IN HISTORIC CILICIA CAMPESTRIS
_Domes, minarets, their spiry heads that rear,_
_Mocking with gaudy hues the ruins near;_
_Dim crumbling colonnades and marble walls,_
_Rich columns, broken statutes, roofless halls;_
_Beauty, deformity, together thrown,_
_A maze of ruins, date, design unknown--_
_Such is the scene, the conquest Time hath won._
NICOLAS MICHEL.
It is doubtful whether, in any part of the world, more history has been
condensed in less area than in the picturesque region formerly called
Cilicia. Roughly speaking, it comprised the triangle bordered by the
Mediterranean and the lofty ranges of the Taurus and Amanus Mountains.
Its rich alluvial plains, watered by the celebrated Cydnus and Pyramus,
Sarus, and Pinarus, early attracted a large population, who found there
not only a mild and serene climate but also a soil that yielded in
rare abundance the plants and fruits most useful to their sustenance
and comfort. But, although the economical value of the Cilician
Plain--called by Strabo _Cilicia Campestris_--was great, it was
rather the political and military importance of this country that made
it the prize of contending nations from the earliest dawn of history.
In the days when Hittite and Assyrian fiercely contended for universal
empire--long
_Ere Rome was built or smiled fair Athen’s charms_
it was the highway between Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. It was the
royal road between Persia and Greece on which was heard the martial
tread of the armies of Xerxes, Cyrus, and Alexander. Rameses II--the
Napoleon of Egypt--and Asurbanipal--the Napoleon of Assyria--led
their victorious hosts along this road and, like the warriors who
had preceded them, found subsistence for their men in the fertile
valleys of the Pyramus and the Cydnus. It was also a field of frequent
sanguinary conflicts during the days of Pompey and Cicero, of Mark
Anthony and Zenobia, the rarely gifted but ill-fated “Queen of the
East.” It was a continued arena of strife during protracted wars
between the Byzantine Emperors and the Sassanian Kings, between the
Osmanlis and Timur and Jenghiz Khan, and, in recent times, between the
Sultan of Constantinople and his ambitious and rebellious viceroy,
Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt.
Three of the decisive battles of the world war were fought on the
Cilician Plain. It was on the banks of the Pinarus that Alexander won
his memorable victory over Darius--a victory that gave the irresistible
Macedonian the control of the vast region between the Mediterranean and
the Euphrates and paved the way for the brilliant triumph at Arbela,
which made him the master of the world’s greatest continent. It was
here that more than five hundred years later Septimus Severus crushed
his rival Pescennius Niger, when “the troops of Europe asserted their
usual ascendant over the effeminate natives of Asia.” And it was on
this same historic spot that Heraclius defeated Chosroes and once more,
in a most signal manner, showed the superiority of the West over the
East.
But in addition to its celebrity as the theater of contests for world
supremacy, Cilicia, like so many other regions we have described in the
preceding pages, is noted as a field of romance, of myths, and legends
innumerable.
Among the strange romances that still await the pen of novelist and
historian is that connected with the extraordinary life and deeds of
the Turkoman freebooter, Kutchuk Ali Uglu, who a century ago had his
stronghold in the mountain fastnesses near Issus. Here, during forty
years, he openly defied the authority of the Porte and the Great
Powers of Europe. With the audacity of a Fra Diavolo and the cruelty
and relentlessness of a Barbary corsair he ravaged the surrounding
country and plundered traveling merchants and the grand annual caravan
of pilgrims from Constantinople to Mecca whenever they came within his
reach.
I am not [he was wont to say] as other Darah Beys are--fellows
without faith, who allow their men to stop travellers on the
King’s highway;--I am content with what God sends me. I await
his good pleasure, and--_Alhumlillah_--God be praised--He
never leaves me long in want of anything.[198]
Among some of the most daring performances of this desperado was the
seizure of the master of an English vessel with a part of its crew, who
were cast into prison. A large ransom was demanded for their release,
but before this was forthcoming all but one perished. Strange as it may
now seem, the English government with all its power was never able to
obtain any satisfaction for this atrocious act of violence.
Shortly afterwards, the dauntless robber took possession of a richly
laden French merchantman--which, through ignorance of the locality,
came too near his fortress--and after appropriating its cargo, sank
the vessel and sent the captain and crew to the French Consul at
Alexandretta. Protests against these high-handed proceedings were
made by all the consular authorities at Aleppo, but without avail. To
the vigorous remonstrance of the Dutch Consul, Kutchuk Ali coolly and
blandly replied:
My dear Friend, I am threatened with attacks from the four
quarters of the earth; I am without money; I am without means;
and the ever watchful providence of the Almighty sends me a
vessel laden with merchandise. Say, would you not in my place
lay hold of it, or not?
It was only a few months later that this same consul was arrested
and imprisoned by the audacious freebooter. And, notwithstanding the
cordial friendship which had long existed between the two men, the
ruthless marauder did not liberate his prisoner until he had extorted
from him a very large ransom.
