wives, as well as the King of kings himself, are each and all supposed to find an inexhaustible source of help and wise guidance. Character, however, has played its never-failing role of supremacy upon this strange and wondrous stage of the serai as it has else where, in all places, ages, and stations. Though as Valideh-Sultan, the mother of the Sultan may rule supreme as queen and empress of the Ottoman court of women ; though her missives are lifted to the lips of Grand Viziers on the slightest communication of her wishes to the Sublime Porte ; though the poor pros trate themselves before her as she proceeds in the royal state of her magnificence of equipage and guards to mosques, or to take the air of the hills ; yet not once 460 77V THE PALACES OF 'THE SULTAN but again and again has she as the " Crown of Veiled Heads " been known to bow her own before such a wife as was the beauteous Russian Roxalana, she who ruled the mighty heart and brain of Suleyman the Magnificent ; or before the lovely Venetian, the Sul tana Sofive or Baffa, whose incompetent husband Murad III. placed in her energetic hands the true wand of power. No later than the days of His Majesty Abdul- Medjid was the palace torn and rent in its most secret rulings by the dazzling, overmastering influence ofthe wondrously beautiful " Lady of Cairo." A mere slave, this Besmi became the legal wife of the infatu ated Sultan. Having been freed and adopted by the Princess Misrili Hanoum, even a Sultan must either make this Besmi, once a slave, his wife or forever regret her. The laws that seem to weigh only upon the weak and defenceless, within the harem walls, are equally stringent and binding upon the Lord of this Ottoman state Institution, the Imperial serai. IX HAREM DISTRACTIONS AND TURKISH HOUSEHOLDS With the head and base of the Imperial harem thus established, we find the hundreds of women within the haremlik walls each having her separate place and state. Next in rank to the "Crown ofthe Veiled Heads" comes the mother of the heir apparent. This Bash 461 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Kadui Effendi is of superior rank to the second, third, and fourth Kadui Effendis. Below these four Impe rial wives come the Hanoum Effendis, the mothers of the Sultan's sometimes somewhat numerous family. The family of the present Sultan is thought to be comparatively limited. He has but thirteen living children. After the Hanoums Effendis come the fringes upon this ample matrimonial mantle. There are the fa vourites or "ikbals;" these in their turn have others to look down upon. There are still the gueuzdes — the " Eyed." Any one of these two latter may, by giving birth to a child, become a Hanoum Effendi. The state reigning within the Imperial harem may be gauged when it is remembered that to each of these ladies, save only the " Eyed," a dairas is given. This dairas comprises an allowance of money, a separate suite of apartments, with an attendant train of servants, slaves, and eunuchs. The Imperial princesses, the Sultan's unmarried daughters, also have their dairas. These young princesses live in the midst of this strange world of women a petted, hothouse-bred existence. Surrounded by flatterers, they know neither restraint nor any law save that of their own wills and the severe rule of the harem etiquette. At an early age — at sixteen or less — they are given a palace, a magnificent trousseau, a large allowance in money, and a husband. The latter is accepted with about the same degree of joy as are the other and equally entertaining adjuncts of the married state. For over the husband, be he minister 462 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN or Pasha, an Imperial princess reigns as she does over her palace, her slaves, and her children. The daugh ters of the Sultan are, indeed, perhaps the happiest, in point of freedom, of any of the women in the whole Turkish realm. Owing to their high rank, they not onlv take precedence of their husbands, but many of the restraints ruling their sex are not enforced upon the daughters of the Padishah. Within the satin-hung and divan-cushioned harem- lik of Yildiz what are the hopes, aspirations, occupa tions, the pleasures and amusements, of this great multitude of women ? — , If I should answer that the daily lives ofthe majority of these ladies correspond more or less to the lives / of thousands of well-to-do women throughout Europe and America I should be met by a storm of indignant denial. Yet such is, in the main, the truth. The Imperial wives and hanoums, Jiayi_ng^families and more or less large and complicated establishments - to look after, are forced to lead more or less sedentary, domestic lives. The education and physical training, of their children is an occupation in itself. The man agement of their households demands the personal surveillance necessary, in any country, to the keeping of a house in good order. There is social stir and excitement enough in this feminine Constantinople world to keep its women almost as wearied with social gaieties as are certain of our American ladies, whose luncheons, musicals, card- parties, and teas make their days one long dissipation. The ladies within the Imperial harem are constantly 463 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN in demand for all the fetes and festivities given by the great world of the Turkish capital. No marriage, no party of circumcision, no fete in honour of a debutante passing from the state of djahel or " ignorant " to the condition of khamil or " perfect" (a ceremony pro claiming her as having reached the marriageable age), no ceremony of any kind is considered complete with out the presence of a lady of the Imperial household. An ex-seraili at the very least must bring her supe rior grace, her delicate refinements of pose, gesture, and bearing, and, above all, that surest betrayal of her Imperial training, her serai accent, to give to a Turk ish festivity its crowning distinction. With visits to the palaces of the royal princesses ; with other obligatory calls to the widows of former Sultans immured in their truly prison-like retreat at Seraglio Point; with continual al fresco fetes, luncheon parties, musicals, caique parties on the Bosphorus or to the open sea; with donkey rides, and the outings in the boats and steam launches on the ponds at