THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OF ARMENIA, BY ROBERT CURZON

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Title: Armenia

Subtitle: A year at Erzeroom, and on the frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia

Author: Robert Curzon

Release Date: November 26, 2018 [EBook #58361]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

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SKETCH OF ARMENIA

ARMENIA:

A YEAR AT ERZEROOM, AND ON THE FRONTIERS OF RUSSIA, TURKEY, AND PERSIA.

BY THE HON. ROBERT CURZON,

AUTHOR OF “VISITS TO THE MONASTERIES OF THE LEVANT.”

Ruined Armenian Church near Erzeroom.

MAP AND WOODCUTS.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

82 BEEKMAN STREET.

1854.

PREFACE.

Almost from time immemorial a border warfare has been carried on between the Koordish tribes on the confines of Turkey and Persia, in the mountainous country beginning at Mount Ararat toward the north, and continuing southward to the low lands, where the Shat al Arab, the name of the mighty river formed by the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, pours those great volumes of water into the Persian Gulf. The consequence of the unsettled state of affairs in those wild districts was, that the roads were unsafe for travelers; merchants were afraid to trust their merchandise to the conveyance even of well-armed caravans, for they were constantly pillaged by the Koords, headed in our days by the great chieftains Beder Khan Bey, Noor Ullah Bey, Khan Abdall, and Khan Mahmoud. The chains of mountains which occupy great part of the country in question are for months every year covered with snow, which even in the elevated plains lies at the depth of many yards; the bands of robbers constantly on the watch for plunder of any kind prevented the mountain paths from being kept open, so that those who escaped from the long lances of the Koords perished in the avalanches and the snowdrifts by hundreds every year.

To put a stop, or at least a check, to so lamentable a state of things, the governments of Turkey and Persia requested the assistance of England and Russia to draw up a treaty of peace, and to come to a distinct understanding as to where the line of border ran between the two empires; for hitherto the Koordish tribes of Turkey made it a virtue to plunder a Persian village, and the Persians, on their side, considered no action more meritorious, as well as profitable, than an inroad on the Turkish frontier, the forays on both sides being conducted on the same plan. The invading party, always on horseback, and with a number of trained led horses, which could travel one hundred miles without flagging, managed to arrive in the neighborhood of the devoted village one hour before sunrise. The barking of the village curs was the first notice to the sleeping inhabitants that the enemy was literally at the door. The houses were fired in every direction; the people awoke from sleep, and, trying in confusion to escape, were speared on their thresholds by their invaders; the place was plundered of every thing worth taking; and one hour after sunrise the invading bands were in full retreat, driving before them the flocks and herds of their victims, and the children and girls of the village bound on the led horses, to be sold or brought up as slaves; the rest having, young and old, men and women, been killed without mercy, to prevent their giving the alarm: their victors frequently coming down upon them from a distance of one hundred to three hundred miles.

In hopes of remedying these misfortunes, a conference was appointed at Erzeroom, where a Turkish plenipotentiary, Noori Effendi; a Persian plenipotentiary, Merza Jaffer Khan; a Russian commissioner, Colonel Dainese; and an English commissioner, Colonel Williams, of the Royal Artillery, were to meet, each with a numerous suite, to discuss the position of the boundary, and to check the border incursions of the Koordish tribes, both by argument and by force of arms, the troops of both nations being ordered to assist the deliberations of the congress at Erzeroom by every endeavor on their part to keep the country in a temporary state of tranquillity. The plenipotentiaries on the part of Turkey and Persia, and the English and Russian commissioners, entered upon their arduous task at the beginning of the year 1842. Colonel Williams, to whom the duties of the English commission had been intrusted, was too unwell to proceed to Erzeroom, and I was appointed in his stead, being at that time private secretary to Sir Stratford Canning, her majesty’s embassador at Constantinople. Colonel Williams afterward recovered so much that he was able to set out, and we started together as joint commissioners, in company with Colonel (afterward General) Dainese, on the part of Russia, a gentleman of very considerable talents and attainments. The discussions between the two governments were protracted by every conceivable difficulty, which was thrown in the way of the commissioners principally by the Turks. At length, in June, 1847, a treaty was signed, in which the confines of the two empires were defined: these, however, being situated in places never surveyed, and only known by traditional maps, which had copied the names of places one from another since the invention of engraving, it was considered advisable that the true situations of these places should be verified in a scientific manner; consequently, a new commission was named in the year 1848, whose officers were instructed to define the actual position of the spots enumerated in the treaty above mentioned. These commissioners consisted of Dervish Pasha for Turkey, Merza Jaffer for Persia, Colonel Williams for England, and Colonel Ktchirikoff for Russia.

This party left Bagdad in 1848, surveyed the whole of that hitherto unexplored region, among the Koordish and original Christian tribes, which extends to the east of Mesopotamia, till they finished their difficult and dangerous task at Mount Ararat, on the 16th of September, 1852. The results of this expedition are, I hope, to be presented to the public by the pen of Colonel Williams, and will, I trust, throw a new and interesting light upon the manners and customs of the wild mountaineers of those districts, and give much information relating to the Chaldeans, Maronites, Nestorians, and other Christian Churches converted in the earliest ages by the successors of the Apostles, of whom we know very little, no travelers hitherto having had the opportunities of investigating their actual condition and their religious tenets which have been afforded to Colonel Williams and the little army under his command.

Armenia, the cradle of the human family, inoffensive and worthless of itself, has for centuries, indeed from the beginning of time, been a bone of contention between conflicting powers: scarcely has it been made acquainted with the blessings of tranquillity and peace, through the mediation of Great Britain, than again it is to become the theatre of war, again to be overrun with bands of armed men seeking each other’s destruction, in a climate which may afford them burial when dead, but which is too barren and inhospitable to provide them with the necessaries of life; and this to satisfy the ambition of a distant potentate, by whose success they gain no advantage in this world or in the next.

It is much to be deplored that the Emperor of Russia, by his want of principle, has brought the Christian religion into disrepute; for throughout the Levant the Christians have for years been waiting an opportunity to rise against the oppressors of their fortunes and their faith. The manner in which the Czar has put himself so flagrantly in the wrong will be a check to the progress of Christianity. That the step he has now been taking has been the great object of his reign, as well as that of all his predecessors since the time of Peter the Great, will be illustrated in the following pages.

The accession of a Christian emperor to the throne of Constantinople will be an event of greater consequence than is generally imagined; for the Sultan of Roum is considered by all Mohammedans in India, Africa, and all parts of the world, to be the vicegerent of God upon earth, and the Caliph or successor of Mohammed; his downfall, therefore, would shatter the whole fabric of the Mohammedan faith, for the Sultan is the pride and glory of Islam, and the pale Crescent of the East will wane and set when Kurie Eleison is chanted again under the ancient dome of St. Sofia.

What an unfortunate mistake has been made in not waiting for a real and just occasion for pressing forward the ranks of the Cross against the Crescent! Then who would not have joined a righteous cause? who would not have given his wealth, his assistance, or his life, in the defense of his faith against the enemies of his religion?

I feel that, in laying this little book before the public, I am committing a rash act, for I am perfectly aware that it has many imperfections. I was prevented from visiting several important places in Armenia by an illness so severe, brought on by the unhealthy climate, that I have not been able to take an active part in life since that time. The following pages were written in a very few days, at a time when other occupations prevented me from giving them that attention which should always be afforded to a work that is intended for the perusal of the public.

Nevertheless, I consider that, as the countries described are so little known, and as it is not improbable that events of great importance may take place within their boundaries, I should be open to greater blame in withholding any information, however humble, than in presenting to the reader a meagre account of those wild and sterile regions, whose climate and manners are so different from those which are generally described in the works of Oriental travelers.

These sketches, slight as they are, may perhaps be found useful to the members of any expedition which the chances of war may occasion to be sent into those remote countries, by giving them beforehand some intimation of the preparations necessary to be made for their journey through a district where they would encounter at every step difficulties which they might not have been led to expect in a latitude considerably to the south of the Bay of Naples.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

The “Bad Black Sea.”—Coal-field near the Bosporus.—Trebizond from the Sea.—Fish and Turkeys.—The Bazaars.—Coronas.—Ancient Tombs.—Church of St. Sofia.—Preservation of old Manners and Ceremonies.—Toilet of a Person of Distinction.—Russian Loss in 1828–9.—Ancient Prayer.—Varna.—Statistics of Wallachia.—Visit to Abdallah Pasha.—His outward Appearance.—His love of medical Experiments.—Trade of Trebizond        Page 17

CHAPTER II.

Departure from Trebizond.—A rough Road.—Turkish Pack-horses.—Value of Tea.—The Pipe in the East.—Mountain Riding.—Instinct of the Horse.—A Caravan overwhelmed by an Avalanche.—Mountain of Hoshabounar.—A Ride down the Mountain.—Arrival at Erzeroom        35

CHAPTER III.

The Consulate at Erzeroom.—Subterranean Dwellings.—Snow-blindness.— Effects of the severe Climate.—The City: its Population, Defenses, and Buildings.—Our House and Household.—Armenian Country-houses.—The Ox-stable        45

CHAPTER IV.

Narrow Escape from Suffocation.—Death of Noori Effendi.—A good Shot.—History of Mirza Tekee.—Persian Ideas of the Principles of Government.—The “Blood-drinker.”—Massacre at Kerbela.—Sanctity of the Place.—History of Hossein.—Attack on Kerbela, and Defeat of the Persians.—Good Effects of Commissioners’ Exertions        61

CHAPTER V.

The Boundary Question.—Koordish Chiefs.—Torture of Artin, an American Christian.—Improved State of Society in Turkey.—Execution of a Koord.—Power of Fatalism.—Gratitude of Artin’s Family        Page 81

CHAPTER VI.

The Clock of Erzeroom.—A Pasha’s Notions of Horology.—Pathology of Clocks.—The Tower and Dungeon.—Ingenious Mode of Torture.—The modern Prison        99

CHAPTER VII.

Spring in Erzeroom.—Coffee-house Diversions.—Koordish Exploits.—Summer Employment.—Preparation of Tezek.—Its Varieties and Uses        105

CHAPTER VIII.

The Prophet of Khoi.—Climate.—Effects of great Elevation above the Sea.—The Genus Homo.—African Gold-diggings.—Sale of a Family.—Site of Paradise.—Tradition of Khosref Purveez.—Flowers.—A Flea-antidote.—Origin of the Tulip.—A Party at the Cave of Ferhad, and its Results.—Translation from Hafiz        110

CHAPTER IX.

The Bear.—Ruins of a Genoese Castle.—Lynx.—Lemming.—Cara Guz.—Gerboa.—Wolves.—Wild Sheep.—A hunting Adventure.—Camels.—Peculiar Method of Feeding.—Degeneration of domestic Animals        125

CHAPTER X.

Birds.—Great Variety and vast Numbers of Birds.—Flocks of Geese.—Employment for the Sportsman.—The Captive Crane.—Wild and tame Geese.—The pious and profane Ancestors.—List of Birds found at Erzeroom        132

CHAPTER XI.

Excursion to the Lake of Tortoom.—Romantic Bridge.—Gloomy Effect of the Lake.—Singular Boat.—“Evaporation” of a Pistol.—Kiamili Pasha.—Extraordinary Marksman.—Alarming Illness of the Author.—An Earthquake.—Lives lost through intense Cold.—The Author recovers        Page 145

CHAPTER XII.

Start for Trebizond.—Personal Appearance of the Author.—Mountain Pass.—Reception at Beyboort.—Misfortunes of Mustapha.—Pass of Zigana Dagh.—Arrival at Trebizond        155

CHAPTER XIII.

Former History of Trebizond.—Ravages of the Goths.—Their Siege and Capture of the City.—Dynasties of Courtenai and the Comneni.—The “Emperor” David.—Conquest of Trebizond by Mehemet II.        166

CHAPTER XIV.

Impassable Character of the Country.—Dependence of Persia on the Czar.—Russian Aggrandizement.—Delays of the Western Powers.—Russian Acquisitions from Turkey and Persia.—Oppression of the Russian Government.—The Conscription.—Armenian Emigration.—The Armenian Patriarch.—Latent Power of the Pope.—Anomalous Aspect of religious Questions        178

CHAPTER XV.

Ecclesiastical History.—Supposed Letter of Abgarus, King of Edessa, to our Savior, and the Answer.—Promulgation and Establishment of Christianity.—Labors of Mesrob Maschdots.—Separation of the Armenian Church from that of Constantinople.—Hierarchy and religious Establishments.—Superstition of the Lower Classes.—Sacerdotal Vestments.—The Holy Books.—Romish Branch of the Church.—Labors of Mechitar.—His Establishment near Venice.—Diffusion of the Scriptures        194

CHAPTER XVI.

Modern division of Armenia.—Population.—Manners and Customs of the Christians.—Superiority of the Mohammedans        Page 209

CHAPTER XVII.

Armenian Manuscripts.—Manuscripts at Etchmiazin.—Comparative Value of Manuscripts.—Uncial Writing.—Monastic Libraries.—Collections in Europe.—The St. Lazaro Library        213

CHAPTER XVIII.

General History of Armenia.—Former Sovereigns.—Tiridates I. receives his Crown from Nero.—Conquest of the Country by the Persians and by the Arabs.—List of modern Kings.—Misfortunes of Leo V.: his Death at Paris        218

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

- Map of Armenia        To face title-page.

- Ruined Armenian Church near Erzeroom        In title-page.

- General View of Erzeroom        To face page 45

- Erzeroom. View from the house of the British Commissioners.        To face page 50

- Koordish Gallows        In page 95

- Fundook
,,

,,

120

- Ruined Tower in the Castle of Tortoom        To face page 145

- Boat on the Lake of Tortoom
,,

,,

,,

149

- Quarantine Harbor, Trebizond
,,

,,

,,

165

ARMENIA.

CHAPTER I.

The “Bad Black Sea.”—Coal-field near the Bosporus.—Trebizond from the Sea.—Fish and Turkeys.—The Bazaars.—Coronas.—Ancient Tombs.—Church of St. Sofia.—Preservation of old Manners and Ceremonies.—Toilet of a Person of Distinction.—Russian Loss in 1828–9.—Ancient Prayer.—Varna.—Statistics of Wallachia.—Visit to Abdallah Pasha.—His outward Appearance.—His love of medical Experiments.—Trade of Trebizond.

Fena kara Degniz, “The Bad Black Sea.” This is the character that stormy lake has acquired in the estimation of its neighbors at Constantinople. Of 1000 Turkish vessels which skim over its waters every year, 500 are said to be wrecked as a matter of course. The wind sometimes will blow from all the four quarters of heaven within two hours’ time, agitating the waters like a boiling caldron. Dense fogs obscure the air during the winter, by the assistance of which the Turkish vessels continually mistake the entrance of a valley called the False Bogaz for the entrance of the Bosporus, and are wrecked there perpetually. I have seen dead bodies floating about in that part of the sea, where I first became acquainted with the fact that the corpse of a woman floats upon its back, while that of a man floats upon its face. In short, at Constantinople they say that every thing that is bad comes from the Black Sea: the plague, the Russians, the fogs, and the cold, all come from thence; and though this time we had a fine calm passage, I was glad enough to arrive at the end of the voyage at Trebizond. Before landing, however, I must give a passing tribute to the beauty of the scenery on the south coast, that is, on the north coast of Asia Minor. Rocks and hills are its usual character near the shore, with higher mountains inland. Between the Bosporus and Heraclea are boundless fields of coal, which crops out on the side of the hills, so that no mining would be required to get the coal; and besides this great facility in its production, the hills are of such an easy slope that a tram-road would convey the coal-wagons down to the ships on the sea-coast without any difficulty. No nation but the Turks would delay to make use of such a source of enormous wealth as this coal would naturally supply, when it can be had with such remarkable ease so near to the great maritime city of Constantinople. It seems to be a peculiarity in human nature that those who are too stupid to undertake any useful work are frequently jealous of the interference of others who are more able and willing than themselves, as the old fable of the dog in the manger exemplifies. I understand that more than one English company have been desirous of opening these immense mines of wealth, on the condition of paying a large sum or a good per centage to the Turkish government; but they are jealous of a foreigner’s undertaking that which they are incapable of carrying out themselves. So English steamers bring English coal to Constantinople, which costs I don’t know what by the time it arrives within a few miles of a spot[1] which is as well furnished with the most useful, if not the most ornamental, of minerals, as Newcastle-upon-Tyne itself.

Beyond Sinope, where the flat alluvial land stretches down to the sea-shore, there are forests of such timber as we have no idea of in these northern regions. Here there are miles of trees so high, and large, and straight, that they look like minarets in flower. Wild boars, stags, and various kinds of game abound in these magnificent primeval woods, protected by the fevers and agues which arise from the dense jungle and unhealthy swamps inland, which prevent the sportsman from following the game during great part of the year. The inhabitants of all this part of Turkey, Circassia, &c., are good shots with the short, heavy rifle, which is their constant companion, and they sometimes kill a deer. As their religion protects the pigs, the wild boars roam unmolested in this, for them at least, “free and independent country.” The stag resembles the red deer in every respect, only it is considerably smaller; its venison is not particularly good.

Trebizond presents an imposing appearance from the sea. It stands upon a rocky table-land, from which peculiarity in its situation it takes its name—τραπεζα being a table in Greek, if we are to believe what Dr. —— used to tell us at school. There is no harbor, not even a bay, and a rolling sea comes in sometimes which looks, and I should think must be, awfully dangerous. I have seen the whole of the keel of the ships at anchor, as they rolled over from one side to the other. The view from the sea of the curious ancient town, the mountains in the background, and the great chain of the Circassian Mountains on the left, is magnificent in the extreme. The only thing that the Black Sea is good for, that I know of (and that, I think, may be said of some other seas), is fish. The kalkan balouk, shield-fish—a sort of turbot, with black prickles on his back—though not quite worth a voyage to Trebizond, is well worth the attention of the most experienced gastronome when he once gets there. The red mullet, also, is caught in great quantities; but the oddest fish is the turkey. This animal is generally considered to be a bird, of the genus poultry, and so he is in all outward appearances; but at Trebizond the turkeys live entirely upon a diet of sprats and other little fish washed on shore by the waves, by which it comes to pass that their flesh tastes like very exceedingly bad fish, and abominably nasty it is; though, if reclaimed from these bad habits, and fed on corn and herbs, like other respectable birds, they become very good, and are worthy of being stuffed with chestnuts and roasted, and of occupying the spot upon the dinner-table from whence the remains of the kalkan balouk have been removed.

On landing, the beauty of the prospect ceases, for, like many Oriental towns, the streets are lanes between blank walls, over which the branches of fig-trees, roofs of houses, and boughs of orange and lemon trees appear at intervals; so that, riding along the blind alleys, you do not know whether there are houses or gardens on each side.

The bazaars are a contrast, by their life and bustle, to the narrow lanes through which they are approached. Here numbers of the real old-fashioned Turks are to be seen, with turbans as large as pumpkins, of all colors and forms, steadily smoking all manner of pipes.

I do not know why Europeans persist in calling these places bazaars: charchi is the Turkish for what we call bazaar, or bezestein for an inclosed covered place containing various shops. The word bazaar means a market, which is altogether a different kind of thing.

The bazaars of Trebizond contain a good deal of rubbish, both of the human and inanimate kind. Cheese, saddles, old, dangerous-looking arms, and various peddlery and provisions, were all that was to be seen. Many ruined buildings of Byzantine architecture tottered by the sides of the more open spaces, some apparently very ancient, and well worth examination. In the porches of two little antiquated Greek churches I saw some frescoes of the twelfth century, apparently in excellent preservation; one of portraits of Byzantine kings and princes, in their royal robes, caught my attention, but I had not time to do more than take a hasty look at it. The tomb of Solomon, the son of David, king of Georgia or Immeretia, standing in the court-yard of another Greek church, under a sort of canopy of stone, is a very curious monument; and in two churches there are ancient coronas, which seemed to be of silver gilt, eight or ten feet in diameter, most precious specimens of early metal-work, which I coveted and desired exceedingly. They were both engraved with texts from Scripture, and saints and cherubim of the grimmest aspect, so old, and quaint, and ugly, that they may be said to be really painfully curious. While on this subject I may remark that I am not aware where the authority is to be found for introducing the quantities of coronas which are now hung up in modern antique churches in England. I never saw one in any Latin church, except at Aix-la-Chapelle; there are, I presume, others, but they certainly never were common nor usual any where in Europe. All those I know of are Greek, and belong to the Greek ceremonial rite. I have never met with an ancient Gothic corona, and should be glad to know from whence those lately introduced into our parish churches have been copied.

On the other side of the town from the landing-place, a mile or so beyond the beautiful old walls of the Byzantine citadel, is a small grassy plain, with some fine single trees. This plain is situated on a terrace, with the open sea on the right hand, on a level of fifty or more feet below. The view from hence on all sides is lovely. The glorious blue sea—for it is not black here—on the right hand; the walls and towers crumbling into ruin behind you, the hills to the left, at the foot of which, built on the level grass, are several ancient tombs, whether Mohammedan or Christian I do not know; they are low round towers, with conical roofs, like old-fashioned pigeon-houses, but rich in color, with old brick, and stone, and marble. Parasitical plants, growing from rents and crevices occasioned by time, are left in peace by the Turks, who, after all, are the best conservators of antiquity in the world, for they let things alone. There are no churchwardens yet in Turkey; there are no tasty architects, with contemptible and gross ignorance of antiquity, architecture, and taste, to build ridiculous failures for a confiding ministry in London, or a rich gentleman in the country, who does not pretend to know any thing about the matter, and falls into the error of believing that if he pays well he will be well served, and that a man who has been brought up to build buildings must know how to do it: and this knowledge is displayed in the production of the British Museum, the National Gallery, and other original edifices.

The spleen aroused in writing these words is calmed by the recollection of the ruins of the fortified monastery, as it would appear to have been, before my eyes at the further end of this charming open plain; a Byzantine gate-house stands within a ditch surrounding a considerable space, in which some broken walls give evidence of a stately palace or monastery which once rose there; but there still stands towering to a great height the almost perfect church of St. Sofia—the Holy Wisdom, not the saint of that name, but the deity to whom the great cathedral of St. Sofia is dedicated at Constantinople. This church is curious and interesting in the extreme; it is most rich in many of the peculiarities of Byzantine architecture outside, and within there are very perfect remains of frescoes, in a style of art such as I have hardly seen equaled, never in any fresco paintings. The only ones equal to them are the illuminations in the one odd volume of the Μηνολογία in the Vatican Library, and some in my own. There are several half figures of emperors in brilliant colors, in circular compartments, on the under sides of some arches, and numerous other paintings, of which the colors are so vivid that they resemble painted glass, particularly where they are broken, as the sharp outlines of what is left betoken that they would be still as bright as jewelry where they have not been destroyed by the plaster, on which they are painted, giving way.

The position, beauty, and antiquity of this Christian relic in a Mohammedan land, give a singular interest to the Church of St. Sofia at Trebizond. I longed to give this place a thorough examination. Perhaps a portrait of some old Comnenus would present itself to my admiring eyes. Many likenesses of by-gone emperors, Cæsars, and princesses born in the purple, might be recovered in all the splendor of their royal robes and almost sacred crowns and diadems, to gladden the hearts of antiquarians enthusiastic in the cause, and who, like myself, would be ten times more delighted with the possession of a portrait, or an incomprehensible work of art of undoubted Byzantine origin, than with the offer of the hand, even of the illustrious Anna Comnena herself. Her portrait, after the lapse of 600 years, would be most interesting; but I do not envy the Cæsar who obtained the honor of an alliance with that princess of the cærulean hose.

At this point, feeling myself entangled with the reminiscences of Byzantine history, I must branch off into a little episode relating to the singular preservation of ancient manners and ceremonies still in use, or, at least, remaining in the year 1830 in Wallachia and Moldavia. The usages and the etiquette of those courts, together with the names and the costumes of the great officers of state, are all derived from those of the Christian court of Constantinople before the disastrous days of Mohammed the Second. Now that those fertile lands are overrun by the descendants of the Avars, and the fierce tribes of northern barbarians, who so often in the Middle Ages carried fire and sword, tallow and sheepskins, almost to the walls of the city—την βολὶν· εις την βολὶν—from whence comes Stamboul, I may be, perhaps, excused if I put in a few lines relating to another country, but which, I think, are interesting during the present state of the affairs of the Turkish empire.

In the year 1838 I left Constantinople on my way to Vienna. I went to Varna, and from thence proceeded up the Danube in a miserable steamer, on board of which was a personage of high distinction belonging to a neighboring nation, whose manners and habits afforded me great amusement. He was courteous and gentlemanlike in a remarkable degree, but his domestic ways differed from those of our own countrymen. He had a numerous suite of servants, three or four of whom seemed to be a sort of gentlemen; these attended him every night when he went to bed, in the standing bed-place of the crazy steamer. First they wound up six or seven gold watches, and the great man took off his boots, his coat, and I don’t know how many gold chains; then each night he was invested by his attendants with a different fur pelisse, which looked valuable and fusty to my humble eyes. Each morning the same gentlemen spread out all the watches, took off the fur pelisse, and insinuated their lord into a fashionable and somewhat tight coat, not the one worn yesterday; but on no occasion did I perceive any thing in the nature of an ablution, or any proof that such an article as a clean shirt formed a part of the great man’s traveling wardrobe.

Varna is situated on a gentle slope a short distance from the shores of the Black Sea, and three or four miles to the south of a range of hills, between which and the town the unfortunate Russian army was encamped during the war of the year 1829. I say unfortunate, and all will agree with me, if they take into consideration a fact which I write on undoubted authority. When the Russians invaded Turkey in 1828, they lost 50,000 men by sickness alone, by want of the necessaries of life, and neglect in the commissariat department: 50,000 Russians died on the plains of Turkey, not one man of whom was killed in battle, for their advance was not resisted by the Turks.

In the next year (1829) the Russians lost 60,000 men between the Pruth and the city of Adrianople. Some of these, however, were legitimately slain in battle. When they arrived at Adrianople, the troops were in so wretched a condition from sickness and want of food that not 7000 men were able to bear arms: how many thousands of horses and mules perished in these two years is not known. The Turkish government was totally ignorant of this deplorable state of affairs at Adrianople till some time afterward, when the intelligence came too late. If the Turks had known what was going on, not one single Russian would have seen his native land again; even as it was, out of 120,000 men, not 6000 ever recrossed the Russian frontier alive. Since the days of Cain, the first murderer, among all nations, and among all religions, he who kills his fellow-creature without just cause is looked upon with horror and disgust, and is pursued by the avenging curse of God and man. What, then, shall be thought of that individual who, without reason, without the slightest show of justice, right, or justifiable pretense, from his own caprice, to satisfy his own feelings, and lust of pride, and arrogance, destroys for his amusement, in two years, more than 100,000 of his fellow-creatures? Shall not their blood cry out for vengeance? Had not each of these men a soul, immortal as their butcher’s? Had not many of them, many thousands of them perhaps, more faith, more trust in God, higher talents than their destroyer? Better had it been for that man had he never been born!

The following prayer is translated from one at the end of an ancient Bulgarian or Russian manuscript, written in the year 1355: “The Judge seated, and the apostle standing before him, and the trumpet sounding, and the fire burning, what wilt thou do, O my soul, when thou art carried to the judgment? for then all thy evils will appear, and all thy secret sins will be made manifest. Therefore now, beforehand, endeavor to pray to Jesus Christ our Lord. Oh, do not thou reject me, but save me.”

The fortifications of Varna are very flat and low, though they are said to be of great strength; but, as the town is built of wood, I should think there would be little difficulty in setting it on fire by the assistance of a few shells or red-hot shot, from ships at sea or batteries on the land. From all such fortresses I am delighted to escape: the bastions, ditches, and ramparts keep me in, though they are intended to keep others out. There is nothing picturesque in a modern stronghold, as there are no battlements and towers, or any thing pleasing to the eye; only, whichever way you turn, you are sure to be stopped by a green ditch with a frog in it; I therefore only remained long enough at Varna to see that there was nothing to be seen.

The principality of Wallachia contains 1,500,000 inhabitants liable to taxation, 800 nobles, and 15,000 strangers, subjects of various powers.

It is governed by a prince (gika), who reigns for life. The civil list amounts to—

50,000 Austrian ducats yearly.

All the officials are paid by the government.

The revenues of the principality are derived from tribute, which amounts to

300,000

ducats yearly.

The salt-works, which yield

150,000

,,

,,

Domains of the prince

30,000

,,

,,

The customs

70,000

,,

,,

Total

550,000

,,

,,

The expenses are, yearly:

Ducats.

Civil List of the prince

50,000

The Ottoman Porte for tribute

30,000

Salaries of officials

150,000

Troops, 4000 men

100,000

Ten quarantine stations on the Danube

20,000

Hospitals

5,000

Schools

12,000

Post

30,000

Repair of roads

8,000

Total

405,000

The capital of Wallachia is Bucharest, containing 12,000 houses and 80,000 inhabitants, of whom 10,000 are strangers.

There is one metropolitan, who lives at Bucharest, and has a revenue of 10,000 ducats; and three bishops, of Rimnik, Argessi, and Buzeo, who have 8000 each. The salary of the first minister is 3600 ducats yearly. There are three ranks of nobles. The highest consists of sixty individuals, who have the right of electing the prince; the second numbers 300, and the third 440. The prime minister is called the bano; the commander-in-chief, spathar; the minister of the interior, the great dvornic; the minister of justice, the great logothete. The greatest family is that of Brancovano, the revenue of its chief being 12,000 ducats. The titles of the great officers of state, and the principal people about the court of the Hospodar, are derived from the institutions of the Byzantine emperors. These nobles are divided into three classes. The following is the order of their precedence:

1ST CLASS.

1.

BANO

Marshal of the Palace.

2.

DVORNIC

Lord Chamberlain.

3.

SPATHAR

Commander-in-Chief.

4.

LOGOTHETE

Chief Secretary.

5.

POSTEMIC

Foreign Minister.

6.

AGA

Inspector of Police.

2D CLASS.

1.

CLOCHIAR

Commissary General.

2.

PAHARME

Cup-bearer.

3D CLASS.

1.

SERDAR

Commander of 1000 men.

2.

PITAR

Inspector of the Ovens.

3.

CONSEPIST

Registrar General.

It is in the power of the government to raise any of these nobles a step after a service of three years. Before the year 1827 these officers were paid by contributions raised on the subjects of the Prince, who were then exempted from any other taxes. The Bano had one hundred and twenty men, the Dvornic one hundred, the Paharme twenty-five, and so on; from these they took as much as they could, one man averaging three ducats a year in value to his lord.

The treaty of Adrianople contains an article insuring the independence of the interior administration of the country. On the 18th of May, 1838, an order was brought from Constantinople by Baron Rukman, in which it was stated that the General Assembly are to insert a clause in the Constitution, which obliges them to have leave of the Russians before any alteration whatever is made in the regulation of the interior. The army can not be increased, or any differences made in the administration of the quarantine, &c., without permission from Russia, which is in direct contradiction to the Treaty of Adrianople. Sentence of death is abolished by the Constitution, but great offenders are sent to the mines for life.

Having accomplished our little tour to Wallachia, we will recross the sea to Trebizond, and return to the inspection of that ancient city, so famous in the romance of the Middle Ages. The Pasha and Governor, Abdallah Pasha, resides in the citadel, a large space of ruinous buildings, surrounded by romantic walls and towers, in the same style as those of Constantinople. As in duty bound, we proceeded in great state to pay a visit of ceremony to the viceroy. As our long train of horsemen wound through the narrow streets, and passed under the long dark tunnel of the Byzantine gateway, we must have looked quite in keeping with the picturesque appearance of that ancient fortress. From the gloomy gate we emerged into a large, ruinous court or space of no particular shape, but surrounded by tumble-down houses, with wooden balconies festooned with vines. I was struck with the absence of guards and soldiers, who are usually drawn up on these occasions in a wavy line, to do honor or to impose upon the awe-stricken feelings of the Elchi Bey.