And during the eight months’ incarceration of the hapless consul,
Kutchuk Ali--was it from shame for ill-treating an old friend?--never
once visited his hapless victim or admitted him to his presence. But,
to show the character of this singular brigand, he did not fail,
through his lieutenant, to send to his prisoner words of sympathy and
consolation.
Tell him [the captor said] that unfortunately my coffers were
empty when fate brought him into this territory; but let him
not despair, God is great and mindful of us. Such misfortunes
are inseparable from the fate of men of renown, and from the
lot of all born to fill high stations. Bid him be of good
cheer; a similar doom has twice been mine, and once during nine
months in the condemned cell of Abdul Rahman Pasha; but I never
despaired of God’s mercy, and all came right at last,--_Alla
Karim_--God is bountiful.[199]
When one is told that Kutchuk Ali, during his forty years of a
desperado’s life, never had more than two hundred men, and frequently
a far less number, it seems incredible that he was so long able to
defy not only the Porte but even the greatest powers of Europe. But
we forget that the notorious Calabian bandit, Fra Diavolo, during the
same period and with a much smaller band of outlaws, was wantonly
perpetrating similar atrocities in southern Italy. And it was only a
few generations earlier that the notorious Captain Kidd was roving the
high seas in open defiance of the naval power of the civilized world.
One of the most popular legends in Cilicia is that of the Seven
Sleepers. According to the Christian version they were seven brothers
who fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus during the persecution of
the Emperor Decius, and did not awake until the time of Theodosius
II--nearly two hundred years later. The Mohammedans, however, contend
that the cave in which this preternatural event occurred was about ten
miles northwest of Tarsus. Because of the prominence the Prophet gives
the legend in the Koran, the Cilician cave has become among the Moslems
a favorite place of pilgrimage. Mohammed has, however, elaborated the
story by introducing the dog--Al Rakim--of the Seven Sleepers and
descanting on the care that Allah took of the bodies of the sleepers
during their long, miraculous sleep.[200]
But it is in classical legend and myth that Cilicia is specially
rich. It was near the mouth of the Pyramus, according to Homer, that
Bellerophon, after his fall from Pegasus,
_Forsook by heaven, forsaking humankind,_
_Wide o’er the Aleian field he chose to stray,_
_A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way._
Mopsuestia, which was formerly one of the largest and most flourishing
cities of Cilicia, was fabled to have been founded during the Trojan
war by Mopsus, the son of Manto and Apollo, while Adana, the most
important commercial center on the Sarus and the Bagdad Railway, owes
its name, legend has it, to Adam, its fabulous founder.
A notable feature of the history of Cilicia is the number of crowned
heads who died or found their last resting place within its borders.
Constantius, the son of Constantine, died of fever at Mopsucrene,
near Tarsus, while marching against his nephew and rival, Julian the
Apostate. It was to Tarsus that the embalmed body of the Apostate
Emperor, who had been transfixed by a Persian javelin beyond the
Tigris, was brought for burial. It was in Tarsus that Maximinus, the
last of the great persecutors of the Church, preceding Constantine the
Great, died in the greatest agony of a frightful disease--a visitation,
according to many, for his barbarous persecutions of the Christians and
for his horrible blasphemies against their Lord and Savior. It was, we
are informed by Strabo, at Anchiale, the port of Tarsus, where were
entombed the mortal remains of the celebrated Assyrian ruler known to
the Greeks as Sardanapalus. On his monument was a stone statue beneath
which was the famous epitaph--attributed to the Assyrian monarch
himself--which, as rendered by Byron in his tragedy “Sardanapalus,” ran:
_Sardanapalus,_
_The King and son of Ancyndaraxes_
_In one day built Anchiale and Tarsus._
_Eat, drink and love; the rest’s not worth a fillip._[201]
Asurbanipal, according to this inscription which was supposed to
express in a few words the guiding principles of this life, evidently
belonged to that class of Europeans who are seemingly becoming daily
more numerous of whom the poet speaks in the words:
_Esse aliquos manes et subterranea regna_
_Vix pueri credunt._[202]
The population of Cilicia, as might be expected from its having been
from time immemorial the great arena of the nations of the Orient and
the Occident, has always been of the most cosmopolitan character. In
ancient times Medes and Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, Scythians
and Hittites foregathered here, sometimes bent on the purpose of
commerce but more frequently on the prosecution of war and conquest.
To-day we find here Syrians and Arabians, Greeks and Armenians, Kurds
and Ansaryii, Turkomans and Osmanlis, and representatives from divers
parts of Africa and Europe. Was it this heterogeneous character of the
Cilicians which gave rise to their widespread reputation for perfidy
and untruthfulness and that led to the proverb _Cilix haud facile
verum dicet_?
Knowing the complex character of its inhabitants, one is not surprised
to learn that the gods and idols of the Cilicians were as manifold
as the people themselves and that their worship exhibited all the
promiscuity of the divers nations from whence they came. Baal and
Astarte, Isis, Ishtar, and Osiris had their altars alongside those of
Mars and Mercury, Zeus and Aphrodite. There was, indeed, a time--just
before the advent of the world’s Redeemer--when it could be said that
Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, was, in very truth, the pantheon of
paganism.