Yildiz ; \ together with the delight of the shopping tours in the | bazaars and the open-air excursions on feast and festi val days to the Sweet Waters of Asia or to those of Europe, there are diversions and amusements enough j offered to the women of the Sultan's harem to stand | comparison with those invented by the women of a Tree republic for their own entertainment. Besides the above distractions, through the halls, corridors, and dairas of the Imperial household there runs an uninterrupted, continuous flutter and excite ment. There was never a court without intrigue ; and 464 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN plotting and counterplotting flourishes into abnormal growth under an autocrat. When the law forbidding Sultans to marry native Turkish maidens was made the Ottoman legislators forgot, in their haste to separate their Sultan from undue Turkish influence, two important truths. In limiting the choice of the Sultan to wives of slave ori gin, his advisers did not consider that women of low- caste origin are far more susceptible to the baser forms of intrigue than are those women in whom blood and family tradition have developed the nobler instincts of honour. It is quite possible the unprogressive charac ter of so many ofthe Sultans may be directly traceable to their maternal inheritances. For there is scarcely a great man or great ruler who has not had a noble- minded mother. The second important factor in the social organisa tion of the Sultan's life, in ordaining the rules gov erning his marital relations, was the entire forgetfulness of the fact that the Sulta'n was no god — but a mere man. Every one of his wives and favourites would have, naturally, but one sole object in life. Being women, to dominate and to influence, as well as to seduce and capture this Lord of lords would be the chief end of every woman who was allowed to approach him. „ — Harem life, therefore, has not always been as dull and unvaried as it has been painted. With mutual jealousies, rivalries, feuds, and wrongs to keep pulses stirring and brains alert; with the petty ambitions of a world self-centred and looked up to by all the outer 3° 4^5 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN feminine world ; with the son of every wife " the little lion " of every dairas, the one sole object of adora tion, the hope of hopes, the prodigy of prodigies, to push and to educate ; with outdoor and indoor feasts to enliven and to invite to personal display, — Kaduis Effendis and Hanoums Effendis lead an exceedingly active, luxurious, and diversified existence. The maiden who, on the occasion of the feast of Bairam, the Moslem Easter, is chosen among the trained slaves as the gift of the year, the offering of the nation to the Sultan, — one tendered him by the hand of his mother, — this maiden who sees herself gracefully renounced, as is the custom of the present Sultan, and given in immediate marriage to some sub ordinate of the palace, finds herself the victim of a supreme disillusion. Hopes of high place, visions of final marital recognition, possibilities of the coveted, the intoxicating position of " Crown of Veiled Heads " coming to her through the reign of the son of her womb, — all these illusions lie shattered for ever. As ex-seraili the discarded slave will, however, always have a certain distinction. Her continued relations with the palace will make her husband show her a perpetual deference. Her acquaintances will, also, know how to please her by paying court to one who has free entrance to the palace. The ruler, king, husband, lover of all these women has no such chances of escape as has the ex-seraili. All his life, from his earliest boyhood's days, when he was still the inmate of the kafe — "the cage" (the house wherein a young heir to the throne is virtually 466 7iV THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN kept prisoner, with his corps of tutors, his ten or twelve maidens, his books, and his slaves) — until the moment when, dying, each and all of his wives are admitted to hear their Imperial husband's last behests, — surely the man who passes through such a world of women and remains a man, with a man's virility of brain and power of will, is a wonder indeed among wonders. "Never listen to the counsels of women," was one of the " four rules of conduct " given, on his death-bed, bv the famous Vizier Mohammed Kiuprili to the young Sultan Mohammed IV. Was this admonition a commentary on the harem system, or merely the result of one widely versed in knowledge of the sex ? It is now some few years since His Majesty has made known his desire that foreign ladies should no longer be admitted into the Imperial harem. It has been whispered throughout Constantinople, however, that this exclusion of foreign visitors has been due rather to the expressed wish of certain ladies of the Imperial household than to any fiat issuing from the royal lips. A reported conversation held between the wife of a certain government official high in office, and an ex-seraili married to a somewhat elderly Pasha made the point of view of modern Turkish ladies regarding the visits of perfect strangers unmistakably clear : — " Why, after all, should we be expected to receive American or English ladies who are entirely unknown 467 < II IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN to us ? We no longer wear the old dress. We dress as they do, only our gowns are more splendid. They wear muslins, even in public. Who of us would go abroad with so poor a gown ? If they come to pay us a visit, it is that they may see us, look upon us, scrutinise us as they would actresses in a play. Why should we be willing to put on a dress we have discarded, and go into our old-fashioned Turkish rooms, to play the play they have come to see ? When my husband asked me lately to receive the wives of two great Americans and the wife of Admiral — the English admiral whose ship is in port — I answered, c My dear, I dress as these ladies dress ; I smoke cigarettes, as they smoke them ; my rooms are as exact a copy of theirs 'as I can make them; if they come to see a Turkish wife and a Turkish interior it is not here they had best come. Let them go to M Bey's household ; there they will see the real thing.' " The Pasha's lady laughed immoderately, at this final sally. For the palace of the Lady M was known throughout Stamboul as being a mediaeval curiosity in point of dirt, ill-dressed slaves, and general untidiness. The wife of the high official was herself a model housekeeper. As her husband had always taken her with him on his travels, she had not only been to Egypt, but also to Paris. Her house and household were thoroughly European. The lady was an author ity on the manner of hanging Parisian draperies ; she it was who could be depended upon to show one how European clothes may be worn so that one 468 ,; y -a- ¦• -i. yy,.yy y.