THE CRADLE OF THE OSMANLIS
_Have Time’s stern scythe, man’s rage and flood and fire_
_Left naught for curious pilgrims to admire?_
_A few poor footsteps may now cross the shrine,_
_Cell, long arcade, high altar, all supine;_
_Bound with thick ivy broken columns lie,_
_Through low rent circles winds of evening sigh,_
_Rough brambles choke the vaults where gold was stored,_
_And toads spit venom forth where priests adored._
NICOLAS MICHEL.
Our next side trip, after visiting Troy, was a short excursion to Brusa
which--partly by steamer and partly by rail--is easily accessible
from Constantinople. I was especially eager to see this famous place,
for its historic associations are numerous and varied. It was to
Brusa--anciently Prusa--that Hannibal fled after his defeat by the
Romans. There are indeed, some authorities who maintain that the great
Carthaginian general was the founder of Brusa. It was from this city,
which was once large and prosperous, that Pliny the Younger, while
governor of Bithynia, wrote his celebrated letter to Trajan, in which
he asked for instructions concerning the policy to be pursued regarding
“the stubborn sect of Christians” who were then rapidly increasing
in numbers and who, by refusing to offer sacrifices to the gods and
by persistently avoiding all pagan rites and observances, had made
themselves specially obnoxious to Roman officialdom. This letter[82]
is remarkable as being one of the first notices in Roman writers
respecting the members of that incipient Church which was eventually to
become mistress of the capital of Cæsars.
In Ottoman history Brusa is notable for having been the capital of
Orkhan, the second ruler of the Osmanlis and for having long been the
favorite resort of Moslem scholars, artists, poets, and dervishes
who enjoyed a great reputation among their coreligionists for their
reputed sanctity. And even after the transfer of the Ottoman capital
to Adrianople and subsequently to Constantinople, Brusa continued to
be one of the sacred cities of the Mohammedans. For here were buried
the first six Osmanli sovereigns besides more than a score of Ottoman
princes and here “more than five hundred pashas, theologians, teachers,
and poets sleep their last sleep around their first Padishas.” Among
the turbehs which particularly impressed me was that of the Serbian
princess who, although the wife of a Sultan, was able to preserve
untainted the religion of her Christian parents. Here were erected
numerous medresses--colleges--mosques and public buildings whose size
and grandeur were for centuries a favorite theme of Moslem poets and
historians. In beauty of design, richness of material, and exquisite
finish some of the mosques--especially the renowned Green Mosque--are
even to-day regarded as the most perfect specimens of Osmanli
architecture.
Our visit to Brusa was most enjoyable and was an ideal introduction to
our long journey through the Ottoman possessions in Asia. For in this
old capital of the sultans we find more strikingly exhibited than in
noisy, metropolitan Constantinople those dominant characteristics of
most Asiatic cities--apathetic immobility, undisturbed quietude, and
dreamy repose.
But before taking the train at Haidar Pasha we spent a day in wandering
through Scutari and Kadi Keui which are just across the Bosphorus from
Stamboul. Like Brusa both of these places--especially Scutari--are
distinctively Oriental in character and are well worthy of a visit.
Both of them, too, have played prominent roles in the long, historic
past and, although they are now so overshadowed by the great city of
Constantine, they, nevertheless, offer many attractions that are well
worthy of the attention of the student and the historian.
Scutari was formerly known as Chrysopolis--the Golden City. Its special
attractions for tourists are the Howling Dervishes, whose peculiar
devotional exercises take place every Thursday, and the Great Cemetery
which is celebrated as the largest and most beautiful Moslem of burying
places. It is a great forest of cypress trees, more than three miles
in length. Each grave has its tombstone, usually a very modest one.
Some of the epitaphs I observed were very touching, especially those
that terminated with a prayer that a Fatihah--the first chapter of the
Koran--might be said for the soul of the deceased.
