The Seven Towers

The Bastille of the Bosphorus

At the southernmost extremity of the Theodosian Walls, where the Byzantine empire once drew its dying breath beneath the scimitar of Mehmed II, stands a grim coronet of granite: the Castle of the Seven Towers, the formidable Yedikule. Western voyagers were under no illusion; Auguste Maquet and Alboize saw in it the monstrous twin of our own Parisian citadel: “It is the Bastille of Constantinople—an Oriental Bastille, bathed by the surge of the Sea of Marmara and haunted by the phantoms of fallen Caesars.”

Here, one found none of the formal chicanery of advocates or the measured judgments of civil tribunals. An order from the Grand Vizier, a hasty line scribbled upon the secret register of the Dizdar—the fortress castellan—and the heavy, iron-clamped portals of the Golden Gate swung shut forever. Whenever war erupted between the Sublime Porte and a Christian monarch, the ambassador of the hostile power crossed this accursed threshold, stripped of his immunity and converted into a hostage of State under the brutal custody of the janissaries. The Baron de Sancy endured its fetters; Pouqueville counted his days here during the Egyptian Campaign. Yet between these walls, twenty feet in thickness, lingered a dread far more unspeakable than diplomatic chains: the scent of imperial blood dried into the very stone.

The Shadow of the Bowstring and the Blood Dungeon

Long before it served as a cage for foreign ministers, the Seven Towers was the clandestine tomb of broken dynasties. None entered its polygonal courtyard without casting a shuddering glance toward the southwestern tower, known as the Tower of Blood. It was there that lay the “Well of Blood,” a yawning circular abyss into which executioners hurled severed heads, leaving them to roll invisibly down to the saline currents of the Bosphorus.

“Within this lightless dungeon, the youthful Sultan Osman, dragged thither by the rabble and mutinous spahis, fought like a lion against six mutes armed with the silken bowstring, before finally succumbing beneath the knee of Davud Pasha.”

When the Chevalier de Beaujeu was cast into this vault in the late seventeenth century, following a sudden outburst of fury in the Divan over royal dispatches from Louis XIV, the turnkey pointed out, with a low chuckle, the iron rings riveted into the damp flagstones. Rumor held that each night, when the muezzin fell silent, the dying groans of the strangled boy-sultan echoed through the stone flues and air shafts. Beaujeu, an iron-willed gentleman tempered on the battlefields of Flanders, listened impassively as the bolts ground shut upon his cell. The Dizdar had promised him either lifelong captivity or poison at the bottom of a cup of mocha. From that first night, huddled on a rotting straw pallet, he resolved not to perish as a sacrificial lamb. If Osman had died beneath the cord, he, at least, would make his exit by way of the heavens.

The File, the Raki, and the Silken Cords

To escape a fortress reputed to be unassailable demanded the cunning of a master chess player and the dogged endurance of a galley slave. For six months, the Chevalier de Beaujeu observed the customs and vices of his gaol. He soon perceived that Ottoman fanaticism harbored a universal flaw: gold and a weakness for forbidden pleasures. Through the agency of a Greek slave permitted to bring him his daily bowls of rice pilaf, Beaujeu passed several diamonds sewn into the lining of his doublet. This treasure bought silence, and soon after, the pliable favor of a janissary non-commissioned officer with an illicit fondness for spirits.

Pint by pint of fiery, contraband raki, the soldier’s vigilance was drowned in stupor. Night after night, accompanied by the howling winter gales that battered the embrasures, Beaujeu wielded a slender file of tempered steel, smuggled to him within a loaf of coarse brown bread. The piercing screech of iron biting into iron was masked by the tempestuous ocean wind and the thundering of the waves against the Byzantine foundations. Bar after bar, the heavy grille sealing the skylight of his cell gave way. To replace the severed iron and deceive the daily rounds of the guard—who habitually tapped the grating with a switch of boxwood—the Chevalier fashioned false bars from kneaded breadcrumbs mixed with charcoal dust and oily soot. The deception was consummate; the turnkey suspected nothing.

There remained the abyss. The embrasure hung more than sixty feet above the chemin de ronde, and the outer rampart plunged another eighty feet down into a moat choked with brambles and jagged masonry. A common hemp rope would have proved far too bulky to conceal beneath his meager bedding. The Greek slave achieved the impossible, smuggling into the cell, skein by skein, spools of raw Aleppo silk. Patiently, with numbed fingers cut and bleeding from the razor-sharp threads, Beaujeu plaited a cord as slender as a riding whip, yet as unyielding as a ship’s hawser.

The Vertigo of the Golden Gate

On the night of the fourteenth of November, a providential storm swept in from the Black Sea, drowning the city beneath sheets of torrential rain. The Turkish sentries, shivering and huddled within their stone watchtowers under heavy sheepskin pelisses, abandoned the exposed battlements. The fateful hour had arrived.

With a sharp thrust of his shoulder, Beaujeu wrenched out the dummy bars of bread and soot. He squeezed through the narrow slit, his bare skin greased with lard to slide across the rough masonry. Outside, the freezing rain lashed his face like needles. Securing his silken cord to the stout oak beam supporting the vaulted ceiling, he swung himself out into the black void. The fine silk scorched his palms to the bone, tearing through the flesh, yet not a gasp escaped his clenched teeth. He touched the paving of the walkway without a sound, gathered his line, and crawled on his belly to the crest of the outer curtain wall.

Below him, the sea roared faintly against the base of the fortifications. If the cord snapped, his body would be dashed to pieces on the jagged rocks where the bones of the victims of the Well of Blood had long since turned to dust. Repeating his maneuver around a brick merlon, Beaujeu launched himself a second time into the abyss. Halfway down, severed by the knife-like edge of the parapet stone, the line snapped clean through. The Chevalier fell twenty feet into the mire of a deserted orchard, his breath knocked violently from his chest, his right ankle severely sprained.

Clenching his jaw against the searing pain, crawling like a reptile through the allotments of Psamathia, he reached the shoreline where a caïque, chartered by merchants from Marseilles, lay rocking in the shadows. When morning came and the alarm cannon of the Seven Towers at last roared across the waters, the Chevalier de Beaujeu was already cutting through the white crests of the Propontis, leaving the bewildered janissaries behind to gaze upon a solitary wisp of silk fluttering in the Eastern wind—a fluttering shroud left upon a conquered fortress.