^s-^ IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN could be certain of wearing the correct number of petticoats, however uncomfortable these might be ; and to tell one just how frequent must be the vigor ous massage of the skilled foreign masseuse, whom the Lady H Pasha had introduced into the upper ten thousand Turkish world of Constantinople. In less exalted circles, European methods of living and European habits and ways of looking at life are sufficiently prevalent, in the more highly educated Turkish society, to have established a standard of development and of good taste. A Turkish friend of ours lived with his wife in a large and fine house. The house stood on the banks of the Bosphorus, in one of the most beautiful of the villages on that incomparable shore. Within the great house four families were gathered, in patriarchal fashion. All were either the sons or daughters, with their wives or husbands and children, of the head of the house — a retired naval officer. This large family, with as numerous a corps of servants, lived an harmo nious, tranquil, and domestic life. Some of the ladies of the household spoke foreign languages. These and their sisters and sisters-in-law read not only their own, but French, English, and German books and newspapers. For these ladies and their families there were frequent caique and driving excursions, to vary the monotony of the daily domestic round. The men of the family, after their duties at the palace or at their various counting-houses, returned home either to join in the family outings, to make or to receive the calls of their relatives (there is com- 469 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN paratively little interchange of masculine social visit ing in good Turkish society), to fish in the waters of the Bosphorus at their doors, to read, or to while away time in watching the never-ending, changeful water- life beyond their windows. The evenings were mostly spent in the playing of cards, — a game to which Turks are passionately devoted. The one wife of each of these four husbands was as much a matter of course, — the chosen wife, as greatly beloved and as tenderly respected, — as any of the countless thousands of wives in our happier country, where man, conscious of his inferiority, enshrines his wife as priestess, goddess, and uncrowned queen. Of the delicacy of sentiment prevalent among Turk ish gentlemen towards their wives I was greatly struck, on two occasions. In walking through the crowded Pera La Grande Rue one late afternoon, I encountered a gentleman whom we had met repeatedly during our stay in that city. He was immaculately garbed in the latest European-cut raiment. In spite of his bravery of attire, however, he did not disdain to be seen carrying a bundle. The latter was a round box, laden, apparently, with a heavy weight. " It is for my wife. It is ' Turkish Delight,' of which she is very fond. It is bad for her, I tell her, but since she adores it I continue to take it to her. WTe have this little custom, you see, yes, to take our wives a gift, however little — every day — when we return to our homes." And our friend, with his perfectly fitting gloves and his smartly adjusted fez and his large round box, bowed and smiled with the 470 IN THE PAL ACLS OF THE SULTAN same grace with which he had made his first cere monious visit. Shortly before our departure it pleased His Ma jesty the Sultan to confer upon our friend Mustafa Bev, the aide-de-camp appointed as escort to Gen eral Porter, as a mark of his approbation, a decoration ofthe higher order. " I shall carry it with ' four hands,' as we say, dear lady, until I can show it, at home. Believe me, it is my wife who will be made very happy," was Mustafa Bey's comment, and the sole one, save his own personal gratitude at receiving so distinguishing a mark of his Majesty's favour. X TURKISH REFORMS AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCES The changes brought about in Turkish social life have been the results of reforms and upheavals in gov ernmental, educational, and legal laws and privileges. When Lord Palmerston said in 1856 that " Turkey had made more progress than any other nation in Europe" his statement referred to the changes and reforms instituted by Sultans in the early half of the nineteenth century. Sultans were among the first to listen to the foreign voices. Two hundred and fifty years ago the approaching "decline ofthe sick man " was announced as immi nent by England's minister to the Porte ; his " total collapse " was one " for which Europe must be on the lookout." Europe, during the succeeding centuries, 47 1 y H yi /TV 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN has been on the keenest possible outlook for Turkey's expected death-bed agonies ever since that English diplomatist's prophetic announcement. Murad IV, Mahmoud the Reformer, and Abdul Hamid II have been the three Sultans, since Suleyman's supremacy of empire, who have given Europe the not altogether agreeable surprise of presenting the aspect of an inter esting invalid with astonishing powers of recuperation. As early as the dawn of the present century Mah moud 1 1 began that series of systematic reforms which are still going on year after year, continued by the present Sultan. With Mahmoud's reign the new, more modernised Turkey began its existence. The mediaevalism of the court at Seraglio Point, its grandeur of costume and pageantry, gave way to a court patterned more and more, as years went on, on the fashions and ceremo nies prevalent in European courts. Old Turkey dis appeared for ever, along with its jewelled girdles, its aigrette-trimmed monstrous turbans, its sables, and gold-wrought robes. Certain mediaeval habits of mind and Asiatic customs went along with the dropping of state robes and the lost pomp and grandeur. The throwing of ambassa dors into the dark dungeons of the .Seven Towers, to furnish, possibly, a series of banquets to scampering rhodentia while Turkey and the foreign power repre sented by the unlucky envoy were deciding which army was the stronger — this summary method of punishing an enemy's representative became impossi ble once the right of way through the Dardanelles 472 77V 7777 PA TALES OF THE SULTAN had been granted to Russia. This right of way once given, with the northern gates ofthe East, with Hun gary and Bulgaria also opened, and Europe sent its curious-eyed travellers to look upon the " Ouecn of Cities." With the increase of travel one by one certain super stitions and the more rigid Moslem customs have dis appeared. Sultans were the first to lead the way in the dispensing of gracious courtesies. Selima III, Mahmoud II, and Abdul Medjid were models of the highest type of sovereigns possessing perfect manners. These Sultans would have been as incapable of the least discourtesy towards a foreign visitor as their pre decessors would disdainfully have proved their right to show their Moslem contempt of Giaours. To touch an infidel was formerly regarded as contamination ; to enter his house was to suffer defilement. With the influx of foreign visitors the Turks — at heart and by training the most courteous of people — soon learned to give the "handshake," with a perfect tact and grace. With their Sultans proffering elaborate banquets to foreign ambassadors, the old-time horror of defilement became a superstition to be laughed at among the upper classes. With the breaking-down of foolish social barriers other cruel customs became equally obsolete. Since the time of Mahmoud II we have the word of one of our ministers that "there has been no more drown ing in sacks of wives and odalisks, no decapitation of officials, and no strangulation of deposed Sultans or of brothers of reigning Sultans. With the death 473 &3JM *4 JT.L 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of Mahmoud such cruelties, which had the sanction of legality in Greek and Roman custom, ceased." Other horrors, also, were abolished. The bastinado was forbidden. The laws ordaining the confiscation of goods and property, in case of death or banishment, were repealed. Torture was to be abolished ; certain obnoxious taxes were removed from the statute laws ; and the admission of Christian evidence in Moslem courts, as well as many other modern and humane laws, were introduced. In the enthusiasm for these new doctrines and laws, and the promise they offered for the elevation and energising of his people, Sultan Abdul Medjid pro claimed his desire to " make the political, civil, and religious conditions so equal between Mussulman and Christian of every denomination throughout the Em pire that there no longer would be under the laws of the Sultan but one and the same people under differ ent races and religions. In a word, to nationalise all the fragments of nations that cover the soil of Turkey by so much impartiality, amenity, equality, and tolera tion that each of these populations should find its honour, its conscience, its security interested in con curring toward the maintenance of the Empire in a species of monarchical confederation under the aus pices ofthe Sultan." These "brave words" were incorporated in "The Illustrious WTriting of the Rose Garden." This, the Hatti-Cherif of Gul-Hane, was the Magna Charta of freedom and guarantee of security to rajah and Chris tian alike. "The Illustrious Writing" came from 474 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN the hand of Sultan Abdul Medjid. The flowery designation of " Rose Garden " was to indicate the place wherein, in the old Seraglio rose garden, this happy augury of Christian security was proclaimed. It is now fifty years or more since the " Illustrious Writing " gave to Protestant and to Catholic, as well as to converted Mussulman, liberty and protection. As in the case of many other Turkish laws, this promised religious toleration has not always been held sacred. With the revolt of the Bulgarians, and the more re cent and more secret conspiracies among Armenians, the indignation of the Christian world has been aroused by the cruelty with which Turkey has pursued these believers in the Greek form of Christian worship. These attacks upon Christians, it should in justice be remembered, however, have only been made when the Christians subject to Turkey have either revolted or have been found conspiring against the rule of the Padishah. Christians in Constantinople are as safe to-day as they are in Paris or London. This was proved in the re cent outbreak of the Armenians in the capital. The exact knowledge among Turkish officials of the num ber, race, religion, and dwelling of every one of the nineteen different races inhabiting the Turkish capi tal was marvellously demonstrated in that swift and terrible punishment meted out to the Armenian con spirators. No single mistake was made. Armenians were picked out with as exact and unerring a certainty in the crowded Galata quarter as though each Arme nian had been personally known to the Imperial 475 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN troops. Not a single Christian of any other race or sect, not a single Jew, Greek, Persian, or Catholic, suffered hurt or harm. Those ladies and gentlemen of the various foreign embassies who sat dressed and armed, with their boxes, ready for flight, during those two dreadful days and nights when the sword of Islam throughout Galata was cutting down conspiracy as a scythe sweeps into ripe grain, need have had no fear. The Sultans of our day have been taught their lesson in international laws. The " Illustrious Writing " is in no sense a dead letter. For the results of the missions and the foreign college and schools upon Turks and Turkey one must look rather to the retroactive effects upon both rulers and people, of our systems of life and educa tion, than to strictly religious results. A missionary, a twenty years' resident of Stamboul, in a recent book on his mission work, confesses it is chiefly through "character" that Christian workers may hope to in fluence Moslems. The result of the influence exercised by Robert College upon the educational systems now in vogue in all