During the zenith of its glory, Cilicia was one of the most densely
populated countries in the world. But it has long since so fallen from
its high estate that, like the lands of the Nile and the Euphrates, it
is a region of ruins. So great indeed have been the ravages of time
and warring mortals that “ruins of cities, evidently of an age after
Alexander, yet barely named in history, at this day, astonish the
adventurous traveler by their magnificence and elegance.”[203]
Mopsuestia, which once counted two hundred thousand inhabitants, was
an archbishopric and for a time the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser
Armenia, now numbers less than a thousand. Anazarbas, which was the
home of the poet Oppian and Dioscorides who, “during fifteen centuries
was an undisputed authority in botany and _materia medica_, has
long since been level with the ground.” Nor is this all. Of many places
mentioned by Cicero, when he was proconsul of Cilicia, even the sites
are unknown.
Because of the strong appeal made by its legendary and historic lore we
lingered longer in Tarsus than in any other spot in the Cilician plain.
Like many other places we visited during our journey, Tarsus is as rich
in myth and legend as it is in literary and historical associations.
According to one myth, Tarsus was founded by Perseus, the son of
Jupiter and Danæ, while on his fabled expedition against the Gorgons.
Another has it that the city was so named because Pegasus, the winged
horse of Olympus, dropped there one of his pinions.[204] Josephus,
however, identifies it with the Tarshish of the Old Testament, whence
the ships of Hiram and Solomon brought their treasures of tin, silver,
and gold.[205]
From an inscription on the Black Obelisk of Salmanasar II, we learn
that Tarsus was captured by the Assyrians under Salmanasar about the
middle of the ninth century, B. C. It was thus in existence several
centuries before the mythical Romulus and Remus erected on the
Capitoline their sanctuary for homicides and runaway slaves, and its
foundation was probably laid before the legendary introduction into
Greece of the Phœnician alphabet by Cadmus when he went in quest of
Europa.
Centuries passed by and Tarsus became a great and flourishing
center of commerce and literary activity. While Paris--_La Ville
Lumière_--was as yet only a collection of mud huts on a little
island in the Seine, inhabited by the Gallic Parisii, and London was
but “a thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart”[206] and occupied
by half-savage, woad-stained Britons, Tarsus ranked as a center of
Greek thought and knowledge with the world-famed cities, Athens and
Alexandria.[207] Its schools and lecture rooms were frequented by vast
numbers of students from far and near, while its agora and gymnasium,
as in Athens in the days of Socrates, drew large concourses of people,
young and old, who assembled to discuss not only the current news of
the day, but also questions of literature, science, and philosophy.
Although famed throughout the Roman Empire as a _civitas libera et
mimunis_--a capital and a free city--and as a great emporium of
eastern trade, its proudest boast was that it was a city of schools and
scholars. Here were found poets and orators of marked eminence. Here
were philosophers of many schools, Stoics and Peripatetics, Platonists
and Epicureans--all with their enthusiastic followers and all seriously
discussing the same problems which have engaged the attention of
thoughtful men from their time to our own.
In the long list of men produced by Tarsus, or who added luster to its
name as teacher of students, were the two Athenodori, one of whom had
been the tutor of Julius Cæsar and the other the friend of Cato and the
instructor of Augustus. These were Stoics. Among the Academicians was
Nestor, who was the preceptor of Marcellus, the son of Octavia, sister
of Augustus. Other eminent men of Tarsus, mentioned by Strabo, were the
philosophers, Archimedes and Antipater, the latter of whom was highly
praised by Cicero, and who, next to Zeno, was considered as the most
eminent of the Stoics. There were also Strabo, the great geographer,
the grammarians Diodorus and Artemidorus, and the poets Dionysides and
Aratus, from whose poem, “Phænomena,” St. Paul quoted the pregnant
words, “For we too are His offspring,” in his epochal address to the
Athenians on the Areopagus.
According to Strabo, Rome was full of learned men from Tarsus, in whose
schools, as has been well said, was taught in its completeness the
whole circle of instruction, the systematic course from which we get
our word “encyclopædia.”[208]
But the flowering of so many ages of preparation in philosophy and
religion was the great “Apostle of the Gentiles.” The selection of his
birthplace seems to have been providential. Sir William Ramsay is so
convinced of this that he writes “that it was the one suitable place
that has been borne in on the present writer during long study of the
conditions of society and geographical environment of the Cilician
lands and cities.... Its peculiar suitability to educate and mould the
mind of him who should in due time make the religion of the Jewish
race intelligible to the Græco-Roman world, and raise that world up
to the moral level of the Hebrew people and the spiritual level of
ability to sympathize with the Hebrew religion in its perfected stage,
lay in the fact that Tarsus was the city whose institutions best and
most completely united the oriental and the western character.... Not
that even in Tarsus the union was perfect; that was impossible so long
as the religion of the two elements were inharmonious and mutually
hostile. But the Tarsian state was more successful than any of the
other of the great cities of that time in producing an amalgamated
society, in which the oriental and the occidental spirit in union
attained in some degree to a higher plain of thought and action.
In others the Greek spirit, which was always anti-Semitic, was too
strong and too resolutely bent on attaining supremacy and crushing
out all opposition. In Tarsus the Greek qualities and powers were
used and guided by a society which was on the whole more Asiatic in
character.”[209]
In Tarsus the future apostle came into close contact with the greatest
teachers and scholars of his time, and was thus prepared to enter the
intellectual arena with the keenest minds of Greece and Rome. Being,
as he could proudly boast, “a Roman of no mean city,” as well as a
disciple of Gamaliel, one of the seven wise men of the Jews, he was
peculiarly fitted to preach the truths of the Gospel not only to his
own people but also to the much greater world of the Gentiles.
Never was a more important or a more far-reaching mission entrusted
to mortal man. It is not too much to say that no one of his time was
better equipped for it than the tent maker of Tarsus. Wherever he
could secure a hearing for his marvelous message he was sure to go--to
the synagogue, to the agora, to the courts of governors and consuls.
Learned in the Law and the Prophets, he was a match for the ablest
teachers of Israel. Familiar with the literature and philosophy of
the pagan world, he spoke as one having authority before the “Men
of Athens” and the representatives of the Cæsars. Thanks to the
opportunities which he enjoyed in his youth of associating with the
wise and learned men of Tarsus and to his thorough acquaintance with
the highest forms of Greek culture, he was able, through his quick
intelligence and his ardent love of souls, “to recognize and sympathize
with the strivings of those who, living in the times of ignorance, were
yet seeking after God, ‘if haply they might feel after Him and find
Him,’ and to read in their aspirations after a higher life the work of
the law written in the hearts of all men.”[210]
As one wanders through the narrow and squalid streets of modern
Tarsus--a city of less than twenty thousand inhabitants--one finds
no vestige whatever of its former splendor. But few ruins remain,
the most conspicuous of which is the concrete foundation of a Roman
structure popularly regarded as the tomb of the cynical voluptuary,
Sardanapalus. No tradition indicates the house of the Apostle of the
Gentiles or points to any church dedicated to his memory. The banks of
the silt-filled Cydnus are lonely and desolate. Owing to the neglected
condition of the river channel, no white-winged ships are here
visible, as of yore, laden with the treasures of foreign lands. And
yet it was up this now abandoned stream that Cleopatra sailed in her
gorgeous barge when she came to answer the challenge of Mark Anthony.
How, by her surpassing address, she led captive the great triumvir is
admirably described by Shakespeare, who, following Plutarch, paints
the famous picture of her entrance into Tarsus, which was then in the
dazzling splendor of oriental magnificence:
_The barge she sat in, like a burnisht throne,_
_Burnt on the water; the poop was beaten gold,_
_Purple the sails and so perfumed that_
_The winds were love-sick._
_With them the oars were silver,_
_Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke_
_And made the water which they beat, to follow faster,_
_As amorous of their strokes. For her own person_
_It beggared all description, she did lie_
_In her pavilion, cloth of gold, of tissue,_
_O’erpicturing that Venus, where we see_
_The fancy outwork nature. On each side her_
_Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,_
_With divers-colored fans whose wind did seem,_
_To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,_
_And what they undid did._
The old capital of Cilicia is, of truth, a city of a wonderful historic
past. But among all her proud memories those which have made her best
known throughout the ages and which will endure the longest are not
those of her abounding wealth and luxury, her superb monuments and
palaces and temples, long in ruins; not those that clustered around her
poets and philosophers and made her a favored sanctuary of the Muses;
not those of her schools and gymnasia and her one-time eminence as the
rival of Athens and Alexandria as the home of learning and culture; not
those of Persian satraps and Roman proconsuls who here lived as the
famed representatives of imperial authority; not those awakened by the
presence within her gates of an Asurbanipal, an Alexander, or a Cicero;
not those associated with the love-enmeshed Mark Anthony and the
fateful “Siren of the Nile,” who both perished the ignoble victims of
a debasing passion and a foiled ambition. No; that which has rendered
her immortal is that she was the birthplace of a poor tent maker who
was disowned by his own family because he became the bond servant of
the Crucified, to whom he bore witness from Jerusalem to Rome; of one
who, while preaching the good tidings of the Gospel, toiled night
and day lest he should “be chargeable to any one”; one who, while
preaching the Kingdom of God, was accused by the Thessalonian Jews of
“turning the world upside down”;[211] one who, during his long and
fruitful apostolate and his almost superhuman labors in the service
of his Master, gloried in persecution and was the frequent victim of
stripes and chains and imprisonment; one who was the fearless teacher
and the strong supporter of the infant Church, and whose matchless
Epistles have, during nineteen centuries, been the guide of doctors
and professors; one who wrote his own epitaph when he declared “To me
to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” and who, in the capital of the
Cæsars, won an Apostle’s exceeding great reward--a martyr’s crown; one
whom his contemporaries knew as Saul, otherwise Paul,[212] of Tarsus.
