Serpentine Column[1] was last seen in an etching in a book by Aubry de La Mottraye.
Mavi Boncuk |
Procession through the Hippodrome, Constantinople (Aubry de La Mottraye's "Travels throughout Europe, Asia and into Part of Africa...," London, 1724, vol. I, plate 15)
Etcher: William Hogarth (British, London 1697–1764 London)[*]
Artist:After Jean Baptiste Vanmour (French, Valenciennes 1671–1737 Istanbul)
Author: Illustrates Aubry de La Mottraye[2] (French, 1674–1743)
Date: 1723–24
[*] In 1720 La Motraye returned to England, where he was for some years engaged in preparing a manuscript about his travels. The description was published in English in 1723 under the title Travels through Europe, Asia and into part of Africa. The plates are all by English engravers, and twelve of them are signed by William Hogarth,. In 1727 he published a French version, with somewhat different content. During the 1720s, La Motraye made further travels in Europe, which he also described in the book. In 1732 he had published a work that critically examined Voltaire's Charles XII biography, Carl XII's history .
[1] The Serpent Column (Ancient Greek: Τρικάρηνος Ὄφις Τrikarenos Οphis "Three-headed Snake"; Turkish: Yılanlı Sütun "Serpentine Column"), also known as the Serpentine Column, Plataean Tripod or Delphi Tripod, is an ancient bronze column at the Hippodrome of Constantinople (known as Atmeydanı "Horse Square" in the Ottoman period) in what is now Istanbul, Turkey. It is part of an ancient Greek sacrificial tripod, originally in Delphi and relocated to Constantinople by Constantine I the Great in 324. It was built to commemorate the Greeks who fought and defeated the Persian Empire at the Battle of Plataea (479 BC). The serpent heads of the 8-metre (26 ft) high column remained intact until the end of the 17th century (one is on display at the nearby Istanbul Archaeology Museums).
The Serpentine Column has one of the longest literary histories of any object surviving from Greek and Roman antiquity — its provenance is not in doubt and it is at least 2,493 years old. Together with its original golden tripod and bowl (both long missing), it constituted a trophy, or offering, dedicated to Apollo at Delphi. This offering was made in the spring of 478 BC, several months after the defeat of the Persian army in the Battle of Plataea (August 479 BC) by those Greek city-states in alliance against the Persian invasion of mainland Greece (see Greco-Persian Wars). Among the writers who allude to the Column in the ancient literature are Herodotus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias the traveller, Cornelius Nepos and Plutarch. The removal of the column by the Emperor Constantine to his new capital, Constantinople, is described by Edward Gibbon, citing the testimony of the Byzantine historians Zosimus, Eusebius, Socrates, and Sozomenus.
[2] Aubry de La Mottraye settled in Constantinople in 1698 to practise freely the Protestant religion. He had already visited Italia, Jaffa, Alexandria, Tripoli, Mahn Harbour, and Lisbon and had followed Tallard to England. He met Tekeli[3] in Constantinople and travelled through Anatolia up to the Black Sea. He sailed to Malta and then towards Barcelona. La Motraye was close to Charles XII of Sweden and visited him during his exile at Bender in Turkey after the Swedish king had disastrously led his troops into battle against the armies of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, subsequently losing the Swedish empire. La Mottraye stroke up a friendship with F.E. Fabrice, an agent of Charles XII towards 1711, when he followed him to Bender. Constant travels between Constantinople and Didymoteicho occupied him until 1714. He left for Sweden with Fabrice and went up to Laponia.
In Aug. after Louis XIV promises aid, the Great Kuruc Rebellion (ends 1686) in Hungary against the Hapsburgs by Magyars, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and a few Romanians begins, led by Count Imre (Emeric) Thokoly (Tokolyi) (Tekely) (Turk. "goaty") (1657-1705), who occupies all E and C Slovakia, followed by all of Hungary, and kicks out the Haspsburg govt., getting all of the Kuruc troops to join him and declare him their leader. He led the Turkish cavalry at the Battle of Slankamen and served valiantly but vainly against Austria during the remainder of the war, especially distinguishing himself at the Battle of Zenta (1697). He was excluded by name from the amnesty promised to the Hungarian rebels by the Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699). After one more unsuccessful attempt, in 1700, to recover the principality, he settled down at Galata with his wife. From Sultan Mustafa II he received large estates and the title of count of Widdin. He died in 1705 in İzmit. He is buried in Kežmarok in the mausoleum of the so-called new church.
Aubry de la Mottraye (1674?-1743) came from a French Huguenot family that had settled in England. He received an excellent education, and started travelling in 1696. In the course of twenty-six years, he toured Northern Europe, Crimea, the Near East, Russia, Prussia and Poland. La Mottraye combined diplomatic travels – as counsellor and attendant to various rulers – with commercial transactions and his activity as a collector.
His chronicle is adorned with impressive engravings of rare subjects, views of cities as well as everyday life scenes. His detailed descriptions make his account one of the first travelogues in which the force of the written discourse equals the impact of the illustrations. To this day, his diary notes in the page margins remain invaluable to researchers.
On his first journey, in 1696, La Mottraye travelled from Paris to Rome, Alexandria and Lisbon, to end up in England. On his second trip, he sailed on a British ship from Gravesend to Smyrna in 1698, and reached the Aegean archipelago by way of Gibraltar. He landed on Patmos on the boat that provided the ship with fish. He crossed over to Clazomenae and arrived at Smyrna, where he stayed for five months. La Mottraye describes the city, English commerce in the area, the grave of Saint Polycarpus, the vines on the outskirts of the city, and mentions the earthquake of 1688. He visited Ephesus in February 1699. He also toured Chios, and wrote about the mastic and the fragrances of the island. He stayed in Samos for three days and visited the ruins of Hera’s temple. A regular seeker of ancient coins, on leaving Smyrna at the end of May 1699, he obtained numerous specimens from Lesbos and the harbours of the Hellespont.
In the section on Constantinople, La Mottraye expands on various aspects of the city, touching on such diverse subjects as current political events and diplomatic relations between the Sultan and foreign ambassadors, the port, the fleet, the impressive kiosks, Chalcedon, Hagia Sophia, the mosques, the palace, the harem, the audiences of the Sultan, the Byzantine hippodrome, the historical columns, the cemeteries of Greeks, Armenians and Jews, a Turkish wedding, dervishes, "bedestens", inns and Ramadan. He describes at length the impressive entrance procession of the Sultan escorted by hundreds of officials and servants of his court.
Mottraye visited Nicomedia and stayed in Bursa till 1703. In April of that year he travelled to Ankara (he provides information on Greek inscriptions, the Greek bishop and the churches in that city), Sinope (where he bought several ancient coins) and Amastris, from where he entered the Bosporus. In July 1703, La Mottraye was an eyewitness to the events in Adrianople, in which Sultan Mustafa II, who was inclined towards reforming the Empire and attempted to regulate its internal affairs after the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), lost his throne. He also writes about the Greek Patriarch and the patriarchal church. In June 1707, La Mottraye embarked on a small ship carrying citrus fruits from Chios and travelled to Smyrna again, where he stayed for three weeks. From there he sailed via Naxos to Santorini, spending three days there. Then, by way of Amorgos, Naxos and Andros, he arrived in Thessalonica. He visited Mount Athos for two days, as well as Aenus and Adrianople, where the Greek wedding he describes took place, and returned to Constantinople.
Until 1710, the year of his final departure from the East, La Mottraye continued his travels from the capital of the Ottoman Empire, reaching as far as Malta and Barcelona. Among other places, he stopped at Lesbos, the Thracian cities in the Hellespont, Tenedos, Lemnos, Troy, Psara, the islands of the Aegean, Monemvasia, Crete, Zacynthos and elsewhere. He was always recording the political events of the time, and never abandoned his quest for and purchase of antiquities, mainly ancient coins.
In 1713, after numerous journeys to Northern Europe, La Mottraye went again to Constantinople. Crossing Eastern Thrace and Adrianople, he continued on to Philippoupolis (Plovdiv), Sofia and Belgrade. From this last city he journeyed to Vienna, the Netherlands and finally to England. In 1714 he returned to Constantinople once more, travelling through Germany, Hungary and the east coast of the Black Sea.
Written by Ioli Vingopoulou