the higher Turkish schools has been incalculable. When in 1859 the doubtful experiment of establish ing an American college under Protestant Christian teachers was first suggested, there was the usual storm of opposition. When the permit for the college was presented to the Porte, the minister of public instruction displayed in his answer an unexpected degree of frankness. Sami 476 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Pasha declared openly that " the Christian communities in the Empire already had more schools, more books, more education and intelligence than the Moslem inhab itants, and his business was to bring the Moslem schools up to a level with the Christian schools." The requested permission to erect the college on the shores of the Bosphorus induced another form of opposition. For over four hundred years the Turkish govern ment had guarded the banks of the Bosphorus from the inroads of all foreigners. The Jesuits had used all their ingenuity, craft, influence, and political power to obtain a footing on those coveted shores. But the Moslems had held firm. Russian as well as Catholic interests were, therefore, arraved against the new enterprise. But when did an American ever allow himself the disagreeable surprise of being beaten? The "to-morrow" ofthe Porte took seven years to fulfil its promise to look into certain " formalities." Mr. Robert and Missionary Hamlin waited those seven years, with the perfect patience of those who intend to succeed. At the end of that time his Highness A'ali Pasha sent a note to the following effect: " Please inform Mr. Hamlin that he may begin the building of the college when he pleases. No one will interfere with him, and in a few days an Imperial irade will be given to him." An Imperial irade is a tenure of property at once the safest, the most sacred, and consequently the most valued, in all Turkey. What neither Jew nor Jesuit, nor Russian nor 477 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Greek, in six centuries had been able to accomplish had been granted to a free republic. What the Turkish point of view may have been, in permitting the establishment of such an institution in her most rigidly guarded territory, it is impossible to divine. The Oriental is not, however, born out of the East to be last in the race of human cunning. "Behold," he presumably says in his wisdom, " the Giaour comes and brings his schools with him. Everything he brings with him — books, and new languages, and all the secrets of Western learning. He is filled with an unutterable longing to teach us all he knows. Let us learn all he has to teach. We will take what we find to be worth while; all that is good and wise for us to take, that will we diligently learn and remember. All else is as naught. For his gods are not like unto our One God, nor will they ever be, nor are their prophets like unto Mahomet. But Europe is near and cometh ever nearer, and behold! we must learn something of her ways in order to defeat her." The Moslem goes in under our flag to learn our speech, our classics, our ways, and our tricks of thought. Once he has captured them he returns to the fast nesses of his more or less unalterable Moslem nature. He will proceed to practise upon his Western brother, but only in ways of self-defence, the new weapons whose use and value he has thus successfully mastered. As for any fear in high quarters that numbers of Turkish subjects will turn Protestant or Catholic, the number of such is so inconsiderable and the character of such 478 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN converts so worthless, as judged by Moslem stand ards, that the Bosphorus might be lined with foreign colleges and Sultans would still continue to protect them with " Illustrious Writings," so little do the Turkish rulers fear their religious influence. Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Montenegrins are those, as we have seen, who chiefly crowd the halls of Robert College. The Turks who enter the college, as Dr. Washburn stated, rarely graduate. The seeds of European and of American ideals of lite, liberty, and of individualism sink into the already overturned soil of fiery young revolution aries. And presently these seeds bear fruit. It is no discredit — it is surely proof of the vitality of the teachings emanating from such foreign schools of learning — to learn, from those who know, that two- thirds of all the conspiracies and plots for overturning the hated Turkish yoke in Bulgaria, or Armenia, or other disaffected Turkish provinces, may be directly traced through the track of the fiery young revolu tionaries who have been graduated from either Robert College, or from some other foreign mission school. Yet such is Turkish reverence for law and for the concession once granted to Robert College by an Imperial irade, such the well-grounded Turkish adhe rence also, to one of Mahomet's strictest religious injunctions, " Let there be no violence in religion," that not only does Robert College stand unmolested on the banks of the Bosphorus, but upon its flag-staff our flag of freedom is allowed to unfurl its stars and stripes to every breeze that can capture it. In all 479 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN Europe, even in our own wide land, where every reli gion is safe, as men of every color, save one, may hope for citizenship, is there to be found another such instance of magnanimity and distinguished courtesy ? I doubt it. The test would be, were it not for a cer tain clause in our Federal Statute, for a Sultan to sug gest to the authorities at Albany the erection of a mosque and of a Turkish school on the banks of the Hudson, with permission to fly the Turkish flag. Were I Sultan I fear I should be tempted to apply this test of international courtesy, in sober earnest and in spite of the Federal clause. The principal reforms instituted by the present Sultan have been confined almost wholly to educa tional and military developments. Sultan Abdul Hamid II is too clever himself not to have an intellectual reverence for learning. Schools — primary as well as higher schools — have been established throughout the Ottoman Empire. The education of children is now compulsory throughout Turkey ; every Turkish subject is com pelled to register his child, whether male or female, for admission into the public schools. The elements of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, lessons in writing, and above all else the learning of certain por tions of the Koran by heart, such is the teaching in the schools. It is chiefly in the superior, in the military and naval schools and the schools of medi cine, that the great changes in public instruction intro duced by the present Sultan are to be looked for. The programme of studies in the Imperial lyceum 480 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN includes a formidable array of subjects. 