FROM BERLIN TO
BAGDAD AND BABYLON

BOOKS BY J. A. ZAHM

(H. J. MOZANS)

FROM BERLIN TO BAGDAD AND BABYLON

THE QUEST OF EL DORADO

THROUGH SOUTH AMERICA’S SOUTHLAND

UP THE ORINOCO AND DOWN THE
MAGDALENA

ALONG THE ANDES AND DOWN THE
AMAZON

WOMAN IN SCIENCE

GREAT INSPIRERS

FROM BERLIN TO
BAGDAD AND BABYLON

BY

THE REV. J. A. ZAHM, C.S.C., Ph.D., LL.D.

(H. J. MOZANS)

MEMBER OF THE AUTHORS’ CLUB, LA SOCIÉTÉ FRANÇAISE DE PHYSIQUE, THE ARCADIA OF ROME, AND OTHER LEARNED SOCIETIES; AUTHOR OF “UP THE ORINOCO AND DOWN THE MAGDALENA,” “ALONG THE ANDES AND DOWN THE AMAZON,” “THROUGH SOUTH AMERICA’S SOUTHLAND,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
THE BEST OF FRIENDS
EVER LOYAL AND INSPIRING

MR. AND MRS. CHARLES M. SCHWAB

IN WHOSE HOSPITABLE HOME EVERY BOOK I
HAVE WRITTEN DURING THE LAST QUARTER
OF A CENTURY HAS HAD EITHER ITS INCEPTION
OR ITS COMPLETION THIS VOLUME

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

PARAPHRASE OF VERSES FROM SHAIKH SADI

By Edwin Arnold

In many lands I have wandered, and

wondered, and listened, and seen;

And many my friends and companions,

and teachers and lovers have been.

And nowhere a corner was there but I

gathered up pleasure and gain;

From a hundred gardens the rose-blooms,

from a thousand granaries grain;

And I said to my soul in secret, “Oh

thou, who from journeys art come!

It is meet we should bear some token of

love to the stayers at home;

For where is the traveller brings not from

Nile the sweet green reed,

Or Kashmiri silk, or musk-bags, or coral,

or cardamum seed?”

I was loath from all that Pleasaunce of

the Sun and his words and ways,

To come to my country giftless, and showing

no fruit of my days:

But, if my hands were empty of honey,

and pearls and gold,

There were treasures far sweeter than

honey, and marvellous things to be told.

Whiter than pearls and brighter than

the cups at a Sultan’s feast,

And these I have brought for love-tokens,

from the Lords of Truth, in my East.

FOREWORD

The following pages are the result of observations made and impressions received during a recent journey between one of the greatest capitals of Europe and the crumbling remains of what was in the long-ago the greatest capital of Asia. The route I followed was that which has been rendered famous by the migrations of the nations from the East to the West and by the march of armies from the days of Asurbanipal, Darius and Alexander to those of Harun-al-Rashid, Godefroy de Bouillon and Kolmar von der Goltz.

The journey in question I made not as a tourist but as a student—as one interested not only in the present condition—social, economic, religious and intellectual—of the peoples of the countries through which I passed, and as one who had had an intense and life-long interest in the history and civilization of the lands which intervene between the headwaters of the Danube and the lower reaches of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The ordinary tourist on pleasure bent would regard most of my journey as having been made through what is usually spoken of as “the unchangeable East.” But to the student who is conversant with the long and eventful past of the Near East the storied belt which connects the Bosphorus with the Persian Gulf has been the theater of more and greater changes in humanity’s development than any other portion of the earth’s surface. It is the fons et origo of the oldest civilization—a civilization whose traditions carry us back to the Garden of Eden. It has witnessed the successive civilizations of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, of the Greeks and the Romans and of the Saracens under the caliphs. And each of these consecutive civilizations has left its monuments of imperial splendor—its temples and palaces and colonnades and its priceless gems of plastic art. Some of these magnificent vestiges of a glorious past, like those of Palmyra, are still standing in the heart of the desert and have long since been abandoned to the roving Bedouin or the rapacious jackal. Others, like those of Ephesus and Pergamum and Nineveh, were long buried under sand and clay and have only recently been unearthed by the pick and the spade of the explorer and the archæologist. But wherever found, whether on the lonely plains and hillsides of Anatolia, or in the solitudes of the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, they possess for the studious traveler an attraction that is not offered in the same degree by any other section of the wide world.

Unlike the mysterious ruins in the steaming jungles of Yucatan or on the chilly plateau of Bolivia, which speak of an enigmatic race quite alien to our own, the remains of antiquity everywhere found in the lands between Stamboul and Babylon are of forms and designs with which we have been familiar from our youth and which belong to the same civilization from which our own is derived—the civilization that had its origin in the city-states of ancient Greece and that was subsequently introduced into western Asia by the soldiers of Alexander and Seleucus and firmly maintained there for centuries by the legionaries of imperial Rome.

To the student traveling through the Near East—especially along the route which I selected—the experience is, in many respects, like that of one passing through a vast museum. At every turn he meets something of rare and enthralling fascination. Now it is a remnant of a marble capital or architrave in a nomad’s hut; then it is a forlorn granite column near a squalid Turkish village—all that remains of some stately temple or sumptuous theater of Greek or Roman greatness. Again it is the fragment of a tomb which was erected to the memory of one who played an important rôle in his day, but whose name and achievements have long since been forgotten. And hovering over these crumbling monuments of a misty past are legends innumerable, but all of entrancing human interest—an interest that is accentuated by the discovery of a Greek or Latin inscription carved in a slab of granite or marble or by the finding of a terra cotta tablet covered with cuneiform characters that carry one back to the stirring reigns of Esarhaddon or Sennacherib.

And then there are the people—especially those of Asia Minor—with whom the author always loved to mingle and of whose kindness and hospitality he will ever retain the fondest memories. No people that I know has been less understood and more misrepresented than the gentle, industrious, home-loving Osmanlis of Anatolia. But of these I shall speak at length when relating my experiences in Asia Minor.

Traveling as a student, I have also written as a student and for students. But I have at the same time endeavored to record my observations and impressions so as to make them of interest to the general reader as well. And while I have given prominence to subjects that specially appealed to myself, these will, I trust, not be devoid of value to others who may wish to have in popular form an account of some of the most famous cities and peoples of the Near East when civilization was in its infancy, or when it was in full bloom under the beneficent influence of Helenism and Christianity.

As many parts of this volume are controversial in character, I have not confined myself to giving simply the results of my own observations and impressions, but I have taken pains to corroborate them by the conclusions of eminent scholars and investigators who have devoted to all the more important subjects long and careful study, and whose opinions, therefore, are entitled to special weight. And that the reader, if so minded, may be able to control my statements and deductions I have invariably given references to my authorities.

In the matter of the orthography of Turkish and Arabic proper names I have had the same experience as Howorth refers to when he writes in his History of the Mongols: “There are hardly two authors whom I have consulted who spell the names in the same way, and very often their spelling is so different that it is nearly impossible to recognize the name under its various aspects.” This arises from the fact that there is as yet no generally accepted system among English scholars for the transliteration of Turkish and Arabic names. Scientific accuracy, therefore, is in this respect difficult, if not impossible. My sole aim, consequently, has been to make myself intelligible. I have, accordingly, followed the orthography adopted by our standard English dictionaries and encyclopedias. In doing this I have, I am aware, exposed myself to the criticism of Oriental philologists, but I shall, I trust, have compensation in the satisfaction of being “understanded of the people.”

Immergrün, Lorreto, Pa.

CONTENTS

FROM BERLIN TO
BAGDAD AND BABYLON

CHAPTER I
ON THE BEAUTIFUL BLUE DANUBE

Wenn ich dann zu Nacht alleine

Dichtend in die Wellen schau’,

Steight beim blanken Mondenscheine

Auf die schmucke Wasserfrau

Aus der Danau,

Aus der schönen, blauen Danau.[1]

Beck

From Ratisbon to Budapest

Berlin to Bagdad! How these words, during the past few years, have stirred the chancelleries of Europe and how they have echoed and reëchoed throughout the civilized world! How they evoke Macchiavellian schemes of rival powers for territorial expansion and recall prolonged diplomatic struggles and countless sanguinary battles for military and commercial supremacy! How they tell of a welter of intrigue, of ambitions foiled, of treaties violated, of nations plunged into the miseries and horrors of the most frightful and most destructive of wars!

No portion of the world’s surface in the entire history of humanity has witnessed so many and so great revolutions as has that narrow strip which connects what was once the palm-embowered capital of Harun-al-Rashid, near the reputed birthplace of our race, with the once proud metropolis of the Hohenzollerns in far distant Niflheim. Across this restricted belt have swept Babylonians and Assyrians, Persians and Greeks, Saracens and Mongols in their careers of rapine and conquest. And across it surged the countless hordes of Huns and Goths, Turks and Tartars, during that protracted migration of nations from the arid steppes of Asia to the fertile plains of Europe. And across it, too, at the head of their victorious armies, forced their way all projectors of world domination from Ashurbanipal and Alexander to Timur and Napoleon.

As a boy no part of the world possessed a greater fascination for me than Babylonia and Assyria. This was, probably, because the first book I ever read contained wonderful stories of the Garden of Eden; of Babylon and its marvelous hanging gardens; of Nineveh and its magnificent temples and palaces; of the Tigris and the Euphrates whose waters were made to irrigate the vast and fecund plain of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. So profound, indeed, was the impression made on me by the reading of this volume that one of the great desires of my life was one day to be able to visit the land whose history had so fascinated my youthful mind and whose people had played so conspicuous a rôle in the drama of human progress.

After many years, when the realization of my dreams seemed no longer possible, events so shaped themselves that I finally found myself, almost as if by enchantment, in a comfortable hotel on the famous Unter den Linden in Berlin making final arrangements for my long journey to

Romantic Bagdad, name to childhood dear,

Where the sorcerer gloomed, the genii dwelt,

And Love and Worth to good Al Rashid knelt.

Had I been in haste and been disposed to follow the most direct route, I should have taken the Orient Express which would have delivered me forty-nine hours later in the famed City of Constantine on the picturesque Bosphorus. But that would have been too prosaic and would have prevented me from feasting my eyes on many things which, during previous visits to Europe had given me special pleasure.

Chief among these was that supreme performance of pictorial art, Raphael’s Madonna of San Sisto in the Royal Art Gallery of Dresden. Although I had many times spent hours in silent contemplation of this masterpiece of the great Umbrian artist, I now felt a greater desire than ever to behold again this matchless creation of genius and feel myself again under the spell of its serene beauty and gaze once more on what has been called “the supernatural put into color and form”—“Christianity in miniature”—what Goethe sings of as

Model for mothers—queen of woman—

A magic brush has, by enchantment,

Fixed her there.

Could one have had before one’s mind during long months in many lands a more elevating or a more inspiring image than that of her whom Wordsworth has so truly characterized as

Our tainted nature’s solitary boast?

From Dresden I went to Ratisbon which, according to a venerable tradition, occupies the site of a town founded by the Celts long centuries before the Christian era and which subsequently became known as Castra Regina, an outpost of the Roman empire on its long northern frontier. In few places of Germany is there more to engage the lovers of historic and legendary lore than this ancient city.

The most conspicuous object is the noble Gothic Cathedral with its delicate crocketed spires. As in the case of the cathedral of Cologne, full six centuries elapsed from the laying of the cornerstone to the completion of the towers of this imposing building. And as in the marvelous church of the Certosa di Pavia the architectural and artistic decoration of this magnificent temple passed from father to son. To these rarely gifted artisans and designers one can apply the words of Longfellow about the Cathedral of Strassburg:

The Architect

Built his great heart into these sculptured stones,

And with him toiled his children, and their lives

Were builded with his own into the walls

As offerings to God.

The numerous square towers which are visible in certain parts of the city remind one of similar towers that are so marked a feature in San Gimignano. They date back to a time when the nobility of Ratisbon, like the noble families of Florence in Dante’s time, employed them as defenses against their enemies.

But it is not my intention to describe even briefly the countless objects which have so long rendered this famous old city a favorite object to the tourist. To do even partial justice to its multitudinous attractions and historical associations would require a large volume.

My purpose in coming to Ratisbon was to embark on one of the small boats that here ply on the Danube, with the view of connecting at Passau, further down the river, with one of the larger boats of the Danube Steamship Navigation Company, which would take me to Vienna. Thence I planned to go by steamers of the same company to Budapest, Belgrade and the mouth of the Danube, whence I had planned to sail by the Black Sea and the Bosphorus to Constantinople.

But why, the reader will ask, did I elect the slower and more roundabout route rather than the direct one by rail? I answer in the words of Ovid:

Ignotis errare locis, ignota videre

Flumina gaudebant, studio minuente laborem.[2]

I had always loved the water and traveling by river has always had a peculiar fascination for me. Besides this, I had for years been specially eager to journey by the Danube from its source to its mouth. Having had the good fortune to sail the entire navigable length of many of the world’s largest rivers, I was doubly desirous of sailing down the historic waterway which connects the noted Black Forest with the famed Euxine Sea of antiquity.

In one of his charming travel-books, Victor Hugo declares:

The Rhine is unique: it combines the quality of every river. Like the Rhone, it is rapid; broad, like the Loire; encased like the Meuse; serpentine like the Seine; limpid and green like the Somme; mysterious like the Nile; spangled with gold, like an American river; and, like a river of Asia, abounding with phantoms and fables.[3]

Hesiod, who first makes mention of the Danube, under the name of the Ister, gives it the epithet of καλλίρέεδρος—the beautifully flowing—and calls it the son of Tethys and Oceanus. Ovid was so impressed with it that he declares in one of his Paitic Epistles, that it is not inferior to the Nile:

Cedere Danubius se tibi, Nile, negat.[4]

Hugo’s brief but graphic description of some of the world’s famed rivers applies with even greater truth to the legendary, the historic, the romantic, the picturesque Danube. No watercourse in the world is tenanted by a larger number of fantastic and mysterious beings; some, like the swan-maidens and the water nymph Isa, making their home in its waters; others, like fairies and pixies and elves, dwelling in the bays, forests, caverns and old dismantled castles on its banks.

According to Pindar, the region about the source of the Danube was a land of perpetual sunshine and teeming with the choicest fruits. It was inhabited by a people who enjoyed undisturbed peace, were immune from disease and lived a thousand years, which they spent in the worship of Apollo. It was from this highly favored land, Pindar tells us, that Hercules brought the olive which, it was averred, grew in profusion about the sources of the Danube.[5]

And, from its headwaters to its entrance into the Euxine, the Danube was as rich in myths and legends as were ever the rivers and mountains and groves of ancient Hellas. According to the great German epic, the Nibelungenlied, it was at Pforring, a short distance above Ratisbon, that the legendary heroine, Kriemhild, bride-elect of Etzel, took leave of her brothers when on her way from the Rhine to far-off Hungary, where she was to join her new husband, the famous Etzel—Attila—king of the Huns, and where she was to consummate her plans of wreaking vengeance upon the murderers of her first husband, Siegfried.

It may here be remarked in passing that the illustrious Albertus Magnus, probably the greatest scholar of the Middle Ages, reputed to be a magician as well as an eminent theologian and philosopher, was bishop of Ratisbon.

About a half hour after leaving Ratisbon, in a cosy little steamer, we find ourselves near the foot of a wooded hill on whose brow

The Walhalla rises, purely white,

Temple of fame for all Germania’s great.

Seen at a distance it appears to be almost a reproduction of the Parthenon, both in dimensions and style of architecture. It is due to the munificence of Ludwig I, of Bavaria, who erected it as a Temple of Fame for those who had in any way signally honored the Fatherland. Some even, whose names are unknown, are duly commemorated in this magnificent edifice. Among them are the architect of the Cologne Cathedral and the author of the great German epic, the Nibelungenlied.

When this temple was solemnly dedicated in October, 1842, Ludwig I, in the course of a stirring address, said, “May the Walhalla contribute to extend and consolidate the feelings of German nationality. May all Germans of every race henceforth feel they have a common country of which they may be proud, and let each individual labor according to his faculties to promote its glory.” It is the use of the word “German” in its broad historic and ethnological sense that explains the existence, in this Teutonic Hall of Fame, of tablets in honor of Hengist and Horsa, Venerable Bede and Alfred the Great.

From Walhalla to Passau, near the Austrian frontier, we had a splendid opportunity, as our little steamer glided along the sinuous Danube, to observe the attractions of the celebrated Dunkelboden, so called from its dark, fertile soil. Much of the country through which we passed was a broad, unbroken plain, dotted with small farmhouses, pretty villages adorned with chaletlike homes, and white churches surmounted by quaint, salmon-colored steeples.

Arrived at Passau I embarked for Vienna on one of the trim and commodious steamers of the Danube Steamship Navigation Company. The appointments and service of these boats are all that could be desired and are fully equal to the best of the excursion steamers on the Hudson or the St. Lawrence. Indeed, for one who desires perfect rest, combined with comfort, while sailing on the most romantic and picturesque waterway in Europe, I know of nothing I can more cordially recommend than a few weeks’ excursion on the Danube.

From time immemorial travelers have sounded the glories of the Rhine. I should be the last to depreciate the many and great attractions of this noble river on which I spent so many happy days, but truth compels me to declare that the Danube, not only in scenic beauty and grandeur, but also in historic and legendary association, far surpasses what the Romans were wont to call Rhenus Superbus.

On the way from Passau to Vienna I spent all my time on deck, as I did not wish to miss any of the countless objects of interest which here make the course of the Danube so famous. What with historic towns and villages, crenelated and machicolated castles—some still inhabited, others long since in ruins—there was much to engage one’s attention.

If the massive walls and somber towers of these moss-covered old castles could speak, what tales could they not tell of love and romance, hate and revenge? What stories could they not tell of wars and sieges when the crossbow, halberd and the broadsword were the chief weapons of offense and defense? And how much would they not have to relate of the lawlessness and cruelty of the robber-barons who sallied forth from these almost inaccessible strongholds to confiscate passing vessels or to pillage the surrounding country. Manzoni, in his vivid pictures of the prepotenti, as portrayed in his masterly I Promessi Sposi, gives one some idea of the insatiable rapacity of the titled brigands of the period which we are now considering. Good old Froissart was right when he denounced them as “people worse than Saracens or Paynims”; as men whose “excessive covetousness quencheth the knowledge of honor.”

Everywhere along the Danube one hears stories about the activities of the Devil in days gone by and of his determined efforts to thwart the works and projects of those whom he regarded as his natural enemies. In Ratisbon is shown a bridge which he is said to have built in exchange for the soul of his employer. Owing, however, to the superior shrewdness of his employer, he lost the remuneration he so greatly coveted.

Further down the river, near Deggendorf, is a great mass of granite which the Devil is said to have brought all the way from Italy in order to destroy the town, because its people were too religious to please his Satanic Majesty. But just as he was about to drop his massive load on the unsuspecting inhabitants, the Ave Maria bell was sounded in the adjacent monastery when the Evil One was forced to let fall his burden before he could compass his purpose. At another point is shown a rock known as the Devil’s Tower, and at still another is a curious mass of rock which, from its peculiar formation, is called Teufelsmauer—Devil’s Wall.

According to a time-honored ballad

There came an old Crusader

With fifty harnessed men

And he embarked at Ratisbon

To fight the Saracen.

These Crusaders and others that followed them down the Danube on their way to the Holy Land so exasperated the Demon that “he plucked up rocks from the neighboring cliffs and pitched them right into the channel of the river, thereby hoping to arrest their progress. But in this he was completely deceived; for after the first rock came plunging down amongst them, every man made the sign of the cross, and uniting their voices in a holy anthem, the fiend was instantly paralyzed, and slunk away without further resistance. So huge, however, was the first stone he threw that for ages it caused a swirl and a swell in this part of the river which nothing but the skill and perseverance of the Bavarian engineers could remove.”[6]

As the Danube moves majestically between ever recurring islets, green with willow and birch, and wooded heights crowned with ruins of castles and monasteries telling of times long past, the veil of romance, with which legend invests everything, seems to become heavier and more variegated. Here are elf-haunted glens and primeval forests which were once declared to be the home of the Erl-King. There is the dark cavern where the lindwurm, like the one slain by Siegfried, lay in wait for his prey, and at still another spot is the lakelet where Hagen met the swan-maidens on his return with the Nibelungs to the lands of the Huns. Further down the stream are the Strudel and Wirbel, the Scylla and Charybdis of the Danube, for ages the reputed trysting-place of all kinds of phantoms and monsters.

But here in

Imperial Danube’s rich domain

sober history has far more to recount than saga and legend, for every spot we pass has its story of ambition, intrigue and revenge; of wars involving the loss of thrones and far-reaching changes in the map of the then known world.

At Dürrenstein, further down the river, are the ruins of a great feudal stronghold in which is still shown the dungeon in which tradition says Richard Coeur de Lion, on his return from the Third Crusade, was imprisoned by his inexorable enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria. The legend, telling how the English King’s liberation was finally effected through his devoted minstrel, Blondel, has long been a favorite theme of poets and artists.[7]

It was not far from Dürrenstein that Julian the Apostate engaged a flotilla for his famous voyage down the Danube—the beginning of that long campaign which was to end so disastrously for him and his army on the sun-parched banks of the far distant Tigris.

At a subsequent period Charlemagne and his Paladins descended the Danube on his campaign against the Avars. Later on he was followed by numerous contingents of Crusaders, among them heroic Barbarossa and his valiant band, on their way to Constantinople and the Holy Land.

It is safe to say that no waterway in Europe has more frequently witnessed the march of vast armies or heard more frequently the echoed roll of battle than has the broadly sweeping Danube. In its wide and fertile valley have met in deadly conflict the well-trained legions of a Prince Eugene of Savoy, a Gustavus Adolphus, a Marlborough, a Bonaparte, and on the issue of the battles in which they were engaged were decided the fate of nations and the course of civilization.

Augustus, it was, who made the Danube the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. It extended like a broad and impassable moat from the Schwartzwald to the Euxine, and, like the Rhine on the East of Gaul, served to keep the barbarians of the north confined within their primeval forests. All along the Danube from its source to its delta are still found countless traces of what were once important military outposts, flourishing towns and centers of advancing civilization and culture.

After passing through the picturesque gorge of Wachau, famed for its wild scenery, its haunted castles, its oak-covered heights, its precipitous crags once crowned by massive strongholds which were tenanted by robber knights who were long the terror of the surrounding country, we enter an extensive plain which the branching Danube cuts into a number of willow and birch-covered islands. Soon, on the right, we reach the mouth of the river Traisen, near whose confluence with the Danube stands Traisenmauer, noted in the Nibelungenlied as being the home of Helka, Etzel’s first queen, and the last stopping place of Kriemhild before her arrival at Tulna, where the King of the Huns was awaiting her.

The progress of the brilliant cavalcade, with all its glittering pomp and pageantry, composed of

Good knights of many a region and many a foreign tongue,

from Tulna to Vienna and thence to the capital of the Huns, is best told in the simple words of the Nibelungenlied:

From Tulna to Vienna their journey then they made.

There found they many a lady adorned in all her pride

To welcome with due honor King Etzel’s noble bride.

Held was the marriage festal on Whitsuntide

’Twas then that royal Etzel embraced his high-born bride

In the city of Vienna; I ween she ne’er had found

When first she wed, such myriads all to her service bound.

*****

So court and country flourish’d with such high honors crown’d

And all at every season fresh joy and pastime found.

Every heart was merry, smiles on each face were seen;

So kind the King was ever, so liberal the Queen.[8]

Having been frequently in Vienna before, I tarried this time hardly long enough to refresh my memory regarding certain things and places that always had a peculiar attraction for me. Among these were its admirable museums and art galleries, its delightful drives and sumptuous palaces. But above all I was particularly eager to revisit the imposing Cathedral of St. Stephen, for it is not only one of the noblest specimens of Gothic architecture in Europe, but is also one of the most beautiful temples of Christian worship in existence. Although erected in the twelfth century, it has survived all the sieges to which Vienna has been subject and is still, after seven centuries, the most conspicuous of the many grandiose structures of Austria’s superb capital. As I examined the exquisite carvings of portal and window and delicate crocketed spire of this stupendous fane I realized as never before how the builders of the Ages of Faith wrought the parts unseen by men with the same care as those which were exposed to the gaze of all. For they labored for God, and God sees everything and everywhere.

And then, too, I desired to spend an hour or two at the Glorietta of Schönbrunn, of which, from a previous visit, I had retained such pleasant memories. From this enchanting spot one has a magnificent panorama of the city and the surrounding country—the theater of many sieges and battles in which, during the heyday of Ottoman power, the fate of Europe seemed to tremble in the balance.

In the memorable siege of 1863, the walls of Vienna had already been breached by the thundering guns of the Moslems, whose tents in countless thousands covered the surrounding plain, and only a miracle, it seemed, could save the city from its impending doom. Famine and death and wan despair stalk through the beleaguered capital. One by one the soldiers of the Cross fall from the fast crumbling ramparts. Everywhere are heard the groans of the dying and the wild laments of its dismayed and enfeebled inhabitants, who are no longer able to stem the resistless onrush of the barbaric host. Mothers press their infants to their bosoms and trembling virgins, sobbing as if their hearts would break, are overwhelmed with dread of a fate worse than death itself.

But, behold! The advancing columns of the infidel horde falter, then halt suddenly as if confronted by some horror-inspiring apparition, or, paralyzed by a colossal Medusa. What appalls proud Mustapha’s haughty warriors? What panic has seized his swarthy Janizaries?

The standards of John Sobieski, the scourge and terror of the Moslems, are seen floating from the crest of Kahlenberg. Presently the hero-king, at the head of his resistless cuirassiers, dashes like a thunderbolt against the enemy and the luckless troops of the grand vizier melt like a mist before the morning sun.

Now joy was in proud Vienna’s town;

Brave Starenberg had won renown:

The sweet Cathedral bells were rung

As for a May-day festival,

And Sobieski’s fame was sung

Throughout the lordly capital.

The Cross had again triumphed over the Crescent and Christian Europe had blasted all Moslem hopes of further progress up the Danube. On Vienna’s ramparts might well be inscribed in letters of gold:

Warring against the Christian Jove in vain,

Here was the Ottoman Typhœus slain.

Some twenty odd miles east of Vienna, near Hamburg, are extensive ruins supposed to be remains of the ancient Roman town of Carnuntum. The place is interesting from the fact that Marcus Aurelius spent three years here during his wars with the Quadi and the Marcomanni. Here also he wrote a part of his “Meditations,” which have contributed more to perpetuate his name than all his achievements as Roman Emperor. Here Septimus Severus was proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers and here, too, Rome had a station for a part of its Danube flotilla. And the empire had need of many flotillas and many frontier garrisons along the extended Danube to keep in check the barbarians on its northern banks, when the prolific North poured them forth

From her frozen loins to pass

Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons

Came like a deluge on the south and spread

Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.

Augustus and his immediate successors had hoped that this broad waterway would serve as an impassable barrier, but subsequent events showed that they were mistaken. Neither the Danube, nor the Rhine, nor the Limes Romanus—a high stone wall connecting these two rivers—which had been constructed by the Emperor Probus, nor other defenses of the empire, which had been developed by his successors, were adequate to prevent the ever increasing incursions of the barbarians into Roman territory. Among them, besides the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whose warlike activities engaged the attention of Marcus Aurelius during his stay in Carnuntum and Vindobona—Vienna—were the Suevi, the Gepidæ, the Alemanni, the Vindelici, the Heruli, and other peoples of Celtic and Germanic stock. These were followed by Slavs, by the Avars, the Goths, the Huns, the Alani, the Vandals, the Langobardi, who in ever increasing numbers crossed the Danube and laid waste to lands far distant from their original homes, until eventually their impetuous hosts had swept the vast region from the Baltic Sea to the desert of Sahara, from the Caucasus to the Pillars of Hercules, and until Alaric “secretly aspired to plant the Gothic standard on the walls of Rome and to enrich his army with the accumulated spoils of a hundred triumphs.”

Gliding down the tortuous Danube past picturesque towns and villages and through delightful woodlands and sun-kissed vineyards our steamer soon carries us over the short distance which intervenes between Carnuntum and loyal old Pozsony—the capital of Hungary before it was transferred to Budapest. In this cosmopolitan city of historic and traditional lore an incident is recalled which puts in strong relief the bravery and chivalrous character of the Hungarians and shows how quick they are to act when a strong appeal is made to their loyalty and patriotism.

Queen Maria Theresa, finding herself threatened by enemies on all sides, convened the estates of the realm in the throne room of the castle of Pozsony. Here the fair young sovereign, with the crown of St. Stephen on her head and an infant son in her arms, delivered in Latin this brief but stirring address:

The disastrous situation of our affairs has moved us to lay before our dear and faithful States of Hungary the recent invasion of Austria, the danger now impending over this Kingdom and a proposal for the consideration of a remedy. The very existence of the Kingdom of Hungary, of our own person, of our children and our crown is now at stake. Forsaken by all, we place our sole resource in the fidelity, arms and long-tried valor of the Hungarians; exhorting you, the States and Orders, to deliberate without delay in this extreme danger, on the most effectual measures for the security of our person, of our children and of our crown, and to carry them into immediate execution. In regard to ourself, the faithful States and Orders of Hungary shall experience our hearty coöperation in all things which may promote the pristine happiness of this Kingdom and the honor of the people.[9]

The effect of this indirect and impassioned appeal was electrical. The assembled multitude, the élite of Hungary’s nobility, instantly drew their swords and shouted, “Vitam et sanguinem. Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresa”[10]—“Our blood and our life. Let us die for our King Maria Theresa.” From this moment the entire nation rallied to the support of their sovereign and her eventual triumph was assured.

This dramatic episode is commemorated by an imposing equestrian statue of Maria Theresa in the Coronation Hill Platz which bears the simple but eloquent inscription—Vitam et sanguinem.

The fact that Maria Theresa and her audience spoke Latin, instead of Hungarian or German, on the memorable occasion referred to is easily explained. For centuries Latin had been in Hungary the language of diplomacy. Lectures in the University were given in Latin and the language of Cicero and Virgil was spoken by the deputies in Parliament. Indeed, until a few decades ago, every man of liberal education was supposed to be able to write and speak Latin with ease and fluency.

“When I was a girl,” a Hungarian countess told me, “the language at table in my father’s house was always Latin. All of us, boys and girls, spoke it as well as our mother tongue.”

I met many Hungarian priests who spoke Latin in preference to their native Magyar. One of them was an orator of exceptional eloquence and could give an extemporaneous address in Latin without hesitating for a word and always in the purest Latinity.

An Englishman who made a journey up the Danube near the middle of the last century tells us that he heard on the steamer a “party of Hungarian priests and a large assemblage of second-class passengers conversing in Latin with as much facility as if it were their native tongue.”[11]

The German traveler, J. G. Kohl, who wrote about the same time as the writer just quoted, gives a part of the conversation he had with a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Tihany during a game of billiards. Those of my readers who understand Latin will be interested in some of the peculiar words and expressions used:

“Ubi globus Dominationis?”—“Where is your Lordship’s ball?”

“Ibi. Incipiamus.”—“Here. Let us begin.”

“Dignetur procedere.”—“Please begin.”

“Dolendum est. Si cærulous huc venisset.”—“What a pity! If the blue had but come this way.”

“Fallit, fallit.”—“It misses, it misses.”

“Nunc flavus recte ad manum mihi est.”—“Now the yellow ball is right to my hand.”

“Bene! Bene! Nunc Hannibal ad portam.”—“Good! Good! Now, look out.”

“Dignetur duble.”—“Please double.”

“Fallit.”—“A miss.”

“O si homo nunquam falleret, esset invincibilis.”—“If one never missed, one would be invincible.”

“Reverende Pater! Nunc tota positio difficilis est.”—“Reverend Father, the position is now very difficult.”

“Nihil video, nisi cæruleum et rubrum percutere velles.”—“I see nothing except a carom on the blue and red.”

“Ah! Ah! Subtiliter volui et nihil habeo.”—“Ah me! I wished to make an extra good play and I have nothing.”

“Bene! Bene! Fecisti. Finis ludi.”—“Good! Good! You have made it. The game is ended.”[12]

After reading the foregoing who will say that Latin is a dead language in Hungary!

From Budapest to the Black Sea

Again the scene has changed and dim descried

A silver crescent marks the Danube’s tide;

Where broad sails glancing o’er the regal stream,

Spread their white bosoms to the morning beam,

With towers that skirt and towns that seem to lave

Their tattled walls in that majestic wave.

From Pozsony to Budapest we passed many places of great scenic beauty and historic interest. Among them was Esztergom, which possesses the most beautiful cathedral in Hungary. It is the birthplace of St. Stephen, patron saint of the country and the see of Hungary’s ecclesiastical primate.

No city in Europe offers a more superb approach than does Budapest to the traveler who enters it on the deck of one of the beautiful steamers of the Danube Navigation Company. As we glide downstream towards the twin city, an immense mass of palatial structures suddenly bursts on our view. Among them is the imposing Royal Palace, which crowns an eminence on the right bank of the many-spired House of Parliament, which stands on the left. Soon we get a glimpse of the beautiful boulevards along the river, which, at the hour of our arrival, are crowded with animated, happy multitudes, who are enjoying their daily promenade and watching the arrival and departure of the numerous steamers and smaller craft which contribute so much to the life of the city.

Hungarians declare that theirs is the most beautiful of all European capitals, and, judging by one’s impression of the city as seen from an arriving steamer, most visitors, I think, will agree with them. Certain it is that neither Paris nor London nor Petrograd can claim such an enchanting river view as that in which Budapest so justly glories.

And they are as proud of their country as of their capital. According to an old Hungarian proverb, “Extra Hungarian non est vita”—“Life is not life outside of Hungary.”[13] “Have we not,” the people here ask, “all that is necessary for our welfare? Our blessed soil provides for all our wants.” And Sandor Petöfi, Hungary’s greatest lyric poet, does not hesitate to declare:

If the earth be God’s crown,

Our country is its fairest jewel.