This chapter [writes Sale, the learned translator of the Koran] is a
prayer and held in great veneration by the Mohammedans.... They esteem
it as the quintessence of the whole Koran, and often repeat it in their
devotions, both public and private, as the Christians do the Lord’s
Prayer.[83]
It is an integral part of each of the five daily prayers which are
said by every good Mussulman. It is, moreover, recited over the sick,
at the conclusion of an action of importance, but it is, above all,
the favorite prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed taking,
in this respect, the place of the Catholic _requiescat_. As
translated by Rodwell it reads:
_Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds!_
_The compassionate, the merciful!_
_King on the day of reckoning!_
_Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help._
_Guide Thou us on the straight path,_
_The path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;--with_
_Whom Thou art not angry, and who go not astray._
As we wandered along the pathways of this last resting place of so
many myriads of Mohammedans--from Constantinople[84] as well as from
Scutari--I was impressed by the number of men and women who were
here absorbed in prayer for their dear departed,[85] or in tending
the flowers which adorned the graves. These quiet mourners, with the
countless turtledoves, which make their home in the branches of the
funereal cypress trees and which seem to keep up continuously their
subdued moan, give to this gloomy necropolis a solemnity and an
impressiveness that are almost lacking in such ostentatious cities of
the dead as Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo of Genoa.
A short drive from the Great Cemetery brings us to the modern town of
Kadi Keui which, like Scutari, is also a part of the municipality of
Constantinople. It was formerly known as Chalcedon and was founded
seventeen years before Byzantium. By the oracle of Delphi it was
designated as “the city of the blind,” because its founders were blind
to the superior position of the tongue of land on the opposite side of
the Bosphorus, on which the City of Constantinople now stands.
Like most other cities in this part of the world it has witnessed many
vicissitudes and has been repeatedly captured and sacked by invading
armies from both Asia and Europe. Famed in antiquity for its temple
of Apollo and for having been the birthplace of Xenocrates, the most
distinguished of Plato’s disciples, its temples and palaces, after its
capture by the Ottomans, served the sultans as a stone quarry when
they required building material for their mosques in Constantinople.
But, although not a vestige of Chalcedon’s former grandeur now remains,
it will always be remembered as the city in which was held in 451 the
fourth œcumenical council of the Church, in which was condemned the
teaching of Eutyches and the Monophysites respecting the human and the
divine nature in Christ. When I recalled the fact that this council,
including the representatives of the absent bishops, was attended by
six hundred and thirty bishops; that more than six hundred of these
belonged to the Eastern Church, and remembered the very small number
of the episcopate that is now found in this part of the world, it was
easy to understand the present backward condition of civilization and
culture in Asia Minor and Syria. What a change, indeed, since the
days of those great doctors of the Oriental Church--the Cyrils, the
Gregories, the Basils, the Ephrems, the Chrysostoms--whose learning and
eloquence have from their time been the admiration and edification of
the whole of Christendom.
A short distance to the north of Kadi Keui is the Haidar Pasha military
hospital which was the scene of Florence Nightingale’s heroic labors
during the Crimean War. The rooms which she occupied while here are
still preserved intact and as I passed through them, I recalled
Longfellow’s beautiful tribute to her in the verses:
_A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood._
_Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Philomena bore._[86]
It is but a few minutes’ walk from Florence Nightingale’s hospital
to the Haidar Pasha railway station. On the way thither we passed
through the well-kept British Cemetery where rest eight thousand
British soldiers who died of wounds and disease during the Crimean
War. The large granite obelisk here by Marochetti is a conspicuous
object and is visible at a great distance. The Haidar Pasha station,
the north-western terminus of the Anatolia[87] Railway was, before
its partial destruction during the war, a most imposing building and
compared favorably with the best of similar structures in Europe.
Shortly after we take a seat in a cozy corridor car our train swings
towards the picturesque shore of the Marmora. From the window of our
compartment we have the most lovely views of the Princes Islands,
and of the quaint little fishing villages which sprinkle the eastern
shore of the Marmora and which are so perfectly mirrored in its placid
waters. For hours, as our train moves alternately along the verge
of lofty cliffs and near the level of the emerald expanse of the
Propontis, we have a succession of panoramas that are scarcely less
fascinating than those seen along the famous driveway between Sorrento
and Amalfi.
