Constantinople old and new

To many people the colour of Stamboul looks purely Turkish—at first sight. The simplest peasant of Asia Minor could not look at it often, however, without noticing things of an order strange to him—a sculptured capital lying in the street, bits of flowered marble set into a wall, a column as high as a minaret standing by itself, a dome of unfamiliar shape, and mosque walls mysterious with unreadable letters and the sacrilegious picturing of human forms, and ruined masonry or dark subterranean vaultings leading off into myth. For other newcomers it may become a game of the most engrossing kind to track out these old things, and mark how Stamboul has fitted into the ruts of Byzantium, and hunt for some lost piece of antiquity that no one else has found. And there are men for whom Stamboul does not exist. Through it they walk as in some inner city of the mind, seeing only the vanished capital of the Cæsars. Divan Yolou is for them the Mese of old. In the Hippodrome they still hear the thunder of Roman chariots. And many a Turkish monument has interest for them only because its marbles are anagrams that spell anew the glory of the ancient world.

Need I say that I am no such man? The essential colour of Constantinople is for me, who am neither Byzantinist nor Orientalist, a composite one, and the richer for being so. I confess I do not like the minarets of St. Sophia, but it is only because they are ugly. I am sorry that the palace of Constantine has so completely disappeared, but I am Philistine enough to suspect that the mosque built on its site may lift quite as imposing a mass against the sky. I like to remember that the most important street of Stamboul was the Triumphal Way of the Byzantine emperors—and earlier still the home-stretch of a famous Roman road, the Via Egnatia, which continued from Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic, the Durazzo of Balkan squabbles, the line of the Appian Way; but it seems to me that the sultans added interest to that historic thoroughfare. Nevertheless, I am inconsistent enough to be sorry that Byzantinists are so rare, and to be a little jealous of

I do not pretend to set up Constantinople against Rome or Athens. Without them, of course, she would not have been—what she was. But I do maintain that her history was as long, that she played a rôle no less important in her later day, and that without her our modern world could never have been quite what it is. We are unjustly inclined to forget that link in the chain. Different from Rome and Athens, as they differed from each other, Constantinople fused in her own crucible, with others of Oriental origin, the elements of civilisation which they furnished. Out of these elements she formulated a new religion, created the architecture to embody it, codified a system of law. Having thus collected and enriched the learning of antiquity, she bequeathed it to the adolescent Europe of the Renaissance. We are accustomed to speak of the dark ages that followed the fall of Rome. There was, properly speaking, no darker age than had been. The centre of light had merely moved eastward, and such miserable frontier villages as London, Paris, and Vienna were merely, for the time being, the darker. To them Constantinople was what Paris is to us, the ville lumière, and far more. She was the centre of a civilisation whose splendour and refinement were the legend of the West. She contained such treasures of ancient art as are now scattered in a thousand museums. Under her shadow Athens became a sort of present-day Oxford or Venice and Rome not much more than a vociferous Berlin. Entirely new races—Slavs, Huns, Turks—began to be drawn into her orbit, as the Gauls, the Britons, and the Teutons had been drawn by Rome. If the far-away cities of Bagdad and Cordova felt her influence, how much more was it so in countries with which she had more immediate relations? Italy in particular, and Venice above all other Italian towns, owe more to Constantinople than has ever been appraised. Venice would always have been Venice, but a Venice without the St. Mark’s we know, without the stolen horses of bronze, without the pillars of the Piazzetta, without many of the palaces of the Grand Canal, without the lion, even, which is as Byzantine as Byzantine can be. Several other Italian cities contain notable examples of Byzantine architecture or decoration, while in half the collections of Europe are ivories, reliquaries, bits of painting and mosaic and goldsmiths’ work that came out of Byzantium. That jewel of Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle, is not Byzantine, but it was built to house the church treasures from Constantinople which were a part of the loot of the fourth crusade, and some of them may still be seen in Notre Dame. In indirect ways the account is harder to reckon. Some authorities find a Byzantine origin for so remote an architectural language as Romanesque building, while few now deny that the Italian school of painting was derived directly from the mosaics of Constantinople. All admit, at any rate, that the prodigious movement of the Renaissance was fed by the humanists who took refuge in Italy from the invading Turk.

Yet Constantinople has remained, comparatively to her two great rivals, an undiscovered country. The Russians are alone to maintain there such a centre of research as the schools of Rome and Athens, and excavaters take it for granted that Stamboul hides nothing worth their trouble. They would have more reason if the emperors had not collected so many of the masterpieces of antiquity. For about Athens will always linger some glamour of the Periclean age, and its sculpture, like its literature, remains the high-water mark of a certain artistic achievement. The case of Rome, however, is more complicated. Rome never created an art so original as Byzantine architecture or Byzantine mosaic; and Justinian it was, not Cæsar or Augustus, who carried Roman law to such a point that no principle has been added to it since. I think the old odium theologicum must have something to do with the fact that the age of Justinian and one or two great periods that followed it enjoy so little general renown. The split between the churches originally destroyed the tradition of renown; and because we are of the West, because we are descended from the crusaders, because we derive our religious traditions from Rome, we still entertain some vague ancestral prejudice against Orthodoxy and its capital. The present masters of Constantinople have, of course, greatly encouraged this prejudice by taking no interest themselves in the history of the city or allowing others to do so. Then other details of accessibility enter into the matter, and of language, and a thousand subtleties of association. Rome, for instance, has long been a province of European literature. Keats and Shelley and Browning, to mention only later English poets, and I know not how many others, besides generations of novelists and playwrights and historians and travellers and painters and sculptors, have made a whole public that knows or cares very little about the Cæsars feel at home in Rome; whereas Gibbon and Byron and Lady Mary Montagu are the sole greater English names that attach themselves to the Bosphorus. It waters, to be sure, a much larger corner of French literature. And the immense learning of Gibbon has perhaps done more than any amount of ignorance and prejudice to weight the scale against Constantinople.

The Rome of literature is not an Augustan Rome. It is the Rome of the popes, the Rome of the Renaissance, the Rome of galleries and haunted palaces and enchanted villas that had no being till Constantinople was at an end. Or it is a simpler Rome still, of the liquid light, of shops and theatres and hotels and a friendly court. Against these Romes I am the last to set up a cry. I merely point out that for most eyes they fill up the picture of the Eternal City; whereas Constantinople can be looked at through no such magnifying-glass. Sacked of her wealth, home of the arts no more, guarded by jealous keepers, and lacking most that is dear to the modern wanderer’s heart, how should she compete with Rome? Only in one respect can she hold her own unchallenged against that potent rival, for by no stretch of the imagination can Rome, crouching on her seven ant-hills beside her muddy river, be given the palm of place over Constantinople. And the campagna of Rome, that stretches so vast and melancholy on many an eloquent page, is but a dooryard to the campagna of Constantinople, which also has imperial aqueducts, and which regards older than Alban hills and the shining spaces of the Marmora dotted by high islands, and far away behind them, like Alps seen across a Venetian lagoon, the blue range, capped three parts of the year with snow, of the Bithynian Olympus.

I follow, however, but an unprofitable trail. Rome is Rome and Constantinople is Constantinople. And a day will no doubt come for the latter when some other impressionist will sigh for the unexploited days of yore. One of the charms of Constantinople, indeed, is that mystery still has room there and one may always hope for treasure-trove. The sacks of 1204 and 1453 undoubtedly made away with the better part of the statuary and other precious things of which Constantinople was so unparalleled a museum, but some buried Greek marble may yet come to light. The soil of Stamboul is virgin so far as excavation is concerned, and you have no more than to scratch it to pick up something—if only a coin or a bit of broken pottery. Until very recently, digging for foundations was the sole thing of the sort permitted. Some most interesting discoveries have been made in this casual way. Quite a museum, for example, could have been formed of the different objects found in the grounds where the American missionaries have their headquarters. While digging, in 1872, for the foundations of the main building, an ancient burial-ground was unearthed. The bones, with lamps and other small objects, were protected by great tiles set triangularly together, and inside each skull was a Roman coin of early imperial times, which once paid, I suppose, a passage over Styx. Near by were ruins of masonry which indicated by their shape a church. Under a later building coins and tiles of the period of Constans were found. A beautiful Corinthian column also came to light, and a life-sized marble statue. When ground was broken for the third building, on the site of a Turkish konak, an old man came to the American in charge and asked for a private interview. He then introduced himself as an Armenian whose ancestors had been courtiers of the last emperor Constantine. From them, he said, a tradition had been handed down in his family about the ground where the Turkish house had stood. “When you dig into the ground,” he said, “you will come to an iron door. When you open the door you will see stone steps. When you go down the steps you will come into a sort of room. Then you will find a passage leading underground in the direction of St. Sophia—and in it gold, jewels, statues, all manner of things that the emperor and his friends put there for safety during the last siege. I only ask you to give me half!” The missionary thought the Armenian mad and treated him accordingly. But the old man spent all his time watching the work. And one day the diggers uncovered a metal door lying horizontally in the earth. With some difficulty they succeeded in jacking the door off the masonry in which the hinges were embedded, and underneath steps appeared, going down into a black void. At that the missionary began to be interested. When the workmen were out of the way he went down with the Armenian to explore. They descended into the subterranean vault they expected. It was held up by marble pillars with crosses on the capitals. But when they came to look for the passage they discovered that one end of the vault, the end toward St. Sophia, had been cut off by a wall of more recent date. That wall, as it happens, belongs to the great building known as the Valideh Han, erected by the famous valideh soultan Kyössem. After her death were found, among other property of hers stored there, twenty chests of ducats. And when I read about them I could not help wondering whether any of those ducats came from the passage which the sultana’s workmen must accidentally have struck into in the seventeenth century.

Constantinople is full of stories and legends of the same sort, in most of which figures a secret passage leading underground to St. Sophia. I have poked my own nose into two or three such tunnels, which no Turk ever constructed, and can vouch for their existence. In reality, however, there is nothing very mysterious about them. The soil of Stamboul is honeycombed with cisterns of all sizes, from the enormous ones picturesquely called by the Turks the Sunken Palace and the Thousand and One Columns to the small one of the Bible House and Valideh Han. Others, like the cistern beside the mosque of Sultan Selim I, were always uncovered. These are usually called choukour bostan, hollow garden, from the fact that vegetable gardens are wont to flourish in the accumulated silt of their centuries. Brick conduits connect many of the reservoirs with a water-system which Hadrian is known to have installed or enlarged while Rome was still the capital of the empire. And it was only natural for such conduits to lead toward St. Sophia, the civic centre of the town. We also know that Constantine constructed deep sewers, on the lines of the cloaca of Rome. But as no one has ever been able to study these systems thoroughly, there remains something half mythic about them.

Another casual but more dramatic way in which old Constantinople proves her temper of eternity is by means of the fires that periodically ravage Stamboul. There is no more striking suggestion of Stambouls within Stamboul than to look at the ashes of some familiar, of some regretted quarter, and discover there a solid piece of antiquity about which houses have been built and burned who knows how many times. In my own day the Column of Marcian has reappeared on its hilltop overlooking the Marmora, having long been lost in the yard of a Turkish house. And I have seen the obscure mosque of Boudroun Jami gallantly reassert itself above the ruin of its quarter as the charming little tenth-century church of the Myrelaion—the convent of Myrrh and Oil. The fires which an archæologist might best have been suspected of setting were those of 1912 and 1913, which swept the slope between the Hippodrome and the Marmora. This was the site of the Sacred Palace of the later Roman emperors. No complete account of it remains, but from the reports of ambassadors and other visitors of note, from references of historians, and from the Book of Ceremonies of the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, scholars have been able to reconstitute that city of palaces, churches, terraces, and gardens that overlapped on one side a corner of the present Seraglio grounds and reached on the other nearly to the church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Constantine the Great was the founder of this imperial residence. His Palace of Daphne, so called from a statue of the nymph he brought from Rome, stood on the site of the mosque of Sultan Ahmed I, and other structures bordered the Hippodrome, opening by a monumental gateway into the Augustæum, now the square of St. Sophia. To Constantine also was attributed the magnificent hall of the Magnaura, which Ebersolt places a little south and west of the present Ministry of Justice. Here was the throne of Solomon, imitated from the one described in the Book of Kings, whose fame has come down in the memoirs of more than one amazed ambassador. It was guarded by golden lions which, during audiences of state, rose to their feet, beat their tails on the floor, and roared, while golden birds in a tree behind the throne began to chirp and flutter among the golden boughs. Still another construction attributed to Constantine was the Porphyra, the little porphyry palace near the sea where the imperial children were born.

I cannot attempt even to catalogue the other splendours of this unparalleled enclosure or the names of those who continued, during six hundred years, to add palace to palace, one richer than another in jewelled furniture, in the new jewelry of mosaic, in the spoils of ancient art. Nicephorus Phocas was the last emperor to do so, when he enlarged and fortified the waterside Palace of Bucoleon. By the eleventh century the emperors had begun to prefer the Palace of Blacherne. But Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, found the great ladies of the court assembled in the Bucoleon when the crusaders occupied the city in 1204, and after the restoration of 1261 Michael Palæologus lived there until Blacherne could be put in order. From that time on the Great Palace fell rapidly into decay. When the Florentine Buondelmonte visited it early in the fifteenth century it was already a ruin. Its condition in 1453 suggested to the Turkish conqueror the Persian distich which has been so often requoted: “The spider has woven his web in the palace of kings, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.” By the sixteenth century little was left of it but a few columns and the ruins of the Bucoleon. The colossal group of a lion and a bull, which gave the smaller palace its name, still stood on the old quay of the imperial galleys in 1532, when it was turned around by an earthquake. Is it impossible that that marble might yet be recovered from the sand of the shore? The westernmost of the palaces composing the Bucoleon, the one associated with the name of the Persian prince Hormisdas, who came as an exile to the court of Constantine the Great, was pulled down as late as 1871, when the Roumelian railway was built. Two lions from a balcony of its sea façade now flank the east staircase of the Imperial Museum. The ruins of the eastern palace, the so-called House of Justinian, where the great emperor may very well have lived before he came to the throne, were barely saved by the Friends of Stamboul when the railway was double-tracked in 1912. To-day this pile of ancient brickwork, rising from the edge of the Marmora, is almost the last vestige of the palace whose legendary splendour filled so many mediæval pages. On the slope behind it the fires to which I have referred laid bare several Byzantine terraces, the entrances to a number of vaulted substructures, and a tower which had been incorporated into the surrounding houses. Might it be, perhaps, the tower of the Great Admiral Apocaucus, which he built as a prison for John Cantacuzene but in which he himself was murdered in 1345? I am not the one to say. But that Palatine Hill, so long the centre of the world, where so much has been enacted that is most coloured and passionate of life, and which now looks so quietly at its quiet sea—and there is a blue keeps no trace of all the keels that have scarred it from the time of the Argonauts!—that Palatine Hill has an immense attraction for me. And I marvel that no one has yet taken advantage of its present accessibility to learn precisely what, after so many fires and earthquakes and other spoilers, may be left of its old arrangement.

A Palatine Hill which might reveal more dominates the opposite end of the city. This ridge above the Golden Horn is the site of the palace whose name of Blacherne—or Vlaherni as I should be tempted to write it if I were not afraid of my friends the Byzantinists—seems to have been derived from that of some barbarian settler. Was he haply a Wallachian? He settled, at all events, on this hilltop in pre-Constantinian days, and outside the line of the Constantinian, or even of the Theodosian, walls. It was only in the seventh century that the emperor Heraclius threw a wall outside the quarter. Which emperor first built a palace there is not known, but Anastasius I enlarged one as early as the fifth century. In 457 the pious Pulcheria, the virgin empress of Marcian, founded the celebrated shrine of the Madonna of Blacherne. Restored and enlarged in different reigns, it was the object of several of those annual imperial pilgrimages which played so large a part in the life of the ancient city. There was even a day in the year when the emperors bathed in the Holy Well of the church. This áyazma may still be seen in the waterside quarter of Balat. The name Balat is a Turkish corruption of the Greek word for palace, and Aïvan Seraï, as the adjoining quarter is called, means the Palace of the Balcony. These names are another reminder of the palace that figures so often in the chronicles of the crusades. Of the palace itself more remains than of the Great Palace, though it still waits for a Labarte or an Ebersolt. Bits of masonry crop out of the ground or stand visibly among the houses all the way up the hill. Indeed, I suspect that a good deal of the hill itself is artificial. Such, at least, is the case of the high terrace bordering the city wall where the mosque of Aïvas Effendi faces two ivy-mantled towers. An innocent-looking hole in the courtyard of the mosque winds down into a black subterranean maze of passages, stairways, cells, and tiers of arches climbing above bottomless pits. So much earth and rubbish have sifted into this extraordinary labyrinth that its true extent can only be guessed at until it is systematically excavated. In the meantime, archæology has been very busy discussing which of the two contiguous towers that form a part of it was the tower of Anemas, and whether either of them was the tower of the emperor Isaac Angelus. The Anemas in question was a Byzantinised Arab, descendant of the Emir who surrendered Crete to Nicephorus Phocas, and he had the honour of being the first of many prisoners of state to be shut up in his tower. Whichever it may have been, however, the most unarchæological visitor is capable of enjoying a dip into that romantic darkness and the view, from the terrace, of a cypressed country beside the Golden Horn.

On top of the hill stands the well-preserved ruin known in Turkish as Tekfour Seraï, the Palace of the Crown-Wearer. As to its real name, there has been the most fanciful variety of opinions. The palace is now generally supposed, however, to have been built in the tenth century by Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It seems to have been separate from the Palace of Blacherne, though on the analogy of the Great Palace it may have belonged to the same group. Architects as well as archæologists take a particular interest in Tekfour Seraï, because it is the only authentic piece of domestic building left of Byzantine Constantinople. The main façade is divided into three tiers of arched windows and ornamented by a mosaic of dark and light stone that recalls the brickwork of later Byzantine churches. What the general effect does not recall is the Venetian version of Byzantine civil architecture. We should not take that version too literally, of course, any more than the Venetian Gothic; but St. Mark’s is so true a transcription of a Byzantine church—without the crockets—that one has the more faith in the palaces. The difference may be chiefly one of periods. It is noticeable that the spacing of the arches of Tekfour Seraï is not like that of the Fondaco dei Turchi, to whose designed irregularity Ruskin drew attention. Neither has the checker-work of the façade anything in common with the plaques of porphyry and serpentine reflected in the Grand Canal. It suggests, rather, the checker-work of the Ducal Palace. The first tier of arches, too, looks like the same kind of ground arcade. Is it possible that any influence interacted between the two palaces? If so the presumption would be that it worked in Venice, under a Gothic cloak; for the Ducal Palace, or the lagoon front of it, belongs to the century after the Latin occupation of Constantinople. In the light of my question this latter detail is interesting, since the features I have noted decorate only the sea façade of Tekfour Seraï. The question lies so near the fantastic, however, and so far from any track of sober archæology where I have happened to browse, that I merely ask it and hurry on, leaving for some happy expert, with means to excavate and knowledge to compare, to state the true affiliations of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus.

The richest remains of old Constantinople are its churches. Little as they are generally known, almost every one knows something about the greatest of them. There seems to me a peculiar fitness in the name of Justinian’s cathedral, which is not exactly rendered by its current vocable. It was not dedicated to any saint, but to the Divine Wisdom; and the Turks still call it Aya Sofya. The cross no longer surmounts that old cathedral, it is true, nor are Christian forms of worship permitted within its walls. In the divine wisdom, however, there is room for more than one form of worship. And St. Sophia, whose marbles, borrowed from half the temples of antiquity, have beautified the rites not only of Mohammed and of Christ, but of Apollo, of Pallas, of Asiatic Cybele, of Egyptian Isis and Osiris and how many older divinities of the pagan world, seems to me more than any other temple to express what is universal in religion, stripped of all pettinesses of creed. I shall make no attempt to analyse the elements of so supreme an expression. One is silenced, too, in the face of so many human associations. A thousand years before St. Peter’s that great dome swung in the Byzantine air, and under it one is bewildered by a cloud of ghosts. Yet impressions detach themselves—of space, of light, of an immense distinction. All the little Turkish rearrangements are swallowed up in it, as must have been the glitter of the Greek ritual. Decoration has no part in the nobility of that effect. There is nothing to hide. Each of those leaping arches and soaring domes does something—and in a way! But there is also a perfection of detail, rich, coloured, as if suffused by a glamour of dusky gold that is between the white morning clarity of paganism and the Gothic twilight.

The churches of Constantinople neither begin nor end with St. Sophia, however. The oldest of them is St. John the Baptist of the Studion, so called from the Roman senator Studius who about 463 founded a monastery near the Golden Gate. The monks by whom this monastery was first peopled belonged to the order known as the Sleepless Ones, because by a system of relays they kept up an unending series of offices. Nevertheless, they found time to gain renown as copyists and illuminators of manuscripts, and some of the hymns they wrote are still sung. The monks took the unpopular side against the iconoclastic emperors, but after the triumph of the iconodules, in the ninth century, the Studion became the most important monastery in the city. Its abbot took precedence of all other abbots. The emperors visited it annually in state. Two of them even exchanged their crowns for its habit. In 1054 several meetings took place there between Constantine X and the legates who had come from Rome to settle the differences between the Pope and the Patriarch. Cardinal Humbert finally settled those differences by laying on the altar of St. Sophia a bull of excommunication against the Patriarch Cerularius and all his followers. That was the first definite schism between the churches. When Michael Palæologus drove the Latin emperors from Constantinople in 1261, he made the first part of his triumphal entry on foot from the Golden Gate to the Studion. In front of him went in a chariot the famous icon of the ὀδηγητρία, the Shower of the Way, which he left in the church. This sacred painting, ascribed to the prolific brush of St. Luke, was acquired with other relics in Jerusalem by Eudoxia, empress of Theodosius II. She gave it to her sister-in-law Pulcheria, who built a special church for it on Seraglio Point. The relic gradually took the place of the Palladium which Constantine brought from Rome. It was prayed to in battles, shown from the walls in sieges, carried in triumphs, and annually borne in procession to the Great Palace for the ceremonies of Easter. The Studion possessed other precious relics of its own, such as the head of John the Baptist and the Sacred Lance. Several persons of importance were buried in the precincts of the monastery. Among them was a Turkish prince, son of Baïezid the Thunderbolt, who died there of the plague in 1417. Brought up as a hostage at the court of Manuel Palæologus, he became a Christian, but for fear of incurring his father’s displeasure the monks would not baptise him till his last illness. It was under Baïezid II that the monastery passed into Turkish hands. By way of compensation the Sultan sent to the Pope of the day, who happened to be Alexander Borgia, the Sacred Lance and other relics. An order of dervishes followed the monks of the Studion, and the church of St. John is now called Emir Ahor or Imrahor Jamisi, the mosque of the Chief of the Stables.

Of the monastery very little remains save a fine cistern and a few fragments of wall. Little more will soon be left of the church unless something be done to save it. A heavy fall of snow crushed in the roof a few years ago, and the powers that be have not yet found means or inclination to preserve that monument of a past in which they had no part. The church is interesting not only because it is the oldest in Constantinople and associated with so much history, but because it is the one pure basilica extant in the city. The best-preserved parts of it are the walls of the narthex, where are still visible the remnants of colonnades with a fine entablature of an early transition period from Corinthian to Byzantine. After the disuse of the basilica as a mosque, the Russian Archæological Institute obtained permission to investigate it and made some interesting discoveries. The north wall of the mosque yard was scraped of its plaster and was found to contain ancient bricks disposed in the form of a cross, proving that the Turkish court takes the place of an early Christian atrium. In the south aisle of the interior three graves were found corresponding perfectly to the description of the last resting-place of the great abbot Theodore of the ninth century. An underground passage was also opened, leading from the bema to the adjoining cistern, and the foundations contained evidence of a more ancient sub-structure. But the most interesting discovery was that of a beautiful marble pavement beneath the Turkish floor, in which figures of men and animals were framed in marble between squares, disks, and geometrical curves of porphyry and serpentine. Unfortunately, some disagreement arose between the Russians and the Ministry of Pious Foundations, and the work was stopped. Nothing was done, however, to protect the ruined basilica, and the last time I saw it the pavement was lost in weeds.

There are some twenty-five other buildings in Stamboul that were originally Byzantine churches. That is, of course, but a small proportion of the multitude that astonished Villehardouin and his men. Covering as they do a period of ten centuries, however, they exhibit most interestingly the gradual development of ecclesiastical architecture from the Roman basilica to the high-domed trefoil church of the fourteenth century. This development is not always easy to follow, as in some cases the churches have been much altered to suit Turkish needs. The orientation of a mosque, for instance, differs from that of a church, since the mihrab must face Mecca, and actual changes of structure have occasionally resulted. Then, of course, all interior decoration too visibly representing Christian symbols or the human form has been destroyed or covered up. And a good deal of exterior brickwork has disappeared under plaster and whitewash. Consequently the prowler in Stamboul is on the look-out, if he have the least tinge of archæology in him, for anything that may hint at a pre-Turkish origin. Not that very much can remain above ground to discover. After so much careful searching it will only be a small built-in structure or fragment that will come to light. But several of the attributions of churches are disputed. Their true names were lost with their original worshippers, and it is a comparatively short time since Christians have been free to circulate at will in the Turkish quarters of Stamboul. And there is reason to hope that under many a piece of baroque stencilling an old mosaic waits to be laid bare.

The art of mosaic existed, of course, long before Constantine. But glass mosaics containing a film of gold were the invention of the later empire, and the Byzantine architects made vast use of them. What a museum of this splendid art Constantinople must once have been we can only guess. Ravenna, however, early became important for the study of mosaics, for in the capital of Justinian many of his masterpieces were destroyed during the iconoclastic controversy. And to-day Salonica, Venice, Sicily, and a few widely scattered monasteries contain the chief remaining specimens. In Constantinople, where palaces, churches, public monuments and private houses without number were tapestried with mosaic, there are in 1914 only four buildings where anything is visible of this lost art. The attendants of St. Sophia used to make quite an income by selling mosaics which they picked out of the walls of the galleries. This infamous commerce has now been checked, but there is no telling what ravages were committed while it flourished. The earthquake of 1894 was also disastrous for the decoration of the mosque, correspondingly enlarging the area of plaster in the nave. The vaulting of the aisles and galleries, however, the soffits of the arcades, and the inner narthex still contain a greater extent of mosaic, and presumably older, than exists elsewhere in the city. The church of St. Irene, long a Turkish armoury and now a military museum, also contains, in the narthex, a little mosaic which may be of Justinian’s time. That of the apse belongs to the restoration of the church during the iconoclastic period. And in a chapel of the eighth-century church of the All-blessed Virgin, now Fetieh Jami, where the figures of Christ and twelve prophets still look down from a golden dome, we have work of a much later period—probably the fourteenth century. But a far finer example of the work of that period is to be seen in Kahrieh Jami, once Our Saviour in the Fields.

Kahrieh Jami, popularly known as the mosaic mosque, is in every way one of the most interesting monuments of Constantinople. Like Imrahor Jamisi it was originally the church of a monastery, and its history goes back as far. Like the Studion, also, it suffered from the quarrels of iconoclasm, it gave hospitality at a historic moment—namely during the last siege—to the miraculous icon of the Shower of the Way, and it fell into Turkish hands during the reign of Baïezid II. Kahrieh Jami means the Mosque of Woe, from the scenes that were enacted there when the Turks stormed the walls. The church seems always to have had a particular connection with Syria. The abbot Theodore, an uncle of Justinian’s empress, came to it from Antioch in 530. Again in the ninth century, when the iconoclasts were finally beaten, the celebrated Syrian monk Michael was made abbot, while pilgrims from Syria always made the monastery their headquarters. The church we know was not the church built outside the walls of Constantine as early, it may be, as the fourth century. The original church was successively rebuilt in the sixth century—by Justinian—in the seventh, in the ninth, and in the eleventh or at the beginning of the twelfth. To this latter restoration by Mary Ducas, a princess with Bulgarian blood in her veins, the church owes its present lines and perhaps a part of its interior decoration.

The last of the Byzantine restorers was a personage who recalls, as he anticipated, the humanists of the Renaissance. His name was Theodore Metochites, and you may see him in a great striped turban kneeling over the royal door of the inner narthex, offering a model of his church to the seated Christ. He was what we call nowadays, though his history has been repeated in every time and country, a self-made man; and like more than one of those who have risen from nothing to the height of power, he outlived his fortune. Born of poor parents in Nicæa, the city of the creed, and early left an orphan, he went as a young man to Constantinople, where he succeeded by his handsome presence and his talent as an orator in attracting the attention of the emperor Andronicus II. He was, however, more than an orator. He aspired to be a poet as well, and some of his not too intelligible verses have been translated into German. In history he took a particular interest. He became the chief astronomer of his time. His favourite pupil in the latter science was Nicephorus Gregoras, a monk of Our Saviour in the Fields, who, three hundred years before Gregory XIII, proposed to rectify the Julian calendar. If Greek priests realised this fact, and how nearly alike were the names of the two churchmen, they might be more willing to adopt a system which was christened after a Pope. It was characteristic of the time that Metochites took as much interest in astrology as he did in astronomy. Philology was another subject that engrossed him. He made six hundred years ago an attempt which is being made in Athens to-day to restore the Romaic Greek language to its Attic purity, for he was a devoted student of Aristotle and particularly of Plato. With all these scholarly tastes, however, he was a man of affairs. By his success as an ambassador and in other public posts, he rose from one responsibility to another till he became Grand Logothetes—or as we might say, prime minister. He was far-sighted enough to see, a hundred and fifty years before the final catastrophe, the imminence of the Turkish peril. Among his writings, too, are some curiously modern reflections on absolute monarchy. Nevertheless he became involved, through his fidelity to his imperial master, in the long quarrel between Andronicus II and his grandson Andronicus III. When the latter usurped the throne in 1328 Metochites was stripped of his honours and his wealth, his palace—near that of Blacherne—was razed to the ground, and he was sent into exile. Allowed to return after two years, he retired to his own monastery, where he lived only two years more.

If this great man was unhappy in his death, he was happier than perhaps he knew in the monument that has kept alive the memory of his humanism and of his loyalty. The grace of its proportions, the beauty of its marbles, the delicacy of its sculpture, everything about it sets the church apart as a little masterpiece. Kahrieh Jami is also notable for the faded frescoes in its side chapel, where a portrait of Andronicus II looks ghostlike out of a niche, for in no other Constantinople church does there remain any visible trace of painting—or any such tomb as the one, in the same chapel, of the Grand Constable Michael Tornikes, with a long Greek epitaph. What completes, however, this picture of the last days of Byzantium, what gives Kahrieh Jami its unique interest, are its mosaics. In the nave they are still hidden, waiting as if for the day of release from a strange enchantment. But in the narthexes Mohammedan sensibilities have for once spared two long series of scenes from the life of Christ and the legend of Mary. And they make one ask oneself again why so noble an art is practically lost. For richness of effect no other form of surface ornament can equal it. The modern art of painting is, of course, far more expressive; for that very reason it is less suited to mural decoration. Mosaic can carry farther, and for great spaces or distances it is equally expressive—witness the tragic Christ of Cefalù. Moreover, it has decorative effects of its own which painting never can rival, while its greater brilliancy is better suited to most architectural settings. And it is infinitely more durable. Of the great frescoes of the Renaissance some are already gone, while others crack and darken year by year. The art of Michelangelo and Leonardo will one day be as mythic as that of Zeuxis and Apelles, except for the shadow of it saved by our modern processes of reproduction. But the mosaics of Venice, Ravenna, and Sicily, of Salonica and Constantinople, will last as long as the buildings that contain them.

In this very matter of the relation between fresco and mosaic, Kahrieh Jami happens to play a particular part. The mosaics are disposed with such a mastery of composition, there is so wide a range of colour in them, in life and naturalness and sometimes in choice of subject they differ so greatly from better-known mosaics of an earlier period, that some critics have seen in them a fine Italian hand—and one no less fine than that of Giotto, who painted the Arena chapel in Padua about the time Metochites restored this church. Not that any one has gone so far as to ascribe the Byzantine series to Giotto himself, but that the qualities I have mentioned, together with certain similarities of detail, have been ascribed to the revolutionary influence of the Italian series. It is not yet unanimously decided whether the mosaics all belong to the same period. Perhaps we must wait for the evidence of those still hidden in the nave to know whether any of them belong to the time of Mary Ducas. The Russian archæologist Schmitt, who has written the completest monograph on the subject—and who picked enough plaster away in the nave to assure himself that mosaics were still there—assigns the work to the period of Metochites, but surmises it to have been inspired by some Syrian original of the ninth century. Diehl, the eminent French Byzantinist, sees rather in Kahrieh Jami a last revival of Byzantine art, contemporaneous with but not derived from the early Tuscan school of painting. When these savants expressed their opinions neither of them was aware of an odd little fact quite lately established not by a Byzantinist but by a layman who was looking at some photographs of the mosaics. In the photograph of the central bay of the outer narthex he discovered, above a two-handled jar which a servant carries on his shoulder to the marriage at Cana, a date in Arabic numerals—but real Arabic numerals, not the ones we have made out of them. This date is 6811, which in the Byzantine system of chronography is equivalent to 1303. The find was interesting in itself as being the earliest use yet recorded—if I am not mistaken—of Arabic numerals on a public monument. It has a further interest in pointing to the Syrian affiliations of the monastery and in lending colour, however slight, to Schmitt’s theory with regard to the Syrian origin of certain of the mosaics. But it tends more definitely to prove that the mosaics were executed before Giotto’s frescoes in Padua, which could hardly have been begun and much less completed by 1303.