Under the Turk in Constantinople E-Book

G. F. Abbott

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

It was apparently an invincible fatality that compelled Sir John Finch to accept, in the month of November 1672, the appointment of English Ambassador to the Porte, in place of Sir Daniel Harvey who had died at his post some weeks before.
Finch sprang from a family which, under the Stuarts, had attained to great eminence in the law and in politics. His father, Sir Heneage Finch, had been Recorder of the City of London and Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Charles I. During the same reign his father’s first cousin, Sir John (afterwards Baron) Finch, had been Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, as well as Speaker of the House of Commons: in all these capacities he had shown himself so ardent a Royalist that, in 1640, he was impeached together with Lord Strafford and Archbishop Laud, and barely saved his head by flying to Holland. 

Leseprobe

UNDER THE TURK IN CONSTANTINOPLE

SIR JOHN FINCH. From the Portrait by Carlo Dolci at Burley-on-the-Hill.

UNDER THE TURK IN

CONSTANTINOPLE

A RECORD OF SIR JOHN FINCH’S EMBASSY

1674-1681

BY

G. F. ABBOTT

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385744052

FOREWORD

By LORD BRYCE

Whoever discovers a dark bypath of history and opens it up by careful research renders a service to scholars. If he has also the gift of presenting the results of his investigation in a form agreeable to the general reader who has a taste for novelties in other books as well as in novels, he earns a double meed of thanks. Mr. Abbott has not only had the good fortune to find such a bypath and the acuteness to note its interest, but is also the possessor of a talent enabling him to make the best use of his materials. To most Europeans and Americans, even among the class which reads for instruction as well as for pleasure, the annals of the Turkish Empire had remained almost a blank from the triumphant days of Solyman the Magnificent through the long process of decay down to the time when Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and Syria and thereafter the Greek War of Independence had drawn attention to the long-forgotten Near Eastern countries. Just in the middle of this period of two and a half centuries several intelligent observers from England and France visited Constantinople and described the singular phenomena of a semi-civilised Empire which, despite its internal corruption and weakness, was still strong enough to threaten its neighbours, maintain a long sea war against Venice and besiege Vienna. One of these observers was Sir John Finch, a man of learning and ability, who had begun his career by studying medicine at the University of Padua, had held the chair of anatomy in the University of Pisa, and had for five years been King Charles II.’s Minister at Florence. In 1672 he was named ambassador at Constantinople, and accepted, somewhat reluctantly, the post, yielding to the counsels of the influential friends who had procured it for him. There he remained till 1681, and his experiences in the discharge of his functions there are recorded in this volume. The letters on which it is based, and from which many extracts are given, present a vivid picture of what Turkish administration was, and of the way in which the long-suffering representatives and merchants of civilised countries had to adjust themselves to it. Mr. Abbott’s book is not only a contribution to history, but a narrative lively enough and dramatic enough to be worth reading as a study in human nature, and more particularly of that Oriental human nature in which guile and folly, inconstancy and obstinacy are so strangely combined.

PREFACE

The history of Anglo-Turkish relations as a whole still remains to be written—a strange and not very creditable fact, considering the part which the Ottoman Empire has played in our commercial and political career since the age of Queen Elizabeth. This monograph deals only with a fraction of a vast subject—the English Embassy to Turkey from 1674 to 1681, though for the sake of intelligibility it glances at the years which preceded and followed that septennium.

Critics, I hope, will not do my work the injustice of thinking that it is not serious because, perhaps, it is not very dull. A piece of historical narrative is a sort of superior novel: it has its heroes and its villains, its vicissitudes, its catastrophes: all of which are eminently capable of administering amusement even to the most seriously minded. Only the amusement must be founded in truth; and the discovery of truth requires painstaking industry. This condition I have endeavoured to fulfil to the utmost of my ability. Every bit of the story here related is the result of careful research among original and, for the most part, hitherto unexploited documents—chiefly the Manuscripts preserved at the Public Record Office (Foreign Archives, Turkey and Levant Company) and the Coventry Papers in the possession of the Marquis of Bath, by whose courtesy I was able to make use of them.

It is impossible to convey the impression given by seventeenth-century despatches in any words but their own: nothing can be more striking to modern eyes and ears than their language, their spelling, their grammar and punctuation, or want of it. The handwriting itself betrays not only the writer’s normal character, but often the particular emotions which swayed him at the moment of writing: as we peruse those ancient sheets of paper—extraordinarily fresh most of them, with sometimes the sand still clinging to the dry ink—we see the person who penned those lines, the very way in which he held his quill. The same facts, extracted, paraphrased, and printed, no longer arouse the same sense of reality, nor grip the imagination in the same way as they do when presented in their native garb. I have attempted to reproduce something of this effect by transcribing as frequently and fully as it is convenient the original utterances in all the individuality and quaintness which belong to them.

In addition to this mass of manuscript, there exists for the period a surprising amount of printed material, some of which, though available for centuries, has not yet been exhausted, and the rest was but recently made public. It so happened that, besides our Ambassador, there resided at the time in Turkey three other Englishmen who left behind them records of current events. They were our Consul at Smyrna, Paul Rycaut; our Treasurer at Constantinople, Dudley North; and the Chaplain, John Covel: all three men of leading and light in their day. Their letters, memoirs, and journals, written independently and from different angles of vision, go a long way towards supplementing, confirming, or correcting the Ambassador’s reports, as well as the information handed down by several foreign contemporaries.[1] For, by another rare coincidence, the representative of France, Nointel, whose history blends with that of Finch, also had round him a number of Frenchmen busy writing. Joseph von Hammer had access to some of these sources and drew in some small measure upon them; but it was left for a modern French writer to turn them to full account in a book which I have consulted with much pleasure and some profit.[2] Lastly, reference should be made to two new works bearing on the subject. Although both publications deal with matters mostly outside the scope of this book, they have furnished me with a number of suggestive details.[3]

I may take this opportunity of mentioning that, in my dates, unless otherwise stated, I follow the Old Style, which still was the style of England, and, in the seventeenth century, lagged behind the New by ten days; but I reckon the year from the first of January. All lengthy notes are relegated to an Appendix, so that matters calculated to benefit the seeker after solid instruction may not bore the reader who seeks only entertainment.

