ko Wier Tee) DA Oen J. A. DOUGLAS.THE REDEMPTION of SAINT SOPHIA hy THE Rev. J. A. DOUGLAS, B.D. ‘Vicar of 8. Lake, Camberwell SAINT SOPHIA —-EXTERIOR, 1919 THE FAITH PRESS LONDON : 22, BUCKINGHAM STREET, CHARING CROSS, W.C.2 MANCHESTER: 5 & 7, GREENGATE, SALFORD. ud at LEIGHTON BUZZARD, BEDS.PREFATORY NOTE Ir is right and probably desirable that I should say ‘that I alone am responsible for the issue of this little book and for the opinions advanced in it. In doing so I may add the request that my readers will remember that what I have written about Islam has reference only to the Turk. The differences among Moslems are as great as those among Christians. ‘The Arab and the Indian would repudiate the material and intolerant system which the Turk has taken to be the interpretation of Islam. Nothing could be further from my mind than to attack Moslems in general. I am, therefore, anxious to make it clear that, in my judgment, the enlightened Moslem is as indignant with the Turkish misuse of his religion as any outsider can be, and that this indictment is directed only against the Turk. Indeed, as I can testify from the experience of a six months’ residence in the house of one of the most liberal minded of Turkish noblemen, the best of the Turks deplore the perversion of the principles of Islam by their nation. Tt may be well also to remove all possibility of misconception as to Greek ambition by saying that nothing is further from the mind of the Greek of to-day than a revival of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek desires, and desires passionately, the unity of his nation and the liberation of Greek lands. That 3Prefatory Note is a desire which should demand satisfaction of all who advocate the ideas underlying the proposal to form a League of Nations. It is, for instance, im- possible to understand how those who claim self- determination for the Esthonian, the Czecho-Slovak, and the Jugo-Slav can deny it to the equally advanced Greek of Constantinople, of the Dodecanese, or of Cyprus. But the most visionary Greek has no will to interfere with the Syrian or the Armenian. He asks nothing for himself which he is not prepared to give to others, Joux A. Dovcras. February 9, 199. Postscair,—The need for a second edition of this book within taree weeks of tho fst evidences. popolar interest. Except b correcting a few misprints, Iheve made no change. T'was tempted, Rowever, to add a paragraph urging that since i the Suleimanijeh the Turis have a far larger mosque than Saint Sophia, built by Suleiman, the greatest of the Sultans, in 1430-6, avowedly to be ine metropettital mosque of the Twrkish Caliphate, only the pride Sf the swoed can stop tio Turks irom falling in wth the true lame ecept that Christans.showid possess their own sacred places. No feels desires to rob them of ay of the half-dozen huge mosques ‘whieh are Nosiem jn orien. ‘My friend Mr. A. E. Henderson, the only artist, I believe, who has ever painted Saint Sophia, is preparing & monograph on the subject. Venture also to say that, in my humble judgment, nothing could ‘be move calculated to strengthen the wicked hands of the ‘Turk or to mate him use Saint Sophia as a hostage than the amazing, though astute, offical maneuvie by which the great meeting atratged for February 19 was postponed. Ii, in fhe end, suck Eimidity and tactics provoked the Indian and other ‘Moslems to think that they ougit to take an interest in Saint Sophia or the ‘ark to injure ie, 1 for one should aot be surprised. LAD, February 28, 1919. THE REDEMPTION OF SAINT SOPHIA CHAPTER I ENGLAND'S OPPORTUNITY Never probably has there existed in Great Britain a sentiment more forceful and more wholly disinterested than that which, though at present hardly articulate, is ready to insist on the Restoration of Saint Sophia” to Christian worship. For the famous church is not only incomparable in its beauty and its romance; unlike the few great buildings which can vie with it for antiquity, it has never ceased to be the symbol of living, world-stirring forces. ‘The first laying of its foundation stone in 326 opened the epoch of the transition from ancient to moder civilisa~ tion, The dedication of the present fabric in 537 typified the permanency of the established order of Christianity, For over nine hundred years it was the mother * The Grook name, Aghia Sophia, pronounced by the Turk ‘Aya Sophia, is strange to our lips. It'is better, therefore, to write Saint Sophia. Sancta Sophia gives the building a Latin character, which, though nice to wltramontane ears, is of course the one thing that its whole history repudiates and vesents.The Redemption of Saint Sophia church of the East and the most renowned shrine in Christendom Its capture and desecration in 1453 