Constantinople (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Constantinople It has not often happened in history that a city which has been the capital of an empire during more than a thousand years has, within twenty-four hours, become the capital of another, founded and developed by a race having a totally different language, a hostile religion and traditions opposed at every point to those of the vanquished. The change after Mehemet's conquest must have been as prodigious as it was sudden, and, on the whole, what took place is greatly to the credit of the conqueror. From that day to this there has never, I believe, been anything like a persecution of Chris tians or Jews in Constantinople. Taking Stamboul, Pera, and Scutari together, there are probably more Christians in the capital to-day than Mussulmans, a fact which can only be attributed to principles of toleration for which the Turks have not generally received credit. The principal churches were indeed converted into mosques, and the cross was everywhere replaced by the crescent, while the innumerable paint ings and mosaics representing sacred personages, saints, and angels were immediately, and in most cases permanently, hidden from view by a thick coating of whitewash. The rigid simplicity of the Mohammedan faith substituted in their place a few names - Allah, Mohammed, Abu Bekr, Hassan, Hossein, Omar, Osman, and Ali, and every mosque in Stamboul, and perhaps throughout the Mohammedan world, is decorated with those eight names magnificently written in Arabic char acters upon eight shields which are hung around the interior. But the Turk was not destructive. On the contrary, he took the Christian Church as his model for his own place of wor ship, and almost all the Turkish mosques are more or less direct imitations of St. Sophia. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.