G. F. A.

Chelsea, March 1920.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] My references are to the following editions:—

The Memoirs of Paul Rycaut, Esq., London, 1679; The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, by Sir Paul Ricaut, Sixth Edition, London, 1686; The Life of the Honourable Sir Dudley North, Knt., by the Honourable Roger North, Esq., London, 1744; Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670-1679 (in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant), edited by J. Theodore Bent, The Hakluyt Society, London, 1893; Some Account of the Present Greek Church, by John Covel, D.D., Cambridge, 1722.

[2]Les Voyages du Marquis de Nointel (1670-1680), par Albert Vandal de l’Académie Française, Paris, 1900.

[3]Report on the Manuscripts of Allen George Finch, Esq., of Burley-on-the-Hill, edited by Mrs. Lomas for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. i., London, 1913; Finch and Baines, by Archibald Malloch, Cambridge, 1917.

CHAPTER IA DIPLOMAT IN SPITE OF HIMSELF

It was apparently an invincible fatality that compelled Sir John Finch to accept, in the month of November 1672, the appointment of English Ambassador to the Porte, in place of Sir Daniel Harvey who had died at his post some weeks before.

Finch sprang from a family which, under the Stuarts, had attained to great eminence in the law and in politics. His father, Sir Heneage Finch, had been Recorder of the City of London and Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Charles I. During the same reign his father’s first cousin, Sir John (afterwards Baron) Finch, had been Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, as well as Speaker of the House of Commons: in all these capacities he had shown himself so ardent a Royalist that, in 1640, he was impeached together with Lord Strafford and Archbishop Laud, and barely saved his head by flying to Holland. His elder brother, the eloquent Sir Heneage Finch, whose pleadings, in the years that immediately followed the Restoration, were the delight of the Council Chamber and of Westminster Hall,[4] after serving the Crown as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, was about to become Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and in due time Lord High Chancellor of England and Earl of Nottingham. His nephew (another Heneage Finch), “a celebrated orator in Chancery practice,”[5] was Solicitor-General in 1679, and crowned a long and distinguished Parliamentary career under Charles II. and James II. with a Barony from Queen Anne and an Earldom from George I.

Notwithstanding this remarkable family record, Sir John had evinced no inclination for a public career. After a brief residence at Balliol, he was obliged, when Oxford became the headquarters of the Royalist troops, to migrate to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and thence, in 1651, he pursued his studies at Padua, where he took a medical degree. From that University, of which he was made Pro-Rector and Syndic, he went, in 1659, to Pisa, to occupy the Chair of Anatomy, having refused the post of English Consul at Padua, ostensibly because it meant getting drunk “at least forty times in the year,” more probably because he did not wish to compromise himself by accepting office under the Usurper. Thus, while Cromwell ruled in England, Finch led a severely private life in Italy, and at the Restoration, like other Cavaliers, he came home to reap the reward of his loyalty. Unlike most of them, he was not disappointed. Honours of all kinds awaited him. In 1661 he was elected an Extraordinary Fellow of the College of Physicians of London, was created M.D. by the University of Cambridge, and was knighted by the King.[6]

Such was the position in which, at the age of thirty-five, when one might think enough of a man’s zest and freshness are left to give an edge to ambition, Finch found himself. The embarrassments which had overcast his earlier prospects were lifting; royal favour seemed assured; the path to fortune lay open before his feet; and there were his brother Heneage and Lord Conway, the husband of his theosophical sister,[7] who wished for nothing better than to smooth it for him. But Finch was a singularly unenterprising man. With a natural propensity to solitude, increased by exile, and with a desultory inclination to poetry and philosophy, he found the boisterous Court of Charles little to his taste. After a very short stay in England, he went back to Tuscany and Anatomy (1663). His friends, amused rather than annoyed at such perversity, did not cease to conspire for his good, and, next year, they prevailed on him to return and let them make his fortune.

Not long afterwards (March 1665) Lord Arlington, then Secretary of State, fulfilled a promise they had extracted from him by appointing Sir John His Majesty’s Minister at Florence. If there was any foreign country which Finch liked, it was Italy: he had, since he came to manhood, resided principally there, had learned its language, and had made himself thoroughly familiar with its manners and customs. If there was any Italian State for which he felt a preference, it was that of Tuscany, where he was highly esteemed and beloved by the Great Duke, his brother Prince Leopold, and every one whose love and esteem were worth having. Yet Finch was not happy. He complained that the dignity of his employment far exceeded the emolument: he would gladly have exchanged it for something better paid at home. His friends agreed; but that ideal something could not be found. The only alternative to Florence was Constantinople. To that post the Finch family, since the Restoration, seemed to have established a sort of prescriptive right: Charles II.’s first representative at the Porte, the Earl of Winchilsea (yet another Heneage Finch), was Sir John’s first cousin, and the second, Sir Daniel Harvey, his elder brother’s near relative by marriage. Sir John could have Constantinople for the asking. But Sir John cherished a profound and, in the light of subsequent events, one might well say, a prophetic aversion to Constantinople: “Nay, though to be sent to Constantinople were a charge of great gaine, yet I would not buy that charge with the affliction so long a separation would create mee,” he wrote to Lord Conway in 1667; and again, a little later: “I doe perfectly abhorr the thoughts of goeing to Constantinople.” He would rather “undertake anything then to be banished any longer from seeing your Lordship and my sister.” But at the same time he admitted, “any thing is better then my present condition, in which I neither enjoy myselfe nor any thing else.”[8] His friends sympathised and continued their efforts on his behalf with indefatigable pertinacity.