'Turkish his tory and literature ; the Arabic language and litera ture; the Persian language ; mathematics, philosophy, physics, history, design, geography, book-keeping, the Greek language, French caligraphv, the German, Eng lish, Italian, and French languages, and gymnastics, such is the curriculum. The wonder evoked in finding every Turk one mav chance to meet among the wealthier governing class speaking — and fluently — French, English, Greek, or German, after such a revelation of the educational opportunities offered to students, becomes no marvel. The Turk has a nat ural aptitude for languages ; this talent is fostered by the attention paid to the teaching in the schools of these foreign tongues. For this teaching the best European teachers are secured. One department of learning we Americans might well copy from the Turks. In the Lycee Imperial an "Administrative School" has been in existence for some two decades. In this school Turkish subjects are trained to a knowledge of the laws and the government of their country. The curriculum of this school is as varied as it is broad ; sanitation, agriculture, literature, geography, history, chemistry, mining, engineering, cosmography, zoology, government, finance, economy, legislation, commercial and international law, as well as French, Arabic, Persian — here is what the young Turk is supposed to absorb and digest before he is qualified to enter, even as a clerk, a government bureau. The rise of men thus trained, to the difficult posts of foreign ambassadors, ministers of foreign affairs and 31 481 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of justice, and to governors of great provinces, proves the value of such a school. The finish and intellect ual breadth and culture of the distinguished gentle men forming the council of the Sublime Porte and of the Court of Yildiz becomes entirely comprehensible after even a cursory review of such educational oppor tunities. The models of these schools have been the best French, English, and American systems of higher education. The changes in the intellectual life of the upper class Mahometans brought about by such schools has been nothing short of revolutionary. The outlook of all the thinking forces of the nation or nations composing the composite Turkish world has been almost completely changed. The appetite for learning, always active in Oriental minds, once thus excited, has become almost universal among the mid dle and higher Turkish classes. Young men who cannot avail themselves of the opportunities given to those who are to enter upon either a military, naval, or administrative career either go abroad to the foreign universities or flock to the American college. No Turk, nowadays, consents to his sons being less well trained, in the modern meaning of the word, than is any other youth of any civilised county. Turkey's true progress is to be measured by her intellectual discontent among the upper intellectual classes, and by the desire among the common people for those easier, freer conditions of life enjoyed by her neighbours — by that Turkey in Europe which is Turkey no longer. 482 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN "Thirty years ago, and even quite enlightened Turks did not know what progress meant. We were not ready for the new movement. Progress to all of us meant heresy, some new form of infidel horror. But in thirty years what a change ! We know now what we want." " And that is ? " I asked of the clever, brilliant Turk who, as far away as Paris, had begun to open his heart on the subject nearest to it, his country and her wants, her needs, and her dangers. After the first outburst the instinct of reticence had come to seal his lips. He had stopped short. He was, however, induced to go on. " Ah-h — what is there we do not want? We want all that you have, all that France has, all that England gives to her children. We want freedom — freedom to work, to enrich both ourselves and our country. We want railroads and telegraphs and trolley-cars." " Oh, no, no ! Let there be one country where the ears are not tortured and nervous systems a wreck ! " I protested. "The trolley car is the Magna Charta of the poor, as well as their flying carpet. It is the great civiliser." " The great commoniser, you mean." " Well ! " laughed Bey with his comfortable Turk's laugh, " yes, it is a commoniser, if you will. But wherever you see the trolley you will find the people already civilised, free. It breaks down bar riers, it makes many people one. Look at Budapest. Before the trolleys came, there were a dozen people, all enemies, in the town ; now all are friends. They 483 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN travel together all day long from street to street. But, even more than the trolleys, we want so many other things ! And now we are ready for them all ! " For see," cried my friend, as he warmed to the subject that alone could arouse the full flame of his enthusiasm, " see what we have, all that we are. We Turks have our poverty, and poverty is a good thing for the people. We are not spoiled by luxury, like the European. We can do without many things, without money ; for instance, look at our soldiers, they are poor, yet how obedient, how brave they are ! " We have our religion, — and it goes very deep, our religion, — it is a part, the greater part, of the daily life of our people ; and when men still pray openly, without shame, then is a nation still strong and virtuous." " And yet," I murmured, " you, for instance, you are no more Mahometan than I am." " Oh ! " Bey laughed, " not in creed, no. But once born a Mahometan always a Mahometan. I should go with my people ; feel as they do, fight as they fight, suffer — I hope — as they know how to suffer. There is another great thing we have — a wonderfully patient, industrious, long-suffering people. The Turk is a good worker. It is only the official who is lazy — I ought to know. I have been one." And again the rich, musical laugh rang out. After a moment the dark eyes became serious once more. And our friend went on : " As you see, everything is ready, the people are ready ; they 4S4 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN come with the best of all gifts to their ruler, they bring their patriotism, their religious fervour, their poverty, their longing to work that they may lighten it. They will give everything if only they are given certain things in return. But, alas ! when it comes to progress, in the true meaning of the word, we feel ourselves to be in such a hopeless situation. Ah ! if Europe would but let us alone, only for a little time, only for a quarter of a cen tury. How much we could do ! We would give Europe a great surprise. But that is what she does not intend to allow us to give her. And so we are always being pressed, harassed ; we have to fight for our very breath. How can we expect our finances to be improved, our people really to grow, when we are fighting for our very lives ? And yet we move slowly, slowly, even as glaciers move, for we are all obedient to the same laws of force and motion, whether we be Turks or Christians." Thousands of educated Turks have the same long ings and desires for their people — for themselves. These are neither revolutionists nor are they disloyal subjects. These men are merely newly awakened to the necessities, longings, trials, and possibilities of an intelligent and strong people who have borne much, who, therefore, could be trusted to do much. The Turks who see this see more. They know that successfully to defeat the designs of Russia, Austria, and Germany it is not enough to fight such designs in the cabinets of ministers, or in the audi ence chamber of their ruler. These more progress- 485 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN ive Turks realise that the people or race who are not in the modern movement are lost ; and the Turkish people — her thinking sons assert — are as capable of being good agriculturists, good miners, mechanics, machinists, sailors, and engineers under the newer, more modern conditions as they have proved their capacity as soldiers, to learn the Prussian goose-step and to fire Maxim guns. Opinions respecting the future of Turkey are as much at variance as they were two hundred years ago. Every nation in Europe and the whole of the Christian world are still divided into two camps. Turkey's nearest neighbours assure you, solemnly, that the " sick man " is in his death-throes, that no amount of foreign education, as a stimulant, will ever effectu ally revive him. Then, presently a little war comes to prove a most disquieting and alarming amount of vigour in Europe's constitutional invalid. England will tell you, since her semi-" protecto rate " of Turkish interests has been abandoned, that " the Turk is in the way, he must go, sooner or later." She also gives you to understand that, but for Russia, it would be soon rather than later on that Turkish territory, like Joseph's coat, would be divided among the Christian brother-nations. Ger many does not speak as loud, for she has certain important Turkish interests and others to further. The much disputed railway to Baghdad is said to be already her prize. The councils of Europe, when they assemble gravely to discuss Turkey's "sad case," give the 486 - Ml ' ¦- V\f "iT-o •«., .__ IN 7777 PALACES OF 'THE SULTAN world and Turkey herself to understand that she will be allowed to remain a nation just so long as Europe sees in her the balancing weight in the Eastern Question — and no longer. Turkey herself openly says nothing. When she can she acts. Ot late years the Christian world has been roused not once, but several times, to a storm of indignation bv acts ot barbarity and cruelty that prove the Turk is still the son ot his fighting fathers and the fierce defender of his own faith. The worst of the atrocities imputed to the Turk have been committed since the late war with Greece, when Europe decreed the Turks should not be permitted to keep that which she has won bv her sword. The hardest of all the battles the Turk has had to fight against European and American forces, political or military, he is fighting to-day. Within the past two decades the most invincible of all powers have been arraigned against him. The sentiment, as well as the religious sympathies, of the entire Christian world has flown to the side of those Turkish sub jects who long to free themselves from Turkish rule. And, as the whole history of European development proves, religious conviction and sentimental emotion alism are powers against which neither kings nor kingdoms avail. There is a deeper racial antagonism existing between the Turk and the European and American than we willingly concede. Below the chasm separating the religious, political, and civil life of the Turk and that of the American and European, there lies the deepest 487 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN of all divisions — that of race antagonism. The Turk belongs to the Turanian branch of the human family, the Latin and Anglo-Saxon to the Aryan division. And between the two there rolls, as there has ever rolled, the broad ocean of divergence that separates a whole continent of ideas. The strongest characteristic of the Aryan is his instinct for self-government. The Turanian instinct is as strongly set towards a despotic form of government. The whole history of Europe since the Christian era has been the history of ideas working through acts, the sentiment of the liberty of the individual, of personal freedom, of religious as well as political freedom, the emancipation of women, the abolition of slavery, and, in more recent years, the emancipation also of the labourer, — in the twenty centuries since Christ preached love and humanity to our world these ideas have been the ruling forces that have inspired men to their best, and to their most sus tained heroic efforts. The Turk — the Turanian — who has had the power to thrust himself into the province of Aryan territory where these Aryan ideas were fighting for conquest, remains more or less what he was when he crossed the Bosphorus. He is still despotic in his instincts, with all the conservatism which characterises both the political and the religious mould of character peculiar to the unchangeable Turanian. Susceptible to certain modifications he has indeed proved himself, as we have seen. How far these modifications may go, and what their ultimate effects may be, this lies in the womb of the future. 