We passed through another court, if I remember right, till we found a number of servants and officials waiting our arrival at an open door, and, having dismounted, with the assistance of numerous supporters we scrambled up a large, dark, crazy wooden stair, at the top of which, on a curtain being drawn aside, we were ushered into a large, lofty room, where we beheld the Pasha seated on the divan, under a range of windows, at the upper end of the selamlik, or hall of reception. Then commenced the regular exercise of formal civilities, bows, and inquiries after each other’s health, carried on in a thorough mechanical manner, neither party even pretending to look as if he meant any thing he said. We smoked pipes, and drank coffee, and made a little bow to the Pasha afterward, in the most orthodox way, till we were bored and tired, and wished it was time to come away; but this sort of visit was a serious affair, and I don’t know how long we sat there, with the crowd of kawasses and chiboukgis staring at us steadily from the lower end of the hall.

What the Pasha looked like, and what manner of man he was, it was not easy to make out, seeing that to the outward eye he presented the appearance of a large green bundle, with a red fez at the top, for he was enveloped in a great furred cloak; he seemed to have dark eyes, like every body else in this country, and a long nose and a black beard, whereof the confines or limits were not to be ascertained, as I could not readily distinguish what was beard and what was fur. Every now and then his excellency snuffled, as if he had got a cold, but I think it was only a trick; however, when he lifted up his voice to speak, the depth and hollow sound was very remarkable. I have heard several Turks speak in this way, which I believe they consider dignified, and imagine that it is done in imitation of Sultan Mahmoud, who, whether it was his natural voice or not, always spoke as if his voice came out of his stomach instead of his mouth. Abdallah Pasha paid us his compliments in this awful tone, and, till I got a little used to it, I wondered out of what particular part of the heap of fur, cloth, &c., this thoroughbass proceeded. I found, to my great admiration, that the Pasha knew my name, and almost as much of my own history as I did myself; where he had gained his very important information I know not, but an interest so unusual in any thing relating to another person induced me to make inquiries about him, and I found he was not only a man of the highest dignity and wealth, possessing villages, square miles and acres innumerable, but he was a philosopher; if not a writer, he was a reader of books, particularly works on medicine. This was his great hobby. In the way of government he seemed to be a most patriarchal sort of king: he had no army or soldiers whatever; fifteen or sixteen kawasses were all the guards that he supported. He smoked the pipe of tranquillity on the carpet of prudence, and the pashalik of Trebizond slumbered on in the sun; the houses tumbled down occasionally, and people repaired them never; the Secretary of State wrote to the Porte two or three times a year, to say that nothing particular had happened. The only thing I wondered at was how the tribute was exacted, for transmitted it must be regularly to Constantinople. Rayahs must be squeezed: they were created, like oranges, for that purpose; but, somehow or other, Abdallah Pasha seems to have carried on the process quietly, and the multitudes under his rule dozed on from year to year. That was all very well for those at a distance, but his immediate attendants suffered occasionally from the philosophical inquiries of their master. He thought of nothing but physic, and whenever he could catch a Piedmontese doctor he would buy any quantity of medicine from him, and talk learnedly on medical subjects as long as the doctor could stand it. As nobody ever tells the truth in these parts, the Pasha never believed what the doctor told him, and usually satisfied his mind by experiments in corpore vili, many of which, when the accounts were related to me, made me cry with laughter. They were mostly too medical to be narrated in any unmedical assembly.

Trebizond is not defensible by land or sea, nor could it be made so from the land side, as it is commanded by the sloping hills immediately behind it. From there being no bay or harbor of any kind, its approach is dangerous during the prevalence of north winds, which lash the waves against the rocks with fury. Inns are as yet unknown; there are no khans that I know of, of any size or importance as far as architecture is concerned; but large stables protect the pack-horses which carry the bales of goods imported from Constantinople for the Persian trade, the bulk of which has now passed out of the hands of the English into those of the Greek merchants. The steamer running from Constantinople is constantly laden with goods, and much more would be sent if additional steamers were ready to convey it.

Our party was received under the hospitable roof of Mr. Stephens, the Vice-Consul, whose court-yard was encumbered with luggage of all sorts and kinds, over which katergis or muleteers continually wrangled in setting apart different articles in two heaps, each two heaps being reputed a sufficient load for one horse. This took some days to arrange, and our time was occupied with preparations for the journey through the mountains.

[1]

Since this was written, the coal-field of Eraglé has been opened under the direction of English engineers, and the coals are sent to Constantinople. ↑

CHAPTER II.

Departure from Trebizond.—A rough Road.—Turkish Pack-horses.—Value of Tea.—The Pipe in the East.—Mountain Riding.—Instinct of the Horse.—A Caravan overwhelmed by an Avalanche.—Mountain of Hoshabounar.—A Ride down the Mountain.—Arrival at Erzeroom.

At last we were ready; the Russian commissioner traveled with us, and we sallied out of the town in a straggling line up the hill, along the only road known in this part of the world. This wonder and miracle of art extends one mile, to the top of a little hill. It is said to have cost £19,000. It ascends the mountain side in defiance of all obstacles, and is more convenient for rolling down than climbing up, as it is nearly as steep as a ladder in some places. When you get to the top you are safe, for there is no more road as far as Tabriz. A glorious view rewards the traveler for his loss of breath in accomplishing the ascent. From hence the road is a track, wide enough for one loaded horse, passing through streams and mud, over rocks, mountains, and precipices, such as I should hardly have imagined a goat could travel upon; certainly no sensible animal would ever try to do so, unless upon urgent business. Pleasure and amusement must be sought on broader ways; here danger and difficulty occur at every step; nevertheless, the horses are so well used to climbing, and hopping, and floundering along, that the obstacles are gradually overcome. In looking back occasionally, you wonder how in the world you ever got to the spot you are standing on. The sure-footedness of the horses was marvelous; we often galloped for half an hour along the dry course of a mountain torrent, for these we considered our best places, over round stones as big as a man’s head, with larger ones occasionally for a change; but the riding-horses hardly ever fell. The baggage-horses, encumbered with their loads, tumbled in all directions, but these unlucky animals were always kicked up again by the efforts of a posse of hard-fisted, hard-hearted muleteers, and were soon plodding on under the burdens which it seems it was their lot to bear for the remainder of their lives. If this should meet the eye of any London cab-horse—for what may we not expect in these days of march of intellect and national education?—let him thank his lucky star that he is not a Turkish pack-horse, made to carry something nearly as heavy as a cab up and down rocks as inaccessible as those immortalized in the famous verse—

“Commodore Rogers was a man

Exceedingly brave—particular;

And he climb’d up very high rocks,

Exceedingly high—perpendicular.”

Thus saith the poet; what Commodore Rogers would have said if he had been of our party, I don’t know. Those ladies and gentlemen who, leaning back in easy carriages, bowl along the great roads of the Simplon, may imagine what traveling there may have been over the Alps before the roads were made, while the nature of the ground is such, in two or three places, that, unless at an incredible expense in engineering, and a prodigious daily outlay to keep them clear of snow, no road ever could be made; yet this is the only line of communication between Constantinople and Persia. Through these awful chasms and precipices all the merchandise is carried which passes between these two great nations. The quiet Manchester stuffs, accustomed to the broad-wheel wagons of Europe, and the rail-ways and canals of England, must feel dreadfully jolted when they arrive at this portion of their journey. How the crockery bears it is easily understood by those who open the packages of this kind of ware at the end of the journey, when cups and saucers take the appearance of small geological specimens, though some do survive, notwithstanding the regular custom of the muleteers to set down their loads every evening by the summary process of untying with a jerk a certain cunning knot in the rope which holds the bales in their places on each side of the pack-horse: these immediately come down with a crash upon the ground, from whence they are rolled along and built up into a wall, on the lee side of which a fire is lit and the muleteers sleep when there is no khan to retire to for the night.

On this journey I for the first time learned the true value of tea. One of the kawasses of the Russian commissioners had a curious little box, covered with cowskin, tied behind his saddle; about twice a day he galloped off like mad, his arms and stirrups, &c., making a noise as he started like that of upsetting all the fire-irons in a room at home. In about half an hour we came up with him again, discovering his whereabouts by seeing his panting horse led up and down by some small boy before a hovel, into which we immediately dived. There we found the kawass kneeling by a blazing fire, with the cowskin box open on the ground beside him, from whence he presently produced glass tumblers of delicious caravan tea,[1] sweetened with sugar-candy, and a thin slice of lemon floating on the top of each cup. This is the real way to drink tea, only one can not always get caravan tea, and, when you can, it costs a guinea a pound, more or less; but its refreshing, calming, and invigorating powers are truly remarkable.

In former days, in many a long and weary march, I found a pipe of great service in quieting the tired and excited nerves; having no love for smoking under ordinary circumstances, these were the only occasions when a long chibouk did seem to be grateful and comforting. That this is pretty universally acknowledged I gather from the habit of all the solemn old Turks in Egypt and hot climates during the fast of Ramadan, who invariably take a good whiff from their pipes the moment that sunset is announced by the firing of a gun in cities, or on the disappearance of its rays toward the west in the country. Supper does not appear to be looked forward to with the same impatience as the first puff from the chibouk. No pipe, however, possesses the agreeable qualities of a cup of hot good tea made in this way; no other beverage or contrivance that I know of produces so soothing an effect, and that in so short a time. In a few minutes the glasses, and the little teapot, and two canisters for tea and sugar-candy, retired into the recesses of the cowskin box; the poor horses, who had had no tea, were again mounted, and on we rode over the rocks and stones, one after the other, in a long line, the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, interrupted every now and then by the crash of one of our boxes against a rock, and the exclamations of the katergis as its bearer wallowed into a hole or tumbled over some horrible place, from whence it seemed impossible that he should ever be got up again. However, he always was, and at last we hardly took notice of one of these little accidents, and notwithstanding which we generally got through the mountains at the rate of about thirty miles a day.

On the second day from Trebizond we arrived at the snow; the hoods with which we had provided ourselves were pulled over our heads. I tied my bridle to the pommel of my saddle, put my hands in my pockets, and nevertheless galloped along—at least the horse did, and all the better for my not holding the bridle. In mountain traveling this is perhaps the most necessary of all the whole craft and art of horsemanship, not to touch the bridle on any occasion, except when you want to stop the horse; for, in difficult circumstances, a horse or mule goes much better if he is left to his own devices. In some dreadful places, I have seen a horse smell the ground, and then, resting on his haunches, put one foot forward as gently as if it was a finger, cautiously to feel the way. They have a wonderful instinct of self-preservation, seeming quite aware of the perils of false steps, and the dangers by which they are surrounded on the ledges of bleak mountains, and in passing bogs and torrents in the valleys below.

At Beyboort we were received by the governor, a Bey, who gave us a famous good dinner or supper, whereof we all ate an incredible quantity, and almost as much more at breakfast next morning. At Gumush Hané, where there are silver mines, a good-natured old gentleman who was sitting by the roadside gave me the most delicious pear I ever tasted. This place is famous for its pears. Being situated in a deep valley, the climate is much better than most parts of the country on this road. Here we put up in a good house, slept like tops, and waddled off next morning as before. I had an enormous pair of boots lined with sheepskin, which were the envy and admiration of the party: they were amazing snug certainly, and nearly came up to my middle. If they had been a little bit larger, I might have crept into one at night, which would have been a great convenience; they were of the greatest service on horseback, but on foot I had much difficulty in getting along, and was sorry I had neglected to inquire how Jack the Giant-killer managed with his seven-league boots. Before arriving at Beyboort we passed the mountain of Zigana Dagh, by a place where a whole caravan accompanying the harem of the Pasha of Moush had been overwhelmed in an avalanche, over the icy blocks of which we made our way, the bodies of the unfortunate party and all the poor ladies lying buried far below. Beyond Gumush Hané rises the mountain of Hoshabounar, which is a part of the chain that bounds the great plain of Erzeroom. This was the worst part of the whole journey: we approached it by interminable plains of snow, along which the track appeared like a narrow black line. These plains of snow, which look so even to the sight, are not always really so; the hollows and inequalities being filled with the snow, you may fall into a hole and be smothered if you leave the path. This path is hardened by the passage of caravans, which tread down the snow into a track of ice just wide enough for a single file of horses; but while you think you are on a plain, you are, in fact, riding on the top of a wall or ridge, from whence, if your horse should chance to slip, you do not know how deep you may sink down into the soft snow on either side.

At the top of the mountain we met thirty horses which the Pasha of Erzeroom had sent for our use. We had above thirty of our own, so now there were sixty horses in our train. The Russian commissioner and I left all these behind, and rode on together with two or three guards, accompanied by the chief of the village where we were to sleep. At last we came to the brow of the hill—we could not see to the bottom from the snow that was falling—it was as steep as the roof of a house, and the road consisted of a series of holes, about six inches deep, and about eighteen inches apart, the track being about sixteen inches wide. To my surprise, the chief of the village, a man in long scarlet robes, immediately dashed at a gallop down this road, or ladder, as they call it; the Russian commissioner followed him; and I, thinking that it would not do for an Englishman to be beat by a Russian or a Turk, threw my bridle on my horse’s neck and galloped after them. Never did I see such a place to ride in! Down and down we went, plunging, sliding, scrambling in and out of the deep holes, the snow flying up like spray around us, to meet its brother snow that was falling from the sky. It was wonderful how the horses kept their feet; they burst out into perspiration as if it had been summer. I was as hot as fire with the exertion. Still down we went, headlong as it seemed, till at last I found myself sliding and bounding on level ground, and, rushing over some horses which were standing in an open space, I discovered that I was in a village, and was presently helped off my panting horse by the gentleman in the red pelisse, who showed the way into a cow-stable, the usual place in which we put up at night. Thus ended the most extraordinary piece of horsemanship I ever joined in. It was not wonderful, perhaps, for the rider, but how the horses kept their feet, and how they had strength enough to undergo such a wonderful series of leaps and plunges, out of one hole into another, appeared quite astonishing to me. The next day we proceeded to Erzeroom, and at a village about two hours’ distance we were met by all the authorities of the city on horseback. Some horses with magnificent housings were sent by the Pasha for the principal personages, and we rode into the town in a sort of procession, accompanied by perhaps 200 well-mounted cavaliers caracoling and prancing in every direction.

GENERAL VIEW OF ERZEROOM.

[1]

Caravan tea is tea which is brought by caravans, over land, from China, through the great deserts of Tartary: it is much superior to the tea which comes by sea. ↑

CHAPTER III.

The Consulate at Erzeroom.—Subterranean Dwellings.—Snow-blindness.—Effects of the severe Climate.—The City: its Population, Defenses, and Buildings.—Our House and Household.—Armenian Country-houses.—The Ox-stable.

We were hospitably entertained at the British Consulate till the Pasha could get a house prepared for us to occupy during our stay; but, as Mr. Pepys says, “Lord, to see!” what a place this is at Erzeroom! I have never seen or heard of any thing the least like it. It is totally and entirely different from any thing I ever saw before. As the whole view, whichever way one looked, was wrapped in interminable snow, we had not at first any very distinct idea of the nature of the ground that there might be underneath; the tops of the houses being flat, the snow-covered city did not resemble any other town, but appeared more like a great rabbit-warren; many of the houses being wholly or partly subterranean, the doors looked like burrows. In the neighborhood of the consulate (very comfortable within, from the excellent arrangements of Mr. Brant) there were several large heaps and mounds of earth, and it was difficult to the uninitiated to discriminate correctly as to which was a house and which was a heap of soil or stones. Streets, glass windows, green doors with brass knockers, areas, and chimney-pots, were things only known from the accounts of travelers from the distant regions where such things are used. Very few people were about, the bulk of the population hybernating at this time of the year in their strange holes and burrows. The bright colors of the Oriental dresses looked to my eye strangely out of place in the cold, dirty snow; scarlet robes, jackets embroidered with gold, brilliant green and white costumes, were associated in my mind with a hot sun, a dry climate, and fine weather. A bright sky there was, with the sun shining away as if it was all right, but his rays gave no heat, and only put your eyes out with its glare upon the snow. This glare has an extraordinary effect, sometimes bringing on a blindness called snow-blindness, and raising blisters on the face precisely like those which are produced by exposure to extreme heat. Another inconvenience has an absurd effect: the breath, out of doors, congeals upon the mustaches and beard, and speedily produces icicles, which prevent the possibility of opening the mouth. My mustaches were converted each day into two sharp icicles, and if any thing came against them it hurt horribly; and those who wore long beards were often obliged to commence the series of Turkish civilities in dumb show; their faces being fixtures for the time, they were not able to speak till their beards thawed. A curious phenomenon might also be observed upon the door of one of the subterranean stables being opened, when, although the day was clear and fine without, the warm air within immediately congealed into a little fall of snow; this might be seen in great perfection every morning on the first opening of the outer door, when the house was warm from its having been shut up all night.

Erzeroom is situated in an extensive elevated plain, about thirty miles long and about ten wide, lying between 7000 and 8000 feet above the level of the sea. It is surrounded on all sides with the tops of lofty mountains, many of which are covered with eternal snow. The city is said to contain between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, but I do not myself think that it contains much more than 20,000; this I had no correct means of ascertaining. The city is said to have been, and probably was, more populous before the disasters of the last Russian war. It stands on a small hill, or several hills, at the foot of a mountain with a double top, called Devé Dagh, the Camel Mountain. The original city is nearly a square, and is surrounded by a double wall with peculiarly-shaped towers, a sort of pentagon, about 20 towers on each side, except on the south side, where a great part of the walls is fallen down. Within these walls, on an elevated mound, is the smaller square of the citadel, where there are some curious ancient buildings and a prison, which I must describe afterward; a ditch, where it is not filled up with rubbish and neglect, surrounds the walls of the city; and beyond this are the suburbs, where the greater part of the population reside. Beyond this, an immense work was accomplished as a defense against the Russian invaders. This is an enormous fosse, so large, and deep, and wide, as to resemble a ravine in many places. It was some time before I was aware that this was an artificial work. As there are no ramparts, walls, or breastworks on the inner side of that immense excavation, it can have been of no more use than if it did not exist, and did not, I believe, stop any of the Russians for five minutes. They probably marched down one side and up the other, supposing it to be a pleasing natural valley, useful as a promenade in fine weather, and the prodigious labor employed on such a work must have been entirely thrown away.

The palace of the Pasha, that of the Cadi and other functionaries, are within the walls of the town. The doorways are the only parts of the houses on which any architectural ornaments are displayed; many of these are of carved stone, with inscriptions in Turkish beautifully cut above them. There are said to be seventeen baths, but none of them are particularly handsome, though the principal apartment is covered with a dome, like those in finer towns. The mosques amount, it is said, to forty-five: I never saw half so many myself. Many of them are insignificant edifices. The principal one, or cathedral, as it may be called, is of great size, its flat, turf-covered roof supported by various thick piers and pointed arches. The finest buildings are several ancient tombs: these are circular towers, from twenty to thirty feet in diameter, with conical stone roofs, beautifully built and ornamented. There must be twenty or thirty of these very singular edifices, whose dates I was unable to ascertain; they probably vary from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, judging from a comparison of their ornamental work with Saracenic buildings in other parts of the world.

The most beautiful buildings of Erzeroom are two ancient medressés or colleges, or perhaps they may be considered more as a kind of alms-houses, built for the accommodation of a certain number of Mollahs, whose duty it was to pray around the tomb of the founder, adjoining to which they are erected. One of these stands immediately to the left hand on entering the principal gateway of the town; above its elaborately-sculptured door are two most beautiful minarets, known by the name of the iki chífteh. These are built of an exceedingly fine brick, and are fluted like Ionic columns, the edges of the flutings being composed of turquoise-blue bricks, which produces on the capitals or galleries, as well as on the shafts, the appearance of a bright azure pattern on a dark-colored ground. The roof of this very beautiful building has fallen in, but the delicacy of the arabesques, cut in many places in alto-relief in a very hard stone, would excite admiration in India, and equals the most famous works of Italy. The other medressé is in a still worse condition, a great cannon-foundry having been erected in the middle of it. The whole building is broken, smoked, and injured; still, what remains shows how fine it must have been.

There are one or two Greek churches and two Armenian churches here, both very small, dark, cramped places, with immensely thick walls and hewn-stone roofs. They appear to be of great antiquity, but can boast of no other merit. Adjoining the principal one, in which is a famous miraculous picture of St. George, they were building a large and handsome church, which is now completed, in the Basilica form, with an arched stone roof. Cut stone being very expensive, and indeed, from the want of good masons, very difficult to procure, the priests bethought themselves of a happy expedient to secure square hewn stone for the corners, door-way, windows, &c., of the new cathedral. They told their flock that, as the ancient tomb-stones were of no use to the departed, it would be a meritorious act in the living to bring them to assist in the erection of the church. They managed this so well, that every one brought on his own back, or at his own expense, the tombstones of his ancestors, and those were grieved and offended who could not gain admission for the tomb-stones of their families to complete a window or support a wall. The work advanced rapidly during the summer, and any large, flat slabs of stone were reserved for the covering of the roof. It promised to be, and I hear now is, a handsome church, strong and solid enough to resist the awful climate, and the snow which lies there for months every year. The Armenian inscriptions and emblems on the stones have a singular effect; but I think, under the circumstances, the priests were quite right to build up with the tombstones of the dead a house of prayer for those about to die.

ERZEROOM—View from the House of the British Commissioners.

In course of time a house was ready for our reception: though not so large as those of some of the great authorities, it was one of the largest class of houses in Erzeroom, and a description of its arrangements will convey an idea of what most of the others were. It was situated in a very good position on the top of a hill, close to the house of the Russian commissioner, and on the same side of the town as those of the English and Russian consuls. From its small, doubly-glazed windows we looked, over a narrow valley covered with houses, on the walls and tower of the citadel, which stood on the hill directly opposite. The walls and towers, and the principal gateway of the town, with its two graceful minarets, to the left hand, and a distant prospect of the great plain and the River Euphrates, and the mountains over which we had traveled, to the right, completed our view, which was, perhaps, the best enjoyed by any house in the place. Our house, like most of the others, was built with great solidity, of rough stone, with large blocks at the corners; the roof was flat, and covered with green turf. The windows were small, like port-holes, but the door was a large arch, through which we rode into the gloomy, sepulchral-looking hall, out of which opened the stables on the right hand, the kitchen, and offices, and some other rooms on the left, while in front a dark staircase of square stones and heavy beams looked as if it had tumbled through the ceiling, and gave access to the upper floor. There was a little garden or yard under the windows, where we planted vegetables, and in one part of which several English dogs, two Persian greyhounds, and an Armenian turnspit, walked about in the daytime. The railing between this and the garden part of the yard was a triumph of art, accomplished by a Turkish guard, who turned his sword into a plow-share when not wanted to look terrific. We had also nineteen lambs, who grazed on the top of the highest part of the house, where they were carried up every morning, except occasionally when there was such a wind that they would be in danger of being blown away. We had I know not how many sheep with large tails; these took a walk every day with a shepherd, who led out all the sheep belonging to the inhabitants of that part of the town. Every house having a few, they are marked, and all come home every evening to their respective houses, and go out again the next morning, and eat what they can get upon the mountains. Our household contained, besides ourselves and servants, one white Persian cat, with a spot on his back, and his tail painted pink with hennah (this race, with long, silky hair falling to the ground as it walks along, comes from Van); five pigeons, and one hen, the rest having fallen victims to the rapacity of mankind; and a lemming,[1] who lived in a brass foot-tub and ate biscuits. This last beast was sadly frightened by a mouse which I put into his habitation one day, and which made use of his back to jump out, after receiving a severe bite in the tail. He generally slept all day, and took a small walk in the tub in the evening.

All the building except the hall and stable had a garden on the roof, that part only being two stories high. The kitchen and some of the other rooms were lit by a skylight, the earth at the back of them being on a level with their ceilings. The walls of the upper floor were not exactly over those below, but were supported by immense beams, some of which had given way, and the principal room leaned over to the left frightfully. Those rooms which are lit by windows have two rows of them one above the other, except the dining-room and ante-room, which had only one row, too high from the floor to look out of, but very convenient for looking into, from the upper garden and the terrace of the next house. The rooms had all white-washed walls, wooden flat ceilings curiously carved and painted. On the floors there was blue cloth instead of carpets, and divans of red cloth. A few chairs, and some lumbering deal tables, with covers on them, at which we wrote, concluded our list of furniture and “genuine effects.” The great difficulty was the eating and drinking part of the arrangements. Every thing except bread and meat came on horses from Constantinople, and about one third of the bottles brought from thence were usually broken. Glass, for the windows, was a curious and expensive luxury, oiled paper being generally used, with a little bit of real glass to peep out of in each, or sometimes only in one window. Wood also was very dear, as there were no trees within a distance of thirty hours. The climate is not too cold for the growth of timber, I should think, for there were a few poplars in the yards near the houses, but the people are too improvident to plant trees, and, except some prodigiously large cabbages, horticulture is not much practiced near the town.

The country houses of Armenia are constructed somewhat differently from those of the towns. When a man wishes—I can not call it to build a house, or erect a house, or set up a house, as none of these terms are applicable—but when a house is to be constructed, the following is the way in which it is set about. A space of ground is marked out, perhaps nearly an English acre in extent; then the whole space is excavated to the depth of about five feet: one part of the excavation is set apart for the great cow-stable; this may be fifty or one hundred feet long, and nearly as wide. Having got so far, some trees are the next requisite; these trees being cut down, the trunks are chopped into lengths of eight or nine feet, the general height of the rooms, and are placed in two or four rows, to be used as columns down the great stable; the larger branches, without being squared or shaped, are laid across from pillar to pillar as beams; the smaller branches are laid across these, the twigs on the top, till the entire trees are used up; the twigs are sometimes tied up in fagots, sometimes not: over this is spread some of the earth that was excavated from below; this is well trodden down, then more earth is added, and on the top of all is laid the turf which formed the surface of the soil before it was moved. Round the stable, in no particular order, smaller rooms are formed; if they are large, their roofs are supported by columns like the stable. In a large house there are often two stables. The space of ground taken up by a rich man’s house is prodigious, the turfed roof forming a small field. The lesser rooms in this subterranean habitation are divided from the stable and from each other by rough stone walls well filled up with clay or mud; their ceilings are contrived by laying beams across each other, two along and two across, in the form of a low pyramid, so that the ceiling is a kind of low square dome: the smaller rooms form store-rooms and apartments for the women. Each room has a rough stone fire-place opposite the door; and in the roof, generally over the door, there is one window about eighteen inches square, glazed with a piece of oiled paper. Outside, these windows look like large mole-hills, with a bit of plaster on one side surrounding the oiled paper, or glass, which transmits the light. Inside, the window is perceived at the end of a funnel, widening greatly toward the room, and contrived so as to throw the light to the centre of the apartment, opposite the fire-place, where a fire of tezek, or dried cow-dung and chopped straw, is constantly smouldering. Over the chimney-piece hangs an iron lamp of simple construction, which, with the help of the fire, produces a dim light in the long nights of winter. There is a divan, usually covered with most beautiful Koordish carpets, which last forever, on each side of the fire-place; and large wooden pegs, projecting from the walls, serve to hang up guns, pistols, cloaks, and any thing else. Some of these rooms are rather roughly pretty in appearance; the floors are covered with tekkè, a thick gray felt, and, among smart people, Persian carpets are laid over the felt, their beautiful colors producing a rich and comfortable effect. About half way up the chimney is a wooden door or damper, which is opened and shut by means of a string; and when it is very cold weather, and they want to be snug and fusty down below, this door is shut, and the room becomes as hot as an oven; the chimney does not rise more than two feet above ground, and has a large flat stone on the top to keep the snow from falling in, as well as the lambs and children; the smoke escapes by apertures on the sides just below the coping-stone. The chimneys look like toadstools from the outside, rising a little above the snow or the grass which grows upon the roof. These subterranean habitations are constructed, not on the side of a hill, but on the side of a gentle slope; and all the earth excavated for the house is thrown back again upon the roof in such a manner that on three sides there is often no sign of any dwelling existing underneath. The entrance is on the lower side of the slope, and there the mound is often visible, as it is raised four or five feet above the level of the hill-side. There are no fences to keep people off the roof, which has no appearance different from the rest of the country. It is often only the dirt opposite the doors, the cattle, and people standing about, which gives information of a small village being present, particularly during the eight months of snow, and ice, and intense cold, when no one stirs abroad except for matters of importance. When a house is ruined and deserted, these holes are sometimes rather dangerous, as the horse you are riding may put his foot into an old chimney and break his leg, there being very frequently no appearance of a habitation below, while you are passing through the open, desolate country, of which the roof seems to be a part. There are stories, perhaps founded on fact, of hungry thieves lifting the flat stone off the top of the chimney, and fishing up the kettle in which the supper was stewing over the fire below with a hooked stick—a feat which would not be at all difficult if the cook was thinking of something else, as sometimes will happen even in the best-regulated families.

The most curious and remarkable part of the house is the great ox-stable, which often holds some scores of cattle. Out of this stable they do not stir, frequently, during the whole winter season, and it is the breath and heat of these animals which warm the house; besides which, they manufacture all the fuel for the establishment: they are fed upon straw, bruised to small bits by the sledge which is driven round the threshing-floor to separate the corn from the husk after harvest time. In one corner of this huge, dim stable, near the entrance door, a wooden platform is raised three feet from the ground; two sides of it are bounded by the stone wall of the house, in one of which, opposite the door, is the fire-place; the other two sides of the square platform have open wooden rails to keep off the cows. This original contrivance is the salemlik, or reception-room, where the master sits, and where he entertains his guests, who, as they stumble into the obscure den from the glare of the sun shining on the snow outside, are received with a yell by all the dogs, who live under the platform. This place is fitted up with divans and carpets; arms and saddles hang against the walls; the horses of the chief are tethered nearest to the rails, the donkeys and cows further off. Among the horses there is always an immense fat tame sheep; this is a universal custom in every stable in Turkey, under or above ground. Among some of the Koordish tribes, a young wild boar is kept in the stable with the horses—a remarkable custom among Mohammedans, who consider the whole race of swine as unclean beasts; this is the only case in which they are tolerated. A small flock of other sheep are sometimes scampering about, or kept from doing so, among the cows; chickens peck in the litter, and several grave cats have their allotted places on the divans of the chief, his wife, and others of his family. A vacant, that is, cowless space, is left between the steps leading up to the platform and the entrance door of the house; this part answers to the entrance hall, as man and beast pass through it on coming in or going out, immediately before the eyes of the master of the house. From hence a sloping passage, about six feet wide, leads to the open air; it has an outer door at the upper end, and an inner door below: this passage may be from ten to twenty feet long. The outer door is a common strong wooden one, but the inner doors all over the house are as singular as the rest of the arrangements. The house-door is of the usual size for the cows and horses to pass through, the others are not more than five feet high; they are constructed in the following manner: the bare wooden valve is first covered with ketché or felt, and on the inside the skin of a sheep, with its legs and arms on, just in the shape in which it came off the animal when it was skinned, being dyed red, is nailed over the felt. On the other side of the door, down the middle, is a long square pipe or box, in which hangs a heavy log of wood, attached to a cord fixed to the upper part of the door-case, which keeps the door shut, as it swings to again after it has been opened, and keeps out the drafts, and keeps in the warm air generated by cows, fires, and lamps, so that the atmosphere is always temperate within, while the cold is such without that men are frozen to death if they stand still even for a short time in the rigorous climate of an Armenian winter.

[1]

Those who take an interest in natural history should read the accounts of the extraordinary migrations of the lemmings, which occur periodically in Norway, after a fixed number of years. ↑

CHAPTER IV.

Narrow Escape from Suffocation.—Death of Noori Effendi.—A good Shot.—History of Mirza Tekee.—Persian Ideas of the Principles of Government.—The “Blood-drinker.”—Massacre at Kerbela.—Sanctity of the Place.—History of Hossein.—Attack on Kerbela, and Defeat of the Persians.—Good Effects of Commissioners’ Exertions.

The first aspect of affairs at Erzeroom was not very satisfactory in any way. The cold and dismal weather was enough to prevent all enjoyment out of doors, and in-doors we had little cause of rejoicing. On first taking possession of our house, my companions had the narrowest possible escape of death from suffocation. The grooms in the stable below the drawing-room had lit an immense fire of charcoal, not for any particular object beyond that common to all servants of all countries, that of wasting their master’s goods, which they had not to pay for themselves. The fumes from the charcoal penetrated the ceiling, when, most fortunately, the Russian commissioner came in, and, finding his two English friends in a half-stupefied state, helped them out of the room on to the terrace, where they both fell down fainting on the snow, and were only recovered after some time and difficulty. If the Russian commissioner had not arrived so opportunely, they would soon have perished. I did not participate in this risk, because I was laid up at the Consulate with an attack of fever, which effectually prevented my moving to my own house.

