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

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When the summer heats and the Plague, which visited every Turkish town with devastating regularity, made Pera unendurable, the English “Nation” resorted to Belgrade—a well-wooded and well-watered, peaceful little village not more than ten miles distant, open to the fresh and wholesome breezes of the Black Sea. Here, in the company of other Franks, they could dine and dance on the grass near the rivulets and fountains as freely as in any country-place in Europe. Here the ladies also, who at Constantinople were obliged to efface themselves, more or less, in conformity to Oriental notions of decorum, joined in the amusements of the men. All this served to alleviate the pains of exile for ordinary Britons.

But alas! the best of these sources of happiness—the happiness that comes from free and unrestrained human intercourse—was sealed to seventeenth-century ambassadors. The trammels of Etiquette lay upon them heavily, and their method of living was calculated to inspire respect, not to promote good fellowship. Although they might receive any visitors they liked, they visited only their colleagues, and those rarely. When they issued from their houses, they did so with all the pomp and circumstance of Eastern satraps—attired in the most sumptuously uncomfortable clothes, attended by numerous servants in gaudy liveries, hampered by half-a-dozen led horses. This state they affected, were it only to cross a narrow street. For the rest, they never appeared in the streets of Pera on common occasions, nor went over to Stambul except on ceremonial occasions. With such solemnity and mystery they surrounded themselves in order to create among the Turks the impression that an ambassador was a different being from the common run of his countrymen—that he stood in the scale of creation as far above them as the Grand Signor stood above his own subjects. This splendid isolation, whether impressive or not, was very irksome. Men used to liberty and to living in their own way could not easily submit to such constraint, self-imposed though it was; and, indeed, there were few among those arrogant Excellencies who could afford to dispense with society, who could find a sufficient fund of entertainment in their own minds to make solitude pleasant.