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

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It is impossible to convey the impression given by seventeenth-century despatches in any words but their own: nothing can be more striking to modern eyes and ears than their language, their spelling, their grammar and punctuation, or want of it. The handwriting itself betrays not only the writer’s normal character, but often the particular emotions which swayed him at the moment of writing: as we peruse those ancient sheets of paper—extraordinarily fresh most of them, with sometimes the sand still clinging to the dry ink—we see the person who penned those lines, the very way in which he held his quill. The same facts, extracted, paraphrased, and printed, no longer arouse the same sense of reality, nor grip the imagination in the same way as they do when presented in their native garb. I have attempted to reproduce something of this effect by transcribing as frequently and fully as it is convenient the original utterances in all the individuality and quaintness which belong to them.

In addition to this mass of manuscript, there exists for the period a surprising amount of printed material, some of which, though available for centuries, has not yet been exhausted, and the rest was but recently made public. It so happened that, besides our Ambassador, there resided at the time in Turkey three other Englishmen who left behind them records of current events. They were our Consul at Smyrna, Paul Rycaut; our Treasurer at Constantinople, Dudley North; and the Chaplain, John Covel: all three men of leading and light in their day. Their letters, memoirs, and journals, written independently and from different angles of vision, go a long way towards supplementing, confirming, or correcting the Ambassador’s reports, as well as the information handed down by several foreign contemporaries.ssss1 For, by another rare coincidence, the representative of France, Nointel, whose history blends with that of Finch, also had round him a number of Frenchmen busy writing. Joseph von Hammer had access to some of these sources and drew in some small measure upon them; but it was left for a modern French writer to turn them to full account in a book which I have consulted with much pleasure and some profit.ssss1 Lastly, reference should be made to two new works bearing on the subject. Although both publications deal with matters mostly outside the scope of this book, they have furnished me with a number of suggestive details.ssss1