DEFYING CONVENTION IN CONSTANTINOPLE WITH LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Today’s Zaman
Aug 23, 2011
Turkey
“It has all been most interesting.” Uttered from her deathbed in 1762
by the English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, these words are
masterly in their understatement.
Breaking free from the shackles that bound the vast majority of
provincial upper-crust womanhood to a life of pampered but insufferably
dull domesticity, she eloped in order to marry Edward Wortley Montagu
and, following her husband’s election as a member of parliament at
Westminster, became a noted society woman at the court of George I,
as well as attending meetings of a notoriously raunchy secret society,
the Hellfire Club. She survived smallpox, bore two children, moved
to the continent, divorced her husband and had affairs with a French
man and then, aged 47, an Italian count half her age.
The most beautiful prospect in the world The remarkably “modern” Mary
is best known today, however, for her five volume “Works.” The letters
she wrote from Constantinople (Ä°stanbul) between the spring of 1717
and the summer of 1718, while her husband was British ambassador to
the Ottoman court, form the heart of this fascinating collection
of correspondence, essays and poems. As a woman, particularly one
that was both bold and unconventional, Mary was able to gain an
insight into the cloistered world of the Ottoman female that her male
contemporaries simply couldn’t match, making her observations all the
more unique and valuable. She did not, however, confine her writing
to all matters female, noting of her arrival at the embassy building
in Pera, today’s Beyoglu:
“Our palace is in Pera, which is no more a suburb of Constantinople
than Westminster is a suburb of London. … One part of our houses
shows us the port, the city and the seraglio, and the distant hills of
Asia; perhaps, all together, the most beautiful prospect in the world.”
Pera in 1717, although very much an integral part of the Ottoman
Empire’s capital city, was far less built-up than it is now, and the
vast majority of fine buildings lining Istiklal Caddesi (formerly
the Rue de Pera), which we today think of as historic, would not
be erected for well over a century and half. The views, though,
are perhaps just as fine in their own way as those admired by Mary.
A tower of Babel Ensconced in her “palace” (the word then used to
describe the embassy buildings of various nations perched on the hills
of Pera) it seems that, initially at least, Mary passed her days in a
manner that, for the most part, more or less conformed to the social
norms of her time.
“Monday, setting of partridges – Tuesday, reading English – Wednesday,
studying in the Turkish language (in which, by the way, I am already
very learned) – Thursday, classical authors – Friday, spent in
writing – Saturday, at my needle – and Sunday, admitting of visits,
and hearing of music.”
Admittedly, this was far more exciting than the endless rounds of
drawing-room tittle-tattle and games of mahjong that she would have
endured had she been back in provincial England, a thrill that was
heightened by the ultra-cosmopolitan nature of her new neighborhood.
“I live in a place that very well represents the tower of Babel: In
Pera they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian,
Russian, Slavonian, Walachian, German, Dutch, French, English,
Italian, Hungarian.” Many of these tongues were represented in the
embassy serving staff and, according to Mary. “They learn all these
languages at the same time, and without knowing any of them well
enough to read or write in it.”
>>From behind the veil It was not long, however, before Mary grew
tired of the restrictions of polite, Europeanized Pera society and
set off to explore the “oriental” parts of the city, blending into
her new environment by the simple but daring expedient of donning a
veil. “The asmack, or Turkish veil, is become not only very easy but
agreeable to me; and, if it was not, I would be content to endure some
inconveniency to gratify a passion that is become so powerful with
me, as curiousity.” Thus disguised Mary is rowed along the Bosporus
(which she describes, bizarrely, as a “canal”) admiring the eastern
shore long before it was swamped with concrete. “The Asian side is
covered with fruit trees, villages and the most delightful landscapes
in nature.” The old city from the water was “an agreeable mixture
of gardens, pines and cypress trees, palaces, mosques, and public
buildings, raised one above another, with as much beauty and symmetry
as your ladyship ever saw.”
The Topkapi Palace was, of course, then still the heart of the
Ottoman Empire and off-limits even to an ambassador’s wife, but
she does describe it from the outside as a “palace of prodigious
extent. … The buildings are all of white stone, leaded on the top,
with gilded turrets and spires, which look very magnificent.”
A handful of mosaic Mary may not have managed to see the magnificent
palace that streams of visitors today take for granted, but she
had rather more luck with what remains one of the biggest draws in
Istanbul, Aya Sofya, or St.