sent a shock through the whole Christian world. Its use as a mosque for 466 years has been a reproach to the free Christian nations of the West, and a torture to the enslaved and suffering Christians of the East, Its liberation is an essential condition and would be the augury of a lasting world Peace, of the self-realisation of the peoples to whom it belongs, and of permanent harmony between Moslem and Christian in the Near East. It is the business of living democracy to compose racial bitterness, and neither to take vengeance for nor to redress the wrongs of a dead and bygone past. No one in his senses would to-day lay forcible hands upon the mosque which Omar built on the site of the Temple at Jerusalem, It is another matter with Saint Sophia, If the Turk had assimilated the Christians whom he conquered, or had reconciled them to the ascendancy of Islam, then Constantinople might have become a wholly Turkish city, and Saint Sophia might have remained a Turkish mosque, without Christian challenge, if with Christian regret. But, as will be evident from the following pages, Con- stantinople belongs to two worlds which are in incurable antagonism. Putting virility, racial tenacity, and intellect as a set- off to the force of armed rule, the Greek and the Turk, the Christian and the Moslem, inhabit it in something like equipoise,* Language, customs, mentality, religion, and * A reliable computation of the population of Constantinople a gute mp ats ots og, of Cer 385,000 Grecks, 160,000 Armenians, and 6,000 Jews, with 145,000 Of ‘other ‘nationalities, the large majority of whom’ is. Christian, Even under Turkish misrale, the Christian element is thus actually in exeess of the Moslem, 6 England's Opportunity inestimably fierce ingrained mutual antipathies forbid them to merge. As a Moslem, the Turk regards the very existence of the Christian as on sufferance. As a con- queror, while he despises the Greek, he fears him, for he knows that his rule is provisional on his keeping him well under. On the other hand, the Greek hates the Turk with what is probably the most bitter hatred ever bone by one nationality towards another. For not only has he intolerable memories of persecuition, oppression, outrage, and habitual degradation which beggar description, at the hands of tyrants who have bludgeoned him into slavery in his own land. He also knows that the Turk has neither kept his nation in ignorance and poverty, nor has made his, rich country a desert, simply from the inherent stupidity of the mid-Asiatic nomad. The experience of centuries has taught him that his conqueror dreads nothing more than his prosperity and his enlightenment. For him to increase his numbers or his wealth—above all, to show adesire to hold up his head as a free man or to progress after the fashion of the civilised nations of Europe—is to invite prompt exploitation, repression, and massacre. ‘That is an irreconcilable conflict, and the symbol of it all is the imam, who, every Friday since 1453, has stood, hand on sword, in the pulpit of Saint Sophia, and has proclaimed that the great church is held for Islam by right of conquest. Saint Sophia, in short, is now invested with two incompatible characters. On the one hand, since 1517 the Sultan of Turkey has ruled the greater part of the Moslem world as the Padishah of the Faithful and the Caliph of Islam. As such he claims to be God’s vicegerent in earth and the corporate head of a temporal power which is prescriptively the empire of the world, Now the capture of Constantinople and the con- version of Saint Sophia into a mosque had been the dreamThe Redemption of Saint Sophia of all Moslem visionaries from the days of Mohammed himself. The realisation of that ambition in 1453 unified Islam, The fact, therefore, that Saint Sophia is the Sultan's Imperial Mosque makes it a holy shrine for those ‘who accept him—as it were, the hub in which his Caliphate now coheres, Take it away and the temporal system which the Turk has imposed on Islam for 400 years must fall to pieces. Doubtless a new and spiritualised Islam, which could live in tolerant harmony with other great world religions, would take its place. The Arab races, always impatient of alien domination, and always indignant at the rule of a Caliph other than of the tribe of the Koreish, would find sufficient compensation in the disappearance of the Turk, Strip the Sultan of his ecclesiastical office and a more rightful Caliph would speedily appear in the Sheriff of Mecca, now known as King of the Hedjaz, or some other genuine descendant of Mohammed. The Turkish Caliphate is crumbling to pieces. Its order is ready to pass away. The loss of Saint Sophia would be its deathblow. On the other hand, Saint Sophia is far more to the Greek