There is still extant a letter in which Lord Conway describes how, in 1668, he lingered in London after the adjournment of Parliament on purpose to get an opportunity of speaking to Lord Arlington about him. The Secretary of State hesitated: to attach to himself, partly by services and partly by hopes, the greatest possible number of adherents was Arlington’s constant aim; but what if Mr. Solicitor-General should enlist his brother in the hostile camp of the fallen Chancellor Clarendon? Conway overcame these apprehensions by bringing about a personal interview between the Secretary and the Solicitor, who assured his Lordship that Sir John would be his Lordship’s faithful retainer. Arlington, satisfied, promised to recall Sir John from Florence and to recommend him to the King for preferment in connexion with foreign affairs. This arrangement Conway thought much better than bargaining for a reversion of some lucrative Court office—a boon perhaps more tempting, but less certain. As to fitness, he assured his brother-in-law that he would have no competition to fear: “You will have the advantage of coming into a Court where there is not one man of ability.” The King, “destitute of counsel, is jealous of all men that speak to him of business.” All that was really needed was a good word from Lord Arlington, “for though Lord Arlington labours with all art imaginable not to be thought a Premier Minister, yet he is either so, or a favourite, for he is the sole guide that the King relies upon.”[9]

And so, after five years of eminently undistinguished and discontented sojourn at Florence, Sir John returned home, in August 1670, served for two years on the “Councell for matters relating to Our Forreigne Colonies and Plantations,” and then, the ideal office still failing to present itself, he had, after all, to accept the Embassy he abhorred.

He set out in May 1673. His frame of mind on leaving England can be seen from the note by which he bade Lord Conway farewell: “This is the third time I have left my Native Soyl,” he wrote. “If God Almighty make me so happy as to return once more to your Lordship, I shall then thinke it is time to fix at home and leave of (sic) all thoughts of further wandering. But [if] my life by its period abroad putts one to my Travell I beseech your Lordship to believe that you have lost the most faythfull and zealous servant the World yet was ever possessed of....”[10]

This letter brings into relief the writer’s characteristic attachment to home and dislike of separation from dear relatives, heightened by a vague anxiety not unnatural in the circumstances. A man who had fretted for five years in Italy could not look forward to an exile of at least six years in Turkey without some alarm. Turkey was not then the accessible, comparatively debarbarised country of our time: the Grand Signor’s dominions were two and a half centuries ago regarded as an obscure and distant region of disease and death. Sir John, in leaving England, felt like one stepping into the unknown: melancholy filled his heart, and pious prayer seemed the only refuge from despondency. Indeed, if he could have foreseen what lay before him, it is a question whether any earthly consideration could have induced him to quit his “native soyl.” One of the many dubious blessings granted by the gods to men is the inability to see into the future.

Meanwhile Sir John knew that, short as it fell of his aspirations, the Constantinople post had not a few advantages. It was the only English mission abroad that, under a King who had little money to spare from his personal pleasures, rejoiced in the rank of Embassy; it carried with it a salary of 10,000 dollars, or about £2500, a year, not to mention perquisites of various kinds; and, be it noted, this salary, not coming out of the reluctant purse of a capricious and impecunious prince, but out of the Treasury of a wealthy business corporation—the Company of “Merchants of England Trading into the Levant Seas”—entailed no heart-breaking delays, no wearisome solicitations of friends at Court, but could be depended upon with as much certainty and regularity as any dividend from a sound investment: all the more, because Finch’s kinsmen, the Harveys, were leading members of that Company. Distinctly, a diplomat might go farther and fare worse. As to the duties of the post, Sir John was well equipped. Apart from ceremonial functions, his time at Florence had been taken up by questions arising out of the English trade in the Mediterranean; and both his correspondence from that place and a report on commerce with Egypt which he had drawn up lately[11] prove that he could do that sort of work easily enough. Now, that was the sort of work he would be called upon to do at Constantinople.

Owing its origin to the enterprise of merchants and maintained entirely at their expense, the English Embassy on the Bosphorus existed chiefly for their benefit; the principal part of the Ambassador’s mission being to promote trade and to protect those engaged therein both against the Turks and against each other. Politics, it is true, were not altogether lost sight of. The Ottoman Empire, though past its meridian, still weighed heavily in the “Balance of Europe,” and the Grand Signor’s attitude was an object of no small concern to the rival groups into which Europe was divided. In the abstract, political writers continued to echo, with unction, the admonitions which the celebrated Imperial Ambassador Busbequius had addressed to Christendom a hundred years before. But since no means had yet been devised “to unite our Interests and compose our Dissensions,”[12] what were we to do? Obviously, what everybody was doing. When occasion arose, it was part, if only a subsidiary part, of an English envoy’s business to intrigue for the good of his country and try to defeat the intrigues of those wicked foreign diplomats who intrigued for the good of theirs. Thus, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, her representatives had exploited Turkey’s hatred of Spain to some purpose; and again during the Thirty Years’ War the representative of Charles I. made strenuous efforts, not of course to set on the “common enemy of Christendom” against the Emperor directly—that, as he recognised, would have been too great a “scandal”—but to procure the Sultan’s indirect support for the Prince of Transylvania who was fighting the Emperor. During the earlier period of Charles II.’s reign, too, Lord Winchilsea had exerted himself to prevent the establishment of friendly relations between Stambul and Madrid, and both he and his successor Harvey had endeavoured to bring about a cessation of hostilities between Stambul and Venice. The former of these ambassadors, in fact, was very eager to play a great political rôle, urging that, as, with the acquisition of Tangier, English sea-power and possessions were expanding Eastwards, the English envoy should no longer confine himself exclusively to mercantile affairs.[13] But Charles had neither funds nor thoughts for such ambitious schemes. So his representative at the Porte had nothing more to do, as regards State affairs, than “to be truly informed of all negotiations and practices in that Court which may disturbe the peace of Christendom in any part of it,”[14] and to transmit his information to London: a passive rôle which suited Sir John’s temperament admirably. As his alter ego wrote to Lord Conway: “Your Lordship will say your Brother here will have little to doe in State Affayrs, which my Lord is very true and so much the more is his quiett.”[15]

This was only one of several happy auspices under which Sir John Finch entered upon his new employment. As a rule, the diplomatic seat on the Bosphorus bristled with thorny peculiarities—peculiarities that had proved trying to most of his predecessors and to some even fatal.

To begin with, our representatives at Constantinople, unlike their colleagues at other capitals, had not one master, but two: the Court from which they held their commission and the Company from which they drew their pay. It is proverbially difficult to serve two masters to the satisfaction of both, and in this case the difficulties of the servant were often accentuated by differences between his employers. With characteristic repugnance to clear definition, our ancestors had left the question of appointment open. There was neither fixed rule nor consistent precedent to show with which of the two masters lay the choice of servant. Hence a periodical feud between the Court and the Company, each claiming a right which the other was loth to concede. Under James I. and Charles I. the Court had more than once forced upon the Company its own nominees, with disastrous results to all concerned. Sir John Eyre, appointed in 1619 under pressure from the Duke of Buckingham, after barely two years, which he spent making himself obnoxious to the English residents and contemptible to the Turkish Ministers, had to be recalled in disgrace. Sir Sackville Crow, similarly appointed in 1638, rivalled Eyre in incompetence, surpassed him in iniquity, and was at last brought home by force and cast into the Tower (1648). At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Company, having thrown in its lot with the Rebels, obtained from Parliament a recognition of its claim to elect and remove the Ambassador, and, much as Cromwell would have liked to follow the example of the Stuarts, he had found it expedient to acquiesce. When the Commonwealth collapsed, the Levant Merchants, who had joined in acclaiming the Restoration as heartily as they had acclaimed the Rebellion, got Charles II. to renew their Charter (April 2, 1661). But submission to the Crown had become so much the fashion that this Charter again left the question of the Ambassador’s election open, thereby affording zealots for the royal prerogative a chance of stirring up discord.[16]

In practice, however, a new spirit seemed to animate the rival authorities now. Both sides had learned by suffering the wisdom of compromise. Now the Merchants begged from the King, as an act of grace proceeding solely from his goodness, leave to offer for his Majesty’s approval such a person as they esteemed most competent to manage their affairs at Constantinople, thus loyally acknowledging the King’s right; while the King, on his part, graciously granted their request, thus waiving the exercise of it. In this way the dignity of the Crown was saved, and the interests of the Company did not suffer. This sweet reasonableness breathes through the petition by which, on Sir Daniel Harvey’s death, the Levant Merchants approached the King for a successor: “They have,” so runs the document, “at a General Meeting of their Company, presumed to fix upon the Hon. Sir John Finch, as one they humbly desire may undertake that affaire, if your Majestie will be graciously pleased to afford your Royal assent; which they humbly beg, wholly submitting the same to your Majestie’s pleasure.”[17] The King, as was expected, readily assented; and thus Sir John set out with the goodwill of both his employers. He travelled across France and North Italy to Leghorn, and there met the Centurion, a frigate of 52 guns, which was to carry him to Turkey.

If we turn from those who sent the Ambassador to those to whom he was sent, we shall see here also Finch greatly favoured by circumstances. Most of his predecessors had found themselves engaged in a Sisyphean labour. For the wrongs to which the English, like other Frank dwellers in the Grand Signor’s dominions, were constantly exposed at the hands of insolent and rapacious officials they could only procure redress, if at all, by purchasing the friendship of the Grand Vizir and of the two or three other grandees who between them ruled the Empire. But, such had long been the stability of the Ottoman Government, none of those personages remained in power for more than a few months—a military mutiny, a popular upheaval, or a palace intrigue was sure to hurl them down the moment after they had reached the top; and our Ambassador was obliged to seek new friends. This state of things had come to an end. In 1656 Mohammed Kuprili assumed the Grand Vizirate with a free hand to purge the body politic of its corruptions, and he performed the task by cutting off all the parts that he could not cure: a dreadful remedy, but not more dreadful than the condition of the patient demanded. Turkey was so split up by factions that it could not have survived, unless all rebellious spirits were implacably extinguished. This great practitioner, who alone had preserved the Empire from falling into as many fragments as there were Pashaliks, died in 1661 of old age, and was succeeded by his son Ahmed—a fact which, being utterly unprecedented in a country where the hereditary principle, except in the royal family, was unknown, amazed the Turks even more than the miracle of a Grand Vizir maintaining himself in office for five whole years and then dying peaceably in his bed.[18]

Ahmed Kuprili at first seemed to have inherited, together with his father’s power, his father’s recipe. The late Vizir’s dictatorship had raised up a multitude of malcontents who imagined that his successor’s youth offered them an opportunity for revenge: “every hour he has a new game to play for his life,” wrote our Ambassador.[19] But once rid of his enemies, the son presented a pleasing antithesis to his father. Mohammed had been an uncouth and illiterate warrior who cared for no laws that stood between him and his will, who valued no arguments that conflicted with his preconceived notions, who even in his dealings with foreign envoys employed methods only one degree less savage than those he applied to the treatment of domestic problems. Ahmed, on the other hand, was the first Grand Vizir with a political, instead of a martial, mind. He had been bred to the study of the Law and had actually practised as a judge in civil causes. By temperament and education alike he was averse to violence. It is true that he had already carried out two successful campaigns and was now engaged in a third. But to this he was impelled by necessity: the Ottoman Empire, having arisen out of war and being constituted for war, would perish in peace. Its rulers could only avoid rebellion at home by providing their turbulent subjects with constant and congenial occupation abroad—a bleeding operation intended to relieve the body politic of its “malignant humours”—and it was particularly necessary for Ahmed, in order to keep his place, to show that he could graft the soldier on the lawyer. But he never became a general. His successes were won in spite of his strategy. In his war against the Emperor he was defeated at St. Gothard (Aug. 1, N.S. 1664), yet immediately after, profiting by the Emperor’s difficulties, he secured a treaty (Peace of Vasvar, Aug. 10, 1664) as advantageous as if it had been the fruit of victory. In Crete his military operations against the Venetians (1666-69) were so clumsy that at one moment he seriously meditated abandoning the siege of Candia, “his ill success having given his enemies hopes of supplanting him.”[20] Yet he obtained by negotiation the surrender of a fortress which until then had been deemed impregnable, and brought a twenty-five years’ struggle to a glorious conclusion. The Polish war which he was now conducting was likewise a matter of diplomatic as much as of military manœuvring. There can be no doubt that, if he had the choice, Ahmed would never have striven to get by force what might be got by subtler means.

