They were made not of stone, but of steel. They turned out to be not minarets but the twin support towers, one rising in Europe, the other in Asia, for the first of two suspension bridges that were being built across the Bosporus. An engineer I knew was in charge of the construction. I called him and he asked if I might like to walk across, along a cable than had been put up the day before. It would, he said, be a rather distinguished thing to do, rather Byronic: to be the first person to walk across the Bosporus, from one continent to another.
So, early the next morning, when it was still cool and when the mile-long steel cable was relatively tight and its catenary curve at its shallowest, I went up a rickety elevator to the top of the European tower. Down below me to the right was the long shoreside sprawl of the Dolmabahce Palace, built by the Ottomans in their waning years in the hope that the structure might kindle more faith and optimism in their rule than had the Topkapi Serai, which they would now abandon. It looked magnificent, its pink and yellow colonnades and spires and minarets glowing richly in the sun that was now rising from behind the Asian hills. And even when I was three hundred feet up, and among the mystified crows and seagulls gliding on the thermals, it looked unforgettably lovely, a symbol of something that had once been grand, even if at the time of its building the empire’s once vast powers were crumbling into nothing.
And then, in a moment I prefer not to remember in detail, I stepped out and onto the wires—one pair of thick cables below my feet, two more slender ones to hold onto, safety ropes and snap links securing me. The wires bounced and shimmied ahead of me as I stood on the takeoff platform. It curved dizzyingly down toward the Bosporus, the shipping lanes busy with cargo vessels, and ferries sneaking across their paths, to and from Üsküdar.
I took a step, carefully, my foot slipping on the condensation that had not yet been burned away by the sun. The engineer was behind me, reassuring: “What could go wrong?” he asked. “The safety ropes will hold.” And so off we marched, steadily, then more rapidly, the view unfolding before and behind as we made our way down toward the water, and to a central resting place made of planks that had been wired in place the day before. It took half an hour to get down; and only then could we stop, turn round, and admire a panorama of mosques and minarets and domes and palaces, the whole of what had once been the most awesome and powerful city in the world.
Here, laid out across the horizon, were the three promontories—Üsküdar on the left, the Asian side, and Beyoglü and Old Istanbul, separated by the Golden Horn, both on the European side on the right. The Black Sea was behind me, the Sea of Marmara ahead—and I remember vividly as we were standing there a dark gray Russian destroyer from Odessa passing by below, with sailors on the forepeak gazing up at the uncanny sight of two men suspended in the sky, and shouting to us in Russian exhortations that sounded very much like “Jump!”
The sight that unrolled before me—the domes and minarets of Old Stamboul, the universally recognizable silhouettes of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and the low palace in the green woods of Seraglio Point, the great Topkapi Serai itself—was barely believable, breathtaking in its beauty and a demonstration of such once-formidable power. A diamond between two emeralds, the city had been called. A jewel in the ring of the universal empire.
Gazing into the rising heat of that day, the images beginning to shimmer as the heat radiated up from the water, it was not too difficult to imagine what it must have been like when the Ottomans were in their ascendant days, when that immense tract of land from Budapest to Benghazi to Baghdad and the Caspian was helplessly under their rule and their administration, and the wealth of half the world flowed in and out of the sultans’ dominions, through the gilded portals of Constantinople.
Dreamy, luxurious, abandoned, perfumed; tulips, carpets, marble, fountains; tobacco, coffee, opium, wine; divans, sofas, caftans, turbans; sultans, caliphs, viziers, muftis; idle, vicious, cruel, corrupt—the lexicon of the Ottomans is both very long and very specific. It is one that could apply to no other empire, for there has never been an empire like it. Nor any capital—for Constantinople, eclipsing all others for its jewel-like magnificence, was perhaps the only capital in the world as given up to pleasure as it was to ruling. The city over which I was gazing in rapture from the bridge-to-be that day had truly been, during the five centuries of the Ottoman dynasty, “the city of the world’s desire.”
We had arrived in the late afternoon, speeding into the maelstrom of modern Istanbul on the four-lane toll-road from Bulgaria, coming from a frontier that was still littered with the sagging remains of the old Iron Curtain watchtowers and rusted barbed-wire fences. Turks—even those who live in its European half—still talk of going to Europe, when they mean Bulgaria. The divide between the two neighbor countries is profound—but the more modern and sophisticated of the two is now Turkey, for when you leave the Bulgarian countryside you leave a place of narrow lanes and horse-drawn hay wagons; once into the flat plains of Turkey you emerge onto a four-lane highway with automatic toll-collection booths, and there is an atomic power station beside the road, steaming contentedly and providing all necessary power for the VCRs and cell phone networks of distant Istanbul.
The western sprawls of Istanbul, which we reached in little more than an hour, were vast, grubby, and vile. The pollution is dreadful, the noise terrific, the traffic as bad as in Bangkok, the dust as bad as in Cairo. But then we spotted a magical sign from the highway, TOPKAPI! as casually as if it had said PARADISE!, and we dropped off the road anyway, and into the anarchic Babel of the town, to spend the rest of the day exploring the nooks and crannies of this extraordinary palace—the storm center, some might say, of all that has happened in the Balkans for the last five hundred years.
Not all would agree with the phrase, of course—certainly not the sultan-caliphs themselves. They had a decided view on their vast empire, a self-satisfied assumption that what they had wrought was martial, tolerant, and civilized, and by and large and most happily Islamic. Those privileged—nay verily, blessed—to be living within its laager inhabited the Dar ul-Islam, the Abode of Peace; those beyond it suffered from having to inhabit the Dar ul-Harb, the Abode of War. The distortions of an imperial view are many, and are by no means the monopoly of the Ottomans—the British, the French, the Dutch even, all fancied their subjects to live in conditions of unalloyed bliss. But the Ottomans, they had a certain additional and manic detachment from reality: a detachment born in no small measure from their sultans’ grand isolation in the vastness and comfort of Topkapi—a palace now viewable every day but Tuesdays on payment of five dollars, and two extra for the harem.
Thirty-one sultans ruled from Constantinople—the grandest of all being Süleyman I the Magnificent, who summarized his lofty position somewhat less than modestly as: “I who am Sultan of Sultans, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, the Distributor of Crowns to the Monarchs of the Globe, the Shadow of God upon the Earth, the Sultan and Padishah of the White Sea, the Black Sea, Rumelia, Anatolia, Karamania, Rum, Dulkadir, Diyarbekir, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Mekka, Medina, all Arabia, Yemen and those other countries which my noble ancestors—may God brighten their tombs!—conquered and my august majesty has likewise conquered with my flaming sword, Sultan Süleyman Khan, son of Sultan Selim, son of Sultan Bayezid.” Court poets at Topkapi referred to the sultan as “the World Emperor and Messiah of the Last Age.”
In their jeweled jungle of a palace the Ottoman sultans ruled from a position of absolute authority, a court arranged according to bewildering ziggurats of rank and with equally bewildering degrees of deference, all courtiers hemmed in by a system of unyielding and inflexible protocol—and in almost total silence. Officially the languages of the court were high-sounding Ottoman Turkish and, once so much of southern Europe had been bent to the Ottoman will, Serbo-Croat. But Süleyman the Magnificent cared little for talk, and decreed instead the use of a language of signs and signals, to be known as ixarette: It was taught t
o the court by mutes.
In many ways Topkapi is similar, in scale and complexity and secrecy, to the Forbidden City of Peking—though an atmosphere of luxury and fragrance still pervades these Ottoman structures, in sharp contrast to the air of intrigue and cruel decadence that hangs about the former court of China. There are in Istanbul, on the bluff overlooking the Bosporus, a cascading series of three courts, with hundreds of windows from which, it was said, the eyes of the empire would gaze out over all the citizenry and the subject peoples.
