Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924 – Philip Mansel - John Murray - 1995
p.283
The modernization of Constantinople was quickened by the arrival of approximately 100,000 immigrants from western Europe. Their presence turned Constantinople in the period 1839-80 - for the only time since 1453 - into a city with a Christian majority. Some immigrants were attracted by the moral anarchy of the city: others were Polish and Hungarian refugees, fleeing Russian and Austrian repression after the revolutions of 1848. True to its finest traditions, the empire caused a diplomatic incident in 1849 when it refused to permit their extraction; Austria and Russia briefly closed their embassies.
Thus if the Ottoman élite embraced Western culture, the relationship was not one-sided: many western Europeans continued, as they always had, to prefer Constantinople to their own homeland. Renewing the ancient Ottoman-Polish friendship, Constantinople was, after the failed Polish rising of 1831, one of the centres of Poland in exile, shared hatred of Russia was stronger than differences in religion. Indeed the Polish revolutionary, Constantine Bozecki (1828-77), converted to Islam and, as Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha, was to an early advocate of political reform and Turkish nationalism. Fiercely anti-Russian, he taught cartography at the military academy, and proposed a national assembly with seats allotted by race and religion. He married a daughter of Omar Pasha, a former Croatian soldier in the Austrian army, who had become commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army during the Crimean War.
Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, likewise felt at home in Constantinople, where he appreciated the honesty of the tradesmen. The Turks’ habit of living among a crowd of dogs and hens reminded him of his home town in Lithuania: ‘We Poles cherish the Turks for not having yielded to force in front of our enemy.’ He died there in 1855, during the Crimean War, from cholera caught while organising a Polish legion to fight with the Ottoman army against Russia. (In another force, known as Sultan’s Cossacks, Poles and Old Believers served under a flag containing both a cross and the Ottoman star and crescent.) Another Pole, Stanislas Chlebowski, was court painter to Sultan Abdulaziz; he worked in a studio in Dolmabahçe from 1864 to 1876, painting scenes of Ottoman glories past and present. His pictures, such as the The Entry of Faith into Constantinople and his frescoes of the Sultan’s battleships, still decorate the palaces today.
Most ‘Franks’, however, came in search of wealth not freedom. Businessmen overburdened with the regulations and taxes of western Europe found it easier to make money in the Ottoman Empire, especially after the treaty with Britain of 1838 which lessened state control of the economy. Capitalism flourished on the ruins of the old economic order. Between 1838 and 1847 land values in Pera rose by 75 per cent; between 1820 and 1850 rents in the Grand Bazaar fell by 90 per cent. Of the 1,159 names of merchants and bankers in the Indicateur Constantinopolitain of 1868, only 222 kept premises in Constantinople proper rather than Pera and Galata - and only 3.6 per cent were Muslim.
The banks in the Bankalar Caddesi in Galata are a monument to this phase of Constantinople’s history. Neither the cultural map of the city, nor Western love of Ottoman profits, had changed since the fifteenth century. Nineteenth-century Western bankers worked in the same street where, four centuries earlier in the Palazzo del Podestà, Genoese merchants had met to discuss the rise and fall of prices and pashas. Like their counterparts in the City of London, the banks are built in styles as various as the bankers’ nationalities: neo-Mameluke, neo-Venetian, neo-classical. The street façade of the Ottoman Bank, in pillared ‘Banker’s Renaissance’, symbolizes triumphant European capitalism. The rear façade is late Ottoman composite. The architect of the bank (and of other nineteenth-century buildings of Constantinople, the Caisse de la Dette, the Cercle d’Orient and the Imperial Museum) was Vallaury, son of a patissier on the Grande Rue de Pera. In keeping with its architectural dualism, the bank, established in 1863, was both a private Anglo-French bank and the official bank of the Ottoman Empire, with sole power to issue bank notes.
French, German and British communities emerged in Constantinople, each with its own chamber of commerce and post office: few foreigners trusted the Ottoman postal service started by Mahmud II. The British community worked in the embassy, the banks, ‘Her Majesty’s Supreme Consular Court’, the British Seamen’s Hospital by Galata Tower, the Imperial Ottoman Mint and the British High School for Girls, founded by Lady Stratford de Redcliffe on the Grande Rue de Pera. Before the Greeks had their Syllogos, the British Literary and Scientific Institution was opened in Pera in 1860. One of the leading authorities on the Ottoman language was John Redhouse, who lived in Constantinople from 1826 to 1853, serving both the Porte and the British embassy as an interpreter. He wrote The Turkish Campaigner’s Vade Mecum (1855), for soldiers in the Crimean War; the first English-Turkish dictionary, of which a version is still in print in Istanbul; and, in 1877, a Vindication of the Ottoman Sultan’s title of Caliph.
From the 1860s until the 1950s merchant dynasties - Whittalls, Barkers, La Fontaines - prospered in Constantinople in the import-export business. However long they had lived there, their sons were always sent to school back in England. There were regular cricket matches between ‘the Embassy’, ‘Constantinople’ and, later, ‘Bebek’ and ‘Moda’. The latter, a village on the Asian side within easy reach of good ‘rough’ shooting, was home of the many branches of the Whittall family. They lived in large houses on ‘The Avenue’ and went to work every day in ‘Con’ by steamer.
By 1878 the British community contained about 3,000 people and, in the words of one consul-general, was ‘rather over-parsoned’. The embassy chapel was select and official; the Crimean Memorial Church tended to ritualism; there were also in Constantinople Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Free Kirk, and American churches, many of whom tried to make converts; and All Saints, Moda, founded in 1876. Despite persecution by the Armenian Patriarchate and the Russian embassy, some Constantinople Armenians ventured to become Protestant.
While much of the Muslim city remained relatively unchanged, the European influx helped transform Pera and Galata into a modern Western city. The twenty years after the end of the Crimean War were decisive. A memorandum establishing the Commission for the Regulation of the City proclaimed the desire to imitate ‘foreign ways’ and ‘the best European cities’, in order to deflect foreign criticism of ‘the threshold of Happiness’, as Constantinople was still called in official documents: ‘In Istanbul the state of the buildings, lighting and cleanliness of the city is second rate ... it has been decided to make use of the knowledge of Ottoman and of foreign families long resident in the city and familiar with foreign ways to form a municipal commission.’ Seven of the first thirteen members were foreigners. In 1865 the worst fire in the history of the city destroyed much of the area between the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn and the mosques of Bayezid and Aya Sofya. Thereafter streets were widened, in some cases incorporating sections of cemeteries. In the same year street names were extended throughout the capital. Regulations about the quality of building materials were gradually enforced. However Constantinople avoided the brutal urbanization, the imposed visual unity, fashionable in other capitals. It had no Ringstrasse, no sad straight boulevards like those driven through the historic heart of Paris by Baron Haussmann and, in direct imitation, through Cairo by the Khedive Ismail.
Note: Philip Mansel has written extensively about the later French monarchy and French society of the period. His other specialisation is the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, where his books include ‘Sultans in Splendour’ (1998) in addition to the above book. He has just (2005) completed ‘Dressed to Rule’, a study of royal costume since 1660, and is working on a history of the Levant. He has contributed articles to a wide range of newspapers and journals, has travelled and lectured widely, and has made a number of radio and television appearances, most recently in 2003 Channel 4 documentary ‘Harem’.
The modernization of Constantinople was quickened by the arrival of approximately 100,000 immigrants from western Europe. Their presence turned Constantinople in the period 1839-80 - for the only time since 1453 - into a city with a Christian majority. Some immigrants were attracted by the moral anarchy of the city: others were Polish and Hungarian refugees, fleeing Russian and Austrian repression after the revolutions of 1848. True to its finest traditions, the empire caused a diplomatic incident in 1849 when it refused to permit their extraction; Austria and Russia briefly closed their embassies.
Thus if the Ottoman élite embraced Western culture, the relationship was not one-sided: many western Europeans continued, as they always had, to prefer Constantinople to their own homeland. Renewing the ancient Ottoman-Polish friendship, Constantinople was, after the failed Polish rising of 1831, one of the centres of Poland in exile, shared hatred of Russia was stronger than differences in religion. Indeed the Polish revolutionary, Constantine Bozecki (1828-77), converted to Islam and, as Mustafa Celaleddin Pasha, was to an early advocate of political reform and Turkish nationalism. Fiercely anti-Russian, he taught cartography at the military academy, and proposed a national assembly with seats allotted by race and religion. He married a daughter of Omar Pasha, a former Croatian soldier in the Austrian army, who had become commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army during the Crimean War.
Poland’s national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, likewise felt at home in Constantinople, where he appreciated the honesty of the tradesmen. The Turks’ habit of living among a crowd of dogs and hens reminded him of his home town in Lithuania: ‘We Poles cherish the Turks for not having yielded to force in front of our enemy.’ He died there in 1855, during the Crimean War, from cholera caught while organising a Polish legion to fight with the Ottoman army against Russia. (In another force, known as Sultan’s Cossacks, Poles and Old Believers served under a flag containing both a cross and the Ottoman star and crescent.) Another Pole, Stanislas Chlebowski, was court painter to Sultan Abdulaziz; he worked in a studio in Dolmabahçe from 1864 to 1876, painting scenes of Ottoman glories past and present. His pictures, such as the The Entry of Faith into Constantinople and his frescoes of the Sultan’s battleships, still decorate the palaces today.
Most ‘Franks’, however, came in search of wealth not freedom. Businessmen overburdened with the regulations and taxes of western Europe found it easier to make money in the Ottoman Empire, especially after the treaty with Britain of 1838 which lessened state control of the economy. Capitalism flourished on the ruins of the old economic order. Between 1838 and 1847 land values in Pera rose by 75 per cent; between 1820 and 1850 rents in the Grand Bazaar fell by 90 per cent. Of the 1,159 names of merchants and bankers in the Indicateur Constantinopolitain of 1868, only 222 kept premises in Constantinople proper rather than Pera and Galata - and only 3.6 per cent were Muslim.
The banks in the Bankalar Caddesi in Galata are a monument to this phase of Constantinople’s history. Neither the cultural map of the city, nor Western love of Ottoman profits, had changed since the fifteenth century. Nineteenth-century Western bankers worked in the same street where, four centuries earlier in the Palazzo del Podestà, Genoese merchants had met to discuss the rise and fall of prices and pashas. Like their counterparts in the City of London, the banks are built in styles as various as the bankers’ nationalities: neo-Mameluke, neo-Venetian, neo-classical. The street façade of the Ottoman Bank, in pillared ‘Banker’s Renaissance’, symbolizes triumphant European capitalism. The rear façade is late Ottoman composite. The architect of the bank (and of other nineteenth-century buildings of Constantinople, the Caisse de la Dette, the Cercle d’Orient and the Imperial Museum) was Vallaury, son of a patissier on the Grande Rue de Pera. In keeping with its architectural dualism, the bank, established in 1863, was both a private Anglo-French bank and the official bank of the Ottoman Empire, with sole power to issue bank notes.
French, German and British communities emerged in Constantinople, each with its own chamber of commerce and post office: few foreigners trusted the Ottoman postal service started by Mahmud II. The British community worked in the embassy, the banks, ‘Her Majesty’s Supreme Consular Court’, the British Seamen’s Hospital by Galata Tower, the Imperial Ottoman Mint and the British High School for Girls, founded by Lady Stratford de Redcliffe on the Grande Rue de Pera. Before the Greeks had their Syllogos, the British Literary and Scientific Institution was opened in Pera in 1860. One of the leading authorities on the Ottoman language was John Redhouse, who lived in Constantinople from 1826 to 1853, serving both the Porte and the British embassy as an interpreter. He wrote The Turkish Campaigner’s Vade Mecum (1855), for soldiers in the Crimean War; the first English-Turkish dictionary, of which a version is still in print in Istanbul; and, in 1877, a Vindication of the Ottoman Sultan’s title of Caliph.
From the 1860s until the 1950s merchant dynasties - Whittalls, Barkers, La Fontaines - prospered in Constantinople in the import-export business. However long they had lived there, their sons were always sent to school back in England. There were regular cricket matches between ‘the Embassy’, ‘Constantinople’ and, later, ‘Bebek’ and ‘Moda’. The latter, a village on the Asian side within easy reach of good ‘rough’ shooting, was home of the many branches of the Whittall family. They lived in large houses on ‘The Avenue’ and went to work every day in ‘Con’ by steamer.
By 1878 the British community contained about 3,000 people and, in the words of one consul-general, was ‘rather over-parsoned’. The embassy chapel was select and official; the Crimean Memorial Church tended to ritualism; there were also in Constantinople Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Free Kirk, and American churches, many of whom tried to make converts; and All Saints, Moda, founded in 1876. Despite persecution by the Armenian Patriarchate and the Russian embassy, some Constantinople Armenians ventured to become Protestant.
While much of the Muslim city remained relatively unchanged, the European influx helped transform Pera and Galata into a modern Western city. The twenty years after the end of the Crimean War were decisive. A memorandum establishing the Commission for the Regulation of the City proclaimed the desire to imitate ‘foreign ways’ and ‘the best European cities’, in order to deflect foreign criticism of ‘the threshold of Happiness’, as Constantinople was still called in official documents: ‘In Istanbul the state of the buildings, lighting and cleanliness of the city is second rate ... it has been decided to make use of the knowledge of Ottoman and of foreign families long resident in the city and familiar with foreign ways to form a municipal commission.’ Seven of the first thirteen members were foreigners. In 1865 the worst fire in the history of the city destroyed much of the area between the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn and the mosques of Bayezid and Aya Sofya. Thereafter streets were widened, in some cases incorporating sections of cemeteries. In the same year street names were extended throughout the capital. Regulations about the quality of building materials were gradually enforced. However Constantinople avoided the brutal urbanization, the imposed visual unity, fashionable in other capitals. It had no Ringstrasse, no sad straight boulevards like those driven through the historic heart of Paris by Baron Haussmann and, in direct imitation, through Cairo by the Khedive Ismail.
Note: Philip Mansel has written extensively about the later French monarchy and French society of the period. His other specialisation is the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, where his books include ‘Sultans in Splendour’ (1998) in addition to the above book. He has just (2005) completed ‘Dressed to Rule’, a study of royal costume since 1660, and is working on a history of the Levant. He has contributed articles to a wide range of newspapers and journals, has travelled and lectured widely, and has made a number of radio and television appearances, most recently in 2003 Channel 4 documentary ‘Harem’.