While in Cilicia I made a special effort to ascertain the truth
regarding the Armenian massacre that so stirred Europe and America to
horror in 1909. I had long been convinced that most of the reports
circulated respecting Turkish atrocities in Cilicia, like the reports
disseminated throughout the world regarding other similar atrocities
so frequently ascribed to the Turks, were _ex parte_ accounts
of what had actually occurred and that most, if not all, of them
were greatly exaggerated. And recalling the activities since 1885 of
Armenian revolutionists, many of them inspired by Russian Nihilist
propaganda, the conviction grew that in probably the majority of
massacres in Asia Minor, as well as in that of Constantinople in
1896, “the Armenian revolutionaries, by their riotous action, had put
themselves and their innocent countrymen outside the law.” As the
result of my investigations I am now satisfied that my previous views
were not without foundation.
The massacre in Cilicia--organized, it was averred, by the Moslem Jews
of Salonica--surpassed in frightfulness any that had taken place during
Abdul-Hamid’s long and troubled reign. When, therefore, one understands
the origin of the Cilician massacre, one may safely conjecture the
cause of most, if not all, of the others in Turkey which have so
shocked the world during the last four decades.
But, in a matter of such import as the one under consideration, I
prefer to give the views of those who visited Cilicia when the terrors
of the great massacre in Adana were still fresh in the memory of
everyone, or who by long residence in Armenia are well acquainted with
its people and are thoroughly familiar with the measures to which
Armenians resort in order to achieve their independence of the Ottoman
Empire.
Many influences [writes an English traveler who had exceptional
opportunities for studying the question and who is well disposed
towards the Armenians] went to the making of the (Cilician)
massacre, some more or less, obscure, as the part taken in
planning it by the Turkish Jews of Salonika and others belonging
to the deeper causes of faith and race which ever underlie
these horrible affairs. But some were local and exhibited the
inconceivable unwisdom which Armenians so often display in their
larger dealings with Moslems.
Cilicia [known during the Crusades as Lesser Armenia] is
a district closely connected with Armenian history and
independence; and here, in the sudden period of liberty
which followed the downfall of Abdul-Hamid, Armenians gave
unrestrained vent to their aspirations. Their clubs and
meeting-places were loud with boastings of what was soon to
follow. Post cards were printed showing a map of the future
Armenian kingdom of Cilicia and circulated through the Ottoman
post. Armenian nationalists marched in procession in the streets
bearing flags purporting to be the flag of Lesser Armenia come
to life again. The name of the future king was bandied about,
no aloof nebulous personage, but, it is said, a well-known
Armenian land owner of the Cilician plain, held in peculiar
disfavor by the Moslems. Giving a fuller meaning to these
matters was the steady assertion that an Armenian army gathering
in the mountains by Hajin and Zeitun--an army of rumor like the
legendary Royalist Army of Jales which terrorized revolutionary
France--would presently march upon Adana and set up an Armenian
kingdom again.
Sober Armenians of Cilicia tell you now that these proceedings
were folly, the work of revolutionary societies and hot-heads
and that the mass of the Armenian population held aloof. But
there can be no doubt that the movement was approved and
supported by many, and intended to involve the whole race;
that it had in fact, got beyond the control both of those who
desired to go more slowly and those who disapproved of it
altogether.[213]
What is here said of the hot-brained revolutionaries of Lesser Armenia
can with even greater truth be affirmed of their seditious compatriots
of Greater Armenia. For those who know them best do not hesitate to
declare that their lurid accounts of frequent and inevitably recurrent
atrocities in certain parts of Asia Minor are to be interpreted in the
same way as those which were first published regarding the horrors
of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909, and of Constantinople
in 1896.[214] We get only one-sided reports respecting them, which
reports, if not glaringly exaggerated, are in nearly all instances in
severest condemnation of the “bloodthirsty” Turk.
No one probably has a more accurate knowledge of Turkey and her people
or has made a more thoughtful study of the Armenian Question than has
the noted traveler and Orientalist, David G. Hogarth, sometime fellow
in the University of Oxford. With an experience of several years in
Armenia, he frankly declares, writing of the Armenian Question:
So far as I understand this vexed matter, the source of the
graver trouble is the presence in the heart of Armenia of the
defiant Kurdish race which raids the villages where the flocks
are fattest and the women most fair, now cutting an Armenian’s
throat, now leaguing with him in a war on a hostile tribe and
resisting in common the troops sent up to restore the Sultan’s
peace. Whatever the Kurd does is done for the sake neither of
Crescent nor Cross, for he bears neither one emblem nor the
other in his heart, but just because he is Ishmael, his hand is
against every man who has aught to lose.
The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his
passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be
a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone ...
but behind the Armenian secret societies--and there are few
Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming
members of such societies at some period of their lives--it sees
the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or, looking west,
it espies, through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the
agitators, Exeter Hall and the Armenian Committees. The Turk
begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize the
more because he represses, and so the vicious circle revolves.
Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as
administrator, oppress? So far we have heard one version only,
one party to this suit with its stories of outrage and echoing
through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth
of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom,
by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the
Christian and the Moslem.