A visitor can stroll through all three courts today at will—although only the act of strolling through the sprawling garden of the outer court, the Court of the Janissaries, where there was a mint, a huge set of stables, and a kiosk where petitions might be presented, faithfully recreates the court as it always was—for anyone always could walk through the Court of Janissaries, even if one was foreign or a tourist. In those days one was halted only at the entrance to the second court—by janissary guards, or halberdiers—who would permit only the privileged or the cursed to pass beyond, and into the inner heart of the palace. (Much the same is true today: those who halt outsiders now do merely to take their tickets, obtained from a guichet beside the seraglio post office.)
The entrance into the second court was by way of the Gate of Salutation, through which only the sultan could ride a horse, and only a chosen few could follow on foot. The kitchens were here—they could prepare food for twelve thousand diners at once—as were the entrances into the harem, with its hundreds of fresh-plucked and well-schooled odalisques,* and the sultan’s private quarters. The grand vizier had his office here as well,† and such petitioners as might have been allowed through by kindly or corrupt palace guards might present their papers here, and thus assure even more direct access to those with the power to help. When we arrived the court was filled with men erecting bleachers and putting up klieg lights: Each summer there is a performance of the Mozart opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, staged in front of the very gate, beside the very harem, from which the abduction supposedly took place.
This gate, which leads into the sanctum sanctorum of the third court, was long known as the Bab-I-Aali, the High Gate. Now it is called, rather more prettily, Babi-Sa’adet, the Gate of Felicity. Beyond, guarded with sedulous care by the wily and protective eunuchs, black or white, are the private rooms—the audience chamber with the divan and the sofa at which foreign ambassadors might kneel and where the dragoman might drone, and the treasury, the harem mosque, and the sultans’ private libraries.
Here the occasional diplomats—who usually took the trouble to learn Turkish, though some sultans made an equal effort to learn French—came to kneel at the feet of the man who, throughout all Europe, was known by the initials as the one and only GS—the grand signor. They knelt, they said little, they then removed themselves by walking backwards—and if they had been fortunate they might have heard, or later claim to have heard, a single grunt of approval from the alcove in which the signor sat, silent and unmoving, but always listening, and all-powerful. “There is not one single thing,” Rose declared late in the day, after we had wearied ourselves by wandering, entranced, from one hall to another, gazing at a thousand display cases, “that is not absolutely beautiful.”
Everything is still preserved and guarded today—little has been plundered, so powerful were the Ottomans against all comers who might take from them. In one hall, where there is a cloak from the Prophet Muhammad, and a piece of the sacred black stone from the Kaaba in Mecca, we found an imam in a small glass cage. He was reading in sonorous tones, and unremittingly, from an ancient copy of the Koran. He was there, a palace official explained, to remind all visitors that this was a holy place as well, and not just a serai devoted to centuries of silent administration and bacchanalian abandon. The sultan, it must be recalled, was the Ottoman caliph too—he was the religious as well as the civil ruler, a man not only bound up in the business of war and conquest and the issuance of firmans and the acceptance of pleas but an interpreter of the words of the Prophet, and as a figure who might set an example to the faithful and the pious.
And then, finally, we came out onto the terrace overlooking the Bosporus, beside the privy gardens and above the Seraglio lighthouse, before which southbound Bosporus ships turn either left, to dock in the Golden Horn by the Galata Bridge, or right, to go through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles past Gallipoli, and through to the Mediterranean. We stood in rapture in the late afternoon breeze, watching as the sun began to slide down, turning the Gulf of Marmara into a vast field of liquid gold, through which the ferries slid, in slow and measured curves, like the fins of distant carp.
And then the cell phone rang. Some weeks before, while I was in Vienna, I had given the number to a scholar named Erwin Lucius, the head of the Austrian Cultural Center in Istanbul. Since I had seen what influence the Ottoman Turks had had on Viennese life—a cannonball in the cathedral tower, a taste for coffee, the croissant, and the infrequent possibility of viewing the preserved head of a long-dead grand vizier—I wondered if the Hapsburgs had had any lasting influence at all on the lives of the Turks of Constantinople. I imagined that Dr. Lucius would know.