The dancing waves of the Marmora, as they gently lap along its curving
shore, are as soothing as a lullaby to a cradled child. And all the
while they are murmuring the same old story that greeted the ears of
the seafaring Megarians as they passed by nearly three thousand years
ago and which reached the crews of the trim Venetian argosies whose
arms proudly floated on their flags and pennants as they conveyed
the treasures of India and China from the ports of the Euxine to the
gem-blue haven of the peerless Queen of the Adriatic. The noonday sun,
playing over the rippling waters, changes them in rapid succession from
the delicate color of the lapis lazuli to the scintillating iridescence
of the opal.
Along the coast line one contemplates with ever-increasing delight
countless views of entrancing beauty and interest--gray moss-covered
rocks which are ever of tender loveliness and reposeful silence;
trembling vines and waving figs and olives and oranges; picturesque
adobe cottages adorned with graceful creepers; romping children who
make the air ring with their joyous shouts; men and women in the most
colorful garbs quietly performing their daily tasks and all the while
completely immune from the feverish haste that so distracts the toiling
millions of Europe and America and converts their life into a long and
troubled nightmare. The secret is that the normal Osmanli peasant is
satisfied with little. Permit him to cultivate his small plot of ground
in peace and to remain undisturbed in the bosom of his family and he is
perfectly happy. Under such conditions he would find nothing to envy
even in the lot of the denizens of the Happy Valley.
On our arrival at Ismid we were reminded that we were traveling over
classic ground. For this small Turkish town was under the Roman Empire
one of the largest cities in Asia Minor. It was here that Diocletian
had his seat of Government; it was here that he began his sanguinary
persecutions against the Christians and it was here that he abdicated
the throne. It was in his imperial villa near here that death claimed
Constantine the Great and it was in a neighboring castle that Hannibal
committed suicide. And Nicomedia was the birthplace of Arrian, the
illustrious disciple of Epictetus, who, from notes of his master’s
lectures, prepared the famed _Discourses of Epictetus_. He also
wrote the scarcely less celebrated _Anabasis of Alexander the
Great_.
Our first stop, however, was at the little town of Lefke where we found
waiting for us an _araba_ which we had ordered the day previously
to take us to Isnik--about four hours’ drive from the railroad--which
is but a small village of mud houses, but which during Roman and
Byzantine times was, under the name of Nicæa, the rival of Nicomedia.
Even while in the possession of the Sultans of Rum it was as a center
of art, poetry, and science scarcely less renowned than Cordova and
Bagdad. And while Constantinople was in the possession of the Latins,
after its capture by the Crusaders, Nicæa served as the temporary
capital of the Byzantine Empire.
There are few places in Anatolia which make a stronger appeal to the
student than the ancient city of Nicæa. Its ivy and fern-covered ruins,
walls, baths, theaters, churches, mosques, towers, gates, aqueducts,
sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions of all kinds are in the
highest degree interesting and offer a mine of most precious material
for the antiquary or the historian.
To us Nicæa was a
_Relic of nobler days and noblest arts_,
and, as we wandered among the ruin-covered streets of the once famous
city, we seemed to hear the monitory words
_Lightly tread, ’tis hallowed ground._
But my object in visiting this famous place was not knowledge so much
as impressions. I was attracted thither by the same magnet that drew
me to Troy and Chalcedon. I wished to get the local color and secure a
local picture of a place which has filled an important page in history
and which for centuries was the goal of contending armies--Asiatics and
Europeans, Moslems and Christians. But the predominant reason for my
visit to this scene of ruins was the fact that it had been a witness of
two of the Church’s most noted œcumenical councils.
The first council which was held here in 325 was likewise the first
General Council of the Church. It is noted for its condemnation
of Arianism and for the formation of the Nicene Creed which, as
subsequently amplified by the Council of Constantinople, has ever since
been the symbol of faith used not only by the Catholic Church but also
by those Eastern Churches which are no longer in communion with Rome
and by many of the Protestant Churches as well.
In the second council of Nicæa, which was the seventh of the Church’s
general councils and which convened in 787, was condemned the doctrine
of the Iconoclasts, which so long agitated the Eastern Church and
which was the cause of so many relentless persecutions throughout
the whole of the Byzantine Empire. Even Moslems, who regard every
kind of representation of the human form as an execrable idol, could
not have been more fanatical and pitiless in their dealings with
anti-Iconoclasts than were Leo the Isaurian, who was suspected of
favoring Islamism, and his son Constantine Copronymus. During their
reigns, not to speak of those of several of their successors, the
churches of the Byzantine Empire were as bare of images and statues as
were the mosques of Medina and Damascus.[88]
By a peculiar combination of events it fell to the lot of two
women--the Empresses Irene and Theodora--to undo the work of the
Iconoclastic emperors and to put a stop to the persecutions which had
caused the exile, the imprisonment, or the death of countless numbers
of the noblest men and women of the empire, whose only offense was
fidelity to the faith of their fathers.
Few things in Anatolia are more competent to awaken memories of the
past glories of Asia Minor than a visit to the spot that on two
momentous occasions witnessed the assemblage of hundreds of bishops
from both the Orient and the Occident. What a contrast between the
present condition of Nicæa and that at the time when the assembled
fathers subscribed to that creed which has ever since been accepted as
the symbol of faith of nearly the whole of Christendom!
In Asia Minor alone there were, in the fifth century, no fewer than
four hundred and fifty episcopal sees. And an imperial law was enacted
that every city should have its own bishop--_unaquœque civitas
proprium episcopum habeto_.[89] But what a change has come over
this once flourishing portion of the Christian Church. The famous
cities--Nicæa, Chalcedon, and Ephesus--in which four general councils
were held and which in Roman times were all capitals of provinces--have
long since been reduced to ruins. So completely, indeed, had Ephesus
disappeared from sight that little was known even about its topography
until the Austrian Archæological Institute began its excavations there
but little more than two decades ago.
And so it is throughout the length and the breadth of Anatolia.[90]
Great and popular cities, which, in the heyday of the Roman Empire
were noted for their splendid temples, baths, gymnasia, colonnades,
Greek theaters, and Roman amphitheaters, which were all graced by
masterpieces of art in marble and bronze--frequently replicas of
matchless Greek originals--are now either entirely deserted or tenanted
by a few nomadic shepherds or poor tillers of the soil whose only homes
are small mud hovels that barely protect them from the elements.
Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere
be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is
particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia.
In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica
herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of
Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of
History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is
now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that
galaxy of philosophers--Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here
the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known
charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia
whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is
celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has
ever known.[91]
In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society
which a French writer has happily named _le printemps de la Grèce_.
For even in the face of recent discoveries in Sparta [writes a
distinguished Orientalist], it may be said without hesitation
that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first
full-bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is a Greek
civilization come to full consciousness of itself and destined
to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius.
Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however,
the Ionian section of the Hellenic race from the accident
of geographical position served more than any other for a
vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual
name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole
Greek people. All who follow the development of free social
institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where
the city-State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence.
Students not only of literature, but of all the means of
communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia
that the alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were
to carry it about the civilized world. And who that belongs to,
or cares for, the republic of art would ignore that “_bel elan
de génie duquel est né la statuaire attique_”?[92]
Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men
and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where
Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,”
first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and
Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets,
while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The
Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”
But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once
their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia
Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by
crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon,
long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where
Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became
famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic
and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now
little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge
even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well
as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature
in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and
Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of
what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world.
How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come
upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which
was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with
brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of
vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the
only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely
indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past?
And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns
and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes
and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere
in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most
delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns--marbles
which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price
and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they
embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which
they formed a part.
But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of
cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters,
they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains
became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the
mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history
has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which
were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon,
Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which
witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic--_Græcia
barbariæ lento collisa duello_--Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela;
the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is
embraced in the term “Ancient History.”
The cradle of the Osmanlis was the small village of Sugut about a day’s
ride on horseback to the south of Nicæa and about the same distance to
the east of the Mysian Olympus. For it was here that Osman, the founder
of the Osmanli dynasty, first saw in 1258 the light of day. The first
thirty years of his life was that of a village chieftain of a pastoral
community, who lived in peace among his neighbors and whose fighting
men did not number more than four hundred. He was then fired with the
ambition to extend his boundaries and at the end of ten years he found
himself at the head of four thousand warriors and in direct contact
with the decadent and moribund Byzantine Empire.