4S8 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN Intelligent as the Turk is, he finds certain so-called Christian practices difficult to understand. Political promises are made and broken, but that is, of course, politically, to be expected. Justice, humanity, liberty, these are words he is perpetually hearing dinned in his ears. Yet when he looks abroad, across the seas to the land from whence these words ring loudest, as a philosopher and student of life and history, he does not find these ideals quite fully realised. He is accused of every form of barbarity known to human cruelty. Yet in America, not much more than two hundred years ago, he reads that witches were burnt in New England. The history of our treatment of the Indian seems to him barbaric ; the freedom given to slaves is a humanitarian act that dates but thirty years back; and, in thinking of certain dark pages in his own more recent history, he finds a grim consolation in re flecting upon the slow growth of all men towards a higher' humanity ; for in the killing of Bulgarians and Armenians — the latter very troublesome subjects whose revolt must be stamped out or the Armenian will suc ceed and win his freedom as has the Bulgarian — during the Turk's attempts to do this he picks up, perchance, a recent American paper, and in his reading of the lynching of negroes by an infuriated mob, as some years ago he also saw the recorded horrors com mitted by a certain secret society called the Kuklux, he once more reflects on the truism of how very uni versal an instinct is inhuman cruelty. If the Turk should arrogate to himself a breadth of political and religious tolerance few European nations 489 IN THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN can prove, we of all people should be the last to smile at his presumption. For we are among those who have presented him — and who continue to pre sent to him — with one ofthe most conspicuous op portunities for the display of his courtesy and his toleration. If an American missionary can proudly boast before an American audience of the numbers of zealous revolutionaries contributed by Robert College to the Bulgarian outbreak, and if other missionaries throughout Turkey can do their utmost to shield and to help Armenian conspirators, we can scarcely wonder at the mixture of delicate scorn in the Turk's smile when we talk glibly of American standards of honour and fair dealing. We shall continue to meet the scorn with a fine in difference, as our sympathies will also continue to run out toward every Armenian and to every other human being — of whatsoever race or colour — who lifts up his hands to heaven, with the cry of " free dom " upon his lips. For we are Aryans and Chris tians ; and stronger than our sense of logic, or our sentiments of political justice or international honour, I fear, is our belief in the principle of liberty. In the future history of Turkey, of the actual mak ing of which some of us may be living witnesses, there are two factors which may play, each in its turn, pos sibly, a very important role. The vitality of the Turk is, and has ever been, one of his most distinguishing characteristics. It is this constitutional strength which makes it well-nigh im possible to predicate anything concerning his near 490 77V THE PALACES OF THE SULTAN future. It is to this amazing vigour among her men that Turkey owes largely the fact of her army being still one of the best fighting corps in Europe. The common Moslem soldier is, as we have seen, hardy, vigorous, skilled in the use of weapons, and a lover of battle for its own sake. He is also, it must never be forgotten, a devout Mussulman. From the Christian standpoint this fact alone singles him out as ripe for extermination. Politically the living, intense belief and faith thrilling the breast of every Moslem soldier, his belief in his God, in his Prophet, in his Sultan, and his fanatical conviction, as we term it, of the ulti mate triumph of Islamism, — these remain as factors to be counted with. In the past century Turkish arms were never beaten in the field. Her still almost inexhausti ble recruiting resources in Asia Minor make this fact at times, disconcerting to those who have already signed Turkey's death-warrant. At a period in the development of warfare when modern invention has placed in the hands of the defendant the deadliest ef fects of its new war- machinery, we have entered upon the era when defensive wars are the likeliest to be either entirely successful or unduly prolonged. Mod ern guns, in the hands of such soldiers as come down from the mountains of Anatolia and the Asian hills, may still play the role that the war-machinery of the sixteenth century did under such leaders as Suleyman the Magnificent. In still another and less fearsome way, possibly, may Turkey's greater future be settled. After the mines of 49 1 77V 7777 PALACES OF THE SULTAN America and Africa have been emptied of their treas ures of iron, of silver, and of gold, and the coming captains of industry turn to new worlds of conquest, Turkey in Asia must inevitably be brought within the commercial sphere of influence. Who knows but that it may be Americans who may be called upon, or who may feel themselves called upon, if not to settle, at least to help Turkey herself to settle the Eastern Question ? The flag of our country Turkish courtesy permits to float on the well-guarded shores of the Bosphorus may be the forerunner of a wider, a less disturbing influence. When the new world discovers the treasures that lie hidden in the bosom of the Asian hills the role played by the gallant Ertoghrul may be repeated. We, in our turn, may fly to the rescue of the weaker power, but with blood less weapons, with our " battle-axes turned into pick axes, and our helmets into bee-hives," to teach Turkey that her greatest strength, save that which she possesses in the moral qualities of her people, lie in her yet un- worked soil. THE END 49-