C ONSTAN TINOPLE.* ONE almost feels that an apology is
necessary for the heading of this article. It should have been Pekin : so completely has the old Eastern question been obliterated in the question of the Far East. But Mr. Hutton's book, we are thankful to say, is not about anything so remote in distance and associa- tions. After all, whether its political importance has waned or not—for this remains to be seen—Constantinople holds an interest and a beauty that a wilderness of Pekins could never approach. There is no capital in the world more exquisitely placed ; there is none, not even Rome herself, with such majestic monuments and such strangely mingled memories of varied rules and races, with such a motley past and so vital a part in the tradition of learning :— " I was the daughter of Imperial Rome,
Crowned by her Empress of the mystic East : Most Holy Wisdom chose me for her home, Sealed me Truth's regent and High Beauty's priest. Lo when fate struck with hideous flame and sword, Far o'er the new world's life my grace was poured."
Constantinople, too, thanks to the unchanging Turk. is not ruined by restoration or degraded by modern bricklayers, in the fashion so pathetically deplored by the most experienced of Roman ciceroni, Mr. Augustus Hare. The Turk does not restore, except under pressure from the West ; and when at last the grave condition of St. Sophia imperatively called for repairs, the work was done by Fossoli in the purest spirit of
Oonstantinopl e: the Story of the Ord Capital of the Empire. By William Holden Hutton, Fellow of S. John Baptist College, Oxford. Illustrated by Sydney Cooper. " Medlseval Town Series." London : J. M. Dent and Co. [4s. 6d. net.] conservatism. Had the noble church been at Oxford in 1847, we should have had, probably, a variation on the familiar " new buildings " of we will not say which College. A great deal of Imperial Constantinople remains, partly hidden or buried, partly transfigured or misused, but still there ; and the rest, after all, is Stamboul,—no wretched modern arrange- ment of boulevards and ronds-points, but the Stamboul of Mahommed the Conqueror, of Suleiman the Magnificent, of Mahmoud the Reformer. In spite of riots and conflagrations and massacres, there is still Justinian's St. Sophia, the " com- pleted glory " of Byzantine art, crowned by the genius of Anthemius of Tralles ; there is still the tomb of the Con- queror, the mosque of Suleiman, the Eski Serai of a thousand traditions, the Roman walls of a hundred sieges. Who cares for the famous smells and Softas, dogs and dragomans, so long as Stamboul is still herself, the glory of the Levant and the meeting-place of the nations ?
The old Eastern capital has ever been so,—a meeting-place, but never a national metropolis. All races collect there, and form its mongrel population,—not the cleanest or the most honest in the world, we will admit. It was just as mixed in the days of Theodora as in those of his Majesty Abd-ul- Hamid II.,—always a cosmopolis ; and in the middle point between the two we find its condition practically unchanged. Mr. Hutton, who has been so fortunate as to contribute a monograph on this enchanted city to Messrs. Dent's "Mediaeval Towns," thus describes Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century ; and as we mean to quote no more, a. long extract may be permitted to show the manner of the book :-
" First and most prominently, it was a great commercial centre. Subordinate to its commerce were its art, rich and wonderful though that was, its military power, even its popular and all- embracing religious ideas. Commerce influenced all these. It gathered together all the nations of the earth, and it inspired
them with greed for its treasures All the traffic of Asia naturally came that way ; the great caravans of Central Asia, the trade of Palestine, Asia Minor, Persia, even Egypt, journeyed naturally to the New Rome. So naturally was Constantinople the centre of trade that she acted as a sort of universal banker. Her coins were in use in India and in distant England. And the merchants who made their living in Constantinople had, like those of the Hansa in London, their own permanent settlements. You may see to-day the great khans or caravanserais where the merchants and pilgrims congregate, the walls strong to resist attack, the gates closed at nightfall, the arrangements for common meals and common ablutions ; and as you pass by you see the dark figures clustering in the doorways, or sitting on the marble steps, in their picturesque colours, and with that strange far-away look on their faces that you learn to know so well in the land where there is never any more pressing need than repose, or any delight more sweet. The custom of these great common lodgings, and very often the buildings themselves, go back far into the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century they held great colonies of merchants, strong for mutual com-
bination and defence As the Turks advanced over Asia, scattering ruin and blight before their path, the riches of the devastated cities fled to shelter behind the Byzantine walls. No city, it seemed to a Jewish observer of the time, was so rich or so full of business, save Baghdad. Gold was nothing accounted of ; it covered the walls and pillars of the palace, it made the throne of the Emperor, the lamps of St. Sophia, the vessels of many an almost forgotten church. All who saw the city were amazed at its riches, at the magnificence of its buildings, its churches, palaces, houses of nobles and merchants. Marble and stone houses filled the chief streets; the splendid marble from the quarries of the Proconnesus, the stone which still stands firm in the massive dwellings of the Phanar. There were, of course, then as now many houses of wood, and fires were constant, but those who noted the fine houses destroyed as more than the three largest cities of France, noted also that of those that remained, as of the treasures of the churches, there was neither end nor measure.' And with all this there was a profound sense of security, so often and so unwarrantably contemporaneous with a marked development of luxurious life. Constantinople bad never been captured ; men easily believed that it never would be. Its walls, so magnificent in their decay, had proved and were thought still to be impregnable."
