The Passing of the Turkish Empire in Europe. B. Granville Baker
almost a saint, lies here. No such reverence is expected by the grave of Roxalana, the “Joyous One”; she was a woman, and therefore had no soul; that makes all the difference.
But Roxalana’s son, Selim II, broke the laws of the Prophet, and died drunk.
The Red Crescent floats over the buildings within the Seraglio enclosure to-day. Thousands of sick and wounded stagger in at the gates, and pass by the Armoury, once the Church of St. Irene, in search of the comforts which Christian nations have in all haste collected to meet the awful consequences of this disastrous war. They gathered in thousands outside the old buildings, leaning up against the walls and the railings of St. Irene, behind which, half-hidden by shrubs, are tombs of long-forgotten Byzantine magnates. There is some doubt in my mind as to who built St. Irene: some attribute it to Leo the Isaurian, who reigned from 718–740; others, and I prefer their version, maintain that Constantine the Great built it at the same time that St. Sophia arose, during the Council of Nicæa, in 325, thus giving his subjects two excellent virtues to emulate—Faith and Wisdom—without committing himself to any narrowing dogma. As this version is the more picturesque, historians will probably declare it wrong, and insist on the authorship of Leo the Isaurian.
In the meantime the buildings of the Seraglio enclosure are full of suffering mortality. Thousands have come in from the stricken field, and all the hospitals are crowded. I have visited some of these sick men and wounded, men whom I have seen wandering dejectedly in little groups, or larger bodies, through the ill-paved streets, some falling by the way, and avoided by all, for cholera, the scourge of Asia, was raging in the ranks of the Turkish Army. They are patient, quiet men, these suffering Turkish soldiers, some still wondering why they were torn from their Anatolian homes and sent to fight with unaccustomed arms men whom they did not know of, for a cause they did not understand, and under conditions such as invite disaster. Untrained they went to war, unfed they fought as long as men could hold out, longer probably than would any European troops, starving, sick, in rags, forsaken by their officers, they staggered back into the City, where those responsible for their sufferings still live in lies. Poor souls, with their tired looks, their patient eyes—it was Bairam, their Feast of Pentecost, and many of them were grieving that they could not pass on to their homes and bring little presents to those they hold dear, away there in the scattered villages of Anatolia.
And these that had come in were only the slightly wounded, only those who were still able to move. What of those who have been stricken down by cholera on the road? What of those mangled and maimed by shrapnel and splinters of shell, mortally wounded by bullet and bayonet?
With no adequate preparations for the sick and wounded here at the base of operations, is it likely that the field hospitals were adequately supplied? Foreigners, Christians, are doing the work now which should have been done before by the Army authorities. It seems as if they, childlike, were only too pleased to shift that burden of responsibility on to other shoulders while they yet prated of victory.
Victory? With Thrace conquered by Bulgaria, Macedonia occupied by Serbs, the Montenegrins before Scutari, and Greeks holding Saloniki and Monastir!
Victory? With the remnant of the Ottoman Army hard-pressed behind the lines of Chatalja, and thousands dying by the road!
As in those May days of 1453, at the Feast of Pentecost, Constantinople awoke from sloth and inefficiency to find an enemy hammering at the gates, so that day, at Bairam, the Turkish Feast of Pentecost, the enemy was hammering at the outer gate, the lines of Chatalja, and this would not have happened but for sloth and inefficiency. In the meantime the hospitals were crowded, here in Constantinople thousands were dying on the road, or lying dead on the fields of Thrace and Macedonia, and the enemy’s guns were pounding on the last defences of a “Passing Empire.”
CHAPTER IV
The Mosque of St. Sophia and its beauties, and some legends that attach to it—The present state of its courts—The Sea of Marmora and an historical pageant: Genoese, Venetians, Khairreddin Barbarossa and his victories—The story of stout Sir Thomas Bentinck—The Palace of Justinian and its story: Theophane and her husbands—The Mosque of Achmet—At-meïdan, the former Hippodrome, and its story—Justin, Justinian and Theodora, and the Blues and Greens—Justinian II and his doings—Some reflections on modern history.
JUST without the walls of the Seraglio stands a building which above all others is connected with Constantinople in the popular mind, the former Church, now Mosque, of St. Sophia. This is one of those particular monuments of history which every one of any pretension to culture wishes to see. A mighty, imposing building, measuring 255 feet from north to south by 250 from east to west. This was the cathedral church of old Byzantium built in the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine the Great, A.D. 325, and dedicated to Divine Wisdom. Constantine’s son Constantius enlarged the building, which was destroyed by fire in the reign of Arcadius, 395–408, in whose time the Goths came down over the hills by Adrianople and devastated the land as far as the Peloponese. It is said that the faction of St. John Chrysostom set fire to this building during one of those religious disturbances which, more than elsewhere in the world, unsettled the minds of men and caused them to overlook the greater truths. Theodosius II, he who built the stout walls that guarded the City of Constantine on the landward side for many centuries, re-erected the cathedral in 415, but little more than a century later, in the reign of Justinian, it fell a victim to the flames again. Twice did this happen in the reign of Justinian, the second time during a revolt of different factions in the Hippodrome, but St. Sophia was rebuilt again in greater splendour and on a larger scale in A.D. 538.
This Church of St. Sophia became the scene of many solemn state functions and religious ceremonies, the fumes of incense curled round its many pillars of porphyry from Phrygia—white marble striped rose-red, as with the blood of Atys slain at Synada; of green marble from Laconia, and blue from Lybia. Celtic marble quarries sent their tribute, black with white veins, and from the Bosphorus came white black-veined marble. Among the most beautiful of all these pillars were those eight which Aurelius had taken from the Temple of the Sun at Baalbec. Then there were monuments of gold, cunningly wrought, enriched with the most precious stones, and about all these glories floated hymns of praise or supplication to the God about Whose Triune Person the citizens wrangled and fought in the Hippodrome and in the narrow streets.
Legend has it that this work of man’s hand was made yet more glorious by angelic influences. An angel appeared to order the work of the ten thousand men engaged in the reconstruction under Justinian; he appeared again, robed in brilliant white, to a boy guarding the masons’ tools by night and ordered an immediate continuance of the pious work, and yet a third time to lead the mules of the Treasury into the vaults to be laden with eighty hundredweight of gold wherewith to decorate the sacred fane. One more angel appeared, this time to the Emperor himself, clad in Imperial purple, wearing red shoes, to ordain that the light should fall through three windows upon the High Altar, this in memory of Holy Trinity. On Christmas Day of 548 Emperor Justinian and Eutychius the Patriarch moved to the newly reconstructed sanctuary with all the pomp and ceremony of the Church. No sooner were the doors opened than the Emperor ran in with outstretched arms crying, “God be praised, Who hath esteemed me worthy to complete such a work. Solomon, I have surpassed thee!”
Not quite ten centuries later, in May of 1453 at Pentecost, the Patriarch was celebrating High Mass within the walls of St. Sophia, the fumes of incense floated heavenward with the supplications of the people, while the Turk was battering down the stout defences of the city and the Emperor and his followers were falling under the sword of Othman about the ruined ramparts. The Mass was interrupted and has never since been resumed,