When Osman died in 1326 his emirate of Sugut had been extended to the
Marmora and the Euxine and included in the conquered territory the
important cities of Brusa, Nicomedia, and Nicæa. This was the beginning
of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. The same emir
of Sugut was also the founder of a dynasty whose male succession has
endured uninterruptedly for more than six centuries and the first ruler
of a people in which there is so complete a blending of Asiatic and
European blood that they have been called a distinct race.
* * * * *
No other dynasty can boast such a succession of brilliant sovereigns
as those who conducted the Ottomans to the height of renown in the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. First there was Osman,
the originator of a race, next came his son Orkhan, the founder of
a state, and then Osman’s grandson, the creator of an empire. These
founders of an empire were succeeded by Bayazid who, on account of his
rapid movements, was called Ilderim--lightning; Mohammed, who retrieved
the losses inflicted by Timur; Murad II, the antagonist of Hunyady and
Skanderberg; Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople; Selim I, who
annexed Kurdistan, Syria, and Egypt, and Solyman the Magnificent, the
victor on the field of Mohacs and the besieger of Vienna. Never did
eight such sovereigns succeed one another--save for the feeble Bayazid
II--in unbroken succession in any other country; never was an empire
founded and extended during two so splendid centuries by such a series
of great rulers. In the hour of dismay, as well as in the moment of
triumph, the Turkish Sultan was master of the situation.[93]
* * * * *
But not only were the Ottoman Emirs and Sultans of this period eminent
as rulers and empire builders. With few exceptions, they, as well as
many of their successors, possessed, like Napoleon, the rare faculty
of choosing the right men for the right place. This is especially
noteworthy in their choice of generals, admirals, and grand viziers
who were selected for the high positions, which they filled with such
distinction, without regard to their nationality or accidents of birth.
Among them were Jews and eunuchs, Greek and Italian, German and Polish
renegades.[94] There was the Italian Cicala, the victor of Karestes;
the German Mehemet Sli, son of a Magdeburg musician, who commanded the
main army in Bulgaria; Omar who from a Croatian clerk became the leader
of the Turkish army in the Crimea. Chief among the great admirals were
the Italian Ululj Ali, the Greeks Kheyr-ed-din and Urug Barbarossa
from the island of Lesbos; Piali Pasha, from Croatia. It was chiefly
through the aid of the last three that Solyman the Magnificent, was
able to secure control of the Mediterranean and the Arab states of
Northern Africa and to extend his devastating raids not only to the
coasts of Italy, France, and Spain but even beyond the Strait of
Gibraltar, to waylay the argosies which were returning to Cadix laden
with the gold and jewels of the Indians.[95]
But more distinguished than the Sultan’s noted generals and his
corsair admirals was the long series of men who occupied the Grand
Vizierate. The most famous of these were the Abyssinian eunuch Bashir;
the renegade Jew, Kiamil Pasha; the Herzegovinan, Mohammed Sokalovich;
the Albanian, Mohammed, Kiuprili, who, from a kitchen-boy in the
Sultan’s palace, became the most noted grand vizier that ever ruled
the great Ottoman Empire. He was succeeded in the Grand Vizierate by
his son Ahmed who, as a statesman, was scarcely less celebrated than
his father. A short interval after Ahmed’s death, Mustafa Kiuprili, a
second son of Mohammed became grand vizier and his rule was marked by
the same consummate statesmanship that so distinguished the rule of
his father and brother. Their rise is especially interesting for, as
observes Von Hammer, “the history of the empires of the Orient offers
only four instances of members of the same family succeeding one
another in the dignity of the Grand Vizierate.”[96]
In this brief reference to the men who achieved such distinction in
building up and extending the Ottoman Empire, we must not forget the
women who played so important a rôle in the history of Turkish politics
and statecraft. Three of the most notable of these were the Muscovite
Roxalana, who passed from a public slave market to the imperial harem
to become the wife of Solyman the Magnificent, the greatest of the
Ottoman Sultans; the Venetian Safia who at an early age was abducted
from her home on the Grand Canal, taken to Constantinople and sold to
the Sultan Murad III, by whom she had a son who, after his father’s
death, became Sultan Mohammed III; Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, who, like
the Empress Josephine, was born in the little island of Martinique and
who, in her youth, was an intimate of the future consort of Napoleon
Bonaparte, but who eventually fell into the hands of Algerian pirates
by whom she was sold in the slave market of Algiers. Thence she was
conveyed to Constantinople as a present to the Sultan, Abdul Hamid I,
to whom she bore a son who became Mahmud II, the grandfather of the
late Abdul Hamid II.