Another misfortune occurred almost at the same period. Noori Effendi, the Turkish plenipotentiary, died suddenly of apoplexy in his bath; he had been embassador in London and at Vienna. All prospect of getting on with our affairs was put off by this unfortunate circumstance. Subsequently, Enveri Effendi, formerly secretary to Noori, was appointed in his place, but he did not arrive for some time after the death of his former chief.

Mirza Jaffer, an old acquaintance of mine when he was embassador from Persia to the Porte, was too unwell to leave Tabriz, and Mirza Tekee was appointed Persian plenipotentiary instead. On his arrival within sight of Erzeroom from Persia, all the great people, except the Pasha and the commissioners, went out on horseback to meet him, and accompany him on his entry into the town. There was a great concourse and a prodigious firing of guns at full gallop, which, as the guns are generally loaded with ball cartridge, bought ready made in the bazaar, though intended as an honor, is a somewhat dangerous display. Unable to resist so picturesque a sight, I had ridden out on the Persian road, though I did not join the escort, and, having returned, I was walking up and down on the roof of the house, watching the crowds passing in the valley below, and looking at the great guns of the citadel, which the soldiers were firing as a salute. They fired very well, in very good time, but I observed several petty officers and a number of men busily employed at one gun, the last to the left hand near the corner of the battery. At length this gun was loaded. A prodigious deal of peeping and pointing took place out of the embrasure, and, just as I was turning in my walk, bang went the cannon, and I was covered with dust from something which struck the ground in the yard in a line below my feet. On looking down to see what this could be, I saw a ball stuck in the earth: the soldiers had all disappeared from the ramparts of the citadel, and I found they had been taking a shot at the British commissioner. A very good shot it was too, exactly in the line, but the ball, not being heavy enough, had fallen a little short, so I was missed. They had manufactured a ball with a large stone, wound round with rope to make it fit the gun, to shoot at the Frank, and that was the occasion of all the peeping and crowding of the men round the gun which I had observed.

As Mirza Tekee is now no more, and he was beyond all comparison the most interesting of those assembled at the congress of Erzeroom, I will give a short account of his history. Mirza Tekee was the son of the cook of Bahman Meerza, brother of Mohammed Shah, and governor of the province of Tabriz. The cook’s little boy was brought up with the children of his master and educated with them; being a clever boy, as soon as he was old enough he was put into the office of accounts, under the commander-in-chief, the famous Emir Nizam, who was employed in drilling the Persian army in the European style. Tekee became Vizir ul Nizam, or adjutant general, in course of time, under the old Emir Nizam, and also amassed great wealth; and as the Shah did not like the idea of paying the expenses of his plenipotentiary—“base is the slave that pays”—he sent Mirza Tekee to Erzeroom with many flattering speeches and promises, none of which he intended to fulfill. The cunning old prime minister, Hadji Meerza Agassi, who was sedulously employed in feathering his own nest, was jealous of Mirza Tekee, and very glad to get him safe out of the way. The Turks and Persians, as every body knows, hate each other religiously, which seems always to be the worst sort of hatred. The Soonis and the Shiahs are, as it were, Protestants and Papists in the Mohammedan faith; and if these two countries are ever reconciled for a time, the smouldering flame is sure to break out again at the first convenient opportunity, and it will do so to the end of time. In 1845, the Turks, who disliked Mirza Tekee with more than common aversion, from his dignified bearing and stately manners, gave out various accusations against him and some members of his household. A fanatical mob of many thousand indignant Soonis surrounded all that quarter of the town, attacked the Persian plenipotentiary’s house, which was besieged for some hours, and volleys after volleys of rifle-shots were fired at the windows, while from within Mirza Tekee only permitted his party to fire blank cartridges. Izzet Pasha, a drunken old gentleman of eighty, who had succeeded Kiamili Pasha as governor of Erzeroom through the intrigues of Enveri Effendi, sat on horseback and looked on, and took no part in the disturbance, though he had all his troops, amounting to several thousand men, under arms. For this conduct he was turned out of his government, and was succeeded by Bahri Pasha, who in 1847 was shot dead by one of his own servants, of the name of Delhi Ibrahim—accidentally or not, does not appear.

Colonel Williams did every thing in his power to assist Mirza Tekee, and risked his life in the affray; but he received no assistance from the Pasha or any of the authorities, who made no attempt to quell the riot.

The Turks swore they would have blood, and that one of the Persians must be given up to them as a sacrifice. A poor man, who had called that morning to say that he was going to Tabriz, and would be happy to carry any letters or messages there, was thrown out of the window and torn to pieces by the mob. Another Persian, a gentleman, secretary to Mirza Tekee, was killed by a butcher the same day, in another part of the town, where he was walking in ignorance of the disturbance that was going on. The Mirza’s house was pillaged, the roof and doors broken in, and every thing destroyed that the mob could get hold of. He himself was only saved by barricading a strong room in a back part of the house, where he and his servants defended themselves for many hours, till the Turks dispersed of their own accord. The Sultan afterward sent him £8000 in repayment of his losses in this disgraceful outrage.

In June, 1847, after he had signed the treaty of peace and commerce between Turkey and Persia with Enveri Effendi and the British and Russian Commissioners, he returned to Tabriz. On the death of the Emir Nizam, he succeeded to his office of commander-in-chief. During the last illness of Mohammed Shah, Bahman Meerza had been intriguing in hopes of succeeding to the throne; but being unsuccessful, and being also found out, he escaped to Teflis, where he still resides, and is protected by the Czar, who keeps him in terrorem over the present Shah, who may be dethroned any day, in which case Bahman Meerza is all ready to reign in his stead.

When Mohammed Shah, who had done nothing all his life but shoot sparrows with a pistol, departed from this world, Mirza Tekee marched the Persian army to Teheran, and seated the young Prince Noor Eddin upon the throne. Noor Eddin Shah gave him his sister in marriage: she is said to have been much attached to her husband, who also succeeded to the immense territorial possessions of Hadji Meerza Agassi, the late prime minister of Persia. The Hadji had been tutor to Mohammed Shah, and became one of the most famous of the Grand Vizirs of that most blundering of dynasties. As a matter of course, when he became rich enough he was robbed by his master, having been himself the greatest extortioner on record for many years. The Shah had allowed him to keep an enormous treasure in gold, silver, and jewels, with which he retired to Kerbela, where he died in the odor of sanctity in 1850.

Mirza Tekee was now seated on the highest pinnacle of the temple of prosperity. The extent of the possessions which the Shah had handed over to him from the plunder of the Hadji was so great as to be hardly credible, and, by a judicious squeezing, the towns, villages, and domains would have yielded the revenue of a petty king. However, all prime ministers are detested—that is, in human nature; first, there is the opposite party in politics, some of whom think differently as to the form and manner in which the taxes should be levied in Europe, the villages racked in Persia. All—whatever they may think on political subjects—feel sure they ought to be in place, rather than the party then in power; if to these are added all thieves, rogues, revolutionists, and those sorts of people, who have a natural antipathy to all government, law, or possession of wealth in the hands of any man except the one individual himself, he being more jealous of his friend than of any other person, a great mass of the population are not only opposed to the minister for the time being, but are in constant readiness to pull down whatever is above them, good, indifferent, or bad.

It is said that the great enemy of Mirza Tekee at court was the Shah’s mother, a lady who in Persia and Turkey enjoys an extraordinary degree of power, wealth, and dignity. In Turkey, the Sultana Validé has the right to build a royal mosque, and to use a caique like that of her son; she is above the law, and can do any thing she likes. If she likes to do good, she can do much good; if she likes to do evil, she can do much evil. Between those who were jealous of the power and who hated the strong government of Mirza Tekee, a powerful party was created, who got hold of the weak mind of the young Shah, who owed every thing in this world to his minister; his destruction was agreed upon, and he was given leave to go to Koom, where he had an estate. So secretly were affairs managed that his suspicions do not seem to have been aroused; his young wife followed him, with all her train, looking forward to the pleasure of living with her husband for a while in the quiet and retirement of a beautiful country; but when she arrived within sight of the town of Koom, a messenger came out to meet her, and the news that he brought was that Mirza Tekee had been killed by the order of her brother the Shah, whose emissaries had seized him unexpectedly in the bath. He made a desperate resistance, but he was overpowered; they opened his veins and held him down till the Grand Vizir had bled to death. No crime whatever was alleged against him: he was murdered foully by the Shah, who thus destroyed one of his best and most honest subjects at the instigation of some of the most infamous and worst. This happened in the year 1851.

There is nothing, however, very unusual in this termination of the life and fortunes of the prime minister of Persia, only it is usually done under more extenuating circumstances. The singular ideas which they entertain of the principles of government are summed up in the notion that it is better to be in the hands of one furious ogre than at the mercy of a hundred tyrants. For this reason the tribes of the Kuzzulbash admire a truculent Shah, such as Aga Mohammed Shah, and they like a Grand Vizir who lets nobody rob and plunder except himself. When he is fat and fit for killing, the blood-drinker on the throne cuts off his head, or strangles him, as the case may be, and then takes possession of his property, throwing a sop to the mob occasionally by allowing them to sack the great man’s house. I do not use the above-mentioned epithet as a term of reprehension or abuse, for Hunkiar is one of the recognized titles of the Sultan of Turkey and of other Eastern sovereigns. The treaty of Hunkiar Skellessi, which made so great a sensation in its day, was so called from the name of a place on the Asiatic shores of the Bosporus. The name means the “Blood-drinker’s Stairs”—an appellation at this time equally suited to either of the “high contracting powers.”

The plenipotentiaries and commissioners being assembled, every thing was in the greatest danger of falling to pieces on the outset, by the very first dispatches which we received, as these related to a frightful massacre which had just taken place at Kerbela, where 22,000 Persians were reported to have been killed by the Turks. Kerbela, in the pashalik of Bagdad, is a Turkish fortified place, containing the tomb of Hossein, the brother of Hassan, and son of Ali, the great saint of the Shiah, or Persian form of the Mohammedan religion. Not only do an immense number of Persians habitually reside there, but every one who has the power strives to retire there in his latter days, that he may lay his bones in the neighborhood of the golden dome which covers the ashes of Hossein. Those who die at a distance are so anxious at least to be buried at Kerbela, that the great article of commerce in that direction consists of the dead bodies of Persian men and women, which are brought by thousands every year, from all parts of the dominions of the Shah, by endless caravans of horses, mules, and camels, many hundreds of which unlucky animals pass their whole lives from year to year in carrying these horrid burdens, which infect the air in all the villages through which they pass.

So great is the sanctity of Kerbela, that, in the estimation of the sect of Ali, it even may be said to surpass that of Mecca, for they, among Mohammedans, are those who “by their traditions have made the law of none effect.” The history of the death of Hossein is so interesting an episode in the history of this country, that I am tempted to give a short account of it, for the benefit of those who may not be well acquainted with the history of the successors of Mohammed, and upon whose fortunes so much of the welfare and also the policy of the various nations of the East, from the seventh century to the present time, depends—premising that the principal cause of the rancorous hatred which always has existed, and still exists in full force, between the Sooni Turks and the Shiah Persians, is principally founded upon events connected with the death of the Imaum Hossein, and the feeling is kept up in full vigor in Persia by a sort of drama, representing the following history, which is enacted before the Shah, and in every town in Persia, every year, at the annual feast of Noo Rooz, which continues for ten days. In one of the acts of this most curious ceremony, a Frank embassador is brought before the audience, who intercedes for the life of Hossein and his followers with the general of the army of Yezid. Who he can have been there is no means of knowing, but he may possibly represent an embassador from the Greek Emperor of Constantinople, who may have been passing on his way to the court of the Caliph. However this may be, his presence produces a kindly feeling toward Europeans in the minds of the Persian populace.

On the death of Ali (A.D. 661), his eldest son, Hassan, was proclaimed Caliph and Imaum in Irák; the former title he was forced to resign to Moawiyah; the latter, or spiritual dignity, his followers regarded as inalienable. His rival granted him a pension, and permitted him to retire into private life. After nine years, passed for the most part in devotional exercise, he was poisoned by his wife Jaadah, who was bribed to perpetrate this execrable crime by Yezid, the son of Moawiyah.

On the death of Moawiyah (A.D. 679), his son Yezid, who succeeded, having provoked public indignation by his luxury, debauchery, and impiety, Hossein was persuaded by the discontented people of Irák to make an attempt for the recovery of his hereditary rights. The inhabitants of Cufa and Bassorah were foremost in their professions of zeal for the house of Ali, and sent Hossein a list of more than 124,000 persons, who, they said, were ready to take up arms in his cause.

Hossein did not take warning from the inconstancy and treachery which these very persons had shown in their conduct toward his father and brother. Assembling a small troop of his personal friends, and accompanied by a part of his family, he departed from Medina, the place of his residence, and was soon engaged in crossing the desert. But while he was on his journey, Yezid’s governor in Irák discovered the meditated revolt, capitally punished the leaders of the conspiracy, and so terrified the rest that they were afraid to move. When Hossein arrived near the banks of the Euphrates, instead of finding an army of his devoted adherents, he discovered that his further progress was checked by the overwhelming forces of the enemy. Determined, however, to persevere, he gave permission to all who pleased to retreat while there was yet time; to their disgrace, many of his followers left him to his fate, and he continued his route to Cufa, accompanied only by seventy-two persons. But every step increased his difficulties, and he attempted to return when it was too late. At length he was surrounded by the troops of the Caliph in the arid plains of Kerbela, his followers were cut off from their supply of water, and, when he offered to negotiate, he was told that no terms would be made, but that he should surrender at discretion. Twenty-four hours were granted him for deliberation.

Hossein’s choice was soon made: he deemed death preferable to submission, but he counseled his friends to provide for their safety either by surrender or escape. All replied that they preferred dying with their beloved leader. The only matter now to be considered was how they could sell their lives most dearly; they fortified their little encampment with a trench, and then tranquilly awaited the event.

That night Hossein slept soundly, using for a pillow the pommel of his sword. During his sleep he dreamed that Mohammed appeared to him, and predicted that they should meet the next day in Paradise. When morning dawned he related his dream to his sister Zeinab, who had accompanied him on his fatal expedition. She burst into a passion of tears, and exclaimed, “Alas! alas! my brother! What a destiny is ours! My father is dead! my mother is dead! my brother Hassan is dead! and the measure of our calamities is not yet full!”

Hossein tried to console her. “Why should you weep?” he said; “did we not come on earth to die? My father was more worthy than I; my mother was more worthy than I; my brother was more worthy than I. They are all dead; why should not we be ready to follow their example?” He then strictly enjoined his family to make no lamentation for his approaching martyrdom, telling them that a patient submission to the divine decrees was the conduct most pleasing to God and his Prophet.

When morning appeared, Hossein, having washed and perfumed himself, as if preparing for a banquet, mounted his steed, and addressed his followers in terms of endearing affection that drew tears from the eyes of the gallant warriors. Then, opening the Koran, he read the following verse: “O God, be thou my refuge in suffering, and my hope in affliction.” But the soldiers of Yezid were reluctant to assail the favorite grandson of the Prophet; they demanded of their generals to allow him to draw water from the Euphrates, a permission which would not have been refused to beasts and infidels. “Let us be cautious,” they exclaimed, “of raising our hands against him who was carried in the arms of God’s apostle. It would be, in fact, to fight against himself.” So strong were their feelings, that thirty cavaliers deserted to Hossein, resolved to share with him the glories of martyrdom.

But Yezid’s generals shared not in these sentiments. They affected to regard Hossein as an enemy of Islám. They forced their soldiers forward with blows, and exclaimed, “War to those who abandon the true religion, and separate themselves from the council of the faithful!” Hossein replied, “It is you who have abandoned the true religion; it is you who have severed yourselves from the assembly of the faithful. Ah! when your souls shall be separated from your bodies, you will learn too late which party has incurred the penalty of eternal condemnation.” Notwithstanding their vast superiority, the Caliph’s forces hesitated to engage men determined on death; they poured in their arrows from a distance, and soon dismounted the little troop of Hossein’s cavalry.

When the hour of noon arrived, Hossein solicited a suspension of arms during the time appointed for the meridian prayers. This boon was conceded with difficulty, the generals of Yezid asking “how a wretch like him could venture to address the Deity;” and adding the vilest reproaches, to which Hossein made no reply. The Persian traditions relate a fabulous circumstance, designed to exalt the character of Hossein, though fiction itself can not increase the deep interest of his history. They tell us that while he was upon his knees, the King of the Genii appeared to him, and offered, for the sake of his father Ali, to disperse his enemies in a moment. “No,” replied the generous Hossein, “what use is there in fighting any longer? I am but a guest of one breath in this transitory world; my relatives and companions are all gone, and what will it profit me to remain behind? I long for nothing now save my martyrdom; therefore depart thou, and may the Lord recompense and bless thee!” The genius was so deeply affected by the reply that his soul exhibited human weakness, and he departed weeping and lamenting.

When the hour of prayer was past, the combat was renewed. One of Hossein’s sons, and several of his nephews, lay dead around him; the rest of his followers were either killed or grievously wounded. Hitherto he had escaped unhurt, for every one dreaded to raise a hand against the grandson of Mohammed; at length a soldier, more daring than the rest, gave him a severe wound in the head. Faint with the loss of blood, he staggered to the door of his tent, and with a burst of parental affection, which at such a moment must have been mingled with unspeakable bitterness, took up his infant son, and began to caress him. While the little child was lisping out an inquiry as to the cause of his father’s emotion, it was struck dead by an arrow in Hossein’s arms. When the blood of the innocent, bubbling over his bosom, disclosed this new calamity, Hossein held up the body toward heaven, exclaiming, “O Lord! if thou refusest us thy succor, at least spare those who have not yet sinned, and turn thy wrath upon the heads of the guilty.” Parched by a burning thirst, Hossein made a desperate effort to reach the banks of the Euphrates, but, when he stooped to drink, he was struck by an arrow in the mouth, and at the same moment one of his nephews, who came to embrace him for the last time, had his hand cut off by the blow of a sabre. Hossein, now the sole survivor of his party, threw himself into the midst of the enemy, and fell beneath a thousand weapons. The officers of Yezid barbarously mangled the corpse of the unfortunate prince; they cut off his head, and sent it to the Caliph.

The escort who guarded it on its way to the court of Yezid, halting for the night in the city of Mosul, placed the box which contained it in a mosque; one of the sentinels, in the middle of the night hearing a noise within, looked through a chink in the door, and saw a gigantic figure, with a venerable white beard, take the head of Hossein out of its box, kiss it with reverence, and weep over it, a crowd of venerable personages following his example, and weeping bitterly at the same time. Fearing that some of his partisans had gained admittance, and that they would carry away the head which he was guarding, he unlocked the door and entered the mosque, upon which one of the figures he had seen approached, and, giving him a blow upon the cheek, exclaimed, “The prophets have come to pay obeisance to the head of the martyr: whither dost thou venture with such disrespect?” In the morning he related what had happened to his commander, the impression of the hand and fingers of the ancient prophet being still visible on his cheek.

The head of Hossein, and that of his brother Hassan, repose under a mosque of the highest sanctity at Cairo: it is called the mosque of Hassanen. Another mosque in the same city covers with its dome the remains of Sitté, or the lady Zeinab, their sister, who was famous for her beauty: her shrine is now visited with great devotion by the ladies and women of her faith. The headless body of Hossein was buried upon the spot where he fell, while above it afterward arose the present place of pilgrimage, so much resorted to by the Shiah sect.

The Persian fanatics of Kerbela had long declined paying the accustomed taxes to the Turkish government. Their insolent behavior had been a constant source of anger and difficulty to successive Pashas of Bagdad. At last the present Pasha was determined to enforce the law: after sending various letters to the town requesting payment of taxes and arrears, which were treated with ridicule and contempt, he gave orders to a general called Aboullabout Pasha, who appears to have been a Sooni of the most orthodox kind, to march an army of several thousand men to compel the people of Kerbela to acknowledge the rule of the Sultan. Aboullabout Pasha arrived accordingly, and pitched his camp in a grove of palms not far from the walls of the city. He brought four guns with him, and a number of topgis, or gunners, to work these instruments of destruction, if the Persians in the town did not choose to obey his commands. These impertinent fanatics treated the Turkish Pasha and his army with derision; rode out in the cool of the evening to look at the encampment, called the Turks grandsons and great grandsons of dogs, whom they would soon pack off to their kennels at Bagdad and Constantinople.

It seems that, trusting in the sanctity of the golden dome, they did not imagine that the Turks would dare to advance to extremities, particularly as several royal princesses and members of the family of the Shah had taken up their abode in the vicinity of the tomb of the Imaum. However, the four guns and the topgis advanced to a position near the walls, and the Pasha sent a civil note to the insurgents within, to say that he would trouble them to pay his little bill; at the very notion of which the Persians were seized with fits of laughter, they were so much amused at the idea of paying away their money to the Turks. After several demands for their surrender, the town was blockaded, and the Persians made various sallies on the Turkish lines, in which they were always repulsed, and, all warnings being disregarded, the four guns at last proceeded to business. The walls tumbled down immediately, the Turks walked in, the Persians ran away, making very little effectual resistance, and fire and the sword, plunder and outrage of all kinds, took place in every quarter of the devoted city. When the Turkish troops entered the town, Aboullabout Pasha, who took it all in a religious point of view, had his carpet spread upon a bastion close above the breach, and having cursed Hassan and Hossein, Sitti Zeinab and Ali, offered ten shillings a piece for the heads of any of their followers; and then went quietly to prayers for the rest of the morning, without making any effort to stop the horrors and excesses which occur when a city has been taken by storm. The accounts of the shocking outrages and barbarities committed by the brutal soldiery are not fit to be repeated. When the town was pillaged, and every thing had been seized that they could lay their hands upon, those who had not been fortunate in lighting upon any treasure, or any thing worth taking away, bethought themselves of the manner in which profit and amusement might be combined, by cutting off every one’s head that they could meet with, and taking it up to the pious old Pasha, who continued praying on his carpet on the bastion. When Persian heads became difficult to find, not being particular, a great many Turks were shot and decapitated by their fellow-soldiers, for the sake of their heads, the fraternal feeling of nationality and Sooniism not being calculated to resist the offer of one ducat per head. If this had been suffered to continue, it is probable that the state of affairs would have resembled that of the celebrated battle between the two Kilkenny cats, who ate each other up entirely with the exception of a small piece of fluff. When the massacre was stopped, 22,000 persons were reported to have been slain. This was very much exaggerated, no doubt, and it does not appear that a very correct account could be made out. A most curious and interesting report was afterward drawn up on this subject by Colonel Farrant, who was deputed by the British government to proceed to Kerbela for the purpose of pacifying the contending parties, and inquiring into the truth and extent of this terrible disaster.

This was the first subject which the congress assembled to discuss measures of amity and mutual confidence between Turkey and Persia had brought before them—one not precisely calculated to insure that calmness of debate and general good-will which all wanted to establish.

In course of time matters calmed down; things were what is called explained. We were all wonderfully civil to each other, and the Turkish and Persian followers of their respective plenipotentiaries did not express their private opinions of each other’s merits till they got home and shut the door.

Gradually they became more used to one another’s ways, and the commissioners worked like special constables to keep the peace—and very hard work they had; and it is wholly and entirely owing to their exertions that the Koordish tribes upon the frontiers, and the wild spirits on both sides who were ready to back them up, were kept down for more than ten years, during which time commerce has been enlarged, the roads have been safe, and the Christian and agricultural population from Bussora to Mount Ararat have enjoyed a tranquillity and prosperity unknown in the memory of man.

CHAPTER V.

The Boundary Question.—Koordish Chiefs.—Torture of Artin, an American Christian.—Improved State of Society in Turkey.—Execution of a Koord.—Power of Fatalism.—Gratitude of Artin’s Family.

One of the most important of the affairs which were to be settled at Erzeroom was the geographical position of the boundaries between the two empires, for along the whole line there ran a broad belt of a kind of debatable land, upon which every man felt it his duty to shoot at every other man whom he did not get near enough to run through with his long spear, or knock upon the head with his mace, these ancient style of weapons being still in use among the Koords. For the purpose of gaining local information, many of the chiefs and principal persons of the wild districts in question were brought up to Erzeroom to be examined before the plenipotentiaries and commissioners. Some of these were most original individuals. The following extract from a letter, written upon the spot, will give a faint idea of two or three of these singular chieftains.

EXTRACT OF A LETTER.

“Erzeroom, August 11th, 1843.

“One day passes much like another at Erzeroom, and though there seldom occurs any thing new to me, perhaps, as it would be all new to you, you may like to hear how I pass my time, so I will give you a sort of journal of the proceedings of yesterday, that you may see how I occupy myself in this outlandish place. First of all, I got up in the morning, ate my breakfast, and then walked about the terrace on the top of the house. At eleven o’clock a messenger came from Enveri Effendi, to ask us to go to his house at one. So at one o’clock we went; the Russian commissioner, with his suite, came also. At the door of Enveri Effendi’s house I saw a fine mare, with very peculiar housings. It was held by a negro, and a Bedouin Arab was sitting on the ground near it. The head-stall was made of a red silk garter, which went over its head, and was attached to the bit by a piece of green leather strap; the saddle was a common Arab saddle, but the housings, made of wadded red silk, ended in two immense tassels, one on each side of the horse’s tail, and almost as large; the shovel-stirrups were beautifully embossed and inlaid with silver, and there was a heavy mace of the same workmanship under the right flap of the saddle. This curious horse belonged to Sheikh Thamir, the chief of the Chaab tribe, and ex-sovereign of all the land at the mouths of the Euphrates. All the time that I was examining the horse and talking about its accouterments, the Turkish guard were presenting arms, and they looked very much relieved when I turned round and went into the house.

“The staircase of this palace is like a chicken-ladder, and the hall at the top, where the servants wait, like a little barn or stable in England. Here, as I was kicking off my goloshes, I was seized by Enveri Effendi himself, who had come up behind me. This was considered as an excellent good joke by the Chaoushes, servants, &c., who stood in a row to receive us; so we went into the selamlik (or reception room) together, and there I was introduced to three of the most picturesque people I have ever seen. The first was Osman Pasha, late Governor of Zohab; the second, Sheikh Thamir, whose horse I had been looking at outside; the third was yclept Abdul Kader Effendi, chief secretary to the government of Bussorah. These persons were dressed in flowing robes of various colors; they had long beards, and enormous turbans of Cashmere shawl. All three were remarkably ugly, strange-looking men, and I can not describe to you the peculiar way in which their clothes were put on, and the wild and almost magnificent appearance they presented. There were, besides these and ourselves, B—— Pasha and four other gentlemen, in the modern Turkish dress. The three commissioners and their two dragomans sat on the divan under the window, all, except myself, with their legs sticking out, like people waiting for an operation in a hospital. Enveri Effendi sat on a cushion on the floor, in the right-hand corner, and the others were ranged on the two sides of the room. As we were fourteen people, on a sudden fourteen servants rushed into the room with pipes; then one brought coffee on a tray, the brocade covering of which was thrown over his left shoulder; and then came a man bringing to each of us a cup, well frothed up, and in a zarf, or outer cup, of a different kind, according to the rank of the person to whom it was presented. Enveri Effendi and the three commissioners had cups of enameled gold, the rest of the Pashas, &c., of silver. When this ceremony was concluded, the door was shut, the servants disappeared, a curtain was drawn across the door, and two chaoushes, with muskets, put to guard it outside. Then Enveri Effendi lifted up his voice, and, after swinging himself about, and grunting two or three times, he told us that the gentlemen in the turbans had brought up a number of old firmans, teskerès, and other papers relating to the lands between Zohab and the Persian Gulf; that he had examined them, and that now he begged the commissioners to put any questions they chose to the worthies before them respecting the lands, &c.

“Then we all looked at each other for a little time, then they all looked at me. Then I took up my parable, and desired the dragoman to ask Osman Pasha who he was. ‘I am Osman Pasha,’ said he; ‘and I and my family have been sovereigns (or hereditary governors rather) of Zohab for seven generations.’ Having asked him a great many questions, and written down his answers, which made him somewhat nervous, I turned to Sheikh Thamir. ‘What is your fortunate name?’ said I; upon which Sheikh Thamir opened his eyes, then he opened his mouth, then he looked at Abdel Kader, then he shut his mouth again, and said nothing. So I asked him again who he had the honor to be. Upon this, Abdel Kader, who appeared to be his mentor or adviser, came and sat down by him, and said, ‘He is Sheikh Thamir.’ Sheikh Thamir upon this shouted out, at the top of his voice, ‘Yes, I am Sheikh Thamir, the son of Gashban, who was the son of Osman, who was the son of—’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I only wanted to know from your own lips who you were, but am not particular as to the names of all your respected ancestors.’ However, Sheikh Thamir was not to be stopped in this way when he had once begun, so he shouted out a long string of names, and when he got to the end he said he was Sheikh of the Sheikhs of the great tribe of Chaab, and commander of the district of Ghoban, which his ancestors had held before him for one or two hundred years—or more, or less, as I pleased. In answer to other questions, which Abdel Kader always accompanied with his own notes and commentaries, he said, ‘I have no papers; we do not understand such things. What do I know? I am an old man. I am forty-five years of age; let me alone.’ In course of time I did let him alone, and a difficult thing it was to draw out any information from this wild desert chief. Every now and then somebody else put in a word. At about four o’clock the meeting broke up. We returned home and dined, and in the evening went out riding. Passing some tents, which the Pasha has set up at the other side of the town, near a tank—the only place where there are any trees near Erzeroom, and they are only about a dozen poplars—I saw a number of people, so I went up to the tents, and found Sabri Pasha, the commander of the troops, an Egyptian Pasha, who is come to buy horses for Mohammed Ali—he has bought some hundreds; Bekir Pasha, some other military Pashas, Namik Effendi, &c., two little sons of Sabri Pasha, dressed in a very odd way, with petticoats of different colored silks in stripes; he said it was the dress of the girls in Albania, but I never saw any thing like it in that country. Here we stayed and chatted with the Turks. The tents are superb; the principal one was 100 feet long, with an open colonnade round it, and lined inside with silk; rich Persian carpets were spread on the ground. I have never seen so beautiful a tent. When the moon rose I went away, a man carrying a meshaleh, a thing like a beacon, on the top of a pole, with old cotton dipped in pitch burning in it; it is the best light there is for out-of-doors, as it never blows out, and gives much more light than any torches or lanterns.

“When I got home I paid my respects to the kid, who came out to meet me; and to the little cow, eighteen inches high, who sat in the door and would not get out of the way; and having drank tea, I went to bed.”

On another occasion certain men represented to me that a Christian oda bashi, or chamberlain of a khan or inn, had been unjustly seized and tortured by the authorities, to make him confess to a robbery that had taken place in his khan, which in reality had been perpetrated by two Turkish soldiers; but the oda bashi being a Christian, neither his evidence nor that of any other Christian could be taken in opposition to that of a Mohammedan, according to the Turkish law. The case was brought before me, and I took some interest in it. I had no authority whatever to deal with such questions as these, and it was only by representations to the Pasha that I was enabled to obtain justice for the unlucky oda bashi.

Finding the case taken down at the time from the word of mouth of some of those who moved in it, I thought it might be interesting as a picture of manners in an out-of-the-way country, and I subjoin it without making any alterations in the language of this piece of justiciary business.

CASE OF ARTIN, ODA BASHI, AN ARMENIAN.

“Erzeroom, August 2d and 12th, 1843.

“A merchant, named Mehemed, brought his merchandise to the Khan Ghengé Aga Khan, where he slept. Two soldiers slept near him. In the morning his goods were gone; he accused the soldiers (who were the only people who had been near him) of the robbery; they denied it, and were let off by the judge at the mekemmé, before whom they had been taken. A Turkish woman, named Zeilha, saw the two soldiers bury something, upon which she told the merchant that his goods were buried at such a place by the soldiers. He went there, and found half the goods; the soldiers, therefore, were again taken up, when they confessed to the theft of half the goods, but said that the oda bashi, an Armenian, named Artin, had taken the other half. Artin was accordingly taken before the tribunal of the Kiaya; the Pasha ordered him to be tortured on his declaring himself ignorant of the theft. A tass (metal drinking-cup) of hot brass was put about his head; afterward a cord was tied round his head, two sheep’s knuckle-bones were placed upon his temples, and the cord tightened till his eyes nearly came out. As he would not confess, his front teeth were then drawn one at a time; pieces of cane were run up under his toe-nails and his finger-nails. Various tortures have been inflicted on him in this way for the last twelve days, and he is now hung up by the hands in the prison of the Seraskier, where he will be kept and tormented till he confesses or dies. This is the deposition of his wife Mariam, who begs me to interpose to save her husband, who, she declares, slept at home, and not in the khan, on the night when the robbery took place.”

According to the Turkish law, two witnesses of unimpeachable character are sufficient to convict any man of any crime, on their accusing him before the cadi. Only in the case of adultery four male witnesses are required. A woman’s evidence is never taken, nor is that of a Christian or a foreigner held good in any case against a Mohammedan. These two soldiers, however, being convicted thieves, their evidence was not valid according to the law, and the oda bashi seems to have been taken up and tortured by an entirely arbitrary act of the Pasha. I went to the palace, and these are the words of Kiamili Pasha, the Governor and Viceroy of Erzeroom.

“You are mistaken; the man has not been tortured; I have proof that he was at the khan that night; he has been found guilty by the court (mekemmé) on proper evidence, and sent to me to receive the punishment due to his offense. As I wished to recover the goods stolen for the benefit of their owner, the merchant Mehemed, I threatened the oda bashi that if he did not tell what he had done with his share of the property, it was in my power to inflict these tortures upon him.

“After this he desired to be allowed to speak to the two soldiers who had possession of the other half of the goods. I consented, and sent him to the prison at Selim Pasha’s palace, where they were confined. As I would not trust to the report of Selim Pasha’s people, I sent a confidential man of my own, who was put in a place where he overheard all that passed. The oda bashi said to the soldiers, ‘If you will say I am innocent, I will share my portion of the stolen goods with you, and you will gain by this, as your share has been taken from you, and I shall get off freely. Do this, and nobody will know.’

“The oda bashi was brought back to his prison: when I asked him what he had said to the soldiers, he told me quite another story. Then I spoke to him in his own words, whereat he was astonished, but he kept silence. He is still in prison, and I am thinking what to do with him; but he has not been tortured in any way; and as you seem to take an interest in his case, I will set him free, and give him to you, to show my friendship for you.”

I replied, “I am glad to hear that the man has not been tortured, for in England we consider torture to be an act of unnecessary cruelty; but your story alters the case. The man is certainly guilty, and as I only asked for justice in this case, and I wish in all things to see justice done, I will not have the man; let him be punished according to the law, only do not torture him.

“The other day you hung a Koord opposite my windows; he was a murderer, and you did right: it is by acts like these that a country such as this can be kept in order, and that protection is assured to those who do well.”

“I am sorry,” said the Pasha, “that they hung the Koord before your windows. I told them not to hang him before the house of the Persian plenipotentiary, where there is a gibbet; but to take him to any place where the Koords resorted, and as there are many coffee-houses near you, that is the reason probably why they hung him there. His story is a curious one: I have been looking after him for the last three years; he has robbed and murdered many people, though he was so young a man, but he had always escaped my agents. At last, a few days ago, he stole a horse, in a valley near here, from a man who was traveling, and whom he beat about the head and left for dead. He brought the horse to Erzeroom and offered it for sale, when the owner, who had recovered, saw him selling the horse, and gave him up to the guard. He was brought up for judgment before me, when I said to him, Who are you? After a silence, the man said, ‘There is a fate in this, it can not be denied. I am * * * *, whom you have been searching for these three years. My fate brought me to Erzeroom, and now I am taken up for stealing one poor horse. I felt when I took that horse that I was fated to die for it. My time is come. It is fate.’ And he went to be hung without any complaint.”

I said he deserved it, and hoped others would take warning by his death.

“I hope they will,” the Pasha said, “but among the Koords of this country there are so few who do not deserve punishment, that if you see two persons you may be sure that one has stolen something. You can not see two people together here but that at least one has been a thief.”

“Well,” I answered, “the British commissioners are two people whom your excellency has often seen together, but I hope, in our case, when we leave the pashalik of Erzeroom, we may be convicted of having stolen nothing but your good opinion;” and so I took my leave.

In the evening, hearing that the wife of the oda bashi was in my house, I said to Paolo Cadelli, my servant, that my desire to liberate the Armenian was changed; that he had not been tortured, but he was a thief. “How!” said Paolo, in a great state of excitement; “a thief he may be, but tortured he certainly was, for in the morning did I not go forth into the bazaar to get wrappers (pestimal) of Persian silk? I went to the Bezestein, and there did I not see the chief of the criers of the Bit Bazaar? he is my friend. Did I not get from him the embroidery, the cloth of gold which you have, which is in your room? And we went, did we not go together, to the court of the palace of the Pasha? It is opposite, is it not opposite to the entrance of the Bezestein? Do not the soldiers present arms to you there when you go in? Yes. There I went, and I saw the Armenian, a poor devil—quite a poor devil—sitting down like a monkey, altogether quite stupid with fear and martyrdom. They had martyred him; they had drawn his teeth; his finger-ends and toes were black, by reason of the canes they had run into them; his thighs had been torn by pincers; he was half dead. He said to the people, ‘What can I do? I am innocent; kill me; but I can not restore goods which I have not got.’ Ah! he is a Christian. Is he not a Christian—an Armenian? That is what these Turks do. They have not tortured the soldiers who are guilty. Certainly they have not, but this man has been tortured because he is an Armenian. They are Turks, my master (padrone); are they not Turks? They are all Turks; that is what they do;” and with many ejaculations Paolo went away to cool down his indignation in the open air.

I was surprised at this account. Yesterday, August 5, * * * Pasha came to breakfast, and I begged him to find out the truth. In the afternoon I was at Enveri Effendi’s house; * * * Pasha was there, and he said the man had not been tortured; that the account given me by Kiamili Pasha was correct; that the man was out of prison, but that the Pasha would seek for him and send him to me.

I heard that, after I went to the Pasha, the Pasha sent for the Kiaya, and finding the oda bashi had been tortured, he found great fault with him, and ordered the man to be released the next day. He is sentenced, as he understands, to pay the half of the value of the goods stolen. While I was with the Pasha, the Tophenkyi Bashi was enraged with this poor victim for getting the assistance of the Franks, as he thought that we were come to the Pasha on his account, whereas our visit was on public business in no way connected with this affair. It appears that while we were sitting on the divan in the Pasha’s hall of audience, the Tophenkyi Bashi was employed during the same time in inflicting additional torments on the unfortunate oda bashi; he snapped his pistol at his head, and informed him that the Pasha had given orders that he was to be hanged in the course of the day. The oda bashi, after we had rescued him from his various tormentors, presented himself before me. He was a good-looking man, about thirty-five years of age, with a black beard, and respectably dressed in blue, in the style usually adopted by the Armenian Christians. He said he had been tortured by the order of the Kiaya Bey; the bones were put to his temples, some of his teeth drawn, his nails pierced, his left thigh torn with pincers; he was hung up by the arms by ropes, but the hot cup was not placed upon his head. He showed me the marks of the pincers and other scars about his body—evident proofs of the truth of his assertion. The two soldiers who were convicted of having stolen the goods (the oda bashi being entirely ignorant of the whole transaction) were to be brought before the Council on the following Monday. They are now in prison, and will be sentenced to pay the other half of the value of the stolen goods. This information the oda bashi received from the merchant Mehemed, the owner of the lost property. He has not heard any other particulars about the soldiers.

From the above account it appears that much injustice may probably be carried on by the inferior officers of the government which never gets to the ears of the Pasha, small officials being notoriously more tyrannical than greater men. The Pasha himself appears to be a kind-hearted, well-intentioned man in a general way; but, in cases where his own interest is not directly concerned, he does not look into the affairs of the pashalik with sufficient keenness to prevent his subordinate officers from practicing various acts of oppression and extortion, according to the fashion of the good old times, when Turkey, like the United States of America, was a land of liberty, where every free and independent citizen had the right to beat his own nigger; for, according to some doctors of the law, pashas, vizirs, &c., might cut off a few heads every day for no given reason, but just for amusement. The Sultan had the privilege of destroying fourteen lives per day of his faithful subjects, who might have committed no crime; after that number, some reason was expected to be shown for the further use of the sword and bow-string on that day. Now the case is altered: fewer crimes are committed in Turkey than in London, and the Turkish pashas endeavor to stop such practices as are considered discreditable on the part of the inferior officers; though they have to contend with great difficulties in a country where it is hardly possible to get at the truth, and where the inferior officers have for generations been accustomed to plunder those below them, directly they are out of sight of the higher authorities; trusting to the want of communication, the slight knowledge of writing, and the many obstacles in the way which prevent the poor man’s story getting to the ears of the Pasha or the Sultan, who, in these days at least, are anxious to remedy such abuses, and to distribute justice with a tolerably impartial hand. I had great satisfaction in hearing afterward that, owing to my exertions in this and other cases—the good cause being taken up warmly by Colonel Williams, after I was gone—all torture was authoritatively abolished in the pashalik of Erzeroom; and I am in hopes that, except in some snug little dungeon in the rocky castle of a half independent Koordish chief, this horrible custom is almost extinct.

The Koord above mentioned was hanged in so original a manner that I must shortly describe it, as it took place immediately under my window. What we called at school a cat-gallows was erected close to a bridge, over the little stream which ran down the horse-market, between my house and the bottom of the hill of the citadel. The culprit stood under this; the cross-beam was not two feet above his head; a kawass, having tied a rope to one end of the beam, passed a slip-knot round the neck of the Koord, a young and very handsome man, with long black hair; he then drew the rope over the other end of the beam, and pulled away till the poor man’s feet were just off the ground, when he tied the rope in a knot, leaving the dead body hanging, supported by two ropes in the form of the letter V. Hardly any one was looking on, and in the afternoon the body was taken down and buried.

I shall always consider this case as a remarkable instance of the power of fatalism over the mind of an ignorant and superstitious man. This Koord was entirely the cause of his own execution: no one knew him by sight at Erzeroom, and there was not the slightest necessity for his declaring his name to the Pasha, and confessing that he had committed murders and outrages of all kinds among the villages of Koordistaun. His punishment for stealing a horse would not have been very severe, and, but for his voluntary admission that he was a notorious malefactor, for whom the police had long been on the look-out, he might have been alive to this day, to rob and murder, till somebody shot him, or he became too old for the exertion. Fatalism, in other cases, has a powerful influence over the true believers in the armies of Islam. The soldier goes to battle with the firm belief that, if his hour is not come, the cannon of the enemy can have no power over him; and that if his hour is arrived, the angel of death will call him, whether he may be seated on his divan, or walking in full health in his garden at home: just as readily does he bow his head to fate in one place as in another. By this institution of the Koran, the wonderful genius of Mohammed has gained many a victory by the hands of his trusting and believing followers for the caliphs and sultans of his creed. Some of the reforms of Sultan Mahmoud, by treating lightly many of the ancient prejudices of the Osmanlis, have shaken the throne under his feet. The progress of infidelity, which has begun at Constantinople, is the greatest temporal danger to the power of the Turkish empire. The Turk implicitly believes the tenets of his religion; he keeps its precepts and obeys its laws; he is proud of his faith, and prays in public when the hour of prayer arrives. How different, alas! is the manner in which the divine laws of Christianity are kept! The Christian seems ashamed of his religion; as for obeying the doctrines of the Gospel, they have no perceptible effect upon the mass of the people, among whom drunkenness, dishonesty, and immorality prevail almost unchecked, except by the fear of punishment in this world; while in Turkey not one tenth part of the crime exists which is annually committed in Christendom.

A few days after this occurrence, as I was sitting in the summer chamber at the top of the house, I heard a most extraordinary shuffling and screeching behind the curtain which hung over the door; the curtain shook about, and numerous subdued voices and noises were heard, which sounded like cocks and hens suffering from strangulation. I shouted out to know what in the world was going on; after a while the kawass drew aside the curtain, and along the floor advanced a most strange and incomprehensible procession of several women and men, crawling on their hands and knees, each with a cock or a hen in their hands, whose fluttering, and screaming, and crowing now broke forth in full chorus; one or two got away, and flew about the room, as its owner, making use of her hands to walk with, was unable to hold the terrified fowl. This procession advanced to the divan, and, without saying a word, the foremost woman seized hold of one of my legs, which was inadvertently sticking out, and, holding on to my ankle, kissed my foot, and burst out into a string of exclamations in Armenian, no one word of which made any impression on my understanding. Being horribly alarmed, I kicked as well as I could, and, having escaped into the remotest corner of the divan, I begged to know what all this portended; and on the chickens being caught, and comparative silence obtained, I found that these were the family of the poor oda bashi, who had brought the chickens as a present, and came with tears to thank me for saving their father, brother, or husband. They were really pained, poor people, when I would not accept the cocks and hens, for, though of little value, it looked like receiving a bribe for justice; and, after a long explanation of my strange notions, they walked off in smiles upon their hind legs, the cocks crowing triumphantly on their way down stairs.

CHAPTER VI.

The Clock of Erzeroom.—A Pasha’s Notions of Horology.—Pathology of Clocks.—The Tower and Dungeon.—Ingenious Mode of Torture.—The modern Prison.

In the citadel—a place which might, with great ease, be rendered very strong, but which now is deserted and disused, having, I believe, been knocked to pieces in the Russian war—there are still two or three curious ancient tombs and some other incomprehensible old buildings. The building containing the prison, which was in constant use in the good old times, and the tower, from whence the flag of Turkey is displayed, possessed an old clock, which had been out of order for many years before the Russians carried it away, but which was the wonder and admiration of all Koords, Armenians, and strangers from the mountains, to whom time was “no object,” and who considered this old clock, with its dial and hands, as some sort of talisman beyond the comprehension of ordinary folks. Erzeroom was indeed lifted up in the estimation of those unsophisticated herdsmen and robbers, as the only place they ever heard of where any thing in the nature of a clock was to be seen. It might happen that some few of those who not only were possessed of such an outlandish article as a watch, but who were in some measure initiated into the uses of that strange production, would expatiate learnedly in the coffee-houses on the wondrous properties of the great talisman in the tower of the citadel, which, in all probability, from its great size and exalted position, was considered as the father of all the little watches of the sheikhs and chiefs among the tribes. As for the clock not going, that signified but little. Talleyrand said that speech was accorded to man for the purpose of enabling him to conceal his sentiments. The big clock had doubtless his reasons for holding his tongue, and telling no lies; I believe his reputation was increased by his silence, as is the case among many other distinguished characters besides the clock of Erzeroom. Now it came to pass, once upon a time, that the great Pasha or viceroy of the wide realms of this great pashalik chanced to be a philosopher; he knew that clocks, though they might have been made to sell, besides this very primary quality, also ought to go, but no artificer in the land of Armenia was competent to accomplish this desirable end. Whenever a Frank traveler—not that there ever were any travelers by profession in those days—but whenever a Frank doctor or hakim made his appearance in those regions, he was always received with distinguished civility by the Pasha, who, after the preliminaries of coffee, Kef enis ayi—“may your powers of enjoyment be in good order!”—always ended with an expression of his desire that the Frank would immediately set about the repairs of the clock.

“Sir, your excellency,” said the poor man, “I am a doctor; I am not a watchmaker or a mechanic. I don’t understand clocks; it is not in my power to set the clock right; it is not in my line of business. I am very sorry, but, O Effendim, I fear I am unable to meet your wishes in this point.”

“Dog of a Frank,” quoth the Pasha, “great-grandfather’s uncle to all dogs, more particularly those of Frangistaun, is it not thy base profession to meddle with the bowels of mankind? canst thou not expel ginns, and evil spirits, and other things, which have taken up their abode in the innermost recesses of the bodies of true believers, which thine eye can not penetrate, while, nevertheless, thou turnest their livers upside down, and their souls inside out; and all this by the accursed aid of thy wretched Frankish incantations; shooting thine arrows at them, or rather sending down their throats certain wicked and diabolical contrivances, which are known by the barbarians of thy benighted country by the name of pills? Dost thou pretend to see all that is going on in the stomach of a follower of the Prophet, and wilt thou tell me with the same breath that thou canst not administer to the disorganized constitution of a clock? Hath not a clock a pulse, when he is alive and in good health? Go thou, feel his pulse, and see whether it is fast or slow; whatever thou mayest want, thou shalt have; my hakim bashi shall assist you, only cure the clock. All Franks make clocks: I have it from authority: do not pretend that thou canst not set the clock going again, for surely thou canst restore it to life, and make it strike, and do all that it ought to do. Behold, thou art a Frank! Guards! take the Frank up into the tower, and make him mend the clock; and if the unbelieving dog will not mend the clock, then put him into the dungeon down below till he confesses that he is ready to do as he is commanded by the Pasha of the true believers.”

In this way every audience concluded. The unlucky Frank, having been exalted to the top of the tower, and exhorted to repair the rickety old clock, which had lost half its works, was debased into the dungeon, there to remain till further notice. Having often heard this story of the good old times, I one day proceeded to the citadel to see the tower where the clock had been, and to examine the dungeon, where I should have been sent if I had arrived at Erzeroom fifty or sixty years ago. This dungeon really was a dungeon: any thing so terrible as an abode for a human being I never saw before. The pozzi at Venice were rather pleasant and agreeable places of retirement, compared with the abode of many a poor Frank, in whose education the art and craft of clockology had been unfortunately omitted.

At the foot of that which had been the clock-tower was a range of small low rooms, of which two were particularly belonging to the prison: the outer room of the two was larger than the other; this was appropriated to the guards, who kept watch and ward, and who fed, or did not feed, the wretched prisoners under their care. The inner room was small and low, and had one window, through which the light and air had to struggle with the opposition of heavy crossed and re-crossed iron bars. The window looked into the castle yard, but the room was so dark that I could hardly see my way.

“A horrible place for the poor prisoners,” said I to my guides; “little chance of their escape from these thick walls, and heavy bars, and low, strong roof; they must have been safe enough here.”

“Oh Effendim,” said the kawasses, “this is not the prison. Here is the prison at your feet, down below.”

“Where?” said I.

“Look down,” they replied, “on the middle of the floor; there is the entrance; you can not see the dungeon itself, for it is, perhaps, a little dark.”

In the centre of the floor of this dismal cell was a heavy wrought-iron grating, square, made of great bars, about six inches apart, seemingly of enormous weight, lying on the ground, and fastened down with two or three huge rusty padlocks on one side, and some lumbering old hinges on the other. This iron grate was opened and raised up for my especial edification, and there appeared under it the mouth of a narrow well cut in the rock, perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, which sank down into the darkness far below. “Now,” said my informants, “if you stand on this side, and look steadily till your eye is accustomed to the gloom, you will be able to distinguish something white a good way down; that is a square stone, like a table, in the middle of the vault, upon which the jailers let down the provisions for the prisoners, as they can see on that stone when the things arrive at the bottom.” This was the old dungeon, the common prison not many years ago; but, I believe, since the reign of Hadji Kiamili Pasha, few or none had been consigned to this horrible abode. The shape of it below, I understood, was that of the inside of a bottle; it was between twenty and thirty feet deep; vermin, dirt and filth, and foul air, formed its only furniture; and into this awful hole many and many an innocent man had been let down: some to be brought up again to pay a ransom of all that they possessed, some to linger there for years, and some to die and rot unnoticed if no food was provided for them by government, when their bones, if not their flesh, gave token to the next inhabitants of what they were to expect, unless their interest or their wealth was greater than that of the poor wretch whose remains lay there before them.

An ingenious and horrible species of torture was sometimes added to the discomforts of this dread abode: a large piece of raw flesh was thrown down into the dungeon; the vermin, and the effluvia which it produced, added to other miseries, made the existence of the wretched prisoner almost intolerable.

The modern prison is bad enough: it consists of a number of cells opening on a small paved court-yard. The prisoners, being just shoved through the door, have to shift for themselves inside, where a kind of Pandemonium exists; the stronger Koords bullying and tyrannizing over the weaker felons, who have neither fire nor candle during the intense cold of a great part of the year: so I was told; but I was not there in the winter, and hope these unhappy wretches may be allowed a little tezek occasionally to keep their dirty bodies and souls together.

CHAPTER VII.

Spring in Erzeroom.—Coffee-house Diversions.—Koordish Exploits.—Summer Employment.—Preparation of Tezek.—Its Varieties and Uses.

When the snows of winter have melted, and the air becomes more temperate, the population of Erzeroom begin to revive. The women and children, who, like the bears, lemmings, and marmottes, have hybernated all the winter, now peep with red eyes out of their subterranean habitations; those streets situated upon hills, as most of them are, become torrents of melted snow, which cut deep ravines through the frozen mass which is piled up many feet on each side; narrow paths are gradually dug out from the low doors of the Armenian man-burrows toward the central river of the street; the winking children creep out to blink their eyes at the sun, and enjoy the fresh air; fusty cows, who have been buried for eight months, come slowly staring out; every now and then a more adventurous infant is carried away by the stream, and its body quickly devoured by the ravenous dogs at the outskirts of the town; wolves, it is said, though I never saw one, prowl about, and eat the dog that ate the child, that came out to see the weather so mild, in the street by the house that (not) Jack built. Women now scream to each other in shrill voices, as they pitch down large wooden spadefuls of half-melted snow upon the heads of those who are passing in the street; knots of Tartars, Circassians, and Lazes, and Koords, in iron-heeled boots and white woolen trowsers, tell lies to each other at the doors of the coffee-houses, which are answered with dignified exclamations of Wullah! Billah! nobody believing his neighbor’s lie, but considering straightway how he can invent a deliberate falsehood to lay before the other liars in his turn. Every now and then one of these stories is true, when a cadaverous-looking Koord, hung round with arms and leaning on his lance, with the black ostrich feathers at the top, being a practical man with very little imagination, coolly relates the history of the sacking of a defenseless village, where murder unresisted, rapine, sacrilege in the burning of the mosque, and spearing the children who run shrieking from the flames of their homes, bear with it the impress of truth, with the conviction on the part of any honest man (if there should be one in the party) that, although the rest are liars, the only truthful narrator is a brute of that atrocious kind, that the falsehoods of the rest are trifles, like chaff before the wind, in comparison with the real and true experiences of this infernal child of hell. Such as this are the Koords; their only virtue is that they are not cowards; but, although they subscribe to a nominal adherence to the Mohammedan religion, the most liberal Imaum would be ashamed to own them. The Yezedis, who worship the devil, are angels in comparison. Yet they are superstitious to a curious degree, as the foregoing anecdote of the Koord who was hung through giving evidence about himself testifies.

At the commencement of the summer the whole city of Erzeroom is engaged, even to desperation, in making tezek; you hear, smell, and see nothing else. How are you off for tezek? Tezek katch, chok tezek, tezek var bourda chok, chok, evet, tezek Effendim, katch gooroosh: in short, no one cares for any thing except tezek, and he who has most tezek is the greatest man, and he who has but little tezek he is naught—no one cares for him, or, indeed, for any thing else except the one absorbing topic of tezek.

The cows, and bulls, and oxen having reappeared on upper earth, the Augean stable is cleared out. Tezek, the only fuel of Erzeroom, consists of the production into which the said oxen have converted their food for many months; it is trodden down hard, and is dug out by zealous Armenians, and brought exultingly to the tops of the houses; it is mixed with a good deal of the chopped straw with which horses, and oxen, and sheep are fed while in the subterranean stables; more chopped straw is added, mixed with water; and, except the higher class of grandees, such as the Pasha, the commander-in-chief, and the author, all true men were employed on the tops of their houses, treading the chopped straw into the tezek with their naked feet, their full Turkish trowsers being pulled up and tied with a belt round their waists. With a stick to lean upon, they are there all day, trotting about, up to their knees in tezek, shouting to each other; Mohammed bringing some more water to pour upon it; Hassan staggering up the ladder with more tezek of the genuine unadulterated kind from the recesses of the stable; Bekir with a great basket of chopped straw; and then all set to with a will, and tread steadily for an hour or two, as sailors do round a capstan, for the dear life; and when they get very hot they wipe their brow with a tezeky sleeve, and their sleeve with a fold of a tezeky trowser, so that they become altogether tezekious before the sun sets upon their labors, and veils his nose, if not his eyes, under the clouds which hang over the eternal snows in the dreaded passes of the mountains of Hoshabounar. The tezek being trodden into a stiff clayey state, about six or seven inches thick, is left alone for a day or two to dry; amateurs, however, scrambling up to the top of the house to see how it is going on, to pick a bit off, and look at it cunningly, and smell it, to find whether it has the true flavor. There are Armenians who are knowing in tezek, who understand the thing; and over a remarkably good batch a knot of the fancy will sit on little stools, and smoke their pipes, and discuss the question scientifically; telling tales of former celebrated heaps, and of Hadji such a one, who was famous in that line, and of one Bokchi Bashi, who had an astonishing talent in the preparation of inimitable tezek.

When it is all ready, it is dug out in square blocks, and carried down the ladders again carefully in open baskets, and piled up in the inner treasuries below, and stored for the fuel of the future winter. It is better for being old, when it resembles peat turf. It gets somewhat dusty in a year or so, and then rivals that sort of snuff called Irish blackguard in its capacity for making you sneeze, if you venture to move a clod of it to put upon the fire; it then burns clear and clean, without flame, and is very hot; but when more fresh—though that is not the word—more new, I may say—it produces a thick stifling smoke, very odoriferous, and not generally appreciated by those who do not love tezek for itself, or who are not at that time maneuvering to make you purchase an astounding bargain of the precious fuel of their own particular manufacture.

Erzeroom is not alone in the production of this article of merchandise. From thence through the whole of Tartary as we call it, or Turkistaun as they call it, this fuel is in universal use as far as the Great Wall of China. Great care is taken sometimes in the production of it for various artistic purposes. In Thibet it is called arghol, and in the very remarkable travels of M. Huc, it is related that that which comes from sheep and goats is more valuable for the purpose of smelting iron and other metals, as it gives a greater heat, and, instead of leaving any ash, melts into a vitreous mass of a bluish green color. I never saw any of this myself, though it may have been used at Erzeroom, for this place was lately famous for the workmanship in iron and steel by seven brothers, whose productions are valuable under the name of Yedi Kartasch, as Manton added a value to those guns to which his name was affixed. The tezek of oxen and cows ranks next; that of horses and donkeys last, from the quantity of smoke produced by it; that of the oxen, with the slightest possible flavor of donkey, was certainly most fashionable at Erzeroom.

CHAPTER VIII.

The Prophet of Khoi.—Climate.—Effects of great Elevation above the Sea.—The Genus Homo.—African Gold-diggings.—Sale of a Family.—Site of Paradise.—Tradition of Khosref Purveez.—Flowers.—A Flea-antidote.—Origin of the Tulip.—A Party at the Cave of Ferhad, and its Results.—Translation from Hafiz.

The atmospheric peculiarities of this climate are such, that the weather, as a general rule, may be considered as on the way from bad to worse. Earthquakes more or less severe are often felt. A severe one occurred in the year 1843, and in the same year the town of Khoi was almost entirely destroyed by one of these awful convulsions of nature. A circumstance occurred on that occasion which was very remarkable, if true. A dervish or fakir of distinguished sanctity felt himself about to die, and, calling his friends and disciples around the couch of skins on which he lay, he prophesied that a terrible disaster was about to fall upon the town of Khoi; that the lives of many would fall into the hands of Monkir and Nakir on that day; but that those faithful believers who accompanied his body to the tomb would be permitted to escape from the sword of the avenging angel for his sake. The old man died, and, being held in universal reverence, the greater part of the inhabitants of Khoi followed his corpse to the burial-ground, which was situated at some distance from the town. While absent on this pious errand, a tremendous earthquake suddenly reduced the city to ruin. So complete was the destruction that hardly a house was left standing, and many of those who had remained at home perished in the fall of their habitations, while those who had accompanied the body of the dervish to the grave were saved from the disaster, as he had prophesied.

This is a wonderful story; I heard it at the time, and was very much struck with the peculiar circumstances of the case. Its accuracy would be difficult either to prove or to disprove, but the history as I have narrated it was current at the time when the earthquake happened.

Pillars of dust, like those of sand seen in the deserts of Africa and Arabia, are supposed to be the works of evil spirits, and often stalk like giants across the plain. The deep narrow valleys and ravines which slope down from the elevated plateau of Erzeroom, are unhealthy and pestilential in the extreme, while the inhabitants of the upper country enjoy good health enough. Here the corn returns about five-fold to the labor of the sower: one being retained for seed, four bushels is the extent of the profit of the husbandman for one which he had sown. The summer, though very short, is hot and parching, the thermometer being usually about 84, though it rises occasionally, I think, to nearly 90. The cold in winter is commonly 16 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, and is often colder. The mercury in my thermometer, which was not calculated for such a climate, quietly retired into the ball in the autumn, and never came out again while I remained at Erzeroom. The great height of the town above the sea was exemplified in a practical manner to me on my first arrival. I was in a state of constant wrath about the tea: the tea was excellent, of the very best quality, but the decoction thereof was always a failure. In vain was the kettle placed upon the fire by my side; in vain did the semavar, the best of tea-urns, boil and steam. Double, double, toil and trouble! the fire burned and the caldron bubbled, but the tea was vapid. As for the eggs, I don’t know how long it took to boil them till the white was fixed. The reason of all this only occurred to me one day when I put my finger into some almost boiling water, which by no means scalded me—for water boiled at 196° of Fahrenheit, as we were between 7000 and 8000 feet above the level of the sea; and, consequently, though boiling and steaming away, it was not hot enough to produce the effects of water boiling at the heat of 212°, which is the temperature at which it boils in London.

Nature has provided a kettle of her own, in a hot spring at Elijé, near which place I was informed that there was a rock against which iron stuck of its own accord—a rock of loadstone; but I never had an opportunity of verifying this report.

The natural history of the highlands of Armenia is particularly interesting, and rich in flowers hardly known to Europeans, and in the prodigious quantities of birds which breed on the plain of Erzeroom, and in the valleys and water-courses of the neighborhood.

The quadrupeds are not numerous; the climate is too rigorous for those not provided with thick furs to protect them from the tremendous cold.

The fish consist only of a sort of barbel, which is found in the high waters of the Euphrates, and of three kinds of trout, swarming in the lesser streams and rivulets which flow down from the snowy mountain-tops.

To commence with the highest order of mammalia: some extraordinary specimens of the genus Homo are to be met with in many parts of the East, generally in the character of Frank doctors. Erzeroom was not wanting in productions of this kind. The character of these adventurers is in every instance precisely alike: they are all sharp and so-called clever men, speaking several languages correctly, with a smattering of general knowledge, but understanding nothing perfectly, and all wanting in the same two qualities—judgment and principle, the consequence of which want is, that not one in a hundred succeeds in life, and, after passing through a series of strange changes of fortune, they usually die unlamented, as poor as when they began their erratic career.

The adventures of one old gentleman, with whom I was acquainted here, was so extraordinary and uncommon, that a history of them would fill a volume. After this man’s death, it appeared that he was not himself, but somebody else; and his true name being the same as that of a person I had met, many years before, at Wadi Halfa, or at Assouan, high up the Nile, made me suspect that these two persons were the same. One half of this character certainly died in a khan at Erzeroom; but as I do not know whether the other half is dead, or whether the two were really one or not, I must forbear the strange narration of their lives, for fear something might meet the eyes of their friends or relations—if they had any—who, perhaps, may be under the pleasing delusion that their respected relative was an honor to their name.