If the Kurdish Question could be settled by a vigorous Marshal,
and the Porte secured against irresponsible European support
of sedition, I believe that the Armenians would not have much
more to complain of, like the Athenian allies of old, than the
fact of subjection--a fact, be it noted, of very long standing;
for the Turk rules by right of five hundred years’ possession,
and before his day the Kurd, the Byzantine, the Persian,
the Parthian, the Roman, preceded each other as over-lords
of Greater Armenia to the misty days of the first Tigranes.
The Turk claims certain rights in this matter--the right to
safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such
hornets’ nests as Zeitun which has annihilated for centuries
past the trade of the Eastern Taurus, the right to remain
dominant by all means not outrageous.
I see no question at issue but this of outrage. For the rest
there is but academic sympathy with aspiring nationalisms or
subject religion, sympathy not over cogent in the mouths of
those who have won and kept so much of the world as we: Arria
must draw the dagger reeking from her own breast before she can
hand it with any conviction to Pætus.[215]
To speak in this fashion of the Armenians is more painful to me than
I can express. From my youth I have sympathized with them in their
great sufferings and, like most other people who depended on one-sided
information, I attributed all their misfortunes to the much maligned
and much calumniated Turks. Were the Armenians raided and maltreated
by the lawless and murderous Kurds, who have been responsible for the
greater part of the crimes which have been imputed to the Osmanlis?
A sensational report was at once flashed over the world of a great
massacre in Asia Minor perpetrated by the fanatical and fiendish Turk.
Were they victims of Russian intrigue and aggression, driven from
their homes and forcibly separated from their families? Again it was
the Turk that was at the bottom of it all. Did they suffer reprisals
for seditious outbreaks of plotting Huntchagists and revolutionary
Armenians of foreign extraction? Still again the hue and cry was raised
in Europe and America that the soulless Turk, always the Turk, only the
Turk, was the guilty one. Armenian agitators, Armenian jacks-in-office,
Armenian revolutionary committees provoking the Turks to retaliate
on their offenders in order to force the intervention of the Great
Powers[216]--these political mischief-makers go scot-free while the
ever vilified Osmanli is pilloried before the world as a monster of
iniquity and a demon incarnate.
The Anatolian Halil Halid, who was born and bred in Asia Minor and
who spent many years in England, commenting on the matters under
consideration, pertinently asks, “Did the humanitarian British public
know these things? No; it does not care to know anything which
might be favorable to the Turks. Have the political journals of this
country--Britain--mentioned the facts I have stated? Of course not,
because--to speak plainly--they know that in the Armenian pie there
were the fingers of some of their own politicians.”[217] And those
that are well informed know the reason of Britain’s attitude toward
Turkey, for they know that “since 1829, when the Greeks obtained their
independence, England’s Near East policy has been remorselessly aimed
at the demolition of the Turkish Empire and the destruction of Ottoman
sovereignty.”
Does France, the first nation of Europe to form an alliance with the
sublime Porte, know these things? She does, but, at the present time,
it suits her purpose to feign ignorance of them and to follow the
policy of England in her dealings with those whom she has professed
to be her friends and allies since the days of Francis I. With a
volte-face worthy of a politician she does not even allow a favorite
Academician, Pierre Loti--who knows the Turks better probably than any
man in France--to make a statement in their favor, without censoring
it, for fear he will reflect on the course of the present government.
Does our own country, whose people are supposed to be always on the
side of justice and fair play, know the truth about the Turks and
Armenians in Asia Minor? Not one in a hundred; not one in a thousand.
The reason is simple. They have heard only one side of the Armenian
question, and, in most cases, are quite unwilling even to hear anything
to the advantage of the long-defamed Turks. With most of our people
the case of the Turks has been prejudged and thrown out of court. And
when one who has made a thorough study of conditions in Asia Minor
writes that “the most part of the peasantry are men of peace, needing
no military force to coerce them, giving little occasion to the scanty
police and observing a _Pax Anatolica_ for religion’s sake,”[218]
he gives most of our people, who should have an open mind, a distinct
shock, but does not change in the least their life-long prejudices.
And when the same well-informed writer declares that “Aliens, Greek,
Armenian, Circassian thrust him”--the Turk--“on one side and take his
little parcel of land by fraud or force”[219] he is suspected of being
a special pleader and his testimony is rejected as worthless.
But it may be said that I too am a special pleader for the Turk.
Nothing is farther from my intention. My sole desire is to make
known the truth as I have found it, and I have found that it is not
all on the side of the Armenians. “The Turk’s patience is almost
inexhaustible, but when you attack his women and children his anger
is aroused and nothing on earth can control it.”[220] Then, like
all other races of mankind, when stirred by religious or political
fanaticism or goaded on by domestic sedition and foreign intrigue, the
Turks also resort to reprisals and massacres that startle the world.
It may, however, be questioned whether in all their history the Turks
have perpetrated such refined atrocities as characterized the Reign of
Terror in France, Russia dragonades in Poland, Serbian and Bulgarian
savagery in the Balkans, unprovoked deeds of violence instigated by
Armenian revolutionists in Asia Minor. But of all the people involved
in these unspeakable outrages the Turk is the only one who is not
pardoned. Why not? He has never been granted a fair hearing before the
great tribunal of humanity.