By their beauty, wit, and fascinating manners these three women gained
an unbounded influence over the Sultans with whom their lives were cast
and, what is more remarkable, they were able, notwithstanding their
numerous antagonists in the harem, to retain their ascendancy in the
affections of their lords long after the season of youth and beauty had
passed. In overweening ambition, diplomatic _finesse_, unfailing
resourcefulness in high resolve, in achieving success in the face of
the greatest obstacles, these three Christian captives were worthy
rivals of their more fortunate sisters of the West--Bianca Capello,
Catherine de’ Medici, and the Marquise de Pompadour.
* * * * *
From the preceding pages, it is clear, as Freeman points out that,[97]
the institution of the tribute children was the very keystone
of the Ottoman dominion. They won the empire for the Turk and
they kept it for him.... During the most brilliant days of
Ottoman greatness the native Turks were well-nigh brought down
to the condition of a subject caste. Manumitted bondmen from
the East, voluntary renegades from the West, Greek and Slavonic
tribute-children directed the councils and commanded the armies
of the Sultans. A Grand Vizier or a Captain Pasha born in the
faith of Islam was indeed noted as a portent. Never did the
craft and subtlety of devil or man devise such a tremendous
engine of tyranny. The chains of the conquered nations were
riveted by their own hands. Their best blood was drawn away to
provide against any degeneracy in the blood of their conquerors.
Their strongest and fairest children, the most vigorous frames
and the most precocious intellects, those whom nature had marked
out as chiefs and liberators of their own race, were carried
off to become the special instruments of their degradation.
This fearful institution, combined with the possession of
Constantinople, and with the marvelous hereditary greatness of
the ruling family, preserved the House of Othman from the common
fate of Oriental dynasties.
According to a long prevalent opinion, the Osmanlis are a Turkish race
who achieved the conquest of Asia Minor before they invaded Europe
and before they became masters of the Byzantine Empire. The fact is
they had subjugated the entire Balkan peninsula before they obtained
possession of more than the northwest corner of Anatolia, and had
maintained Adrianople as the Ottoman capital eighty-seven years before
Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, transferred it to
its present location on the Bosphorus.
Nor were the Osmanlis, even in their earliest days, composed entirely,
as is so often asserted, of Turkish nomads from the East. Far from it.
They were welded from the heterogeneous elements--Greeks, Carians,
Phrygians, Galatians, the followers of Osman, and other peoples who
then inhabited the north-western part of Asia Minor. And, as early
as the reign of Orkhan, the son and successor of Osman, this complex
blending of peoples became not only a distinct race but a race with a
national consciousness.
So far are the Osmanlis from regarding themselves as heirs of the
Seljukian Turks or as transformed Turkomans that they have always
endeavored to remove this erroneous impression which has so long
prevailed concerning their people. The distinguished historian,
Mouradja d’ Ohsson, declares:
The Osmanlis employ the word “Turk” when referring to a coarse
and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the epithet Turk
belongs only to the peoples of Turkestan and to those vagabond
hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of Khorassan. All
the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the
collective name of Osmanlis from Osman I, the founder of the
Monarchy, and they do not understand why they are called Turks
by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most
marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to
use it in speaking to them.[98]
The Osmanlis, as we have seen, were of mixed blood, even while still
confined to Asia Minor. But after their conquests in Europe and
further expansion in Asia they “became in blood the most cosmopolitan
and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks
and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian,
Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol,
Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, Arabian--this was the ancestry
of the Osmanlis, who, under Solyman the Magnificent, made the whole
world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis
in modern times is the present population of the United States and
Canada.”[99] It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of
superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the
present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire.[100]
Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have
been classed as raiders like the devastating hordes of Timur and
Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed
were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars
that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists
and empire builders. This was the secret of their success and the
explanation of the marvelous development of the Empire of the Sultans,
which, as the eminent Austrian historian, Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall,
has declared “was more rapid in its rise than Rome, more enduring than
that of Alexander.”