nation than Westminster Abbey is to the Anglo- Saxon. Athens is no more than the archeological metropolis of a kingdom which is a fraction of true Greece. Its modem associations and functions have been the work of nineteenth-century propaganda and organisation, The true economic, geographical, historic, ecclesiastical, and intellectual mother city of Greece is Constantinople, in which, even under Turkish occupation, much of Greek life centres. For a thousand years it was the Imperial capital of the Greek Empire, the only focus of light and civilisation in the dark ages. For the last four and a half centuries, though they hardly dared spealt of it, it has remained the modem Greeks’ cynosure. If they find the inspiration of pride in their claim to descent 3 England's Opportunity from the Greeks of antiquity, it has been mediated through their Byzantine ancestry. For the Hellene of to-day Constantinople epitomises the history of his race. Without it he can never achieve complete unity nor realise the potentialities that are in him, but must remain in exile from the community of Western nations, Now, Saint Sophia is the symbol of Constantinople and of all for which Constantinople stands—of Constan- tinople in her first and ancient glory, and of Constanti nople in shameful captivity with her children, Take it away and Greek Constantinople is gone. Tt is coeval with the city which it dominates in fact and in ideal. If, since 325 a.p., there is nothing in Greek history which has not its threads in Constantinople, so there is nothing in the history of Constantinople in which Saint Sophia has not played a part. It is not surprising, there- fore, that the great Hellenist, Vikelas, should declare that “ during the slow ages of bondage the longing of the Greeks gathered round the desecrated Church of the Eternal Wisdom.’ If the redemption of Saint Sophia means the death of the Turkish tyranny, it also means new life to the Greek race. Moreover, Gibbon wrote wisely and without exaggera- tion when he designated Saint Sophia as ‘ the metropolis of Eastern Christianity.’ It was and is vastly more to Eastern Christendom than of late years S, Peter’s and the Vatican have been to the Roman Obedience. The present building and its two predecessors were the cultural and, in a measure, the administrative centre of the later patristic age. In Eastern Christendom State and Church are the bilateral organisation of one community, and in the days before the Turk came, the whole was embodied in the persons of the Casar and of the Ecumenical Patriarch, whose thrones faced each other under the dome of Saint Sophia, To-day Casar is gone, and many national °The Redemption of Saint Sophia sovereignties have taken his place. But, on the principle of de minimis non curat, Easter Christendom is still a unity, and is identical with the vast communion of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is composed of a brother- hood of autocephalous* national churches, none of which claims feudal overlordship over another, and all of which are bound together in 2 marvellous and harmonious common life. Of that brotherhood, which includes the overwhelming majority of Russians, the Ruman and his comationals, the Serb and other Jugo-Slavs, the Greek of Europe and of Asia, as well aS minor races, and, at least in theory, the Bulgar, the Ecumenical Patriarch is the symbolic chief, and Saint Sophia is the symbolic mother church. They are at the heart of Eastem Christendom, While the Patriarch remains the thrall of the Sultan, and Saint Sophia remains a mosque, Eastern Christendom, if it does not disintegrate, must, in a measure, remain paralysed and its life-blood stagnant. The Liberation of the one and the Redemption of the other mean the beginning of a new era of enlightenment, brotherhood, and self-development for the Christians of the Near East. To speak for the Moslem would be an impertinence in a Christian, We are tempted, however, to add that the ending of Turkish domination would be quickly followed, in Europe and Asia Minor, by that mutual respect and goodwill of Moslem and Christian which in India and other non-Turkish Moslem countries is evidenced by their common progress and co-operation in all good works. The issue, therefore, which it is now in the hands of England to decide, is this : Will she, in fear of the unreal shadows which obsessed * The term sutocephalous implies no outside earthly head. 10 England’s Opportunity her old policy and her old diplomacy, elect to hold together the semblance of the Turkish Caliphate ? Or will she, as Gladstone and Lord Salisbury and her democratic instinct bid her, follow the bold path which is alike the path of justice and of expediency ? If, for no selfish ends, and regardless of the