Where Constantinople Falls

The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell by Lew Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was an amazing book. Two volumes--over 1000 pages--lots of characters and settings--and it was entertaining throughout. I loved it.

These are my thoughts--bit of a jumble:

There is a sort of quirk about the book. The main character, the so-called "Prince of India" is a figure from legend known usually as the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to long life for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. He's an interesting character, a brilliant man who wants to end religious strife, who travels the world, learns languages, makes himself wealthy so that he can have access to important people, and espouses a sort of unification of religion. Though he does some awful things before the end of the novel--causing a deadly fire before helping the Turks defeat the Greeks--most of the time I found myself very sympathetic to him, particularly as he tried to get the leaders of Islam and Christianity to recognize their connection, their mutual belief in a loving god. He reads like a sort of Gandalf figure, or some other wise man who is endowed with a little supernatural ability. (He's immortal, rich, intelligent, and a capable astrologer. He's not magic, exactly, but he can do some stuff.)

From time to time, the author's overt support for Christianity comes through, rather like you find in Quo Vadis or similar novels (which I also liked, actually), but it's generally no more overt than most Regency or Victorian literature, for example. (We don't get any readings from Fordyce's sermons, thankfully. And we don't get a Jane Eyre preparing to go preach Christianity in India.) It's mostly a romance like Sir Walter Scott or maybe Dumas, with action across Arabia and Syria and, especially, Constantinople, with hidden treasures, sailing ships, war, and abducted maidens who need to be rescued.

The sultan's best friend, Mirza, the best warrior in the story, is the heart of the second half of the novel. He is a loyal fighter who was stolen from his home in Italy as a baby. He is sent to the city as a spy where he is intended in part to gather information for the invasion, but he's tasked even more with the job of watching over and protecting Irene, the beautiful cousin of the emperor. (The sultan previously traveled to her home, disguised as a storyteller, and fell in love with her, intending to marry her.) Mirza falls in love with her too and starts to rethink his identity, taking back his name and title as Count Corti. When the friends meet again, both men pledge to protect Irene, no matter the outcome of the coming war. (They honor this pledge, and in the very end the sultan marries Irene while the count returns home to the mother who never stopped searching for him, where he discovers the sultan has long since paid to rebuild their home and restore their fortunes. But that's a spoiler, so shhh.)

There are about 10 really great characters in this novel, any one of whom should have their own book. Sergius, the idealistic Russian monk, might be my favorite. Irene, the iconoclastic and stoic noblewoman, unbowed after long imprisonment, and who refuses to wear a veil as honest women were expected to do, is admirable and captivating. Lael, the young Jewish woman adopted and educated by the Prince of India, is sweet, and the wealthy Demedes, the epicurean son of a courtier who abducts her and hides her in a cell floating built in the giant underground cistern of Constantinople, is a great villain. The African servant of the Prince of India who helps Sergius find her and free her is a a cool character, too.

The novel concludes with the siege and capture of the city. It's a great retelling, stretching over many packed chapters, all given from the POVs of characters we care about. Very affecting. Very informative.

I enjoyed this from beginning to end, and even though I don't align with the author's central religious belief, I applaud his ecumenical philosophy, the one he gives mostly to the Prince of India and, in some measure, to Queen Irene and the monk Sergius. It's surprising in a novel like this, published in 1893, and I give him some credit. Lew Wallace is better known for Ben Hur, and now that I've read this one I realize I need to read that one, too.

Very good writer. Highly recommended.

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Where Constantinople Almost Gets Sacked

Count Robert of Paris: The Works of Sir Walter Scott by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I see others are more likely to give this a 3 or lower, but I almost gave it a 5. My most honest ranking, though, has to be 4. I'm a fan, so I like almost everything Sir Walter Scott writes; that's a given. And I liked this quite a lot. But it just misses for me, and it misses by more for a lot of readers.

[I am putting aside the intrusive racism of the time. Others may not be able to do that. The author makes it clear when it shows up in the story that the people of the time were prejudiced--using that very word--so he seems aware of the issues with racism, but it wasn't clear to me this time, as compared to his other books, that he didn't mostly agree with their sentiments. I hope not.]

It's a good setting--Constantinople at the time that Western European crusaders are on their way to Jerusalem. The Franks and their allies don't much understand the Greeks and their whole vibe, and vice versa. I found that very interesting. The empire is coming under attack on all sides, and they have to buy people off, like these crusaders, so that they don't get sacked. It's okay, though, because they've got the money. What they don't have is fighters.

But here's the other cool part--they do have Varangians. I had thought they were mostly Vikings out of Scandinavia and their relatives, the people of Kievan Rus. But here it's clear that many were Angl0-Saxons or Anglo-Danes fleeing from England after the Norman invasion. One of the main characters, named Hereward, is one of those men, a soldier serving in the emperor's Varangian guard, and he hates the Franks and the Normans who are coming through. Like the Franks, the Varangians (as they are portrayed here) are warlike in a way that is useful to a rich empire without a strong warrior class.

The novel has some great intrigue, with an ongoing conspiracy to take down the emperor that Hereward learns about. It becomes entangled with a separate intrigue between one of the conspirators and one of the leaders of the crusaders--Robert of Paris, who the novel is named for--when he kidnaps the man's wife. (She's awesome--I would have liked more of her. She's a strong warrior in her own right.) All of the intrigues are coming together in a joust between those two men at huge event that will be the beginning (and ending, theoretically) of the uprising.

Unfortunately, it gets tied up in bits and pieces after that, and we see less of the noble Hereward and more of the emperor gathering up the conspirators and deciding what to do with them. There's an old rival brought out of the dungeons who looks like he's gonna play a really cool part, but then he gets sorta written out. The joust goes forward, in a different form, but the uprising is pre-empted. Hereward ends up going with the crusaders for a very important reason (the only spoiler I'm not revealing). And that's cool. But we stop seeing any of the events from the eyes of the best characters, and I was disappointed.

It's still good. It just had too much of the drama siphoned off at the end. It's mostly a true story, so there are constraints, but I feel like Scott stumbled at the conclusion and made an amazing novel just good.

Well, that's good enough. I still enjoyed it. As is so often the case, it's only really recommended for those who already like Sir Walter Scott, or maybe those interested in the setting.

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