I must, however, relate a little anecdote of the Egyptian half of my acquaintance. At Assouan, below the Cataracts, I saw an extraordinary-looking boat, built of bits of hard wood, like iron-wood, each about two feet long, caulked or cemented in the seams with reeds and mud, precisely in the manner in which the ancient boats are represented in the hieroglyphics. This strange vessel was of large size, and was navigated by a crew of blacks, of a tribe with which I was not acquainted. The proprietor of the ship was dressed in a much worn and old-fashioned Turkish dress; his cabin was carpeted with lion-skins; his cushions were the skins of some small deer, stuffed. He was very civil, and spoke in the French language to me, while he gave his orders to his servants in a dialect which bore little resemblance to Arabic, but which belonged to some distant region of the interior of Africa, where he had been living many years. His personal servants were the handsomest negroes I had ever seen: though they were dressed as men, I found they were girls; one, who was beautiful, was his wife. He was an interesting personage, and appeared on friendly terms with his black attendants, who looked forward with great glee to the wondrous sights which they were to see at Cairo. After listening to some curious stories of the manners and customs of the black nations of the interior, unknown to Europeans, he showed me three or four strongly-made iron-bound chests, which, on being opened, proved to be full of gold, to the amount of some thousands of pounds; some was in nuggets, but most part of it was in the form of rings the size of bracelets, and others the size of large heavy finger-rings, all of pure gold. These rings were passed as money, and were of the exact form of those used for the same purpose by the ancient Egyptians, and of the rings found in Celtic and British tombs. Independent of their intrinsic value, they were exceedingly curious; and he said gold might be procured in great quantities in the mountains beyond Darfoor. Here, then, is an opening for some future diggings, and an object to promote discoveries in the centre of Africa. My informant was a European, of the same nation and the same name as the person whom I met at Erzeroom, but I now doubt whether the two were or were not the same. Some time afterward I made inquiries at Cairo about this singular adventurer, when I heard that he had sold his strange vessel, his wife, his servants, and his crew, to their astonishment and dismay, for they did not consider themselves as slaves, and he had taken his departure for Europe with his gold rings and the produce of the sale of his confiding family.

It may not be generally known that Erzeroom is supposed to be the site of the terrestrial paradise. The reason of this supposition is deduced from the fact of so many great and famous rivers taking their rise in this exalted region.

About three hours from Erzeroom, passing the ancient monastery of Kuzzul Vank, on the way to Tortoom and Kars, a rocky top of a mountain rises about two thousand feet above the plain, and consequently about ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. Standing on one spot upon this mountain, the traveler can see the sources, beneath his feet, of the Euphrates, the Araxes, and the river which falls into the Black Sea in the pestilential neighborhood of Batoum; one river falling into the Persian Gulf, one into the Caspian, and one into the Black Sea. The traditions of the country relate that the flowers of paradise bloomed in luxuriant splendor in this now barren region till the days of Khosref Purveez. This mighty Persian monarch, “the Great King,” was encamped upon the banks of the Euphrates, on the plains of Erzeroom, when a messenger arrived from the Prophet Mohammed, then an insignificant pretender, offering this magnificent sovereign protection if he would give up the religion of his fathers and embrace the faith of Islam. Khosref Purveez, in derision, threw the letter from the prophet into the waters of the river, when Nature, in dismay, withered all her trees and flowers, and the bounteous stream, which formerly bestowed wealth and abundance to the country on its shores, shrank into its bed, and, refusing to fertilize the earth, cold, and frost, and barrenness have been ever since the consequence of the impiety of the Persian king: not only this, but the days of his ancient empire were numbered; and in the days of Yesdijird, a few years after this event, the blacksmith’s apron, the victorious standard of Persia, fell into the hands of the Mohammedan general, at the great battle of Kudseah, where the sun of Persia set to rise no more.

Among the rocks, not far from Erzeroom, is an artificial cavern, hewn out of the mountain side by Ferhad, the successful rival of Khosref in the affections of the beautiful Shireen. It was here—or others say at Beysittoon—that Ferhad threw himself from the precipice on hearing the false intelligence that Shireen was dead; and that famous beauty herself died on seeing the remains of the mighty Khosref, who had been murdered by his own son Schiroueh out of jealousy and love for her.

From the tops of the mountains surrounding Erzeroom the snowy summit of Mount Ararat can be seen—another monument in the history of the cradle of the human race, and at its feet the town of Nackchevan was built by Noah, on his descent from the ark. This was the first city built by man after the Flood, according to Armenian, and I think also Mohammedan, tradition.

Some slight remains of paradise are left, even to our days, in the form of the most lovely flowers, which I gathered on the very hill from whence the three rivers take their departure to their distant seas. Though one of them has a Latin scientific name, no plant of it has ever been in Europe, and by no manner of contrivance could we succeed in carrying one away. This most beautiful production was called in Turkish, Yedi kartash kané (Seven brothers’ blood), in Latin, Ravanea, or Philipea coccinea, a parasite on absinthe, or worm-wood. This is the most beautiful flower conceivable: it is in the form of a lily, about nine to twelve inches long, including the stalk; the flower and stalk, and all parts of it, resembling crimson velvet; it has no leaves; it is found on the sides of the mountains near Erzeroom, often in company with the Morena Orientalis, a remarkable kind of thistle, with flowers all up the stalk, looking and smelling like the honeysuckle. Another beautiful flower found here has not been described. It grows among rocks, and has a tough carroty root, two feet or more in length; the leaves are long grassy filaments, forming a low bush, like a tussock of coarse grass; under the leaves appear the flowers. Each plant has twelve or twenty of them (like large white-heart cherries on a stalk), in the form of a bunch of grapes, eight or ten inches long; these flowers are merely colored bladders holding the seed. An iris, of a most brilliant flaming yellow, is found among the rocks, and it, as well as all the more remarkable flowers of this country, blooms in the spring soon after the melting of the snow—that is to say, about June.

Piré otou, a herb, which is sold here in powder (Anthemis rosea, aut carnea), instantly kills fleas and other insects, and would be invaluable to travelers in warm climates. We possessed a certain little dog called Fundook (a nut), who held the important position of turnspit in our kitchen: he was a wise dog, with a look of dignity about him like a dog in office, and one that had something on his mind and knew more than he would say. He turned out his elbows and turned in his toes, and sat at the door in a solemn attitude when not employed on the business of the nation. In the pursuit of his vocation he became sadly vexed with fleas, and his dignity suffered from the necessity of scratching with his hind leg, just like a common, vulgar dog. Commiserating his condition, one of the grooms went to the expense of five paras (one farthing sterling), with which he purchased two good handfuls of powdered leaves of Piré otou, the effect of which was magical: in one minute every flea was dead, and Fundook swaggered into the kitchen quite a renovated dog.

It may not be generally known that the tulip owes its origin to the blood of Ferhad, which was sprinkled on the ground when he threw himself from the rocks in despair, on hearing of the death of his glorious Shireen. In this story we see how one beautiful idea is copied and admired by mankind in the most distant regions, times, and circumstances, for this is the same tradition as that of the Anemone, which, in classic lore, arose from the blood of Adonis while Venus was weeping for his loss.

Upon a day we gave a party at the cave of Ferhad; this was a rare function; parties were not common at Erzeroom.

“When the Orient sun arose, and shed his golden beams o’er the snowy peaks of the mountains of the East, Apollo on that day must have reined in his steeds in wonder at the unwonted stir that was taking place at Erzeroom, as Aurora withdrew the purple veil of night from the features of fair mother Earth, refreshed with the slumbers she had enjoyed under the guardianship of Endymion. She of the rosy fingers doubtless started up in beautiful surprise at the bustle and the activity displayed beneath her gaze. Phœbus, not resisting the pleasure of curiosity, gazed down in all his glory on the Armenian plain, where horses neighed, and cattle lowed, and hasty marmitons laded ox-eyed oxen with bright coppers from the kitchen shelves; wains were there laden with wide tubs of cooling snow; cooks, in a perspiration, swore deep oaths; the voice official of Fundook was heard yelping and barking in the morning breeze, and under Sol’s first rays a caravan set forth in long, dark outline, winding o’er the plain of Erzeroom.” For the rest, see Homer, unpublished edition, cap. x.

Fundook.

All the rank and fashion of the place were present; the rank rode on horseback, the fashion followed in a cart drawn by four oxen—this would sound better if it were called an araba—and therein was contained all the beauty of the city of Erzeroom. The distance may have been ten miles; some of the party got there in three quarters of an hour, and others arrived in an hour and three quarters. Among the distinguished guests were two philosophers, one of whom, having lately arrived in these unknown regions, was remarkable for the glorious colors of his waistcoat. This effulgent garment having been admired, the answer was returned in the following mysterious sentence, as I well remember, in a language unknown, as far as my knowledge is experienced, in any nation upon earth: “Zést mon vamme, gui ma tonné ze chilet.” Our admiration of the chilet gave way before the announcement that the carriage and four was approaching the cave, and all sallied forth to receive the lovely damsels that it bore. Through many a quag, o’er many a rock, and many a jolt had those oxen drawn the araba for many a weary hour before they lay down in front of our cave; and now it was the happy lot of those who got there first to hand out of their carriage the admired beauties of Armenia. The carriage stopped, and we were in readiness, our feelings of politeness screwed up to the most perfect tone—

When the pie was opened,

The birds began to sing:

Wasn’t that a dainty dish

To set before a king?

But the birds did not come out—there was much to be done before that desired object was concluded: first, out came a cushion, then a feather-bed, and then a pretty girl; then another cushion, then another lovely damsel; then three or four more cushions, and another feather-bed, and then the prettiest little girl of all jumped upon the ground, half laughing and half smothered; for such dainty goods would have broken all to bits on those rough roads, if they had not been packed so carefully. The mother of the three graces accompanied them, and, the party being assembled, the great business of life commenced in earnest. Dolmas, and kieufté, and cabobs soon graced the board—not that there was any board, but it sounds well. “Viands,” that is, chickens, lamb stewed with quinces, and all manner of good things, appeared and disappeared, to the wonder of certain hungry Koords who happened to be passing, and who would have been run through with the spits, if not devoured by Fundook, our brave ally, if they had made a row. Corks from foreign bottles of champagne popped in brisk salute. Cooks and kawasses, grooms, arabagis, eiwasses, and heiwans followed the good example set them by their lords, and, “fruges consumere nati,” did their best to follow the end of their creation. Then, and on that occasion only, did many a lantern-jawed, hook-nosed Koord imbibe the unknown potations of Frangistaun. Then, in glorious generosity, did the trusty marmiton dispense the bones of slaughtered lamb, drumsticks of fowl, and crust of pie, whereof repletion dire denied the power to partake. By staggering chiboukgis pipes were next produced, and fragrant coffee, served on salvers bright; and, on soft Persian carpets now reclined, the party enjoyed the scene before them, passing an agreeable afternoon in each other’s society, accompanied, I thought, with some little flirtations between some of the company, which, I suspect, left pleasing recollections on their minds; for though I can not boast that any thing came of it that day, yet not long afterward two marriages were declared between some of those who assisted at the dinner in the cave of Ferhad; and the most anxious chaperon will acknowledge that that was as much as could be expected under the circumstances, seeing that there were but two unmarried ladies of the company.

Afterward I found among my papers the following doleful ditty, purporting to be a translation of Hafiz, on the fertile Persian subject of Ferhad and Shireen; and as the reader is not obliged to read it unless he likes to do so, I subjoin it in memory of the day that I, for my part, passed so pleasantly with many agreeable companions in this unfrequented spot. The accompaniment to the air having been kindly undertaken by Fundook, the minstrel thus begins:

Hafiz, who pass’d his sunny hours

By the sweet stream of Mosellay,

Singing of vineyards and of flowers

To pass the fleeting time away,

Tells how the blood of Ferhad’s wound

Had stain’d fair Nature’s mantle green,

Sprinkling with ruddy spots the ground

Before the feet of fair Shireen.

The tulip from his blood arose

Beside her path in that sad hour.

Displaying how its leaves inclose

A goblet in each opening flower.

Then to the lips the goblet press,

Whose rim contains forgetfulness.

The vine, the glorious vine, arose,

Unscathed by crime, unchanged by woes,

Exulting in her charms;

Waving her tendrils in the breeze,

And clasping the rough, rugged trees

In her encircling arms.

With clustering grapes upon her brow,

Still as she binds each willing bough

Their welcome aid she gains;

On them she leans, but they confess

The power of her loveliness,

And glory in their chains.

Fill up the bright and sparkling bowl,

That cures the body, heals the soul.

No—be it not refused—

Hail to the vine! whose purple juice

Was sent on earth for mortals’ use,

But not to be abused.

Still to the lips the goblet press,

Whose rim contains forgetfulness.

Forgetfulness, alas! ’tis this

That mortals hold the height of bliss

In this sad world of care;

For Memory through life retains

A catalogue of griefs and pains,

But little else is there.

Then to the lips the goblet press,

Whose rim contains forgetfulness.—HAFIZ.

CHAPTER IX.

The Bear.—Ruins of a Genoese Castle.—Lynx.—Lemming.—Cara Guz.—Gerboa.—Wolves.—Wild Sheep.—A hunting Adventure.—Camels.—Peculiar Method of Feeding.—Degeneration of domestic Animals.

Of four-footed beasts, the most illustrious is the bear, of which there are a good many in the wooded sides of the mountains in the neighborhood of Kars. Near the strange, unearthly lake of Tortoom, I saw the fresh footprint of a real Ursa Major—a thundering old bear he must have been. He had only just departed, and the mark of one of his paws was large enough to hold more than both of mine. In another place I came upon the ruins of one of the string of Genoese castles which, in former days, reared up their lordly towers at distances of not more than eight or ten hours apart the whole way from Trebizond to Teflis. Their splendid ruins have been my admiration on many an imposing rock, frowning over an unknown valley. Even the names of most of these are lost, while we only know of the history of their founders that once upon a time there were such merchant princes. In the bottom of a broken turret a bear had taken lodgings, but he was not at home when I called. Others, not far off, on another hill, had given a small party, and had been amusing themselves by rolling about a piece of rock about five feet in diameter—a game of roulette, on a large scale, which showed their wondrous strength. The mud from their paws upon the stone was wet when I came up to join the party, but, perhaps luckily for me, they declined the honor of my acquaintance, and the society had broken up. Some sturdy peasants of Lazistaun, hearing of my partiality for strange creatures, brought me two young bears one day, who lived in our house for some time. They were very sensible, the she bear keeping her brother in remarkable order. They became very tame. They were, in some respects, different from the European bear, and of a light cinnamon color. I sent them to England. They were great favorites with the sailors on board ship, and arrived safely at the Tower Stairs, when some white paint being left out for the beautification of the vessel, the poor bears ate it all up, and not only died of the unwholesome feast, but the poison was so strong as to bring the fur off their skins, so that they could not be stuffed and immortalized in a glass case.

After the bear the next animal is the lynx, the fur of whose belly is of the highest value in Turkey, while that of the back is worth very much less. These animals are not rare in Armenia, and Enveri Effendi prided himself on a splendid robe of this valuable fur, which he paid for by selling the skins of the backs of the lynxes at Constantinople for more than he had given for the precious under-fur at Erzeroom. The lynx is famed for the quickness of his sight, but Enveri Effendi had a sharper eye than he in all affairs relating to his own benefit.

In the spring of the year, soon after the women and children, the lemmings come out, and sit upon their hind legs, and wipe their eyes with their fore-paws, and seem to wonder quietly at those who pass by, taking a header, or summerset, down their holes if you stop suddenly to look at these curious little beasts.

A soft, cozy, fat little quadruped, called cara guz (black eyes), about the size of a young Guinea-pig, and much of the same shape—only his color is gray, and he has a most wonderfully soft coat—comes out, too, about this time. He is so fat that he can not walk very fast, and is easily taken, and in his captivity prefers almonds and raisins to any other bill of fare which I was able to put before him. This little fellow eats his breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper slowly and respectably, without testifying any alarm for mankind. I could not make out his scientific name; he is probably some kind of little marmotte, and he falls readily into the manners and habits of the society in which Providence has placed him.

After cara guz, the gerboa comes out of his hole, and hops about on his long tail and hind legs; a miniature kangaroo, in whose acquaintance I have rejoiced in the burning deserts of Africa as well as in the frozen regions of the highlands of Erzeroom. In this country the number of quadrupeds is very limited; the fox is occasionally seen, as well as the gray beaver (kondooz), badgers, and wolves. At the melting of the snow the wolves come even into the towns, and devour the dogs with which every town is amply supplied. There are awful stories of their carrying off the little, peeping, blear-eyed children, who creep out of their holes in the beginning of spring, and who are occasionally washed away in the torrents of melted snow—the only washing attended to hereabouts. Wolves are not very unfrequently started out of the inside of one of the numerous dead horses, whose overworked bodies have been frozen into the consistency of flint during the winter, and which form savory banquets for the famished wolves when the snow and ice recede, and display these dainty morsels to their haggard eyes.

The wild sheep frequent the inaccessible rocks of the lower mountains, where a scanty herbage may be browsed beneath the line of perpetual snow. No two animals can be more different, both in appearance and habits, than the wild and tame sheep. The wild sheep of Armenia (Ovis gemelli) is in size, shape, and color like the doe of the fallow-deer, only it has two short horns bending backward, like those of a goat. The strength and agility of this most nimble creature are astonishing; they are more difficult of approach than the chamois of the Alps. I have usually seen them in pairs, but was never able to get a shot. I brought three skins and several heads of this rare animal to Europe, out of which one stuffed specimen was made up in the British Museum; it is, I believe, the only one extant. The method employed to hunt this sheep is to climb to the highest summit of a mountain, and then, cautiously approaching the edges of the cliffs, to peep down with a telescope into the gorges and ravines below, where, if you have luck, you may see the sheep capering about on the ledges of the precipice, jumping, standing on a stone on their hind legs to reach a little tuft of herbage, and playing the most curious antics, for no perceptible reason, unless it is that they find their digestion improved by taking a considerable deal of exercise. In these gymnastics the hunter must participate to a great extent in following the tracks of the jumpingest creatures (excepting fleas) that he can ever have to deal with. It requires much activity, and a good head for looking over a height, to attempt to come up with them, and many a sad accident has occurred to the adventurous sportsman in this pursuit. I myself have been in some awkward situations: once particularly, having let myself down by the roots of a kind of juniper on the ledge of a tremendous precipice, I found there was no way further down, and, what was of more consequence, no way up again, for the roots of the stunted tree were above my reach. A hunter—a Laz, or a native of Lazistaun—was with me, and when we had done watching the two sheep scampering off out of shot below, we looked at the place we were on, and then in each other’s faces in blank dismay. We were in the same scrape as the Emperor Maximilian got into in the Tyrol, near … only there being no angels about in the mountains of Lazistaun, we had no expectation of being assisted by a spirited or a spiritual goatherd, as he was. After a good deal of pantomime, which would have puzzled any bird who might be wondering at our maneuvers—for we did not understand each other’s language—we took off our boots, all our outer clothes, and our arms and rifles, and tied them in a bundle; then I planted myself firmly, with my face to the wall of the cliff, sticking my rifle into a crevice to give me more steadiness, and the hunter climbed carefully up my back on to my shoulders till he got hold of the roots of the tree; the tree shook, and plenty of stones and dirt fell upon my head, while the hunter scrambled into the trunk, and he was safe. He sat down a while to rest, and then hauled up the clothes and guns with our shawls that we had taken off from round our waists; a gentle qualm came over me at this moment, for fear he should be off with my, to him, very valuable spoils, and leave me in peace upon the shelf. But he was a true man, as a hunter generally is; so, after a variety of signs and gesticulations to each other as to how it was to be done, he lugged me up, first by the shawls, and then by hand, until I could reach the roots of the tree. Here there was only room for one, so he climbed higher, and, after some wonderful positions, struggles, kicks, and scrambling, I got back among the roots, then up the trunk of the old gnarled juniper, or whatever it was, and at last upon a slope, partaking much of that character which, in the states of the free and independent slave-dealers over the water, is called slantindicular. Here we both lay down. As for me, I was quite faint with giddiness and hard kicking, with nothing under me to kick at; but soon we picked up our effects, put on our boots, &c., scrambled, slid, and climbed about again after some more sheep; but, by reason of their having two pair of legs each, and each pair better adapted to present circumstances than our one pair each, they always got away, and we came down the mountain muttonless and hungry for that day, not sorry to find a famous good supper in the tent, in our encampment by the trout stream, in the Valley of Tortoom.

One more quadruped nearly concludes the short catalogue of the mammalia of Erzeroom—the capricorn, many specimens of whose enormous horns are nailed up over the doors of houses in the city; but I never saw this last animal at Erzeroom, alive or dead.

Innumerable camels accompany the caravans from hence to Persia, looking very much out of place in the deep snow. They are the Arabian camel with one hump, and I had no notion that my old acquaintance of Arabia could bear the tremendous cold of Erzeroom. Great quantities of corn and meal are brought here from the more prolific countries of the neighborhood. This is the staple merchandise of the city, which is the only place on the road between Persia and Turkey where caravans can recruit their thousands of jaded horses, and procure provisions for their journey. In this consists the political importance of an otherwise worthless and infertile spot. The number of camels, horses, mules, and beasts of burden assembled sometimes at Erzeroom is immense, and they have here a peculiar method of feeding the camels by opening their mouths with the left hand, and with the other shoving down the poor beast’s throat a ball of dough about the size of a cricket ball.

One peculiarity of the domestic animals in this fearful climate is, that they are dwarfed and dwindled in size to an extraordinary degree. A bull used to run about the lower regions of my house, which was barely eighteen inches high; the sheep were so small that grown up mutton looked like lamb. The same occurred with fruit; none at all grew at Erzeroom, but we had from villages some miles off, on the edges of the plain, plums the size of damsons, apricots the size of walnuts, and other fruits in proportion.

CHAPTER X.

Birds.—Great Variety and vast Numbers of Birds.—Flocks of Geese.—Employment for the Sportsman.—The Captive Crane.—Wild and tame Geese.—The pious and profane Ancestors.—List of Birds found at Erzeroom.

I now enter upon a subject to which I fear I have neither time nor power to do justice. The number of various kinds of birds which breed on the great plain of Erzeroom is so prodigious as to be almost incredible to those who have not seen them, as I often have, covering the earth for miles and miles so completely that the color of the ground could not be seen; particularly at one period, when the whole country had a rosy appearance, from the countless flocks of a sort of red goose, which I take to be the ruddy sheldrake—a splendid bird, though not good to eat. It is about the size of a small goose or a Muscovy duck, almost entirely clothed in various shades of red. Troops of the two varieties of the wild gray goose form whitish spots in the animated landscape, their wild cries and noises sounding in every direction. So closely covered was the plain with this prodigious multitude of every kind of wild fowl, that I have galloped among them for some distance, the birds getting up about one hundred yards in a circle round my horse, and settling again behind me with loud cries, while the air rustled with the beating of innumerable wings of those birds which had been disturbed by my approach. The sportsman may imagine what shooting there is at Erzeroom, for when one genus has reared its young and flown away to far and distant lands, another takes its place. Quails are at one time almost as thick as flies; and numerous varieties of small birds, among which the horned lark and the red-winged finch flew in clouds. That beautiful variety, the rosy starling, has been often shot, as well as the merops, and so many other little fowls of varied plumage, that I must refer the reader to the accompanying list, for it would fill a book to give even a slight description of them all. On the banks of the river I used to shoot all sorts of waders, particularly spoonbills, and that most delicate of birds, the egret or white heron, famous for its plumes. I must own to being a bad shot, having been more accustomed to the rifle, but these white herons afforded me great practice; as they flapped along, I shot numbers of them, as well as many and many a quaint fellow with long legs, whom I brought home merely to make out who he was, and to write down his name. Later in the year I risked my neck by riding as hard as I could tear over the rocky, or rather stony, plains at the foot of the mountains after the great bustard. I have more than once knocked some of the feathers out of these glorious huge birds, as they ran at a terrible pace, half flying and scrambling before my straining horse, but I never succeeded in killing one, though I have constantly partaken of those which had fallen before more patient gunners, who stalk them as you would a deer, and knock them over with a rifle or swan-shot from behind a stone or bank.

I had more success with the great cinereous crane, which runs much faster than a horse. I shot one at full gallop with a rifle, in a place overgrown with reeds. This was a mighty triumph, for, though my game was about five feet high, he was so very long in the legs and neck, that the body offered but a small mark to be brought down under such circumstances, and the pace he was going at the time, and I after him, was, as they say, “a caution.” This is a bird with whom it is requisite to be wary: if he is down, and not killed outright, like the heron and the stork he makes a dart with his sharp, long bill at the eyes of his enemy, and its strength is such that it might easily, I should think, penetrate the brain; at any rate, the eye would be picked out at once, and that would suffice for that time.

A man brought in a crane which he had winged, and we turned him out into the yard with the poultry, where he stalked up and down with a proud, indignant air. He soon became pretty quiet, and ate his corn with the rest, while he had a deep bucket of water for his own use, into which he used to poke his head continually. One day a stupid, heavy servant went into the yard, and, not knowing that the bucket was placed there for the stork, he took it up to carry it away, when the bird flew at him and pecked at his face, but, missing his eye, seized him tightly by the nose, and there he held him for a good while. The poor man halloed loud enough, but those who came to his assistance could not help him at first for laughing; and though he kept beating at the crane with the bucket, which he held in his hand, his long neck enabled him to keep so far off that he escaped all the frantic attempts of his prisoner to reach him. The man’s nose was swelled and very sore for some time, and he never got over the ridicule which attached to him for his perilous adventure with the crane. It was touching to watch this crane: when the time for its emigration arrived, a flock of its magnificent companions every day used to fly high up in the air, in a wheeling circle, above its head. This circle of flying birds has a very striking effect. The cranes above called to their friend to join them for their distant journey to a happier climate, and the poor helpless crane below, stretching its long neck up toward the sky, answered the appeal in a singularly mournful cry.

Various kinds of partridge exist, and the lesser bustard, called, in Turkish, Mesmeldek, is an excellent bird for the table. They have a curious method of catching the mesmeldek in some of the steppes in Southern Russia. At the commencement of winter, parties of horsemen gallop out upon the plains before sunrise, at which hour the wings of these birds are frozen to their sides, and, the hunters stretching out their horses in a line, the birds are driven by them into the villages, and secured, before the warmth of the sun releases their wings and restores their powers of flight. Great flocks of the lesser bustard have been driven in this manner occasionally into Odessa. Hawks and stately falcons hover over head, and prey upon their defenseless brethren at their ease.

Storks build upon the chimneys; and among the sticks of which their huge nest is formed, the sparrows make their nests, stealing, when they can, any food, which the old birds bring for their young.

Here, as in all other parts of the world, this impertinent race of little birds dispute possession of the house with mice and other intruders; but at Erzeroom they are hardly put to it sometimes for want of twigs to perch upon, and they sit usually, instead, upon the iron bars of the windows in the town. Here I have often watched them chirping in the cold, as they sat by the dozen on the bars of my window, dressing their feathers, and jabbering to each other, like true Koordish sparrows, about the corn that they stole from my chickens yesterday, and how, with case-hardened consciences, they intend to steal as much more as they can get to-day.

This is a subject on which I could dilate to any length, but at present I must conclude with the following list of the various tribes of birds who, in thousands and millions, would reward the toil of the sportsman and the naturalist on the plains and mountains of the high lands of Armenia; merely adding to this brief notice of the birds of this country the following veracious anecdote, as perhaps hitherto naturalists may not all of them be aware of the origin of the separation of the wild and tame goose:

In former days, two geese agreed to take a long journey together: the evening before they were to set out, one said to the other, “Mind you are ready, my friend, for, Inshallah, I will set out to-morrow morning!” “And so will I,” replied he, “whether it pleases God or not!” The sun rose the next day, and the pious goose, having ate his breakfast, and quenched his thirst in the waters of the stream, rose lightly on the wing, and soared away to a distant land. The impious bird also prepared to follow him; but, after hopping and fluttering for a long while, he found himself totally unable to rise from the ground; and his evolutions having been observed by a fowler who happened to be passing that way, he was presently caught, and reduced to servitude, in which his race have ever since continued, while the descendants of the religious goose still enjoy that freedom in which they were originally created.

LIST OF BIRDS FOUND AT ERZEROOM.

RAPTORES (BIRDS OF PREY).

Vultur fulvus

Fulvous vulture.

Aquila fulvus

Fulvous eagle.

Aquila

Eagle.

Accipiter fringillarius

Sparrow-hawk.

Falco tinnunculus

Kestril.

,,
osalon

Hobby.

,,
subbuteo

Merlin.

,,
rufipes

Orange-legged hobby.

,,
peregrinus

Peregrine falcon.

,,
peregrinus

Falcon.

Milvus ater

Common kite.

Buteo ater (?)

Common buzzard (?).

,,
ater

Marsh buzzard.

Circus pallidus

White hen harrier.

,,
rufus

Marsh hen harrier.

Noctua Indica

Small Indian owl.

Strix Indica

Another owl.

INSEPORES (OR PERCHERS).

Deutirostres.

Lanius excubitor

Great strike (or butcher-bird).

,,
collurio

Red-backed strike.

Collurio minor

Small strike.

Musicapa grisola

Spotted fly-catcher.

,,
luctuosa

Pied fly-catcher.

Turdus merula

Blackbird.

,,
torquatus

Ring-ouzel.

,,
pilaris

Fieldfare.

,,
musicus

Song-thrush.

Petrocinela saxatilis

Rock-thrush.

Cinclus aquaticus

Water-ouzel (or dipper).

Oriolus galbula

Golden oriole.

Motacilla alba

White wagtail.

,,
flava

Yellow wagtail.

Saxicola rubicola

Stonechat.

,,
rubetra

Whinchat.

,,
ænanthe

Wheatear.

Sylvia trochilus

Willow wren.

,,
hippolais

Willow wren.

Salicaria phragmitis

Sedge-warbler.

,,
cetti(?)

Sedge-warbler(?).

Curruca cineria

Whitethroat.

,,
atricapilla

Blackcap.

Phœnicura ruticilla

Redstart.

,,
tilkys

Black redstart.

,,
succica

Bluebreast.

Erythaca rubecula

Redbreast.

Troglodytes Europæus

Wren.

Rudytes melanocephala

Wren.

Anthus arboreus

Tree-pipit.

,,
pratensis

Pipit-lark.

,,
rufescens

Pipit-pipit.

Fissirostres.

Hirundo riparia

Saced martin.

,,
rustica

Swallow.

Cypselus murarius

Swift.

Caprimulgus Europæus

Goat-sucker.

Conirostres.

Alanda arvensis

Skylark.

,,
arborea

Woodlark.

,,
calandra

Calandre.

,,
brachydactila

Little lark.

,,
penicillata

Horned lark.

,,
rupestris

Rock lark.

,,
rupestris (?)

(An Albino variety).

,,
rupestris

Albino lark.

Parus major

Great titmouse.

,,
cœruleus

Blue titmouse.

Emberiza citrinella

Yellow-hammer.

,,
hortulana

Ortolan.

,,
miliaria

Common bunting.

,,
cia

Meadow bunting.

Fringilla cœlebs

Chaffinch.

,,
montefrengilla

Mountain-finch (or brambling).

,,
nivalis (?)

Snow-finch (?)

,,
sanguinea

Bloody-finch.

Pyrgita domestica

House-sparrow.

,,
petronea

Stone-sparrow.

Carduelis communis

Goldfinch.

Pyrrhula communis (?)

(A variety of the bullfinch).

Linaria montuim

Mountain linnet (or twite).

,,
cannabina

Greater redpole.

Coccothraustes chloris

Greenfinch.

,,
vulgaris

Hawfinch.

Loxia curvirostra

Crossbill.

Sturnus vulgaris

Common starling.

Pastor roseus

Rosy-pastor.

Corvus modedula

Jackdaw.

,,
frugeleus

Rook.

,,
cornix

Hooded or Royston crow.

Pica candata

Magpie.

Garrulus melanocephalus

Black-headed jay.

Coracias garrula

Roller.

Tenuirostres.

Upupa epops

Hoopoe.

Merops apiaster

Bee-eater.

Alcedo ispida

Kingfisher.

SCANSORES (OR CLIMBERS).

Yuux torquilla

Wryneck.

Cuculus canorus

Cuckoo.

Cuculus (?)

Cuckoo.

RASORES (ALLINACEOUS BIRDS).

Otis tarda

Great bustard.

,,
tetrax

Small bustard.

Pterocles arenarius

Sand-grouse.

Perdix saxatilis

Red or Greek partridge.

,,
cineria

Gray or English partridge.

Coternix vulgaris

Quail.

Columba ænos

Stock-dove.

,,
turtur (?)

Turtle-dove (?).

GRALLÆ (OR WADERS).

Charadrius morinelles

Dotterel.

,,
minor

Small ring-plover.

,,

major

Large ring-plover.

Ædienenuus crepitans

Stone-curlew.

,,
crepitans

Stone-curlew.

Vanellus cristatus

Crested lapwing.

,,
keptuschka

Crested lapwing.

,,
keptuschka

Crested lapwing.

