The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage Read Online Free PDF Page B

magnificently sited, or greets the sea voyager with such a mighty sense of consequence – not even Manhattan, when its tight-packed silhouette greets you through the Narrows, or London when you first see the towers of Westminster grave and heavy beyond its bridges. Constantinople was built on a high narrow peninsula, the Marmara on one side, the deeper-water inlet called the Golden Horn on the other, commanding the narrow strait of the Bosphorus as it runs away between hills towards the Black Sea. It is so tremendous a site, on the very frontier between Europe and Asia, where the warm seas meet the cold, that the ancient settlement of Chalcedon, on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, was said to have been called the City of the Blind because its founders must have been myopic to have settled so crassly in the wrong place.
    Constantinople is called Istanbul now, and one’s first distant sight of it is misleading. It looks like simply another fold in the hills, unimpressive beside the white-capped mountains of Anatolia over the water to the east. But as the ship draws closer an indefinable sense of excitement grows. The passing water-trafficthickens, the pace quickens, and all of a sudden the peninsula is clarified, and you realize that it is not simply a protrusion of the landscape, but a solid mass of city. Nowadays its skyline is dominated by the domes and pinnacles of its mosques, one after the other along the ridge – a stupendous encrustation up there, huge hulks of buildings, dish-domed and buttressed all around, and transmitting like so many beams into the sky their fragile minarets. Below them the city spills away down the hillsides in a messy confusion, patternless, greyish, until at the water’s edge it is bounded by the crumbled remains of a city wall, battlemented still. At the tip of the peninsula are the towers and gardens of a great palace: and as your ship steers beneath its walls, past the little castle which, standing on its island off-shore, looks like a toll-house for the passing vessels, abruptly to your left the Golden Horn runs away on the other side of the promontory, seven miles long, cast in shadow, spanned by two busy bridges and full of ships.
    Everywhere is full of ships. ‘You are accustomed to the Gondolas that slide among the palaces of St Mark,’ wrote Alexander Kinglake in the 1840s, ‘but here at Stamboul it is a hundred and twenty-gun ship that meets you in the street… the stormy bride of the Doge is the bowing slave of the Sultan.’ It is true still. Ferry-boats push and manoeuvre crazily all about you, blowing their sirens, threshing their propellers, perilously keeling to their moorings as their passengers rush to the quayside rail. Caiques come chugging down the Horn, their masts laid flat for the passage of the bridges. A string of big liners is always moored along the waterfront, and perpetually off the city, never absent, never stopped, the deep-sea freighters pass up and down the Bosphorus. A constant rumble hangs on the air, as your own ship ties up, and wherever you look around you, pouring over the bridges and fly-overs, thronging the docksides, clambering up the steep sides of the peninsula, flooding down the cobbled streets on the other side of the Golden Horn – wherever you look the Turks are on the move, tireless, numberless and grey.
    As you step ashore into the tumult of it all (fragrance of frying fish from the floating restaurants by the Galata Bridge, tinkle of brass bell from the water-seller outside the Egyptian Bazaar,swoop of dingy pigeons around the mosque of Yeni Cami) – as you edge your way into the crowd you know at once that you are entering a great presence, which displays even in its modern impotence the stance of old majesty.
    If sailing to Byzantium feels like this today, imagine the sensations of the Crusaders as they sailed out of the Marmara on 24 June 1203, their purpose now revealed to them all! Istanbul is not even the capital of Turkey: