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46 CONSTANTINOPLE AND ITS ENVIRONS ;
were stimulated by encouragements and rewards. The emperor himself appeared
among them, and paid them every night, in pieces of silver, for the work they had
executed during the day. He was seen divested of his imperial robes, in a simple tunic
of linen, examining their progress, and applauding and conferring gifts on the most
expert and industrious artisans. In five years and eleven months, the vast building was
completed; and when he had thus accomplished his splendid undertaking, he exclaimed
with exultation, " I have conquered thee, O Solomon." The city was at that time so
subject to earthquakes, that private houses were generally constructed of wood, to obviate
their destructive effects. This magnificent work had scarcely been completed, when it
was shattered by one of those rude and frequent shocks; but the indefatigable emperor
again repaired the shaken ruins. From some unknown physical cause, the violent
concussions ceased to shake the place, so that slight and scarcely perceptible shocks occur
only at intervals of many years; and the church of Santa Sophia is now as it was left
by the last re-edification of Justinian.
When the Turks entered the city, they rushed to this building, to massacre or make
slaves of all who took refuge there; they then proceeded to demolish it, as the most
eminent place of infidel worship. In this critical moment, the sultan entered, and
arrested the destruction just as it had commenced. He announced, that he gave to his
soldiers the plunder of spoil and captives, but the public edifices he reserved to himself.
He at once conceived the idea of converting this magnificent Christian church into a
Mohammedan mosque; and as he had transferred the government of the Osmanli to the
most splendid capital, so the worship of Islam should be celebrated in the most splendid
edifice in the world. In order to accommodate the interior to the new rites, the effigies
and pictures which covered the walls were erased, and all trace of such representations
was effaced by a simple and uniform colouring: the arms of the cross were, with little
violence of alteration, bent up into the form of a crescent; and, to silence the sound cf
a bell, so revolting to the followers of the Prophet, he caused a minaret to be erected at
an angle, to invite the faithful to prayer by the sound of the human voice; and having
thus purified it from what he supposed to be superstitious and idolatrous emblems, he
sat down cross-legged in the sanctuary, and caused himself to be shaved there. He then
ordered the Koran to be read in place of the Bible, offered up his prayers, and finally
suspended the curtain that had once closed the door of the temple at Mecca. He made
no further alteration in the Christian church, and it remains as it was left by Justinian,
unchanged for 1300 years, the most perfect and splendid monument of the arts of the
Lower Empire.
The general model of a Christian church was that of a cross ; the stem represented by
the nave, the cross by the transepts, and the upper part by the choir: but from the
inequality of the parts, the western churches laboured under a disproportion from which
the eastern were exempt. The arms of the Greek cross are all of equal length, and Santa
Sophia is built on its model; it has therefore a symmetry which the Latin churches
have not, though founded on the same symbol. The ground-plan is that of a cross
enclosed in a square whose sides measure 243 feet, but, including the portico, its |