From the foregoing it is evident that the Armenian Question will not be
settled so long as Armenian agitators are allowed to sow with impunity
the seeds of sedition in Asia Minor, or so long as they are abetted by
European nations whose manifest goal is the partition of the Turkish
Empire.[221] It is also evident that, so long as present conditions
persist, sporadic massacres like those provoked by the Armenians in
Cilicia and Constantinople are inevitable. These conditions involve
also the greater and more important Turkish Question, or, speaking
broadly, the Mussulman Question. The Great Powers cannot, without grave
consequences, treat Turkey as a pariah nation. This the ever-increasing
number of adherents of the Prophet will not tolerate. The two hundred
millions of the Faithful are, be it remembered, the chief factors
in the Near Eastern Question, which can never be settled so long as
the Moslems are not accorded fair play in the arena of nations. The
present schemes of exploitation and conquest in Mohammedan lands now
being executed by the Great Powers can, in the long run, have but
one result--and that in spite of all peace treaties and leagues of
nations--the result of still farther separating the Cross and the
Crescent and of strengthening the barriers that have existed between
the East and the West since Greek battled with Trojan on the Plain of
Troy.
As we wandered through the suburbs of Tarsus, made fragrant by the
inviting gardens and orchards of lemon and orange, we were deeply
impressed with the possibilities of the exceptionally rich alluvial
soil of the Cilician Plain. Having all the fertility of the Nile it
should, if drained, irrigated, and scientifically farmed, sustain a
population even greater than that which inhabited it in the days of
Pompey and Trajan. In soil and climate it is as favorable for the
production of cotton and sugar cane as Texas or Louisiana, while in
cereals and fruits of many kinds it yields as large crops as the most
favored districts of France or Germany.
But irrigation is needed near the foothills of the surrounding
mountains and adequate drainage is required near the mouths of the four
chief rivers that bring fertility to the plain. For, as it is now, a
great part of the land bordering the Mediterranean is covered with
swamps like that described by Ovid in his beautiful story of Philemon
and Baucis:
_Haud procul hinc stagnum, tellus habitabilis olim,_
_Nunc celebres mergis fulicisque palustribus undæ._[222]
During the past few decades a great change has been made for the
better, as is attested by the large number of American agricultural
implements which are now found throughout the plain and the hundreds
of ginning machines, looms, and thousands of spindles--mostly from
England--which are seen in the cotton factories of Tarsus and Adana.
But, although a great advance has been made over the condition
which obtained a third of a century ago, there is yet vast room for
improvement. When the Ottoman Government shall awaken to the necessity
of conserving its natural resources, when it shall systematically
reforest the territory whose once precious woodlands have been so sadly
despoiled, and shall duly drain the vast swamps which have been formed
by the neglect of its treasure-giving rivers, _Cilicia Campestris_
will again be worthy of the name which legend tells us it once
bore--Garden of Eden.
As it is now, the whole extent of Cilicia from the Taurus to the Amanus
and from the mouth of the Cydnus to the headwaters of the Pyramus
is chiefly remarkable for ruins of cities and the sites of towns
whose very names are forgotten. Everywhere on the plain and on the
girdling foothills, one will see crumbling fortresses built by Genoese
and Venetians; moss-covered strongholds of Saracens and Crusaders;
Corinthian columns and marble colonnades, arches, and vaulted roofs
of Christian churches; reminders of mediæval warfare and of days when
this historic land was swept by inundations of barbarian hordes, who
destroyed by fire and sword the arts and labors which were once the
pride of western Asia. Everywhere one observes fragmentary remains of
Roman bridges and arches, of aqueducts and causeways, of Greek altars
attributed to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians;
dilapidated walls and towers and sepulchral grottoes with an occasional
Greek or Arabic inscription to mark the sites of Corycus, Pompeiopolis,
and Anazarba--those cities of renown, where their inhabitants could
quietly rest under their vines and fig trees free from the incursions
of predatory Cliteans and Tibareni and barbarians of Hun and Scithian
savagery, who spread terror and devastation wherever they could gratify
their lust of cruelty or plunder. It was the boast of the Mongols that
so complete was their work of “extirpation and erasure” of certain
cities, where they had wreaked their full fury of rapine and murder,
“that horses might run without stumbling over the ground where they had
once stood.”[223] Judging by the calamities that have been inflicted
on the once populous cities of Cilicia one would say that they were,
in the expressive words of St. Prosper of Aquitaine, _depredatione
vastatœ_--ravaged by depredations as ruthless as those that ever
characterized the frightful irruptions of Timur or Jenghiz Khan.
