Читать книгу Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy, 1674-1681 онлайн

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The history of Anglo-Turkish relations as a whole still remains to be written—a strange and not very creditable fact, considering the part which the Ottoman Empire has played in our commercial and political career since the age of Queen Elizabeth. This monograph deals only with a fraction of a vast subject—the English Embassy to Turkey from 1674 to 1681, though for the sake of intelligibility it glances at the years which preceded and followed that septennium.

Critics, I hope, will not do my work the injustice of thinking that it is not serious because, perhaps, it is not very dull. A piece of historical narrative is a sort of superior novel: it has its heroes and its villains, its vicissitudes, its catastrophes: all of which are eminently capable of administering amusement even to the most seriously minded. Only the amusement must be founded in truth; and the discovery of truth requires painstaking industry. This condition I have endeavoured to fulfil to the utmost of my ability. Every bit of the story here related is the result of careful research among original and, for the most part, hitherto unexploited documents—chiefly the Manuscripts preserved at the Public Record Office (Foreign Archives, Turkey and Levant Company) and the Coventry Papers in the possession of the Marquis of Bath, by whose courtesy I was able to make use of them.