Page:The Fall of Constantinople.djvu/170

 152 THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. the last century, and the consular courts of China and Japan, all owed their judicial system to a conception of law resem- bling that which led to the establishment of the capitulations in Constantinople, and all ultimately develop the legal fiction that the territory in the foreign country is a portion of the empire from whose shores they have been planted. I have said that the idea in Constantinople was that for- eigners should not be entitled to the privileges of the citizen, but should be allowed the advantages of their own laws. Ma- hometans have never advanced sufficiently far to outgrow this conception. All Christians are, in a sense, foreigners to Ma- hometans, and cannot have the advantages of Moslem law. Still, neither in the case of the foreign colonies under the Byzantine empire, nor in those which were found by the Turks, nor in those actually existing in Constantinople, was there any considerable sense of hardship. The colonists had their own predilections in favor of their own laws. The na- tive was equally convinced that his system was the best. I repeat that there has existed no period in the history of They are a Constantinople in which foreigners have not en- noran^i'nveu- J^J^^ ^^^^ advantages, and been subject to the disa- tiou. bilities, of exterritoriality. The existing system of capitulations is a survival rather than, as it is generally repre- sented, a new invention specially adapted to Turkey. Still less is it a system, as it is often said to be, of magnanimous concessions made by far-sighted sultans of Turkey in order to encourage foreigners to trade with and reside in the empire. The capitulations were neither badges of inferiority imposed on foreigners, as they have often been described, nor proofs of exceptional wisdom peculiar to the sultans. As a fact, for- eigners have never held so important a position in the capital under Ottoman rule as under that of the Christian emperors, and especially at the close of the twelfth century. While the native population has probably remained stationary during the last six centuries, the foreign population was probably never so large as at that period. I now propose to point out what were the principal colonies of foreigners which existed in Constantinople, and in other of