About this time the Levant Company suffered somewhat from the conflicting state of parties in England. Sir S. Crowe was appointed in 1642 as ambassador of the Levant Company; he was a staunch loyalist, and, during his tenure of office abroad, his goods in England were confiscated by the Parliamentarians. On hearing this, Sir S. Crowe imprisoned many of the English factors in Constantinople, and appropriated their goods. The Parliamentarians forthwith obliged the Company to send out another representative, Sir J. Bendish, who, after some difficulty, succeeded in establishing himself as the ambassador of England, and Sir S. Crowe was sent home. On arriving in London, he was impeached at the suit of the Company, condemned, and kept in prison till 1653.

The regulations of the Company with regard to their employés were very strict in those days; none of the consuls under their authority might marry without the consent of the directors, and the factors or merchants at Constantinople and elsewhere in the Levant frequently received admonitions from the governing body at home against “sensuality, gambling, Sabbath-breaking, neglect of public worship”, and other irregularities of life in which the merchants, far from the influence of their strait-laced relatives at home, were prone to indulge.

In 1661 the Earl of Winchilsea went out on The Plymouth as ambassador for the Company. Captain Hayward was in command of the vessel, with whom Pepys (p. 50) made merry at the Rhenish Wine House. Lord Winchilsea is described as “a jovial Lord, extremely favoured by Vizier Kiuprili”. Two Kiuprilis, father and son, were practically the rulers of Turkey from 1658 to the death of the latter in 1676. Both the Kiuprilis were men of exceedingly good powers of organisation, and raised Turkey to comparative power, despite the weakness of her princes. The Sultan Mahomed IV, about whom Dr. Covel in his MS. tells us so much, was a man of weak character, devoted only to the chase, and left the organisation of the empire to his Vizier. From him Lord Winchilsea obtained further capitulations, an account of which is given us by his secretary, Paul Ricaut, in a pamphlet entitled The Capitulations and Articles published by Paul Ricaut, Esquire, Secretary to his Excellencie the Lord Ambassador, in 1663, and addressed to the Governors of the Levant Company. In this pamphlet he says: “The first capitulations took place 80 years before, in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and have been enlarged in the time of allmost every ambassador, with such alterations as the state of affaires, and the abuses, and the iniquities of the times suggested.” The principal grievance which this set of capitulations rectified was “that English ships should be exempt from search for foreign goods”. Mahomed IV, in his address to Charles II, on the occasion of the granting of these capitulations, speaks in high-flown language of “the Queen of the aforesaid Kingdom” who commenced the Levant trade.

A curious and ludicrous instance of the fanaticism of the times occurred in 1661. An individual called “John the Quaker” arrived at Constantinople, and began to preach at the street corners repentance to the Turks in his own native tongue. Naturally enough, the Mohammedans looked upon him as a lunatic, and consigned him to a mad-house, where he languished for eight months, until his nationality was discovered, and he was taken before Lord Winchilsea. On entering the ambassador’s presence, true to the regulations of his creed, John refused to remove his hat, whereupon he was bastinadoed; and, on his clothes being examined, a letter was discovered in his pocket addressed to the Sultan, politely telling that monarch that he was the scourge employed by God to punish wicked Christians.

There was a distinct revival at this juncture in the condition of the power of the Ottoman Turks at Constantinople; under the severe rule of the elder Kiuprili, and the firm but temperate jurisdiction of his son Ahmed, both internal and external affairs prospered favourably. Ahmed Kiuprili conducted the wars with Austria with a fair amount of success. He won Crete for the Turks, in 1669, from the Venetian general Morosini; the wars with Sobieski, under his guidance, were, with certain fluctuations, favourable to the Turks. He, in 1675, instituted the levy of 3,000 boys from the Christian population to fill the ranks of the Janissaries; and three days after the peace of Zuranna, by which the Turks regained much of their lost military prestige, he died, very shortly after the events related in such minute detail by Dr. Covel in our second manuscript, and very shortly after the ratification of further capitulations with the Levant Company at Adrianople; the incidents concerning the obtaining of which Dr. Covel relates so graphically.

§ 4.—Of Dr. John Covel.