But it is the people of this fair capital that make the strongest appeal to the traveler. It matters not if he be a stranger. Their proverbial hospitality immediately makes him feel at home. Like the Viennese they have a savoir vivre that is truly admirable. Their courtesy and cordiality are boundless and make one desire to prolong one’s sojourn among them. And one no sooner comes in contact with them than he is conscious of a certain indefinable charm that is found only among people of rare culture and refinement. In leaving them—old friends and new—I experienced in a peculiarly keen manner the sincere regret that I have so often felt in other parts of the world when the hour came for departure from people whom I had learned to admire and love for their exceptional goodness and worth.

From Budapest to Belgrade our course for the greater part of the distance was almost due south. For twenty-four hours we journeyed through the Alfold—the great central plain of Hungary—about which so much has been written during the last few years. In many respects it reminds one of the broad maize lands of eastern Kansas and Nebraska. It is also equally productive and has for centuries constituted one of the most important granaries of Central Europe.

Although to the traveler the Alfold—the Hungarian word for lowland—offers little of scenic interest, the Magyar bard finds in it as much to awaken his muse as does the Arabian poet in the broad expanse of his much-loved desert; and each would recognize as his own the sentiment of Sandor Petöfi, when he sings:

I love the plains. It is only there I feel free.

My eyes can wander as they please, quite unconstrained.

One is not confined by barriers.

Throughout the region which we are now traversing legend still lingers, but it is history that has now most to tell. And how much could it not relate regarding the struggle between the barbarians and the Romans in these parts—of the long contests between Christians and Ottomans. It was at Mohacs that the Turks, under Solyman the Magnificent, achieved, in 1526, the decisive victory which enabled them to hold Hungary in a state of vassalage for a hundred and fifty years. It was at the same place that the Ottoman forces, after being defeated by Sobieski in Vienna, made their final stand before they were forced to relinquish the land which they had so long held in subjection.

Further down the river is Illock, which was for a time the home, as it is the burial place, of St. John Capistran. It was this celebrated Franciscan friar who led an army of Crusaders, which he had collected by his preaching, to the assistance of Hunyady Janos when this renowned warrior compelled the Turks under Mohammed II to raise the siege of Belgrade.

Still further down stream is the little town of Petervarad with its strong fortress, long known as the Gibraltar of the Danube. It is so named because Peter the Hermit here marshaled in 1096 the hosts which he had assembled from far and wide for the First Crusade.

As the tones of the vesper bell of a village chapel are wafted over the peaceful waters, the famed “White City” of Serbia appears in the distance. Situated at the confluence of the Danube and the Save, Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, has for more than two thousand years been a strategic point of prime importance. Occupied by Celts, generations before the Christian era, it became, under the name Singidunum, a stronghold of the Romans, who held it for four centuries. It subsequently belonged to the Byzantine Empire and, later on, was occupied at various times by Avars, Huns, Gepids, Goths, Sarmatians, Turks, Hungarians, Austrians, until in the beginning of the nineteenth century the Serbians made it their capital. The Turks, however, did not relinquish possession of its citadel until 1867.

Few places have passed through more sieges or experienced more frequently the horrors of war than Belgrade. Aside from its historical associations, I found little of interest in the city. The inhabitants had none of the gayety and animation of the people of Vienna and Budapest. Their cheerless faces were like those of a race that has witnessed many tragedies and is living in constant fear of impending disaster.

And what country, indeed, has passed through more and greater disasters than Serbia? For it is not too much to say that during the past twenty-five centuries of its history it has been almost continually in a condition of social unrest and political chaos. Times without number the tides of invasion and devastation have swept over this unfortunate land. The general poverty and intellectual stagnation of the people were aggravated by the follies of their rulers and by dynastic scandals that shocked the civilized world. For generations at a time the administration of the country was little better than organized brigandage. Unscrupulous officials, living in Oriental indolence, prospered on the life-blood of the down-trodden peasantry, for whom justice was but a myth. Blood feuds, political murders and internecine strife were long endemic, and guaranties for life and property were, consequently, impossible.

And this was true not only for Serbia but also for the whole of the Balkan peninsula—for Bulgaria, for Macedonia, for Roumania and for the half-barbarous principalities along the Adriatic. So completely separated were they from the rest of the world that little was known of them in western Europe until less than a century ago, when they began to give stronger evidence of national consciousness than they had previously exhibited, and to manifest a united purpose to liberate themselves from the Ottoman yoke, under which they had suffered for so many centuries.

But it would be contrary to the teaching of history to assert that all the disorders endured and all the cruelties suffered by the inhabitants of the Balkans during the long period when they were deprived of their independence were due to the Turks. Nothing is farther from the truth. The fact is that the various Balkan races—the Greeks and Bulgars for instance—hated one another far more than they—either individually or collectively—hated the Turks.

From the point of view of humanitarianism [as has been well said] it is beyond a doubt that much less blood was spilt in the Balkan Peninsula during the five hundred years of Turkish rule than during the five hundred years of Christian rule which preceded them; indeed it would have been difficult to spill more. It is also a pure illusion to think of the Turks as exceptionally brutal or cruel; they are just as good-natured and as good-humored as anybody else; it is only when their military and religious passions are aroused that they become more reckless and ferocious than other people. It was not the Turks who taught cruelty to the Christians of the Balkan Peninsula; the latter had nothing to learn in this respect.[14]

But, notwithstanding the long and trying ordeal through which the peoples of the Balkans have passed, a new era seems to be dawning for them at last. Education is receiving more attention and law and order are gradually assuring to the masses the blessings of civilized life. When, however, we think or speak of the Balkans and their inhabitants there are, as the distinguished British writer D. G. Hogarth reminds us, certain salutary things to bear in mind, among which is that “less than two hundred years ago England had its highwaymen on all roads and its smuggler dens and caravans, Scotland its caterans and Ireland its moonlighters.”[15]

As I viewed from the citadel the magnificent panorama that unfolded itself before me in the broad valleys of the Save and the Danube, I recalled certain alliterative verses which I was wont to recite in my youth, beginning with

An Austrian army awfully arrayed,

Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade,

Cossack, commander, cannonading come,

Deal devastation; dire destructive doom.[16]

While gazing at the sun-bathed vineyards, ruin-crowned heights and broad, verdant plains which followed one another in rapid succession as our steamer bore us seawards, I was especially impressed by the multiplicity of languages I heard spoken by the passengers. For among my fellow travelers were Germans, French, Turks, Serbs, Croats, Russians, Bulgarians, Roumanians, Greeks, Albanians, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, English, and Americans, and probably several others whom I did not recognize. There was, indeed, a Babel of tongues such as one would scarcely find elsewhere. How the famous polyglot, Mezzofanti, would have reveled in such a gathering where he could have held converse with all of them, as he was wont to do with the students of the Propaganda, in Rome, who came from all parts of the world and with the languages of all whom the illustrious Cardinal was perfectly familiar.[17]

And variety of garb of this motley crowd was almost as manifold as was that of their languages and dialects. From the sedate Englishman in tweed to the animated Roumanian in his Phrygian cap of liberty, the tarbooshed Ottoman dreamily fingering his tespis (string of beads), the sad-faced Serb with his conical Astrakan cap, and the voluble Albanian in a snow-white fustanella, there was every conceivable variety of wearing apparel. And the styles and colors of the dresses worn by the women exhibited even greater diversity. They could be compared only with those of the infinitude of shades and adornments of the feathered songsters of a large aviary or of the multitudinous flowers of a botanical garden.

From Belgrade eastwards Oriental color becomes rapidly more pronounced. This results from the long occupation by the Ottomans of the country through which we are now passing and constant communication between Turkey and the Balkans.

The first objects of note to arrest our attention below Belgrade are the great ruined fortress of Sendria and, further downstream, the ruins of the two castles of Galambocz and Laszlovar. These massive strongholds, located on opposite sides of the river, guarded what was long known as “The Key of the Danube.” They, like the scores of ruins which we have passed on our way from Ratisbon, are rich in historic and legendary associations of the most interesting character.

Near Galambocz is shown a great cavern, in which, legend has it, St. George slew the dragon. When we reflect that practically nothing is known of the patron of chivalry and the champion of Christendom, except that he suffered martyrdom at or near Lydda in Palestine before the time of the Emperor Constantine, it becomes difficult to account for the existence of this dragon-slaying tradition in this spot. Its origin may be due to pilgrims or Crusaders, who brought it from the Holy Land in the same way as they popularized the cultus of the Saint in England as early as the days of Arculph and Richard Coeur de Lion.

But after all, it is no more difficult to account for the contest between St. George and the dragon here than at “a stagne or a pond like a sea,” near Silena in Libya, as we read of it in Caxton’s version of the Legenda Aurea, or, to explain the associations of the martyr-knight with the Order of the Garter, the Union Jack or the white ensign of the British Navy.

Immediately below Galambocz we enter the wildest and grandest scenery along the Danube. The foaming rapids and the towering cliffs of the gorge of Kazan recall the famed cañons of Colorado or Montana, although in magnitude and grandeur it is far inferior to the stupendous gorges of the Arkansas or the Yellowstone.

But far more interesting to me than the gorge itself was an inscription at the lower end which is cut in the solid rock and commemorates the completion of the marvelous roadway which the Romans constructed along the western face of this formidable defile. To me it seemed one of the most extraordinary of all the countless achievements of imperial Rome in the entire length of the Danube valley. The inscription reads:

IMP. CÆS. D. NERVÆ. FILIUS. NERVA. TRAJANUS.
AUG. GERM. PONT. MAX....

But even more noteworthy than the wild Kazan ravine and the wonderful Roman thoroughfare is the celebrated Iron Gate at the confines of Serbia, Hungary and Roumania. This narrow defile long constituted an almost impassable barrier to intercourse between the peoples of the upper and lower Danube. During low water, navigation, except for the smallest craft, was impossible, until the completion, in 1896, of a channel which was blasted out of the living rock on the Serbian side of the seething cataract. This canal guarantees a sufficient depth of water the entire year for steamers of considerable draft and contributes enormously to the importance of the Danube as a highway of international commerce.

Shortly below the Iron Gate we were shown remains of the mammoth stone bridge which was built by Trajan across the Danube. This was even a more astonishing achievement than the construction of the roadway through the gorge of Kazan. I had often admired the wonderful, lifelike reliefs of Trajan’s column in Rome, which represent, among other things, the celebrated campaign of the emperor in Dacia, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to contemplate the remains of the road and the bridge he built during this memorable period of his reign. Dacia, which embraced modern Roumania, is noted as being the only province that the Romans ever possessed north of the Danube. And “the last province to be won, it was,” as Freeman puts it, “the first to be given up; for Aurelian withdrew from it and transferred its name to the Mœsian land, immediately south of the Danube.”[18]

But the remarkable thing about Roumania, as the same eminent historian observes, is that although it has been cut off “for so many ages from all Roman influences, forming, as it has done, one of the great highways of barbarian migration, a large part of Dacia, namely, the modern Roumanian principality, still keeps its Roman language no less than Spain and Gaul. In one way the land is to this day more Roman than Spain or Gaul, as its people still call themselves by the Roman name.”[19]

The Roumanians are not only proud of their Roman origin but take special pleasure in recalling the fact, especially when conversing with foreigners. “We are,” they will tell you, “neither Slavs, nor Germans, nor Turks; we are Roumanians.”

Roumania, they will insist, is a Latin islet in the midst of a Slavic and Finnish ocean which surrounds it. This island when known as Dacia was in reality a new Italy and its inhabitants were the Italians of the Danube and the Carpathians. In a recent speech delivered in Rome, the distinguished Roumanian historian, V. A. Urechia, proudly claimed the capital of the Cæsars as the mother of his country—“Nous sommes ici pour dire à tout le monde que Rome est noire mère.”

A short distance below the ruins of Trajan’s bridge we pass, at the embouchure of the Timok River, the frontier of Serbia and Bulgaria. Thenceforward, until we reach the Black Sea, we have Bulgaria on our right and Roumania on our left. But there is little on either side to arrest our attention, for the history of this part of the world is little more than a chronicle of the horrors of warfare and marauding armies from the time of Alexander the Great. No part of Europe, not even Belgium or northern Italy, can point to so many battlefields in the same limited area, and none of the many peoples inhabiting the vast Danube basin have suffered more than Roumania from the calamities of war—of the long and bloody struggle between the Cross and the Crescent for the mastery of this part of Europe.

As I surveyed the broad plains of Bulgaria, I vividly recalled the thrill of horror that stirred the civilized world when my old friend and schoolmate, Januarius A. McGahan, of Perry County, Ohio, there penned his famous letters to the London Daily News on the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria.[20]

He told the Ottoman authorities that their depredations and carnage would have to cease forthwith or he would have the Russian army across the Danube in six months. They laughed him to scorn. But he was as good as his word. In a brief space of time the Russians, accompanied by their brave Roumanian allies, were in Bulgaria, and at Plevna and Shipka Pass the fate of Turkey in this part of Europe was sealed and the greater portion of the Balkan peoples was at length liberated from the Turkish yoke. The Russians, under their gallant commander, Skobeleff, pushed on to San Stefano, within sight of the domes and minarets of Constantinople. Then, by orders from St. Petersburg, the conquering general was halted in his course just when Russia’s long-coveted goal, the capital on the Golden Horn, was within his grasp.

The chivalrous McGahan, whom his distinguished associate, Archibald Forbes, declared to be the most brilliant war correspondent[21] that ever lived, was stricken with typhus and after a very brief illness died in Constantinople, June 10, 1878, in the early bloom of a glorious manhood. His chief mourner was his bosom friend, the noble Skobeleff, who, with unfeigned emotion, declared at the grave of his illustrious friend, whom he loved as a brother, that his heart was interred with his beloved Januarius and that he had nothing more to live for.

The grateful Bulgarians erected a splendid monument to the memory of McGahan, whom they recognized as their deliverer from the age-long domination of the hated Turks. On this monument were inscribed the words, Januario Aloysio McGahan, Patri Patriæ. Some years later his remains were transferred to his home town, New Lexington, Ohio, and in its modest little cemetery is seen above his last resting-place a plain block of granite which bears beneath the deathless hero’s name the simple but well-earned tribute—Liberator of Bulgaria.

On the left bank of the Danube, slightly northeast of Plevna, is the little town of Giurgevo, which was founded centuries ago by that wonderful commercial metropolis, Genoa. Like its great rival, Venice, it was long celebrated for its commercial and military activities in the Levant and in the Crimea. But that its merchant princes should have extended their trade to the lower Danube in that early period when the navigation of this great river was so difficult and dangerous is indeed remarkable.

From Giurgevo I made a hasty trip to Bukharest. I did not wish to pass “The City of Delight,” as the attractive capital of Roumania is named, without calling on some friends there whom I had not seen in several years. But neither the capital nor the country was what it had been but a few years before. A note of sadness, in consequence of the ravages of the recent war, seemed to dominate the joyful greetings of an erstwhile happy and pleasure-loving people. It will, I fear, be a long time before one can again apply to Roumania the epithet—Dacia Feli—Happy Dacia—which it bore in the days of long ago, when it was one of the most flourishing colonies of the Roman Empire.[22] But the self-reliant people of Roumania are not depressed or discouraged by the present condition of their war-tried country. These descendants of the Dacians, whom the Romans called “the most warlike of men,” have abiding confidence in their recuperative power and their ability to make good their claim to an honorable position among the nations of the civilized world. Their native proverb—Romanul non père—The Roumanian never dies—shows in three words what manner of men they are and what may be expected of them when they shall have rallied from the havoc of war and shall again be free to devote themselves to the stimulating arts of peace.

Among the many things that especially impressed me in Roumania was the large number of gypsies. In no part of the world, it is said, are they so numerous in proportion to the population as among the descendants of the ancient Dacians. The chief reason for this is that these strange, dark-eyed, music-loving nomads from India have met a kinder reception here than in other countries, where they have been regarded as pariahs and often treated with harshness bordering on cruelty.

From Giurgevo to the Black Sea the broad, multi-islanded Danube sweeps majestically through the ever-expanding, reed-covered lowlands—the home of many kinds of water-fowl—and the far extending acres devoted to pasturage and agriculture, which contribute so much to the commerce and wealth of the Balkan Peninsula. Near the village of Rassova, on the right bank of the river, we see what remains of Trajan’s wall, which extends from the Danube to Constanza on the Black Sea. This earthen rampart was constructed during the Roman occupation of the country to prevent barbarian incursions into the colonial possessions of the empire. But, like the wall of Probus, connecting the Danube with the Rhine, it withstood but a short while the ever-increasing onrush of the savage hordes from the north.

Not far from this relic of Roman dominion in this part of the world is the colossal steel railway bridge across the Danube, completed in 1895, and justly regarded as one of the greatest engineering achievements of modern times.

At Braila and Galatz—Roumanians great ports of entry—we were greatly impressed by the activity and enterprise of these flourishing entrepôts of commerce. But I must confess I was here more impressed by what tradition declares to be the spot where Darius Hystaspes built a bridge across the Danube at the time of his famous campaign against the Scythians, more than five centuries B. C.[23]

And what a war-theater this ill-fated land has been since that far-off time! Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, Trajan, and countless leaders of barbarian and Turkish hordes have been here or in the vicinity during the twenty-five centuries that have intervened between the advent of Darius and his resistless legions. Certain spots of the earth seem to be perennial battle centers and the land bordering this part of the Danube, as history shows, is one of the most notable of them.

It is in this part of the Danube that one begins to have an adequate idea of the size of this historic waterway and of its transcendent importance in the mercantile life of Europe. It is surpassed by no other European river except the Volga. From its source in the lovely park of Prince Fürstenberg, at Donaueschingen, to where it delivers its mighty tribute to the Black Sea, the length of the Danube is nearly eighteen hundred miles—more than two-thirds of that of our famed Mississippi.

But in the amount and character of the traffic it bears and the number of people it serves, the Danube is incomparably superior to the Volga and even to our great “Father of Waters.” The Volga, like the Mississippi, is only a national river, while the Danube majestically sweeps through many principalities and kingdoms and empires of Europe and assures easy relations between regions widely separated. And, as the Danube in the past has served as the great natural route for the migrations of nations and the warring hordes of Asia and Europe, so it is now, more than ever before, one of the world’s great highways of commerce and industry, and from present indications the day is not far distant when, economically, it will be the greatest.

The reason for this seemingly paradoxical assertion is not far to seek. The importance of rivers is not due to their length and volume of water, but rather to the density of the population on their banks and to the industrial productivity of the peoples who dwell in their vicinity. Thus, the Danube not only passes through some of the most fertile lands in the world, where intensive agriculture is carried to the highest degree of efficiency, but also facilitates the exchange of commodities of all kinds between distant nations and delivers supplies and the necessary raw material to the countless industrial centers of middle Europe.

Of the affluents of the Danube that are navigable, or large enough to float rafts, there are more than sixty, while the number of inhabitants along the course of the Danube alone is more than fifty millions. Add to this the myriads of people who dwell along its numerous tributaries and this immense number will be greatly augmented. It will not only far exceed the number of people who live along the Volga and are benefited by its traffic, but will also far surpass that of the Mississippi basin, if it does not indeed equal that of the entire United States. It was for this reason that Napoleon considered the Danube the king of rivers and Talleyrand declared that “the center of gravity is not Paris nor Berlin but the Mouths of the Danube.”[24]

If these two eminent personages were now living they would have much stronger reasons for entertaining such views than existed a century ago. For, thanks to the genius of modern engineers, the value of the Danube as a great commercial highway has been immensely enhanced. By dredging the canal at the Iron Gate, by jettying the Sulina branch of the delta and by making innumerable other improvements along the course of the river, the European Danube Commission, which has had charge for more than half a century of the betterment of this great international waterway, has eliminated the dangers to navigation which previously existed and has made the river navigable for much larger craft than was before possible. Since the establishment of this International Commission by the Treaty of Paris in 1856, the amount of traffic passing through the mouth of the Danube has increased enormously. According to a recent official report of the Commission, “Sailing Ships of two hundred tons register have given way to steamers up to four thousand tons register, carrying a dead weight of nearly eight thousand tons and good order has succeeded chaos.”[25]

But this is not all. The far-reaching utility of the Danube has been greatly augmented by the construction of such canals as the one which connects it with the Tisza, and still more by the famous Ludwig Kanal which links it with the Rhine. It was a matter of particular pleasure to the late King Charles of Roumania when the Roumanian flotilla of gunboats was able, thanks to the Ludwig Kanal, to steam directly from London to the Black Sea by way of the Rhine and the Danube.

And yet more. When the projected Danube-Salonica Canal, the Danube-Elbe and the Danube-Oder Canals, both under construction, shall be completed, the Danube will tap the greatest industrial centers of middle Europe and will reduce by one-half the trade water route between the Suez Canal and the ports of the North and Baltic Seas as compared with the present water route by way of Gibraltar.[26]

Recalling the days when the Danube was controlled by the robber barons who tenanted the massive castles along its banks, and trade was all but paralyzed; when Genoese and Venetian merchants sailed their small craft down its treacherous waters to collect grain from the fertile fields of Wallachia and hides and furs from the vast plains and forests of Russia; when it was but a Turkish River as the Black Sea was but a Turkish Lake, we can better appreciate its various phases of development during the past and more fully realize the vast expansion of trade which it has witnessed since its navigation was, in 1856, declared to be free to all nations. And looking forward to the time when all the numerous artificial waterways, now projected or nearing completion, shall extend the arms of the Danube to all the commercial and industrial metropolises of Central Europe, we can well believe that historic river will then, from the standpoint of international trade, be not only the most important river in Europe, but also the most important in the world. Then, indeed, will this highway of commerce be, in the words of Napoleon, the king of rivers, and then, too, will be verified the statement of Tallyrand, if it was not justified when he made it a century ago, “Le centre de gravité de l’Europe n’est pas à Paris, ni à Berlin, mais aux Bouches du Danube.”[27]

CHAPTER II
THE EUXINE AND THE BOSPHORUS IN STORY, MYTH AND LEGEND

The Pontic Sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due course

To the Propontis and the Hellespont.

Shakespeare “Othello.”

Our entrance into the Black Sea was through the well-jettied Sulina Canal—a canal which, for a great part of its length, passes through a reed-covered lowland which is so near sea-level that, when the Danube is in flood, vast stretches of it are completely under water. The delta of the Danube, which has an area of about one thousand square miles, has been built up by the immense accumulation of mud and sand which has been brought down by the great river and its numerous affluents from the rain-drenched Balkans and Carpathians and from the far-off snow fields of the Carnic and Rhætian Alps. The rate at which the delta is encroaching on the sea may be judged from the carefully conducted investigations that have been made, which show that the amount of earth discharged at the mouths of the Danube totals several thousand cubic feet a minute. For many leagues out from land the earth-colored water of the Danube is easily distinguished from that of the Euxine. This alone enables one to realize the extent of the erosion going on in the Danube basin and the immensity of the deposit that is daily laid on this part of the bed of the Black Sea.

As myth and legend hover over the Danube from its source to its delta, so do they also linger along the western shore of the historic Euxine. Even before we have left the earth-colored flood which pours into it, we descry in the distance the little island of Fido-Nisi—Serpent Island—so called from the great number of snakes which are said to infest its sea-lashed cliffs and about which, from time immemorial, Russian and Turkish sailors have told the most fantastic stories.

In antiquity it was known as Leuce—

“Leuce, the white, where the souls of heroes rest.”

According to Homer, the ashes of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, were placed in a golden urn and deposited in a tumulus on the promontory of Sigeum in the Troad. This elevated headland, visible far out on the Ægean, served as a landmark for passing mariners. Later poets, however, inform us that the body of Achilles was snatched from the burning pyre by Thetis, his goddess-mother, and transferred to the Island of Leuce where, with his bosom friend, Patroclus and other heroes,[28] it was speedily worshipped by the Greeks who here erected a temple in the hero’s honor. For this reason Leuce was long known as the Island of Achilles.

The Greek historian Arrian in his Periplus of the Euxine Sea, written in the form of a report to the Emperor Hadrian, says:

Some call this the Island of Achilles, others call it the chariot of Achilles, and others Leuce, from its color. Thetis is said to have given up this island to her son Achilles, by whom it was inhabited. There are now existing a temple and a wooden statue of Achilles of ancient workmanship. It is destitute of inhabitants and pastured only by a few goats which those who touch here are said to offer to the memory of Achilles. Many offerings are suspended in this temple, as cups, rings and more valuable gems. All these are offerings to Achilles. Inscriptions are also suspended written in the Greek and Latin languages. Some are in praise of Patroclus, whom those who are disposed to honor Achilles treat with equal respect. Many birds inhabit this island, as sea gulls, divers, and coots innumerable. These birds frequent the temple of Achilles. Every day in the morning they take their flight and, having moistened their wings, fly back again to the temple and sprinkle it with the moisture, which having performed they brush and clean the pavement with their wings.... It is said that Achilles has appeared in time of sleep both to those who have approached the coast of this island and also to such as have been sailing a short distance from it and instructed them where the island was most safely accessible and where the ships might best lie at anchor. They also say further that Achilles has appeared to them not in time of sleep, or a dream, but in a visible form on the mast, or at the extremity of the yards, in the same manner as the Dioscuri have appeared. This distinction, however, must be made between the appearance of Achilles and that of the Dioscuri, that the latter appear evidently and clearly to persons who navigate the sea at large, and, when so seen, foretell a prosperous voyage, whereas the figure of Achilles is seen only by such as approach this island.[29]

A short sail southwestwardly from the island of Achilles brings us in view, on our starboard, of the important seaport of Constanza. It is located at the eastern extremity of Trajan’s wall and had a special interest for me because its site is near that of Tomi to which the poet Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus. The privations which he had to endure on this distant boundary of the Roman Empire and the miseries of his life among the barbarians on the shore of the Euxine are graphically described by the poet in his Tristia and Letters from Pontus.

The climate of this inhospitable place was trying indeed to the disconsolate exile who had just come from the palace of the Cæsars and who had so long enjoyed all the delights of the Roman capital. For here, to his eyes, the fields were without verdure, the spring without flowers, and snow and ice were eternal. The long hair and beards which concealed the visage of the rude Sarmatians, among whom he was compelled to live, clicked with icicles. Wine froze and had to be cut with a sword. According to Ovid’s account the cold was more severe in his time than it was during the memorable arctic winter many centuries later when the temperature fell so low that the Euxine was frozen over for weeks and the ice on the Bosphorus was so thick that people were able to pass on foot from the Asiatic to the European shore.

It was in this cheerless and frigid region, far from home and friends, that one of Rome’s greatest poets spent the last eight years of his life and here it was that he died. Before his death he had expressed a wish that his ashes, enclosed in a modest urn, should be taken to Rome in order that he might not be an exile after death, as he had been during so many years of his life, but his request was not granted.[30] A tradition exists that a tomb was erected to his memory in Tomi, but there is among scholars as much doubt respecting the existence, or location of such a tomb, as there always has been regarding the reason of the poet’s banishment by one who had showered on him so many and so great favors.

According to a legend that Ovid recalls in one of his elegies, Tomi was a place of ill omen, for it was here that Medea murdered her brother and strewed the sea with his carved limbs. And it was from this atrocious fratricide, according to the poet, that the town of Tomi took its name:

Inde Thomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo

Membra soror fratris consecuisse sui.[31]

From the most remote antiquity the Euxine has been noted for the fury of its tempests and for the reputed terrors of its navigation, as well as for the savage character of the inhabitants on its coast. For this reason the ancients called it Pontus Axenus—the inhospitable sea. Subsequently, as if to placate its fury, by an euphemism, it was called the Euxine—the hospitable sea—a name which it has since borne.

But the first name given to this extended body of water was simply Pontos—the Greek word for sea—as if it were the sea par excellence. The noted traveler, Giovanni da Piano Carpini, a Franciscan friar, and Ricoldo da Monte di Croce, a Dominican missionary in the Orient, called it Mare Magnum—the great sea. In the Itinerarium, however, of Blessed Oderic of Pordenone it bears the name Mare Majus—the greater sea—as it does also in I Viaggi of Marco Polo who calls it Mare Maggiore. But this is not all. Friar Jordanus speaks of it as the Black Sea—Mare Nigrum, as likewise does Sir John Mandeville who gives it the name Mare Maurum—Mauros, in Byzantine, as in Modern Greek, signifying black. But there was, probably, no better reason for calling this sea black than there was for giving to certain other well-known seas the epithets of red, white, and yellow. From all this it appears that what we now know as the Euxine or Black Sea has been rich in names as well as in myths and legends.[32]

The Euxine, however, is famed not only for legendary associations but for having been for centuries a section of the great highway between the Occident and the Orient. It was by this route that Fra Oderic of Pordenone, that celebrated missionary of the fourteenth century, made his wonderful journey from Venice to China and other parts of the Far East. It was by the same route that Marco Polo—the most famous traveler of the Middle Ages—returned from his long peregrinations in eastern Asia to his home in the Queen City of the Adriatic. And it was by way of the Euxine that Marco Polo’s father and uncle had preceded him to far-off Cathay where they were most cordially received by the famous Kublai Khan.

It was also for ages an important link in one of the world’s great commercial highways. From time immemorial there were three great trade routes which connected India and China with Europe. One was the Persian Gulf route which ran from the mouth of the Indus to the Euphrates and along this latter river to Zeugma, or Thapsacus, whence it proceeded to Antioch and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean. The second was the sea route which went from India along the Persian and Arabian coasts to Aden, thence by the Red Sea to Alexandria and Tyre and Sidon. The third was the great overland route which started from Bactra—long, like Babylon, a market-place for the races of the world and a great emporium for Indian and Chinese commerce—and reached the West by two roads. One was the caravan route which crossed Parthia and Mesopotamia and ended in Antioch. The other passed down the river Oxus to the Caspian Sea and thence to the Euxine. This is the trade route that has the greatest interest for us at present—a route that served as one of the world’s chief commercial highways for more than two thousand years.

Long before Alexander made Bactra his base for the invasion of India, long before the Greek Skylax of Karyanda made his famous voyage from the mouth of the Indus to Arsinoe on the Red Sea, and many centuries before Hippalus made his epoch-making discovery of the existence of the moonstones of the Indian Ocean, which immensely augmented the ocean-bound traffic between India and Egypt, a very large volume of the luxuries of the Far East found their way to the Occident by the great Oxus-Caspian-Euxine trade route. And while the ships of Tarshish and

Quinquiremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With cargoes of ivory and apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet, white wine,

were bringing to Syria and the Land of the Pharaohs treasures from the coast of Malabar and

The spicy shore

Of Araby the blest,

interminable caravans and countless merchantmen were always busy along the Oxus-Caspian-Euxine route bearing to Byzantium and Athens and Rome silks from China and Bengal; muslin and other stuffs from Benares and Kotumbara; tortoise-shell from the Golden Chersonese; indigo from Sind; drugs, spices, cosmetics, perfumes, pearls, beryls, and precious stones from other parts; costus from Cashmere; pepper from Malabar; gums, spikenard, lycium, and malabathrum from the forests of the Himalayas; and sapphires, rubies, and aquamarines from Burma, Siam, and Vaniyambadi.

What was the volume of this trade between the Orient and the Occident, especially after the establishment of the Pax Romana under Augustus, may be gauged by the fact that the unprecedented demand by the fashionable world of Rome for all kinds of eastern luxuries for a while seriously imperiled the imperial finances. In the single item of aromatics for funerals, the extravagance indulged in seems incredible. At the obsequies of Sulla, before the time of Augustus, more than twelve thousand pounds of precious spices were consumed, while Nero had more expensive aromatics burnt on the funeral pyre of Poppœa than Arabia produced in a year.

When, after the destruction of Bagdad by Hulaku Khan, Tabriz in Persia became the great political and commercial city of Asia, it was by the Euxine that the merchant princes of Venice and Genoa conducted their commerce with the Middle and Far East. Passing through the Hellespont and the Bosphorus, their galleys proceeded to Kaffa in the Crimea which was their chief entrepôt on the Euxine. From this point the enterprising traders continued their course by way of the Sea of Azov, the Don, and the Volga to a port on the Caspian Sea. Thence their caravans started on their long overland journey over lofty mountains and through vast deserts and hostile nations to far distant Cathay in quest of the highly-prized commodities of Chinese kilns and looms. Other traders went directly by sea from Kaffa to Trebizond whence they journeyed over broad, arid plains to Tabriz. Here their numerous caravans were laden with the rich fabrics of Persia and the rare products of India and the Isles of Spicery. From these centers of Asiatic traffic, long lines of patient camels transported their precious burdens to ports on the Euxine where a fleet of Genoese and Venetian galleys was waiting to receive the merchandise collected at so much risk and at the cost of so much labor and which was subsequently distributed among the expectant marts of southern Europe.[33]

Before embarking at Sulina for Constantinople, I almost dreaded the voyage to the Bosphorus. From the time of the Argonauts the tempestuous Euxine has been a byword among mariners and the dread of travelers who have to trust themselves to its storm-lashed waves. In the words of Ovid its fury was inferior only to the turbulence of the fierce barbarians among whom he was exiled. I had prepared myself to endure for a day all the horrors which characterize a rough passage across the English channel. Nor were my fears entirely groundless. The sea was heavy,—the weather was squally. Many of the passengers, unwilling to trust themselves on deck, sought the seclusion of their staterooms. As for myself, I did not feel reassured until we had finally entered the more protected waters of the Bosphorus. Even at the entrance of this famous channel the voyager may, at times, experience great discomfort. Byron states the reason in the well-known stanza of Don Juan:

The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave

Broke foaming o’er the blue Symplegades;

’Tis a grand sight from off “The Giant’s grave”

To watch the progress of those rolling seas

Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave

Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease;

There’s not a sea .....

Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.[34]

Inter utrumque fremunt immani turbine venti.

Nescit cui domino pareat, unda maria.

Nam modo purpureo vires capit Eurus ab ortu;

Nunc Zephyrus, sero vespere missus, adest;

Nunc gelidus sicca Boreas bacchatur ab Arcto;

Nunc Notus adversa praelia fronte gerit.