The causes which contributed to the rapid development of the Osmanlis
from the four hundred warriors of Osman into the vast armies of his
successors and to the achievement of such extraordinary results in so
short a period of time were, as the historian Finlay points out, “in
some degree similar to those which had enabled small tribes of Goths
and Germans to occupy and subdue the Western Roman Empire.”[101]
But there were other contributory causes which enabled the Osmanlis
so quickly to become masters of the Byzantine Empire and to make
themselves a menace to the whole of Europe. Chief among these were the
conflicting ambitions of numerous aspirants to the Byzantine throne and
the rivalries of the petty chieftains of the Balkan Peninsula and the
commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa. All these purely secular
aims made anything like joint action against the followers of the
Crescent quite impossible.
It was Cantacuzenos, a traitor to his empress, the widow of Andronicus
II, who introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. After usurping the
Byzantine throne, he gave his daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the
emir Orkhan in exchange for six thousand soldiers to aid him in his
struggle against his legitimate sovereign. By his infamous betrayal of
his empress and country he contributed more than any single factor to
the ultimate downfall of the Byzantine Empire.
It was the despot Theodore Paleologus who invited the Osmanlis into
Greece to support him in his contest with the Greeks and the Franks.
It was the Serbian prince Stephen Bukcovitz who formed an alliance
with the emir Bayazid to whom he gave his sister as wife and for
whom he commanded a contingent in the Ottoman Army--even against his
coreligionists. When the Osmanli forces, after their signal defeat
by Timur at Angora, were faced with annihilation at the hands of the
victorious Tartars, it was the Greeks, Genoese, and Venetians who saved
them from destruction by transporting them across the Dardanelles and
the Bosphorus to Europe where their relentless pursuers were unable to
follow them.
But these are only a few instances of the aid which the Ottoman
conquerors received from the Christian nations of Europe. “In their
conquest of the Balkan peninsula it is remarkable,” declares a recent
writer, “that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of
allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the
Moslem yoke.”[102] The victories of Bayazid in the region of the Danube
were largely due to the coöperation of his Christian vassals. And in
his invasion of Hungary he was more beholden to the Wallachians than to
his famed corps of Janissaries.[103]
Yet more. For, contrary to a common opinion, he received no assistance
whatever from Saracens or Persians, for the simple reason that these
peoples did not join forces with the Ottomans until a much later date.
The Osmanlis did not cross the Taurus until more than a century after
they had passed the Balkans and did not become “masters of Asia Minor
until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded
in Europe as a _fait accompli_.”[104]
And it is equally true that “whatever they accomplished in Asia was the
indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to
last the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was
by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves
Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of
Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.”[105]
Besides the causes just enumerated, there were others of quite a
different nature that made for the phenomenal military achievements of
Osmanlis in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. They were the same causes
which had so greatly favored the ready submission of the peoples
of Syria and northern Africa and which had so potently contributed
towards the rapid diffusion of Islam in all countries which bordered
the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Byzantine Empire had
long been afflicted by incompetent and decadent rulers. The tyranny
and the vexations of exarchs had become intolerable. The people were
overburdened with taxes and their property was in a large measure
confiscated. Under such conditions the Saracens and the Ottomans came
as liberators to the long-suffering, down-trodden populations. By
embracing Islam, the Christians of the Orient were relieved from the
oppressive taxes of Byzantium and entered again into the possession of
their sequestrated property. Even when they refused to accept the Koran
they recovered their lands by the payment of a moderate capitation
tax and were thus enabled to live under the protection of Moslem law
which took no notice of the religious controversies of rival Christian
sects. This liberal policy of Islam towards its Christian subjects--a
policy which safeguarded their persons and property--following as it
did on the heels of the odious tyranny of the Lower Empire--was an
important factor in the marvelously rapid extension of Islam and in
the easy domination of the conquering Ottomans and Saracens. In Asia
Minor, particularly, Mohammedanism achieved an easy triumph because it
was opposed to Byzantine despotism which was the object of universal
execration.