The passage immediately precedes the conquest by the Crusaders in 1204, which taught the unfortunate city its mistake with a ruthless barbarity which the Turkish conquest of 1453 scarcely rivalled. If Mr. Hutton is fortunate in his subject, on the other hand the subject is in safe hands. It would be easy to ruin it—by " gush," by ignorance, by bigotry —in a hundred different ways. Mr. Hutton has succeeded in a delightful but far from easy task. He is a serious historian, and his work on the early Church showed that he had not neglected the study of the East Roman Empire, even while
wandering so far afield as to relate the achievements of th Marquess Wellesley in a very different field of Empire. He is more in sympathy with Byzantine thought than earlier writers on the subject, and whilst, as an English clergyman, in no wise recommending the worship of icons, he knows the firm distinction between relative service, aorta* wpoduayaffic, and that Itavpwrizti or worship which, directed to images, would be properly termed idolatry. Like Professor Oman, whose clever sketch of Byzantine history was almost impertinently aggressive to Gibbon's sarcastic view, Mr. Hutton is no believer in the effete degeneration of Eastern Rome, and he brings out her virtues and her faults with equal skill and temperance. We are accustomed to hear the " Scriptores historia3 Byzantine " held up as examples of the per- fection of arid chroniclers — and to say Booth they are not often lively to read — but Mr. Hutton has shown that Byzantine history, and even Byzantine theology and heresy, may be made emphatically interesting even to those who come quite fresh to the subject. He is less sure in his treatment of Ottoman history, for which he has probably had no special training. One ought to know Turkish before one writes of the Turks, and numerous little slips show that Mr. Hutton knows none, except the too familiar " Yasok ! " " Forbidden " ! He might at least have discovered that the name which he variously spells " Bairaciktar " and " Baraicktar " is the Persian word "Bairakdar," meaning " standard-bearer," though generally pronounced " Bairaktar " in Turkish. " Irarde," " Teheshmeh," " Kapou," "Gill Kkineh," are doubtless misprints, as is the statement that the armour of Murad IV. in the Seraglio Treasury was worn at the siege of "Belgrad" in 16387-meaning Baghdad. But apart from slips of this kind, the Turkish period, is hurriedly and rather carelessly written. No doubt it is less interesting than the period that preceded it, from Mr. Hutton's point of view, and the authori- ties from which the narrative is compiled are less graphic. It is not easy to make von Hammer's Geschichte des Osmanischen Belches light reading, and so far as we can see 6[r. Hutton did not even get beyond the Vte. de la Jonquiere's usai de vulgarisation. Still, nine pages from the Conquest to Lepanto, 1453 to 1571, are short rations. On the other hand, when we have done with the history, which fills too large a ;hare of the book, and come to the arche=ology, our author is himself again, an excellent guide and appreciative expounder of much learning that he has extracted from the elaborate works of van Millingen, Lethaby and Swainson, or the more dubious Paspates. Mr. Hutton borrows extensively, with the most affable acknowledgments, from these authorities, from Profes-
sors Bury and Lane-Poole, and others ; and frankly he could not otherwise have written the book. But he has borrowed from the best lenders as a rule, and the result, although unequal and sometimes oddly pieced, is a very creditable compilation, which our readers would do well to put in their breast-pockets (but not their portmanteaus, having regard to
the Custom House) when next they revisit Constantinople. It is not a guide-book, yet it is a most desirable made mecum, and it is produced, as a pocket companion should be, in an irreproachable costume, elegant type, and adorned with Mr. Sydney Cooper's charming illustrations.
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