To these traits, common among lawyers, he added a genuine love of justice and a scrupulous integrity rare among lawyers everywhere, and nowhere rarer than in the East. Endowed with such qualities, Ahmed proved himself one of the most moderate, and, at the same time, one of the least pliant Ministers that Turkey ever knew. Under his firm and equitable administration the Ottoman Empire recovered some of its prosperity, and, what is more pertinent to note here, the Frank residents enjoyed a Sabbath of rest. Tyranny, of course, could not be altogether avoided. But, on the whole, the privileges conferred upon them by their Capitulations were respected, extortions (avanias) were seldom indulged in with impunity, and the foreign merchants were treated with unexampled forbearance.[21] Towards the English the Grand Vizir was particularly well disposed, and with good reason.

The main principle of Charles II.’s policy in foreign as in domestic affairs was to avoid friction. Indolent, unambitious, and a hater of everything likely to disturb the even flow of his voluptuous existence, the Merry Monarch would sooner have surrendered his rights than have taken the trouble to defend them. No prince ever stood less upon his dignity; perhaps because no prince ever had less dignity to stand upon. In the course of their protracted struggle for the conquest of Candia, the Turks repeatedly pressed English ships into their service. Cromwell had opposed vigorously all encroachments of the sort; but the representatives of Charles, after some feeble and ineffectual protests, not only acquiesced tamely, but bitterly blamed those captains who ventured to resist; and, while the Grand Signor violated the neutrality of England, the English Secretary of State overwhelmed him with assurances that his Majesty “does inviolably observe his peace with the Grand Signior.”[22] Nor were these empty assurances. Individual Englishmen might assist the Venetians in what contemporary Christendom regarded as a holy war, but, unlike the French, whose volunteers passed on in a steady stream from Paris itself to reinforce the garrison of Candia, they did so at their own risk and peril without the least countenance from their Government. Indeed, such crusaders were so few and far between that Ahmed Kuprili commented on the fact that he did not find “soe much as an English seaman amongst his enemies att Candia.”[23]

To these general conditions which at the time rendered our Embassy unusually comfortable for any tenant of average tact, must be added an event that secured for Sir John Finch’s person special consideration.

Soon after his appointment, an English ship, the Mediterranean, on her passage from Tunis to Tripoli, had been met by the redoubtable corsair Domenico Franceschi—a Genoese by birth, but then domiciled at Leghorn and holding a privateering commission from the Great Duke of Tuscany. Normally an English vessel had nothing to fear from a Tuscan man-of-war; but the Mediterranean happened to carry the retiring Pasha of Tunis, homeward bound with his family and the spoils of his province, and, as the Duke was at perpetual war with the Sultan, Domenico could not well forgo such a chance of serving his sovereign and enriching himself. The Mediterranean managed, before the corsair could come up with her, to set the Pasha with some of his belongings ashore at Tripoli, but she was captured, taken to Malta, and pillaged of the bulk of the Pasha’s treasure, including his women. The incident was serious: it was one of those incidents which often strained Turkey’s relations with Western Powers in those days; and with no Western Power more often than with England. Not to dwell on remoter instances,[24] only a year before some other Turkish passengers on another English ship, the Lyon, whilst sailing from Tunis to Smyrna, had been carried off with their goods by the same pirate. At that time Sir Daniel Harvey addressed to the home Government an energetic protest against “the insolence and piracy” of a person in the service of a friendly prince, pointing out that his exploit endangered the safety of the English colonies in Turkey, and, if not taken notice of, might be an encouragement to him and others to do likewise.[25] But nothing was done, and the late Ambassador’s prediction had now come true even beyond his anticipation. For in that case the victims were Turks of very humble rank (a cap-maker with his two servants, and two old men who had just been redeemed at Malta, one after 48, the other after 50 years’ captivity), and the booty a trifle—3 chests of caps, 3 bales of blankets, and 3 boxes of botargoes.[26] This time the victim was a high functionary of the Porte, and the loot enormous. The Turks’ wrath was proportionate. They threatened that, if the property was not restored, the loss should be made good by the English residents; the Porte’s position always being that a Frank nation was collectively responsible for any Turkish passengers or goods that fell into the hands of pirates whilst travelling under that nation’s flag. Matters were not improved by the fact that the Mediterranean had offered no resistance, but was seen sailing away in the corsair’s company with every appearance of being a willing captive.

The directors of the Levant Company in London were not slow to realise the gravity of the situation. As soon as official reports from the Consuls at Leghorn and Tripoli reached them, they petitioned the King to write to the Great Duke and to demand complete restitution of the Pasha’s property and reparation for damages, with due punishment of “so notorious an offender.”[27] The King hastened to indite an epistle in that sense to the Duke,[28] and, at the same time, instructed Sir John Finch, then on his way out, to repair to Florence and make the necessary representations to his Highness by word of mouth. These instructions found Finch at Genoa; and he applied himself to the task with energy, anxiety for his own future in Turkey lending a spur to his concern for the public good.

In order to simplify matters, he procured, before leaving Genoa, the banishment of the corsair from that State, and then proceeded to Leghorn. There he found an Aga whom the Pasha of Tunis was sending to England as his Procurator on that very business. When he heard of Finch’s arrival, the Aga thought to save himself the journey to London by laying his case before him. Finch made the most of this lucky encounter. Concealing from the Aga his instructions, he gave the affair a totally different turn. The Mediterranean, he argued, was not an English ship. It is true that her Master, Captain Chaplyn, was an Englishman; but he had changed his religion, renounced his country, and, having for ten years lived at Leghorn and married there, had become a Tuscan subject, so that his Majesty of England was no longer concerned in him. With these “and other motives” (a delicate euphemism for the motive vulgarly known as bribery), the Ambassador prevailed on the Aga to give him a declaration in writing, attested by public notaries, that he had no claim upon Captain Chaplyn or any other Englishman; only, as Finch was accredited to the Porte, it would be taken very kindly of him if he would assist a Pasha in distress, the more as he lay under no obligation to do so. Having had this document signed and sealed, the resourceful diplomat approached the Duke in another way—the way dictated by the facts of the case and his instructions.

In that quarter also, Sir John’s efforts, thanks to his long connection with the Tuscan Court, met with success. At Florence itself he recovered 5000 dollars in ready money and a portion of the stolen goods. Then, armed with letters from the Duke, and accompanied by the Aga and Captain Chaplyn, he went on to Malta, where he managed, though not without great difficulty, to obtain the restitution of 75 more bales of goods and the redemption of seven captives, among them the Pasha’s sister-in-law, whom the Pasha afterwards made his wife. At Smyrna, where the Ambassador, still accompanied by the Turkish Aga and the English Captain, landed on the 1st of January 1674, he caused the former to give him before the Cadi of that place an official receipt for all the recovered goods—30,000 dollars—and a full discharge to Captain Chaplyn.[29]

We are told that the Turks expressed boundless admiration at this action—an action without a parallel in the annals of piracy: who had ever heard of a corsair being made to disgorge? They applauded the Ambassador’s skill and regarded his success as a manifest proof of his sovereign’s influence over foreign Governments. They were also impressed by his luck—no small recommendation to a superstitious people in an astrologically-minded age. Had not his landing on Turkish soil synchronised with the celebration of the holiest of Moslem feasts—the Feast of the Bairam?[30] As to the English Factory, its sixty members (merry young blades most of them) manifested their joy at the sight of their long-expected Ambassador after a fashion which must have made it a little difficult for his Excellency to maintain the reserve and gravity proper to his exalted station.

From Smyrna Sir John continued his journey to Constantinople, arriving there about the end of March; and some two months after, in the absence of the Grand Vizir, he had audience of the Vizir’s Kaimakam, or Deputy. On this occasion the new Ambassador gave the first evidence of that meticulous devotion to forms which made up then an enormous, and still makes up a very considerable, part of the complete diplomat’s mentality. Before going to audience he took care to find out how many kaftans, or robes of honour, the Kaimakam meant to present him and his suite with. “I was offerd’,” he says, “But 15: no English Ambassadour ever having had more from the Chimacam: But understanding the Venetian Bailo had 17, I would abate nothing of what he had had.” After a tug of several weeks, he wrested the two extra vests from the Turk.

One or two other features of that ceremony remain on record.

“I am,” said the envoy to the Kaimakam, “I am come Ambassadour from Charles the Second, King of England, Scottland, France and Ireland; sole and Soveraigne Lord of all the seas that environ His Kingdome: Lord and Soveraigne of Vast Territory’s and Possessions in the East and West Indy’s: Defender of the Christian Faith against all those that Worship Idolls and Images, To the Most High and Mighty Emperour Sultan Mahomet Ham, Cheif Lord and Commander of the Mussulman Kingdome, Sole and Supream Monarch of the Eastern Empire, To maintain that Peace which has bin so usefull and that Commerce which has bin so profitable to this Empire; For the continuance and encrease whereof I promise you in my station to contribute what I can; And I promise to myselfe that you in yours will doe the like.”

Sir John had written this speech in Italian and given it to his two chief Interpreters, with orders to study it carefully beforehand, so that they might not omit one word in interpreting what he should say. The Interpreters having fulfilled their function, some conversation ensued, in the middle of which the Kaimakam, abruptly, “as if he had much reflected on what his Lordship said,” asked whether the King of England had any fortresses in the Indies. Finch answered: “He had very many and not a few of those Inexpugnable.” The Kaimakam did not carry his cross-questioning any further. Presumably he understood that the English were imbued, like other nations, with a very sincere opinion of their own greatness.

Sir John reported this his début on the official stage of Turkey to his patron with evident self-satisfaction.[31] He had every reason to feel proud of the past and confident of the future. He had shown himself possessed of energy, finesse, firmness, and, though innocent of any acquaintance with the habits and prejudices of the Turks, he was already persona gratissima with them. The flattering way in which he had been received on his arrival in the Grand Signor’s dominions gave him not only the hope, but the certainty of a residence agreeable to himself and profitable to his country. Clearly, the Turks had been much maligned by common report. These feelings are faithfully reflected in a letter which Sir John’s alter ego penned to Lord Conway, while Sir John himself was penning his report to Lord Arlington:

“Give me leave to turne to ... your Brother my Lord Ambassadour’s condition under this Embassy: He hath dealt with the crafty close Genevese; with the wise and stayd Florentine; with the untameable and rugged Maltese; with the faythlesse Greek and false Jew; and lastly with the sober and stubborne Turk,”—then, leaving the others to rejoice in their respective epithets, the writer fixes his penetrating eye upon the Turks: “Under correction and with modesty I will say that I find them a sober and ingenious people; sober they are because they never drink wine, ingenious I call them from the Bassa who came to visit my Lord at the galley, so soon as he arrived at the port, for I seldom heard in Europe a more dextrous, short, and courtly reply then what the Bassa made to my Lord. I, over and above, find an Ambassadour here to have, according to their customes, as much respect as they have in most places in Europe. Certainly there is a mutuall and reciprocall jealousy betwixt the Court and foreign publick Ministers, between which there is neither religion nor custome of life, nor laws that beget any confidence or publick tie, and to the captious it gives many exceptions. But, setting these things apart, as yett I can call nothing strange.” Thus wrote this acute judge of national characters, after seeing only one Turk for a few moments; thus he wrote, no doubt with my Lord Ambassador’s concurrence, and thus he thought. Yet even in the midst of his rosy illusions, he had some dim, subconscious perception of realities. For he adds: “But, my most noble Lord, these are my first sentiments, perhaps when I have stayed here longer, I may have as much reason to reclaime against them as other men....”[32]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Evelyn’s Diary, Oct. 27, 1664; Pepys’s Diary, May 3, 1664, April 21, 1669.

[5] Roger North’s Life of Guilford, p. 226.

[6]Dictionary of National Biography; Malloch’s Finch and Baines.

[7] Anne, Viscountess Conway—a very learned lady and a very odd. There is a notice of her in the Dict. of Nat. Biog., where her father’s name is given wrongly as “Henry.”

[8] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 54.

[9]Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1667-68, pp. 258-9.

[10] Malloch’s Finch and Baines, p. 59.

[11] Finch to Arlington, Dec. 23, 1672, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[12] Rycaut’s Present State, p. 404.

[13] Winchilsea to Secretary Nicholas, March 18-28, 1660-61, June 12, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 17.

[14] Instructions for Sir John Finch, Cl. 6. See Appendix I.

[15] Sir Thomas Baines, May 25, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[16] See Appendix III.

[17]Register, 1668-1710, p. 22; S.P. Levant Company, 145.

[18] Winchilsea to Nicholas, March 4, 1660-61, Nov. 11-21, 1661, S.P. Turkey, 17; Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 68; J. von Hammer’s Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, vol. xi. p. 111. Winchilsea mentions only the “six thousand Bashaws and great men,” whom Mohammed put to death “partly by his own hands and by his commands.” Rycaut gives the total of the Vizir’s victims as “thirty-six thousand persons.” Hammer, though he does not consider this statement excessive, is content with an estimate of “trente mille personnes,” or an average of 500 executions a month—figures which, even if reduced by a nought, would still appear respectable.

[19] Winchilsea to Nicholas, May 20, 1662, S.P. Turkey, 17.

[20] Harvey to Arlington, Jan. 31, 1669 [-70], S.P. Turkey, 19.

[21] See Appendix IV.

[22] For illustrations of this timorous attitude see Winchilsea to Nicholas, March 4, 1660-61, Feb. 11, 1661-62; the Same to Arlington, March 26, 1668; Rycaut to Arlington, July 18, 1668; Letters from Messrs. Thomas Dethick & Co., Smyrna, Feb. 7, March 1, 1667-68; Harvey to Arlington, June 19, 1669, S.P. Turkey, 17 and 19.

[23] Harvey to Arlington, Aug. 18, 1669, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[24] See Appendix V.

[25] Harvey to Arlington, Jan. 24, March 15, 1671-72, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[26] “A Relation of the Damage rec. by me, Thomas Parker, Master of the Lyon pinke from a Corsair near the Island of Delos. Smyrna, 9 Dec. 1671,” ibid.

[27]Register, p. 39, S.P. Levant Company, 145.

[28]Ibid. pp. 40-41. This letter, written in Latin, is dated “ex pallatio nostro Westmonasteriensi, Quarto die Augusti, Anno Doñi 1673, Regni nostri 25o.”

[29] Sir John Finch’s own Narrative, Sept. 24, 1680, S.P. Turkey, 19.

[30] Rycaut’s Memoirs, p. 312.

[31] Finch to Arlington, May 25, 1674 (with Inclosure), Coventry Papers.

[32] Sir Thomas Baines to Conway, May 25, 1674, S.P. Turkey, 19. The letter, though unsigned and unaddressed, carries within it conclusive proof of its authorship and destination.

CHAPTER IISIR JOHN’S PROGRAMME

Sir John regarded his audience with the Kaimakam as nothing more than a prologue: the real action had yet to begin. His first business was “to make my selfe an Ambassadour by delivering His Majesty’s Credentials to the Gran Signor and His Letter to the Gran Visir.”[33] But that could not be done at Constantinople. For over a dozen years the seat of the Ottoman Empire had been at Adrianople.

Mohammed IV. nourished an unconquerable detestation of Constantinople. It was said that when any of his Ministers ventured to urge upon him the advisability of showing himself there, he used to answer: “What shall I do in Stambul? Did not Stambul cost my father his life? My predecessors, were they not always the prisoners of rebels? Rather than go back to Stambul, I would set fire to it with my own hands.” True or apocryphal, these words describe the position accurately. Constantinople under the Sultans, like Rome under the Caesars, was the home of an insolent militia and a turbulent mob. The maladies which infected the Empire had their breeding-ground in it. It supplied a centre for all the intrigues and seditions which time and again had brought Turkey within an inch of disruption. Its revolutionary habits made it insecure. So the reigning monarch, except for occasional visits reluctantly undertaken and speedily terminated, kept away from the ill-omened city. Love of sport conspired with fear of death to drive the Grand Signor from his capital. For never had Turkey known so great a Nimrod. With other Sultans the chase had been a recreation; with Mohammed IV. it was an obsession—a monomania. “When He cannot range to Hunt,” says Finch, “He is never well.”[34] Hence his nickname of Avji, or the Hunter. The fatigues he underwent in the indulgence of this consuming passion are almost fabulous: in the height of summer as well as in the depth of winter, he sallied forth two or three hours before sunrise and spent the whole day dashing up hill and down dale like one possessed by a thousand restless demons. The courtiers whose privilege it was to ride in the Sultan’s train looked back with unfeigned regret to the soft vices of his father: what were the amorous whims of Ibrahim compared with the strenuous vagaries of Mohammed? But if he spared his courtiers as little as he spared himself, this sportsman spared his humbler subjects even less. Wherever he hunted, the inhabitants of the district were obliged either to provide beaters—sometimes as many as 30,000—or to beat the woods themselves. In the summer, they had, in addition, their crops ruined. In the winter, numbers of these wretched peasants, exposed to cold and hunger during several days and nights, paid for their master’s pleasure with their lives. So it came to pass that, while the titular capital of the Empire, in the absence of the Grand Signor’s luxurious Court, drooped like a flower in the shade, the Imperial sun shone upon Adrianople: the environs of that town affording exceptional facilities for the pursuit of game—of all pursuits the one this degenerate son of Osman loved the most and understood the best.[35]

To Adrianople, therefore, Sir John would have to betake himself. The journey was expensive, and the Levant Company extremely close-fisted. But in this juncture our Merchants could not stint the piper, seeing that they called the tune. For the presentation of his Credentials, though the first, was the least of the motives that impelled Finch to the Sublime Threshold.

It had been the ambition of every English Ambassador up to that date to renew the Capitulations originally granted to the English by Sultan Murad III. in 1580,[36] with a view to obtaining a confirmation and elucidation of old and the addition of new privileges. During the reign of the present Sultan the Capitulations had already been renewed twice, by Sir Thomas Bendyshe and by Lord Winchilsea; and Sir Daniel Harvey would have renewed them for the third time, if death had not prevented him. Sir John Finch was anxious to tread the path of his predecessors and to go farther than they.

There were, in the first place, tariffs to be revised and Customs-duties to be reduced, or defined to our advantage. For instance, by a Hattisherif, or Imperial decree, granted to Sir Sackville Crow, the Merchants of Aleppo had to pay 3 per cent ad valorem on the goods they imported—cloths, kerseys, cony skins, tin, lead—as well as on the goods they exported—raw linen, cotton yarn, galls, silk, rhubarb and other drugs. This decree determined what was to be called 3 per cent in terms of Turkish weights, measures, and money, leaving no loop-hole for extortion. But, resting as it did solely upon the Sultan’s word, it was regarded as reversible at his pleasure. Therefore, Sir John’s predecessors had laboured to have it inserted in the Capitulations, but without success, and the Hattisherif had gradually become so antiquated that not only the local Customs authorities refused to obey its provisions, but the Grand Vizir himself refused to enforce them. Finch wished to embody this decree in the Charter, so that the English should henceforth have not only the Grand Signor’s signature but also his oath, and convert what was a mere concession to merchants into a covenant between prince and prince.

Another Article coveted by the Ambassador aimed at securing a similar definition for duties levied upon our Factors at Smyrna and Constantinople. By the Capitulations they were obliged to pay 3 per cent on imports and exports. But differences had lately arisen between them and the Customs authorities concerning English cloth. The duty had been fixed when the English imported only a kind of coarse cloth called “Londras,” for which they were content to pay ad valorem; but since they had begun to import finer cloths they demurred, insisting that the Customs authorities were not entitled to more than the amount of duty established of old. The authorities, on their part, to avoid what they considered an attempt to cheat the Grand Signor, insisted that the duty should be paid in kind. Sir John had so far let the merchants compound with the authorities underhand, in order that our case might not be prejudiced by the judgment of inferior Courts; but it was his intention to have the matter settled at Adrianople: success on this point, he reckoned, meant some 60,000 dollars a year saved; and besides, it would enable the English to trade in cloth of equal fineness with that of their Dutch competitors on infinitely more advantageous terms—paying only two where the Dutch paid six dollars per piece.

Next, there was in our Capitulations a clause by which Englishmen engaged in litigation with natives for a sum above 4000 aspers were entitled to bring their case before the Divan. But this clause, being limited to private individuals, did not protect the English against the Grand Signor’s officials, whose arbitrariness grew in proportion to their distance from the “Fountain of Justice”; for they had it in their power to squeeze the defendants by detaining them and sequestering their ships and goods. The Ambassador wished to deprive the local tyrants of every temptation by introducing into the Capitulations an Article which authorised the English Consul on the spot to become surety for his countrymen.

Another abuse Finch sought to remedy was of a converse nature. Native defendants used to evade prosecution by putting in a claim not to be sued except before the Divan, where the practice was for the successful litigant to pay 10 per cent on the debt recovered, instead of the 2 per cent with which the provincial Cadis were nominally content. This frightened Englishmen from suing in the best Court of Justice, and gave the Cadis a chance of extorting from them 6 or 8 per cent. It was the Ambassador’s object to render such evasions and extortions impossible by obtaining an Article which made the fees uniform.

Further, Sir John wished to establish uniformity in the anchorage charges imposed upon English shipping, and to remove a chronic grievance by exempting a ship which had paid anchorage at one Turkish port from a like liability in another she might call at in the course of her voyage.

Such were the most important innovations Sir John contemplated. But the most piquant of all referred to the contingency of English factors in Turkey robbing their principals in England and shielding themselves from English justice by becoming Mohammedans—“turning Turks,” as the phrase went. This interesting problem had arisen out of a recent incident at Smyrna. In September 1673 a young gentleman of good family and rigid religious upbringing, one, too, who had a fair fortune of his own, was tempted by the Evil One to commit a deed that covered the English “Nation” in the Levant with shame. Availing himself of his partner’s absence, he appropriated a large quantity of goods and gold belonging to several merchants at home. Then he went before the Cadi and made a solemn profession of Islam, so that he might shelter himself under the Moslem Law, which admitted no Infidel’s evidence against a True Believer. We possess a full account of this scandalous affair from the pen of our Consul at Smyrna, who tells how, after seven months’ unremitting pursuit, he managed to recover the best part of the property and to reduce the culprit to such distress that at last the wretch humbly begged him to contrive his return to Christendom and Christianity in the frigate which had brought Sir John out.[37] As a safeguard against similar accidents, the Ambassador proposed that the Porte should be asked to allow in future Christian witnesses in such cases.[38]

Over and above all these matters of business, there was a point of honour to be struggled for—a point by which Sir John set immense store. The French enjoyed a privilege which the English had for generations craved in vain: the King of France, alone among Christian monarchs, was honoured by the Turks with the title of Padishah, or Emperor; the King of England was styled simply Kral, or King. The representatives of Queen Elizabeth, it seems, not caring much for titles, had acquiesced in that modest designation, and the precedent once established, all the efforts of later envoys had failed:[39] “So hard a thing it is to unrivitt what Time has fixd’,” moralised Sir John; but the hardness of the thing, instead of damping, fanned his ardour. If he could only get that high-sounding title for his sovereign, what a feather would it be in his cap! He had already, at his audience with the Kaimakam, taken the first step towards that goal. He had commanded his Interpreters most particularly not to forget, in translating his speech, to render the word “King” by “Padishah,” not “Kral”; and as they, aware of the tenacity with which the Turks clung to established customs, evinced some reluctance to attempt an innovation, Sir John had agreed, when he uttered the word “King,” to add “or Padishah,” thus securing the Interpreters by his authority. That was done accordingly, and “taken without any exception.” But it was only the thin end of the wedge. Sir John was resolved to prosecute “with my utmost Vigour” the insertion of the title into the new Capitulations;[40] and so to score off all the ambassadors who went before and bequeath a legacy of imperishable lustre to all those who should come after him.

A comprehensive programme, excellent in conception; but for its execution Sir John had to wait.

While the Grand Signor hunted, his Grand Vizir was busy conducting hostilities with Poland and, simultaneously, negotiations for peace. Sir John was kept informed of these proceedings by the Dutch Resident, who, with his wife, his children and his Secretaries, followed the Ottoman camp, having orders from his Government to watch the march of events in concert with the Emperor’s Resident. Holland and Germany were then at war with France, which endeavoured to bring about an agreement between Poland and Turkey and to induce the latter Power to turn her arms against the Emperor. England, on the other hand, had recently made peace with Holland, and the Dutch Resident, before his departure from Constantinople, had recommended his “Nation” to Sir John’s protection. He now wrote to him about the prospects of peace.