cost, she now proceeds to set the Cross again upon the dome of the great church, she will kindle a beacon of peace and of Progress which will change the face of the earth and the ways of men. uCHAPTER IL THE PERENNIAL MOTHER CITY OF THE BAST ‘As Constantine found it, the Roman Empire was the world and the world was the Roman Empire. In the East there was the ancient kingdom of Persia, To the north in Europe and to the south in Africa there were wild barbarians. That was all. For every practical purpose, Roman Casardom and the Inhabited Earth (Oisoupey) had Deen interchangeable terms for three centuries. But although the empire still held together, it was like a dilapidated building which a tap from without or the giving of an unsound part from within may at any time bring crashing to the ground. ‘To the ancient, as to the Eastem to-day, a division between the secular onder and the religious was unthinkable, Paganism was outwor. Christianity was everywhere, and, though outside the law, was neither to be ignored nor repressed. The old govemmental system had become ineffective. The whole fabric of the empire needed recon- struction, It was a psychological moment, and Constantine was the man for the work. He deliberately proceeded to reconstitute the old world, and to that end instituted a new state system, established a new religion, and founded anew capital, The last was not the least important, and was, indeed, ‘the symbol and the instrument of the transition from the civilisation of the ancients to that of Christendom. For if, as is often said, the modern world be the offspring of 2 The Perennial Mother City of the East Antiquity and of Christianity, then it was conceived in the womb of Constantinople. Constantine was doubtless vain and foppish. He revelled in pomp and was a glutton after celebrity. None the less, he had the swift, big, unerring vision of the empire-builder. He saw at a glance that the Roman system could never be reconstituted without a new metropolis. Old Rome was dying. Its revolutionary habits made it insecure. It was the home ‘of the lost cause of heathendom. The maladies which infected the empire had their breeding-ground on the banks of the Tiber. Moreover, the centre of gravity for Christianity was in the Greek lands, Therefore he made the great decision, and planned the most drastic and pregnant reform which has ever been carried ont by a single decree. He would seal his own conversion and the new birth of his empire by founding a new capital which should be worthy to be the metropolis of a christianised world. To that end he pulled down the second-rate Greek town of Byzantium (325 A.D.), and, laying out its site on the most spacious lines, rebuilt it with unrivalled magnificence and named it New Rome. By common consent, indeed, the Imperial city which he thus founded has been called by his own name. But from its dedication on May 11, 330, until that sorrowful May 29, 1453, on which Mohammed II. made it the hub of Islam, it held the proud place, at least in the Eastem world, for which he designated it, and wes New Rome, the City of Cwsar, God’s vicegerent in earth, and the Metropolis of Christendom. Three causes conspired to confer that destiny upon it. To begin with, no city in the old world can compare with it for site and position, Sooner or later, a great 18The Redemption of Saint Sophia city must have arisen on the lopsided, broad-based, round-tipped triangle which is formed on’ the European side of the southem mouth of the Bosphorus by the inthrust of salt water, known as the Golden Hom, and by the bulge of the Sea of Marmora. In itself the place was ideal for ancient fortification. The area is sufficient for a very large population. The air and soil are excellent, The biggest ships can float seven miles up the Golden Hom, the mouth of which can be guarded by a chain. In addition, the Marmora, with its rich lands and fisheries, is the city’s private lake, while the two straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus seem created to serve it Doth as waterways and as impregnable fortress gates, In the dim days of young Greece, when the men of Megara passed by and preferred Chalcedon, on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, the Delphic oracle justly poked fun at them as blind. The claims of the site he chose must have thrust themselves on Constantine. Again, Constantine's New Rome was not only at the meeting-place of Asia and Europe, and so furnished a focus for those older civilisations which were too far away to be more than tributary to Old Rome. By supplying the Greeks with a capital, for lack of which they had never before realised themselves as a single and organised state, it changed the Greek nation from a scattered abstraction