LXVIII. CHAP. among themselves by a prior seizure, by personal strength, and by the authority of command. In the space of an hour, the male captives were bound with cords, the females with their veils and girdles. The senators were linked with their slaves; the prelates with the porters of the church; and young men of a plebeian class, with noble maids, whose faces had been invisible to the sun and their nearest kindred. In this common captivity, the ranks of society were confounded; the ties of nature were cut asunder; and the inexorable soldier was careless of the father's groans, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the children. The loudest in their wailings were the nuns, who were torn from the altar with naked bosoms, outstretched hands, and dishevelled hair; and we should piously believe, that few could be tempted to prefer the vigils of the haram to those of the monastery. Of these unfortunate Greeks, of these domestic animals, whose strings were rudely driven through the streets; and as the conquerors were eager to return for more prey, their trembling pace was quickened with menaces and blows. At the same hour, a similar rapine was exercised in all the churches and monasterics, in all the palaces and habitations of the capital; nor could any palace, however sacred or sequestered, protect the persons or the property of the Greeks. Above sixty thousand of this devoted people were transported from the city to the camp and fleet; exchanged or sold according to the caprice or interest of their masters, and dispersed in remote servitude through the provinces of the Ottoman empire. LXVIII. empire. Among these we may notice some re- CHAP. markable characters. The historian Phranza, first chamberlain and principal secretary, was involved with his family in the common lot. After suffering four months the hardships of slavery, he recovered his freedom; in the ensuing winter he ventured to Adrianople, and ransomed his wife from the mir bashi, or master of horse; but his two children, in the flower of youth and beauty, had been seized for the use of Mahomet himself. The daughter of Phranza died in the seraglio, perhaps a virgin; his son, in the fifteenth year of his age, preferred death to infamy, and was stabbed by the hand of the royal lover *. A deed thus inhuman, cannot surely be expiated by the taste and liberality with which he released a Grecian matron and her two daughters, on receiving a Latin ode from Philelphus, who had chosen a wife in that noble family t. The pride or cruelty of Mahomet would have been most sensibly gra tified by the capture of a Roman legate; but the dexterity of Cardinal Isidore eluded the search, and he escaped from Galata in a plebeian habit ‡. The See Phranza, 1. iii. c. 20. 21. His expressions are positive: Ameras suâ manu jugulavit. .. . . volebat enim eo tur piter et nefarie abuti. Me miserum et infelicem. Yet he could only learn from report, the bloody or impure scenes that were acted in the dark recesses of the seraglio. + See Tiraboschi (tom. vi. p. i. p. 290.), and Lancelot (Mem. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, tom. x. p. 718 ). I should be curious to learn how he could praise the public enemy, whom he so often reviles as the most corrupt and inhuman of tyrants. The Commentaries of Pius II. suppose that he craftily placed his cardinal's hat on the head of a corpse, which was cut off and exposed in triumph, while the legate himself was bought СНАР. Amount of the spoil. The chain and entrance of the outward harbour was still occupied by the Italian ships of merchandise and war. They had signalised their valour in the siege; they embraced the moment of retreat, while the Turkish mariners were dissipated in the pillage of the city. When they hoisted sail, the beach was covered with a suppliant and lamentable crowd; but the means of transportation were scanty; the Venetians and Genoese selected their countrymen; and notwithstanding the fairest promises of the Sultan, the inhabitants of Galata evacuated their houses, and embarked with their most precious effects. In the fall and the sack of great cities, an historian is condemned to repeat the tale of uniform calamity; the same effects must be produced by the same passions; and when those passions may be indulged without controul, small, alas! is the difference between civilized and savage man. Amidst the vague exclamations of bigotry and hatred, the Turks are not accused of a wanton or immoderate effusion of Christian blood; but, according to their maxims, (the maxims of antiquity), the lives of the vanquished were forfeited; and the legitimate reward of the conqueror was derived from the ser, vice, the sale, or the ransom, of his captives of both sexest. The wealth of Constantinople had been bought and delivered, as a captive of no value. The great Belgic Chronicle adorns his escape with new adventures, which he suppressed (says Spondanus, A. D. 1453, No. 15.) in his own letters, lest he should lose the merit and reward of suffering for Christ. + Busbequius expatiates with pleasure and applause on the rights of war and the use of slavery among the ancients and the Turks, (de Legat. Turcicâ, epist. iii. p. 161.). LXVIII. been granted by the Sultan to his victorious troops; CHAP. and the rapine of an hour is more productive than the industry of years. But as no regular division was attempted of the spoil, the respective shares were not determined by merit; and the rewards of valour were stolen away by the followers of the camp, who had declined the toil and danger of the battle. The narrative of their depredations could not afford either amusement or instruction; the total amount, in the last poverty of the empire, has been valued at four millions of ducats*; and of this sum a small part was the property of the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, and the merchants of Ancona. Of these foreigners, the stock was improved in quick and perpetual circulation; but the riches of the Greeks were displayed in the idle ostentation of palaces and wardrobes, or deeply buried in treasures of ingots and old coin, lest it should be demanded at their hands for the defence of their country. The profanation and plunder of the monasteries and churches excited the most tragic complaints. The dome of St Sophia itself, the earthly heaven, the second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory of God †, was despoiled of the oblations of ages; and the gold and silver, the *This sum is specified in a marginal note of Leunclavius, (Chalcondyles, 1. viii. p. 211.), but in the distribution to Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Ancona, of 50, 20, 20, and 15,000 ducats, I suspect that a figure has been dropt. Even with the restitution, the foreign property would scarcely exceed onefourth. See the enthusiastic praises and lamentations of Phranza, (1. iii. c. 17.). CHAP. the pearls and jewels, the vases and sacerdotal orLXVIII. naments, were most wickedly converted to the ser vice of mankind. After the divine images had been stripped of all that could be valuable to a profane eye, the canvas, or the wood, was torn, or broken, or burnt, or trod under foot, or applied, in the stables or the kitchen, to the vilest uses. The example of sacrilege was imitated, however, from the Latin conquerors of Constantinople; and the treatment which Chrift, the Virgin, and the saints, had sustained from the guilty Catholic, might be inflicted by the zealous Mussulman on the monuments of idolatry. Perhaps, instead of joining the public clamour, a philosopher will observe, that in the decline of the arts, the workmanship could not be more valuable than the work, and that a fresh supply of visions and miracles would speedily be renewed by the craft of the priest, and the credulity of the people. He will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion; one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared *; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the science and literature of ancient Greece. We may reflect with pleasure, that an inestimable portion of our classic treasures was See Ducas (c. 43.), and an epistle, July 15th, 1453, from Laurus Quirinus to Pope Nicholas V. (Hody de Græcis, p. 192. from a MS. in the Cotton Library). |