This indiscriminate destruction of centers of culture and marts of
commerce is often attributed to the Turks. But, as we have already
seen, the Turks--I refer especially to the Osmanlis--who have been the
rulers of the Ottoman Empire for more than five hundred years, were
not like the Mongols and Tartars, a nation of raiders, but a nation of
colonizers and empire builders. Their object, therefore, was not to
destroy but to construct and develop. Those who make this charge, which
is in great measure gratuitous, forget the wholesale destruction of
the hordes of Timur and Jenghiz Khan, not to speak of other raiders,
and lose sight of the fact that some of the most famous cities of the
East were reduced to ashes by the armies of Greece and Rome more than
a thousand years before the appearance of the armies of the Ottoman
conquerors in Syria, Greece, and Ionia. Thus, to mention only a few
instances, it was Alexander the Great who destroyed Halicarnasus,
the birthplace of the historians Herodotus and Dionysius. Here stood
the magnificent tomb of Mausolus, classed by the ancients among the
seven wonders of the world, the ruins of which were in 1402 used by
the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem as a quarry for building their
castles. It was the Roman general Mummius who brought ruin to the
famous city of Corinth. This was, in truth, rebuilt by Julius Cæsar,
but only to be destroyed again, at a much later period, by the Greeks
themselves. It was the Emperor Aurelian who doomed to destruction
Palmyra, the magnificent capital of Zenobia, almost during the heyday
of its architectural splendor and commercial prosperity. It was the
Goths who demolished the temple of Diana at Ephesus, another of the
world’s wonders, while the city itself was in ruins even before the
advent of the devastating Timur. But it was Timur who razed Sardis, the
capital of Crœsus, whose name has ever been a synonym of untold wealth.
It was Malik al-Ashraf, ruler of Egypt and Syria, who destroyed the
famed city of Tyre after its long and eventful history which antedated
the reigns of Hiram and Solomon.
Moreover, for thousands of years before the advent of the Osmanlis
in western Asia there was at work an agency of destruction that is
usually quite disregarded by those who are so propense to impute to the
“Unspeakable Turk” the heaps of ruins which overspread a large part
of the great Ottoman Empire--an agency whose power of annihilation is
incomparably greater than ever was that of Hun or Mongol. This is the
earthquake. From the dawn of history this irresistible power has been
in action in nearly all the countries bordering the Mediterranean,
and has, times without number, exhibited its relentless fury from
Cilicia to Sicily and from Egypt to Dalmatia. In Palestine, Syria,
Asia Minor,[224] and Greece whole cities were subverted. In the reign
of Valens and Valentinian the greater part of the Roman world was
shaken by seismic disturbances of the most appalling violence. Time and
again the massive walls of Constantinople, its palaces, churches, and
monasteries crumbled under the earth’s paroxysmal movements, and the
extent of the disaster inflicted was beyond computation. At Cyzicus
a temple which its builders fondly hoped would be as stable and as
durable as the pyramids was, in an instant, leveled with the ground by
one of those periodical earth shocks that have visited Asia Minor from
time immemorial.
In the destructive earthquake of 365 A. D., no fewer than fifty
thousand persons lost their lives in Alexandria. But probably no city
in the world has suffered more from seismic vibrations than Antioch,
which is near the southern border of Cilicia. Here in the terrific
earthquake of 526 A. D., the loss of life totaled a full quarter of a
million people. During the celebration of a public festival in Greece,
at which a vast multitude had assembled, “the whole population was
swallowed up in the midst of the ceremonies.” It was during this period
of widespread catastrophe in Greece that “the ravages of earthquakes
began to figure in history as an important cause of the impoverished
and declining condition of the country.”[225]
The same causes that led to the economic and social decline of Greece
operated with equally dire results in Asia Minor and Syria and
Palestine. When, therefore, we contemplate the countless ruins of
once famous cities, that are so conspicuous in a great part of Greece
and Turkey in Asia, let us assign them to their real causes--not “the
ravaging Turks,” but the devastating Huns and Goths, Tartars and
Mongols, Persians and Saracens, and the blind and convulsive forces of
nature.
It is far from my purpose to excuse the Osmanlis from any of the
crimes they have perpetrated against civilization. But the foregoing
paragraphs evince that their part in the destruction of the proud
cities and monuments--magnificent centers of culture and commerce--of
the ancient world has been greatly exaggerated. Their great sin against
humanity, at least for generations past, has been one of omission
rather than commission.[226] It has consisted--I speak of the ruling
classes--in their inefficient government, which has given little or
no encouragement to trade or industry; which has neglected roads and
bridges, making interior communication difficult and often impossible;
which has failed to develop the vast resources of a country to which
a beneficent nature has been rarely prodigal; which has oppressed and
trodden down a laborious and long-suffering peasantry, than which
there is no better in the world; which has failed to provide for the
education of the masses, ever eager for knowledge and improvement;
which has permitted systematic bribery in high places and allowed
crying malfeasance in office to go unpunished; which, by its unexampled
apathy, has been responsible for one of the richest countries in the
world degenerating into one of the most desolate, and for a great mass
of its people--although innocent--becoming the most execrated.
Surely this indictment is damning enough without cumbering it with
counts which are irrelevant or of which the Sultan’s government is
not guilty. But, fortunately for those who are able to read the signs
of the times, there are well-grounded hopes for a change for the
better--for a return to the position among nations which the Ottoman
Empire occupied when its schools and scholars were as famed as were its
achievements on land and sea--when the followers of Osman shall be as
far in the van of civilization as they are now in the rear.