Grus cineria

Gray crane.

Ardea alba

White heron.

,,
cineria

Gray heron (two sorts very large).

,,
cineria

Night heron.

,,
cineria

Black heron.

,,
cineria

Black and gray heron.

Botaurus stellaris

Bittern.

Nycticorax Europæus

Night heron.

Ciconia alba

White stork.

Platolea leucorodia

White spoonbill.

Scolopax rusticola

Woodcock.

,,
major

Double snipe.

Gallinago media

Common snipe.

,,
minima

Jack-snipe.

Ibis falcinellus

Marone ibis.

,,
falcinellus (?)

Marone ibis.

Limosa melanolensa

Tringa subaiquata

Curlew tringa.

,,
minuta

Small tringa.

,,
variabilis

Changeable tringa.

,,
pugnax

Ruff and reve.

,,
pugnax

Ruff and tringa.

Totanus hypolencos

Common sandpiper.

,,
ochropus

Green sandpiper.

,,
glotis

Green shankpiper.

,,
calidris

Red shankpiper.

Himantopus melanopterus

Stilts.

Rallus crec

Corn-crake.

,,
crec

Corn-rail.

,,
crec

Corn-rail.

Zapornia pusilla

Corn-rail.

Fulica atra

Coot.

Gallinula chloropus

Water-hen.

Glareola limbata

Pratin cole.

,,
torquata

Austrian cole.

PALMIPEDES (WEB-FOOTED BIRDS).

Podiceps cristatus

Crested grebe.

,,
rubricollis

Red-necked grebe.

,,
auritus

Eared grebe.

Larus ridibundus

Laughing gull.

,,
argentatus (?)

Herring gull (?).

Sterna hirundo

Common tern.

,,
leucoptera

Common tern.

,,
nigra

Black tern.

Pelicanus onocrotalus

Pelican.

Carbo cormoranus

Cormorant.

Anas boschas

Wild duck.

,,
boschas

Wild duck.

Cygnus ferus

Wild swan.

Anser ferus

Gray-leg goose.

,,
albifrons

White-fronted goose.

Fuligula rufina

Red-headed pochard.

,,
rufina

Common pochard.

,,
cristata

Tufted duck.

Querquedula cinerea

Summer teal.

Querquedula crecca

Common teal.

Dafila caudacuta

Pintail duck.

Chaulelosmus strepera

Gadwall.

Rynchapsis clypeata

Black-headed shoveler.

Tadorna rutila

Ruddy sheldrake.

,,
vulpanser

Common sheldrake.

Mergus albellus

Smew.

For this list of birds I am indebted to the kindness of my friend Mr. Calvert, of Erzeroom, to whom I take this opportunity of expressing my best thanks for a communication so interesting to lovers of natural history.

RUINED TOWER IN THE CASTLE OF TORTOOM, BUILT BY THE GENOESE, OR PERHAPS BY THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS.

CHAPTER XI.

Excursion to the Lake of Tortoom.—Romantic Bridge.—Gloomy Effect of the Lake.—Singular Boat.—“Evaporation” of a Pistol.—Kiamili Pasha.—Extraordinary Marksman.—Alarming Illness of the Author.—An Earthquake.—Lives lost through intense Cold.—The Author recovers.

Between the days of arrival and departure of the tatars, or couriers, to Constantinople, and the struggles to keep the peace and explain the simplest transaction with our colleagues, we found time for various expeditions to the neighboring countries on all sides. The most remarkable of these was that to the deep, unfathomable lake of Tortoom, about three days’ journey off. Our main object in going there was to fish, and we encamped for that purpose on the upper streams of the Batoum River and other places. In the valley of the castle of Tortoom the trout abounded, and were of that unsophisticated nature that, fishing one hour in the dawn and one hour before sunset with two fly-rods, we caught every day enough to feed our camp, and to send a horse-load (no small quantity) in the evening to our friends at Erzeroom. This was one day’s march, and the horses, traveling all night, brought the fish, though in the hot weather, in great perfection to the city in the cool of the morning. We were not aware, till it was too late, of the deadly nature of the malaria in these rocky valleys, where the precipice shot up clear and straight to the height, sometimes, we used to judge, of above a thousand feet. On our way through one of these romantic dells, we all rode, bag and baggage, over a bridge, to be compared only to the bridge of Al Serat, over which the souls of the judged will have to pass from the Temple of Jerusalem, over the Valley of Jehoshaphat, till they reach the other world, which bridge is as narrow as the edge of the cimeter of Mohammed. The fright I was in is not to be described when I saw the first horseman, who was at the time filling his pipe, walk his horse unconcernedly over this bridge, which was composed of two pine-trees thrown over a torrent which roared and tumbled thirty feet below. However, being afraid to show I was afraid, I rode over too, and certainly thought myself a bold fellow when I got safe to the other side. To ride safely over such a bridge, a horse ought to be brought up to practice on a tight-rope. I would not attempt to walk over such a place nowadays in England.

We passed a village in one lovely valley, in a grove of peach-trees, where we found that every soul, or rather every body, was dead; only one man survived the fever which had killed the rest.

BOAT ON THE LAKE OF TORTOOM.

Of all the strange and gloomy scenes that I have witnessed, none have left a deeper impression on my mind than that of the black, unfathomable lake of Tortoom. Mountains of dark rock fall sheer down in awful precipices right into these deep, still waters on each side. No fish are to be found in this Dead Sea, though perhaps they may retreat there in the winter from the mountain rills. If the lake was a strange place, the boat which we discovered on the shore was in character with the scene. It was the only vessel on its waters, and its builder probably never studied naval architecture in the dock-yards of the maritime powers. It was formed out of the trunks of two trees; but as no description would so well convey a notion of its form, I refer the curious to the accompanying sketch. The standing figure in it represents a valorous kawass, who fired his pistol in the air for the sake of the echo, and, on the smoke clearing off, he found that the entire pistol had evaporated too; nothing visible remained in his hand; it had burst all to pieces. But, fortunately, neither he nor any of the party were hurt by the fragments, which fell into the waters of the dark and silent lake.

October 1, 1843. This day I was riding on the road toward Bayazeed and Persia. Hearing some shots, I turned toward the hills lying between the town of Erzeroom and the mountains, and there I saw two or three tents pitched, and a number of officers, servants, and people attending on Kiamili Pasha, who was shooting at a mark with a pistol.

He is the most wonderful shot I ever heard of: he always fired at a distance of about 250 paces, or yards. Any one who will take the trouble to step this distance in a field or park will see how far it is to shoot with a rifle, and how entirely out of all usual calculations in pistol practice. I went into the Pasha’s tent. He received me, as usual, with great kindness, and, after pipes and coffee, I begged him to go on with his shooting. The way he set about it was this: he sat on one of the low, square rush-bottomed stools which are always found in Turkish coffee-houses, but which must have been brought from Constantinople probably by the Pasha, as those kind of stools are not usually met with in Erzeroom. He did not rest his elbow on his knee, but pressed it steadily against his side, took a deliberate but not very slow aim, and sent the ball through a brown pottery vase filled with water, about fifteen inches high, which stood on the other side of a valley, on a level with the tent, and full 250 yards off. I think the Pasha broke two while I sat with him, and made a hole which let the water out of another. His pistols were a pair of very slightly rifled dueling-pistols, about nine inches in the barrel, made by Egg, Great George Street, London. I was so much astonished at the Pasha’s shooting, that I asked him to give me one of the pieces of the vase, which I took home with me, and talked to my friends about it. I felt perfectly well when we went to dinner, when suddenly it appeared to me that what I was eating was burning hot, and had a strange, odd taste. I believe I got up and staggered across the room, but here my senses failed me, and I remained insensible for twenty-seven days. An attack of brain fever had come upon me like a blow, as sudden and overwhelming as a flash of lightning.

On the 27th of October I awoke in the morning, but, as I suppose, went to sleep for a while; in the afternoon I fairly came to my senses, and saw my servant sitting on the scarlet-cloth divan under the window looking at me. I felt something strange, and still, and gloomy in the air, and was rather bewildered with the sensation. This was soon to be accounted for: the servant, seeing that I was alive, came forward toward the bed, while a low rumbling noise made itself heard. This noise became louder; flakes of plaster fell from the ceiling; the room trembled, and was filled with a fine dust, with which I was nearly choked. My man exclaimed, “The earth moves—are you not afraid?” As he spoke, the noise which we had heard increased, and an immense beam, made of the trunk of a whole tree, which was immediately above my bed, split with a report like a cannon. The earthquake shook the house terribly; it creaked and trembled like a ship in a heavy gale of wind; the noise increased to a roar, not like thunder, but howling and bellowing, with a low rumbling sound, while the air was as still as if Nature was paralyzed with dread; every now and then a tremendous crash gave notice of a falling house. The one opposite our house, belonging to a poor widow, was entirely destroyed; and, in the midst of a most fearful uproar, the two rooms, one on each side of my bed-room, fell in, while the air was darkened altogether, as in an eclipse, with clouds of dust. So great was the noise of the earthquake all around, that neither my attendant nor I distinguished the particular crash when the two rooms adjoining us fell in. Some of the minarets, and many of the houses of the city, were demolished; parts of the ancient castellated walls fell down. The top of one of the two beautiful minarets of the old medressé, the glory of Erzeroom, called usually Eki Chifteh, disappeared. Those who were out, and able to witness the devastation, and to hear the awful roaring noise, said they had never seen or heard any thing more tremendous than the scene before their eyes. It is difficult to express in words the strange, awful sensation produced by the seeming impossible contradiction of a dead stillness in the midst of the crash of falling buildings, the sullen, low bellowing, which perhaps sounded from beneath the ground, and the tremendous uproar that arose on all sides during the earthquake. I have not met with an account of this strange phenomenon in the descriptions of other earthquakes, and do not know whether it is a usual accompaniment to these terrible convulsions of nature.

The earthquake accomplished its mission: in the midst of terror and destruction, it restored one poor creature to life. I regained my senses and my faculties on the 27th, as suddenly as I had lost them on the 1st day of this month. God give me grace to make a good use of the life which was restored to me under such awful circumstances!

On that day the doctor, who had some difficulty in getting to my room through the ruins of the ante-room, took the ice off my head, and in a few days I recovered sufficient strength to move my limbs, which I could not do at first.

As soon as it appeared that there was any probability of my recovery, my kind friends agreed that the best chance of regaining my health lay in removing, as soon as I could bear the journey, to a better climate. During great part of the year, and naturally in the winter, the cold was so severe that any one standing still for even a very short time was frozen to death. Dead frozen bodies were frequently brought into the city; and it is common in the summer, on the melting of the snow, to find numerous corpses of men, and bodies of horses, who had perished in the preceding winter. So usual an event is this, that there is a custom, or law, in the mountains of Armenia, that every summer the villagers go out to the more dangerous passes, and bury the dead whom they are sure to find. They have a legal right to their clothes, arms, and the accouterments of the horses, on condition of forwarding all bales of merchandise, letters, and parcels to the places to which they are directed.

During the whole month of December the Pasha had caused four mules to be exercised every day with a takterawan, or litter, which he provided for my conveyance to Trebizond. Two mules, led by one man, carried the litter; the other two followed tamely, led by another man, close behind, to be ready to take the places of the others if they were tired or disabled. From morning to night, the men and the mules, and the takterawan, stumped along through the snow, till they dared to face the storm and the immense cold, and could climb up and down the icy rocks like goats. As soon as I was able, I was sent out in the litter to try how I could bear it, and to settle various contrivances for keeping out the cold, and enabling me to bear the motion of the mules.

One day Colonel Williams rode out on the Persian road to see whether it was passable for Dr. Wolf, who was then staying at Erzeroom, and who wished to continue his journey to Bokhara, when he met a number of horses, each laden with two frozen bodies of Persian travelers, one tied on each side of the pack-horse. An unfortunate Piedmontese doctor had been lost in a snow-storm a short time before, and his body was found afterward near a small monastery, three or four miles from Erzeroom, where he had wandered, bewildered with the falling snow; and a whole party, with one or two ox-carts, who left a village in the morning on their way to another a short distance off, never arrived there; they were found huddled together, oxen, horses, men, and women, in a snow-drift, dead, and frozen hard and stiff, some weeks afterward. The cold was so tremendous at this time that the mountains were impassable, and no one was able to move beyond a short distance from the town.

CHAPTER XII.

Start for Trebizond.—Personal Appearance of the Author.—Mountain Pass.—Reception at Beyboort.—Misfortunes of Mustapha.—Pass of Zigana Dagh.—Arrival at Trebizond.

On the 27th of December, all preparations being completed, I started on my journey over the mountains to Trebizond. Kiamili Pasha had prepared an order to all and sundry, great and small, upon the road, to give me every assistance, and, with this and a powerful firman from the Sultan, I had authority to do whatever I pleased in that part of the world. About twenty attendants accompanied me, besides a certain levy from every village I passed, who were to march to the next village every day to clear the roads, move the snow, and pick us out of it when we tumbled in, &c. These villagers were all armed with the peculiar dagger of Circassia, called a cama, a most efficient tool as well as weapon, and a short, heavy rifle, generally beautifully made, with which they hit objects at very long distances, 400 yards not being considered out of shot. My personal appearance must have been remarkable: I had a long beard, and so thin a face that my nose was translucent, if not transparent. I had a Persian cap upon my head, and over other garments a toilet of my own invention, which vested me with a dignity peculiar to myself: this was a large eider down quilt, of bright green silk, in the middle of which I had caused a hole to be made, through which I put my head; the two ends of the quilt hung down before and behind, like a chasuble or a poncho; round it I tied a girdle. My general appearance must have been rather striking to the beholder, and was probably considered by the natives on the road as the official costume of an Elchi Bey. I was so weak that when I was bundled into the takterawan I could not turn round, and was nearly smothered in my own feathers, till somebody turned me on the right side upward, when I was able to bid adieu to all the principal Europeans and others who had kindly assembled to see me off. A number of people accompanied me for some distance out of the town; and Colonel Williams came as far as Elijè, about three hours in the snow, which ended my first day’s march.

On the next day, December 28th, we got to Meymansoor, a village at the foot of the first mountain pass, called Hoshapoona, a terrible place at all times, but frightful in the depth of winter, and under the circumstances I was in. Only two or three days before it had been rendered practicable, by driving a thousand horses, belonging to the caravans which were snowed up at the foot of the pass, up and down the road to make a track. This road is what is called a scala; that is, a series of holes, each about a foot deep, sometimes two feet, about eighteen inches in diameter, and the same in distance from one another. From long practice, the horses put their feet very cleverly into these holes without tripping over the intervening ridges of hardened snow. Men on foot usually step on the ridges, which is like walking on the rounds of a ladder for a few hundred miles, the probabilities of not breaking your leg if you slip into the hole before or behind you being very slight. As in many places this road was slantindicular, going up and down at an angle of 45°, I was reclining in the litter alternately on my head and on my heels—mostly on my head going up hill. My mules were held upon their feet by as many men as could stand on each side, where the road was wide enough; most of it was a ledge on a precipice, about eighteen inches wide, when the men supported my equipage with ropes, a strong body hopping and stumbling behind and before, at the rate of about one mile an hour. My glass windows were smashed with the least possible delay, but we repaired them the next day with oiled paper. At the top of the pass we came upon a party of Persians, who were going the other way toward Erzeroom; they were seated in a row, on the ledge of the precipice, looking despairingly at a number of their baggage-horses which had tumbled over, and were wallowing in the snow many hundred feet below. They did not seem to be killed, as far as I could see, as the snow had broken their fall. The drift covered the precipitous rock from the bottom to within twenty or thirty feet of the top, and they slid down this till they popped into a deep hole in the snow, like a well, in the valley below. It did not appear that there was any probability of their getting up again. The poor Persians crammed themselves into nooks and little hollows on the ledge to make room for us to pass. I presume their horses were frozen to death before we had left them very long. This was an awful spot altogether. We had started before light in the morning, and arrived in a dreary mountain valley, at a hovel called Zaza Khan, in the evening. During one part of the day, the danger to the takterawan was so great that I was plucked out, and a tall, good-natured man, called Beyragdar (the standard-bearer), carried me like a baby in his arms, one or two others supporting him, across a tremendous ledge. I was light enough to carry, but was such a great bundle of fluff that he could not see over me, and another man helped him along, and showed him where to put his feet. We were very fortunate in a fine sunny day for our journey over this tremendous mountain. On the last day of the year 1843 we arrived at the town of Beyboort. Though I had sent two horsemen on to say that I was coming, no one came out of the town to meet me, and on proceeding to the palace or house of the Bey, the governor of the place I was refused admittance, though he had received orders before to pay me every attention. I at last was taken in by the Cadi, in whose comfortable house I was kindly entertained. The next day we met a tatar, a government courier, on the road from Trebizond. I sent letters by him to Erzeroom, complaining of my reception by the Bey of Beyboort; and so rapidly were matters conducted by my friend the Pasha, that the Bey was turned out of his government, and another Bey appointed to succeed him, before I and my party arrived at Trebizond. This was sharp practice, and doubtless had a good effect. The chiefs of the other villages, and the one town of Gumush Khannè, treated me always with great kindness and civility. On the 2d of January, at a hovel called Khaderach Khan, I met a rich Persian merchant coming from Constantinople with his wife and family. He had been eighteen days on the road from Trebizond, which is thirty-two hours of tatar-posting; from hence, at this rate, he would be six months on his journey to Teheran, to which place he was bound. He was a remarkably gentleman-like man, as most Persian gentlemen are. He had a great train of servants and attendants, well dressed and well armed, each with a silver tass, or drinking-cup, slung over his shoulder, and a handsome cama dangling by a narrow strap from the front of his girdle, and his waist squeezed till he could hardly shut his mouth, in true Circassian style. He had numbers of curious contrivances for comfort and convenience: little fire-places, hanging to the stirrup, for hot coals, to light the caleoons, &c. His son, a smart youth, spoke French, and we passed a very pleasant hour together, though I had turned him out of the best hole in the hovel, into which Beyragdar laid me down softly in the corner; and I was so much exhausted that I knew nothing of the confusion I had made till I had had a cup of blazing hot Russian tea, with a slice of lemon in it instead of cream, and had taken the diversion of wondering at an odd sort of partridge which one of my men had knocked over with a stone, for which act I presented him with the sum of 5½d. sterling.

At Kalé Khan I had given leave to one Mustapha, my kawass bashi, or captain of the kawasses, to go and see his family, who lived in a village a short distance off the road; he had not seen them for a long time, and went on his way rejoicing. At a place called Porda Bakchelari, where I was resting on the 3d, he made his appearance again; he was so altered in looks that I did not know him at first; so much so, that I asked him who he was, and what he wanted with me. His history, poor fellow! was as follows:

When he arrived at his village, he rode up to the door of his own house, thinking to give a happy surprise to his wife and children, whose names he called out as he stopped his horse in the little street. No one answered, when he called again, and knocked loudly at the door several times. At last an old woman put her head out of the door of another house, and screamed to him to know what he was making such a noise about.

“I want such a one,” said he, naming his wife.

“What, Eyesha?” said the old woman; “who are you? You must be a stranger to this place not to know that she died of the fever and was buried two weeks ago.”

“And where is Hassan?” said the poor kawass, asking for his eldest son.

“Oh, he died three months ago.”

“And the two little ones?” he asked.

“They were buried, I forget how long it is since,” said the old woman; “the fever got into that house; the people are all dead. You had better not go in, stranger, for it has been locked up by the cadi, and the owner, Mustapha Aga, lives a long way off at Erzeroom. Inshalla! he will come some day, and the cadi will deliver the key to him.”

Mustapha kawass never dismounted from his horse in his native village; he turned slowly away, and rode back to the track of the mules and horses of my followers till he caught us up at Bakchelari Khan.

“Allahkerim!” (God is merciful!) said his companions, when he had told us this sad history. His family was swept from the face of the earth; there was not a servant left, not one old well-remembered face to greet him in his visit to the village where he had passed his childish days. He had heard nothing of the fever or of the infliction which had fallen upon his house, and suddenly he found himself alone in the wide world. We were all grieved for him, but what could we do? every one looked grave as we plodded on again through the snow and ice, and smoked the pipe of reflection in silence on our weary way.

On the 7th we got into a fix near a place called Madem Khanlari, in the pass of Zigana Dagh, a worse place than Even Hoshabounar: we had been all day scrambling about in rocky ledges, and crossing torrents and snow-drifts, each of which seemed impassable till we went at it with a will: a number of villagers, with axes and ropes, came with us, and worked valiantly in clearing the ice off the narrow shelves of rock, and leading the horses through the most difficult places, where they could hardly stand; sometimes the horses were almost lifted by the men. By the greatest care and exertion, none as yet fell over the precipices. My takterawan was surrounded by a posse of zealous, active mountaineers, clinging to each other, and putting the mules’ feet into the holes which they cut for them with their axes. At last we got to a place where there was a sudden turn at the narrow edge of a gorge or cleft of rock: the length of the litter, with one mule before and another behind, made it impossible to turn without going over. Somehow, by the help of a number of men, the front mule was carried by main force round the corner, till we were in such a position that the hinder mule was being dragged over the precipice by the poles of the takterawan, to which it was harnessed. Without a drawing it is difficult to describe the position we had got into; but it may be partly understood by the fact that, out of whichever side of the takterawan I looked, there was nothing under me, for perhaps two hundred feet, till you arrived at a brawling torrent, which kept itself alive by violent exercise, in jumping, leaping, and tumbling over the rocks and cascades at the bottom of the ravine, so that it was the only thing not frozen hard and still in the dead landscape of thick ice, and snow, and shattered rock, and the clean, smooth precipice towered up from the little merry stream to hundreds of feet above our heads, where an edge of snow and a fringe of icicles shone in the bright sky upon the topmost margin of the cliffs. Some of the men now sat down, with their legs hanging over the precipice; they were supported by other men, while, in their turn, they held the legs of the mules, who were beginning to get frightened, or perhaps choked, and gave utterance to curious exclamations. My friend Beyragdar made a bridge of his long body, by leaning over from the inner angle of the road to the side of the takterawan. As for me, beyond peeping like an old rat out of a cage, I could not move, so I lay still till I was pulled out by two men over Beyragdar’s back, handed like a bundle over the foremost mule, and stuck upon a horse a little farther on. The mules were, somehow or other, saved and released from the shafts of the takterawan, which I never saw again; they could get it no further, and the rest of the journey I made on horseback, supported by a man on each side when the road was wide enough, by one when it was too narrow for two, and, when there was only room for the horse alone, Beyragdar carried me in his arms till we got to the Strada Reale, good two feet wide, when I was put upon a horse again.

QUARANTINE HARBOR, TREBIZOND.

In this way, by slow degrees, we scrambled on our way, till, on the 10th of January, after fifteen days’ journey through the intense cold of the mountains, I arrived, in better health and strength than when I started, at the edge of the table-land, from whence I saw the blue waters of the sea, and at 11 o’clock A.M. I was seated in my room in the quarantine station at Trebizond.

CHAPTER XIII.

Former History of Trebizond.—Ravages of the Goths.—Their Siege and Capture of the City.—Dynasties of Courtenai and the Comneni.—The “Emperor” David.—Conquest of Trebizond by Mehemet II.

Trebizond, so famous in the Middle Ages as the residence of magicians, enchanters, and redoubted heroes of chivalry, is better known in the pages of romance than for any facts of historical importance which occurred there during many centuries. The only person who might probably have been able to throw much light upon the ancient history of this Byzantine city was that veracious chronicler, the Cid Hamet Bengenelli, who, in his account of the renowned and valorous Knight of the Rueful Countenance, records of Don Quixote that “the poor gentleman already imagined himself at least crowned Emperor of Trebizond by the valor of his arm; and wrapped up in these agreeable delusions, and hurried on by the strange pleasure he took in romances of chivalry, he prepared to execute what he so much desired.”

Two real events, however, occurred at Trebizond which I shall endeavor to describe—the only ones which stand out with any prominence in the records of the dukes, counts, and governors who held this province in their languid rule.

In the third century the Goths, a band of desperate barbarians, who came originally from Prussia, were established in a curious out-of-the-way kingdom, situated on the Cimmerian Bosporus, the inlet which gives access to the Sea of Azof from the Black Sea. Trebizond, the capital of a Roman province, had been founded in the days of Xenophon by a Grecian colony, and now owed its wealth and splendor to the munificence of the Emperor Hadrian, who had constructed an artificial harbor for its shipping, while the town was defended on the land side by a double line of walls and towers, some part of which probably exist at the present time among the fortifications afterward erected by the Christian emperors and the Turks. In those troublous times the country was in disorder, and the wealthy patricians had sent their treasures into the town for greater security, the garrison having been re-enforced by an additional body of 10,000 men. A numerous fleet of ships was in the harbor, which, perhaps, were timidly seeking refuge from the pirates of the Euxine within the encircling quays of the harbor of Hadrian. The riches of the inhabitants, the balmy climate, and the soft manners of the Greeks, had enervated the spirits of the commanders of the troops; the fashionable triflers were sunk in luxury and ease; feeling secure within the impregnable walls of the imperial fortress, they gave themselves up to feelings of indolent disdain of foreign enemies; and the brilliant officers and scornful senators, in flowing robes, passed their days in feasting and attending upon the ladies, to the neglect of discipline and vigilance, trusting that the lofty walls and mighty towers were sufficient bulwarks to keep off the barbarians whom they despised.

About the year 260 of our era, the Goths, who had made several roving expeditions on the shores of Circassia, had plundered, with various success, the temples and cities on the coasts of the Black Sea. These indomitable savages embarked on board a fleet of small flat-bottomed boats, each containing only a few men, who inhabited a sort of house with a shelving roof, built of wood, in the centre of the boat. An innumerable shoal of these floating houses spread over the surface of the waves, trusting to the winds for the course they should pursue, and to the ravage of the villages on shore for food. This swarm of rapacious pirates arrived in the course of one of their forays in the neighborhood of Trebizond; they landed in numbers under the walls, from the summits of which the fair damsels and silken warriors looked down with pitying scorn on the uncouth behavior, badly-made garments, and coarse appearance of the roving Goths, and, having satisfied their curiosity and expressed their contempt for the horde of barbarians who had arrived in the strange fleet of little boats, they retired to the arcades surrounding the courts of the palaces; some went to the forum in the centre of the town, to hear the news and laugh at the uncouth appearance of the Goths. The ladies and gentlemen, changing their morning dresses for a lighter and richer evening costume, assembled in the marble halls of many palaces, charmed with the excitement of a new subject for ridicule in the persons and dresses of the Goths, and a new theme for conversation in the refined assemblies of the polished nobles and lovely damsels of the luxurious city of Trebizond.

I can imagine the conversation of a pleasant little party assembled In the triclinium of the prefect of the city. The gentlemen, in studied attitudes, reclining on the divans or couches placed against the wall, behind the marble tables; the ladies, in graceful robes, seated at their feet; while pages, with wreaths of flowers round their heads, in short tunics of white silk, brought up dishes of blackbirds stewed in wine; tarts sweetened with honey, which could be eaten with impunity by natives, while strangers lost their senses if they ventured on the dangerous condiment.

“Eudocia, dearest, did you go up those horrid steps upon the wall, to look at those people outside? Did you ever see such creatures?”

“Oh, yes, Lais, I did. Poor barbarians! why do they tie their legs up with leather thongs in that funny way? And what skimpy tunics they wear! I think they must be made of sheepskin! There was one of them—a great personage, no doubt, in his own nasty little country—who had made himself a toga of a blanket. Did not you see him, Xenophon? You were with us.”

“Well—aw—why, yes, I think I did,” says Xenophon; “but what heavy axes they carry! what long, straight swords they wear! They say their hilts are gold; I dare swear they are brass. Our legionaries would make short work of them.”

“Well,” says Lais, “I wish you would send those ugly people away, for one can not take a drive in the Hippodrome since they have been here these two days, and the new silver harness for my white oxen is so pretty. But, Eudocia, did you see the lady? I hear she is a princess—a princess, who travels in a punt! Dear me, a great lady she must be!”

“I never heard of her,” says Eudocia; “do tell me all about her. What is she like? Is she tall or short? pretty or ugly? or what? Let us have a description of your barbarian lady.”

“Why,” answers Lais, “she is awfully tall, and she has light hair, plaited in two long tails like ropes, and much of the same color, which hang down on each side of her face in front, and reach to her knees. She is dressed in a long and very full gown, with innumerable plaits, coming high up round her throat. Her gown is confined round her waist by a girdle of gold and jewels, and she has a golden fillet round her head. This gown was light blue, and was so long I could not see her feet; but those of the maidens with her were of such a size, Eudocia, that four of our feet might walk about in their shoes, which were of gold stuff, coming up to the ankle, and worked with pearls—as heavy as lead, I should imagine.”

“But was the princess pretty?” again inquires Eudocia.

“Xenophon says she is, but I don’t believe him. She has strange-colored eyes, I was told—the color of her gown, and is not pale and smooth as marble, but with rosy cheeks and a throat as white as snow; but she looked very stupid, and solemn, and proud. What she can have to be proud of, poor creature! I can not conceive; she has not the black eyes and bright smile of our girls.”

“That is a curious wool the men wear on their caps,” saith Xenophon; “it is curly, and of a light bluish-gray color. The barbarians seem to think it is very fine. I have not seen any thing like it: it is made of the skin of a peculiar breed of lambs, to be met with nowhere out of their country.”

“What in the world can they want so many fagots for?” asks another young lady. “I am sure the days are hot enough in the summer; perhaps they have no firewood in their own miserable regions; they have been doing nothing but cut bushes and make fagots of them on the hill-side above the citadel ever since they have been here.”

“Ah,” says Xenophon, “except the amusement of burning a few villages, though that could hardly repay them the trouble, for all the goods worth carrying away have been brought within the walls. However, here comes the little cup-bearer with the Chian and Falernian wine. Never mind these outer barbarians; let us go to supper.”

So they went to supper, and, affecting classic tastes, sang verses on heroic themes from Homer, accompanied by music on the lyre and the double pipe.

The Goths went to supper too outside, under the trees, and ate great pieces of beef cut from oxen roasted whole. The night was very dark, but the guards and the citizens lit up their rooms gayly within the city, which resounded with laughter, songs, and merriment.

The night advanced, and so did the Goths; each man bore a fagot, which he threw into the ditch below the wall. Thousands were piled upon those below, others were thrown on them; the heap of fagots rose, the upper ones were level with the battlements. Where were the city guards? Where were the legionaries and the 10,000 auxiliary troops? They were sleeping off the fatigues of the evening feast; they were any where but where they should be—upon the walls.

Down from the towers and the bastions poured a stream of fierce determined warriors; they closed the gates on that side, for fear the garrison should get out; but the alarm was spread; the legionaries, who were awakened by the cry, made off through the opposite side of the fortifications and escaped into the country. Those who were not quick enough were stabbed in the back and slain in heaps; fire and the sword commenced their fearful reign, blood ran in the streets, the massacre was horrible. The most holy temples, says the historian, the most splendid edifices, were involved in a common destruction. The booty that fell into the hands of the Goths was immense. The wealth of the adjacent countries, which had been deposited in Trebizond as a secure place of refuge, was added to the spoil. The number of captives was incredible; those who were left alive were gathered together by the Goths. Lais and Eudocia became the handmaids of the Gothic princess. Xenophon and 2000 able-bodied dandies were driven down to the port by 200 Goths, who made them chain each other to the oars of the galleys, on board of which the enormous plunder of Trebizond was embarked by the forced labor of the citizens, one or two being cut in half with a sweep of the long Gothic sword, to encourage the others if they did not hurry in their work under the burning rays of the sun. The Cimmerian Bosporus received the fleet of galleys laden with the treasures, and rowed by the slaves, of the noble city of Trebizond, now smouldering in a heap of smoking ruins.

Thus ended the first episode in the history of Trebizond.

For more than a thousand years the history of Trebizond remains enveloped in the mists of obscurity and insignificance; various dukes, princes, and counts succeeded each other in a long line of inglorious pride.