Tristia, lib. L, Elegia II.

The “blue Symplegades,”—at least what is left of them—to which Byron here refers, are famous for their connection with one of the oldest and most interesting of Greek legends—that of the Argonauts. According to the story which Apollonius of Rhodes has so well developed in his Argonautica, the Symplegades were two floating and ever-clashing rocks, at the junction of the Euxine and the Bosphorus, which were fabled to close upon and crush all ships that attempted to pass between them. When Jason with his fifty-oared ship, the Argos, and his fifty heroes set out for Colchis to fetch back the golden fleece he was obliged to pass between these great colliding rocks. Thanks, however, to the instructions he had received from the seer, Phineus, who had been delivered from the tormenting Harpies by two of the Argonauts, he was able to effect this hitherto impossible passage and to proceed without interruption to his destination.

After this event the eyotlike rocks became fixed in the positions they now occupy. The one, however, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus has, owing to the action of the elements, long since disappeared beneath the waves. The other, on the European side, is also rapidly disintegrating, and soon will litter the floor of the sea. But the story of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece will endure as long as men shall retain a love for the fascinating in myth and legend and the beautiful in art and literature.

Although the Cyanean Islands—as the Symplegades are now called—and the shores of the Euxine are exceptionally rich in places and things of great historic and mythological interest, they are in this respect surpassed by the Bosphorus. Nowhere in the world do myth and legend, traditional associations and historic souvenirs cluster in such numbers and varieties as they do about every rock and bay and promontory of this famous waterway that connects the Euxine with the Sea of Marmora.

Even the names bestowed upon this channel have been manifold. To the ancients it was variously known as the Mouth, the Throat, the Door, and the Key of the Euxine. To-day it is frequently called the Narrows, or the Strait or the Canal of Constantinople. But the appellation which is still the most popular and that by which it is usually designated is that which has its origin in one of the earliest of Greek legends. As expressed in English, the name, which signifies Cow-Ford, or Ox-Ford, seems very prosaic, but the legend on which it is based has always been a favorite with poets and artists.

Io, the beautiful priestess of Hera at Argos, was loved by Zeus and was, in consequence of the jealousy of the goddess, metamorphosed into a heifer. Arriving at the eastern side of the strait, so the fable runs, she plunged into its swiftly-flowing waters and swam to the European shore. And from that time to the present, this famed watercourse has been known the world over as the Bosphorus.

On the promontory of Anadoli Kavak on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, we get a view of the site of Hieron which was long regarded as one of the most sacred places in the pagan world. Covered then with gorgeous temples dedicated to the twelve greater gods it ranked as a place of pilgrimage with Delphi and Olympia. The most imposing and sumptuous of these temples was said to have been founded by Jason and consecrated to Zeus Urius, in thanksgiving for the safe return of himself and his fellow Argonauts from their successful expedition to Colchis. Within it stood a priceless statue of Zeus made of ivory and gold, at the base of which was a slab, now preserved in the British Museum, on which were inscribed the words:

The sailor who invokes Zeus Urius that he may enjoy a prosperous voyage either toward the Cyanean Rocks, or on the Ægean sea, itself unsteady and filled with innumerable dangerous shoals scattered here and there, can have a prosperous voyage if first he sacrifices to the god whose statue Philo Antipater has set up, both because of gratitude and to insure favorable augury to sailors.

But unlike Delphi and Olympia where there is still, thanks to the labors of French and German archæologists, very much to remind one of the past grandeur of these historic places, “not a stone upon a stone” remains on the site of Hieron to attest to its former splendor and majesty. As in so many other parts of the world, the temples of Hieron served as quarries for peoples of a later age who knew not the gods of Olympus, or who had a special interest in consigning them to oblivion. And where, in days of yore, the clouds of incense and the smoke of sacrifice, in the most superb of temples stimulated the fervor of vast multitudes from far distant lands, the traveler to-day finds nothing of the pristine glory of Hieron except what nature gave it—its superb site and its enchanting vistas of the Bosphorus and the Euxine.

After the fall of paganism, Hieron had many vicissitudes. Having been converted into one of the strongest fortresses on the Bosphorus, it was time and again singled out for attack by the enemies of the Byzantine Empire. Among the most celebrated of them was Harun-al-Rashid who led an army the whole way from Bagdad with a view of effecting the conquest of Constantinople and with it of the Byzantine Empire. At a later date Hieron and the stronghold on the opposite side of the Strait fell into the hands of the Genoese. Not long afterwards it was captured by the Sultan Bayazid I, “the Thunderbolt,” and since then it has been in the possession of the Turks.

A short distance to the southwest, on the European shore, is a beautiful valley where the Crusaders are said to have encamped on their way to the Holy Land. A colossal plane tree is here seen which bears the name of “Plane tree of Godfrey of Bouillon,” from a tradition that it was planted by this famous hero of the Christian host.

At Roumeli Hissar, we reach the narrowest point of the Bosphorus and one which is most rich in historical associations. According to tradition, it was here that Xenophon and his immortal Ten Thousand crossed over into Europe after their famous retreat from the heart of Babylonia—a retreat which, revealing, as it did, the military weakness of the Persian Colossus, paved the way for the victories of the Granicus, the Issus, and Arbela and for the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great.

Here, too, it was that Mandrocles of Samos constructed the bridge of boats that enabled the vast Persian army under Darius to cross into Europe at the time of that monarch’s disastrous campaign against the Scythians. Mandrocles was so elated by his achievement that he had it commemorated in the temple of Hera, in his native Samos, by a picture with the inscription:

The fish-fraught Bosphorus bridged, to Juno’s fane

Did Mandrocles this proud memorial bring;

When for himself a crown he’d skill to gain,

For Samos praise, contenting the Great King.

But a large volume would be required to give even a brief notice of the countless myths, legends, traditions, and historical souvenirs which cluster about the shores of the Bosphorus from the Euxine to the Golden Horn. They have been the scenes of tragedies and romances and intrigues without number. From the dawn of history the Bosphorus has been constantly a bone of contention among rival and conflicting interests and an important factor in many of the great wars that have convulsed Asia and Europe. And until a plan shall be elaborated for eliminating international jealousies and harmonizing the antagonistic policies and aspirations of many peoples of divers races and creeds, it is not probable that the future history of this unique waterway will be materially different from that of the past. Altruism among nations has so far been confined to words and, from present indications, the day is far distant when it will be revealed in deeds.

It is not, however, through its legendary and storied past that the Bosphorus makes its strongest appeal to the ordinary traveler. It is rather through its scenic beauty—the enchanting vistas it everywhere offers on both the Asiatic and the European shore. These have for ages been celebrated in song and story and few who have been privileged to gaze on them will say that their praises have been exaggerated. From whatever point the Strait is viewed it is picturesque in the highest degree and exhibits all along its course countless objects of exhaustless interest.

Almost the entire distance from the Euxine to the Golden Horn one sees bordering the Bosphorus an almost continuous succession of kiosks, palaces, chalets, bungalows, mosques, and minarets. There are the imposing homes of ambassadors accredited to the Sublime Porte, the luxurious residences of the wealthy pashas and merchant princes of Stamboul, the superb marble palaces of sultans and sultanas, all surrounded by inviting groves and artistically laid-out parks rich in flowers and trees from many climes. Here and there in shaded glens and verdant dales are picturesque villages and hamlets whose quaint wooden houses form a striking contrast to the magnificent structures which are in their immediate vicinity.

Of the many beautiful valleys that debouch into the Bosphorus is that of the Great Geuk Su—Sweet Water—on the Asiatic side which appealed to me most strongly. Its clumps of balmy pines, somber cypresses, and graceful mimosas and its romantic groves of wide-spreading planes, sycamores, magnolias, and beech trees whose pendent branches dip into the crystal stream present rarest pictures of sylvan charm and loveliness. They forcibly reminded me of similar spots of scenic beauty which, years before, had so fascinated me in the far-famed Vale of Tempe in northern Thessaly. Emptying into the same bay as the Great Sweet Water is the Little Sweet Water and the valleys of these two enchanting streams together with their common bay constitute the so-called “Sweet Waters of Asia.”[35] Their attractive groves and greenswards have long been a favorite pleasance for Ottomans and Greeks as well as for foreign residents of Constantinople.

But what most interested me in this heart-gladdening spot was the countless groups of merry and beautiful children who had been brought here by their mothers and nurses for an outing. They seemed to be everywhere. Running and leaping, laughing and shouting, singing and dancing, vanishing among the bushes and suddenly reappearing in the broad greensward, their little forms were perfect pictures of restless energy and unalloyed happiness. Many of the boys and girls were dressed like children one sees in the Bois de Boulogne and their features were just as fair. Nowhere in the East did I see a more animated or a more charming scene except, perhaps, on the embowered banks of the Sweet Waters of Europe on the upper reaches of the Golden Horn.

And the mothers seemed to enjoy themselves fully as much as their children. Some sat quietly conversing under the umbrageous trees while others were enjoying a pleasant row in their light and gaily decked caiques. Most of them were garbed in the tcharchaff, a cloak and veil of somber color, but a few still retained the graceful feridgi and yashmak which were formerly in almost universal use among the Ottoman women of the well-to-do classes.

To eastern poets the Sweet Waters of Asia are quite as dear as was the Vale of Tempe to the ancient Greeks. For to the poets of the East this spot is a veritable paradise on earth and far surpasses the vaunted attractions of the celebrated groves of Damascus and the sun-kissed meadows of Shaab Beram in Southern Persia. It supplies, in fullest measure, three of the Moslem’s chiefest delights—umbrageous trees, flowing water, and sweet repose.

The poet must have had some such an enchanting spot in mind when he sang:

The land of the cedar and the vine,

Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;

Where citron and olive are fairest of fruit,

And the voice of the nightingale never is mute;

Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky,

In color though varied in beauty may vie.

Space precludes more than a passing reference to the sumptuous palaces which adorn the bay-indented shores of the Bosphorus. Of these magnificent edifices Yildiz Kiosk—Palace of the Star—is noted as having been the favorite place of residence of the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. It is a large structure of white marble and from its commanding site on a grove-clad hill it affords one of the most gorgeous panoramas to be seen anywhere along the matchless Bosphorus.

At the foot of the hill on which stands the palace of Yildiz Kiosk is seen what is undoubtedly one of the most grandiose palaces in the world. It is known as the Serai of Dolma Baghtcheh and was built by the Sultan Abdul-Medjid. His Armenian architect, Balian, was given carte blanche in the matter of expenditure and style of architecture. Only one condition was imposed on him by the Sultan and that was that the completed structure should surpass in magnificence every other imperial palace in the world. Architecturally it is a strange combination of Greek, Roman, Moorish, Turkish, Persian, and Renaissance styles and exhibits both interiorly and exteriorly what is most admirable in the noted palaces of the Louvre, Versailles, the Schönbrunn in Vienna, the Winter Palace in Petrograd, and the imperial palace of the Kremlin in Moscow. With the Ionian-blue Bosphorus as a foreground and the Imperial Park clad in perennial green as a background the snow-white palace of Dolma Baghtcheh, with its delicate lace-like carvings, is, indeed, in the words of an enthusiastic writer, “a pearl placed between a turquoise and an emerald, each jewel multiplied in size and loveliness many million-fold.”[36]

CHAPTER III
ROMA NOVA

The City of the Constantines,

The rising city of the billow-side,

The City of the Cross—great ocean’s bride,

Crowned with her birth she sprung long ages past,

And still she looked in glory o’er the tide

Which at her feet barbaric riches cast,

Pour’d by the burning East, all joyously and fast.

Our journey through the park and palace-fringed Bosphorus had duly prepared us for the culmination of these beauties and wonders, when, as we neared Seraglio Point, the Imperial Capital of the Byzantine Cæsars burst upon our view in all its glory and magnificence.

From the time of Tournefort travelers have vied with one another in their attempts to convey in words their impressions on their first view of the superb capital of the Ottoman Empire. Poets and artists have essayed to depict the splendors of what they regarded as the queen city of the world. There are pen-pictures of innumerable writers who came under the spell of this city of the Cæsars and who were unable to find language which would adequately express their sensations of ecstatic trance and rapturous delight. Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Edmondo De Amicis, Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Edmond About, the Countess de Gasparm, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Robert Hichens, and Pierre Loti all are overcome with wonder at the marvelous spectacle and despair of finding language to express their surprise and emotion in the presence of such an enchanting spot.

It is at Constantinople [writes Lamartine], that God and man, nature and art have created and placed the most marvelous point of view which the human eye can contemplate on earth.[37]

Chateaubriand expresses almost the same sentiment when he declares “On n’ exagère point quand on dit que Constantinople offre le plus beau point de vue de 1’univers.”[38] But notwithstanding this almost extravagant statement, the distinguished littérateur does not hesitate to add in a footnote, “I, however, prefer the bay of Naples.”

Like Lamartine and Chauteaubriand, I, too, was greatly impressed by my first view of Constantinople when seen from the deck of our steamer as it glided towards the mast-thronged harbor of the Golden Horn, but, as I have stated elsewhere,[39] the prize, for the World’s City Beautiful, must, me judice, be awarded to Rio de Janeiro, the incomparable capital of Brazil.

It is not within the scope of this chapter to give even a brief description of Constantinople. That is rendered quite unnecessary by the scores of valuable books which have been written on this fascinating subject. This, however, does not mean that I was not intensely interested in its countless attractions or that they did not make deep impressions on me and give rise to serious reflections. Far from it. I spent every available hour in visiting its churches, mosques, schools, museums and in contemplating its hoary, lichen-covered ruins, its battlemented walls and ivy-festooned towers which, for long ages, cast their trembling shadows on the glimmering waters of the Sea of Marmora and served, for more than eleven hundred years, as effective bulwarks against the fierce assaults of Avars and Goths, Arabs and Persians, Slavonians and Bulgarians and Mongols. And, as I threaded my way through its narrow and devious streets and inspected the picturesque and tumble-down houses, I found special pleasure in scrutinizing the letters and inscriptions and epitaphs engraved on slabs of marble or on blocks of granite, some of which were in their original position while others had been used in the construction of some now crumbling wall or building. If they could speak, what stories could not these disconnected letters and incomplete inscriptions tell of the shadowy past—stories of dark and strange events connected with sieges and conquests—stories of intrigue and deeds of violence and tyranny in which ambitious eunuchs, heartless pashas, and bloodthirsty sultans were the chief actors—stories, too, of exalted virtue and heroism displayed by noble men and women that time the fanatic followers of Mohammed boastfully announced their intention to plant the Crescent over the Cross and to remove from the devoted city of Constantine the last vestiges of Christian art and culture.

The first object to claim my attention after arriving in Constantinople was the majestic and solemn church, now a mosque, of Santa Sophia. To the Greeks it is known as the church of Hagia Sophia—Divine Wisdom. More frequently, however, it is called ’Η Μεγάλη Εκκλησία—“The Great Church—the church par excellence.”

Exteriorly this masterpiece of Byzantine basilicas has the aspect of a massive, irregular time-worn fortress. Surrounded by all kinds of low, unsymmetrical buildings—shops, storehouses, baths, schools, turbehs—one can have no idea of its original design or external appearance as it came from the hands of its architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus.

The beauty of Santa Sophia, like that of so many of the famous churches of the Old World, is within. But even within, the first impression of the ordinary visitor is one of disappointment. But its surpassing beauty and grandeur quickly reveal themselves and then one stands in awe and amazement. Its marvelous harmony of design, its wealth of ornamentation, its lavish display of the finest marbles, porphyries, jaspers, serpentines, granites, alabasters, gold mosaics are bewildering in their effect and one can easily realize what must have been the splendor and magnificence of this august temple when, on the day of consecration, the emperor Justinian exultantly exclaimed: Glory be to God, who has deemed me worthy to accomplish such an undertaking. Σολομὼν, νενíκησá σε—Solomon, I have conquered thee!

And his exclamation of triumph was justified. For never before had the spoils of paganism’s great sanctuaries contributed so much towards the erection and embellishment of any single Christian edifice. Among the massive columns which support the great arches of the basilica are eight of verdantique which were brought from the celebrated Temple of Diana at Ephesus. There are eight of porphyry which belonged to the Temple of the Sun in Baalbek. These were the gifts of the noble Roman lady, Marcia, who, with characteristic piety, offered them, as she expressed it—Υφὲρ τῆς ψυχíκῆς μον σωτηρíας—for the salvation of my soul.

In addition to these splendid monoliths there are columns from the Temple of the Sun, at Palmyra; from the Temple of Jupiter at Cyzicus; from temples in Greece and Italy, Egypt, and the Cyclades. Its floor, walls, piers, arcades are overlaid with precious marbles of every hue—snow-white marble from Paros and Pentelicus, azure marble from Lybia, green marble from Laconia, flecked, rose, yellow, and golden marbles from Marmora, Synnada, Phrygia, and Mauritania. On all sides is a magnificent display of wonderful shafts, capitals, cornices, lintels, and panels of colors as variegated as their provenience is manifold. In them we see grayish marbles from sea-girt Proconnesus, verdantique from Thessaly, cipollino from Eubœa, Pavonazzetto from Synnada, lumachelle from Chios, Brocatel from Spain, Fior di Persico from Dalmatia, Bardiglio from the Apennines, giallo antico from distant Numidia and bianco and nero-antico from the far-off Pyrenees, while from the still-worked quarries of Egypt are marbles of emerald green and imperial purple.

Nor is this all. Besides marbles of every hue and from every clime there are borders of green serpentine, columns and panels of jasper of every shade, bands of oriental alabaster of clear honey color from the land of the Nile, exedras of porphyry from the Thebes of the Pharaohs—all arranged so as to produce the most perfect harmony of color and the most impressive effect on the beholders.[40]

When, even in its present defaced and despoiled condition, Santa Sophia is still one of the greatest, if not the greatest, triumphs of Church architecture, what must it not have been when “its domes and vaultings resplendent with gold mosaic interspersed with solemn figures” made it, what is in many respects the most magnificent temple of worship that the world has yet known.

The Grand Opera House of Paris boasts of the beauty of its interior which is adorned with thirty-three varieties of marble and other ornamental stones. It is indeed beautiful, but it cannot compare with the matchless interior of the Church of Holy Wisdom which is embellished by the spoil of the most superb temples of antiquity and the treasures of the richest quarries of the civilized world.

No other monarch has ever had at his disposition such rare and precious building materials as had Justinian for the construction of Santa Sophia and it is safe to say that no one will ever again have materials of such uniqueness and value. When one, therefore, considers all their richness and the admirable manner in which they have been utilized, we can easily understand how the legend soon arose which declares that while the Church of Holy Wisdom was building, the workmen were specially instructed by an angel from heaven. Nor need we go far for the origin of the story according to which Justinian set up a statue “representing Solomon as looking at the Great Church and gnashing his teeth with envy.” And one is not surprised at the rapturous expressions of Corippus, a poet-bishop of the sixth century, when he declares, “Praise of the temple of Solomon is now silenced and the Wonders of the World have to yield the preëminence. Two shrines founded by the wisdom of God have rivaled Heaven, one the Sacred Temple, the other the splendid fane of Santa Sophia, the vestibule of the Divine Presence.”[41]

But the most striking feature of this magnificent structure is its dome. As viewed from below, it seems, as Madame de Staël says of the dome of St. Peter’s, “like an abyss suspended over one’s head,” or as the Byzantian historian, Nicetas Acominatus, declares “an image of the firmament created by the Almighty.”

The eminent architectural authority, Fergusson, speaking of Justinian’s masterpiece, avers, “Internally, at least, the verdict seems inevitable that Santa Sophia is the most perfect and most beautiful church which has yet been erected by any Christian people. When its furniture was complete the verdict would have been still more strongly in its favor.”[42]

But the Ottomans, in taking possession of this unique sanctuary, removed or destroyed its priceless furniture and decorations and concealed its matchless mosaic pictures—pictures which Ghirlandajo declares are “the only paintings for eternity”—with a layer of white-wash! And although in its present condition, it is still, despite Moslem desecration, the delight of the artists and architects of the world, its interior is as far from exhibiting the glories of its pristine state as is the exterior of the Parthenon, since its mutilation by Lord Elgin—an act of vandalism denounced by Byron as “a triple sacrilege”—from displaying the peerless beauty of the sublime creation of Ictinus and Phidias.

Is it then any wonder that Saint Sophia was, from its completion, regarded as the very heart of the Byzantine Empire—that it has ever held the same place in the affections of the Greeks as St. Peter’s, the Cathedral of Rheims, and Westminster Abbey occupy in the hearts of the peoples of Italy, France, and England? And is it a matter of surprise that,

Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine

the Greeks of to-day still cherish the hope that it will, in the designs of Providence, eventually be returned to them and that Christian worship, with all the pomp of the Grecian liturgy, will again be restored under Santa Sophia’s wondrous dome?

It is related that when Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, took possession of Santa Sophia, he observed an Ottoman soldier destroying the mosaics of the church with his mace. “Let those things be,” Mohammed cried, and with a single blow he stretched the fanatical vandal at his feet. And then, in a lower tone, he added, so the historian avers, “Who knows but in another age they may serve another religion than that of Islam?” God grant it!

Nor have the Greeks ever abandoned the hope of one day regaining possession of the City of Constantinople. They claim it as their heritage, which was lost to them by the fortunes of war, and they patiently await the turn in fortune’s wheel when

The city won for Allah from the Giaour,

The Giaour from Othman’s race again may wrest.[43]

After leaving Santa Sophia, I spent some time in the extensive grounds of the Seraglio,[44] which, since the young Turks have come into power, have been used as a public park. About the buildings and the occupants of the Seraglio much has been written—the greater part of it based on imagination rather than on fact. But I have no desire to dwell on

That spacious seat

Of Wealth and Wantonness,

which, for three centuries, was “the heart of Ottoman history” and which for ten generations was the home of palled votaries of pleasure, but too often, alas! the hated prison of innocent victims who were condemned to pander to the basest passions of heartless minotaurs of lust and crime.

To the south of Santa Sophia is all that remains of the Hippodrome which, in its heyday of splendor, was regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Modeled after the Circus Maximus of Rome, it served as a forum, as a race course, and a museum in which were collected the choicest sculptures of Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. Here were statues of Phidias and Praxiteles and other master sculptors of the ancient world. Among them were an exquisite statue of Helen of Troy, “whose beauty of form and feature drove brave men distraught,” and the famed bronze horses of Lysippus—which were carried off by Dandolo to Venice, where they now adorn the cathedral of San Marco—and countless other masterpieces of scarcely less value and beauty.

Besides serving as a race course the Hippodrome, which had, it is estimated, a seating capacity of a hundred and twenty thousand people, was used for every purpose that could attract a large multitude of people. The Spina—a low wall dividing the Hippodrome into two sections—was, in common parlance, “the axis around which the Byzantine world revolved.” It was the favorite place for athletic sports and for the exhibition of wild animals. It was here that distinguished emperors and generals, like Heraclius and Nicephorus and Belisarius, celebrated their victories over the enemies of the empire. It was here that were witnessed not only the pride, the power, and the glories of New Rome, but also its tragedies, its massacres, its decadence, and ruin. In the acme of its magnificence this historic circus, with its forty tiers of marble seats and its superb promenade which surmounted all, was resplendent with the most beautiful works of Greek and Roman art—spoils from Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Mauritania.

Of this marvelous Hippodrome only a part of the site is now visible, while of its ornaments but three are still extant. These are a bare column of masonry once covered with bronze plates which caused it “to gleam like a column of light”; an Egyptian obelisk that antedates the time of Moses, and one of the most ancient relics of Greece. This is the Serpent column from Delphi which, with the bronze Wolf of the Capitol in Rome, “may count as the most precious metal relic which remains from the ancient world.” It bears witness to the final defeat of Xerxes at Platæa, the first great triumph of the West over the East. For eight centuries it served as a pedestal for the golden tripod of the priestess of the god, and during long centuries it was for the Greeks an object of pilgrimage. When, nearly two thousand years later, the East, under Mohammed the Conqueror, was victorious over the West, this secular monument was permitted to remain on the base which has supported it for sixteen centuries that it might continue “to bear witness to the link of New Rome with Old Greece” and endure as a vivid reminder of the pomp of Byzantine rule and of the continuity of civilization.

Scarcely less interesting to me than the age-old remnants of the Hippodrome were the massive and crumbling walls that for a thousand years were the city’s palladium against the barbarian hordes of Asia and Europe. What visions crowd upon the memory as one stands upon this hoary rampart and surveys the scene around one! It was thanks to the impregnable walls of Constantinople no less than to the unique strategic position of the city that Roma Nova was able so long to hold her place as the home of art and letters, history and philosophy; that, in spite of desolating wars which everywhere raged in the rest of the world, and which at times carried their ravaging effects to her very gates, she continued to be the world’s one sure refuge of law, justice, and freedom; that, notwithstanding internecine strife, and changes of dynasties, her government was the one that for centuries afforded the greatest security for life and property; the one under which commerce and civilization were most fostered and most flourishing.

If the walls of Constantinople could speak, what thrilling stories could they not relate of the score of sieges to which they were exposed! For vivid color and breathless interest they surpass the siege of Tyre by Alexander, the siege of Carthage by Scipio, the siege of Jerusalem by Godfrey de Bouillon as described in the glowing epic of Tasso. Unlike the last-named sieges, those directed against the city on the Bosphorus “stand out on the canvas of history by the magnitude of the issues involved to religion, to nations, to civilization.” This is particularly true of the sieges by Saracens, Turks, and Mongols, for, if these barbarians and sworn enemies of the Christian name had succeeded in piercing the walls of this greatest bulwark of civilization before the dawn of the reconstructive work of the fifteenth century, the results to learning, art, Christendom would have been disastrous beyond conception, while progress and social order would have been retarded for untold centuries.

Never, probably, in the history of our race has the possession of any city led to more devastating and longer continued wars, to greater international rivalries and contentions than has the fair capital on the Golden Horn. It was in 673—but little more than a generation after Mohammed’s death—when the Moslems under the Saracen Moawiah laid siege to Constantinople, which was then the greatest and the richest city of the known world. They were defeated but not crushed. Knowing the incalculable treasures the city contained and realizing fully its supreme importance as the center of a world empire, they determined never to desist from their purpose until Constantinople was the capital and sovereign seat of Islam. Not until 1453, after eight centuries of deferred hopes, were their aspirations realized.

For a much longer period has Russia had her longing eyes on what she was wont to call “The Sacred City”—the city which had so long been the goal of the nations of Asia and Europe. From the days of Rurik, the reputed founder of the Russian monarchy, the Muscovites have never ceased to look forward to the time when the peerless city of Constantine would be in the possession of Holy Russia, and when the strategic channel which links the Euxine with the Mediterranean would be under her absolute control.

For a thousand years the forces of Russia continued irresistibly to move toward the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. When Catherine II, “The Semiramis of the North,” in 1787, made her magnificent progress through Southern Russia she entered the city of Kherson under a triumphal arch which bore the inscription “The Way to Byzantium.” As still further expressive of her faith in Russia’s ultimate destiny there was a gate in Moscow named “The Way to Constantinople.”

But this was not all. With the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, she worked out a scheme for a restored Greek Empire, with Constantinople as its capital, the throne of which was to be given to her second grandson. And so sure was she of effectuating her plan that “the boy with sagacious prescience had been christened Constantine; he was always dressed in the Greek mode, surrounded by Greek nurses and instructed in the tongue of his future subjects. That no detail might be lacking which foresight could devise, a medal had already been struck, on one side of which was a representation of the young prince’s head and on the other an allegorical device indicating the coming triumph of the Cross over the Crescent.”[45]

At the famous conference on the raft anchored in the river Nieman, when Napoleon and Alexander I discussed plans for the division of the world’s sovereignty, the Russian monarch demanded, as his share of the partition, the City of Constantinople together with the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. For this he was willing to concede to the French Emperor the most valuable regions on the Mediterranean littoral and to aid him with money and men in his projected conquest of India. But this the ambitious dictator of Europe would not grant. Placing his finger on the map where Constantinople was indicated, he exclaimed with passionate emphasis, “Constantinople! Constantinople! Never. That would mean the empire of the world!” At St. Helena he again gave clear expression to his estimate of the value of Constantinople when he declared “Constantinople est placée pour être le centre et le siege de la dominion universelle.”[46]

Almost exactly a thousand years after the death of Rurik, Russia’s victorious army was at San Stephano within sight of the domes and minarets of the City of Constantine. “At last,” shouted the jubilant soldiers, “we have reached our goal and Czargrad”—their name for Constantinople—“is ours!” Only a few hours more, they fondly believed, and they would see the Greek cross supplanting the Crescent at the dome of Santa Sophia and the dreams of ten centuries finally realized.

But it was not to be. Russia had indeed advanced nearer the goal on which her eyes had been fixed for a thousand years, but the coveted prize, though seemingly so near, was yet far from her grasp. The Treaty of San Stephano had, it is true, established a dominant Slav state in the Balkans which it was intended should be but a simple dependency of Russia and a stepping stone to Constantinople, but the treaty was scarcely signed before England and others of the Great Powers insisted on its revision. This was done at the Congress of Berlin. Here Beaconsfield, in order “to check Russian influence in the Balkans” and to safeguard “the vital requirements of Britain’s Eastern policy,” insisted on the restoration of “the position of Turkey as a European state”—a position which had been practically lost by the treaty of San Stephano.[47]

The Turk is still in Constantinople and is there notwithstanding the loud and reiterated declarations of statesmen from Gladstone to Lloyd George that he was to be cast “bag and baggage” out of Europe for evermore, but, when one remembers that, since the days of Solyman the Magnificent, the imminent downfall of Turkey as a European power has been confidently predicted scores of times; that, since the Osmanlis reached the Bosphorus nearly six centuries ago, no fewer than a hundred plans have been made for the partition of their territory[48] and that recently the English premier, Lloyd George, made the evacuation of Constantinople by Turkey an essential condition of peace—at least until he could have time to change his opportunist mind—one asks oneself how much longer the Sultan will successfully pursue his time-honored policy of divide et impera and how much longer diplomats will continue to insist that the maintenance of the City of Constantine as the capital of the Ottoman Empire is a political necessity, and when, if ever, Russia’s persistent ambition of a thousand years will at last be realized.[49] From present indications there is little likelihood that the jealousies of the more powerful nations of Europe respecting the matchless capital of the Golden Horn will abate or that the traditional ability of Turkey’s astute rulers to play off the Great Powers one against the other will be less marked in the future than in the past.

If, however, there is to be a transfer of Constantinople to some other power than that of the Ottoman Empire, poetic justice seems to require that the aspirations of Greece should receive first consideration. Greek in language and nationality from the days of Byzas until it was lost by the fortunes of war to the followers of Mohammed, this city is claimed by the people that counts among its own a Belisarius, a Pulcheria, a Tribonian, an Anthemius, a Chrysostom, a Gregory Nazienzus—men and women who in eminence and achievement were surpassed by none of their contemporaries west of the Adriatic and who were the glories of the greatest home of art and literature and culture when Russia was yet a land of wild nomads and ignorant barbarians. And this same people claims Constantinople as theirs “by origin and by long possession, a possession which has in some sort gone on both under Frankish and under Turkish rule.”[50]

One of the most interesting and picturesque sights in Constantinople, but of a far different character from those of which I have been speaking, is to be seen on the lower bridge over the Golden Horn. Connecting Galata, the part of the city which is chiefly inhabited by non-Mussulmans, with Stamboul, which is occupied almost entirely by Turks and Moslems of various nationalities, this bridge is frequently crowded with people of every color and from every clime. But what a noisy, jostling, struggling, wrangling, cosmopolitan throng one here encounters! Here one sees representatives from all parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa—bright-turbaned Turks, supple and chattering Greeks, jauntily attired dragomans, gorgeously uniformed kavasses, heavily burdened hamals, round-browed Montenegrins, white-kirtled Albanians, bronzed and sun-dried Bedouins from Arabia, shuffling and high-voiced eunuchs from Nubia and Abyssinia, and high-capped Tartars from the steppes of Russia and Central Asia—all vociferating in a score of languages and dialects, all utterly regardless of those who are round about them.

And such a variety of garbs and partial garbs! And yet they attract no attention in this motley crowd who here, as elsewhere in the East, are accustomed to seeing people appareled in garments of every conceivable style and color. “A man,” as has been observed by one who knows the Orient well, “may go about in public veiled up to the eyes, or clad, if he please, only in a girdle; he is merely obeying his own law”[51]—following a custom which has prevailed among his ancestors through countless generations.

After a tiresome climb I once found myself on the highest platform of the lofty Galata tower. From this point one has probably the best obtainable view of Constantinople and its environment. The panorama which is disclosed is certainly beautiful, superb; but I am not prepared to agree with the enthusiastic writer who declares that “nothing on this globe can surpass it—that it is incomparable in its panoramic variety and sublimity!”[52] I still contend that the palm for enchanting scenic beauty and for magnificent natural panoramas belongs to Rio de Janeiro.

I readily grant, however, that in wealth of legend, romance, and historic associations of every kind New Rome far surpasses the fascinating capital of Brazil. And I am inclined to think that most of those who descant so enthusiastically on the marvelous beauty of Constantinople unconsciously allow their judgments of the city’s present beauties to be colored by the magic and the glamour of the historic past.

Considering the Byzantine capital as the theater of thrilling deeds and notable achievements, it is probably unsurpassed in human interest except by Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. And the views one may have from the height of Galata’s tower are, historically considered, inferior only to those that so impress the spectator who stands on the ruin-crowned summit of the Palatine, the majestic portico of the Parthenon, and the sanctified heights of the Mount of Olives.