He was calling to say he would be happy to see us the following morning, if that was convenient. It was, and I blessed the efficiency of the loaf-haired secretary back in Austria, who had remembered the date of our arrival here rather more accurately than I had. And so Rose and I left for a taxi back across the Golden Horn and to the Pera Palas Hotel—where we discovered two things: that the hotel was much costlier and considerably seedier than when I had been there twenty years before; and the famous elevator, the first ever made, was now not working. But that night there was a dance of Turkish schoolchildren in the main dining room, and had it been working they would no doubt be playing around in its cage of fretted ironwork and keeping the guests—including the two of us, weary now that we were so close to journey’s end—from sleeping.
On the way home, as we walked back through the squares and gardens and mosques and museums and the Hippodrome of Sultanahmet, I stopped before one place of pilgrimage—a high marble gate that was topped with a curving fan-shaped porte cochère. It was an undistinguished-looking gate now, merely an entranceway to some obscure departments of the Istanbul city government, a place where trams would stop, and where policemen would lounge and smoke their richly aromatic cigarettes.
But until 1923, when the last sultan abdicated, left by the Orient Express, and went to live and die in Switzerland (and be buried in Damascus), this was the gate that had taken over the name Bab-I-Aali, the High Gate, from the one that separated the first from the second court of Topkapi. This was the gate that led into the main offices of the Ottoman grand vizier—the gate through which passed all the official administrative business of the empire. For three centuries this gate was known to all by the name that came to stand for the entirety and grandeur of the Ottoman Empire itself—the Sublime Porte. Whatever business was done by the king or doge or mameluke or czar or Hapsburg emperor and even, in later years, by the American president, was conducted with the Porte. That was all that needed to be said. The Porte was the Empire, as one might later say the White House was the United States, the Elysée France, or, more prosaically, that Downing Street was Great Britain.
And a prosaic comparison is perhaps not inappropriate. For no one who passes sees this gateway now as anything much more than an entrance to a series of buildings where a citizen of Istanbul might get his driving license or his library card. As the greatest indignity of all, these days it has a blue-and-white enamel plate attached to it, bearing a number. It has and is, of all things, an address: The Sublime Porte is now 15, Alemdar Caddesi, Istanbul. The mighty here have fallen quickly, and they have fallen far.
Once the tide of empire had visibly begun to ebb—once the siege of Vienna had been overwhelmed, and the Ottomans started to be chased back to their lairs—so the Austrians themselves began to cast a covetous eye on the
possibility of spoils. Within three years of the failure of the siege, the Austrians had taken Budapest (or Buda as it was then) and two years later, Belgrade (though in a sick convulsion the Ottomans recovered it half a century later). Back in Constantinople people began to fear that a Christian army would suddenly appear at the gates. House prices fell. There was a mass migration across the Bosporus to Asia. There were veiled mutterings against the indifference and pomposity of the sultan and his court, the luxury and abandon, the absurdities of his ram fights and of camel wrestling, and of the cruel caprices of the courtiers’ whims.
At its zenith the empire was truly vast—Morocco to Mesopotamia, Poland to Yemen—and when it began to totter, Russia and Austria discussed dividing it between them. In Moscow, especially, there was a move to reestablish Byzantium in Constantinople, and with a Russian prince to rule as emperor. In 1908 the Austrians formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, still then technically Ottoman territory. The whole of the tottering Empire was then available for plunder, and the Austrians above all wanted to have the larger share for themselves. But it was not to be: Their own follies saw to it that it was the Russians who gained the ascendancy, and took the greater part of the Ottomans’ northern dominions. Vienna was left with almost nothing.
The Russians were eventually to turn the Black Sea from a Turkish lake into a Russian, to possess the old Ottoman lands from the Crimea to the Caucasus. The Hapsburgs were on the other hand fated to retreat themselves, to withdraw from the northern Balkans just as fast as the Ottomans were withdrawing from the southern. And today, after all of that defeat and humiliation and withdrawal, all that the Austrians have left is Austria—and in the Istanbul that had caused them so much vexation and anxiety, one impressive yali, a mighty waterfront house beside the Bosporus.