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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 Suleiman 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, in constancy 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 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 the 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 dispatches 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, para-phrased, and printed, no longer arose 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 convinient 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.
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 Honorable 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.
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 Suleiman 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, in constancy 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 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 the 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 dispatches 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, para-phrased, and printed, no longer arose 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 convinient 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.
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 Honorable 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.
| CONTENTS | |
| CHAPTER I | |
| A Diplomat in Spite of Himself | Page 1 |
| CHAPTER II | |
| Sir John’s Programme | 24 |
| CHAPTER III | |
| Life in Constantinople | 33 |
| CHAPTER IV | |
| The men about the Ambassador | 46 |
| CHAPTER V | |
| Strenua Inertia | 68 |
| CHAPTER VI | |
| Sir John goes to Court | 89 |
| CHAPTER VII | |
| The festivities | 105 |
| CHAPTER VIII | |
| Diplomacy - High and Otherwise | 116 |
| CHAPTER IX | |
| The Sublime Threshold | 136 |
| CHAPTER X | |
| Hopes deferred | 147 |
| CHAPTER XI | |
| From Purgatory to Pera | 163 |
| CHAPTER XII | |
| Halcyon days | 178 |
| CHAPTER XIII | |
| The stroll of repentance | 196 |
| CHAPTER XIV | |
| Kara Mustafa and the Aleppo Dollars | 227 |
| CHAPTER XV | |
| Interlude | 246 |
| CHAPTER XVI | |
| The case of Mrs. Pentlow | 266 |
| CHAPTER XVII | |
| The pilot at rest | 278 |
| CHAPTER XVIII | |
| The price of parchment | 290 |
| CHAPTER XIX | |
| Sir John’s “Ticklish condition” | 301 |
| CHAPTER XX | |
| A lull in the storm | 322 |
| CHAPTER XXI | |
| Release | 339 |
| CONCLUSION | 355 |
| APPENDICES | 377 |
| INDEX | 409 |