As I stood on the dizzy balcony which surmounts the lofty tower and beheld the magnificent vistas that opened up before me on every side, I realized as never before what a unique site was occupied by the City of Constantine. On the north are the cypress and palace-crowned hills of the winding Bosphorus and the delightful Sweet Waters of Europe, which are even more attractive than the rival Sweet Waters of Asia. On the south gleams the silver expanse of the Marmora, in which are mirrored the picturesque Islands of the Princes, over which hover so many morbid and voluptuous memories of the past. On the east across the Strait stand out in bold relief the Maiden’s Tower and the Golden City of Scutari, both wrapped in an atmosphere of heavy and exotic passion and “holding their secrets of the Orient closely hidden from the eyes of Europe.” On the hills laved by the glimmering waters of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, and bounded on the west by the historic plain of Thrace, proudly sits, half veiled by a tremulous amethystine haze, the peerless Queen of the East in all her majesty and shedding on the fascinated beholder a strange sense of mystery—seeming not a living, palpable thing, but rather a brilliant phantasm, or a rainbow dream of mystic remoteness.

Almost within a stone’s throw of where I stood was the Golden Horn sprinkled with hundreds of delicate, pointed caiques and bearing on its sapphire bosom ships of all sizes and flying the flags of all nations. It was up this famous stream that Byzas, the reputed son of Neptune, steered his frail craft nearly seven centuries before our era. And it was on the southern bank of this sheltered haven that the daring navigator, with his doughty Megarans, laid the foundation of Byzantium—named after himself—which was to play such a remarkable rôle in the world’s great drama.

A thousand years later—almost to a day—Constantine the Great abandons the city of Romulus and selects that of Byzas as the capital of the great Roman empire. On foot, with a lance in hand, the Emperor leads a solemn procession, and, under divine command—jubente Deo, as he phrased it—traces the boundary of the future metropolis. His assistants, astonished at the over-growing circumference of the destined capital, ventured to observe that the contemplated area of a great city had already been exceeded. “I shall continue to advance,” replied the Emperor, “until the Invisible Guide who precedes me bids me halt.”

It was across the Golden Horn that “blind old Dandolo”—that marvelous doge of ninety-seven years—led the Venetian forces against Constantinople and awakened the degenerate Greeks from “a dream of nine centuries—from the vain presumption that the capital of the Roman Empire was impregnable to foreign arms.” The marble mausoleum of this remarkable man—whose physical and mental powers were vigorous to the last—occupied a place in Santa Sophia until it was transformed into a mosque, and, even to-day, one may see in one of the galleries of the venerable fane a marble slab bearing in almost illegible characters the name of Henricus Dandolo.

And it was across the Golden Horn that Mohammed II passed when he entered the breached walls through New Rome as conqueror. But he was not able to effect an entrance into the ill-fated city without passing over the lifeless body of its noble defender, the valiant Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Byzantine Cæsars.[53]

For six centuries Constantinople had been an impregnable bulwark against the forces of Islam. For nearly twice that space of time she had successfully resisted the menaces and attacks of the barbarians of the north—Goths, Huns, Avars, Russians, Bulgarians, Chazars—and had proudly defied the power of Chosroes, Timur, Bayazid, Harun-al-Rashid, and other leaders of savage hordes from Persia, Arabia, and Central Asia. Unlike Old Rome, which frequently opened her gates to invaders from the north of the Danube, New Rome never once yielded to her Teutonic and Slavonian foes. Although besieged more than a score of times between the fourth and the thirteenth century[54] she was able to withstand every assault however furious or long continued. And this she did after the vast empire which once extended from the Tigris to the Guadilquivir had been so reduced that little was left of it but the capital itself, which, at the time of its capture by the Turks under Mohammed II, was scarcely more than a besieged fortress.

How the occupation of Constantinople by Mohammed the Conqueror, has complicated the political, military, and economic conditions of Europe for nearly five centuries is a matter of gloomy history. Owing to its matchless position it was long the natural center of the world’s commerce, the clearing house between Europe and Asia. Destined by nature itself to be the seat of two worlds, Constantinople must, as Freeman well observes, “remain the seat of imperial rule as long as Europe and Asia, as long as land and sea keep their places.”[55]

The transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, the foundation of Constantinople in 330 A. D., was one of the master-strokes in the history of civilization—indeed from the material and strategic point of view, I hold it to be the greatest. Rome, Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Berlin, Washington, became capital cities by the gradual acts of the rulers in the course of years. But in ten years Constantinople remade the center of the civilized world. Nothing so stupendous in civic origins has ever been accomplished before or since, for its effects have been maintained with rare and partial breaks for eleven, nay, for fifteen centuries. The foundation of Alexandria by Alexander, of Antioch by Seleucus have some parallels. Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, Delhi have had fluctuating histories. Peter’s creation of Petrograd was a splendid mistake, which has ended in hideous failure. But the creation of Constantinople marks Constantine as one of the truly great, beside Julius, Trajan, Charles and Washington.[56]

But more remarkable than anything that has yet been said of the Queen City of the Bosphorus is her marvelous continuity of imperial rule. From the time when Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, when, in the works of Dante,

Per cedere al Pastor si fece Greco,[57]

New Rome—notwithstanding all its wars and vicissitudes, all its changes of race and religion, all its changes of laws and customs and institutions—has been the continuous seat of empire for sixteen centuries. This is something that is without parallel in the history of our race.

Rome was the local center of empire for barely four centuries.... The royal cities that once flourished in the valleys of the Ganges, the Euphrates or the Nile were all abandoned after some centuries of splendor, and have long lost their imperial rank. Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, Athens, had periods of glory but no great continuity of empire. London and Paris have been great capitals for at most a few centuries; and Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg are things of yesterday in the long roll of human civilization.[58]

This exceptional continuity in Constantinople may, it has been asserted, “be ultimately traced to its incomparable physical and geographical capabilities.”

But while I contemplated the capital of Constantine as it lay bathed in the tremulous and ethereal atmosphere of an autumn afternoon and recalled its past history, enveloped in the mist of years—a history which then seemed more like a confused and troubled dream than a veritable record of stirring and vivid actualities—I presently lost sight of the wars and sieges and conquests of which this Castle of the Cæsars has so frequently been the theater and thought of its rather as the erstwhile home of art and literature, as the renowned center of religion and culture.

Among its ecclesiastical rulers were some of the brightest luminaries of the Eastern Church. There was the scholarly St. John Chrysostom, “the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit.”[59] There was the illustrious St. Gregory Nazienzus, whom Villeman calls the greatest Oriental poet of Christendom. There was Photius, “whose learning and width of culture was astonishing and whose library-catalogue is the envy of modern scholars.” And there were those two learned women, the Empress Eudocia and the Princess Anna Comnena, who, as Gibbon phrases it, “cultivated in the purple, the arts of rhetoric and philosophy.”[60]

It was in Constantinople that, at the command of Justinian, was framed the famous Code that bears his name—the most important of all monuments of jurisprudence and which, notwithstanding subsequent modifications, is still the basis of all legislation throughout the civilized world.

It was here that Byzantine art took its highest flights. Santa Sophia was but one of the churches of New Rome from which western artists and architects drew their inspiration. We see this in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto and in the countless Italian edifices which exhibit the evidence of Byzantine influence.

And it was here, in the libraries and monasteries, that was preserved that precious heritage of Greek thought and Greek genius, which, at a later age, was to be transferred to Western Europe, and which, through the activity of Byzantine scholars, was to be the foundation of the Renaissance. During the period immediately preceding the Conquest of Constantinople there was, declares Gibbon, “more books and more knowledge within the walls of Constantinople than could be dispersed over the extensive countries of the West.”[61]

“When the arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses” from the Queen City of the East, Greek learning sought an asylum on the banks of the Arno and the Tiber. Among the first of Greek scholars to find a congenial home in the land of Dante and Petrarch were Janon Lascaris and Manuel Chrysoloras. They were received with open arms in the universities of the Peninsula and lectured with signal success to vast numbers of eager and enthusiastic students of every age and condition. But nowhere were they and others of their countrymen of a later date[62] accorded a more cordial welcome than in the palaces of the Medici and at the courts of Leo X and Nicholas V. Under such illustrious patrons, Greek letters flourished amazingly and quickly prepared the way for the great humanistic movement that culminated in the literary triumphs of Politian, Reuchlin, and Erasmus.

But the fall of Constantinople was epoch-making not only in its relation to the Humanistic Renaissance but also in its effect on the economic and commercial development of Europe. Before the Ottomans achieved the conquest of the Græco-Roman Empire of the East, this region constituted what has happily been designated as “the nerve-center of the world’s commerce.” But no sooner had it passed into the hands of the Ottomans than the great trade routes between the Orient and Europe were completely blocked “by a power inimical to commerce and still more inimical to those Christian nations for whose benefit intercourse between the East and West was mainly carried on.”

It was then imperative for Europe, unless it was prepared to forego its trade with the East, to discover a new route to the Orient, which would be beyond the interference of Ottoman power. This much desired result was accomplished by two of the most decisive events in the world’s history—“the rounding by Vasco da Gama of the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of the New World.” By these far-reaching achievements “the center of gravity, commercial, political and intellectual, rapidly shifted from the south-east of Europe to the northwest; from the cities of the Mediterranean littoral to those of the Atlantic. Constantinople, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, Marseilles were deprived at one fell swoop of the economic and political preëminence which had for centuries belonged to them” ... and the Mediterranean, which for ages had “been the greatest of commercial highways, was reduced almost to the position of a backwater.”[63]

Among the many names given to the Ottoman capital by the peoples of the East is that bestowed upon it by the Arabs, namely, El Farruch—the Earth-Divider. In view of what has been said in the preceding pages no epithet could be more expressive of the truth. For, since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, together with its two appanages, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, has constituted the chief line of demarcation between the East and the West, between the Cross and the Crescent.

One of the most difficult and delicate problems which diplomacy has yet to solve—war has been impotent to bring about a solution—is the future status of the historic city of the Bosphorus and the relations between the powers of Islam and the Christian nations of Europe.

As the solution of the problem cannot, apparently, be effected by conquest or by a sordid exploitation of the lands of the East, it seems that the time has now arrived when more unselfish and more Christian methods should be applied than those based on force and international rivalries.

We owe much, very much, to the East. From her, through Greece and Rome, have come our civilization and culture, our art and literature. From her has come the religion that molds the mind and purifies the heart of Christendom. To her, therefore, we owe an immense debt of gratitude, a debt that can be paid only by helping her in her present lethargic state and by aiding her to return to her former condition of vigor and progress. We should, consequently, endeavor to understand the needs of the East in order that we may the more intelligently contribute towards her resuscitation—moral and intellectual, as well as material—and that we may more rationally coöperate with her in regaining, at least in a measure, that position of preëminence which she occupied when she was acclaimed the cradle of civilization and the mother of culture; when Bagdad and Damascus were famed centers of learning; when Saracen scholars made known to the nations of the West the treasures of Greek science and philosophy; when it was said, “In all other parts of the world light descends upon earth, from Holy Bokhara it ascends.”

Is this an impossible task? It is certainly not unworthy of being essayed by the lovers of humanity, who are beholden to the East for the greatest blessings they now enjoy. The welfare of our race and the peace of the world demand the removal of the impassable barriers which have so long separated the Orient from the Occident. Of all the plans now engaging the minds of men for securing permanent peace in the Near East and achieving, at the same time, its spiritual and social regeneration, this seems to be the only one that is likely to have a successful issue—the only one which has a real basis in genuine altruism and Christian righteousness.

CHAPTER IV
THE HELLESPONT AND HOMER’S TROY

Now let

Us fly to Asia’s cities of renown!

Already through each nerve a flutter runs

Of eager hope, that longs to be away;

Already ’neath the light of other suns

My feet, new-winged for travel, yearn to stray.

Catullus, XLVI.

After awaking from a protracted reverie on the summit of Galata’s lofty tower I found, to my surprise, that I had spent much more time there than I had originally intended. Twilight, delicate and ethereal, was beginning to fall and to veil the mosques and minarets and cypress-crowned heights of solemn, crafty, mysterious Stamboul. An animated pageant was slowly wending its way through the Grand Rue de Pera—part of it on its way to popular resorts of amusement and relaxation; part returning from the cares of office and counting-room to the repose of homes on the tranquil banks of the palace-fringed Bosphorus.

But I could linger no longer in the contemplation of such fascinating scenes. The previous day I had made arrangements with a friend to take the steamer that very evening for Chanak Kalesi, on the Dardanelles. One of my long unrealized dreams had been to visit the site of ancient Troy. Several times I had been near it, but pressing engagements had always prevented me from gazing on the spot

Where stood old Troy, a venerable name,

Forever consecrated to deathless fame.

A few moments after our steamer left her moorings in the Golden Horn, she began to round Seraglio Point. Galata and Pera twinkle in the gathering gloom. The domes and minarets of Stamboul rise like dark, shadowy monsters above the somber groups of low, wooden houses by which they are surrounded. Broken stars quiver in the swift-flowing waters of the Bosphorus and, while we are still gazing at the venerable, ivy-mantled walls and towers that so long guarded the City of Constantine, we enter the Sea of Marmora—known to the ancients as the Propontis—the sea before the Pontus or the Euxine of which Herodotus says “there is not in the world any other sea so wonderful.”

Early the following morning we were in the storied channel of the Thracian Hellespont—now more familiarly known as the Dardanelles. Like the Bosphorus, the Hellespont is replete with human and historic interest, and, as I contemplated its rugged cliffs, I recalled Lucan’s words that here

Each rock and every tree recording tales adorn.

This is particularly true of that section of the channel at Fort Nagara, formerly known as the Strait of Abydos. For it was

Here young Leander perished in the flood,

And here the tower of mournful Hero stood.

It was here that the venture-loving Byron swam across the Hellespont. And it was here that Xerxes spanned the Straits with the famous double bridge that enabled his vast army to cross over to the Thracian shore on his way to Greece, where “the barbarian despot sought to repress in the deadly bonds of Persian thralldom the intellect and the freedom of the world.” But the epoch-making victory of Salamis frustrated all his plans of conquest. Accompanied by his counted myriads the Persian invader, sure of his prey, entered Greece with all the wantonness and deadly hostility of barbaric pride; after his defeat by Themistocles, when army, fleet, and treasure were gone, he was forced to flee like the meanest fugitive. The Italian poet, Luigi Alemanni, tells in a single line the fate of the proud organizer of this widely heralded campaign when he writes:

More than a god he came, less than a man he fled.

A century and a half after the flight of Xerxes, Alexander’s army, under Parmenio, crossed the Hellespont at the place where it had been bridged by the ambitious and vainglorious Persian despot. It was at, or near, this spot that Frederick Barbarossa crossed at the head of the Third Crusade. And it was at this same spot that Solyman Pasha, the warlike son of Orkhan, passed from Asia to Europe, where, in 1354, he planted the Osmanli standard and where it has ever since flown as a sign of Moslem faith and of Moslem victory over the hated Giaour.

We disembarked at the town of Chanak Kalesi, which Europeans usually call the Dardanelles. It is noted as being at the narrowest point of the Hellespont—the channel here is about fourteen hundred yards in width—and was until recently the headquarters of the general in command of the Turkish troops in the many forts which defended the Strait.

In the long-discussed plans of Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia, for joint dominion of the world, the Russian monarch always insisted on securing possession not only of the Bosphorus and Constantinople but also of the Strait of the Dardanelles. But the French emperor just as persistently refused to acquiesce in the Czar’s demands. For a while Napoleon seemed disposed to yield the Bosphorus and even Constantinople, but nothing could induce him to consider for a moment the granting to his ally of control of the Dardanelles—the key to the Mediterranean.

Alexander insisted that, owing to its geographical position, the Dardanelles should belong to Russia; that, having Constantinople, he should also hold the key to the Ægean. But Napoleon retorted that, if Russia possessed this important waterway, she would at once become mistress not only of the commerce of the Levant and of India, but she would also be a constant menace to Toulon, to Corfu, and to the commerce of the world.

But the Czar and his advisers would not take a refusal. They realized that they would never again have so good an opportunity of gaining possession of the long-coveted capital on the Bosphorus and of the channel connecting the Euxine with the Mediterranean as when Napoleon was counting on their coöperation with him in his great schemes of conquest in Asia. Negotiations continued without interruption from the conference of Tilsit to that of Erfurt, and nothing stood in the way of their successful issue except the possession by Russia of the narrow strait between the Marmora and the Ægean. In return for this Alexander was prepared to accede to Napoleon’s every wish.

In a letter of Caulaincourt, the French Ambassador at St. Petersburg, written to Napoleon in 1808, the envoy declares that Russia, “once mistress of Constantinople and its geographical dependencies, will go with us not only to India, but to Syria, to Egypt, wherever we may judge it useful to employ her fleets and draw her armies. Besides this, she will leave the French Emperor free to organize the south and the middle of Europe as he may elect. Reserving for herself only the affairs of the north, she will abandon to him the direction of all the others, will not interfere with his gigantic operations, will renounce all jealousy and will consent that the partition of the Orient shall in fact become the partition of the world.”

Concluding his letter to Napoleon, Caulaincourt writes:

Let your majesty reunite Italy, perhaps even Spain to France; change dynasties, found kingdoms; demand the coöperation of the Black Sea fleet and a land army for the conquest of Egypt; demand any guarantees whatsoever; make with Austria any exchanges that may be expedient; in one word, let the world change place, if Russia obtains Constantinople and the Dardanelles, we shall, I believe, be able to have her consider everything without uneasiness.[64]

Could anything evince more clearly than this remarkable statement the supreme value which Alexander placed on the Dardanelles as a Russian outlet to the Mediterranean? And could a more tempting offer have been made to Napoleon, who was then the arbiter of Europe and seemed on the point of becoming the dictator of the world, than that which was dangled before his eyes by his ambitious ally? But the compact that Russia so eagerly desired was not to be made. For when both the Czar and the Emperor appeared to be near an agreement on their long-discussed plans of world domination, Spanish valor and patriotism and Austrian diplomacy were concerting to check the Corsican’s vaulting ambition and to prepare for his ultimate downfall at Waterloo.

In a preceding page reference has been made to the Arab name—El Farruch—Earth-Divider—of Constantinople. The same can with equal reason be applied to the Dardanelles. For during long centuries it, with the Bosphorus, has been an effective barrier between the East and the West and has constantly held in check Russia’s aspirations towards the Mediterranean. How much longer will El Farruch continue to keep apart the nations of the earth, and how long will it prove to be the paramount crux of the Near Eastern Question and the occasion of long and sanguinary wars? This is a question that only the future—and, apparently, the very distant future—can answer.

After inspecting the fortifications of Chanak Kalesi and Kilid Bahr and making a visit to the site of ancient Abydos, whence Xerxes is supposed to have surveyed his vast army as it crossed the Hellespont, and whence one has a splendid view of the narrowest part of the Strait, we prepared to continue our journey to the site of ancient Troy.

Our first objective was Eren Keui, a flourishing Greek village, where we purposed stopping over night. This short trip of about three hours we made on horseback. Our road lay along the edge of the Strait over wooded hills, well-cultivated valleys, and picturesque villages surrounded by numerous vineyards and olive groves. From the hills we had splendid views of the Dardanelles, the Thracian Chersonese, the distant Ægean, and “many-fountained Ida” beyond the Trojan plain.

On our way we passed the site of Dardanus—a town also known as Teucris—from which the Dardanelles takes its name. The epithet Hellespont, Sea of Helle—which has also been given to the Strait—is derived from the mythical Helle, who is said to have been drowned near the southern entrance of the channel that bears her name.

From an eminence near Eren Keui, which we reached under an overclouded sky, we were captivated by the fascinating prospect that burst upon our view. For some miles ahead of us, lying in a tremulous azure haze,

We saw the dark outline of the Trojan plain,

Misty and dim, as things at distance seem

Through the fast waning light of summer eve.

We lost no time in reaching the spot which, for me at least, had been one of peculiar and ever-growing interest since, as a youth, I had fallen under the magic spell of the immortal author of the Iliad and Odyssey. And I was not long on the plain of Troy when I realized the full force of Byron’s words when he declares:

It is one thing to read the Iliad at Sigeum and on the tumuli, or by the springs with Mount Ida above and the plain and the rivers of the Archipelago around you, and another thing to trim your taper over it in a snug library—this I know.[65]

But there is nothing in this historic region that will appeal to the ordinary tourist. It is a circumscribed plain about eight miles long by four broad, on which he will see little beyond a few bare hillocks and tumuli and occasional hunts or villages of the poor people who here have their home,[66] and hear little as he treads his way through the scattered brakes that cover much of the ground except the voice of a solitary bird which at intervals bursts into song and then is still.

Nor is there anything here to attract those self-satisfied iconoclasts who not only deny that Homer wrote the Iliad but also deny his very existence. Neither is there anything here to impress the followers of Wolf and other so-called atomists who insist that the Iliad is but a collection of ballads composed by a number of rhapsodists.[67] Still less is there here aught to interest those who not only maintain that Homer and his authorship of the Iliad are myths but who also contend that there is no evidence whatever for believing that there was such a place as Troy or for supposing that the traditional Troy was located in this place, or that there ever was such a conflict as the Trojan War, which is so graphically described in the Iliad.

No. To be thrilled by a visit to the well-fought field of Ilium, one must share the sentiments which animated Byron when he contemplated what Catullus so well denominated:

Troia (nefas) commune sepulchrum Asiæ Europæque,

Troia virum et virtutum omnium acerba cinis.[68]

He must share the sentiments of thousands of others—-poets, artists, historians, kings, statesmen, commanders of vast armies—-who, during the past twenty-five centuries, have found on the site of Ilium, once the

City of unconquered men

an inspiration in their work and an incentive to high achievement which they could not find in the same degree in any other place in the wide world.

When Xerxes, with his army, was on the way from Sardis to Greece he stopped at Troy, and “when he had seen everything and inquired into all particulars, he made an offering of ten thousand oxen to the Trojan Minerva, while the Magians poured libations to the heroes who were slain at Troy.”[69]

And the first thing Alexander the Great did on arriving in Asia, previously to beginning his stupendous campaign against the Persians, was to make a pilgrimage to what was once the city of Priam. The famous Macedonian was a credit to his master, Aristotle, both as a scholar and as a philosopher. He was, moreover, a great admirer of Homer and slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. Ascending the acropolis of New Ilium, he, like Xerxes, sacrificed to Minerva and also to the shade of Priam, which he wished to propitiate before starting on his expedition into the heart of Asia. And, as an assumed descendant, through his mother, of Achilles, he offered an oblation on the tumulus of Achilles, beneath which, it was believed, the ashes of the hero, together with those of his friend Patroclus, were preserved in a golden urn. After this he made a careful topographical survey of the Trojan plain. And so convinced was he of all that tradition claimed for it that he promised to enrich and fortify the New Ilium,[70] but was prevented by premature death from carrying his project into execution.

Similarly Julius Cæsar, of the gens Julia, which traced its origin to Iulus, son of Æneas, and was proud of its legendary descent from Trojan stock, lavished honors on Troy,[71] as did also the Consul Livius, who offered sacrifice on the acropolis of Ilium, in the name of Rome, and not only exempted it from tribute but also gave it jurisdiction over that part of the surrounding country known as the Troad.

If then, one would come under the spell of Troy, if one would experience the magic influence of its spiritus loci, one must visit it as did Byron and Cæsar and Alexander—free from the withering doubts raised by modern atomistic criticism and with a reasonable belief not only in the existence of Priam’s city but also in the personality of Homer and in his authorship of the marvelous epic on the Trojan war. And we must remember that for nearly three thousand years there was no question regarding the identity of that Greek whom Dante calls poeta sovrano, the one, he tells us, who was

Of mortals the most cherished by the nine.[72]

We must recall the estimation in which he was held by the ancients, who never wavered respecting the identity of

The blind old man who dwelt on Scio’s rocky isle.

So paramount, indeed, were the reputation and influence of the immortal poet “whose genius had breathed inspiration into the national life of Greece” that it was said, when tradition respecting his sublime achievements was still fresh,

Seven cities now contend for Homer dead

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

The genius of Homer [declares a recent writer] was worshiped as god-like and temples were erected to his honor at Chios, Alexandria, Smyrna, and elsewhere; games were also instituted in his memory; Apollo and Homer were actually worshiped together at Argos, the one as the god of song, the other of minstrelsy.[73]

Filled with these thoughts and with a life-long love of the poet’s masterpieces, I visited every nook and corner of the Trojan plain and with unrestrained rapture contemplated the places which had so haunted my youthful imagination when I first became acquainted with the sublime pages of the Iliad. For the time being I forgot all about Wolf, Lachman, Hermann, and other advocates of the atomistic theory respecting Homer’s matchless epic and, like a child reading a fairy tale, I loved to picture before my eyes the wonderful events which Homer so vividly describes and which seemed to me almost as real as they were to the actual spectators three thousand years ago.

Still in our ears Andromache complains,

And still in sight the fate of Troy remains;

Still Ajax fights, still Hector’s dragged along,—

Such strange enchantment dwells in Homer’s song.

Fancy was animated as I strolled along the storied Simois, which “sprouted ambrosia-like pasture” for the horses of Hera and Athena, and the serpentine Scamander—“fair-flowing with silver eddies”—which formerly entered a bay upon the shores of which the Greeks hauled up their ships, and as I stood before the reputed tumuli of Achilles and Patroclus, Ajax and Antilochus. But it was more vivacious far when I ascended the hill of Hissarlik, which Schliemann has identified as the site of Homer’s Troy. From the highest point of this elevation one has a view that is truly entrancing. On the north is the Hellespont—the road, as the ancients conceived, to the Cimmerians and the Hyperboreans—with all its myth and legend. To the west are the murmurous waters of the island-studded Ægean. Near the coast line is vine-clad Tenedos, whither the Greek fleet withdrew while the wooden horse was being taken into Troy. Further beyond is Lemnos, where Hephæstus is said to have fallen when he was hurled from Olympus. To the northwest is rock-ribbed Imbros, and further afield is Samothrace, from the towering peak of which Poseidon looked down upon Troy during its investment by the Greeks. To the northeast is the eminence of Callicolone, whence Apollo and Mars, the protectors of Ilium, watched the operations of the contending Greek and Trojan armies. To the eastward is snow-crested Ida—whence Zeus observed the combatants—whose lofty pines and valonas

Wave aloft

Their tuneful, scented, dove-embowering shade,

And ’neath twilight broods as gray and soft

As when of yore the shepherd Paris strayed

With glad Œnone; while their bleating flocks

Grazed the wild thyme bright with ambrosial dew;

And lovers piping ’neath the o’ershadowing rocks

Laded with love the breezes as they flew.

It was on such panoramas that Helen was wont to fix her wistful gaze—fair Helen, who

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars

*****

... launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.

Yes, I dreamed as I had previously dreamed in Sparta, the famed abode of Menelaus and his faithless Helen; as I had dreamed in “gold-abounding” Mycenæ, the home of Agamemnon, “King of men”; as I had dreamed when contemplating desolate Delphi, Corinth, and Olympia, their glory gone and their temples in ruins; as I had dreamed on the summit of cloud-capped Parnassus, haunt of the Muses, and on the banks of the rippling Cephisus, where Plato taught and where

Girls and boys, women and bearded men

Crowded to hear and treasure in their hearts

Matter to make their lives a happiness.

At all these places, as on the site of Troy’s citadel, I loved to recall the Greeks’ love of beauty and the marvelous mythopœic faculty of their poets, and it required no spur to fancy to imagine that I was, for the moment, in actual communion with the thoughts and feelings of the world’s masters of beauty in art and literature.

The plain of Troy [it has been said] has been a battlefield not only of heroes, but of scholars and geographers, and the works which have been written on the subject form a literature to themselves.[74]

This is true. But, however much students of the Iliad may have disagreed about the location of the city of Priam, about the courses of the Simois and Scamander and certain minor details, all have been compelled to recognize the accuracy of the poet’s topographical descriptions and the appropriateness of the epithets which he applies to the most striking features of the enchanting landscape which he so graphically depicts. He does not, of course, give the numbers and distances, as some of his critics would seem to demand, that a civil engineer would require for a contour-line map. This would violate entirely the most elementary canons of poetical treatment. But he does use numbers and distances so far as they are necessary to give reality to the action of the poem. And though his realities are in the highest degree idealized, nevertheless, so fully do they meet the general exigencies of time and place that they prove almost to demonstration that Homer was thoroughly familiar not only with Troy but also with all the surrounding region.[75]

The epithets applied by the poet to the mountains, islands, rivers, and other natural features described in his matchless work show that he must have been intimately acquainted with them, not by hearsay but by personal inspection. Thus when he speaks of the “rapid current” of the Hellespont, of the “broad-flowing” and “eddying” Scamander, of “the peak of lofty Samothrace appearing over the intervening mass of Imbros,” thus enabling Poseidon to look down from its summit on the plain of Troy, we are convinced that the author of the Iliad had carefully examined on the spot the objects he so vividly brings before our view. And so it is in his graphic delineations of “lofty,” “many-fountained” Ida, of “many-crested,” “dazzling”

Olympus, the reputed seat

Eternal of the gods, which never storms

Disturb, rains drench, or snow invades, but calm.

So graphic and exact indeed are the epithets and descriptions of Homer that they far surpass those of the later poets of Greece. In this respect he constantly reminds one of Dante, that consummate master of epithet and of brief but most exact description, who had the rare faculty of expressing the import of a whole sentence in a single word. I was then more than ever before impressed with the truth of Gœthe’s words:

Wer den Dichter will verstehen

Muss in Dichter’s Lande gehen.[76]

As we wandered along the willow-lined Mendere—the “divine” and “flower-fringed” Scamander—and threaded our way through clumps of tamarisk, agnus castus, and odoriferous Artemisia, frequently stopping in our course to admire a beautiful lotus or asphodel and to gaze on “spring-abounding” Ida’s heights, whence swift-footed Iris sped to sacred Ilium at the command of ægis-bearing Jove, the question arose as to the location of the Olympus, whence the “king of gods and men”

Surveyed the walls of Troy, the ships of Greece,

The flash of arms, the slayers and the slain.[77]

The doubt was raised by the fact there are in Greece the islands of the Ægean and in Asia Minor nearly a score of peaks and mountain ranges that bear the name of Olympus, and the further fact that Olympus is almost a generic name in this part of the world for a lofty mountain or chain of mountains. On the confines of Mysia and Bithynia and visible from the summit of Ida, which overlooks the Trojan plain, there is a high mountain which is called Olympus, which many writers have declared to be the one on whose summit mythology placed the home of the gods,

Where Jove convened the senate of the skies.[78]

But a single quotation produced by the Hellenist of our party sufficed to prove that the Olympus which Homer had in view was that located in northern Thessaly—the Olympus on which Hesiod placed the battle of the gods and Titans and on which mythology from the earliest time located “the residence of the dynasty of the gods of which Zeus was the head.” The quotation in question refers to the visit of Here to Zeus, who was then on Mt. Ida observing the belligerents on the Trojan plain, and reads:

But Juno down from high Olympus sped;

O’er sweet Emathia and Pieria’s range,

O’er snowy mountains of horse-breeding Thrace,

Their topmost heights she soared, nor touch’d the earth.

From Athos then she cross’d the swelling sea,

Until to Lemnos, God-like Thoas’ seat

She came.[79]

From Lemnos and Imbros, veiled in cloud,[80] skimming her airy way she passes, to “spring-abounding Ida.” Could anything indicate more clearly than this the relative positions of Olympus and Troy and fix more definitely the position of the home of the Olympian gods as conceived by the sovereign poet of Greece?

Although I had always been specially interested in Greek archæology I felt no inclination, during my short visit to Troy, to indulge my taste for archæological pursuits. I was satisfied to accept the conclusions of Schliemann and Dorpfeld and Virchow respecting the location of Ilium and the bearing of their discoveries on the reality of Homer and the Trojan war. And, as I roamed the plain on which the Greek army was encamped, I could not help hoping that further investigation would prove that the startling discoveries of Schliemann at Mycenæ would remove the last vestiges of doubt regarding the actual existence of Agamemnon and Cassandra.[81] This would be a tangible proof of the reality of at least one of Homer’s heroes. It would, too, be a most interesting contribution to the Homeric question and would be specially gratifying to those who, in spite of certain modern critics, have unfalteringly clung to the views concerning Homer, Troy, and the Iliad which have universally prevailed since the days of Aristarchus and the Homeridæ.

The blind bard of Chios then is to-day, as he always has been, as he always will be so long as men shall love supreme excellence in letters, a living personality whose wonderful epics have exercised a wider and a more potent influence on the intellectual progress of our race than all other epics combined. No books, except perhaps those of the Bible, have been more frequently quoted nor have any received more attention from poets, orators, dramatists, and lovers of the noblest models of literary style.

Another remarkable fact is the gift of immortality which Homer, with Jovelike power, has conferred upon his heroes. Although but the creations of the poet’s genius, they stand forth to-day, men of flesh and blood, in all the vigor and freshness which characterized them thirty centuries ago. And there never have been among the children of men any who are better known, or whose names more frequently occur in song and story than the undying characters of the Odyssey and the Iliad. These facts impress every lover of Homer as he surveys the plain of Troy from the spot on which stood the Pergamus and recollects the achievements of the blind bard’s heroes during the ten long years of the Trojan war.

And, like Achilles and Agamemnon, Priam and Hector, the Troy of Homer also is immortal. Notwithstanding the efforts of a jealous Demetrius or an ill-informed Le Chevalier to transfer the glory of Troy to some other locality, its claims, as Schliemann has shown, still stand on as firm a basis as ever. Yes, of a truth,

Thou livest, O Troy, forever unto men.

*****

All to the magic of that world-sung song,

That god-breathed legend dost thou owe thy fame;

The golden weft the blind man wove so long,

Hath linked to immortality thy name.

His tale to many another’s lyre hath given

Its stirring echoes; and in every age

What story more than of thy woes hath riven

Their hearts who dream upon the poet’s page.

And though for long thou in the dust hast lain,

Still, still the visions of the mighty past,

The memory of thy struggle, and thy pain,

Thy god-built turrets,—these forever last.

CHAPTER V
THE CRADLE OF THE OSMANLIS

Have Time’s stern scythe, man’s rage and flood and fire

Left naught for curious pilgrims to admire?

A few poor footsteps may now cross the shrine,

Cell, long arcade, high altar, all supine;

Bound with thick ivy broken columns lie,

Through low rent circles winds of evening sigh,

Rough brambles choke the vaults where gold was stored,

And toads spit venom forth where priests adored.

Nicolas Michel.

Our next side trip, after visiting Troy, was a short excursion to Brusa which—partly by steamer and partly by rail—is easily accessible from Constantinople. I was especially eager to see this famous place, for its historic associations are numerous and varied. It was to Brusa—anciently Prusa—that Hannibal fled after his defeat by the Romans. There are indeed, some authorities who maintain that the great Carthaginian general was the founder of Brusa. It was from this city, which was once large and prosperous, that Pliny the Younger, while governor of Bithynia, wrote his celebrated letter to Trajan, in which he asked for instructions concerning the policy to be pursued regarding “the stubborn sect of Christians” who were then rapidly increasing in numbers and who, by refusing to offer sacrifices to the gods and by persistently avoiding all pagan rites and observances, had made themselves specially obnoxious to Roman officialdom. This letter[82] is remarkable as being one of the first notices in Roman writers respecting the members of that incipient Church which was eventually to become mistress of the capital of Cæsars.

In Ottoman history Brusa is notable for having been the capital of Orkhan, the second ruler of the Osmanlis and for having long been the favorite resort of Moslem scholars, artists, poets, and dervishes who enjoyed a great reputation among their coreligionists for their reputed sanctity. And even after the transfer of the Ottoman capital to Adrianople and subsequently to Constantinople, Brusa continued to be one of the sacred cities of the Mohammedans. For here were buried the first six Osmanli sovereigns besides more than a score of Ottoman princes and here “more than five hundred pashas, theologians, teachers, and poets sleep their last sleep around their first Padishas.” Among the turbehs which particularly impressed me was that of the Serbian princess who, although the wife of a Sultan, was able to preserve untainted the religion of her Christian parents. Here were erected numerous medresses—colleges—mosques and public buildings whose size and grandeur were for centuries a favorite theme of Moslem poets and historians. In beauty of design, richness of material, and exquisite finish some of the mosques—especially the renowned Green Mosque—are even to-day regarded as the most perfect specimens of Osmanli architecture.

Our visit to Brusa was most enjoyable and was an ideal introduction to our long journey through the Ottoman possessions in Asia. For in this old capital of the sultans we find more strikingly exhibited than in noisy, metropolitan Constantinople those dominant characteristics of most Asiatic cities—apathetic immobility, undisturbed quietude, and dreamy repose.

But before taking the train at Haidar Pasha we spent a day in wandering through Scutari and Kadi Keui which are just across the Bosphorus from Stamboul. Like Brusa both of these places—especially Scutari—are distinctively Oriental in character and are well worthy of a visit. Both of them, too, have played prominent roles in the long, historic past and, although they are now so overshadowed by the great city of Constantine, they, nevertheless, offer many attractions that are well worthy of the attention of the student and the historian.

Scutari was formerly known as Chrysopolis—the Golden City. Its special attractions for tourists are the Howling Dervishes, whose peculiar devotional exercises take place every Thursday, and the Great Cemetery which is celebrated as the largest and most beautiful Moslem of burying places. It is a great forest of cypress trees, more than three miles in length. Each grave has its tombstone, usually a very modest one. Some of the epitaphs I observed were very touching, especially those that terminated with a prayer that a Fatihah—the first chapter of the Koran—might be said for the soul of the deceased.

This chapter [writes Sale, the learned translator of the Koran] is a prayer and held in great veneration by the Mohammedans.... They esteem it as the quintessence of the whole Koran, and often repeat it in their devotions, both public and private, as the Christians do the Lord’s Prayer.[83]

It is an integral part of each of the five daily prayers which are said by every good Mussulman. It is, moreover, recited over the sick, at the conclusion of an action of importance, but it is, above all, the favorite prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed taking, in this respect, the place of the Catholic requiescat. As translated by Rodwell it reads:

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds!

The compassionate, the merciful!

King on the day of reckoning!

Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help.

Guide Thou us on the straight path,

The path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;—with

Whom Thou art not angry, and who go not astray.

As we wandered along the pathways of this last resting place of so many myriads of Mohammedans—from Constantinople[84] as well as from Scutari—I was impressed by the number of men and women who were here absorbed in prayer for their dear departed,[85] or in tending the flowers which adorned the graves. These quiet mourners, with the countless turtledoves, which make their home in the branches of the funereal cypress trees and which seem to keep up continuously their subdued moan, give to this gloomy necropolis a solemnity and an impressiveness that are almost lacking in such ostentatious cities of the dead as Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo of Genoa.

A short drive from the Great Cemetery brings us to the modern town of Kadi Keui which, like Scutari, is also a part of the municipality of Constantinople. It was formerly known as Chalcedon and was founded seventeen years before Byzantium. By the oracle of Delphi it was designated as “the city of the blind,” because its founders were blind to the superior position of the tongue of land on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, on which the City of Constantinople now stands.

Like most other cities in this part of the world it has witnessed many vicissitudes and has been repeatedly captured and sacked by invading armies from both Asia and Europe. Famed in antiquity for its temple of Apollo and for having been the birthplace of Xenocrates, the most distinguished of Plato’s disciples, its temples and palaces, after its capture by the Ottomans, served the sultans as a stone quarry when they required building material for their mosques in Constantinople.

But, although not a vestige of Chalcedon’s former grandeur now remains, it will always be remembered as the city in which was held in 451 the fourth œcumenical council of the Church, in which was condemned the teaching of Eutyches and the Monophysites respecting the human and the divine nature in Christ. When I recalled the fact that this council, including the representatives of the absent bishops, was attended by six hundred and thirty bishops; that more than six hundred of these belonged to the Eastern Church, and remembered the very small number of the episcopate that is now found in this part of the world, it was easy to understand the present backward condition of civilization and culture in Asia Minor and Syria. What a change, indeed, since the days of those great doctors of the Oriental Church—the Cyrils, the Gregories, the Basils, the Ephrems, the Chrysostoms—whose learning and eloquence have from their time been the admiration and edification of the whole of Christendom.

A short distance to the north of Kadi Keui is the Haidar Pasha military hospital which was the scene of Florence Nightingale’s heroic labors during the Crimean War. The rooms which she occupied while here are still preserved intact and as I passed through them, I recalled Longfellow’s beautiful tribute to her in the verses:

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand

In the great history of the land,

A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here

The palm, the lily and the spear,

The symbols that of yore

Saint Philomena bore.[86]

It is but a few minutes’ walk from Florence Nightingale’s hospital to the Haidar Pasha railway station. On the way thither we passed through the well-kept British Cemetery where rest eight thousand British soldiers who died of wounds and disease during the Crimean War. The large granite obelisk here by Marochetti is a conspicuous object and is visible at a great distance. The Haidar Pasha station, the north-western terminus of the Anatolia[87] Railway was, before its partial destruction during the war, a most imposing building and compared favorably with the best of similar structures in Europe.

Shortly after we take a seat in a cozy corridor car our train swings towards the picturesque shore of the Marmora. From the window of our compartment we have the most lovely views of the Princes Islands, and of the quaint little fishing villages which sprinkle the eastern shore of the Marmora and which are so perfectly mirrored in its placid waters. For hours, as our train moves alternately along the verge of lofty cliffs and near the level of the emerald expanse of the Propontis, we have a succession of panoramas that are scarcely less fascinating than those seen along the famous driveway between Sorrento and Amalfi.

The dancing waves of the Marmora, as they gently lap along its curving shore, are as soothing as a lullaby to a cradled child. And all the while they are murmuring the same old story that greeted the ears of the seafaring Megarians as they passed by nearly three thousand years ago and which reached the crews of the trim Venetian argosies whose arms proudly floated on their flags and pennants as they conveyed the treasures of India and China from the ports of the Euxine to the gem-blue haven of the peerless Queen of the Adriatic. The noonday sun, playing over the rippling waters, changes them in rapid succession from the delicate color of the lapis lazuli to the scintillating iridescence of the opal.

Along the coast line one contemplates with ever-increasing delight countless views of entrancing beauty and interest—gray moss-covered rocks which are ever of tender loveliness and reposeful silence; trembling vines and waving figs and olives and oranges; picturesque adobe cottages adorned with graceful creepers; romping children who make the air ring with their joyous shouts; men and women in the most colorful garbs quietly performing their daily tasks and all the while completely immune from the feverish haste that so distracts the toiling millions of Europe and America and converts their life into a long and troubled nightmare. The secret is that the normal Osmanli peasant is satisfied with little. Permit him to cultivate his small plot of ground in peace and to remain undisturbed in the bosom of his family and he is perfectly happy. Under such conditions he would find nothing to envy even in the lot of the denizens of the Happy Valley.

On our arrival at Ismid we were reminded that we were traveling over classic ground. For this small Turkish town was under the Roman Empire one of the largest cities in Asia Minor. It was here that Diocletian had his seat of Government; it was here that he began his sanguinary persecutions against the Christians and it was here that he abdicated the throne. It was in his imperial villa near here that death claimed Constantine the Great and it was in a neighboring castle that Hannibal committed suicide. And Nicomedia was the birthplace of Arrian, the illustrious disciple of Epictetus, who, from notes of his master’s lectures, prepared the famed Discourses of Epictetus. He also wrote the scarcely less celebrated Anabasis of Alexander the Great.

Our first stop, however, was at the little town of Lefke where we found waiting for us an araba which we had ordered the day previously to take us to Isnik—about four hours’ drive from the railroad—which is but a small village of mud houses, but which during Roman and Byzantine times was, under the name of Nicæa, the rival of Nicomedia. Even while in the possession of the Sultans of Rum it was as a center of art, poetry, and science scarcely less renowned than Cordova and Bagdad. And while Constantinople was in the possession of the Latins, after its capture by the Crusaders, Nicæa served as the temporary capital of the Byzantine Empire.

There are few places in Anatolia which make a stronger appeal to the student than the ancient city of Nicæa. Its ivy and fern-covered ruins, walls, baths, theaters, churches, mosques, towers, gates, aqueducts, sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions of all kinds are in the highest degree interesting and offer a mine of most precious material for the antiquary or the historian.

To us Nicæa was a

Relic of nobler days and noblest arts,

and, as we wandered among the ruin-covered streets of the once famous city, we seemed to hear the monitory words

Lightly tread, ’tis hallowed ground.

But my object in visiting this famous place was not knowledge so much as impressions. I was attracted thither by the same magnet that drew me to Troy and Chalcedon. I wished to get the local color and secure a local picture of a place which has filled an important page in history and which for centuries was the goal of contending armies—Asiatics and Europeans, Moslems and Christians. But the predominant reason for my visit to this scene of ruins was the fact that it had been a witness of two of the Church’s most noted œcumenical councils.

The first council which was held here in 325 was likewise the first General Council of the Church. It is noted for its condemnation of Arianism and for the formation of the Nicene Creed which, as subsequently amplified by the Council of Constantinople, has ever since been the symbol of faith used not only by the Catholic Church but also by those Eastern Churches which are no longer in communion with Rome and by many of the Protestant Churches as well.

In the second council of Nicæa, which was the seventh of the Church’s general councils and which convened in 787, was condemned the doctrine of the Iconoclasts, which so long agitated the Eastern Church and which was the cause of so many relentless persecutions throughout the whole of the Byzantine Empire. Even Moslems, who regard every kind of representation of the human form as an execrable idol, could not have been more fanatical and pitiless in their dealings with anti-Iconoclasts than were Leo the Isaurian, who was suspected of favoring Islamism, and his son Constantine Copronymus. During their reigns, not to speak of those of several of their successors, the churches of the Byzantine Empire were as bare of images and statues as were the mosques of Medina and Damascus.[88]

By a peculiar combination of events it fell to the lot of two women—the Empresses Irene and Theodora—to undo the work of the Iconoclastic emperors and to put a stop to the persecutions which had caused the exile, the imprisonment, or the death of countless numbers of the noblest men and women of the empire, whose only offense was fidelity to the faith of their fathers.

Few things in Anatolia are more competent to awaken memories of the past glories of Asia Minor than a visit to the spot that on two momentous occasions witnessed the assemblage of hundreds of bishops from both the Orient and the Occident. What a contrast between the present condition of Nicæa and that at the time when the assembled fathers subscribed to that creed which has ever since been accepted as the symbol of faith of nearly the whole of Christendom!

In Asia Minor alone there were, in the fifth century, no fewer than four hundred and fifty episcopal sees. And an imperial law was enacted that every city should have its own bishop—unaquœque civitas proprium episcopum habeto.[89] But what a change has come over this once flourishing portion of the Christian Church. The famous cities—Nicæa, Chalcedon, and Ephesus—in which four general councils were held and which in Roman times were all capitals of provinces—have long since been reduced to ruins. So completely, indeed, had Ephesus disappeared from sight that little was known even about its topography until the Austrian Archæological Institute began its excavations there but little more than two decades ago.

And so it is throughout the length and the breadth of Anatolia.[90] Great and popular cities, which, in the heyday of the Roman Empire were noted for their splendid temples, baths, gymnasia, colonnades, Greek theaters, and Roman amphitheaters, which were all graced by masterpieces of art in marble and bronze—frequently replicas of matchless Greek originals—are now either entirely deserted or tenanted by a few nomadic shepherds or poor tillers of the soil whose only homes are small mud hovels that barely protect them from the elements.

Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia. In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that galaxy of philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has ever known.[91]

In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society which a French writer has happily named le printemps de la Grèce.

For even in the face of recent discoveries in Sparta [writes a distinguished Orientalist], it may be said without hesitation that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first full-bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is a Greek civilization come to full consciousness of itself and destined to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius. Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however, the Ionian section of the Hellenic race from the accident of geographical position served more than any other for a vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole Greek people. All who follow the development of free social institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where the city-State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence. Students not only of literature, but of all the means of communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia that the alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were to carry it about the civilized world. And who that belongs to, or cares for, the republic of art would ignore that “bel elan de génie duquel est né la statuaire attique”?[92]

Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,” first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets, while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”

But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon, long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world.

How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past?

And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns—marbles which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which they formed a part.

But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters, they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic—Græcia barbariæ lento collisa duello—Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela; the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is embraced in the term “Ancient History.”

The cradle of the Osmanlis was the small village of Sugut about a day’s ride on horseback to the south of Nicæa and about the same distance to the east of the Mysian Olympus. For it was here that Osman, the founder of the Osmanli dynasty, first saw in 1258 the light of day. The first thirty years of his life was that of a village chieftain of a pastoral community, who lived in peace among his neighbors and whose fighting men did not number more than four hundred. He was then fired with the ambition to extend his boundaries and at the end of ten years he found himself at the head of four thousand warriors and in direct contact with the decadent and moribund Byzantine Empire.

When Osman died in 1326 his emirate of Sugut had been extended to the Marmora and the Euxine and included in the conquered territory the important cities of Brusa, Nicomedia, and Nicæa. This was the beginning of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. The same emir of Sugut was also the founder of a dynasty whose male succession has endured uninterruptedly for more than six centuries and the first ruler of a people in which there is so complete a blending of Asiatic and European blood that they have been called a distinct race.

No other dynasty can boast such a succession of brilliant sovereigns as those who conducted the Ottomans to the height of renown in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. First there was Osman, the originator of a race, next came his son Orkhan, the founder of a state, and then Osman’s grandson, the creator of an empire. These founders of an empire were succeeded by Bayazid who, on account of his rapid movements, was called Ilderim—lightning; Mohammed, who retrieved the losses inflicted by Timur; Murad II, the antagonist of Hunyady and Skanderberg; Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople; Selim I, who annexed Kurdistan, Syria, and Egypt, and Solyman the Magnificent, the victor on the field of Mohacs and the besieger of Vienna. Never did eight such sovereigns succeed one another—save for the feeble Bayazid II—in unbroken succession in any other country; never was an empire founded and extended during two so splendid centuries by such a series of great rulers. In the hour of dismay, as well as in the moment of triumph, the Turkish Sultan was master of the situation.[93]

But not only were the Ottoman Emirs and Sultans of this period eminent as rulers and empire builders. With few exceptions, they, as well as many of their successors, possessed, like Napoleon, the rare faculty of choosing the right men for the right place. This is especially noteworthy in their choice of generals, admirals, and grand viziers who were selected for the high positions, which they filled with such distinction, without regard to their nationality or accidents of birth. Among them were Jews and eunuchs, Greek and Italian, German and Polish renegades.[94] There was the Italian Cicala, the victor of Karestes; the German Mehemet Sli, son of a Magdeburg musician, who commanded the main army in Bulgaria; Omar who from a Croatian clerk became the leader of the Turkish army in the Crimea. Chief among the great admirals were the Italian Ululj Ali, the Greeks Kheyr-ed-din and Urug Barbarossa from the island of Lesbos; Piali Pasha, from Croatia. It was chiefly through the aid of the last three that Solyman the Magnificent, was able to secure control of the Mediterranean and the Arab states of Northern Africa and to extend his devastating raids not only to the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain but even beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, to waylay the argosies which were returning to Cadix laden with the gold and jewels of the Indians.[95]

But more distinguished than the Sultan’s noted generals and his corsair admirals was the long series of men who occupied the Grand Vizierate. The most famous of these were the Abyssinian eunuch Bashir; the renegade Jew, Kiamil Pasha; the Herzegovinan, Mohammed Sokalovich; the Albanian, Mohammed, Kiuprili, who, from a kitchen-boy in the Sultan’s palace, became the most noted grand vizier that ever ruled the great Ottoman Empire. He was succeeded in the Grand Vizierate by his son Ahmed who, as a statesman, was scarcely less celebrated than his father. A short interval after Ahmed’s death, Mustafa Kiuprili, a second son of Mohammed became grand vizier and his rule was marked by the same consummate statesmanship that so distinguished the rule of his father and brother. Their rise is especially interesting for, as observes Von Hammer, “the history of the empires of the Orient offers only four instances of members of the same family succeeding one another in the dignity of the Grand Vizierate.”[96]

In this brief reference to the men who achieved such distinction in building up and extending the Ottoman Empire, we must not forget the women who played so important a rôle in the history of Turkish politics and statecraft. Three of the most notable of these were the Muscovite Roxalana, who passed from a public slave market to the imperial harem to become the wife of Solyman the Magnificent, the greatest of the Ottoman Sultans; the Venetian Safia who at an early age was abducted from her home on the Grand Canal, taken to Constantinople and sold to the Sultan Murad III, by whom she had a son who, after his father’s death, became Sultan Mohammed III; Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, who, like the Empress Josephine, was born in the little island of Martinique and who, in her youth, was an intimate of the future consort of Napoleon Bonaparte, but who eventually fell into the hands of Algerian pirates by whom she was sold in the slave market of Algiers. Thence she was conveyed to Constantinople as a present to the Sultan, Abdul Hamid I, to whom she bore a son who became Mahmud II, the grandfather of the late Abdul Hamid II.

By their beauty, wit, and fascinating manners these three women gained an unbounded influence over the Sultans with whom their lives were cast and, what is more remarkable, they were able, notwithstanding their numerous antagonists in the harem, to retain their ascendancy in the affections of their lords long after the season of youth and beauty had passed. In overweening ambition, diplomatic finesse, unfailing resourcefulness in high resolve, in achieving success in the face of the greatest obstacles, these three Christian captives were worthy rivals of their more fortunate sisters of the West—Bianca Capello, Catherine de’ Medici, and the Marquise de Pompadour.

From the preceding pages, it is clear, as Freeman points out that,[97]

the institution of the tribute children was the very keystone of the Ottoman dominion. They won the empire for the Turk and they kept it for him.... During the most brilliant days of Ottoman greatness the native Turks were well-nigh brought down to the condition of a subject caste. Manumitted bondmen from the East, voluntary renegades from the West, Greek and Slavonic tribute-children directed the councils and commanded the armies of the Sultans. A Grand Vizier or a Captain Pasha born in the faith of Islam was indeed noted as a portent. Never did the craft and subtlety of devil or man devise such a tremendous engine of tyranny. The chains of the conquered nations were riveted by their own hands. Their best blood was drawn away to provide against any degeneracy in the blood of their conquerors. Their strongest and fairest children, the most vigorous frames and the most precocious intellects, those whom nature had marked out as chiefs and liberators of their own race, were carried off to become the special instruments of their degradation. This fearful institution, combined with the possession of Constantinople, and with the marvelous hereditary greatness of the ruling family, preserved the House of Othman from the common fate of Oriental dynasties.

According to a long prevalent opinion, the Osmanlis are a Turkish race who achieved the conquest of Asia Minor before they invaded Europe and before they became masters of the Byzantine Empire. The fact is they had subjugated the entire Balkan peninsula before they obtained possession of more than the northwest corner of Anatolia, and had maintained Adrianople as the Ottoman capital eighty-seven years before Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, transferred it to its present location on the Bosphorus.

Nor were the Osmanlis, even in their earliest days, composed entirely, as is so often asserted, of Turkish nomads from the East. Far from it. They were welded from the heterogeneous elements—Greeks, Carians, Phrygians, Galatians, the followers of Osman, and other peoples who then inhabited the north-western part of Asia Minor. And, as early as the reign of Orkhan, the son and successor of Osman, this complex blending of peoples became not only a distinct race but a race with a national consciousness.

So far are the Osmanlis from regarding themselves as heirs of the Seljukian Turks or as transformed Turkomans that they have always endeavored to remove this erroneous impression which has so long prevailed concerning their people. The distinguished historian, Mouradja d’ Ohsson, declares:

The Osmanlis employ the word “Turk” when referring to a coarse and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the epithet Turk belongs only to the peoples of Turkestan and to those vagabond hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of Khorassan. All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the collective name of Osmanlis from Osman I, the founder of the Monarchy, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.[98]

The Osmanlis, as we have seen, were of mixed blood, even while still confined to Asia Minor. But after their conquests in Europe and further expansion in Asia they “became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis, who, under Solyman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.”[99] It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire.[100]

Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have been classed as raiders like the devastating hordes of Timur and Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists and empire builders. This was the secret of their success and the explanation of the marvelous development of the Empire of the Sultans, which, as the eminent Austrian historian, Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall, has declared “was more rapid in its rise than Rome, more enduring than that of Alexander.”

The causes which contributed to the rapid development of the Osmanlis from the four hundred warriors of Osman into the vast armies of his successors and to the achievement of such extraordinary results in so short a period of time were, as the historian Finlay points out, “in some degree similar to those which had enabled small tribes of Goths and Germans to occupy and subdue the Western Roman Empire.”[101]

But there were other contributory causes which enabled the Osmanlis so quickly to become masters of the Byzantine Empire and to make themselves a menace to the whole of Europe. Chief among these were the conflicting ambitions of numerous aspirants to the Byzantine throne and the rivalries of the petty chieftains of the Balkan Peninsula and the commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa. All these purely secular aims made anything like joint action against the followers of the Crescent quite impossible.

It was Cantacuzenos, a traitor to his empress, the widow of Andronicus II, who introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. After usurping the Byzantine throne, he gave his daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the emir Orkhan in exchange for six thousand soldiers to aid him in his struggle against his legitimate sovereign. By his infamous betrayal of his empress and country he contributed more than any single factor to the ultimate downfall of the Byzantine Empire.

It was the despot Theodore Paleologus who invited the Osmanlis into Greece to support him in his contest with the Greeks and the Franks. It was the Serbian prince Stephen Bukcovitz who formed an alliance with the emir Bayazid to whom he gave his sister as wife and for whom he commanded a contingent in the Ottoman Army—even against his coreligionists. When the Osmanli forces, after their signal defeat by Timur at Angora, were faced with annihilation at the hands of the victorious Tartars, it was the Greeks, Genoese, and Venetians who saved them from destruction by transporting them across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to Europe where their relentless pursuers were unable to follow them.

But these are only a few instances of the aid which the Ottoman conquerors received from the Christian nations of Europe. “In their conquest of the Balkan peninsula it is remarkable,” declares a recent writer, “that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke.”[102] The victories of Bayazid in the region of the Danube were largely due to the coöperation of his Christian vassals. And in his invasion of Hungary he was more beholden to the Wallachians than to his famed corps of Janissaries.[103]

Yet more. For, contrary to a common opinion, he received no assistance whatever from Saracens or Persians, for the simple reason that these peoples did not join forces with the Ottomans until a much later date.

The Osmanlis did not cross the Taurus until more than a century after they had passed the Balkans and did not become “masters of Asia Minor until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded in Europe as a fait accompli.”[104]

And it is equally true that “whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.”[105]

Besides the causes just enumerated, there were others of quite a different nature that made for the phenomenal military achievements of Osmanlis in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. They were the same causes which had so greatly favored the ready submission of the peoples of Syria and northern Africa and which had so potently contributed towards the rapid diffusion of Islam in all countries which bordered the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Byzantine Empire had long been afflicted by incompetent and decadent rulers. The tyranny and the vexations of exarchs had become intolerable. The people were overburdened with taxes and their property was in a large measure confiscated. Under such conditions the Saracens and the Ottomans came as liberators to the long-suffering, down-trodden populations. By embracing Islam, the Christians of the Orient were relieved from the oppressive taxes of Byzantium and entered again into the possession of their sequestrated property. Even when they refused to accept the Koran they recovered their lands by the payment of a moderate capitation tax and were thus enabled to live under the protection of Moslem law which took no notice of the religious controversies of rival Christian sects. This liberal policy of Islam towards its Christian subjects—a policy which safeguarded their persons and property—following as it did on the heels of the odious tyranny of the Lower Empire—was an important factor in the marvelously rapid extension of Islam and in the easy domination of the conquering Ottomans and Saracens. In Asia Minor, particularly, Mohammedanism achieved an easy triumph because it was opposed to Byzantine despotism which was the object of universal execration.

But nothing, probably, contributed more towards the rapid conquest of the Osmanlis than their spirit of tolerance in matters of religion. This will, I know, seem strange to those who, from their youth, have listened to the story of the atrocities of that mythical personage, “the Moslem warrior with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other.”

But [writes one who has made a special study of the subject], whether their tolerance was actuated by policy, by genuine kindly feeling, or by indifference, the fact cannot be gainsaid that the Osmanlis were the first nation in modern history to lay down the principle of religious freedom as the cornerstone in the building up of their nation. During the centuries that bear the stain of unremitting persecution of the Jew [in western Europe] the Christian and the Moslem lived together in harmony under the Osmanlis.[106]

To one who is familiar with the teachings of the Koran and the policy of Islam since the days of Mohammed there is nothing surprising in this tolerance and religious freedom which Osmanlis and Moslems have always accorded their Christian subjects. “Let there be no compulsion in religion,”[107] declares the Prophet, and again it is written, “Wilt thou compel men to become believers? No soul can believe but by the permission of God.”[108]

Nor were these and numerous other declarations of the Koran of similar import ever ignored by the leaders of Islam in their dealings with their non-Moslem subjects. There have been, it is true, frequent outbursts of fanaticism, even of persecution among Mohammedans, which resulted in much suffering on the part of the Christian population and in putting in force against them very intolerant measures. But the persecutions and harsh ordinances were not so much the result of religious antagonism as of political conditions at the time. Not a few of them are traceable to a distrust of the loyalty of Christians towards their Moslem rulers or to the intrigues of Christian nations like Russia whose secret emissaries have been responsible for so much of the agitation in Asia Minor for generations past. Others again may be traced to the bad faith of certain European powers in their dealings with Moslem rulers, or to the “harsh and insolent behavior of Christian officials” in the service of Mohammedan sovereigns.[109]

Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out their Christian subjects or banished them from their dominions as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the English the Jews, for nearly four centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Selim I (in 1514) or Ibrahim (in 1646) to have put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred forty thousand Shiahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious belief among his Mohammedan subjects. The muftis who turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose did so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.[110]

“The very survival,” therefore, “of the Christian Churches to the present day, is,” as the same author pertinently observes, “a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Mohammedan governments towards them.”[111]

Ecclesiastical writers of the epoch of the Mohammedan conquest give still another explanation of the rapid progress of Moslem armies, which was quite in accord with the spirit of the time. God wished, they declared, to chastize the Christians for their infidelity and to compel them to do penance for their manifold heresies. In their view it was not the astounding conquests of the Mussulmans that led to the apostasy of such vast numbers of Christians. It was rather the numerous and widespread defections of heretical churches which rendered the conquest of Islam so easy that it surprised the victors as much as the vanquished. Moslem arms, then, according to these writers were but an instrument of divine vengeance, or, as one of them expressed it, peccatis exigentibus victi sunt Christiani.[112]

As one traverses the small territory which was the cradle of the Osmanlis and reflects that the people to whom the insignificant emir of Sugut gave his name were, from their first appearance in history, almost within sight of the City of Constantine, one cannot help admiring their marvelous transformation from retainers of a village chieftain to heirs of the empire of the Cæsars, to masters of vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe.[113] From the humblest beginnings they gradually became a people who can boast of the longest continued dynasty in Europe; and who can point in their early history to a rare series of brilliant rulers and a line of sovereigns who have occupied a throne which has been immovable from the days of Mohammed the Conqueror, nearly five centuries ago, and which, notwithstanding menaces from many quarters, seems destined to remain immovable for many long generations to come.

CHAPTER VI
HOME LIFE OF THE OSMANLIS IN ANATOLIA

Truths can never be confirmed enough,

Though doubts did ever sleep.

Shakespeare “Pericles” V. I.

No part of Asia Minor possesses greater interest for the traveler of a studious turn than that which borders the Anatolian Railroads. And this, as the historian well knows, is saying much indeed. For from time immemorial the peninsula of Asia Minor has been the great battlefield between the Orient and the Occident. Topographically it is like a great bridge over which, as has been well said, “the religion, art and civilization of the East found their way into Greece; and the civilization of Greece, under the guidance of Alexander the Macedonian, passed back again across the same bridge to conquer the East and revolutionize Asia as far as the heart of India. Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, have all followed the same route in the many attempts that Asia has made to subdue the West.”[114]

It is the bridge over which passed the famed “Royal Road,” so graphically described by Herodotus, which extended from Ephesus on the Ægean Sea to far-off Susa in southern Persia. To make the journey between these two cities required, according to the same historian, no less than ninety days. And it was the bridge over which the Christian pilgrims were wont to pass on their way from Europe to the Holy Land, and the bridge also which was crossed by the Crusaders under Godefroy de Bouillon, Louis VII of France, and Frederic Barbarossa when they sought to recover Jerusalem from the Mohammedans.

The course of the Anatolian Railroad is, for the most part, the same as that of a great military highway in Roman and Byzantine times from Nicæa to Dorylæum. And the scenery along it, especially between Ismid and Eski-Shehr, is often of rare beauty and grandeur. In places it is much like that of southern Colorado and northern California. There is the same succession of smiling landscapes—emerald valleys dotted with modest homesteads, broad stretches of meadow land sprinkled with sleek herds and happy flocks, noble forests of oak and pine, walnut and sycamore. In some localities the vegetation is almost of tropical luxuriance and the road is fringed by a wild tangle of bramble and brushwood tapestried with clematis and ivy and woodbine in a flaming setting of dog-rose and azalea.

As we approach Bilejik eastward of the snow-capped Mysian Olympus the character of the scenery completely changes. The grade of the road rapidly increases and as we pass along gorges and cañyons, through tunnels and over bridges and describe innumerable curves we realize that we are ascending the famed table-land of Anatolia and are nearing Sugut, the earliest home of the Ottoman Turks.

Eski-Shehr, from which a branch of the Anatolian Railroad runs to Angora, the ancient Ancyra, is a flourishing town and, thanks to its finely equipped railway shops, is the home of a large number of railway employees and their families. Before the world war an excellent school for the benefit of the children of the employees was established here and was well attended. It was conducted on the German system and instruction was given in German. Among the languages taught, besides German, were Greek, French, Turkish, and Armenian. The town is noted for being the chief center of the world’s supply of meerschaum, a commodity from which the Turkish Government derives a handsome revenue. From Eski-Shehr we went to Afium-Kara-Hissar, from which great quantities of opium are annually shipped, and thence to Konia, anciently Iconium, which is the western terminus of the Bagdad Railway.

But more interesting far than its scenic attractions and its historic ruins, its railroads and various industries, are the people of Anatolia. And by the people I mean not the foreign element—the Greeks, Armenians, Circassians, and others, so conspicuous in Smyrna and Constantinople—but the Osmanlis. For it is not in the large cities of Turkey, where there is always such a heterogeneous population, that the Ottoman is found at his best but in the small towns and villages of the interior of the country and particularly in that portion of the Ottoman Empire which formerly constituted the emirates of Osman and Orkhan.

No people in the world, it is safe to say, have ever been more misunderstood or more misrepresented than the Osmanlis. For generations they have been regarded as a nation guilty of every crime and steeped in every vice. But since the Bulgarian agitation, in 1876, when Carlyle wrote “the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question, and the country left to honest European guidance,” the Osmanlis have been treated as a nation of pariahs who had not to their credit a single redeeming feature.

They have been denounced as cruel, bloodthirsty, treacherous, dishonest, intolerant, and fanatical in the extreme. They have been pilloried as a nation of gross voluptuaries totally devoid of all moral sense and incapable of any noble sentiment and generous action. They have been stigmatized as a cancer on the body of humanity that should be dealt with in the most drastic manner by the Great Powers of Europe. Gladstone expressed public opinion when, speaking on the Eastern Question, he said, “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying away themselves.... One and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.”

But what is the truth about the Osmanlis? Are they the vile and abominable people which Carlyle’s epithet would indicate? And are the Christian nations of Europe justified in adopting towards them what the English Conservatives aptly termed “Gladstone’s bag and baggage policy”?

Let us see.

First of all it may be premised that most of the above indictments against the Turks have been made by people who have little or no personal knowledge of them, or by people who have been governed by passion or prejudice or have been actuated by selfish or political motives. And, secondly, it may be asserted as a fact that cannot be gainsaid that those who have lived among the Turks any length of time and have had an opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted with them find them to be thoroughly good, gentle, brave, and loyal to the core. And the longer one lives among them and the better one knows them the greater is one’s admiration for them. This is especially true of the real Turk—the Osmanli—particularly those of the peasant and bourgeois class in Anatolia. These are as honest and upright as they are temperate, pious, and religious.