Sophia as she calls it. It wasn’t easy, though, as today’s museum was
then the most important mosque in Constantinople. Compelled to apply
three times to the kaymakam (local governor) before finally obtaining
permission to visit she wrote, “I can’t be informed why the Turks are
so delicate on the subject of this mosque than on any of the others,
where what Christian pleases may enter without scruple.”
Mary’s theory as to why foreigners found it difficult to access
the mosque is that unlike, say, the Sultanahmet Camii (Blue Mosque)
opposite, not only had Aya Sofya once been the greatest church in
Byzantium, it still contained “saints who are very visible in the
Mosaic work, and no other way defaced but by the decays of time.”
Christian visitors therefore might “on pretence of curiousity, profane
it with prayers.” Today tourists can purchase bucketfuls of Aya Sofya
souvenirs from the on-site shop, but Mary’s guides presented her with
something rather more original to remember her visit. “There are two
rows of galleries, supported with pillars of party-coloured marble,
and the whole roof Mosaic work, part of which decays very fast,
and drops down. They presented me a handful of it.”
Better than St. Paul’s Mary confessed herself to be no architect,
but clearly preferred the aesthetics of the old city’s purpose-built
mosques to those converted from Byzantine churches (in which she seems
to have had no interest whatsoever). She describes Sinan’s masterpiece,
the Suleymaniye Camii, as follows: “That of Sultan Solymon is an exact
square, with four fine towers in the angles; in the midst is a noble
cupola, supported with beautiful marble pillars. …The pavement is
spread with fine carpets and the mosque illuminated with a vast number
of lamps. The court leading to it is very spacious, with galleries of
marble” and goes on to say: “This description may stand for all the
mosques in Constantinople. The model is exactly the same, and they
only differ in largeness and richness of materials.” These sentiments
are echoed today, for rather different reasons, by countless tourists
dragged around one too many Ottoman mosques by over-zealous guides,
with the term “mosqued-out” becoming a part and parcel of 21st
century tourist argot. Mary, though, with rather more time to spare
in Istanbul than the vast majority of today’s visitors, was besotted,
describing the Valide-Sultan mosque (better known today as the Yeni
Camii, on the Eminönu waterfront) as “the most prodigious, and, I
think, the most beautiful structure I ever saw. … Between friends,
St. Paul’s church would make a pitiful figure next to it.”
Whirling dervishes and naked wedding parties Mary made the rounds of
the old city’s sights much as any visitor today would, taking in the
Hippodrome, the Grand Bazaar and the aqueducts. A whirling dervish
ceremony is another sight many visitors today are determined to
witness, and the tourist-orientated shows are relentlessly promoted
by the city’s hotels. Mary, of course, was in the city long before
Ataturk banned the dervish orders and observed the authentic rites
of the Mevlevi with great interest. “Nothing can be more austere
than the form of these people; they never raise their eyes, and seem
devoted to contemplation. And as ridiculous as is this description,
there is something touching in the air of submission and mortification
they assume.” Although it is not certain which one, she also visited
a notable Turkish bath, where she provided a vivid description of
a wedding party disporting themselves naked in the steam, images
painters like Ingres (who never actually went to Constantinople,
never mind entered the female section of a Turkish bath) conjured up
on canvas, producing the exotic, eroticized hamam scenes that still
fire the Western imagination.
A beauty marred by smallpox Apart from amusing and informing the
aristocrat ladies to whom most of her epistles were dispatched and
providing valuable source material on life in Ottoman Constantinople,
it wouldn’t be fair not to mention what was perhaps Mary’s greatest
contribution to the world. Having caught smallpox herself (her
beauty was marred by a disfiguring attack in 1715, and she lost a
brother to the often deadly disease), she was fascinated to find
that in the Ottoman Empire smallpox was kept in check by a process
she called engrafting (variolation). An early form of inoculation,
secretions were taken from the blisters of a smallpox victim and
jabbed with an ordinary needle into the bloodstream of the person to
be immunized. Mary dared to have her own five-year-old son protected
in this way while in Pera and took the idea back to London with her,
where in 1721 she had her four-year-old daughter immunized in the
presence of the king’s physician. This popularized the technique
in Europe and helped pave the way for eventual eradication of the
disease. She was a woman way ahead of her times, so let’s leave her
musing on the lot of a woman in what was very much a man’s world.
“The one thing that reconciles me to being a woman is the reflection
that it delivers me from the necessity of being married to one.”
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