Historical Fiction
Much blood, much money, many anathemas, and many apostasies have marked the progress of this quarrel, and still it has not even yet been made quite clear whether the Shiites or the Sunnites are the true believers. The question to be decided is this: which of the four successor...
Much blood, much money, many anathemas, and many apostasies have marked the progress of this quarrel, and still it has not even yet been made quite clear whether the Shiites or...
2. Chapter 2The booth of Halil Patrona, the pedlar, stood in the bazaar. He sold tobacco, chibooks, and pipe-stems, but his business was not particularly lucrative. He did not keep opium, a...
3. Chapter 3The sun is shining through the windows of the Seraglio, the two Ulemas who are wont to come and pray with the Sultan have withdrawn, and the Kapu-Agasi, or chief doorkeeper, and...
4. Chapter 4Worthy Halil Patrona had become quite a by-word with his fellows. The name he now went by in the bazaars was: The Slave of the Slave-Girl. This did not hurt him in the least; on...
5. Chapter 5What a noise, what a commotion in the streets of Stambul! The multitude pours like a stream towards the harbour of the Golden Horn. Young and old stimulate each other with looks...
6. Chapter 6A contrary wind was blowing across the Bosphorus, so that it was not until towards the evening that the Sultan arrived at Scutari, and disembarked there at his seaside palace wi...
7. Chapter 7It is not every day that one can see budding tulips in the middle of September, yet the Kapudan Pasha had succeeded in hitting upon a dodge which the most famous gardeners in th...
8. Chapter 8At the sixth hour (according to Christian calculation ten o'clock in the evening) the ship arrived bearing the Sultan, the princes, the magnates, and the sacred banner, and cast...
9. Chapter 9Before coming to the council-chamber he had kissed all his children, one by one, and when it came to the turn of his little ten-year-old child, Bajazid, he saw that the little f...
10. Chapter 10The surgujal--the turban with the triple gold circlet--was on the head of Mahmud, but the sword, the sword of dominion, was in the hand of Halil Patrona. The people whose darlin...
11. Chapter 11Halil Patrona was sitting on the balcony of the palace which the Sultan and the favour of the people had bestowed upon him. The sun was about to set. It sparkled on the watery m...
12. Chapter 12A time will come when the star has risen so high that it can rise no higher, and perchance learns to know that before long it must begin its inevitable descent!...
13. Chapter 13Everything was now calm and quiet, and the world pursued its ordinary course; but far away among the Blue Mountains dwells a woman who knows nothing of all that is going on arou...