The piety and the devotion of the Moslems, their gravity and solemnity and reverential attitude during prayer, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, are of such character as to make a deep impression on even the least religious. “I have never entered a mosque,” writes Renan, “without a deep emotion, and—shall I say it?—without a certain regret at not being a Mussulman.”[115]

This devout character of the Mohammedans which so profoundly impressed Renan, appealed with equal force to the poet who wrote:

Most honor to the men of prayer,

Whose mosque is in them everywhere!

Who amid revel’s wildest din,

In war’s severest discipline,

On rolling deck, in thronged bazaar,

In stranger land, however far,

However different in their reach

Of thought, in manners, dress or speech,—

Will quietly their carpet spread,

To Mekkeh turn the humble head,

As if blind to all around,

And deaf to each resounding sound

In ritual language God adore,

In spirit to His presence soar,

And in the pauses of the prayer,

Rest, as if rapt in glory there.

Many, if not most of the erroneous notions which have been obtained respecting the Osmanlis have had their origin, at least in the minds of the great majority of people, in the ludicrous conceptions which have long been current regarding the harem life of these much maligned people. When a harem is referred to in Europe or America it is pictured as consisting of a swarthy, fierce, and sensual pasha, seated on a broad divan, garbed in richly embroidered robes, armed with a highly ornate scimitar, and contentedly smoking his narghile while his ever-youthful wives are entertaining him with music and dance and song.

Nothing could be more preposterous, or further from the reality. For monogamy and not polygamy is the rule in the Ottoman Empire especially in Anatolia, and always has been. The Koran does, indeed, permit polygamy but under such restrictions that a plurality of wives is confined to those who are able to make due provision for their support. And even among the wealthy monogamy is daily becoming more prevalent. Thus the late Sultan, Mohammed V, unlike some of his polygamous predecessors, had but a single wife and to her, also unlike his predecessors, he was legally married.

Indeed, so unpopular has polygamy become among enlightened Mussulmans that an eminent authority on the subject declares that “if Mohammedanism had a Pope and a Church, in a word, an authority always living and invested with the right to modify the precepts of the Koran, in order to adapt them to the needs of the age, it is almost certain that polygamy would already have disappeared.”[116]

Much of the prevailing misconception concerning the harem life in the Orient arises from the lamentable ignorance in our western lands regarding the true meaning of the word harem. To many who should know better it is synonymous with a place of debauchery, whereas, it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of this. Derived from the Arabic word harim, Turkish harem, it signifies anything forbidden or a sacred thing or place. Thus the part of a Moslem’s home which is assigned for the exclusive use of his wife and children, for their female servants and friends is called the harem. It is their sanctuary to which no males are admitted except the immediate members of the family. It may be but the half of a Bedouin “House of hair,” or the wing of a marble palace on the Bosphorus but it is still the harem—the sacred abode, the sanctum sanctorum, of the feminine members of the household and women visitors.[117]

In ordinary Ottoman houses the harem occupies the upper story and is the best and most commodious part of the building. The usual term employed to designate the wife’s apartment is haremlik, while that occupied by the husband—his reception room where he receives his male friends—is known as selamlik, and is generally on the ground floor. The women’s apartment is always recognized by its screened windows. The occupants of the haremlik can thus see everything in the immediate vicinity without being seen.

The name harem applies not only to the wife’s part of the home but also to the sections reserved for women on tram cars and steamers, and to the women’s waiting rooms in railway stations and women’s compartments on railway trains. The harem, thus understood, is an institution that has very much to recommend it. It secures its occupants a privacy which, in the estimation of Oriental women, more than counterbalances their apparent loss of liberty.

But, contrary to what is usually thought, the harem is not a Mohammedan institution. It long antedates Islam for, as archæological investigations in the Orient clearly evince, there were separate apartments for women in the buildings of ancient Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia.[118]

Nor do the inmates of the harem consider themselves as imprisoned in their houses like birds in a cage. Far from it. Mrs. Meer Ali, an English lady who married a Mohammedan gentleman and resided twelve years in Lucknow, India, clearly states the Oriental women’s view of harem life when she writes:

To ladies accustomed from infancy to confinement, this kind of life is by no means irksome. They have their employments and their amusements, and though these are not exactly to our tastes, nor suited to our mode of education, they are not the less relished by those for whom they were invented. They, perhaps, wonder equally at some of our modes of dissipating time and fancy we might spend it more profitably. Be that as it may, the Muslim ladies, with whom I have been long intimate, appear to me always happy, contented and satisfied with the seclusion to which they were born; they desire no other, and I have ceased to regret that they cannot be made partakers of that freedom of intercourse with the world we deem so essential to our happiness, since their health suffers nothing from that confinement by which they are preserved from a variety of snares and temptations; besides which they would deem it disgraceful in the highest degree to mix indiscriminately with men who are not relations. They are educated from infancy for retirement and they can have no wish that the custom should be changed which keeps them apart from the society of men who are not very nearly related to them. Female society is unlimited and they enjoy it without restraint.[119]

What has been said of the harem may also be asserted of the yashmak—the veil worn by most Oriental women, irrespective of race or creed. When women appear in public,—and they have great liberty in this respect, if properly veiled—this garb or the tcharchaff, possesses many advantages which Christian as well as Moslem women would be loath to forego. For like the latticed window of the harem it enables them to see without being seen and like the caliph of the story, they can freely move through a crowd without having their identity known. Furthermore, when enveloped in her ferijee—cloak—and yashmak, the person of the Oriental woman is as secure as in the harem and she is thus safeguarded against all the annoyances and insults to which her western sisters, especially those in the larger cities, are so frequently exposed. Some of the Ottoman suffragettes of Stamboul may envy the European women their gorgeous Parisian hats and gowns, but I am quite convinced that many western women would gladly exchange the creations of Worth and Redfern for the tcharchaff or for the ferijee and the yashmak, or for the bash-oordoo and the yeldirmee—which serve the same purpose—and all the immunities and privileges which these kinds of apparel secure to the wearer.

Again much has been said about the cruel treatment which Ottoman women have to endure from their husbands. To judge by the accounts of certain writers who substitute fancy for fact, the average Turkish husband is a Bluebeard who makes his wife’s life one continuous martyrdom. Such reports are as ill-founded as all the fantastic tales that have so long obtained credence respecting the harem and other matters pertaining to the everyday life of the Ottoman Turk. But, as in these things it is impossible for a man to obtain first-hand information, I shall quote from a woman who had exceptional opportunities of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the home life of the Osmanlis of Anatolia and whose conclusions, therefore, are of preponderant value.

This woman is Lady Ramsay, the gifted wife of Sir W. M. Ramsay, the distinguished archæologist of Aberdeen. Professor Ramsay whose investigations in Anatolia extend over a period of thirty-five years is probably the greatest living authority on the history of this part of Asia and on the manners and customs of its inhabitants. As Lady Ramsay frequently accompanied her husband on his expeditions which led him to very nook and corner of the country, she had absolutely unique opportunities for studying the home life of the Ottoman women of Asia Minor. As a result of her observations she does not hesitate to declare that “cases of brutality on the part of a man towards his wife are a hundred times commoner among the lower classes of this country”—Great Britain—“than they are in Turkey.”[120]

Such testimony coming from a witness so competent and so impartial should be conclusive. The reports to the contrary of men who have traveled in Anatolia are of no value whatever, for the simple reason that these men could not possibly get information at first hand. For the harem is everywhere absolutely barred to them, and what information they might get would necessarily be based on idle rumor and therefore quite valueless. Women, however, even when total strangers, are always hospitably received by their Ottoman sisters. And if they are able to speak the language of the country, they have little difficulty in becoming quite familiar with the everyday life of the people. But men, no matter how extensive their travels in Anatolia, will all be forced to confess with a noted English traveler—“throughout our journey, the female sex may be said not to have existed for us at all.”[121]

Much has been said about the divorce evil in Turkey. No doubt this does constitute a foul blot on the social system of Islam but it is not so bad as it is usually represented. The Koran safeguards the rights of the wife in many ways and public opinion is daily becoming more opposed to a man’s arbitrary repudiation of his wife. In spite, however, of the present facile dissolution of the marriage bond the frequency of divorce in Anatolia is far less than in many parts of the United States.

The Turkish wife [writes another English traveler who had spent many years in the Ottoman Empire] has been called a slave and a chattel. She is neither. Indeed her legal status is preferable to that of the majority of the wives in Europe and, until enactments of a comparatively recent date, the English was far more of a chattel than the Turkish wife who has always had absolute control of her property. The law allows her the free use and disposal of anything she may possess at the time of her marriage, or that she may inherit afterwards. She may distribute it during her life, or she may bequeath it to whom she chooses. In the eyes of the law she is a free agent. She may act independently of her husband, may sue in the courts or may be proceeded against without regard to him.[122]

The same author, in referring to the attachment of husband and wife for each other, declares that among the Turkish peasantry “one meets with Darby and Joan as frequently as in England.”[123]

“How far removed are we then,” asks an Ottoman gentleman, “from the seductive odalisques whose pictures, in the East, are only to be seen on biscuit tins.”[124]

But a stranger error than any yet referred to is that which asserts that the Ottomans and Mohammedans generally deny to women the possession of a soul as well as a future existence. How such an opinion originated or gained such wide acceptance is impossible to say. I have never known an Ottoman to hold such a view, and there is certainly no warrant for it in the Koran. And yet in an article on “Woman’s Place in the World,” written but a few years ago by a noted duchess in England, it is explicitly stated that Mohammedanism “consigns woman, as far as psychic qualities are concerned, to the level of beasts, forbidding her forever the hope of salvation.”[125]

A few quotations from the Koran will suffice to show how groundless is this statement. In the twentieth sura—chapter—we read:

O my servants—enter ye into Paradise, ye and your wives, with great joy.

Again the Koran declares:

But he who doeth good works—be it male or female—and believes, they shall enter into Paradise.

In the thirty-third sura it is written:

Verily the Moslems of either sex, and the true believers of either sex, and the devout men and the devout women, and the men of veracity and the women of veracity, and the patient men and the patient women, and the humble men and the humble women, and the almsgivers of either sex, and the men who fast and women who fast, and the chaste men and the chaste women, and those of either sex who remember God frequently, for them hath God prepared forgiveness and a great reward.

According to the teaching of Mohammed, all true Moslems are enjoined to pray for the dead—for the women as well as for the men. This, of itself, is sufficient evidence of Islamic belief in the future life for all mankind, irrespective of sex. There are, doubtless, in Turkey as elsewhere, men who deny immortality to women, but these are confined to that class of Moslems “who, having made shipwreck of their faith,” prefer to class themselves with the beasts of the field by denying that they themselves have souls.

Surprising as it may seem to some, no more beautiful tributes to women can be found than those given in the Koran, or in the Hadith which contains the traditional teachings of Mohammed. In one place the Prophet declares “the world and all things in it are valuable but more valuable than all is a virtuous woman”; in another he asserts that “women are the twin-halves of men.” Again, he tells his followers that “the son gains Paradise at the feet of the mother”; and yet again we have his truly remarkable statement that “Paradise is beneath the ground on which mothers walk.” Are not these amazing words to proceed from the lips of a seventh century Arabian?

One need spend but little time in Anatolia to find that the men among the Osmanlis are a most lovable people. What first impresses one is their good manners. Whether they live in a palace or a hovel they are always self-respecting, courteous, and dignified. In this respect they continually remind one of the people of Spain where courtesy is a national heritage. It was this striking characteristic of the Osmanli that led Bismarck to declare:

In the Orient the only gentleman is the Turk.[126]

Another national characteristic of the Osmanlis is cleanliness. Their homes, however humble, are as scrupulously swept and scrubbed as a Dutch dwelling place.[127] And the same may be said of their coffeehouses and restaurants. In this respect they are in marked contrast with those of the Greeks and Arabs.

Many writers have endeavored to account for the exceptional courtesy and cleanliness of the Osmanlis, but the reasons usually advanced are far from satisfactory. “Their religion,” writes Sir Edwin Pears, “inculcates cleanliness and sobriety; ... it has helped to diffuse courtesy and self-respect among its adherents.”[128]

If this were true it should hold good for the Moslems of Egypt and Morocco which, as all travelers in these countries know, is very often far from the case. When we shall be able to assign a reason for the matchless courtesy of the Castilian hidalgo or for the Dutch hausfrau’s singular love of cleanliness, we shall probably find an acceptable explanation of the seemingly innate courtesy and cleanliness of the Osmanlis of Anatolia.

And contrary to almost universal belief, the Osmanlis, both men and women are a people of very industrious habits. This is particularly true of those who make their living by tilling the soil and by tending their flocks and herds. So far as the men are concerned the traveler has ample evidence of their toilsome lives from the time he leaves the swift-flowing Bosphorus until he arrives at the foothills of the picturesque Taurus. As to the women they are, according to those who know them best, as laborious as the men. A competent witness, one who is himself an Ottoman, who was born and bred in Anatolia and whose testimony regarding the domestic life of his countrymen bears the clearest impress of truth, is the clever and entertaining Halil Halid who, having spent many years in England, writes English as a native.

Speaking of his countrywomen he declares:

No qualities are so much sought after in average marriageable women as the domestic ones. In the provinces the peasant women, besides managing their humble domestic affairs, have to work in the fields, more especially when their brothers and husbands are away discharging their compulsory military service. The daughters of well-to-do people, besides attending to the business of their households, are indefatigable with their needles and are always busy with needle work or embroidery.[129]

It will be understood from the details I have given [he continues], that the popular notion prevailing in this country of the harem and the life of the harem is much mistaken. Women in Turkish harems do not really pass their time in lying on sofas or couches eating sweetmeats and smoking water-pipes all the day long. Of course, they are as fond of sweet-stuffs as most ladies of this country. But to lie down on a couch in the presence of others is considered by Turkish women vulgarity of the most disgraceful kind.

The representations of harem life given in books and on the stage or shown in exhibitions, is either the work of Turkey’s detractors or simply the work of imaginative persons who know nothing about it and whose object is to attract the curiosity of English people by exhibiting grotesque sights and thus to make money.

Many Europeans [writes the same author] who pay a flying visit to the Levant and hasten to sit down and write a book about their experiences, derive all their information from their cicerones and interpreters [worthless and unscrupulous fellows whom our author justly denounces as ignorant and shameless cheats] who are, as a class, of the worst products of non-Mussulman natives of the Levant. Probably it is on account of this that a countryman of mine once remarked: “When we read such books, especially those written in English, about ourselves, we always learn something from them which we never knew or heard of before.”[130]

“But,” it will be asked, “what about the morality of the Turks”? This is a question that is continually asked and about which as many erroneous notions prevail as about the harem. One might answer by saying that, where passion is given free rein, poor human nature is about the same in all parts of the world. I shall, however, reply in the words of the witty and vivacious Lady Mary Montague who, writing from Constantinople where her husband was ambassador, to a friend in England, declares:

As to their morality or good conduct, I can say, like Harlequin, that it is just as it is with you; and the Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians. Now that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring, either the exemplary discretion, or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them.[131]

As to “the infamous vices” of which the Mussulman Orient is said to be the chief theater, it will be sufficient for our present purpose to quote the words of one who has spent many years among the Moslems and who has, probably, as thorough a knowledge of them as any recent writer. “Is it, then, true,” demands the distinguished Count Henri de Castries, “that these vices are more numerous in the Orient than in the Occident? This reputation given to Islam is the result of superficial generalizations without which travelers would have scarcely anything to write. These vices of mature age are, unfortunately, common to all countries. More of them are indulged in Paris, London, and Berlin than in the entire Orient.”

It would be difficult to find people who are more distinguished for natural virtues than are the Osmanlis who have not been debased by oppression or corrupted by power. Their love of the simple life is remarkable. Often their only fare is bread and water. To this they may add a little cheese and fruit and some vegetables. The majority are vegetarians. Of those who are not, their meat diet consists chiefly of mutton and fowl which is usually prepared with rice or with vegetables. Beef they rarely eat and pork never, for its use as an article of food is strictly proscribed by the Koran.

And yet, notwithstanding their frugal fare, they are noted for their health and strength. “As strong as a Turk” has long been a proverb. And when one sees the amazing burdens which the hamals of Stamboul frequently carry, one is ready to admit that the proverb is more than justified.

The chief beverage of the Osmanlis is water, for the Koran absolutely forbids the use of intoxicating drinks of any kind whatsoever. For the Osmanli, therefore, the dramshop does not exist. He does, however, love his little cup of black coffee. Although the Moslem doctors of the law originally interdicted its use as the invention of the devil, the drinking of coffee in Mohammedan countries is now universal.

I know of only one prettier picture of contentment than an Osmanli peasant taking his cup of coffee before going to work in the morning or after the labors of the day, and that is when he indulges in his favorite pastime of Kaif—which is perhaps best expressed by the Italian phrase, dolce far niente. Garbed in his brown shalvar—baggy trousers—blue jacket, red sash, and white stockings, and sitting before his home under a tentlike plane tree, quietly smoking his narghile, with drooped eyelids and rapt countenance, he is the personification of comfort and happiness. Tranquil, immobile, absorbed in an enchanting reverie, how far is he not removed from the unbridled desires and malignant envy of the restless populace of our large cities of the West!

Ah! qu’il est doux de ne rien faire

Quand tout s’agite autour de nous!

What a subject for the brush of a Villegas or a Fortuny![132]

And then the honesty of this quiet peasant of simple tastes and harmless pleasures. He would never cheat you. Even if he be but a poor fruit seller, gaining but a pittance for a day’s labor, he will always add something to the amount called for, for fear of having made a mistake in the amount due the purchaser. If you should be his guest, you may sleep in his home with open doors. Nobody will molest you and your belongings will be as safe as if under lock and key. So great, indeed, is the reputation of the Osmanli for probity and sterling honesty that:

Among men, who do not concern themselves with politics, but whose fortune and interests are bound up in the country, the vast majority prefer the Turk to any other denizen of the land for his integrity and trustworthiness.

The proof of it is that it is to him they confide the care of their property. There are English families that have existed in Turkey for generations, and generations of Turks have served them in positions of trust. These are invariably Turks of the old school, good Mussulmans and simple in their thoughts and lives. A finer type of men no land can show, and happily they are not yet rare.[133]

Nor does one find elsewhere such humane treatment of dumb animals. “Fear God with regard to animals,” enjoined Mohammed, “ride them when they are fit to be ridden and get off when they are tired. Verily there are rewards for our doing good to dumb animals and giving them water to drink.” No Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is needed among the Osmanlis for so strong a sympathy exists between this gentle and tender-hearted people and all domestic animals that anything like cruel treatment would be impossible. Even the dog, which is considered as an unclean animal, is always treated with kindness. An Osmanli will gather together the folds of his garments to prevent his coming in contact with the impure brute but will at the same time gladly divide with it his last morsel of food.

There are few writers who are more familiar with the real Ottomans than the distinguished Academician, Pierre Loti. And this is what he says of them:

Nowhere, so much as among the Turks—the real Turks—does one find solicitude for the poor, the helpless, the aged and for children; such respect for parents, such tender veneration for the mother. If a man, even of mature years, should be seated in one of those innocent little cafés, where alcohol has always been unknown, and his father should unexpectedly enter, he rises, lowers his voice, extinguishes his cigarette, and humbly takes a seat behind him.[134]

Elsewhere the same sympathetic and magnanimous author writes:

Their little towns located in the interior, their villages, their country homes, are the last refuges not only of the calm but also of the patriarchal virtues which are more and more disappearing from our modern world: loyalty and honesty without blemish; veneration of children for parents of a kind that is not longer known to us; inexhaustible hospitality and chivalrous respect for guests; moral elegance and native delicacy, even among the most humble; kindness towards all—even towards animals; unbounded religious tolerance for whomsoever is not their enemy; serene faith and prayer. When arriving among them after leaving our Occident of doubt and cynicism, of noise and scrap-iron, one feels as if suffused with peace and confidence and believes he has remounted the course of time towards some indeterminate epoch, near, perhaps, to the Golden Age.[135]

In Anatolia particularly are applicable the words of the English traveler, Walpole, who, when speaking of the hospitability of the people of Turkey, tells us that “in the East alone now do we find in the Oda Nessafer of the village the guest-chamber of Plato. A sum is set apart by the government for supplying these; though usually the more wealthy traveler repays what he receives, adding a small gratuity.”[136]

In hospitality the Osmanlis of to-day are heirs of the best traditions of the Greeks of old who, as Homer informs us, were wont to say:

For Jove unfolds our hospitable door:

’Tis Jove that sends the stranger and the poor.[137]

One of the most striking instances of Osmanli hospitality of which I have recently heard is an experience of my good Franciscan friend, the Reverend Paschal Robinson, Professor of History in the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. Some years ago he had occasion to travel through the greater part of Asia Minor. During the seven months of his journey he was always the guest of the Turks, who were all Moslems. And yet, although he was an entire stranger among them, the generous and courteous Osmanlis everywhere received him with the most cordial hospitality. Not only did they supply him gratis with food and shelter, but they also provided him with the necessary means of transportation from one place to another. And never would they accept the slightest compensation for their services.

My actual traveling expenses during these seven months [Father Paschal assures me] were the equivalent of only seven American dollars. And, although the passport requirements in Turkey have always been exceedingly strict, I never carried a passport and nobody ever asked me for one. My habit which I always wore in Anatolia was my passport.

But for members of his order, Father Paschal’s case is not exceptional. In Moslem lands the Sons of St. Francis are always shown similar kindness and consideration and have been ever since the famous interview of the Poverello of Assisi with the Sultan of Egypt at Damietta eight hundred years ago. Can greater hospitality be found in other lands?

By the hammering reiteration of a tradition which, for most part, had its origin in the reports of imaginative travelers and which has, in recent years, been greatly fostered by a subsidized press bent on forcing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Osmanlis have been pictured as monsters of cruelty. To judge by certain propaganda articles and brochures which, within recent years, have been given world-wide currency, the average Ottoman is like the viceroy described in Don Quixote, who “every day hanged a slave; impaled one; cut off the ears of another; and this upon so little animus, or so entirely without cause, that the Turks would own he did it merely for the sake of doing it, and because it was his nature.”[138] People who have lived among the Osmanlis and have learned to admire their gentleness and sense of justice would denounce such a characterization as absurd.

“During the two years I have traversed the country,” writes a French Colonel from Asia Minor, “I have never heard of a murder or a theft.” This is not the evidence of a solitary witness. Innumerable foreigners who have resided in Anatolia could give similar testimony.[139]

Nor does it apply only to the Osmanlis of the present time. History abounds in like testimony regarding them in every century of their history.

It is surprising [writes the historian Finlay] how well the Ottoman government preserved tranquillity in its extensive dominions, and established a greater degree of security for property among the middle classes, than generally prevailed in European states during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This end was obtained by a regular police, and by the prompt execution of a rude species of justice in cases of flagrant abuses and crimes. In the populous cities of the Ottoman Empire, and particularly in Constantinople, which contained more inhabitants than any three Christian capitals, the order which reigned in the midst of a great social corruption, caused by extreme wealth, the conflux of many different nations, and the bigotry of several hostile religions, excited the wonder and admiration of every observant stranger. Perfect self-reliance, imperturbable equanimity, superiority to the vicissitudes of fortune, and a calm temper, compensated among the Ottomans for laws which were notoriously defective and tribunals which were infamously venal.

Knolles says, “You seldom see a murder or a theft committed by any Turk.” European gentlemen accustomed to the barbarous custom of wearing swords on all occasions, were surprised to see Turks of the highest rank, distinguished for their valor and military exploits, walking about even in provincial towns, unarmed, secure in the power of public order and the protection of the executive authority in the State.[140]

But, it is asked, do not the reported atrocities of the Turks in Armenia and the Balkans prove that their reputation for the most frightful deeds of savagery is established beyond peradventure? An adequate answer to this question would lead us too far afield, for the Osmanlis, unlike their enemies, have few champions or political knights-errant, and our information, therefore, respecting the atrocities in question is almost entirely one-sided. To those, however, who are desirous of reading the Ottoman side of the question I would recommend the thoroughly documented work of Pierre Loti entitled Turquie Agonisante.[141] A careful perusal of this work will convince any impartial reader that in this, as in every other question, “the unspeakable Turk” is far from being “the homicide of all human kind” he is so frequently pictured to be.

I would not, however, have it inferred from the foregoing pages that I ignore the corruption and organized bribery and the extent to which the government is made to subserve the interests of those who govern rather than those who are governed. This condition has existed in Turkey from time immemorial, not only in the administration of governmental affairs but in the administration of justice as well. But it is, unfortunately, a condition that exists in all parts of the Orient from Constantinople to Peking.[142]

Nor am I blind to the incalculable miseries to which the peasantry of Anatolia are exposed by the ravenous tax-gatherers who rob them of their little savings and keep many of them in constant penury. The exactions and cruelties of these soulless agents of Turkish misrule are almost incredible. It is these oppressive measures of Turkish maladministration, coupled with the opening of the Suez Canal, which have done much to close the overland trade routes to which Anatolia owed much of its former prosperity. It is to be hoped that the reorganized Ottoman government will succeed in eliminating the crying evils here indicated, but they are of so long standing that statesmanship of the highest order will be required to deal with a situation which is now almost desperate.

In marked contrast to the administrative bribery and corruption which have so long been the bane of Turkey, as well as of so many Eastern countries, is the remarkable spirit of tolerance which distinguishes the Ottoman government. Thus when the members of religious orders—priests and nuns—were cruelly driven from France they were cordially welcomed by Turkey—the reputed home of intolerance and fanaticism—where they were guaranteed full liberty to continue their apostolate of education and charity.[143]

The opposition raised a few years ago by an uncontrollable mob to the passing of a procession in honor of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of London is still fresh in the memory of all. Contrast this with the attitude of the people of Constantinople to a similar ceremony. The following account of the procession is translated from the Turkish newspaper, the Stamboul:

On Sunday last took place the annual procession—I underscore the word annual—of Corpus Christi. The brilliance of the fête was heightened by the presence of Monsignor Nardi, and all the Catholic colony of the neighborhood assembled in the pretty church to see and hear its first pastor. Towards five o’clock the procession emerged amid a vast concourse of spectators who lined the way on either hand, the sacred cortège marching to the music of liturgical chants and the band of the Salesian Fathers. In front walked the school children, after them the faithful, then the clergy and notables of Makri Keui, while in the rear Monsignor Nardi, surrounded by the clergy, bore the Blessed Sacrament. Perfect order was maintained by the police with a degree of tact which did honor to the force. And for the space of an hour the procession traversed the gayly decorated streets of the quarter, which had been newly graveled for the occasion by the orders of the worthy and ever-courteous president of the municipality, Sherif Effendi. Such ceremonies leave a pleasant impression in a country like Turkey where everyone is free to practice his religion according to the dictates of his conscience.[144]

The same freedom of worship, notwithstanding reports to the contrary, is enjoyed by the Armenians. They are, besides, left perfectly free to have their own schools and to retain their own language. They have not had such liberty in Russia. “For six hundred years the Armenians were contented under the dominion of the Turks,” declared one of their bishops a few years ago, and they would, doubtless, be still living in peace with their old masters were it not for the machination of Russian propagandists and Armenian revolutionists. The proof of this is that “the highroad from Trebizond to Erzeroum ... is dotted with Christian monasteries and churches unmolested for centuries.”[145]

Napoleon I was wont to say that a lie, given twenty-four hours’ start, becomes immortal. But, when lies about the Turks have been repeated for generations in spite of the official denials of the Ottoman government and in spite of the contradictions of men who have long lived among these much misunderstood and greatly misrepresented people, what hope, one may ask, can there be for the final triumph of truth? What can be done to counteract shameless calumnies and official dementis when the greater part of the press is either muzzled or avowedly hostile and when public opinion has been so utterly poisoned by long and constant reiteration of all kinds of vilification and slander that the unfortunate victims are everywhere prejudiced and denied the right of a hearing which the law—not to speak of Christian charity—of all civilized nations accords to even the worst of criminals?

“Professional scribblers,” writes Pierre Loti, “who have never set foot in Turkey, expectorate ‘great historical romances’ on the ‘Tigers of the Bosphorus’ and the ‘Monsters of Stamboul.’”[146] “And they go so far even as to confound the true Turks with that aggregation of sharpers from all the Balkan and Levantine races who put on a fez in order to live among the Anatolians as gnawing parasites, parasites to the bone, whose depredations and usury, ruining entire villages, would almost excuse the worst vengeance of the rude and upright laborers of Anatolia who finally revolted.”[147]

Sidney Whitman, the distinguished English author who knows Turkey so well, is at one with the illustrious Academician when he writes:

In the course of my many visits to Constantinople I have repeatedly been made acquainted with instances of questionable newspaper correspondents who came to the Palace with the scarcely veiled intimation that it was to be a case of pay or slander. During the Armenian disturbances in 1896 a French female journalist went up to the Palace and openly declared that she intended to be paid or write up “atrocities.”[148]

But, notwithstanding the lurid tales that have so long been circulated about the Osmanlis, they have, nevertheless, loyal friends where one would least expect to find them. I have adduced in their favor the testimony of those who from long association among them have learned to know them and admire them for their splendid human qualities. Among these witnesses to the virtues of the Osmanlis are French, English, and American men whose competence is as incontrovertible as their authority is unimpeachable. It were easy to add to the number and among them we should find French, Italian, and German priests and bishops, Sisters of Charity and religieuses of the various teaching orders who have spent long years among the Osmanlis in all parts of the Ottoman Empire and their testimony would confirm that already introduced.

It may, however, be urged that the testimony in question is that of friends and sympathizers. It affords me, therefore, special pleasure to reproduce here the generous appreciation of “The Terrible Turk” which has recently appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette[149] from the pen of a Serbian gentleman who has had an opportunity of knowing him in war as well as in peace. It fully corroborates all that has been stated in the preceding pages and is as great an evidence of the writer’s nobility of soul, as it is a splendid tribute to the character of a whilom foe:

We Serbians are fighting against the Turks with all our might, but we do not wish to be unjust to them. I am perfectly certain that every Serbian soldier, marching now victoriously through Macedonia and Albania, and every wounded Serbian lying somewhere in a hospital, and every Serbian mother, sister, wife, sweetheart, who has lost her son, or her brother, or her husband, or her lover, on one of the many bloody battlefields, would applaud my effort to do justice to our enemy. And, therefore, I do not hesitate to say a good word for the Turk. I do homage not to the Turk, but to truth.

An average Turk—or shall I perhaps call him a normal Turk?—is an excellent man. He believes in God, and prays to God more earnestly and more intensely than an average or normal Christian does. And he persistently and honestly tries to conform his everyday life to the commandments of his great Prophet. He is charitable, honest, trustworthy; he is modest, yet dignified; he is proud, but not vain; he is brave, but not boastful; he is sober, clean, polite; he is generally poor, but always hospitable; and he is patriotic, ready to starve and suffer and die, without a murmur, for his faith and the honor of his country. But this excellent, virtuous, and God-fearing brave man is heavy, slow and somewhat stupid, and in the electrical and aeroplanic twentieth century cannot stand against scientific organizations and quick-firing guns of the clever, sharp-witted Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgars.

The Turk was master of the Balkan nations for nearly five centuries. During all those centuries he consistently refrained from interfering with our national churches and with our village municipal life. From the liberty which the Turk left to our Church and our municipal life in the country, our political liberty was re-born. But, notwithstanding his religious tolerance and his non-interference with our village life, we hated him as long as, and just because he was our master. But now, when our victories have deprived him of his position as master of our countries, we will be pleased to have him for our friend, because—although he is not exactly a “jolly”—he is certainly a good fellow.

How different is this portrait of “The Unspeakable Turk,” painted by one who knew him by life-long association from that of the atrabilious author of Sartor Resartus, whose delineation of him was based on fancy and prejudice, if not on pathetic ignorance!

The great trouble in Asia Minor to-day is an economic one. This is the verdict of those who are most competent to judge—of those who have lived among the Osmanlis for years and have only words of praise for their many natural virtues and their abounding goodness of heart. It is the verdict of men and women to whom the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God are not empty words, of those who believe that the precepts of Christian charity are as obligatory for nations as for individuals, and that it behooves the Great Powers to assist in its economic stress at least this part of the Ottoman Empire and to help it to develop its marvelous natural resources. Were they to do this, Anatolia would again blossom as the rose and flourish once more as it did in the heyday of Greek and Roman splendor. But such altruism is quite alien to the self-seeking policy of the dominant nations of Europe. Acting on the theory that might makes right they coolly proceed to the dismemberment of the empire and endeavor to justify it by alleging, in French diplomatic phrase, the requirements of the action civilisatrice of Western as against Eastern civilization while every one who thinks knows that the real reason is the lust of conquest.

Although I do not hold a brief for the Osmanlis, I would make a plea for more tolerance for a people who have so long exhibited such tolerance toward others. Having myself been among the number of those who unconsciously did grave injustice to them before I came to know them as they are, I feel that I am fully warranted in urging a change of attitude towards them. Equitable statesmanship, as well as Christian charity, demands such a change. We can never hope to remove the barrier between the East and the West, between Islam and Christianity, so long as the age-long misunderstandings and misrepresentations above referred to continue to separate peoples who should live in union and harmony.

CHAPTER VII
THE BAGDAD RAILWAY

In its political and military, not to speak of its commercial, consequences, the securing by Germany of the Bagdad Railway is perhaps the most important event which has occurred in the Old World since the Franco-Prussian War.[150]

André Chéradame.

At Konia, anciently Iconium, we reached the junction of the Anatolia and the Bagdad Railways. From an economic and military standpoint, both roads are of supreme importance to the Ottoman Empire. They supply commerce with long needed means of communication between the interior and the seaboard, and enable the Sultan to conduct the administration of his extensive territory with far more efficiency and despatch than was before possible. Politically, however, the Bagdad Railway is incomparably still more important. No great railroad has ever attracted more attention; none has ever owed so much to its name; none has ever so fired the imagination of Germans and Ottomans; and none has ever so exhausted the resources of diplomacy or provoked greater struggles for its control. Historically both roads have a special interest to the student and the historian not only on account of the classic lands through which they pass but also on account of the long and strenuous efforts which several rival nations made to obtain from the Sublime Porte the authorization to build and operate the great road which was to unite the West and the East.