into a concrete unity. Old Byzantium had been a Greek city. New Rome kept that characteristic. Its people still call themselves Puydisox, and tell you that they speak Pondixe. They were never Romans except in name. From the day of its dedication, every Greek ambition and activity pulsed in and out of it, and fed, and in tum were fed by, it until it became for all time the heart of Greece, That is why, while it is still Rum, the mighty mistress of the world, to the Oriental, its name to the Greek remains ‘H 1é\,, the City. M The Perennial Mother City of the East And thirdly, the submersion of Old Rome and the West in the fifth century by a welter of barbarism left Constantinople alone. They had disappeared from the civilised world, the empire over which Caesar alone was invested with divine right to rule. Until they were restored to him, and he to them, they lay outside the true pale of Christendom. Charlemagne's medieval revival of the empire in the West never had validity for the East. But New Rome remained. It was so that after the sixth century the Patriarchs of Constantinople tightly, if provisionally, adopted the title of CEcumenical.* The history. of Constantinople divides itself roughly into four epochs. ‘The first, from its foundation to the middle of the seventh century, saw it reach and pass the height of its splendour. In’ that golden age of its wealth and power, when all the West was drowned in the deluge of barbarism and Old Rome had almost ceased to count, it shone as the one light of Christendom, and was the mother city of Egypt, of Syria, and of Asia Minor, as well as of the Balkans, the Egean, and even Italy. It produced warriors such as Theodosius, Belisarius, and Heraclius, and rulers such as Justinian, who relaid the foundations of jurisprudence on the basis which is still the foundation of modem law. The Seven Ccumenical Councils grouped themselves round it. ‘Among the greatest, and certainly the majority, of those first Nicene Fathers, who worked out Catholic Theology, lived within its spiritual orbit. John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Photius were its patriarchs. Under its hegemony Eastern Christendom became the © Le. of the Olsouséry, the civilised world. BwThe Redemption of Saint Sophia strong, supple, healthy polity which it is to-day. Russia and the Slavs were converted by it. Where its influence reached there was civilisation. Where it did not, there was none. The peoples of the West looked to it as those of Central Asia might look to London to-day. Apart, therefore, from its incomparable and superb magnificence as a city, throughout this period it was well-nigh alone in the world for wealth and dignity and power and enlightenment. In the second period, from the middle of the seventh century to the end of the eleventh, it could still produce justly famous men and achieve no small things. But its strength was slowly broken between two implacable enemies, In the seventh century the sudden birth of Islam brought upon it that first, hot, furious onslaught of the Arab world which submerged Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and twice® carried. the green flag as far as its own walls. The Caesar of the day, Constantine IV., Pogonatus, indeed, stemmed the Arab rush and saved not only Eastern Christendom, but also the youthful Christendom of Western Europe. But though the Arabs fell back, the lost ground was never really recovered, and Constantinople was soon to be assailed from the rear. As the West evolved itself from barbarism, so it evolved the feudal system, and with the feudal system the Papacy. Between the new claims of Old Rome and the age-long traditions of New Rome, no compromise was possible. Constantinople admitted, ‘though a little grudgingly, the primacy of the ancient capital. It would not hear of its overlordship. In reality, the clash, althongh it took place in the ecclesiastical sphere, was between the settled civilisation of Constan- tinople and the new world which was slowly shaping itself in the West. Who was this Bishop of Rome, in his squalid, In 688 and 716 av. 6 SAINT SOPHIA~INTERIOR (1910),The Perennial Mother City of the East half-ruined city, suddenly to come forth and dictate to Casar in the living metropolis of the world and to the Patriarch in the Queen of Churches? The quarrel grew and grew as the years went by, until the great schism egun, and only healed over, in the ninth century, was consummated in 1054. The Pope excommunicated the Patriarch, and the Patriarch, in tur, excommunicated the Pope. That symbolic action stereotyped and com- pleted the antipathy and estrangement between East and West. By degrees the Latin world became determined either to break the will of the stubborn Greek heretic or to push him to destruction. The Greek despised the upstart, and grew to prefer the Sultan's turban to the Pope's tiara, There is no need here to tell the story of the fourth and infamous Crusade, of the sailing of the Venetian fleet under Dandolo to Constantinople in 1204, of the sack of the city, and of the orgies with which the Latin took seisin of Saint Sophia, of the short-lived miserable Westem Cesardom in New Rome, of the Roman Patriarchate in the Great Church, and of the return of the first of the Paleologi and the Greek Nation in r26r to their own, It is interesting to speculate’on what might have been if the West had not used the Crusades to hamstring the East, on the possible earlier and wider coming of the age of progress and enlightenment, on the probable disappear- ance of Islam, and on the peaceful and fruitful develop- ment of the Kingdom of God in an united and immense Christendom. The West paid the penalty in the long wars and bitter religious strife which might have been mediated by the influence of a strong and free East, The crime, however, of the Crusades, as viewed by Easter eyes, was that it gave its death-blow to the Greek Empire and entailed the triumph of Islam. "The Redemption of Saint Sopbia “If writes Paparregopoulos, of the First Crusade, the Emperor Alexis had been able to employ against the Turks the forces which he at length found himself com- pelled to tum against the Latin Christians . . . he would have been able to get rid of all danger from the unbe- lievers.’ The ‘ might have been’ of history, however, is of less importance to our subject than the certainty of that which Constantinople was in 1204, and of that which she has never been again, Villchardouin, one of Dandolo's comrades, records that the hearts of the Crusaders stopped in amazement when they beheld the city, ‘ Those who had never seen it before,’ he says, ‘stood on the decks, gazing at the mar- vellous sight and scarcely able to believe that the world could contain acity sorich. Above all were they astonished at the sight of the lofty walls and tall towers with which it is engirt, the magnificent palaces, and the splendid churches, the number of which is such that no one can believe it who has not seen it, and the length and breadth of this Queen of Cities The Jew Tudela, thirty years before, had written : “The inhabitants of the land are rich. They dress in silk and wear mantles broidered with gold. When you see them thus attired, coming out on horseback, you would take them for kings’ sons. The country is broad and plentiful with meat and fruit and bread and wine. No men in the world are so rich as these people,’ ‘Only those who Imow the monuments of Constanti- nople to-day can realise these pen-pictures. ‘The opening of the third period, from r204 to 1453, saw the city, broken and plundered, the sporting ground of its implacable Christian enemies, No sooner had they been ejected, than the scarcely more implacable Turks began to threaten its very existence. “Turks of a kind, indeed, had come from their ancestral 1s The Perennial Mother City of the East wandering grounds in the steppes of Asia, due north of India, at least as early as the eighth century, and, accepting Islam, had become its chief fighting force and its greediest looters. The descendants of these pioneer bands had infested Asia Minor, but, though they were less barbarous through Arab influences than their successors, they suffered from the Turks’ essential stupidity and incon- sequentiality,* and were unable to form efficient States. Tn 1288, however, Othman—whence the name Ottoman or Othmanli—the chief of a band of recent immigrants, founded a Sultanate within sixty miles of the Marmora, which soon menaced the existence of the Greek Empire. ‘That Sultanate for eight generations passed directly from father to son, and each Sultan in tum proved a vigorous and determined conqueror until, at the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Justinian of the Othmanlis, in 1566, the strain seemed to have worked itself out. Othman’s son, Orchan, robbed the Greeks of the Asiatic coast of the Marmora and both shores of the Dardanelles. His grandson, Murad I, attacked and crushed the Bulgars and Serbs, who, settling in the Balkans about the seventh century, and becoming Christians, were first the trouble- some vassals of Constantinople and afterwards its inde- pendent and often dangerous neighbours, There is no need here to tell the story of the fatal and ever-memorable battle of Kossovo in 1386. That defeat not only con- demned the Serbs and Bulgars to a servitude from which the last of them were only delivered in rgr2. It left Constantinople encircled by the Turks. Nothing remained of the empire except the Morea, a few islands, and some sixty square miles round the capital, * In spite of the vast admixture of Christian blood, the Turkish race possesses thase four characteristics: the nomads lack of the sense of permanence, the child's inconsequentiality, the dog’s fidelity to orders, and the tiger's love of cruelty. 9The Redemption of Saint Sopbia The Sultan Murad was murdered on the scene of his victory, and his son Bayezid would doubtless have grasped the long-coveted prize, had not the terrible incursion of the Mongols under Timur for the time obliterated the Turkish power. The fact that Constantinople was not able to use the priceless opportunity of its enemy's paralysis to recover its position is a complete proof of its utter weakness, The respite, indeed, lasted for fifty years, but the empire's one hope in earth lay in help from the West. Without the Pope's bidding that help could not be given. His terms were clear. If Western Europe was to deliver Constantinople, Constantinople must submit to Westera Europe, and must become Latin and Papal, There could not be two Christendoms. If the only way to end the schism was to be found in the exterminating sword of Islam, it were better to endiit that way. Greek faithfulness preferred the latter alternative. Sooner than that the Greek nation should be lost in the Latin orbit, it would go down fighting before Islam. For a time, indeed, its desperate rulers tried the cowardly and illusory path of surrender of principle, There is nothing more abject and tragic in history than that fruitless and pathetic pilgrimage to Florence, made in 1438 by the Emperor John Paleo- logus and the Patriarch. There is also nothing more cynical and brutal than the terms of the degrading Act of Union in which they were then required to submit to Rome. The expedient, however, was chimerical. Western Europe never paid the price of that apostasy. No crusade was forthcoming. The Patriarch died in Italy. John Paleologus returned to be execrated for his treachery. The Pope's legate was, indeed, received in Saint Sophia, but the people would have none of him. When, with rapine and with orgies which rivalled those of the Crusa- ders in 1204, the young Sultan Mohammed IJ. tightened his net and stormed Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the 20 The Perennial Mother City of the East empire went down like a ship which retumns its enemies’ fire to the last. Gibbon is always unfair to the Byzantine Greek. He was a sceptic, and it is the way of the sceptic to sneer at that which he dislikes, His mind was steeped in the prejudices of those Western writers for whom the con- demnation of Constantinople was necessary in order to vindicate Rome. And he was a votary of that classicism which, in order to uphold its quasi-deification of the ancient Greek, is compelled to assume the complete degeneracy of the modem Hellene. Gibbon’s influence for long infected Englishmen with contempt for the Greek Empire. In fact, whatever were the failings of Constantinople, she was always great, and never greater than in the days of her downfall, Hemmed in by remorseless enemies, with dwindling population and shrunken wealth, she remained able to produce great patriots, great rulers, great artists, great writers, and great saints. From 325 to 1453 she had never ceased fighting. She fought off the Goths, the Huns, the Avars, the Slavs, the Persians, the Bulgars, and the Arabs. She was the bulwark of the ‘West against Islam until she received a Latin dagger in the back, No wonder that at last she fell exhausted, and ‘that at last the lamp of Christian civilisation, which she had held safe for r,000 years, crashed from her hand, and its flame lay dying in the dust. ‘The fourth period, which dates from 1453, and is, of course, not yet ended, is the petiod of the Turkish occu- pation. Mohammed II. knew very well that by the capture of Constantinople he had not only secured a magnificent and renowned city for his residence, but the succession of ‘a great empire. In fact, Constantinople did for Islam exactly what it had done for the Greeks in the fourth aThe Redemption of Saint Sophia century. Within fifty years it had become the capital of the orthodox Moslem world, which had ceased to be, as it had been for five centuries, a number of weak states, and had been welded into the Ottoman empire. Tt was thus that in 1517 Selim Mohammed's grandson marched to Egypt, overthrew Motawakkil, the last Arab Caliph, and presently assumed the office of Allah's vice- gerent in earth, From 1453, indeed, conquest followed conquest, until by the end of the sixteenth century the rule of the Turkish Caliphate exceeded the area of the Greek empire at its greatest. Constantinople was thus the Imperial capital of Hungary and Jugo-Slavia, of Rumania