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

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ssss1 Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 312.

ssss1 Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674 (with Inclosure), Coventry Papers.

ssss1 Sir Thomas Baines to Conway, May 25, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19. The letter, though unsigned and unaddressed, carries within it conclusive proof of its authorship and destination.

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Sir John regarded his audience with the Kaimakam as nothing more than a prologue: the real action had yet to begin. His first business was “to make my selfe an Ambassadour by delivering His Majesty’s Credentials to the Gran Signor and His Letter to the Gran Visir.”ssss1 But that could not be done at Constantinople. For over a dozen years the seat of the Ottoman Empire had been at Adrianople.

Mohammed IV. nourished an unconquerable detestation of Constantinople. It was said that when any of his Ministers ventured to urge upon him the advisability of showing himself there, he used to answer: “What shall I do in Stambul? Did not Stambul cost my father his life? My predecessors, were they not always the prisoners of rebels? Rather than go back to Stambul, I would set fire to it with my own hands.” True or apocryphal, these words describe the position accurately. Constantinople under the Sultans, like Rome under the Caesars, was the home of an insolent militia and a turbulent mob. The maladies which infected the Empire had their breeding-ground in it. It supplied a centre for all the intrigues and seditions which time and again had brought Turkey within an inch of disruption. Its revolutionary habits made it insecure. So the reigning monarch, except for occasional visits reluctantly undertaken and speedily terminated, kept away from the ill-omened city. Love of sport conspired with fear of death to drive the Grand Signor from his capital. For never had Turkey known so great a Nimrod. With other Sultans the chase had been a recreation; with Mohammed IV. it was an obsession—a monomania. “When He cannot range to Hunt,” says Finch, “He is never well.”ssss1 Hence his nickname of Avji, or the Hunter. The fatigues he underwent in the indulgence of this consuming passion are almost fabulous: in the height of summer as well as in the depth of winter, he sallied forth two or three hours before sunrise and spent the whole day dashing up hill and down dale like one possessed by a thousand restless demons. The courtiers whose privilege it was to ride in the Sultan’s train looked back with unfeigned regret to the soft vices of his father: what were the amorous whims of Ibrahim compared with the strenuous vagaries of Mohammed? But if he spared his courtiers as little as he spared himself, this sportsman spared his humbler subjects even less. Wherever he hunted, the inhabitants of the district were obliged either to provide beaters—sometimes as many as 30,000—or to beat the woods themselves. In the summer, they had, in addition, their crops ruined. In the winter, numbers of these wretched peasants, exposed to cold and hunger during several days and nights, paid for their master’s pleasure with their lives. So it came to pass that, while the titular capital of the Empire, in the absence of the Grand Signor’s luxurious Court, drooped like a flower in the shade, the Imperial sun shone upon Adrianople: the environs of that town affording exceptional facilities for the pursuit of game—of all pursuits the one this degenerate son of Osman loved the most and understood the best.ssss1