In the thirteenth century the chivalrous house of Courtenai, by the assistance of the heroes of the Crusades, mounted the throne of Constantinople, and the ancestors of the Earl of Devon produced three emperors, who reigned in succession over the Oriental portion of the Roman empire. The ancient dynasty of the Comneni, being expelled from the dominions over which they had presided for centuries, fled for refuge into various lands. Alexius, the son of Manuel and grandson of Andronicus Comnenus, obtained the government of the duchy of Trebizond, which extended from the unfortunate Sinope to the borders of Circassia. He seems to have reigned in peace. The acts of his son, who succeeded him, are as unknown as his name, which has not even descended to posterity. The grandson of Alexius was David Comnenus, who, with an assurance and presumption which is almost ludicrous, took upon himself the style and title of Emperor of Trebizond. Puffed up with vanity and self-conceit, this feeble prince enjoyed for a short period the imperial dignity which he possessed only in name. The erection of this quaint and ridiculous Christian empire appears to have made a great sensation among the knights and troubadours of the fifteenth century. The geographical knowledge of those days was confined to few, and the empire of Trebizond, like that of Prester John, whose extent and situation were equally apocryphal, formed the theme of many a fabulous adventure and many a romance, which served to beguile the evening hours by the firesides of the castles and convents of England and France. Fairies and wizards, ogres and giants, peopled the realms of fancy in this distant empire. Lovely princesses were rescued from the thraldom of paynim castellans, and followers of Mahound and Termagaunt, by valiant Christian knights armed with cross-hilted swords, and lutes, and talismans, the gift of benignant fairies, whose existence was only to be found in the imaginations of the unknown but delightful authors of the romances of chivalry, and the poems and ballads of the trouveurs and troubadours.

The truths were not so agreeable as the fictions of “the good old times.” As it happens to be in my power to do so, I present the reader with a portrait of the mighty emperor, as he appeared on the occasion which I am about to describe. His dress consisted of a tight gown of scarlet silk; round his neck, down the front of his gown, and round the bottom of it, were bands of gold about four inches wide; these were edged with pearls, and ornamented with large rubies and emeralds in rows down the centre of each band of gold. On his arms, above the elbows, were golden armlets, and round his wrists gold bracelets, all set with colored precious stones. His girdle, of the same pattern, and about three inches wide, had a hanging end about two feet long, which the Byzantine emperors, for some undiscovered reason, seem always to have carried over the left arm. In his right hand he bore a golden sceptre, about three feet long, with a largish cross at the top, set with enormous pearls. On his head he wore a close golden crown, of which the top (that part made of velvet in the crown of England) was also of metal, like a helmet. From this crown a fillet set with pearls hung down on each side of his face to his beard, which was of some length. Scarlet silk hose and golden sandals completed the imperial costume, except that he rejoiced in two round ornaments of gold and jewels, each the size of a plate, which were affixed to his robe on the outside of the thigh.

The costume of the empress was very similar, only her crown was open at the summit. She, contrary to female custom, wore no girdle, while over her shoulders hung a mantle of a dark color, embroidered all over with gold. The emperor wore no mantle, although this garment is usually considered as an essential part of the royal costume. Such was the appearance of David Comnenus, Emperor of Trebizond, when he gave audience to the embassadors from foreign powers, seated on a golden throne at the summit of a high flight of steep golden steps, surrounded by his court and his officers (conspicuous among whom appeared the lictors with silver axes, for, as in the third century the Romans affected the usages of the Greeks, in the fifteenth century the Greeks followed the customs of the Cæsars—so prone is human nature to revere the ancient ceremonies of by-gone days), puffed up with vanity at his own glorious position, and placed in awful majesty upon his golden throne in the chamber of audience, whose walls were painted to look like porphyry, and the ceilings colored with figures on a gold ground in imitation of mosaic, an ornament too expensive for the resources of the empire. The chamberlains and heralds with a loud voice announce the arrival of an envoy from the high and mighty lord the Soldan Mehemet II.; upon which the twelve lictors round the throne lifted up their voices, and cried out, “Semper bibat imperator:” the letter v not being found in the Greek alphabet, vivat was spelt with a beta, β; and being pronounced as it was spelt, the sense of the exclamation was a good deal compromised.

The solemn envoy from the Soldan stalked into the hall, followed by a grisly retinue clothed from head to foot in armor, partly composed of steel plates inlaid with sentences from the Koran in gold letters, and partly completed with flexible chain mail. Their helmets had conical summits, almost like a low church steeple, while instead of plumes they displayed a rod of steel, from which fluttered a small crimson flag from the summits of their casques. The letter from the Soldan, inclosed in a bag of brocade, was handed to the important emperor, who, on breaking the seal, read the following words:

“Wilt thou secure thy treasures and thy life by resigning thy kingdom, or wilt thou rather forfeit thy kingdom, thy treasures, and thy life?”

But a short time before, such was the terror occasioned by the name of the redoubted Sultan Mehemet II., who had just planted the victorious crescent over the cross of St. Sofia, that Ismael Beg, the Mohammedan Prince of Sinope, who derived an enormous revenue from the copper-mines in his principality, immediately surrendered his dominions on a summons of a like import with the above, although at that period Sinope was defended with strong fortifications, 400 cannons, and 12,000 men.

David Comnenus descended from his golden throne in the year 1461, and with his family was sent, apparently as a prisoner, to a distant castle, where, being accused of corresponding with the King of Persia, he and his whole race were massacred by the orders of his furious conqueror. With him ended the illustrious dynasty of the Comneni, and the history of the independent state of Trebizond, which has since those times remained a remote, and till lately an almost unexplored province of the Turkish empire.

CHAPTER XIV.

PRESENT CONDITION OF ARMENIA.

Impassable Character of the Country.—Dependence of Persia on the Czar.—Russian Aggrandizement.—Delays of the Western Powers.—Russian Acquisitions from Turkey and Persia.—Oppression of the Russian Government.—The Conscription.—Armenian Emigration.—The Armenian Patriarch.—Latent Power of the Pope.—Anomalous Aspect of religious Questions.

The description of Armenia and the adjacent districts in the foregoing pages will have sufficed to give a general idea of the many difficulties to be encountered by those whose business leads them through this inhospitable region, where they meet with impediments at every step, from the lofty mountains traversed by roads accessible only to mules and horses, the extreme cold of the high passes and elevated plains, the impossibility of obtaining provisions, and the savage character of the Koords and other wandering tribes who roam over this wild country. If a traveler, accompanied by a few followers, and assisted by firmans from the Sultan, finds this journey arduous in the extreme, how much more so must it prove to the general in command of an army, with many thousand men to provide for, with artillery and heavy baggage to encumber his march, on roads inaccessible to carriages or wheeled vehicles of any kind! and if to these is added an enemy on the alert to cut off supplies, to harass the long, straggling line of march, and to attack the passing army in narrow defiles from behind rocks, and from the summits of precipices, where they are safe from molestation, it will be understood that the difficulties presenting themselves to military operations in these regions are almost insuperable. It is the inaccessible nature of Circassia, even more than the bravery of its inhabitants, which has enabled them to resist the overwhelming power of Russia for so many years. On the approach to Erzeroom these difficulties increase. From Georgia, Persia, and Trebizond, there is no other city or entrepôt where an army could rest to lay in stores and collect supplies for a campaign, with the exception of Erzeroom, which is the centre or key to all these districts. If it was strongly fortified, as it should be, or was, at any rate, in the occupation of an active, intelligent government, the power who possessed it would hold the fate of that part of Asia in its hands.

No caravans could pass, no mercantile speculations could be carried on, and no large bodies of troops could march without its permission. They would, in all probability, perish from the rigors of the climate if they were not assisted, even without the necessity of attacking them by force of arms. At this moment, the greater part of the artillery of the Turkish army is, I believe, buried under the snow in one of the ravines between Beyboort and Erzeroom, from whence it has no chance of being rescued till next summer. It was the impassable character of this country, and the treacherous habits of the robber tribes of Koordistan, which made the retreat of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand through the same regions the wonderful event which it has been always considered. While this is the nature of the elevated lands and mountains, the valleys which surround the snowy regions are absolutely pestiferous: in many of them no one can sleep one night without danger of fever, frequently ending in death. The port, or roadstead, of Batoum is so unhealthy as to be utterly uninhabitable to strangers during all the hot season of the year. I wish to draw attention to these circumstances, in order to explain the almost impossibility of dispossessing any power which had already obtained a firm footing in this district; and it is in order to fix herself firmly in this important post that Russia is now advancing in that direction, with a perfect knowledge of the advantages to be derived from this barren and unfruitful region, while she has the advantage of being able to send supplies to her forces by the Caspian Sea; for, once within her grasp, Persia is no longer independent; and, fettered as she is by her Russian debt, and what, in private affairs, would be called her heavy mortgage on her only valuable provinces on the shores of the Caspian—Geilaun and Mazenderaun—she must sink into the state of a vassal kingdom, subject to the commands of her superior lord the Czar.

The sum she owes to Russia is said to be about two millions sterling; far more than she could ever raise at a short notice, while she would receive no assistance in war from any of the neighboring Sooni tribes, whose religious feelings are so much opposed to the Sheahs; therefore, unless supported by Great Britain, Persia is now almost at the mercy of Russia. Russia is altogether a military power, and, as in the Dark Ages, the Czar and his nobles affect to despise the mercantile class, and, instead of doing what they can to promote industry and commerce, by opening communications, making roads and harbors, establishing steamers on rivers, and giving facility to the interchange of various commodities, the productions of distant quarters of her own enormous empire, she throws every obstacle in the way of her internal trade, and by heavy import duties, exactions of many oppressive kinds, and the universal plunder and cheating carried on by all the government officials in the lower grades of employment, she has paralyzed both her foreign and domestic resources. The Czar prefers to buy his own aggrandizement with the blood of his confiding subjects, to the more honorable and less cruel course of enriching his empire by the extension of his commercial relations abroad, and the development of the peaceful arts, industry, science, and general improvement of the nations subjected to his rule. If it was not for this utter disregard of commerce, and the undivided attention of the Russian government to every thing connected with military glory, the navigation of the great rivers would have poured many more roubles into the treasury of St. Petersburgh than will be gained by any territorial accessions previous to the taking of Constantinople. Even under present circumstances, it is wonderful that a canal has not been made from Tzaritzin, on the Volga, to the nearest point upon the Don, a distance of not more than thirty miles, for by this means the silk of the northern provinces of Persia would be brought with the greatest facility into the Black Sea. In a mercantile point of view, Russia would gain more by the construction of that canal than by the conquest of Armenia, for it would enable her to develop the great resources of Geilaun and Mazenderaun, virtually belonging to her at this moment. The trade which in former times enriched the famous cities of Bokhara and Samarkand would be carried by caravans through Khiva, either now, or soon to be, the head-quarters of a Russian governor; from thence they would, with any encouragement, pass on their rich bales of merchandise to the Russian posts of Karagan, or Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shores of the Caspian, or to Asterabad on the south, and at these ports, now unknown to European navigators, ships might be laden which would discharge their cargoes at Liverpool, St. Petersburgh, or New York.

I have said above that Russia has but little to gain by her territorial conquests in Asiatic Turkey until she takes Constantinople. I say this because, if things are permitted by the Western Powers to continue as they have done for some years, the Czar will most certainly be enthroned in the capital of the Byzantine emperors, principally by the assistance of England and France. It is a question only of time: for that the Patriarch of Constantinople will give his blessing to the Christian emperor under the dome of St. Sofia sooner or later, and before many years have passed, I have hardly any doubt; and when once fairly seated on that throne, the Powers of Europe will not shake him in his seat. The acquisition of the Crimea, with the strong naval arsenal of Sevastopol, gave the Czar the command of the Black Sea. The wonderful business of Navarino, where the English and French admirals fought his battle for him, and crippled his enemy and their own ancient ally for many a year, was the next important step. The third seems to be taking place at this moment, if indeed sufficient advantages have not been gained already to suffice for the present emergency. It matters little whether Russia does or does not retain the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia, which she has several times occupied before; she has almost drained the treasury of her enemy, now straining every nerve to avert the impending evil. Turkey will hardly be able to support the expenses of the war for any length of time from her own resources. Even if a diplomatic peace is concluded, it will, in fact, amount only to a truce, during which the Czar will have time to strengthen his position, and prepare his forces for another and a more vigorous assault on the first convenient opportunity which occurs, from any dissension which may arise between the leading powers of the West; and the Sultan, having received nothing from his ancient allies but fair words, will be less able to defend himself than he is at present.

The greatest of blessings in this world is peace, and every thing should be done to avoid the breaking out of war, with all the horrors and sufferings which are brought upon mankind by that dreadful scourge. I think it was the Duke of Wellington who said that, next to a defeat, the most awful of all calamities was a victory. Every endeavor should be made to secure the happiness of peace. To those, however, who have no further means of information than what they read in newspapers, it would seem that, while we might have put out the candle, we have waited till the chimney is on fire, if not the house itself, and then who can tell how far and wide the conflagration may extend?

If England and France had shown a determined front, and informed the Czar that, being bound by treaty to preserve the integrity of the Turkish empire, they should consider the passage of the Pruth by one Russian armed man as a violation of that treaty and a declaration of war, and that they should act accordingly without delay, in all probability no war would have commenced, no blood would have been shed, no ruinous expenses would have been incurred. War having commenced, heavy and exhausting sums of money have been drawn from the treasury of the Sultan. When the ice set in upon the Baltic, what was to prevent the allied fleet from taking possession of the stores of corn, and occupying or destroying the city of Odessa? Sevastopol, impregnable by sea, is not—or was not two years ago, and, I believe, at this day is not—defensible on the land side. The Bay of Streleskaia offers a convenient landing-place about three miles in the rear of the fortifications of the arsenal, where a Turkish army might be brought in two days from Constantinople to try its fortunes with the Russian force; or, if that was not judged expedient, Sevastopol could have been blockaded till some advantageous terms were gained for our ally. Failing this, a French army, convoyed and assisted by their own and our fleets, would have settled the question without doubt, and may do so still; but, unless an indemnity for the expenses of the war is exacted from Russia for her most unjust and unjustifiable aggression, very little advantage will be gained for Turkey, a great step will have been accomplished by the Czar, and the possession of the Crimea almost insures him the possession of Constantinople some day, perhaps at no very distant period. The restoration of the Crimea to the Turkish empire would, I imagine, be the only means of checking the advance of Russia in that direction. This, accompanied by a forced treaty, releasing Persia from her usurious debt, would restrain the encroachments of the Czar within certain bounds for some years to come. The present aspect of affairs in the East becomes more alarming every day. If negotiations are protracted till the ice of the Baltic melts in the spring or early summer, things will assume a much more grave appearance, and it will depend on many circumstances over which we have no control where the conflagration then may spread and where the war will end.

It is impossible to look back upon the history of Russia for the last 150 years without admiration and astonishment at the enormous strides which have been made by the giants of the north since that period. When Peter the Great acceded to the throne of Muscovy, there was no maritime outlet to his empire excepting in the icy shores of the Northern Ocean. The ground on which the metropolis of St. Petersburgh now stands was not in the possession of Russia till the year 1721. Since the year 1774 Russia has acquired, quite in the memory of man, a territory from Turkey equal in extent to the whole empire of Austria, and much larger than the present possessions of the Turks in Europe. The following table of the progress of the Russian arms in the East will show at a glance how rapidly and steadily she has extended her power, her grasping hand, and her outstretched arm in that direction; and it can not be expected that, when she has rested and strengthened herself, and consolidated her resources in her newly-acquired territories, she will be prevented by any slight obstacle from further aggrandizement.

RUSSIAN ACQUISITIONS FROM TURKEY.

Country to the north of the Crimea

1774

The Crimea

1783

Country round Odessa

1792

Country between the Sea of Azof and the Caspian, at the same period as the Crimea

1783

Besarabia

1812

RUSSIAN ACQUISITIONS FROM PERSIA.

Mingrelia, on the Black Sea

1802

Immeritia, the same year

1802

Akalzik

1829

Georgia

1814

Ganja

1803

Karabaugh

1805

Erivan, Mount Ararat, and Etchmiazin

1828

Sheki

1805

Shirvan

1806

Talish, on the Caspian

1812

Few of these conquered or deluded nations have been able to bear the intolerable oppression of the Russian government, arising from the insolence of the petty employés, and more particularly the dreadful scourge of the conscription, by the aid of which, at any moment, children are remorselessly torn forever from their parents, whose sole support they were; families are on a sudden divided; one half sent off no one knows whither, never to meet again; none of these unhappy slaves knowing whether it will be their lot to become soldiers or sailors, but, in either case, they are driven off, like beasts, in flocks, by cruel, savage tyrants, who steal, as a matter of course, the money provided by the superior government for the food of the despairing conscripts, while they—brutal and drunken though they may be—are distinguished for their love of home, and the affection and respect they bear for their parents.

The Nogai Tatars abandoned the Christian religion, and took refuge in the territories of the Khan of the Crimea, becoming Mohammedans in hopes of obtaining the protection of the milder rule of Turkey.

In 1771 a still more extraordinary event took place. The Kalmuks, a people who had emigrated from the frontiers of China, unable to endure the insults and oppressions of the Russian tyranny, made up their minds to return to the dominions of the Celestial Empire, from whence their ancestors had originally come. They fought their way through all the hostile tribes intervening between them, and their whole nation arrived safely under the wing of the Emperor of China, who afforded them protection, and gave them great tracts of land for the pasture of their flocks and herds. The embassador of the Empress Catharine, who had been dispatched to desire the surrender of the fugitive tribe, and—as at this day in Turkey—to demand a “renewal of treaties” between the two countries, received the following answer from the court of Pekin: “Let your mistress learn to keep old treaties, and then it will be time to apply for new ones;” an answer which might have been given in our day to Prince Menschikoff, who was lucky in meeting with a milder reception at Constantinople than his predecessor received from the stout old mandarin at Pekin.

In the year 1829, Kars, Bayazeed, Van, Moush, Erzeroom, and Beyboort (which is coming very near) were occupied by the Russians, who evacuated that portion of the Turkish empire on the conclusion of the treaty of Adrianople. Trusting to the protestations of a Christian emperor, sixty-nine thousand Christian Armenian families were beguiled into the folly of leaving Mohammedan dominions, and sitting in peace under the paternal protection of the Czar. Over their ruined houses I have ridden, and surveyed with sorrow their ancient churches in the valleys of Armenia, desecrated and injured, as far as their solid construction permitted, by the sacrilegious hands of the Russian soldiers, who tried to destroy those temples of their own religion which the Turks had spared, and under whose rule many of the more recent had been rebuilt on their old foundations. The greater part of these Armenians perished from want and starvation; the few who survived this sharp lesson have since been endeavoring, by every means in their power, to return to the lesser evils of the frying-pan of Turkey, from whence they had leaped into the fire of despotic Russia.

By the treaty of Turkomanchai, 1828, the Czar became possessed of Persian Armenia, of which the capital is Erivan. In this district are contained the two great objects of Armenian veneration, Etchmiazin and Mount Ararat. This noble snowy mountain takes the place, in the estimation of the Armenians, that Mount Sinai and Mount Zion do among the followers of other Christian sects. The foolish legends which disgrace the purity of true religion usually relate to the object of local tradition which may be met with in the neighborhood of the monastery; consequently an attack of indigestion in an Armenian monk generally produces a vision of some nonsensical revelation about Noah’s ark, which is still supposed to remain, hidden to mortal eye, under the clouds and snows of Mount Ararat.

Etchmiazin is an ancient fortified monastery, within whose walls resides the Patriarch of the Armenian Church, the spiritual head of that body, and who is looked up to indeed as the temporal chief of that scattered nation whose industrious children are settled in India, Constantinople, and in many other parts of the world, so that those who live and thrive abroad are much more numerous and more wealthy than those who reside in Armenia itself. The possession, therefore, of the person and residence of the Patriarch is a fact of no small importance in the history of Russian advancement. To undertake a pilgrimage to Etchmiazin is a meritorious act among the professors of the Armenian faith; and the influence exercised over the Patriarch is diffused, through the obedient medium of bishops, priests, and deacons, through all parts of Turkey, and many of the cities of India, to an extent which would surprise those who never have troubled themselves with the affairs of the Armenian jeweler or silversmith in an Eastern bazaar, for they are almost invariably dealers in jewels and precious metals; or serafs, bankers, among the native population; a position which renders their influence of no small consequence in every city where they reside. By these means, among others, the political interest of the Czar is nourished and extended on the Persian Gulf, at Bombay, Bushire, Madras, and many another place, in the same manner as the sway and power of the Roman pontiff is upheld, and that by no weak and trembling hand, in Ireland, England, London, and the House of Commons. And yet we pretend that there is no such power as the See of Rome; we ignore the existence of the Pope, and sneer at the prince of a petty Italian state supported by French bayonets, who is in that rotten and decaying state that we or our children are to see his end.

But my belief is, that the power of Rome is by no means in a falling state, nor would it be so even if the rule of some band of miscreants usurped for a little while the misgovernment of the Eternal City. The power of the Pope is now, at this moment, one of the greatest upon the earth; and as irreligion and dissent increase, so will the most wonderfully clever institution of the temporal power of the Roman Church increase. Its minute and marvelous organization, the perfect understanding and subordination of the inferior to the superior officer, its fixed and certain purpose, give the Pope the command over such a united and well-disciplined army of trained and fearless soldiers as never could be brought together by Cæsar, or Napoleon, or our own old Duke. The peace of Europe in this direction arises not from the slightest want of power or means on the part of the See of Rome, but from the jealousy of the body in whose hands the election of the Supreme Pontiff lies. For many years they have elected a good old monk, who has passed his whole life in a state of supreme ignorance of the world in general, and the whole art of government in particular. In his hands the mighty power at his command remains inert—a slumbering volcano. But should the ivory chair of St. Peter ever sustain the weight of a young and energetic man of genius, with some years of life before him, no one would laugh at the tottering state of Rome.

As for the petty principality of a state in Italy, I have been told, in the Pope’s own ante-room, that it is a burden to him. His extended sway does not depend on the doubtful loyalty of half a dozen regiments of Italians, or on the more honest obedience of two or three thousand Swiss guards, but on the hearts and hands of many millions, who look up to him as their spiritual superior at all times, and their temporal superior, whom they are bound to obey in opposition to all other sovereigns, when any thing occurs “ad majorem Dei gloriam,” and for the advancement of the Church of Rome.

A power such as this, which in our trafficking and money-making country is thought little of—a power such as this lies dormant in the hands of the Grand Lama of Thibet, whose followers form almost half of all mankind—in those of the Patriarch of Constantinople—and to an inferior degree in those of the Patriarch of Etchmiazin. They are all paralyzed and quiescent from the same cause, namely, that the chiefs of these mighty institutions are old, ignorant men, whose minds have not the energy, or their hands the power, to work the tremendous engine committed to their care. That the Czar is perfectly aware of the uses to be made of the religious feelings of the inhabitants of other governments to further his own ends, we see from the numerous magnificent presents ostentatiously forwarded by him to churches in Greece and Turkey, where the monks and priests by these means are gained over to his interests. From his generous hand, extended to the borders of the Adriatic, about £5000 are annually dropped into the poor-box of that truculent specimen of the church militant, the Vladica of Montenegro. But the Czar is not an aged monk; he is not wanting in energy or strength; and he will not fail to pull the strings which hang loosely in the hands of the Armenian patriarch. If he pulls them evenly and well, he will advance his interests far and wide, even in the dominions of other princes, who may hardly be aware of the influence exercised in their states from a source so distant and unobtrusive. The danger in his case is, that he may use too great violence, and break the strings from too severe a tension, raising the storm against himself which he intended to direct against others. However this may be, the power of which he holds the reins is one which may be used for the advancement of the greatest or the most ignoble ends. For the most sublime and glorious actions, the most heroic and the most infernal deeds that have ever been accomplished by mankind, have been occasioned by the awakening of religious zeal, or by the fanaticism of religious hatred, from the earliest days, when the pen of history was first dipped in blood.

Nothing can be more anomalous than the present aspect of religious questions. The Christian Emperor of Russia is at this moment exciting the minds of his subjects to make war upon the infidel; and his armies march under the impression that they undertake a new crusade. Yet this crusade is carried on in direct contradiction to truth, justice, honor, and every principle of the Christian religion, whose pure and sacred precepts are violated at every turn. On the other hand, the Mohammedan, or infidel, as he is called, displays, under the most difficult and insulting circumstances, the highest Christian virtues of integrity, moderation, and strict adherence to his word in treaties granted by himself or his predecessors; at the same time, the armies of the upright Sultan are commanded by a Christian renegade who has abjured his faith, and yet he fights against the Christian power in a righteous cause.

The terrible revolution which is the cause of such awful scenes of bloodshed and atrocities in China is carried on under the name of our merciful and just Savior, whose mild religion these rebels against their sovereign affect to follow.

The savage atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, the cruel massacres by the Spaniards in America, were perpetrated by men who made a cloak of the benevolent precepts of the Gospel for the perpetration of the most brutal crimes.

Those times we thought were past, but human nature is the same; and where the light of true Christianity has penetrated, we find a period of wonderful intelligence and appreciation of the truths of the doctrines of our Lord in some places; in others, where a nominal Christianity alone prevails, actions are committed by men in the highest stations which would disgrace the records of the Dark Ages.

CHAPTER XV.

Ecclesiastical History.—Supposed Letter of Abgarus, King of Edessa, to our Savior, and the Answer.—Promulgation and Establishment of Christianity.—Labors of Mesrob Maschdots.—Separation of the Armenian Church from that of Constantinople.—Hierarchy and religious Establishments.—Superstition of the Lower Classes.—Sacerdotal Vestments.—The Holy Books.—Romish Branch of the Church.—Labors of Mechitar.—His Establishment near Venice.—Diffusion of the Scriptures.

The ruins of Ani to this day attest the magnificence and antiquity of former dynasties which long since reigned and passed away in the highlands of Armenia. In the time of Cyrus, according to Moses of Chorene, the historian of that country in the sixteenth century, Greek statues of Jupiter, Artemis (Diana), Minerva, Hephæstion, and Venus, were brought to Ani and placed in the citadel of that town. Here the treasures and the sepulchres of the ancient kings were preserved in a fortress deemed by them impregnable. I will not pause to disentangle the records of Armenia before the time of our Savior, for even during the life of our Lord the annals of Armenia become remarkably interesting as connected with his holy faith, and the rise and progress of Christianity in the countries immediately adjoining the sacred soil of Palestine. Abgarus, king of Edessa, and sovereign of great part of Armenia, with the adjoining countries, is said by Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, the early historian of the Church, who flourished in the fourth century, to have written a letter to our Savior, requesting him to repair to his court and to cure him of a disease under which he labored. The following is a translation of the letter which Abgarus is said to have written to our Lord:

“ABGARUS, King of Edessa, to JESUS the good Savior, who appeareth at Jerusalem, greeting:

“I have been informed concerning thee and thy cures, which are performed without the use of medicines or of herbs.

“For it is reported that thou dost cause the blind to see, the lame to walk, that thou dost cleanse the lepers, and dost cast out unclean spirits and devils, and dost restore to health those who have been long diseased, and also that thou dost raise the dead.

“All which when I heard I was persuaded of one of these two things:

“Either that thou art God himself descended from heaven;

“Or that thou art the Son of God.

“On this account, therefore, I have written unto thee, earnestly desiring that thou wouldst trouble thyself to take a journey hither, and that thou wilt also cure me of the disease under which I suffer.

“For I fear that the Jews hold thee in derision, and intend to do thee harm.

“My city is indeed small, but it is sufficient to contain us both.”

In the history of Moses of Chorene, this letter begins with the words “Abgar, the son of Archam,” but the substance of it is the same as the above, which is taken from the pages of Eusebius, who lived a century earlier than Moses of Chorene. This author ascribes the answer to St. Thomas the Apostle, who was deputed to write an answer to the above in these words:

“Happy art thou, O Abgarus, forasmuch as thou hast believed in me whom thou hast not seen.

“For it is written concerning me, that those who have seen me have not believed on me, that those who have not seen me might believe and live.

“As to that part of thine epistle which relates to my visiting thee, I must inform thee that I must fulfill the ends of my mission in this land, and after that be received up again unto Him that sent me; but after my ascension I will send one of my disciples, who will cure thy disease, and give life unto thee and all that are with thee.”

These two letters are generally considered to be forgeries, although they are mentioned by some of the earliest historians of the Church.

Some years ago I was informed, while at Alexandria, that a papyrus had been discovered in Upper Egypt, in an ancient tomb; it was inclosed in a coarse earthenware vase, and it contained the letter from Abgarus to our Savior, written either in Coptic or uncial Greek characters. The answer of St. Thomas was said not to be with it. I was told that the manuscript afterward came into the possession of the King of Holland, but I have no means at present of ascertaining the truth of the story, or the antiquity of the papyrus of which it forms the subject.

The seeds of the Christian faith were sown in Armenia by the apostles St. Bartholomew and St. Thomas. According to Tertullian (adv. Judæos, c. 7), a Christian Church flourished there in the second century. St. Blaise and other bishops suffered martyrdom in different parts of Armenia during the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 310.

To St. Gregory, the Illuminator, is due the honor of having established Christianity in this region, and he is known by the title of the Apostle of Armenia. Toward the middle of the third century, having been himself a convert from Paganism, he first preached the doctrines of our Lord among the mountains of his native land. He had received his education at Cæsarea in Cappadocia, where he was baptized. The zeal with which he was animated gave irresistible force to his words, and the people flocked to him in great multitudes, and were baptized by his hands. The King Tiridates, a violent persecutor of the Christians, touched by the piety and virtues of St. Gregory, embraced the Christian faith, and, with his queen and his sister, received the sacrament of baptism in the 16th year of his reign, A.D. 274, and became the first Christian King of Armenia. St. Gregory was consecrated bishop by St. Leontius, Bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, and continued his labors in propagating the faith all over Armenia, Georgia, and the nations living on the borders of the Caspian Sea. From this circumstance it became the custom for the Primate of Armenia to receive his consecration from the Archbishop of Cæsarea, which continued to be the practice for several centuries. St. Gregory died in the year 336, in a cave to which he had retired, desiring to end his days as an anchorite, according to a custom much observed in the fourth century.

In those disturbed and unsettled times, the religion of our Savior alternately rose and prospered, or was oppressed by the persecutions of various governors under the Emperors of Rome. Numerous heresies distracted the minds of the priesthood, and confused the doctrines of the Armenian Church. About the year 390 rose the most celebrated man in the history of this country: his name was Mesrob Maschdots. This personage was born in the town of Hatsegatz-Avan, in the province of Daron: he had been secretary to the Patriarch Narses, and to the Prince Varastad, who was dethroned by the Romans in the year 382. In the year 390, in conjunction with the Armenian Patriarch Sahag, he occupied himself in the extinction of the idolatry which still prevailed, and was the first person who arranged the forms of the Armenian liturgy. Before this time the Armenian language had no written character; the inhabitants of the eastern districts used the Persian alphabet, while those of the west wrote in the Syriac character. Mesrob either restored the ancient Armenian letters according to the historian Moses of Chorene, who gives a long miraculous account of the event, or he invented an entirely new alphabet—a solitary instance, I believe, of such an undertaking having been accomplished by one man. The present Armenian letters were adopted by the commands of Bahram Schahpoor over the whole of that country in the year 406. The first complete version of the Bible was now arranged and promulgated by Mesrob, and written on parchment in his new characters; numerous copies of it were distributed to the churches and monasteries of Armenia, and the important circumstance of their being now able to read the Holy Scriptures in their own language tended to preserve their faith, and to unite them as a nation during the continual troubles and adversities which they have suffered ever since. This great benefactor to his country died in the year 441.

The Armenian hierarchy had till now been a branch of the Greek Church, but, unable to read their liturgy, troubled with diversities of opinion, and oppressed first by one neighboring tyrant and then by another, this helpless nation finally settled down into the heresy of Eutyches, and, under the guidance of their patriarch, separated themselves from the Church of Constantinople. They believe that the body of our Savior was created, or else existed without creation, a divine and incorruptible substance, not subject to the infirmities of the flesh. This schism took place about the year 535.

The Armenian era commences in the year 552, from which epoch their manuscripts and calendar are dated. The custom continues to the present day. By the council of Tibena in 554, they were confirmed in their persistence in the Eutychian heresy. The council of Trullo, 692, and the council of Jerusalem, 1143, condemned the errors of the Armenians. In the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII. sent a Dominican friar, called Bartholomew the Little, into that distant region, with several colleagues, to preach the doctrines of the Church of Rome. Bartholomew was consecrated bishop (of Nakchevan?), and since that time the archbishop of that province has, with all his dependencies, continued a member of the Roman Church. The thunders of the Lateran have often since been directed against the perseverance of these distant heretics, but they have been of no avail.