So greatly has the Bagdad Railway modified the Near Eastern Question, so completely has it changed the data and the consequent solution of the problem, and so perfectly does its history dovetail into the narrative of our journey, that a brief account of the origin and struggling beginnings of the road is necessary to a clear conception of many things that shall be said in subsequent chapters.

Many and diverse, as the ambitions of those who gave them birth, have been the projects to unite by rail the superb capital on the Bosphorus with the mysterious city of Harun-al-Rashid on the distant Tigris.

Two-thirds of a century ago there were few projects which were proposed with more insistence to the British Cabinet and to the House of Commons as well as to English capitalists than that which had for its object the construction of a railway which, starting from a point on the Mediterranean, should cross Mesopotamia in the direction of India.

The original plan called for an overland route which would connect the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. It was based on an elaborate survey of the Euphrates valley, which had been made by an English officer, Colonel Chesney, in 1835–1837. The primary object was to shorten the journey from England to India, which was then made across the Isthmus of Suez, or round the Cape of Good Hope.

The preliminary survey of this contemplated line was made by order of the British Government which voted £20,000 for expenses. Materials for two armed steamers were, under the direction of Colonel Chesney, transported with almost insuperable difficulties from the mouth of the Orontes to the Euphrates. This gallant officer had under his command a well-equipped staff of engineers and men of science, and the work which the expedition set out to execute was performed, as the official reports show, in the most thorough manner. More than two years were devoted to the task of exploring the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the region through which they flowed, and the enthusiastic commander felt sure his labors were to issue “in the consolidation and perfection of the overland communications between Great Britain and India.”[151]

But how quickly and completely his illusions were dispelled!

When I returned from the East in 1837 [he wrote long after] it was with the full belief that a question of such vast importance to Great Britain—nationally, politically and commercially—would be at once taken up warmly by the Government and the public. The way had been opened—difficulties which at one time had looked formidable had been overcome; the Arabs and the Turkish Government were favorable to the projected line to India. But thirty-one years have since passed, and nothing has been done.[152]

In 1851 a company was organized in England for realizing Colonel Chesney’s plan for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. A firman was obtained from the Porte and everything was ready for beginning work—except cash. As the enterprise was not supported by the government, English capitalists considered participation in it too hazardous to justify investment. The company’s concession lapsed for lack of the necessary funds.

The question was again taken up in 1872 and referred to a Parliamentary commission. But, although Colonel Chesney’s plan of building a road along the Euphrates was favorably received, it was again abandoned—this time in favor of the Suez Canal, a large interest in which had been purchased for England by her astute premier, Disraeli, who was quick to perceive the paramount value of this passageway between England and her possessions in the Orient.[153]

During many years thereafter this new route between Asia and Europe so absorbed public attention that the Euphrates Railway was almost forgotten. But towards the end of the century numerous projects for constructing the road were taken up by several groups of promoters and financiers of different nationalities.

Among these was the project of an Italian, Sig. A. Tonietti, who, acting in behalf of a company of Italian and English financiers, sought a concession for the construction of a line which should start from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean and which, following the Euphrates to Bagdad and Basra, should terminate at a point on the Persian Gulf. He also sought a concession for building a number of branch lines, one of which was to extend to Khanikin on the Persian frontier. In addition to this he asked for authorization to cultivate the unoccupied government lands along the course of the railroad during the term of the concession. In return for this authorization he agreed to establish an irrigation system which should restore the Euphrates valley to its pristine fertility.

There was also a French group of financiers who, headed by M. Cottard, a distinguished railroad engineer in Turkey, endeavored by all means in their power to secure a concession for building a railway which was to be a prolongation of the Anatolian line to Bagdad and Basra and to follow essentially the same course along the Euphrates as the projected road of Sig. Tonietti.

In addition to the two projects just mentioned was that of the Russian Count Kapist, who proposed to build a line which should start from Tripoli, in Syria, and, passing Bagdad, should terminate at Koweit on the Persian Gulf. Count Kapist and his associates pretended that they were assured of the eventual coöperation not only of English capitalists but also of the British Government.[154]

The applicants for these divers concessions were, however, all doomed to disappointment. Never before had so many, so antagonistic, and so powerful interests made so long and so strenuous efforts to secure the coveted privilege of building a railroad in foreign territory. Never were diplomats more active in Constantinople, never was intrigue more complicated, and never was greater pressure brought to bear upon the Sublime Porte by the rival nations of Europe. France wished to safeguard her interests in the Levant and extend her sphere of influence in the Near East. Russia desired to tighten her hold on Transcaucasia and to prepare for the eventual dismemberment of the Turkish Empire of which she fondly hoped to secure the lion’s share. England, although she had control of the Suez Canal, saw in the Bagdad Railway a menace to her Indian possessions and determined to nullify the danger before it was too late.

France had been on the friendliest terms with the Ottoman Government since the time of Francis I and her financiers naturally felt that the much coveted concession should be awarded to them as citizens of the most favored nation. English capitalists put forward claims which they regarded as deserving greater consideration than those of their competitors.

But French and English as well as Italian and Russian claims were ignored, their projects for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf were rejected and the long and eagerly sought concession was awarded to a group of German capitalists, alias the Deutsche Bank, alias, their opponents contend, the German Government.

What the Germans call Drang nach Osten—Trend towards the East—dates from the time of Alexander the Great. It drove the legions of the Cæsars to the Euphrates and the Tigris and impelled the hosts of the Crusaders to seek glory on the desert wastes of Syria and Mesopotamia. It urged Napoleon to undertake his famous campaign in Egypt and was at the bottom of his alliance with the Czar Alexander I—an alliance that was to carry the combined armies of France and Russia to the heart of India.

As to the Germans, they have never ceased “to dream of the Morgenland since the epic of Barbarossa’s crusade and the legendary disappearance of that great figure of Teutonic battle and romance in the Cilician stream.” When von Moltke, 1835–1839, was assisting the Sultan Mahmud II to reorganize the Ottoman army on the German plan he was greatly impressed with the possibilities offered by Asia Minor as a field for German commerce and enterprise. Others of his countrymen thought it would be good policy to divert the current of German emigration from America to Asia Minor. And, although the Porte had always been opposed to all schemes of German colonization in Turkey, there was reason to believe that the Ottoman Government, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, would consent to German colonists settling in certain places in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. For, several decades before the Germans had secured the concession to build the Bagdad Railroad, the friendliest relations had existed between Constantinople and Berlin. This was particularly true after the defeat of France in 1870, when Germany was reorganized as the first military power in the world. For thenceforward Turkey not only maintained a goodly number of military students in Germany, but also had many German officers in her army, among whom was the distinguished Field Marshal Goltz Pasha.

It was, however, more than a half century before von Moltke’s idea of developing Anatolia and Mesopotamia was given practical consideration. It was then taken up by Dr. George von Siemens, the distinguished president of the Deutsche Bank, who, like so many of his countrymen, had come under the spell of Germany’s Weltpolitik and, like them, had been caught in the current of the Drang nach Osten.

Dr. von Siemens was not only one of the ablest of the group of eminent men whom the Kaiser had gathered about him, but was also a great favorite of the German War Lord. He not only shared von Moltke’s views regarding the development of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, but, with rare clearness of vision, saw that this development could be achieved only by the construction of a railway through the broad wastes which lay between the Bosphorus and the Persian Gulf. To reclaim for civilization the long-neglected valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and to restore to their ancient splendor the broad and fertile plains of Anatolia and Mesopotamia—so long the favored home of humanity—became his dominant ambition, and to the achievement of his cherished project he directed for years, with marvelous address and persistency, his indomitable energy and savoir faire. Slowly but surely his dream began to be realized.

Before the Anatolian Railway was completed the Turkish Army was eating bread made from Russian flour; now it is using grain grown in the fertile acres of Asia Minor. And before the advent of the railroad the communications between the interior of Asia Minor and the seaboard were so wretched that the freight on domestic grain was greater than on that imported from Russia or the United States. The result was that the Anatolian peasants then grew only enough wheat for their own needs. Before the advent of the railroad not a single ton of grain from the region traversed by the Anatolian Railroad reached the seacoast for export. After the road was completed the export of wheat and other cereals became, in a very short time, an important item of commerce. The peasantry received “for their harvests from twice to four times the prices formerly paid and the railways brought revenue to the (Ottoman) treasury.”[155]

The cost of the railway was great, indeed, but greater far was its value to Turkey, for it was not only the best but also the only practical means of “bringing the disjointed members of that large empire within reach of control,” and of “bringing security and cultivation, order and civilization, to a country that once had been the most fertile on earth.”[156]

That Germany should have received the concession for building the Bagdad Railway in the face of such strong competitors as Russia, France, and England was a great surprise to those who were not familiar with the relations among the Great Powers and who were not well informed respecting the diplomatic game as it was then played in Constantinople. To those, however, who had an accurate knowledge of the strained relations which existed between the Porte and certain of the western nations and who knew how suspicious Abdul-Hamid II was of all schemes affecting Turkey, which were engineered in Russia or Great Britain, or in behalf of Russian or British interests, the outcome of the long diplomatic game at the Porte was looked upon as a foregone conclusion.

A brilliant French publicist attributes the success of the Germans in securing the concession for the Bagdad Railway to the fact that the era of great ambassadors from France and England at the Sublime Porte was closed at the period in question—that in the year immediately preceding “the publication of the irade of the concession in 1899,” there was then “an utter bankruptcy of great men” at Constantinople from these two countries.[157]

Opposed to the English, French, and Russian Ambassadors, and almost isolated from his colleagues, was the alert and sagacious Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the noted ambassador from Germany who, according to an anonymous writer in the National Review, “was the most influential of the ambassadors at Yildiz, and, in accordance with the thoroughly sensible and practical cast of German ideas as to the functions of diplomacy, had used his position more actively and successfully than any minister had done before to promote the business interest of his nationals in Turkey.”[158]

Not to speak of the failure of France and Russia to secure the concession for building the Bagdad Railway, it may here be declared that England’s hopes of securing it were doomed from the very beginning. Her control of the Suez Canal and her occupation of Egypt, which was the territory of a Turkish vassal, not to speak of Gladstone’s denunciation of the Sultan as the “Great Assassin,” all predisposed Abdul-Hamid in favor of Germany and as strongly predisposed him against Great Britain.

A writer in the National Review, referring to this subject, declares:

For many years the immobile Turk had never been so likely to go out of his way for any purpose in the world as when an opportunity to do the English Government a discourtesy or English influence a disservice; and it may almost be said that even a bribe worthy of the fabulous wealth of the detested island would not have induced Abdul-Hamid to give to an Englishman what he could give to any one else.[159]

When it was officially announced that the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway had been granted to a German syndicate, there was great jubilation from the Rhine to the Vistula over what was regarded as a great victory for Teutonic diplomacy and enterprise. The enthusiastic sons of the Fatherland fancied that they already saw the well-equipped trains of the Bagdad Railway “running in the track of Alexander” from the Dardanelles to the embouchure of the Shatt-el-Arab, and exulted in the thought that “where the Mermnadæ, the Achæmenidæ, and the Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Turkish conquerors failed, there Germany had a good prospect of success.”[160]

In Turkey the diplomatic victory of the Germans meant a great exaltation of Teutonic prestige and a corresponding diminution of the credit and influence of the defeated Powers.

In France, the predominant position of power and influence acquired by Germany was interpreted as a complete subversion of the Eastern Question and as an event which made the solution of this long-standing question correspondingly difficult—“ce qui boulverse complètment les données du problème et par consequent sa solution possible.”[161]

France [writes M. Aublé] had long been the disinterested protector of a nation whose moral and material elevation she had constantly sought and had spent in all branches of human activity of that unfortunate country many milliards of francs. What she loved to regard as a second France, she saw with sorrow was about to escape her and come under the influence of a hated rival.[162]

Russia’s attitude toward the Bagdad Railway was no less hostile. It had, for obvious reasons, been her policy since the time of Peter the Great to weaken and eventually dismember the Ottoman Empire. Her objection to the road was that it contributed immeasurably to the financial, political, and strategical strength of Turkey, and that this would completely foil all her well-laid plans for her ultimate partition. She also regarded the road as a menace to Transcaucasia, but, more than this, she feared that it would, in the possession of Germany, halt her further advance into Western Asia and prove, mayhap, a stepping-stone to Germany’s annexation of Asia Minor.

But the resentment of Great Britain was far greater than that of either France or Russia. She had more at stake and greater reasons for serious apprehension for the future. So long as she controlled the Suez Canal and there was no competing line towards India she felt secure. But when, in 1888, Baron Hirsch’s Railroad through the Balkan Peninsula was completed to the Bosphorus and connected Constantinople with Western Europe, and steps were taken to extend this line through Anatolia and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, alarm, bordering on dismay, took possession of her publicists and statesmen.

The political and military importance of an overland railway from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf which could not be reached by a hostile fleet could not be overestimated.

Indeed [as a noted English authority wrote in 1917] so long as the forts of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus remain intact the Sultan and his allies enjoy the advantages of a naval power in a limited area—the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles—without the possession of a fleet. This enables the Sultan and his Germanic allies rapidly to convey troops or foodstuffs from Europe to Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia and vice versa, in the very face of the Allied Fleets, which are powerless to interfere in areas protected by defences which had proved, as one had to expect they would prove, impregnable.[163]

Another English writer saw in German control of the Bagdad Railway the doom of English trade and French enterprise in the Near East.

Is the same fate [he asks] to be meted out to the French railways in Syria as that which has overtaken the non-German railways in Asia Minor? Are they to be absorbed into the Bagdad Railway, or be cut off from any prospects of development? On the further side of the area, are the British communications up the Tigris to be starved into submission, and is the trade of Manchester and our great industrial centers to be placed at the mercy of variable by-laws in the statutes of railway companies owned or largely controlled by Germany? In the present temper of British diplomacy, a German victory of this kind is, I am sorry to say, not outside the bounds of possibility, however momentous may be the consequences, not only to our trade but also to our whole political future. If it be achieved, German enterprise will dominate the countries west of India and will extend along two great arms to the frontiers of Egypt and to the head of the Persian Gulf. Regions lying upon the main line of the maritime communications of the British Empire will gradually, but none the less irrevocably, become invested with a political complexion and bias out of harmony with our vital interests.[164]

But this was not all. Judging by the articles that filled the English press after the concession for building the Bagdad Railway had been granted to Germany, the great fear of many in England was that this concession would lead to a protectorate over Turkey by the Teutonic Powers;[165] that it “would permanently diminish English credit in the East and throughout all Islam” and exalt German prestige at Britain’s expense; that it involved the ousting of England from their “former political and commercial primacy in the Ottoman Empire”; that, to quote a British writer, it would “squeeze us out of Asiatic Turkey,” as the diplomacy of Germany had “succeeded in squeezing us out of East Africa where we surrendered to her territory which was ours by virtue of having been explored by Speke, Grant and Stanley.”[166]

In the meantime the Teutonic Powers were trying to secure the necessary capital for their stupendous enterprise. From the very beginning of their vast undertaking they, under the lead of Dr. Siemens, president of the Administrative Board of the Anatolian Railway, fully realized the difficulties they would encounter in securing the funds requisite to cover the enormous cost of their colossal work. But to achieve success they had recourse to all the methods of shrewd business and sane diplomacy. And they were quick to perceive that the wisest and safest policy would be to work along the line of least resistance. Instead, therefore, of antagonizing their defeated competitors they would invite them to coöperate with them in the construction and operation of the great steel highway. They would, in a word, internationalize it and make it a purely commercial enterprise, whose sole object would be the expansion of western trade and the development of the fabulous resources of the mysterious East.

But, as the concessionaires soon discovered to their surprise and disappointment, this was more easily said than done. The story of their many and long negotiations with foreign capitalists and statesmen is a long one and reveals, as few other things have done, national jealousies, distrusts, and ambitions. Each of the nations concerned desired to have the lion’s share in the building and management of the road, and, when this was impossible, those who had perforce to accept minor parts, or none at all, strove by every means in their power, covertly or openly, to misrepresent the object of the undertaking and damn it in the estimation of those who were counted on to coöperate in carrying the enterprise to a successful conclusion.

Neither the French nor the English government was willing to give the Bagdad Railway project official recommendation. This attitude of the two governments deterred many capitalists from investing in an enterprise which they had been disposed to view most favorably. The French Government went so far as to forbid the securities to be listed on the Bourse.[167]

But the chief opposition to the project came not so much from the governments in question as from the press. This was particularly the case in England.

A letter written in 1903 by the late Sir Clinton Dawkins—one of a group of English capitalists who were eager to coöperate with the Germans in the building of the Bagdad Railway—to Herr Arthur von Gwinner, the successor of Dr. von Siemens as director of the road, leaves no doubt about this whatever.

The fact is [Sir Clinton writes] that the business has become involved in politics here, and has been sacrificed to the very violent and bitter feeling against Germany exhibited by the majority of our newspapers and shared in by a large number of people.

This is a feeling which, as the history of recent events will show you, is not shared by the Government or reflected in official circles. But of its intensity outside those circles, for the moment, there can be no doubt; at the present moment coöperation in any enterprise which could be represented, or, I might more justly say, misrepresented, as German will meet with a violent hostility which our government has to consider.... The anti-German feeling prevailed with the majority; London having really gone into a frenzy on the matter, owing to the newspaper campaign which it would have been quite impossible to counteract or influence.[168]

As a result of an important meeting of Potsdam between the Czar and the Kaiser in November 1910, Russia waived all share in the Bagdad Railway. The reason for this withdrawal was, it is asserted, the willingness of Germany to allow Russia to build a railway in the north of Persia which should eventually connect with a branch of the Bagdad Railway at Khanakin on the Persian frontier.

The reason, therefore, why the Bagdad Railway was not internationalized, as was the desire of Dr. Siemens and his associates, is manifest. The nations constituting the Entente Cordiale were unwilling to accept the offer of the concessionaires, who thereafter proceeded to construct the line without outside assistance.[169]

When the statesmen and financiers of France and England found that internationalization of the Bagdad Railway was impossible and that the Germans were preparing to build it without their coöperation they bethought themselves of killing the enterprise by creating a financial vacuum:

“Let a vacuum of capital be created around the Bagdad Railway,” ironically writes M. André Geraud, who had no sympathy with the methods his countrymen and their English allies had adopted in their dealings with the German concessionaires, “let the Anglo-French air-pump be set in action, and then, as soon as the pecuniary oxygen becomes rarefied, the Bagdad Railway will be seen to languish and die.”[170]

But this method, it was soon discovered, utterly failed to have the desired effect. It neither deprived the railway company of resources nor checked its activity. “The air-pump,” as M. Geraud wittily remarks, “broke down as soon as it was started.”[171]

The time had passed when it could be truthfully said that the Bagdad Railway could not be built by a single power. The same statement had been made regarding the Suez Canal, but France, under the lead of De Lesseps, showed what the enterprise and the genius of her people were capable of accomplishing when they were united in an undertaking that was to reflect on them imperishable glory and redound at the same time to the welfare of humanity.

Confident in their ability to construct the Bagdad Railway unaided, the Germans, under the guidance of able financiers, were not long in demonstrating to the world that their enterprise was in no wise inferior to that which led to the magnificent achievement of the French in the Land of the Pharaohs.

The hostile attitude of the Anglo-French press towards the Bagdad Railway was not allowed to pass unnoticed by the publicists of Germany. From the day that the irade authorizing the building of the great railroad was issued they had been enthusiastic about the enterprise that was, they felt sure, to be of inestimable advantage to the Fatherland. They descanted especially on it as an agency for developing German trade in the Near East, whose commerce hitherto had been almost entirely in the hands of their rivals. They fondly pointed to the day, in the not distant future, when they would be able to exploit the vast mineral riches of Asia Minor, and when Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, as a result of intensive culture under German direction, would be able to supply them with untold stores of grain, wool, cotton, fruit, petroleum, and other commodities; when, thanks to their control of the Bagdad Railway and its branches, they would enjoy a virtual monopoly of near eastern commerce.

The eminent German engineer, Wilhelm von Pressel, who had served the Fatherland so long and so well in the Ottoman Empire,[172] prepared plans for connecting Europe with Asia by a tunnel under the Bosphorus. But his fellow countryman, Siegmund Schneider, insisted that the two continents should be connected by a bridge, which he describes in a dithyrambic fashion which most vividly exhibits the exaltation of the promoters of the great Berlin to Bagdad Railway.

The architectural effect [Herr Schneider writes] of the metallic mass richly gilded, suspended from massive piers, crowned by glittering cupolas and minarets, brilliantly illuminated at night would be fantastic. This bridge would constitute a formidable closure of the enfilade of fortified works with which the Turkish coasts bristle. Its debouches in Asia and Europe would be defended by powerful bridge-heads, its piers would be armed with armored rotary batteries whose long range would infallibly sink any squadron that would venture into the Strait.... The express trains of the future will go directly from Berlin to Babylonia in five days.[173]

German engineers confidently asserted that the day was not far distant when trains de luxe equal to any in Europe or America would cover the distance between Constantinople and Bagdad in sixty-five hours. The time formerly required to make the journey between these two cities by caravan was from fifty to fifty-five days.[174]

Nor was this an empty boast. No road has ever been more carefully or more solidly built than is the Bagdad Railway. Roadbed, culverts, revetments, bridges are of the strongest and most durable materials. The sleepers are of metal, while the steel rails are specially made for sharp curves and fast and heavy trains. German engineers declare that they are the heaviest in existence. At a time when the heaviest rails used in the United States weighed one hundred pounds per lineal yard, those selected for the Bagdad Railroad weighed twenty per cent more. And so it is with the warehouses, the offices, and especially the stations all along the line. So massive are the last-named structures that they are called “German Castles.” Indeed, it is the firm conviction of many that these buildings were so designed that they might serve as strongholds in emergencies, such as sudden uprisings of lawless nomads or fanatical Moslems. Nothing was left to chance. So far as experience and engineering science could forecast the necessities of the future, provision was made for all eventualities—save only such a cataclysm as a world war, which threatened to interrupt the continuity of civilization.

As to the end and aim of the Bagdad Railway we are left in no doubt.

We must [writes Professor Diering] be true to ourselves by emphasizing and cultivating everything German. In all undertakings engineered by German diplomacy and financed with German money the official language must be German. Hence French, which has been the official language on Turkish Railways, must disappear. There must be a German school near every large railway station; and in these schools both the German and Turkish languages must be employed in giving instruction; any other language will be merely taught. Only specially selected and well-educated teachers should be sent to Turkey. Above all, German medical men must be introduced into Turkey’s railway system. They are the best medium for spreading German influence and for awakening esteem and affection for Germany.

On broad lines it is now quite clear what form the future Turkish Empire will assume. From Tripolis across to Persia and on to the ridges of the Caucasus, German energy—without injury to the sovereignty of the Osmanic State—will coöperate in Turkey’s renaissance and in the development of her treasures. But our enemies, together with their money, languages and schools will disappear from the territories which they hoped to divide among themselves.[175]

Equally explicit is another German writer, Herr Trampe, respecting the ulterior object of the Bagdad Railway.

The ancient highroad of the world [he declares] is the one which leads from Europe to India—the road used by Alexander—the highway which leads from the Danube via Constantinople to the valley of the Euphrates, and by northern Persia, Herat, and Kabul to the Ganges. Every yard of the Bagdad Railway which is laid brings the owner of the railway nearer to India. What Alexander performed and Napoleon undoubtedly planned can be achieved by a third treading in their footsteps. England views the Bagdad Railway as a very real and threatening danger to herself—and rightly so. She can never undo or annul its effects.[176]

The increasingly hostile attitude of the Entente Cordiale toward the Bagdad Railway, the violent ebullitions of the press of the rival powers portended trouble. No sooner had the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway been officially announced than it began to weigh as a nightmare on a great part of Europe. The chancelleries of the Old World began then to realize more clearly than ever before the boundless possibilities of the great oriental highway. English statesmen saw in it the virtual doubling of the German fleet at the head of the Persian Gulf, and then the cry was heard throughout Britain, “Let us have the Russians at Constantinople rather than a great power on the Persian Gulf.”

The Bagdad Railway [declares an English writer] was a damnosa hæreditas, which was due as much to a lack of imagination and effective organization on the part of our business community in the eighties and nineties of the last century, as it undoubtedly was to a mistaken policy in those critical years on the part of the British Government.[177]

Small wonder, then, is it that the Bagdad Railway was from the very beginning of the great World War considered as one of the chief contributing causes of the terrific cataclysm of the second decade of the twentieth century and that, whatever political, economic, and social adjustments may be entailed as a result of the most stupendous struggle of history, it is destined to modify even more profoundly the relations between the Orient and the Occident than did the far-reaching campaigns of Alexander the Great, which introduced Greek people and Greek culture to the East and made known to the West the riches and the wonders of Persia and India and Babylonia.

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE CRUSADERS

Nations melt

From power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt

The sunshine for a while, and downward go

Like lauwine loosened from the mountain’s belt.

Byron “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV, 12.

Aside from the interest which attaches to it as the north-western terminus of the Bagdad Railway, Konia, the ancient Iconium, like so many other places in Anatolia, is extremely rich in legendary and historic lore. According to a local myth it was the first spot to emerge from the waters of the Deluge. It is mentioned in the legend of Perseus and the Gorgons. A local legend has it that the name was derived from the Greek word eikon—figure or image—referring to the mud figures, which, when breathed upon by the wind, were converted into living men and women. This is evidently a variant of the old myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha. It was doubtless this pride in their great antiquity and a belief that Phrygian was the primitive language of our race that led the inhabitants of Iconium to claim a Phrygian origin. That Phrygian was really the oldest language they had no doubt. For, it was averred, the Egyptian King, Psametik, had conclusively proved this by showing that “infants brought up out of hearing of human speech spoke the Phrygian language.”

The Ten Thousand Greeks, in the army of Cyrus, halted here on their famous expedition to southern Mesopotamia. Cicero reviewed his troops here when he was proconsul of Cilicia. It was one of the important missionary centers of the early evangelizing activity of St. Paul. It was to this city that, accompanied by Barnabas, he directed his steps after he had been expelled by the Jews from Antioch.

In Roman times Iconium stood at the intersection of several important highways and was designated by Pliny urbs celeberrima—a most celebrated city. According to a venerable tradition, Iconium had for its first bishop Sosipatros, one of the seventy-two disciples, who was succeeded in the episcopal chair by Terentius, likewise one of this chosen body of disciples. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Iconium was the birthplace of St. Thecla, who is said to have been converted to Christianity by the Apostle St. Paul. She is the heroine of the Acta Pauli et Theclæ. From the earliest ages of the Church she was greatly venerated in Asia Minor, where she was known as the “Apostle and Proto-martyr among Women.” In the Greek Church her feast is celebrated on the twenty-fourth of September under the title of “Proto-martyr among Women and the Equal of the Apostles.”

And here, according to a venerable tradition on which oriental geographers set much store, is the tomb of “Plato the Divine,” who, under the name of Eflat, is revered by the local population as a thaumaturgus. The origin of this singular tradition in this part of Anatolia—so distant from the real burying place of the immortal philosopher—is one of the curiosities of Ottoman folklore.[178]

During two centuries—from 1099 to 1307—Iconium was the capital of the Seljuk Sultans of Rum[179] and is still regarded as one of the holy places of Islam. Many of its sultans were patrons of art and literature, and, during the zenith of its splendor, this Seljukian metropolis could boast of nearly as many colleges and students as Bagdad—the far-famed capital of the Abbasside Caliphate.

Its present chiefest title to fame is the tomb of the noted Jelal-ed-din-Rumi, usually known as Mevlana. He was famed for knowledge and wisdom and was the founder of the Dancing Dervishes and the author of the “Mesnevi,” a celebrated poem in Persian verse, in which is instilled the Sufi system of pantheism. His successors, as heads of the Dancing Dervishes, have their residence in Iconium and theirs is the right and the privilege to gird each Ottoman Sultan, on his accession to the throne, with the historic sword of Osman. This imposing function, which is performed in the Mosque of Eyub in Stamboul, has been likened to the coronation by the Pope of the Holy Roman Emperor.

By those who know them best the better class of Dancing, or, more properly, the Whirling Dervishes, are described as being a very tolerant and large-minded people. Thus it is said that “in the dangerous period in the winter of 1895–1896, when religious and national feeling ran high in Turkey, it was mainly owing to the Mevlevis that the softas of Konia were prevented from attacking the Christian population of the town.”[180]

But the orthodox Moslems, as represented by the softas and mollahs, do not regard with sympathy the peculiar ceremonial practices of the various orders of dervishes, especially their use of incense, music, and lighted candles in public worship. To the strict followers of the Koran the characteristic forms of worship of the Mevlevis and Rufais, more commonly known as the Dancing and Howling Dervishes, are as distasteful as are the ritualistic services of certain modern Anglicans to the conservative members of the Church of England. As to the esoteric doctrines of the dervishes, especially those based on the Mesnevi, they are declared by the doctors of Islam to be quite irreconcilable with both the Koran and the Hadith—the accepted traditions of Mohammedanism. It must be said that the bizarre performances of the Dancing and Howling Dervishes—performances which are resorted to as a means of detaching the minds of the devotees from all things earthly and attaining a state of spiritual ecstasy—are to the casual spectator but little different in kind from certain revivals of our southern negroes. The solemn dervishes, however, exhibit far more dignity and reverence in their devotions than do the excitable and noisy Africans in their camp-meetings and revivalistic gatherings.

Surrounded by a barren and desolate country, Konia, when seen from afar, looks like an oasis in the desert. It is situated on an elevated plateau well-watered by mountain streams and blessed with a salubrious climate. It was these attractive features that led the Seljukian Turks to choose it for their capital. Its luxuriant gardens and orchards have long been famous and add much to the city’s picturesqueness—especially when viewed from a distance. For when one enters the old Seljukian capital there is little to attract attention except a few mosques. Of the old Greek city practically nothing remains aside from the fragments of friezes, cornices, bas-reliefs, and ancient inscriptions which are found in the walls which surround the erstwhile Seljukian capital. Here, as in so many other places in Anatolia, the Turks, when requiring material for their mosques and palaces, converted the imposing temples of the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines into quarries for stone, and lime. As in Nicæa, a great part of the space within the walls of Konia is covered with crumbling ruins overgrown with weeds and bushes. The poet must have had such a scene in his mind’s eye when he penned the lines:

There a temple in ruin stands

Fashioned by long-forgotten hands;

Two or three columns and many a stone,

Marble and granite with grass overgrown

Out upon time! It will leave no more

Of the things to come than the things before.

Modern Konia, a good part of which lies outside of the walls of the Seljuk capital of the thirteenth century, is composed of one-story buildings, constructed chiefly of wood and sun-dried bricks. But amid all the squalor and decay that distinguishes this historic city there are several mosques and medresses—colleges—which will well repay careful inspection.

Among the buildings deserving particular attention is the splendid tekke of the Dancing Dervishes, in which is the tomb of Hazret Mevlana, the founder of this peculiar order. It is popularly known as the “Blue Mosque” from the exquisite sapphire and turquoise blue tiles which until recently covered the cupola that rises above the great turbeh of the founder. There is nothing in Brusa, Stamboul, or Cairo that can surpass its rich and delicate traceries and arabesques, its profusion of jeweled lamps, its wealth, precious tapestries, wondrous faïence, its magic glories of color from the looms and kilns of Persia and India. But over and above all this wealth of ornamentation there is a religious atmosphere that does not exist in the ordinary mosque. For the dervishes, unlike the orthodox Moslems, make a special appeal to the emotions of their followers, and hence their widespread influence and popularity throughout the Mohammedan world.

There is, however, no attempt made here to affect the emotions through any of the plastic or pictorial arts. In this respect the Blue Mosque, like every other mosque in Islam, is absolutely devoid of paintings and statues. The reason is that Moslem law proscribes all representations of the human form, either in painting or statuary, as impious, because they are regarded “as encouragements to idolatry and as profanations of God’s chief handiwork.”[181]

According to one of the traditional sayings of Mohammed, “Whoever draws a picture will at the day of resurrection be punished by being ordered to blow a spirit into it; and this he can never do; and so he will be punished as long as God wills.” Nor does the Prophet leave any doubt as to the nature of the punishment, for he declares explicitly, “Every painter is in hell-fire.” In another saying, however, he greatly modifies this pitiless statement and tells the painter, “If you must make pictures, make them of trees and of things without souls.” It is because of this concession to artists that one may frequently see in Mohammedan houses pictures of flowers and trees and even of landscapes, provided there be in them no delineation of “the human form divine.” But in the homes of the strict adherents of Moslemism all images are rigorously tabooed, for, according to another saying of the Prophet, “Angels do not enter into the house in which is a dog, nor into that in which are pictures.”[182]

Konia is now a flourishing city of about sixty thousand souls. Most of its inhabitants, like those of Brusa, are pure Turks, who rigidly adhere not only to the religion but also to the manners and customs of their fathers. There is here, however, a goodly number of Greeks, Armenians, and Germans, besides whom there is also, among the employees of the Bagdad Railway, a sprinkling of Swiss, French, and Italians. Among the various institutions we visited, none gave us more agreeable surprise than those established here some decades ago by the Priests and Sisters of the Assumption from France, which are in a very prosperous condition. The Sisters have a school and dispensary, and their devoted care of the poor and sick has made them greatly beloved by all classes, irrespective of creed. Nowhere is the zeal of the ardent French nun seen to better advantage than in foreign missions, where her enthusiasm, notwithstanding the great difficulties she frequently encounters, never abates and where she exhibits a happiness that communicates itself to all who come in contact with her.

Nowhere in Anatolia, except probably in Brusa, has one a better opportunity to study the manners and customs and simple pastimes of the genuine Turk than in Konia. Theaters and operas, as we know them, they have not. From all social assemblages, like those in the western world, which are frequented by men and women alike, they are debarred by a custom that is more binding than the laws of the Medes and Persians.

But notwithstanding the total absence of all the entertainments that contribute so much to the pleasure of the people of Europe and America, the Anatolian has a way of spending his leisure hours that quite satisfies him. His amusements are simple indeed, but with them he is content.

Most of these center in the coffeehouse, which, to a great extent, takes the place of the restaurant in France and the club in the United States. Like the club and restaurant the Turkish coffeehouse

Is the resort of public men; the haunt

Of wealthy idlers and the trysting-place

Of such as have no home to indicate—

A place where each may come and go at will,

Think his own thoughts, pursue his own affairs,

Or fling his ore of feeling and of sense

Into the common crucible.

Unlike the club and restaurant, the coffeehouse serves no food or alcoholic liquors of any kind. Aside from the people who congregate there, and it is usually well-patronized, its attractions are as limited as they are simple. In the less pretentious places these are confined to coffee, tobacco, and, occasionally, the Medak, or story-teller. In the more sumptuous places of the larger cities there is also music, but it is generally of a very inferior quality, for the instruments employed are for the most part limited to a drum, a tambourine, and two or three rude guitars.

In Anatolia, as in all Moslem countries, the Medak is a most popular character. Not infrequently his ability is so marked that he attains the rank of a personage, and his services on festive occasions are in great demand and for them he is liberally remunerated. The admirable manner in which he can, unaided, fill the rôle of entire casts of the most diverse characters, his marvelous versatility in personating the people of different nations, and in imitating the tones, phraseologies, and even the facial expression of the multitudinous races of the Turkish empire are really astonishing and are to his audience a source of unending delight. Not a few of the Medaks, in addition to histrionic talent that would do honor to the best European stage, have a gift of expression and a facility of invention that make them the rivals of the most eminent Italian improvisatori. With such entertainers the Turks can readily forego our more elaborate forms of amusement, even if they were available.[183]

But the stories and drolleries of the Medak—although always a perennial source of pleasure—are not the chief attractions of the coffeehouse. These are partly supplied, as Lowell so playfully puts it, by

The kind nymph to Bacchus born

By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems

Gifted on her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams—

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grapes’ bewildering juice.

Although the use of tobacco was long forbidden in the Mohammedan world[184] and although its lawfulness is still disputed by a large number of Moslems, especially the Wahabis, the “scented weed” is now used almost universally from Morocco to Delhi and from Stamboul to Mecca. It is, however, well for the Moslems of to-day that tobacco and coffee were unknown in the time of Mohammed, as he would most likely have put them under the same ban as intoxicating liquors and games of chance.

Nothing more perfectly harmonizes with the temperament of the Oriental than the smoking habit, and it is doubtless this practice that contributes not a little to that remarkable patience and that wonderful repose which so distinguishes the Turk and the Arab from the nervous and overwrought American or European. An Oriental reclining on his cushioned divan with his bubbling narghile supplied with the rose-scented tobacco from Shiraz or Salonica is a matchless picture of contentment, and nothing that the hurry-scurry West can offer will excite his envy or disturb his peaceful reverie.

The invariable accompaniment of the narghile or chibouk with their aromatic and sedative narcotic is the zarf, with its small cup of foaming black coffee made from the prized Mocha berries of Arabic Felix.[185] Only in the East is this grateful and refreshing beverage properly prepared.[186] Let those who doubt this statement read of its virtues as celebrated by the Arabic poet, Abd-el-Kader Anazari Djezeri Hanbali. Only those will find his eulogy a wild extravagance who have never experienced the revivifying effects of the dark ambrosia that so gladdens the Bedouin’s tent and the pasha’s palace.

O Coffee! thou dispellest the cares of the great; thou bringest back those who wander from the paths of knowledge. Coffee is the beverage of the people of God and the cordial of His servants who thirst for wisdom. When coffee is infused into the bowl it exhales the odor of musk and is of the color of ink. The truth is not known except to the wise who drink it from the foaming coffeecup. God has deprived fools of coffee, who, with invincible obstinacy condemn it as injurious.

Coffee is our gold and in the place of its libations we are in the enjoyment of the best and noblest society. Coffee is as innocent a drink as the purest milk from which it is distinguished only by its color. Tarry with thy coffee in the place of its preparation and the good God will hover over thee and participate in His feast. There the graces of the salon, the luxury of life, the society of friends, all furnish a picture of the abode of happiness.

Every care vanishes when the cup-bearer presents the delicious chalice. It will circulate freely through thy veins and will not rankle there. If thou doubtest this, contemplate the youth and beauty of those who drink it. Grief cannot exist where it grows; sorrow humbles itself in obedience before its powers.

Coffee is the drink of God’s people; in it is health. Let this be the answer to those who doubt its qualities. In it we will drown our adversities and in its fire consume our sorrows. Whoever has once seen the blissful chalice will scorn the wine-cup. Glorious drink! Thy color is the seal of purity and reason proclaims it genuine. Drink with confidence and regard not the prattle of fools who condemn without foundation.[187]

So much for the oriental coffeehouse and the pleasure and surcease of care and sorrow which it offers its listless, dream-loving habitués. What are the amusements of the women of the Orient? Let the distinguished English writer, Julia Pardoe, whose knowledge of Turkish life and manners was not surpassed even by that of the well-informed Lady Mary Wortley Montague, give a reply to this interesting but ill-understood question. In the quotation given she is writing about the women of Constantinople, but what she says of them can, ceteris paribus, be asserted of their sisters in other parts of the Ottoman Empire:

It is a great fallacy [she declares] to imagine that Turkish females are like birds in a cage or captives in a cell;—far from it; there is not a public festival, be it Turk, Frank, Armenian or Greek, where they are not to be seen in numbers sitting upon their carpets or in their carriages, surrounded by slaves and attendants, eager and delighted spectators of the revel. Then they have their gilded and glittering caiques on the Bosphorus, where, protected by their veils, their ample mantles and their negro guard, they spend long hours in passing from house to house, visiting their acquaintances and gathering and dispensing the gossip of the city.

All this may and indeed must appear startling to persons who have accustomed themselves to believe that Turkish wives were morally manacled slaves. There are, probably, no women so little trammelled in the world; so free to come and go unquestioned, provided that they are suitably attended, while it is equally certain that they enjoy this privilege like innocent and happy children, making their pleasures of the flowers and the sunshine and revelling, like the birds and bees in the summer brightness, profiting by the enjoyment of the passing hour and reckless or thoughtless of the future.[188]

Since these lines were written, the liberty of the Turkish woman has been greatly extended, as have also her opportunities of obtaining a higher education, which were so long denied her.

From the foregoing it seems that the peoples of the Orient—both men and women—get quite as much pleasure out of life—in their own way, of course—as do our luxury-loving people of the Occident at the expenditure of far greater effort and wealth. But in this, as in other things—every one to his taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.

But much as one may be interested in the mosques and medresses and the customs of the people of Konia, the traveler of a practical turn of mind will find more to engage his attention in the splendid barrage which was constructed about a decade ago, some twenty odd miles to the south-east of the city, for the irrigation of the broad plain of Konia. It is the work of a German company, which, by utilizing the waters of two neighboring lakes—the Beushehr and the Sogla Geul—has enabled its enterprising managers to irrigate nearly a hundred and fifty thousand acres of valuable land which would otherwise remain arid and unproductive. It is notable as being the first undertaking of the kind in Asia Minor, and has already been of untold value to the inhabitants of Konia Plain. The success of this important work is sure to lead to the construction of similar reservoirs in other parts of Anatolia, with the happy result that many broad stretches of this long-neglected and deserted country will eventually be restored to their former fertility and populousness.

Time was, as history informs me, when Asia Minor, which has long been presented in many parts by pictures of utter barrenness and desolation, was one of the most fertile and productive and flourishing in the world. It was from this land, as DeCandolle[189] has shown, that Europe received many of its most important fruits and cereals, as well as many of its most valuable shrubs and trees. From Asia Minor came the peach, the plum, the cherry, and the apricot, the quince and the mulberry, and probably also the apple and the olive. From it also came wheat, barley, oats and lucerne and numerous other useful cultivated plants. It was doubtless for these reasons that an old legend located in this region the cradle of our race.

Before leaving Konia it may be noted that it was on the route of the Crusades led by Godfrey de Bouillon and Frederic Barbarossa. Godfrey’s forces found the city abandoned by the enemy, but the army of Barbarossa was forced to take the city by storm and compel the Sultan to sue for peace.

After leaving the old Seljukian capital we found little worthy of note until we reached the famous chain of the Taurus Mountains. For a great part of the distance our train passed over a level plain, sparsely populated. Here and there were small villages with mud-built houses surrounded by diminutive tracts of land under cultivation, not unlike those that are everywhere visible in northern Mexico.

What impressed us here, as in other parts of Anatolia, was the paucity of its inhabitants and their total failure to utilize the marvelous natural resources of the country. Although the area of Asia Minor is equal to that of France, its population is but one-fifth of that of the French Republic. And yet the natural resources of the country are enormous, and if properly conserved would suffice to support several times its present population. Rich in valuable minerals of all kinds, its untold treasures of ore are left unmined. Its flora, too, is as varied as it is valuable. The oak, for instance, counts more varieties here than in any other part of the world. Fifty-two species occur in Anatolia, twenty-six of which are not known to exist elsewhere. But in this part of the world, forestry is an unknown science. Worse still. Not only is arboriculture practically unknown, but thousands of valuable trees are every year wantonly destroyed. If the water, mineral, and forest resources were properly conserved and developed, Asia Minor would again be as it was in the long ago—one of the most populous and flourishing regions of the globe.

No country perhaps has seen such a succession of prosperous states and had such a host of historical reminiscences, under such distinct eras and such various distributions of territory. It is memorable in the beginning of history for its barbarian kings and nobles whose names stand as commonplaces and proverbs of wealth and luxury. The magnificence of Pelops imparts lustre even to the brilliant dreams of the mythologist. The name of Crœsus, King of Lydia ... goes as a proverb for his enormous riches. Midas, King of Phrygia, had such abundance of the precious metals that he was said by the poets to have the power of turning whatever he touched into gold. The tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, was one of the seven wonders of the world.[190]

But as it is now, this country, once so famed for its wealth and its splendid cities, for its “powerful and opulent kingdoms, Greek or Barbarian, of Pontus and Bithynia and Pergamus—Pergamus[191] with its two hundred thousand choice volumes”—is so poor and neglected that its people frequently suffer from famine and from all the miseries consequent on improvidence and failure to utilize the vast treasures within their reach. It is to be hoped that the advent of the railroad and the introduction of irrigation and the promised establishment of an efficient forestry will ere long materially improve the present sad economic condition of the country, and that fair Anatolia will once more be covered, as of yore, with flourishing marts of commerce and magnificent cities where there are now crumbling columns of Greek temples and scattered fragments of Roman palaces and amphitheaters—a veritable “sepulchre of the past.”

The plain which we now traversed was for a considerable distance gravelly land, alternately marshy and dry and not infrequently very saline. Rocks of a volcanic character were often visible. There were little evidences of life except here and there long droves of heavily burdened donkeys and camels and occasional flocks and herds of wandering Turkomans.

Trains of camels in the deserts of Asia and Africa have always had a peculiar fascination for me. Like the llama trains of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes they seem to be specially adapted to their environment and to the work which they are called upon to perform. Before the invention of the steam engine both, in their sphere, were all but indispensable—the sure-footed llama on dizzy mountain heights, the thirst-resisting camel in torrid, interminable deserts. Even since the appearance of the locomotive these useful animals are apparently as much in demand as ever. For, in addition to transporting merchandise, as formerly, where railroads do not exist, they are still in constant use in delivering goods to such roads as are already in operation.

In the region of which I am now speaking, one, at times, sees only three or four camels at most; at others there are a hundred or more, all loaded to the limit of endurance. But whenever they appear in the gray, barren, undulating plain, they, with their drivers, at once give life and color to the landscape which is else but a dull study in monochrome. Their leader is usually a dirty, unkempt, diminutive donkey—in marked contrast to the stately animals that submissively follow him—which is frequently bestridden by a somnolent Turk wearing a faded old fez and voluminous red trousers, with his legs reaching almost to the ground. As the caravan gradually approaches one hears the jingling of the bells of the light-stepping donkey and the clanging of the larger bells of the heavy, lurching camel. But we also presently discover that both donkey and camels are decked with gaudy trappings adorned with beads and cowrie shells. These, however, are not solely for ornament, as one might suppose, but rather to avert the evil eye which, in the Near East, is even more dreaded than it is in any part of southern Italy.

How the camel carries one back to patriarchal times, to times even when the domesticated horse was known only in warfare! As a long line of betasselled camels came near our train one day, they seemed by their sneers and the lofty manner in which they held up their heads to be conscious of their ancient lineage and to resent the trespassing by the Bagdad Railway on what was long their exclusive domain. But to judge by the general appearance of the country—the old patched tents, the reed huts, the hovels of unbaked mud, the peculiar garb of the people, the primitive methods of agriculture, the simple manners and customs of the people—this part of Anatolia, notwithstanding the advent of the iron horse, is in almost the same condition as it was when Joseph and his brethren tended their father’s flocks in the land of Canaan.

If this part of Asia Minor was as arid and desolate in the days of Godfrey de Bouillon and Barbarossa—and we have no reason to believe it was materially different—we can easily realize what must have been the trials and sufferings of the Crusaders during their long march through “burning Phrygia” and inhospitable Lycaonia. Their route was through a dry, sterile, and salty desert, a land of tribulation and horror.[192] It was then, no wonder that, in view of the perils and sufferings entailed by an inland expedition, the later Crusaders preferred to make the journey from Europe to the Holy Land by sea.

Terror [writes Michaud] opened to the pilgrims all the passages of Mount Taurus. Throughout their triumphant march the Christians had nothing to dread but famine, the heat of the climate and the badness of the roads. They had particularly much to suffer in crossing a mountain situated between Coxon and Marash which their historians denominate, “The Mountain of the Devil.”[193]

So great, indeed, were the toils and dangers and disasters experienced by the Crusaders before they reached the Holy City of Jerusalem, that the brilliant French historian is moved to declare, “If great national remembrances inspire us with the same enthusiasm, if we entertain as strong a respect for the memory of our ancestors, the Conquest of the Holy Land must be for us as glorious and memorable an epoch as the war of Troy was for the people of Greece.”[194] Again he avers, “When comparing these two memorable wars and the poetical masterpieces that have celebrated them, we cannot but think the subject of the Jerusalem Delivered is more wonderful than that of the Iliad.”[195]

There are several passes through the Taurus, but by far the most important of them is the famous one long known as the Pylæ Ciliciæ, or Cilician Gates.[196] From time immemorial this celebrated pass has been the gateway between Syria and Asia Minor, between southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe. Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Crusaders passed through them. Asurbanipal, Cyrus the Great, and Sapor I led their armies through their narrow defiles. Cyrus the Younger and Xenophon pushed their way through them on their way to fateful Cunaxa. Alexander, Cicero, Harun-al-Rashid led their armies through this narrow passage. It was also traversed by St. Paul, by hosts of the Crusaders and by pilgrims innumerable from the earliest ages of the Church.

On our way across the Taurus we followed in the footsteps of Alexander and the Crusaders as far as the Vale of Bozanti. Here the Bagdad Railway diverges slightly eastward from the old military and trade route which passes through the Cilician Gates. As we preferred to follow the old historic route to passing through nearly eleven miles of railway tunnels, we left the train at Bozanti Khan and proceeded by carriage through the Cilician Gates to Tarsus.

We were well repaid for so doing, for we had, in consequence, one of the most delightful mountain drives in the world. On each side of the road were towering heights clothed with forests of pine and other evergreens, while rising far above these was the sky-piercing summit of Bulgar Dagh covered with a mantle of snow of dazzling whiteness. Further on our way

The pass expands

Its strong jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,

And seems with its accumulated crags,

To overhang the world.

And, as if to give life and variety to the majestic scene, we saw circling the fantastic peaks and hovering above the beetling crags in quest of prey, a number of great bare-necked vultures, which seemed to be fully as large as the lammergeier of the Alps and no mean rivals of the condor of the Andes.

The narrow gorge known as the Cilician Gates answers perfectly to Cicero’s appellation of Pylæ-Tauri, gateway of the Taurus. And it corresponds almost equally well with Xenophon’s description of it when he declares it “but broad enough for a chariot to pass with great difficulty.” On both sides of the mountain torrent which rushes along the historic roadway are lofty and almost vertical precipices that could easily be so fortified as to convert it into a Thermopylæ, where a handful of men could hold a large army at bay. It was indeed by fortressing this pass that Mehemet Ali was long able, in defiance of the power of the Turkish Sultan, to retain control of Syria.

Shortly after emerging from the Pylæ Ciliciæ we catch our first view of the famed Cilician Plain, the Cilicia Campestris, which occupies so large a page in the history of this part of the world. Through it we see coursing like silver bands the distant rivers of familiar names—the Sarus, the Pyramus, and the Cydnus. The road in the vicinity of the pass is fringed with forests of pine and plane trees, under whose outstretched branches flows a leaping, laughing, tuneful stream which is ever making the same gladsome music as it did when St. Paul passed this way bearing the joyful tidings of the Gospel to the receptive peoples of Asia Minor. But as we near the plain we note a marked change in climate. Vegetation is not only more luxuriant but is almost semi-tropical in character. The road is bordered with laurel, bay, cedar, evergreen oak, wild fig, and wild olive. There are thickets of myrtle and oleander draped with wild vines and creepers, which greatly enhance the picturesqueness of the enchanting scene.

It was along this road, embowered in all the verdure and bloom of a semi-tropical climate, that the weary and footsore Crusaders passed after their long and toilsome march through the burning desert of Phrygia. Now that they had crossed the formidable Taurus, the greatest barrier athwart their long line of march, and were at last about to tread the sacred soil of the Holy Land, we can easily imagine the joy with which they chanted their favorite hymns, the enthusiasm with which they filled the air with their war cry, Dieu le veult. Clad in polished armor, shining brightly in the Syrian sun, and exultantly marching under their great banners, they form a magnificent pageant, worthy of the chivalry of the Ages of Faith and of the noble cause in which they have magnanimously pledged fortune and life. And as the Christian host moves onward towards its goal, “one pictures, above the lines of steel, the English leopards, the lilies of France, the great sable eagle of the Empire and then the other coats of the great houses of Europe—chevrons and fesses and pales”—ever triumphantly approaching the Holy City until at last they are privileged to “plant above the Holy Sepulchre the banner with the five potent crosses, argent and or, unearthly, wonderful as should be the arms of the heavenly Jerusalem.”

Still following in the footsteps of the Crusaders we finally, after the most delightful of drives, arrived at the old city of Tarsus, the birthplace of St. Paul the Apostle. This was the first city in which Baldwin and Bohemond and the Tancred the Brave flew their colors after crossing the Taurus. We had followed in their footsteps a great part of the way from the legend-wrapped Bosphorus to the romantic Cydnus—the Cydnus in which Alexander so imprudently bathed, where Cleopatra met Anthony and where legend long had it that Barbarossa lost his life. But the truth of history bids us declare that this great German hero—in whose footsteps we had so closely followed from his embarkation on the far-off Danube—perished not in the waters of the Cydnus but in those of the Calycadnus, several score miles to the northwest of the more famed Cilician stream. It was then in the Calycadnus—the modern Gieuk Gu—that “perished the noblest type of German kingship, the Kaiser Redbeard, of whom history and legend have so much to tell.” The spot where he met his fate was fabled to have been indicated long ages before by a rock near the river’s source, which was said to bear the portentous words Hic hominum maximus peribit—here shall perish the greatest of men.

But although history had declared that the heroic Römischer Kaiser was no more, his admiring subjects knew better. Like Charlemagne, Desmond of Kilmallock, Sebastian I of Brazil, Napoleon Bonaparte, and other worthies,[197] he still lives, but has retired into strict seclusion till, in the fulness of time, “he shall come again full twice as fair and rule over his people.” According to one legend the monarch is fast asleep in the castle of Bordenstein, or in the vaults of the old palace of Kaiserslautern. But according to another legend, he is held by enchanted slumber under the Kyffhauser mountain. All, however, agree that he sits

Taciturn, sombre, sedate and grave,

before a stone table “through which his fiery-red beard has grown nearly to the floor, or around which it has coiled itself nearly three times.” Here, like King Arthur, of whom it is written, “Arturus rex quondam rexque futurus,” he rests until

In some dark day when Germany

Hath need of warriors such as he,

A voice to tell of her distress

Shall pierce the mountain’s deep recess—

Shall ring through the dim vaults and scare

The spectral ravens round his chair,

And from his trance the sleeper wake.

The solid mountain shall dispart,

The granite slab in splinters start,

(Responsive to those accents weird)

And loose the Kaiser’s shaggy beard.

Through all the startled air shall rise

The old Teutonic battle cries;

The horns of war that once could stir

The wild blood of the Berserker,

Shall fling their blare abroad, and then

The champion of his own Almain,

Shall Barbarossa come again.

CHAPTER IX
IN HISTORIC CILICIA CAMPESTRIS

Domes, minarets, their spiry heads that rear,

Mocking with gaudy hues the ruins near;

Dim crumbling colonnades and marble walls,

Rich columns, broken statutes, roofless halls;

Beauty, deformity, together thrown,

A maze of ruins, date, design unknown—

Such is the scene, the conquest Time hath won.

Nicolas Michel.

It is doubtful whether, in any part of the world, more history has been condensed in less area than in the picturesque region formerly called Cilicia. Roughly speaking, it comprised the triangle bordered by the Mediterranean and the lofty ranges of the Taurus and Amanus Mountains. Its rich alluvial plains, watered by the celebrated Cydnus and Pyramus, Sarus, and Pinarus, early attracted a large population, who found there not only a mild and serene climate but also a soil that yielded in rare abundance the plants and fruits most useful to their sustenance and comfort. But, although the economical value of the Cilician Plain—called by Strabo Cilicia Campestris—was great, it was rather the political and military importance of this country that made it the prize of contending nations from the earliest dawn of history.

In the days when Hittite and Assyrian fiercely contended for universal empire—long

Ere Rome was built or smiled fair Athen’s charms

it was the highway between Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. It was the royal road between Persia and Greece on which was heard the martial tread of the armies of Xerxes, Cyrus, and Alexander. Rameses II—the Napoleon of Egypt—and Asurbanipal—the Napoleon of Assyria—led their victorious hosts along this road and, like the warriors who had preceded them, found subsistence for their men in the fertile valleys of the Pyramus and the Cydnus. It was also a field of frequent sanguinary conflicts during the days of Pompey and Cicero, of Mark Anthony and Zenobia, the rarely gifted but ill-fated “Queen of the East.” It was a continued arena of strife during protracted wars between the Byzantine Emperors and the Sassanian Kings, between the Osmanlis and Timur and Jenghiz Khan, and, in recent times, between the Sultan of Constantinople and his ambitious and rebellious viceroy, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.

Three of the decisive battles of the world war were fought on the Cilician Plain. It was on the banks of the Pinarus that Alexander won his memorable victory over Darius—a victory that gave the irresistible Macedonian the control of the vast region between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates and paved the way for the brilliant triumph at Arbela, which made him the master of the world’s greatest continent. It was here that more than five hundred years later Septimus Severus crushed his rival Pescennius Niger, when “the troops of Europe asserted their usual ascendant over the effeminate natives of Asia.” And it was on this same historic spot that Heraclius defeated Chosroes and once more, in a most signal manner, showed the superiority of the West over the East.

But in addition to its celebrity as the theater of contests for world supremacy, Cilicia, like so many other regions we have described in the preceding pages, is noted as a field of romance, of myths, and legends innumerable.

Among the strange romances that still await the pen of novelist and historian is that connected with the extraordinary life and deeds of the Turkoman freebooter, Kutchuk Ali Uglu, who a century ago had his stronghold in the mountain fastnesses near Issus. Here, during forty years, he openly defied the authority of the Porte and the Great Powers of Europe. With the audacity of a Fra Diavolo and the cruelty and relentlessness of a Barbary corsair he ravaged the surrounding country and plundered traveling merchants and the grand annual caravan of pilgrims from Constantinople to Mecca whenever they came within his reach.

I am not [he was wont to say] as other Darah Beys are—fellows without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the King’s highway;—I am content with what God sends me. I await his good pleasure, and—Alhumlillah—God be praised—He never leaves me long in want of anything.[198]

Among some of the most daring performances of this desperado was the seizure of the master of an English vessel with a part of its crew, who were cast into prison. A large ransom was demanded for their release, but before this was forthcoming all but one perished. Strange as it may now seem, the English government with all its power was never able to obtain any satisfaction for this atrocious act of violence.

Shortly afterwards, the dauntless robber took possession of a richly laden French merchantman—which, through ignorance of the locality, came too near his fortress—and after appropriating its cargo, sank the vessel and sent the captain and crew to the French Consul at Alexandretta. Protests against these high-handed proceedings were made by all the consular authorities at Aleppo, but without avail. To the vigorous remonstrance of the Dutch Consul, Kutchuk Ali coolly and blandly replied:

My dear Friend, I am threatened with attacks from the four quarters of the earth; I am without money; I am without means; and the ever watchful providence of the Almighty sends me a vessel laden with merchandise. Say, would you not in my place lay hold of it, or not?

It was only a few months later that this same consul was arrested and imprisoned by the audacious freebooter. And, notwithstanding the cordial friendship which had long existed between the two men, the ruthless marauder did not liberate his prisoner until he had extorted from him a very large ransom.

And during the eight months’ incarceration of the hapless consul, Kutchuk Ali—was it from shame for ill-treating an old friend?—never once visited his hapless victim or admitted him to his presence. But, to show the character of this singular brigand, he did not fail, through his lieutenant, to send to his prisoner words of sympathy and consolation.

Tell him [the captor said] that unfortunately my coffers were empty when fate brought him into this territory; but let him not despair, God is great and mindful of us. Such misfortunes are inseparable from the fate of men of renown, and from the lot of all born to fill high stations. Bid him be of good cheer; a similar doom has twice been mine, and once during nine months in the condemned cell of Abdul Rahman Pasha; but I never despaired of God’s mercy, and all came right at last,—Alla Karim—God is bountiful.[199]

When one is told that Kutchuk Ali, during his forty years of a desperado’s life, never had more than two hundred men, and frequently a far less number, it seems incredible that he was so long able to defy not only the Porte but even the greatest powers of Europe. But we forget that the notorious Calabian bandit, Fra Diavolo, during the same period and with a much smaller band of outlaws, was wantonly perpetrating similar atrocities in southern Italy. And it was only a few generations earlier that the notorious Captain Kidd was roving the high seas in open defiance of the naval power of the civilized world.

One of the most popular legends in Cilicia is that of the Seven Sleepers. According to the Christian version they were seven brothers who fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus during the persecution of the Emperor Decius, and did not awake until the time of Theodosius II—nearly two hundred years later. The Mohammedans, however, contend that the cave in which this preternatural event occurred was about ten miles northwest of Tarsus. Because of the prominence the Prophet gives the legend in the Koran, the Cilician cave has become among the Moslems a favorite place of pilgrimage. Mohammed has, however, elaborated the story by introducing the dog—Al Rakim—of the Seven Sleepers and descanting on the care that Allah took of the bodies of the sleepers during their long, miraculous sleep.[200]

But it is in classical legend and myth that Cilicia is specially rich. It was near the mouth of the Pyramus, according to Homer, that Bellerophon, after his fall from Pegasus,

Forsook by heaven, forsaking humankind,

Wide o’er the Aleian field he chose to stray,

A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way.

Mopsuestia, which was formerly one of the largest and most flourishing cities of Cilicia, was fabled to have been founded during the Trojan war by Mopsus, the son of Manto and Apollo, while Adana, the most important commercial center on the Sarus and the Bagdad Railway, owes its name, legend has it, to Adam, its fabulous founder.

A notable feature of the history of Cilicia is the number of crowned heads who died or found their last resting place within its borders. Constantius, the son of Constantine, died of fever at Mopsucrene, near Tarsus, while marching against his nephew and rival, Julian the Apostate. It was to Tarsus that the embalmed body of the Apostate Emperor, who had been transfixed by a Persian javelin beyond the Tigris, was brought for burial. It was in Tarsus that Maximinus, the last of the great persecutors of the Church, preceding Constantine the Great, died in the greatest agony of a frightful disease—a visitation, according to many, for his barbarous persecutions of the Christians and for his horrible blasphemies against their Lord and Savior. It was, we are informed by Strabo, at Anchiale, the port of Tarsus, where were entombed the mortal remains of the celebrated Assyrian ruler known to the Greeks as Sardanapalus. On his monument was a stone statue beneath which was the famous epitaph—attributed to the Assyrian monarch himself—which, as rendered by Byron in his tragedy “Sardanapalus,” ran:

Sardanapalus,

The King and son of Ancyndaraxes

In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus.

Eat, drink and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip.[201]

Asurbanipal, according to this inscription which was supposed to express in a few words the guiding principles of this life, evidently belonged to that class of Europeans who are seemingly becoming daily more numerous of whom the poet speaks in the words:

Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna

Vix pueri credunt.[202]

The population of Cilicia, as might be expected from its having been from time immemorial the great arena of the nations of the Orient and the Occident, has always been of the most cosmopolitan character. In ancient times Medes and Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Scythians and Hittites foregathered here, sometimes bent on the purpose of commerce but more frequently on the prosecution of war and conquest. To-day we find here Syrians and Arabians, Greeks and Armenians, Kurds and Ansaryii, Turkomans and Osmanlis, and representatives from divers parts of Africa and Europe. Was it this heterogeneous character of the Cilicians which gave rise to their widespread reputation for perfidy and untruthfulness and that led to the proverb Cilix haud facile verum dicet?

Knowing the complex character of its inhabitants, one is not surprised to learn that the gods and idols of the Cilicians were as manifold as the people themselves and that their worship exhibited all the promiscuity of the divers nations from whence they came. Baal and Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, and Osiris had their altars alongside those of Mars and Mercury, Zeus and Aphrodite. There was, indeed, a time—just before the advent of the world’s Redeemer—when it could be said that Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was, in very truth, the pantheon of paganism.

During the zenith of its glory, Cilicia was one of the most densely populated countries in the world. But it has long since so fallen from its high estate that, like the lands of the Nile and the Euphrates, it is a region of ruins. So great indeed have been the ravages of time and warring mortals that “ruins of cities, evidently of an age after Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day, astonish the adventurous traveler by their magnificence and elegance.”[203]

Mopsuestia, which once counted two hundred thousand inhabitants, was an archbishopric and for a time the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, now numbers less than a thousand. Anazarbas, which was the home of the poet Oppian and Dioscorides who, “during fifteen centuries was an undisputed authority in botany and materia medica, has long since been level with the ground.” Nor is this all. Of many places mentioned by Cicero, when he was proconsul of Cilicia, even the sites are unknown.

Because of the strong appeal made by its legendary and historic lore we lingered longer in Tarsus than in any other spot in the Cilician plain. Like many other places we visited during our journey, Tarsus is as rich in myth and legend as it is in literary and historical associations. According to one myth, Tarsus was founded by Perseus, the son of Jupiter and Danæ, while on his fabled expedition against the Gorgons. Another has it that the city was so named because Pegasus, the winged horse of Olympus, dropped there one of his pinions.[204] Josephus, however, identifies it with the Tarshish of the Old Testament, whence the ships of Hiram and Solomon brought their treasures of tin, silver, and gold.[205]

From an inscription on the Black Obelisk of Salmanasar II, we learn that Tarsus was captured by the Assyrians under Salmanasar about the middle of the ninth century, B. C. It was thus in existence several centuries before the mythical Romulus and Remus erected on the Capitoline their sanctuary for homicides and runaway slaves, and its foundation was probably laid before the legendary introduction into Greece of the Phœnician alphabet by Cadmus when he went in quest of Europa.

Centuries passed by and Tarsus became a great and flourishing center of commerce and literary activity. While Paris—La Ville Lumière—was as yet only a collection of mud huts on a little island in the Seine, inhabited by the Gallic Parisii, and London was but “a thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart”[206] and occupied by half-savage, woad-stained Britons, Tarsus ranked as a center of Greek thought and knowledge with the world-famed cities, Athens and Alexandria.[207] Its schools and lecture rooms were frequented by vast numbers of students from far and near, while its agora and gymnasium, as in Athens in the days of Socrates, drew large concourses of people, young and old, who assembled to discuss not only the current news of the day, but also questions of literature, science, and philosophy.

Although famed throughout the Roman Empire as a civitas libera et mimunis—a capital and a free city—and as a great emporium of eastern trade, its proudest boast was that it was a city of schools and scholars. Here were found poets and orators of marked eminence. Here were philosophers of many schools, Stoics and Peripatetics, Platonists and Epicureans—all with their enthusiastic followers and all seriously discussing the same problems which have engaged the attention of thoughtful men from their time to our own.

In the long list of men produced by Tarsus, or who added luster to its name as teacher of students, were the two Athenodori, one of whom had been the tutor of Julius Cæsar and the other the friend of Cato and the instructor of Augustus. These were Stoics. Among the Academicians was Nestor, who was the preceptor of Marcellus, the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus. Other eminent men of Tarsus, mentioned by Strabo, were the philosophers, Archimedes and Antipater, the latter of whom was highly praised by Cicero, and who, next to Zeno, was considered as the most eminent of the Stoics. There were also Strabo, the great geographer, the grammarians Diodorus and Artemidorus, and the poets Dionysides and Aratus, from whose poem, “Phænomena,” St. Paul quoted the pregnant words, “For we too are His offspring,” in his epochal address to the Athenians on the Areopagus.

According to Strabo, Rome was full of learned men from Tarsus, in whose schools, as has been well said, was taught in its completeness the whole circle of instruction, the systematic course from which we get our word “encyclopædia.”[208]