Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Mantagu

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. 1988. Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu / introduced by Dervla Murphy; edited and complied by Christopher Pick. New York: New Amsterdam

Accompanied by an escort of 500 Janissaries, Wortley and his party reached Adrianople (modern Edirne) on 13 March by way of Sofia and Philippopolis. Lady Mary's two-month stay here, in elegant lodgings provided by the Sultan in one of his palaces, gave her every opportunity to explore the city and to become acquainted with Ottoman society. The enthusiasm of her letters from Adrianople, the zestful curiosity they display, make evident Lady

Mary's rapture with all she saw. In Sofia, she had already penetrated the hot baths (the hammam), travelling incognito in a hired coach, and had marvelled at their furnishings and, more especially, at the fact that the 200 women present were all 'in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed'. So pressing was their invitation to Lady Mary to join them that she was able to decline only by showing them her stays, into which, she reported, they were convinced that her husband had locked her. (Lady Mary's visits to the baths in Adrianople and later in Constantinople provided the inspiration for Ingres' painting Le Bain Turc 1862 with its throng of naked women embracing.) In Adrianople, which had served as the Ottoman capital until 1453 and was still much visited by the Sultan and his court, she watched the Sultan pass by in procession to the Mosque, dined with the Lady of the Grand Vizier (the Sultan's Chief Minister) and, dressed in her Turkish costume, visited the Selimiye Mosque. The dinner was rather dull - her host turned out to be a respectable middle-aged lady 'entirely given up to devotion' and Lady Mary was evidently becoming a little tired of Turkish cooking - but the evening was saved by an invitation to go on to visit the Lady of the Kahya, the second minister. Lady Mary was entranced with Fatima - she could find no imperfection in her features, she was 'so struck with admiration that I could not for some time speak to her' - and with the rich furnishings and sensual atmosphere of her harem; the two parted with every expression of friendship, and indeed did meet again in Constantinople.

Such meetings, and the discussions she had had with Ahmed Bey in Belgrade about the customs of Islam, led Lady Mary to develop one of her favourite themes: the freedom enjoyed by Turkish women (or at least those of high rank) in comparison with their counterparts in England. Almost inevitably, Lady Mary viewed this freedom primarily in sexual terms: the strict rules requiring women to remain veiled at all times gives them 'entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery.... ‘Tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her.... You may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from their lovers' indiscretion.' A Turkish woman, Lady Mary found, also preserves her financial independence; while married, she retains control of her own money, and should her husband divorce her he is obliged to continue to maintain her. Can one perhaps detect, in these passages, some element of wistfulness, some kicking against the fetters of her own marriage?

What Lady Mary's Turkish letters, both those from Adrianople and those composed during her fourteen month stay in Constantinople, lack is any insight into the political and military situation, which is scarcely even discussed. Visits to harems and mosques, and rambles around Adrianople and Constantinople, could be arranged. Meetings with high court ladies were permitted; as well as Fatima and the Grand Vizier's lady, Lady Mary also made the acquaintance of Sultana Hafise, the widow of Mustafa II whom the present Sultan, Ahmed III, had deposed in 1703. But the Sultan himself and his officials she saw only at a distance, usually in procession, while the whole realm of politics and court intrigue and diplomatic negotiation was entirely closed to her. How frustrating Lady Mary (whose years spent in English Court circles had enabled her to develop some shrewd political instincts) found this situation her letters do not reveal. Nor can we be certain how much Wortley told her about the progress of his negotiations with the

Sultan, or how far she was able to bring her influence to bear on him in private.

What we do know is that Wortley made his task, for which he would not have been ideally suited at the best of times, more difficult still by his rapidly growing Turkophilia and his apparent unwillingness to recognize the weakness of the Ottoman military position. The peace proposal he despatched to Vienna from Adrianople after more than a month's negotiations with the Grand Vizier was ill received there. The Turks, he suggested, would agree to a cease-fire if Temesvar, which they had lost to Austria the previous year, were restored to them. From the Austrian point of view, there was little logic about this proposal. While the Turks had reached the city gates of Vienna little more than thirty years before, since then they had been beaten back, and now most of Hungary was in Imperial hands. Prince Eugene had defeated an army twice the size of his at Peterwaradin in 1716, and even now was planning to beseige Belgrade before the Turks could bring in troops from Asia. Wortley's argument for his plan - that failure to agree on peace terms would lead to the deposition of Ahmed III by a less peaceable Sultan more willing to use his Empire's great wealth to prolong the war - failed to impress either the Austrian Emperor or Abraham Stanyan, the English ambassador in Vienna, who was already intriguing to have Wortley replaced.