The Patriarch of Armenia resides at Etchmiazin. He is styled Catholicos, and holds under his sway forty-seven archbishops, of whom the greater part are titular, having no jurisdiction or dignity beyond their titles; many of these reside in the monastery, and form a sort of court around their spiritual lord the Patriarch. They seem to hold the same position as the Monsignores of the court of Rome. Above the titular and actual archbishops are three Patriarchs, whose seats are at Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Diarbekir. The number of bishops and episcopal sees is very considerable, but I have not been able to enumerate them. The monasteries are also very numerous, and are scattered all over the mountains of Armenia, the islands of Lake Van, and other places in Persia, Georgia, and Turkey.

The ancient monasteries of their own land are of a peculiar construction, remarkable for the diminutive proportions of the churches and the small size of the monastic buildings, as well as their massive strength and the great squared stones of which they are built. They are little fortresses, and seem always to have been very poor, though some are larger and more wealthy, comparatively, than the generality. They have been erected to resist the incursions of the Saracens, Knights Templars, Koords, Turks, and Persians, who, from time to time, overran this abject principality. Their massive strength alone has saved them from being pulled down and utterly destroyed; the time necessary for such an operation could not be spared during the inroad of a chappow, or plundering expedition. Nothing worth stealing remains in the various monasteries which I have visited. A few dirty and imperfect church-books, some faded vestments and poor furniture for the altar, and the cells of three or four peasant-monks, were all the wealth that they displayed. Very few appear to have contained a library—none that I have seen. Their manuscripts were written in former days at Edessa, Etchmiazin (which is a more extensive fabric), Teflis, Ooroomia, Tabriz, and other cities, and not usually in these outposts among the mountains. The little monastery of Kuzzul Vank possesses one ancient manuscript of the Holy Scriptures, written in the year, as far as I can remember, 422, which, if it refers to the Armenian era, would be 974; it is written in uncial letters, on vellum, in a small, thick quarto form.

Ignorance and superstition contend for the mastery among the lower classes of Armenia, whose religion shows that tendency to sink into a kind of idolatry which is common among other branches of the Church of Christ in warmer climates. The following anecdote will explain my meaning in advancing such a charge. One of my servants had a bad toothache; he was a Roman Catholic of Smyrna; he made a vow to present an offering to the shrine of St. George at Smyrna if his toothache was cured by the mediation of that saint, but the pain still continued. A friend of his at Erzeroom advised him to vow a silver mouth to St. George of Erzeroom; “for,” he said, “St. George of Smyrna is a Roman saint, and, of course, he can have no authority here; but our St. George is an Armenian, and he will hear your prayer.” The advice was taken: a silver mouth was vowed to St. George of Erzeroom, and the toothache ceased immediately, the servant firmly believing that he had been cured by this saint, who, he considered, was another person, and not the same as St. George of Smyrna, and that his picture here was more powerful in working miracles than the others. In the same manner, the pictures or images of Our Lady of Loretto, Guadaloupe, or del Pilar are believed to be endowed with peculiar powers, and are, in fact, worshiped for their own merits, and not for what they represent.

A curious episode in the history of Armenia took place in the time of Shah Abbas the Great, who established a colony of the natives of that province at Julfa, a village near Isfahaun. He gave them many privileges and immunities, which a remnant of their descendants enjoy still. The forms and ceremonies of their worship resemble those of the Greek Church, from which they are derived. Their vestments are the same, or nearly so: and here I will remark that the sacred vestures of the Christian Church are the same, with very insignificant modifications, among every denomination of Christians in the world; that they have always been the same, and never were otherwise in any country, from the remotest times when we have any written accounts of them, or any mosaics, sculptures, or pictures to explain their forms. They are no more a Popish invention, or have any thing more to do with the Roman Church, than any other usage which is common to all denominations of Christians. They are, and always have been, of general and universal—that is, of catholic—use; they have never been used for many centuries for ornament or dress by the laity, having been considered as set apart to be used only by priests in the church during the celebration of the worship of Almighty God. These ancient vestures have been worn by the bishops, priests, and deacons of that, in common with the hierarchy of every other Church. In England they have fallen into disuse by neglect; King Charles I. presented some vestments to the Cathedral of Durham long after the Reformation, and they continued in use there almost in the memory of man.

The parish priests of the Armenian religion are, I believe, permitted, if not obliged, to marry, as is the case in the Greek and Russian Churches; but they can not, so long as their wife survives, be promoted to any of the higher orders of the hierarchy. Bishops, archbishops, and patriarchs are elected out of the monastic bodies who take the vows of celibacy; their fasts are long and rigorous, their food simple, and their style of life severe; their time is almost entirely taken up with the services of religion, and, as a general rule, their ignorance is extreme.

In their doctrine of the Holy Trinity, they believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone; that Christ descended into hell, from whence he reprieved the souls of sinners till the day of judgment; that the souls of the righteous will not be admitted to the beatific vision till after the resurrection, notwithstanding which they invoke them in their prayers. They make use of pictures in their churches, but not of images; they use confession to the priests, and administer the Eucharist in both kinds.

In baptism they plunge the child three times in water, apply the chrism with consecrated oil prepared only by the Patriarch. They also touch the child’s lips with the Eucharist, which consists of unleavened bread sopped in wine.

The Holy Scriptures contain more books than those of the Western Churches. In the Old Testament, after the Book of Genesis, occurs The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Sons of Jacob; then The History of Joseph and of his wife Asenath; The Book of Jesus the Son of Sirach. After these the order of the scriptural books succeeds as with us. In the New Testament, after St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, we find the Epistle of the Corinthians to St. Paul, which is followed by St. Paul’s Third Epistle to the Corinthians. The remainder of the New Testament is the same as ours.

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, are well known; but I am not aware that the Book of Asenath has been printed in any European language. This curious book was translated into Italian, from an ancient Armenian manuscript of the Bible in my possession, by an Armenian friend, and translated from the Italian into English by myself: this I presume to be the only copy of the Book of Asenath in the English language. It is a work of considerable length, and is interesting, not only from the place it holds in the estimation of a numerous body of Christians, but also from the picture it presents of the manners and customs of Egypt, at some remote period when it was written. Several passages in it indicate that it must have been composed when what may be called the classic style of life was still in use. Whether it was included among the number of the sacred books collected by Mesrob I do not know: in that case it would date as far back as the fourth century after Christ, a period prolific in apocryphal books, several of which were forged about that time to support the authority of the various heresiarchs who promulgated their opinions in many countries of the East, and who, being unable to produce texts from the accepted books of the Sacred Scriptures which would prove the truth of their doctrines, invented others more suitable to their own purposes, and written more in accordance with their views.

The Epistle from the Corinthians to St. Paul, and the answer from the great apostle, is of a higher class, and bears much resemblance to his other Epistles. It has been published among Lord Byron’s works. He took a few lessons in Armenian from Father Pasquale Aucher, a monk of the monastery of St. Lazarus, at Venice, a man of extraordinary learning, who speaks most of the European languages, as well as Turkish, Armenian, and other Oriental tongues. He translated these Epistles into English, with the assistance of Lord Byron.

The Roman Catholic branch of the Armenian Church has done much more for literature and civilization than the original body. Few Catholics are found in Armenia itself, excepting at Erzeroom and other cities, where a remnant remain, while at Constantinople a great number of the higher and wealthier Armenians give their adherence to that creed. Their minds are more enlarged, they are less Oriental in their ideas, being usually considered as half Franks by their more Eastern brethren. Their churches bear a great resemblance to those of other Catholics, but they retain their own language in their ritual, with many of the forms and ceremonies of the Oriental Church. The Armenian Patriarch, with his long beard, and crown instead of a mitre, is one of the picturesque figures to whom attention is drawn in the ceremonies of the Holy Week at Rome, where there is a college for the education of priests of their nation. They have another college at Constantinople, and several handsome churches; but the most important establishment of this branch of their religion is that of the convent or monastery on the island of St. Lazarus, near Venice.

This society, as they themselves call it, was founded by Mechitar, an Armenian, who was born at Sebaste, in lesser Armenia, in 1676. He received holy orders from the Bishop Ananias, superior of the convent of the Holy Cross, near Sebaste. He afterward studied in the convent of Passen, near Erzeroom, and at another on the island on Lake Van. His wish was to remain in the great monastery of Etchmiazin, to which place he traveled, but, finding no opportunities of study at the seat of the Patriarch, he proceeded to Constantinople, where he afterward founded a small society, of a monastic kind, at Pera, in the year 1700.

In the year 1708 he established a church and monastic society at Modon in the Morea, then under the government of Venice; but the Turks having taken that place, his companions were made prisoners and sold for slaves. He, with some others, escaped to Venice, where he received a grant, in the year 1717, from the Signory, of a small deserted island in the Lagunes, originally the property of the Benedictine order, who established a hospital for lepers there in 1180. In this island he set up a printing-press about the year 1730, for the production of Armenian religious books; and he had the satisfaction of seeing his convent increase in comfort, wealth, and respectability before his death, which took place on the 27th of April, 1749.

So high was the character of this establishment for usefulness and good conduct, that in 1810, when other monastic establishments were suppressed at Venice, the abbot of St. Lazaro received a peculiar decree, granting him and his community all the privileges of their former independence. So high also has been the character of this society since that time, that it has been usual for the Pope to confer upon each new abbot the title and dignity of Archbishop, although he has no province or bishops under him. The service they have rendered to their countrymen is very great: they have at present five printing-presses, from whence every year proceed numerous volumes of religious and historical character, as well as school-books, and a newspaper in the Armenian language. These are mostly sold at Constantinople, and among the scattered societies of their nation. The funds produced from this source enable them to establish a considerable school or college at Venice, and to send literary missionaries, as they may be called, to collect manuscripts and historical notices among the barren mountains of Armenia. Of these they make good use, compiling, from imperfect and mutilated fragments, authentic histories of their country; printing the almost hitherto lost and unknown works of ancient Armenian authors, and distributing copies of the Holy Scriptures among their brethren in the wasted and benighted land of their fathers.

They printed the Armenian Bible in the year 1805; and, entirely by their energy, the small spark which alone glimmered in the darkness of Armenian ignorance in the East has gradually increased its light into a feeble ray, which now, seen faintly through the mist, draws every now and then the attention of some one endowed by nature with more intelligence than the rest, and incites him to inquire into those truths the rumors of whose existence had only reached him hitherto. Slowly enough, but we trust surely, the good work prospers: when curiosity and interest are awakened, the mind turns naturally to the sources from which information may be gained. The Holy Gospels, the New Testament, and, in some places, the whole Bible, may now be procured at a comparatively trifling expense; the leaven, once introduced, sooner or later will leaven the whole mass; truth and common sense will dissipate the clouds which ignorance and superstition have gathered over the face of the land, and the light of true religion will arise to set no more.

CHAPTER XVI.

Modern division of Armenia.—Population.—Manners and Customs of the Christians.—Superiority of the Mohammedans.

The country which was called Armenia in ancient times is now divided into two portions; the smaller of the two belongs to Persia, but the larger part is contained in the Turkish province or pashalik of Erzeroom. It does not possess any communication with the sea, and is a wild and mountainous district. Although not of any high importance for mercantile productions, it has continually been an object of jealousy to the neighboring empires of Persia and Byzantium—or, in our time, Persia and Turkey—from the high road between those empires necessarily passing through it; the power of cutting off supplies, and permitting the passage of caravans laden with the rich productions of other lands, being vested in the hands of the military governor of Erzeroom. The number of inhabitants of this pashalik is estimated at 1,000,000; there were probably more in earlier times. The principal cities are—Erzeroom, the capital, containing about 30,000 souls. The population of Kars is considered to be about 20,000, Van 20,000, Moosh and Beyboort about 8000 each. The Turkish governor of the pashalik has generally an armed force of 25,000 regular soldiers; but it would be easy for him, with sufficient funds, to raise a more considerable force of irregular cavalry, and infantry armed with rifles, the use of which weapon is well understood by the hardy mountaineers and hunters, whose manners in some respects resemble those of the Tyrolese. The greater half of the population are Mohammedan Turks or Osmanlis, followers of Osman. The word Turk is never used in this country, and is more generally applied to the Turkomans and some of the tribes on the Persian border, who are of Calmuc or Tartar origin, and a completely different sort of people from those whom we call Turks. The Christian population consists of a small number of Greeks, Nestorians, and Roman Catholics, the greater part being descendants of the ancient possessors of the soil, and professing the Christianity of the Armenian Church, which I have attempted to describe above. Their manners and customs are the same as those of the Turks, whom they copy in dress and in their general way of living; so much is this the case, that it is frequently difficult to distinguish the Turkish from the Armenian family, both in Armenia and at Constantinople; only the Armenian is the inferior in all respects; he would be called in China a second-chop Turk. He is more quick and restless in his motions, and wants the dignity and straightforward bearing of the Osmanli. More than 100,000 Armenians are settled at Constantinople. These are not so ignorant, and are, even in appearance, different from those of their original country, who are a heavy and loutish race, while the citizens are thin, sharp, active in money-making arts, and remarkable for their acuteness in mercantile transactions. Each Turkish village elects its cadi, a sort of mayor; an Armenian Christian village elects its elder, who is called the Ak Sakal, or White Beard; he is the responsible person in all transactions with government, and sometimes holds an arduous post.

The women live in a harem, like the Turkish women, separate from the men. The mistress of the house superintends the kitchen, the making of preserves, and salting winter stores; they wear the yashmak, or Turkish veil, at Constantinople, where the Armenian ladies are celebrated for their beauty, and their fine eyes, and black, arched eyebrows. In Armenia, the women, when they go out, wrap themselves up in a large piece of bunting, the same kind of stuff that is used in Europe for flags; being of wool, it takes a fine color in dyeing. The ample wrappers of the women are sometimes of a bright scarlet, sometimes a brilliant white or blue. The effect of this veil is much more pleasing than those of Constantinople or Egypt. The Armenians are not bad cooks: some of their dishes are excellent; one of mutton stewed with quinces leaves a very favorable impression on the recollection of the hungry traveler. The country people live underground in the peculiar houses which I have described; they are an agricultural peasantry, tilling the ground, and not possessing large herds of sheep or cattle, like the Turkomans, Koords, or Arabs; they are a heavy-looking race, but are hardy and active, and inured from youth to exercise and endurance, but even in these respects they are excelled by the Mohammedan mountaineers.

The superiority of the Mohammedan over the Christian can not fail to strike the mind of an intelligent person who has lived among these races, as the fact is evident throughout the Turkish empire. This arises partly from the oppression which the Turkish rulers in the provinces have exercised for centuries over their Christian subjects: this is probably the chief reason; but the Turk obeys the dictates of his religion, the Christian does not; the Turk does not drink, the Christian gets drunk; the Turk is honest, the Turkish peasant is a pattern of quiet, good-humored honesty; the Christian is a liar and a cheat; his religion is so overgrown with the rank weeds of superstition that it no longer serves to guide his mind in the right way. It would be a work of great difficulty to disentangle the pure faith preached by the Apostles from the mass of absurdities and strange notions with which Christianity is encumbered, in the belief of the villagers in out-of-the-way places, among the various sects of Christians in the dominions of the Sultan. This seems to have been the case for many centuries, and it has produced its effect in lowering the standard of morality, and injuring the general character of those nations who are subjects of Turkey and not of the Mohammedan religion. For, of two evils, it is better to follow the doctrines of a false religion than to neglect the precepts of the true faith.

CHAPTER XVII.

Armenian Manuscripts.—Manuscripts at Etchmiazin.—Comparative Value of Manuscripts.—Uncial Writing.—Monastic Libraries.—Collections in Europe.—The St. Lazaro Library.

Armenian manuscripts are of extreme rarity, not only in Europe, but in Armenia itself, at Constantinople, or any other place. The unsettled state in which that distracted province has from time immemorial been sunk, has prevented the development of the peaceful arts, and few of the monastic establishments of that country had wealth, or leisure, or convenience to copy and illuminate their books. The few fine manuscripts which I have met with seem to have been written for some Armenian princes, and were the works of scribes supported by exalted personages, who wrote under the shadow of their protection in the metropolitan cities, or in the patriarchal monastery of Etchmiazin. I was prevented by illness when in the neighborhood from visiting Etchmiazin, but there are preserved (or rather neglected) there, I have been given to understand, more than 2000 ancient manuscripts. These are completely unknown, unless within these few years they have been examined by any Russian antiquarian; no other traveler has been there who was competent to overlook a dusty library, so as to give any idea, not of what there is, but even what it may be likely to contain. This, as my bibliographical friends are well aware, is a peculiar art or mystery depending more on a general knowledge of the first aspect of an old book than a capacity to appreciate its contents. A book written on vellum implies a certain antiquity immediately recognizable by the initiated. If it does not appear to be ancient, it is then more than probable that it contains the works of some author of more than ordinary consideration, to have made it worth while to go to the expense and labor of a careful scribe and a material difficult in those days to procure. An illuminated manuscript on vellum, if not a prayer-book, secures additional attention; independent of its value as a work of art, it must be of some consequence to have made it worth illuminating. A large manuscript, as a general rule, is worth more than a little one, for the same evident reason that its contents were considered at the time when it was written to have been of some importance, and deserving of more labor, time, and care, than if it was just written out cheaply by a common scribe. Uncial writing—that is, a book written in capital letters—is much more ancient than one written in a cursive hand, and the most ancient volumes were generally large square quartos. It is curious that this should be the case in almost all nations and languages surrounding the Mediterranean, though their customs may be so different in other respects. Manuscripts on paper, again, are sometimes of remarkable interest, from their containing the works of authors then considered trivial and inferior, but now of much more value than the more ponderous tomes of the Middle Ages.

The majority of the volumes in an ancient monastic library are worn-out, imperfect church-books, which have been cast aside from time to time, and committed to the care of the mice and spiders, who alone frequent the shelves or the floor of that dusty lumber-room. It is uncommon to find a manuscript in more than one volume, unless it may be the works of St. Chrysostom, or another of the Fathers of the Church. In this case the volumes are hardly ever found together, and a complete set of three or four volumes is beyond hoping for, carelessness and neglect having been for centuries the librarians of the monastery. These and other circumstances combine to make a cursory examination of one of these original hoards of by-gone literature a task for which the learned student of some abstruse science, or dead or dying language, is totally incompetent. The translator of an almost forgotten tongue, the laborious compiler of unpublished history, requires that the musty chronicles, the splendid illuminated volumes bound in gold and velvet, the crabbed, ill-written works of antique lore, should be laid upon the table before him, so that, in the undisturbed silence of his study, surrounded with lexicons and modern books of reference, he may bit by bit extract the pith, and winnow off the chaff, from the venerable manuscripts of distant lands and other times. The bibliographical traveler, who is to provide these precious relics for his careful use, who is to drag them from their dark recesses, where they have been lying undisturbed 500 or 1000 years, has an entirely different task to fulfill. The professor would require months to look over each book one by one, to brush away the cobwebs, to ascertain by difficult and uncertain passages what the subject of those manuscripts might be which had lost many pages at the beginning and end, and to satisfy himself at last that it was worthless—a conclusion to which another would arrive at the first glance. This power of immediately appreciating the value of ancient manuscripts in the manner above mentioned will be understood by those who are aware that such is the usual jealousy of the ignorant monks for that which they can neither use nor understand themselves, that it hardly ever happens that a stranger is permitted to take more than a general survey of the worm-eaten and dusty mass which lies in heaps upon the floor, or is piled in the corners of the room which they call their library, but which they probably have never entered on any other occasion.

Such as I have described are the libraries at Etchmiazin, the monastery on Lake Van, those near Ooroomia, and the few places where more than the church-books are still remaining.

In England, the Bodleian Library contains about twenty volumes of Armenian manuscripts; the British Museum not so many, I believe; the Royal Library at Paris has about 200, which were collected by the emissaries of Louis XIV. Some of these are of considerable antiquity and beauty. In private collections very few are to be found. In my library there are about a dozen, of which two are the most splendid that I have met with in the East, or in any country. I possess also a number of loose leaves of the highest antiquity, which are so far curious that they display the progress of the art of writing almost since the days of Mesrob to the present time. But, with the exception of the unknown treasures of Etchmiazin, the convent of St. Lazaro at Venice not only preserves, but makes good use of, the finest collection of Armenian manuscripts extant. Their number is about 1200, of which 100 are on vellum; the rest are written partly on ancient paper made from cotton, and partly on paper such as we use at present. Three volumes on Charta Bombycina are among the most ancient that I have met with that are written on that material: one contains commentaries on the Psalms and the Epistles, by Ephraim Syrius and St. Chrysostom, written in the year of the Armenian era 448, Anno Domini 999; the second is a small book of prayer, containing the date of A. D. 1178; the third is the romance of Alexander the Great: this curious volume is illustrated with numerous drawings, richly gilt and colored; it was written in the thirteenth century.

They have three copies of the Gospels, and one Ritual written in uncial letters (one of these ancient copies of the Gospels is illuminated with several large miniatures in a style resembling Greek art), as well as several others of inferior interest.

The library also possesses six or seven richly illuminated copies of the Scriptures, some splendid books of prayer, and a great number of other Armenian manuscripts, containing records of the history or the works of authors who were natives of that country, from which have been printed many volumes whose pages illustrate manners and events which were completely forgotten before the monks of St. Lazaro rescued them from oblivion.

CHAPTER XVIII.

General History of Armenia.—Former Sovereigns.—Tiridates I. receives his Crown from Nero.—Conquest of the Country by the Persians and by the Arabs.—List of modern Kings.—Misfortunes of Leo V.: his Death at Paris.

The general history of Armenia contains but little that is interesting. It presents the picture of a line of sovereigns who have seldom been able to support their own authority, and who have constantly abdicated, embraced monastic vows, or been driven from the throne by rebellions of their subjects, and invasions of neighboring conquerors more talented and more powerful than themselves. Many of the Armenian kings seem to have lived almost on the charity of other states; the lines of their dynasties have been so often interrupted, and the changes from kings to governors, dukes, and counts have been so frequent, that their history is most intricate; and, from the boundaries of the so-called kingdom of Armenia having never been the same for many years together, it is difficult to understand from the scattered notices which history has transmitted to us who should be considered as the head of the state, or which of the many vassal princes, under the great empires of the East, has the better claim to the title of sovereign of this ancient kingdom.

At the time of our Savior, Abgarus, king of Edessa, seems to have exercised sovereignty over great part of Armenia, on the southern and western sides. Tiridates I. is the first person styling himself King of Armenia after this period. He conquered the country from Rhadamistus, by the assistance of his brother Vologeses, King of Parthia. The Romans, however, who did not approve of the erection of an independent kingdom in those regions, sent an army against Tiridates, commanded by Corbulo, who forced Tiridates to abdicate, on condition of his proceeding to Rome to receive his crown from the hands of the Emperor Nero. He was received with the highest honors by the Roman emperor, who advanced as far as Naples to meet him. Tiridates won his good graces by the artful manner in which he flattered Nero on his skill in driving a chariot. They became great friends: the Armenian king received large sums of money from the emperor, with which he returned to his own country, and repaired his dismantled fortresses. He changed the name of his capital from Artaxarte to Neronia, in compliment to his imperial protector, and died in the year 75 A.D., after a reign of eleven years.

To him succeeded several princes who were vassals to the Roman empire, but whose actions do not seem to offer any thing of interest. Tiridates II. had received his education at Rome, and, assisted by the emperor, he was placed upon the throne of Armenia, by the general consent of the nobles of his country, in 259. He, as I have mentioned in the ecclesiastical sketch of this history, embraced Christianity, and died in the year 314. Other unimportant princes succeeded, among whom John Nustaron governed Armenia, under the Emperor Maurice. The Persians conquered the country in the reign of the Emperor Phocas, but it was soon retaken by Heraclius. Pasagnates revolted against the Emperor Constantine II., who defeated him, and placed Sabarius, a Persian, on the throne, who also rebelled, and was beat in the year 658. Justinian II. concluded a treaty with the Caliph Abdolmalek, by which the two sovereigns divided between them the revenues of Armenia, Iberia, and Cyprus; and the same emperor, Justinian II., placed Sablas on the Armenian throne. This prince, being established in this mountainous kingdom, organized an army, and, having attempted to extricate his country from the power of the Caliph, was defeated by him in 687, and the Arabs became masters of Armenia. The Emperor Constantine Copronymus retook this province, and established Paulus as viceroy. Paulus was conquered by the forces of the Caliph, but he afterward re-established himself upon the throne.

After his reign, Armenia was governed by several dukes and counts, some of whom ruled over a larger, and some over a smaller, portion of the country. During this period constant battles and disturbances took place between the adherents of the caliphs and the Christian emperors in this distracted province. The Patriarch of Constantinople made every endeavor to break down the religious subjection of the Armenians to their heretical Patriarch. But the history of the numerous princes who succeeded each other, after periods of short and doubtful power, on the throne of parts only of Armenia, is so complicated and so doubtful, that I shall not attempt to speak of them, and proceed to the time of the first generally acknowledged king of modern times. The name of this monarch was

Philaretes Branchance. After resisting the forces of the Emperor Michael Ducas, he submitted to his successor, Nicephorus Botoniates, by whom he was supported through the rest of his reign. He flourished about the year 1080.

Constantine was succeeded by his brother

Taphroc, or Taphnuz. Under these two sovereigns appear numerous petty princes, who were feudatories to the King.

Leo, who was long a prisoner under the Turks, lived in 1131.

Theodorus, or Thoros, after a stormy reign, died in 1170.

Thomas, son of the sister of Thoros.

Milo, brother of Thoros. Under this reign the power of the Knights Templars was formidable. They had acquired large possessions in Armenia; and their numerous preceptories were in fact fortified castles, from which they defied the power of their suzerain. Milo waged war with the Templars, and succeeded in banishing many of their followers from his dominions. He died in 1180.

Rupinus was made prisoner by Bohemond, Prince of Antioch. He died in 1189.

Leo I., or Livon, concluded a treaty, by which he freed Armenia from the tribute which it had paid to the Prince of Antioch, instead of which he voluntarily paid homage to the Pope Celestinus III. He lived in perpetual war with the formidable body of Knights Templars, with various success, and died in 1219.

Isabel, daughter of Leo. In the reign of this princess the kingdom of Armenia became tributary to the Turkish Sultans of Iconium.

Aiton, or Otho, sent embassadors to St. Louis, King of France, in the island of Cyprus. He made a visit to Mangou, Khan of Tartary, whom he converted to Christianity, and in alliance with whom, assisted by his brother, Houlagou Khan, he made war against the Mohammedans, and, having destroyed the castles of the Assassins, penetrated into the dominions of the Sultan of Aleppo, their further progress being stopped by the death of Mangou Khan, which occasioned the return of Houlagou to his own country. The Saracens or Mohammedans, on this change of affairs, in their turn overran Armenia, where they committed dreadful cruelties; and Aiton, having abdicated the crown in 1270, retired into a monastery, under the name of Macarius, where he died in the year 1272.

Leo, the son of Aiton, mounted the throne of his father in 1270, and was in constant war with Bondochar, Sultan of Egypt, who massacred 20,000 persons in Armenia. He was excommunicated for outrages committed upon the Patriarch of Antioch. After a reign of trouble and disaster, he died in 1288.

Aiton, or Otho II., the son of Leo, with many of his nation, embraced the Roman faith, and demanded the assistance of Pope Boniface VIII. against the infidels who menaced his power. No effective assistance having been afforded him, he abdicated the throne, took the habit of a Capuchin friar, and, under the name of Brother John, died in the year 1294.

Thoros, or Theodorus, despairing of success against the incursions of the neighboring nations, also became a Capuchin friar. He died in 1296.

Sembat, or Penibald, the brother of Aiton and Thoros, usurped the throne in the absence of his brothers; he was dethroned by another brother, Constantine, and died in 1298.

Constantine sent his remaining brothers to Constantinople, with a recommendation to the Emperor to take care of them. The year of his death is uncertain.

Leo III. was murdered in the year 1307.

Chir Ossim, with the assistance of Pope John XXII., made an advantageous truce or treaty with the Kings of Sicily and Cyprus, with whom he was at war. This was accomplished through the mediation of the Genoese, who at this time appear to have been the principal traders in Constantinople, Persia, and Armenia. He died in 1320.

Leo IV. lived in continual war with the Saracens. This king sent embassadors to Philippe de Valois, King of France, to beg assistance against the incursions of the Saracens. He married first Constancia, daughter of Frederick, King of Sicily, and secondly the daughter of the Prince of Tarentum, niece to Robert, King of Naples. Having provoked the jealousy of his countrymen by promoting numerous Frenchmen to high offices of government, he was assassinated in the year 1344.

After his death Guy de Lusignan was elected King of Armenia. He died in 1344.

Constans, or Constantius, apparently his son, succeeded Guy de Lusignan, and was killed by the Saracens in 1351. He had dispatched embassadors to implore assistance against the infidels to the courts of the Pope, the King of England, and the King of France.

Constantine, the next king, appears to have lived in continual troubles with his own subjects, as well as in constant alarm at the increasing inroads of the neighboring powers on both sides. The annals of his stormy reign are almost silent, and it is not known when he died. To such a state of misery and confusion was the kingdom of Armenia now reduced, that the existence of another king, who was probably his successor, is only known by the witness of a rare coin, which bears as legend DRAGO . REX . ARMEN . AGAPI. In the year 1368 the nobles of Armenia elected Peter I., King of Cyprus, king; but he was at Rome at that period, and never took possession of his precarious honor.

The records of the Armenian sovereigns are now drawing to a close. About this period, Leo V., of the family of Lusignan, was seated on his trembling throne. He was famous only for his misfortunes. Menaced on every side, his provinces and castles, one by one, fell before the victorious inroads of the Turks. The Genoese alone, who, in pursuit of trade, had fortified many strong places in Armenia, held out gallantly against the common foe, and the Mohammedan invaders were unable to gain possession of the town of Curco, or Corycus, in Cilicia, which was defended by the soldiers of the intrepid merchants. After a constant series of disasters and defeats, the unhappy king escaped with his life to the island of Cyprus, from whence he passed to Italy, and afterward to Castile, where he implored in vain for assistance from those Christian princes to reinstate him in the kingdom of his ancestors, which had fallen into the power of the infidel, and which, from that period to the present day, has continued to form one of the great pashaliks, or provinces of the Turkish empire. From Castile he took refuge in France, where he was received with distinguished favor and hospitality by King Charles V., who assigned for his residence the hotel of St. Ouen, near St. Denis. About the year 1378 Leo passed over to England, in the hopes of effecting peace between King Richard II. and the King of France, with whom he was then at war, and inducing the two sovereigns to embark in a crusade against the Turks for the recovery of the Holy Land, and for his own restoration to his kingdom. His overtures, like all his other acts, were unsuccessful; but from Richard, King of England, he received magnificent presents, and a pension of 20,000 marcs, which munificence was imitated by the King of France in an annual allowance of 6000 livres.

Leo, King of Armenia, was of small stature, but of intelligent expression and well-formed features. He lived in great magnificence, being richer from the presents of the Christian monarchs than he had been in his own beleaguered kingdom. The last of his royal line, he died, leaving no successor, at Paris, in the year 1393. His body was carried to the tomb clothed in royal robes of white, according to the custom of Armenia, with an open crown upon his head and a golden sceptre in his hand. He lay in state upon an open bier hung with white, and surrounded by the officers of his household, clothed all of them in white robes. He was buried by the high altar of the church of the Celestines, where his effigy was to be seen upon a black marble tomb under an archway in the wall, and on the tomb was written

Cy gist le tres noble et tres excellent Prince, Lyon de Lusignan, quint Roi Latin du Royaulme d’Armenie, qui rendit l’ame a Dieu a Paris le xxix. Jour de Novembre, l’an de Grace mcccxciii.

THE END.

COLOPHON

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Title:

Armenia: A year at Erzeroom, and on the frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia

Author:

Robert Curzon (1810–1873)

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Language:

English

Original publication date:

1854

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Table of Contents

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Armenia, by Robert Curzon

PREFACE.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ARMENIA. CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV. PRESENT CONDITION OF ARMENIA.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Colophon

Availability

Metadata

Revision History

External References

Corrections

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE