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

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ssss1 See “New Articles added to the Capitulations,” together with “The Grounds and Advantages” thereof, by Sir John Finch, in the Coventry Papers.

ssss1 E.g. Sir Thomas Glover to Salisbury, March 3, 1606-7; Winchilsea to Nicholas, Nov. 11-21, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 5 and 17.

ssss1 Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674; the Same to Coventry, Sept. 9, 1675, Coventry Papers.

ssss1 Finch to Arlington, July 27, S.N., 1674, Coventry Papers.

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To a man who had passed the better part of his life in the elegant cities of Italy—cities like Florence, famous for its neat streets and palaces of sculptured stone—Constantinople assuredly was no paradise. Its streets were narrow, crooked, and dirty. The houses, built of timber and sun-dried brick, soon fell into decay. Nor was there the least attempt to make up in style what these ephemeral habitations wanted in solidity. In the whole of the Ottoman capital you would not have found one stately house. Western visitors, impressed by this phenomenon, endeavoured to account for it, each according to his lights. Some saw in it a manifestation of Turkish other-worldliness; making the Turk say to himself: “’Tis a sign of a proud, lofty and aspiring mind, to covet sumptuous houses, as if so frail a creature as man did promise a kind of immortality and an everlasting habitation to himself in this life, when alas! we are but as pilgrims here. Therefore we ought to use our dwellings as travellers do their inns, wherein if they are secured from thieves, from cold, from heat, and from rain, they seek not for any other conveniences.”ssss1 But this pretty theory was refuted by the fact that not only the Turks, but the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians manifested the same studious avoidance of any approach to architectural display. The true explanation was much more prosaic: a fine dwelling would have been a proof of wealth, and wealth, in a country where all men were slaves except one, was a dangerous thing. A trumped-up charge, on the sworn testimony of two incredible witnesses, was enough to bring about the ruin of the man who had the misfortune to be rich. So, while the interior of an Eastern home might teem with all the luxury that vanity could prompt and money procure, outwardly it presented to the onlooker a picture of abject meanness.ssss1 The picture had its charm; but it was a charm too subtle for ordinary seventeenth-century eyes. Judged by contemporary aesthetic standards, the metropolis of the Ottoman Empire was, as a predecessor of Sir John’s had described it, “a sink of men and sluttishness.”ssss1 Sir John must have often wondered what his cousin Winchilsea could have meant when in years gone by he had written to him: “This city I hold much better worth seeing then all Italy.”ssss1