Events soon swept past Wortley. Vienna simply made no response to his plan, in August the Turks were defeated in Belgrade, and in September the English government announced that it was replacing Wortley with Stanyan, who was to be assisted in his negotiations by Sir Robert Sutton, Wortley's predecessor in Constantinople. Word of his recall did not reach Wortley for some time - in early autumn he had set out for the Grand Vizier's military camp near Sofia, where he remained until the following May - and when it did he redoubled his efforts to devise peace terms acceptable to both sides; if only he could achieve peace before his successor arrived in Turkey, both the diplomatic and financial fruits of success would then be his.

He failed, and must have alienated his friends in government with his naive and rather pathetic appeals to be allowed to remain in office. Stanyan arrived in Adrianople in May 1718, the Wortleys left Constantinople for home in July, and in the autumn the Treaty of Passarowitz was signed, by which the Turks ceded to Austria a slab of territory in Hungary, Serbia and Wallachia.

But all this lay ahead as Wortley and Lady Mary left Adrianople for Constantinople towards the end of May 1717. They took a palace in Pera, the hilltop suburb on the north bank of the Golden Horn where foreigners were lodged. Here, and also at their summer villa in the woods at Belgrade Village close to the Black Sea, Lady Mary fell into a pleasant routine. In the country 'days were passed, she recounted to Pope on 17 June, in reading, writing, studying the Turkish language and listening to music. In the city, there were visits to the old quarter of Constantinople on the far side of the Golden Horn, where, properly veiled and dressed, Lady Mary rambled through streets and markets, visited the baths once again, saw as much of the Seraglio as was permitted, examined mosques and monasteries, in one of which she observed the 'devotions of the dervishes, which are as whimsical as any in Rome', and took boat excursions up the 'canal' (the Bosphorous). As persistent as ever, she made at least three applications for permission, eventually granted, to visit the Santa Sophia mosque.

Two other events marked Lady Mary's stay in Constantinople. The first was the birth of her daughter, in late January; she was named Mary after her mother. Charles

Maitland, the surgeon whom Lady Mary had engaged England, and also the eminent Constantinople physician Emanuel Timoni, attended her. Wortley himself was away from Constantinople, attending the Grand Vizier near Sofia. Lady Mary was struck with the easy acceptance of childbirth in Turkey - pregnant women 'see all company the day of their delivery and at the fortnight's end return visits, set out in their jewels and new clothes' but was less certain that she approved of the habit of large families and the constant child-bearing women underwent. A couple of months later, the same doctors were involved in a courageous and potentially risky- experiment initiated by Lady Mary. It was in Adrianople that she had first observed the practice of innoculating young children against smallpox, and in Constantinople shoe continued her investigations, eventually deciding to have her son Edward 'engrafted'. (The technique developed in England by Edward Jenner towards the end of the 18th century used the cowpox virus, while in Turkey innoculation was performed, at much greater risk, with the smallpox virus). Dr Timoni, a Fellow of the Royal Society who had described the process in the Society's Transactions in 1714, was no doubt on hand to give advice. An old Greek woman was found to perform the innoculation, but she so distressed the child that Charles Maitland stepped in and administered the injection himself. (On his return to England, Maitland was to find himself swept up in Lady Mary's enthusiastic advocacy of innoculation, and he came out of retirement to take part in the experimental innoculations she arranged.) The boy suffered no ill effects.

This must have been a good time to live in Constantinople. True, many of the problems that led to the gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire we.-re already manifesting themselves: inflation and economic difficulties; increasing social distress; the declining ability of the Sultans, which in turn lessened the authority of the central government in the face of powerful provincial rulers; and the weakening of the administrative system, which was now opening high office to people with the money to purchase it rather than on merit. But, given the closed and secretive nature of Ottoman society, none of this would have come to Lady Mary's notice. On a more superficial level, life was easy. The Sultan was devoted to extravagance and luxury rather than to war, or even to the arts of government and administration. His two grand passions (aside from those of the flesh) were parties and tulips. According to one 'authority, he 'had so many offspring that, with the celebration of the children's births, the sons' circumcisions, and the daughters' marriages, there was a holiday atmosphere in the Saray [the harem] throughout his reign'; for one such celebration, where the feast was prepared by 1500 cooks and the guests were entertained by jugglers and no fewer than 2000 musicians, he himself designed 18-foot 'sugar gardens', extravagant concoctions installed in tents for the guests to nibble. So great was his mania for tulips - bulbs were imported by the thousand for the harem gardens, and each April a magnificent tulip fete was staged there - that the latter part of his reign is commonly known as the Tulip Period, Lale Deri.

Some of this was still in the future when Lady Mary and her husband reluctantly left Constantinople in midsummer 1718; Passarowitz enabled the Sultan to turn his whole attention from the cares of war to those of frivolity. But the memories of her stay in this magical city at the gateway to Asia, filled with people of every race and religion, its markets laden with goods from the exotic, unknown East, were to remain with Lady Mary for the rest of her life.