and Bulgaria and Greece, of the littoral of the Black Sea and the lands that bordered the Caspian, of Asia Minor and of all Mesopotamia, of Syria and Egypt and Libya and Algiers, and of Arabia with the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. It is remarkable, indeed, that the dwindling of the ‘Turkish empire is marked by the same process as that of its Greek predecessor. Outlying territory aiter territory is lopped off ; but though the life of the whole dies down, Constantinople remains its heart ‘There is, however, this difference. In 1453 Constan- tinople was altogether Greek, and remained the mother city of the Greek lands which were already captive. The ‘Turk might rule in the interior of Asia Minor ; the mass of the people there were Greek, and still looked to the City. To-day Constantinople is only half, and that superficially, Turkish. The peoples of the lands which the Sultan has lost will have none of the Turk, and, except for a part of Asia Minor*, which has been Turkified by the *The majority of the people in the interior of Asia Minor is pow Turkish, ‘the Christians having been slowly exterminated or converted; but at feast till the end of the sixteenth century it was Greok, 22 The Perennial Mother City of the East practical extirpation of the Greek, every race, Christian or Moslem, in the Turkish Empire is eager to be done with him, ; Remove the Sultan to Iconium, or even Eskishehr. Let the Arabs do what they choose. And in twenty ‘years, nomad fashion, the Turk will almost have forgotten. ‘that he has ever occupied New Rome, while his occupation will remain only as a nightmare in the recollection of its people.CHAPTER I THE MONUMENTS OF CONSTANTINOPLE ‘TuovcH the Greek of Constantinople has been bludgeoned. into silent submission for centuries, he has in heart never acquiesced in the rule of the Turk. If he were minded to forget his birthright, the very stones of the city would remind him of his past glory and prompt him to dream of his future liberty. That is the great blunder the Turks have made. They did not sin enough. Seeing that Mchammed the Con- queror wished to play the part of a Moslem Cwsar in New Rome, he should have exterminated its people or at least have done with their monuments that which Lord Kit- chener did with the Mahdi’s tomb. As it was, it probably never entered his head that the edge of the ‘ Sword of Islam * could be blunted ; therefore he and his immediate successors suffered the former to live, and used them, according to the mood, as domestic animals or as vermin. The latter they allowed to stand and to crumble away. The result is that the Constantinople of to-day is like a palace garden, once the perfection of ordered beauty, but now invaded by jungle. One half the population, with its big mosques and fountains and streets of latticed windows, is Turkish, and just as stupid and nomad in the core as were its forbears in the days of Ertogrul. But though it is lord and master in the Greek mother city, * Le, the Turks. Bt The Monuments of Constantinople it is only an overgrowth. ‘The other half is Christian, an underworld of its own, with the old culture and polity, the old Ianguage and customs and laws, above all with the living fire of the old Faith. That is the significance of those sublime and pathetic sermons in stone which the ‘Moslem has had neither the taste to preserve nor the wit to destroy. ‘You may live for years in Constantinople, and, like 2 stranger in a mystery land, never read its riddle, just because you never guessed that, under its Turkish wrap- pings, it is all Greck, Except a few great mosques, which ‘Ciuistians built at the bidding of the Sultans, and which are of the style of Saint Sophia, every noteworthy monu- ment in Constantinople belongs to the splendid first centuries of the Imperial millennium. Of the ancient Byzantine period, 684 p.c.—330 A.D., nothing now remains except a few seats in the Hippodrome and the fine Latin column* put up by the Emperor Claudius Gothicus, in memory of the victory which gave him his tile in 269 A.D. Constantine seems otherwise to have made a clean sweep of every monument of the ancient ‘town, In effect, a lot of churches, Iarge and small, and nearly all beautiful, together with some patchwork, represent the decadent Empire. ‘A sketch of the tour of the city will make evident the suggestiveness of these facts. Tf you approach Constantinople from Princes Islands, across the Marmora, its salient feature is Saint Sophia. Constantine chose well when he began his Imperial church on the northemmost of the two hills—for New Rome matches Old Rome with seven—which form the blunt apex of the triangular site. Nor was Justinian less wise * In the garden of the Bagdad Kiosk on Seraglio Point. 25