The writer of the second MS. we have before us is mentioned by Evelyn in his Diary (ii, 338) as “Covel, the great Oriental traveller”. Evidently he intended either to publish a work himself, or that his diary should be published shortly after his death, for he divided part of his MS. into chapters, put in illustrations, and collected together everything connected with himself, every scrap of letter and paper that would be of use, even down to his testamur when he took his B.A. in 1657; but this mass of MS. has remained hidden in the British Museum, and has never yet seen the light of day. It is easy to see why any publisher would recoil from bringing out so prolix a work, for the Doctor is wearisome in the extreme. Before we leave Deal, in his first chapter, at the outset of his travels, we are treated to at least thirty closely-written pages on the wonders of the deep, which he picked up there; soon follows a long dissertation on sea-sickness, and its supposed causes; and whenever he came near any place of archæological interest, such as Carthage, Ephesus, Constantinople, etc., he gives us enough information to fill a good-sized volume on each spot. Consequently, it has been found necessary to eliminate much in Dr. Covel’s exceedingly bulky diaries.

His narrative is, however, extremely interesting on many points: during the six-and-a-half years he resided at Constantinople, from 1670 to 1677, he noticed everything; his sketches of life, costumes, and manners are minute and life-like. Sir George Wheeler says, in his volume of travels: “Dr. Covel, then chaplain to his Majesty’s ambassador there, amongst many curiosities shewed us some Turkish songs set to musick; which he told us were, both for sense and music, very good: but past our understanding.” Being, as he was, intimately connected with the embassy, he had ample opportunity for studying the politics of the time. Dr. Covel was present at the granting of the capitulations of 1676, which gained for the Levant Company privileges which established it, for the ensuing century and a half of its existence, on an unapproachable foundation.

John Covel was born at Horningsheath, in Suffolk, in 1638, and educated at Bury St. Edmunds and Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the hall of which his portrait, by Valentine Ritz, is still to be seen. He studied medicine in early life with a view to being a physician, which will account for his intimate knowledge of botany and drugs; but eventually, being elected to a Fellowship at his College, he changed his line in life and took Holy Orders.

Covel was distinguished for his erudition, and was a scholar of no mean repute, as his MS. shows; and on the Restoration, in 1661, he was deputed to make a Latin oration in the hall of Christ’s College, to celebrate the return of the Stuart family to the throne of England. He composed a long poem also to celebrate this event, a few stanzas of which I give here:

In 1669 Covel was appointed as chaplain to the ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Daniel Harvey, by the Levant Company, and Charles II gave him a dispensation to go to Constantinople and hold his Fellowship at the same time: it runs as follows:

During his residence at Constantinople he witnessed many important sights, notably the great fêtes at Adrianople in honour of the circumcision of Prince Mustapha, and the marriage of the Sultan’s daughter, which were the most noted fêtes of the century in Turkey,[3] and also the granting of the capitulations during the time of the plague. The next nine years of Covel’s life were spent in travel. In 1679 he returned to England, and immediately afterwards took his D.D., and was chosen as Margaret preacher of Divinity at Cambridge. In 1681 he got one of his college livings of Kegworth, and was soon afterwards appointed as chaplain to the Princess of Orange, and resided at the Hague. In October 1685 the Prince of Orange intercepted a letter written by Dr. Covel to Skelton, the English ambassador, giving an account of Prince William’s tyrannical behaviour to his wife. Dr. Covel was forthwith dispatched home again in great disgrace; he never spoke of what had transpired, and it was long a mystery. There is, however, a letter to Princess Mary amongst his papers, in which he speaks of the scurrilous reports which alleged that he tried to make mischief between the King and the Prince, and between the Prince and your Royal Highness, and concludes, “in the words of the Royal Martyr, your most glorious grandfather, that as He hath given us afflictions to try our patience, so He would give us Patience to bear our afflictions.”

Dr. Covel was twice Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the first time in 1689, when King William visited the University, and his letters show a considerable degree of anxiety as to how the King, whom he had maligned as Prince, would receive him. In reply to these anxieties, King William sent a curt answer, stating “that he could distinguish between Dr. Covel and the Vice-Chancellor of the University”.

Dr. Covel was not fortunate with his voluminous writings; he got into another scrape with the Court in a book entitled The Interpreter of Words and Terms; it was ordered to be destroyed, being, as it was supposed, “in some points very derogatory to the supreme power of this Crown”. He also wrote on gardening and fruit-trees; but his magnum opus was a work on the Greek Church, which he published shortly before his death, which remained for long the standard work on the subject. It is entitled: Some Account of the present Greek Church, with Reflections on their present Doctrine and Discipline, particularly on the Eucharist and the rest of their seven Pretended Sacraments. In his Preface he apologises for the long delay, owing to his “itinerant life”, and having been “chained to a perpetual college bursar’s place”. It is evident from his diary that, when at Constantinople, Dr. Covel gave himself up to this study very closely, in fact, he was deputed to do so, for the controversy was then at its height which was started by M. Arnold, Doctor of the Sorbonne, as to whether the Greeks held the doctrine of transubstantiation or not, and a union between the Eastern and Western Churches was much feared by the Protestants. The eccentric Marquis de Nointel, who was the French ambassador to the Porte at that time, was most eager to bring this about, and as he was on very friendly terms with Sir John Finch, it was suspected that he used his influence to win over the English ambassador; hence Dr. Covel had an important task to perform, and no wonder he writes so bitterly on the ignorance and corruption of the Greek clergy. To show his zeal, the Marquis de Nointel celebrated Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, 1673, in the cave of Antiparos, with a broken-off stalactite as his communion-table, on which may still be read the words he carved:—

“Hic ipse Christus adfuit
Ejus natali die mediâ nocte celebrato
MDCLXXIII.”

The ambassador was accompanied by five hundred people—his domestics, merchants, Greeks, and Turks—and he was so impressed by it, that he repeated the experiment on two subsequent occasions. The proposed union of the Churches, however, never came to anything, and by the time Dr. Covel’s book came out the controversy was at an end and forgotten.

Dr. Covel was appointed Master of Christ’s College in 1688, and retained this position until his death in 1722, at the ripe age of eighty-four.

The good work that Sir John Finch did for the Company in getting the capitulation of 1676, as Dr. Covel relates, in the teeth of the plague at Adrianople, did much for the security of trading and property in the Levant. Attached to these capitulations is the following clause: “That two ships’ loads of figs and currants should be allowed to be annually exported from Smyrna for the use of the King’s kitchen.” Sir John Finch was the son of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and was brought up as a physician, together with his bosom companion Thomas Baines; they studied together in England, and in Padua, and when Sir John was appointed as Minister to Tuscany, he got Charles II to attach his friend as physician to the legation, and also to bestow on him the honour of knighthood. When Sir John Finch was moved to Constantinople Sir Thomas Baines accompanied him in the same capacity; they were together with Covel during the trying time of the plague at Adrianople, and frequent allusion is made to them both in the diary. They were known in Constantinople as the ambassador and the chevalier, the two inseparable friends, whose attachment to one another was as romantic as that of Damon and Pythias. Sir Thomas Baines died in Constantinople in 1680, and, in great grief, his friend had his body embalmed and sent home to be buried in Christ’s College. Two years later, immediately on his return to England, Sir John Finch himself died, and, by special request, was buried in the same tomb as his friend, with the same marble slab over them, on which Henry More wrote a touching epitaph. Jointly, they endowed two scholarships and two fellowships for Christ’s College, and are still jointly thanked as benefactors of that very College over which their friend and companion in adversity, Dr. Covel, ruled for forty years after their deaths.

§ 5.—Of the subsequent History of the Levant Company.

From the life of Dudley North, afterwards Sir Dudley, son of Lord North, and ambassador for the Company to the Porte, which life was written by his son, we get an interesting insight into the life and times of those Merchant Adventurers in the seventeenth century, who were undoubtedly the founders of our national fortunes and national pre-eminence.

Dudley North was born in 1641, and went out to Smyrna as supercargo, and was apprenticed to a Turkey merchant when eighteen years of age, with a capital of £400. For many years he lived a most frugal life, making himself master of the Turkish language, and keeping himself aloof from the extravagant and luxurious lives which the English merchants in the Smyrniote factories lived in those days. When they “procured a pack of hounds, and hunted in the country, after the English way”, young North resisted the temptation to buy a horse, and went out hunting on an ass. He was a young man sure of eventual success. On his subsequent removal to Constantinople, and employment in the factory of Messrs. Hedges and Palmer, he lived in the building itself, and looked after the bookkeeping, and gained his first credit by getting in the outstanding debts of the firm. He made himself master of the “rules of Turkish justice”, and at once set about to institute five hundred claims in the law courts. These claims he conducted himself in the Turkish Courts in the Turkish language, and won a great many of those which his employers had hitherto looked upon as hopeless.

He soon set up business on his own account, and as it rapidly increased, he sent for his brother Montagu, from Aleppo, and together the brothers built up for themselves the fabric of a colossal fortune.

The brothers North appear to have dealt largely in jewels, with which they tempted the women of the Seraglio, and to have lent money at from 20 to 30 per cent. to impecunious Pashas. Dudley North became treasurer of the Levant Company in Constantinople, did excellent work in the survey of the city, and eventually concluded his successful career by being appointed ambassador for the Company to the Porte. He was a man of strong business capacity, and “his first care”, says his son, “on setting up for himself, was to get a fire-tight room to secure his goods from fire, and a sofa-room in which to entertain the Turks.”

About this time we hear ever more and more, in the Levant Company’s dealings with the Turks, of the avanias, or unauthorised demands made by the Turks on foreign merchants. Sir Dudley North at once took up this question, and wrote himself an interesting account of these encroachments on the capitulations granted to the Turkey merchants. The avanias had their origin in small matters of etiquette; gradually they spread to commerce and merchandise, and in 1685 came the great edict, which obliged every foreigner who had married a Turkish subject, himself to become a subject of the Porte, and these men were forbidden to leave the country without the Sultan’s consent.

This edict has given rise to the still numerous Levantine families to be found in the Turkish Empire, families bearing English, French, and Italian names, and tracing their origin to those nations, but practically absorbed in the Ottoman Empire. It was a great blow to many artisans and merchants who had married and settled in the Levant. No less than forty French watchmakers, who had married Greek wives and settled in Galata, were obliged to become Turkish subjects in spite of the remonstrances of the French ambassador, and the case of Mr. Pentloe settled the question with regard to the English. He had married a Greek lady, and on his death left a will appointing two English merchants as his executors, obliging them to realise his property, and send his widow and her two children to England. Accordingly, the executors proceeded to carry out his wishes, but the Turkish Government seized Mrs. Pentloe and her children on embarkation, and threw the two executors into prison, from which they did not emerge for some considerable period; all Mr. Pentloe’s money was confiscated, and our ambassador could get no redress. This iniquitous avania was not repealed for a hundred years afterwards, and may be taken as the origin of most of the so-called Levantine families, great numbers of which are to be found in Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonika, and other trade centres in the Turkish Empire.

The progress of the Levant Company was steady, and prosperity attended their commerce. Notwithstanding, in 1681 we find the Turkey merchants petitioning Parliament against the East India Company, and begging for permission to have “exercise of trade in the Red Sea, and all other dominions of the Grand Signior, and to forbid the East India Company to import raw or wrought silks”; and further stating that as their freights were “raw silks, gaules, grograms, yarn, cotton, etc., and as they, not being a joint-stock Company, did not export much gold”, that the East India Company ought to be restricted from importing such things as they considered they only had the monopoly of. To this petition the East India Company drew up an exhaustive reply, and Parliament set the petition on one side.

For the first three decades of the last century the prosperity of the Levant Company may be said to have been at its height. In the years 1716 and 1717 they exported to Turkey “43,000 cloths, and a very great quantity of lead, tin, sugar, etc.” In 1718, for the greater protection of merchants, “general ships”, which sailed together in large squadrons, were appointed, and the manufacturers had nothing to do but to convey their goods to the wharves, consign them to the shipowners, and pay the freight. These general ships, as they were called, used to leave England about July 1st, so as to have good weather in the open seas, and reach Turkey about the right time for the winter markets; then they returned home with raw silks, mohair, and other products of the East.

For some cause or another, in 1753 the condition of the Levant Company was not so satisfactory. In this year they sent a petition to Parliament for the remodelling of their charter on more favourable conditions. In this petition they stated that a quarrel between Sir Kenelm Digby and the Venetian admiral in the Bay of Scanderoon had cost the Company £20,000; that the indiscretion of a young man at Aleppo had imperilled the lives of all Europeans, and incurred enormous losses on the Company; that they had to pay an indemnity of £12,000 for prisoners taken in war, and other similar misfortunes had fallen upon them. Consequently, Parliament thought fit to grant them their petition: they were to have unmolested choice of the ministers maintained by them at home and abroad, ambassadors, governors, deputies, consuls, etc.; nobody except free brothers of the corporation could send ships into those parts, and very stringent rules were made on this point, full powers being given to the Company to fine, imprison, and send home in custody any individuals who infringed this rule; they were allowed to make their own laws and by-laws, though these had to receive the sanction of the Board of Trade; and, with various little assistances from Government in minor points, the Company of Levant Merchants again became exceedingly flourishing, and continued to be so until the end of its days.

At the end of the last century it would appear that the Company consisted of eight hundred members, each and all calling themselves “Turkey Merchants”. The wages of their officials, that is to say, the ambassador, secretaries, chaplains, consuls, and physicians at Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Alexandria, Algiers, Patras, etc., came to £15,000 per annum. Many of our consulates in the East, as they now stand, were built by them, and the fine embassy at Constantinople cost the Company £10,000. The Porte gave the ground for this building out of gratitude to England for driving the French out of Egypt, and the opening of it was hallowed by the liberation of many Christian slaves, mostly Maltese, who came in a body to the ambassador to tender their heartfelt thanks.[4]

In 1803 it was that the British Government first assumed the appointment and payment of the ambassador and his secretaries; this was the first step towards the disestablishment of the Company. The Eastern Question was then beginning to make itself felt, the Balkan States were in arms against Turkey, and, the interests of trade being naturally subordinate to foreign policy, the Levant Company had to give way.

In 1825, when the disintegration of the Turkish Empire appeared imminent, the Levant Company came to an end. Mr. Canning’s communication to them ran as follows: “It results solely from considerations of public expediency, and in no degree from any disrespect, or disposition to impute any blame to their past administration.” The fact was obvious: the new order of things had to supersede the old; the political atmosphere was full of ideas of free trade; and the aristocratic, exclusive Company of Turkey Merchants had to give way, and they did so gracefully. The deed of surrender was drawn up in 1825, “of all the several grants, privileges, liberties, powers, jurisdictions, and immunities granted and conferred by their charters”; and in solemn conclave the Company of merchants dissolved themselves, after honourably providing pensions for their officials, and handing over a substantial balance to the treasury.

During its life of 244 years the Levant Company had had a most exemplary and noble career, beneficial not only to its members, but to the English nation, building up for her her commerce, and making her name respected in the East. It would take a volume to enumerate the deeds of their great men, and how they have not only contributed to our commercial success, but have embellished our literature with admirable studies both of the past and of the present. Sir Paul Ricaut and Sir James Porter wrote admirable works on the policy and government of the Turkish people. Montague, Covel, and Pococke gave some of the earliest accounts of the people of the East in our tongue.

Under the influence of the Company, considerable attention was paid to archæology: Spon and Wheeler, Chishull, Shaw, and last, but not least, Lord Elgin, who rescued the marbles of the Parthenon from being damaged in the bombardment of 1827. The Company’s doctors used to make a special study of the plague. Russell on the Plague was quite the standard work of its time, and Dr. Maclean also made a special study of that dread disease; and to the efforts of these men we may almost say that we owe the gradual diminution and eventual eradication of the malady.

The rescuing of slaves from corsairs, the liberation of oppressed Christians, whether they happened to be English, Greeks, or Armenians, will be for ever one of the noblest and proudest of our actions. Without the influence of the Levant Company, Greece would probably have never succeeded in establishing her independence, and the Mussulmans would have effectually eradicated the Christian populations of the East; and it is a question for grave thought, as to whether our free and enlightened Government, during the half-century that it has had control over our actions in the East, has been as active and as influential as the Company of Turkey Merchants, who could draw the sword as well as the purse-strings, and were not hampered by the parsimonious feelings of those who have to draw up an economical budget to present to the people whose goodwill they wish to retain.

LIST OF ENGLISH AMBASSADORS TO THE PORTE
IN THE 16th AND 17th CENTURIES.

ADDENDA ET CORRIGENDA.

PART I.
MASTER THOMAS DALLAM’S DIARY.

1599.

In this Book is the Account of an Organ Carryed to the Grand Seignor and Other Curious Matter.

Nessecaries for my voyege into Turkie, the which I bought upon a verrie short warninge, havinge no frend to advise me in any thinge.

From the Landes end of England to the straites mouthe is 4 hundrethe leagues.

Betwixte the straites mouthe and Argeare in Barbarria is one hundrethe and fiftie leages.

From Argeare to Cisillia is 2 hundrethe leages.

From Cesillia to Zante is 90 leages.

From Zante to Scandaroune is 2 hundrethe and fiftie Leages.