But nothing, probably, contributed more towards the rapid conquest of
the Osmanlis than their spirit of tolerance in matters of religion.
This will, I know, seem strange to those who, from their youth, have
listened to the story of the atrocities of that mythical personage,
“the Moslem warrior with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the
other.”
But [writes one who has made a special study of the subject],
whether their tolerance was actuated by policy, by genuine
kindly feeling, or by indifference, the fact cannot be gainsaid
that the Osmanlis were the first nation in modern history to
lay down the principle of religious freedom as the cornerstone
in the building up of their nation. During the centuries that
bear the stain of unremitting persecution of the Jew [in western
Europe] the Christian and the Moslem lived together in harmony
under the Osmanlis.[106]
To one who is familiar with the teachings of the Koran and the policy
of Islam since the days of Mohammed there is nothing surprising in this
tolerance and religious freedom which Osmanlis and Moslems have always
accorded their Christian subjects. “Let there be no compulsion in
religion,”[107] declares the Prophet, and again it is written, “Wilt
thou compel men to become believers? No soul can believe but by the
permission of God.”[108]
Nor were these and numerous other declarations of the Koran of similar
import ever ignored by the leaders of Islam in their dealings with
their non-Moslem subjects. There have been, it is true, frequent
outbursts of fanaticism, even of persecution among Mohammedans, which
resulted in much suffering on the part of the Christian population
and in putting in force against them very intolerant measures. But
the persecutions and harsh ordinances were not so much the result of
religious antagonism as of political conditions at the time. Not a
few of them are traceable to a distrust of the loyalty of Christians
towards their Moslem rulers or to the intrigues of Christian nations
like Russia whose secret emissaries have been responsible for so much
of the agitation in Asia Minor for generations past. Others again may
be traced to the bad faith of certain European powers in their dealings
with Moslem rulers, or to the “harsh and insolent behavior of Christian
officials” in the service of Mohammedan sovereigns.[109]
Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian
brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly
defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful
rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out their Christian
subjects or banished them from their dominions as the Spaniards
did the Moors, or the English the Jews, for nearly four
centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Selim
I (in 1514) or Ibrahim (in 1646) to have put into execution
the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their
Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred forty
thousand Shiahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of
religious belief among his Mohammedan subjects. The muftis who
turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose did
so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.[110]
“The very survival,” therefore, “of the Christian Churches to the
present day, is,” as the same author pertinently observes, “a strong
proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Mohammedan governments
towards them.”[111]
Ecclesiastical writers of the epoch of the Mohammedan conquest give
still another explanation of the rapid progress of Moslem armies,
which was quite in accord with the spirit of the time. God wished,
they declared, to chastize the Christians for their infidelity and to
compel them to do penance for their manifold heresies. In their view
it was not the astounding conquests of the Mussulmans that led to the
apostasy of such vast numbers of Christians. It was rather the numerous
and widespread defections of heretical churches which rendered the
conquest of Islam so easy that it surprised the victors as much as the
vanquished. Moslem arms, then, according to these writers were but
an instrument of divine vengeance, or, as one of them expressed it,
_peccatis exigentibus victi sunt Christiani_.[112]
As one traverses the small territory which was the cradle of the
Osmanlis and reflects that the people to whom the insignificant emir
of Sugut gave his name were, from their first appearance in history,
almost within sight of the City of Constantine, one cannot help
admiring their marvelous transformation from retainers of a village
chieftain to heirs of the empire of the Cæsars, to masters of vast
territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe.[113] From the humblest
beginnings they gradually became a people who can boast of the longest
continued dynasty in Europe; and who can point in their early history
to a rare series of brilliant rulers and a line of sovereigns who have
occupied a throne which has been immovable from the days of Mohammed
the Conqueror, nearly five centuries ago, and which, notwithstanding
menaces from many quarters, seems destined to remain immovable for many
long generations to come.