Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy

Under the Turk in Constantinople: A record of Sir John Finch's Embassy by George Frederick Abbott

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 has 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 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 despatches 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, paraphrased, and printed, no longer arouse 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 convenient 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. 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. 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.

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.