A little clan of oriental shepherds, the Turks had in two generations
gained possession of the whole of the northwest corner of Asia Minor
and established themselves on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus. The
great city of Brusa, whose groves to-day enshrine the stately beauty of
their mosques and sultans' tombs, capitulated to Orkhan, the son of the
first Sultan, in 1326; and Nicaea, the cradle of the Greek church and
temporary capital of the Greek Empire, {4} surrendered in 1330. On the
other side of the Bosphorus Orkhan could see the domes and palaces of
Constantinople which, however, for another century was to remain the
seat of the Byzantine Empire.
The Turks crossed the Hellespont and, favored by an earthquake, marched
in 1358 over the fallen walls and fortifications into the city of
Gallipoli. In 1361 Adrianople succumbed to the attacks of Orkhan's
son, Murad I, whose sway was soon acknowledged in Thrace and Macedonia,
and who was destined to lead the victorious Ottoman armies as far north
as the Danube.
But though the provinces of the corrupt and effete Byzantine Empire
were falling into the hands of the Turks, the Slavs were still
unsubdued. Lazar the Serb threw down the gauntlet to Murad. On the
memorable field of Kossovo, in 1389, the opposing forces met--Murad
supported by his Asiatic and European vassals and allies, and Lazar
with his formidable army of {5} Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Poles,
Magyars, and Vlachs. Few battles in the world have produced such a
deep and lasting impression as this battle of Kossovo, in which the
Christian nations after long and stubborn resistance were vanquished by
the Moslems. The Servians still sing ballads which cast a halo of
pathetic romance round their great disaster. And after more than five
centuries the Montenegrins continue to wear black on their caps in
mourning for that fatal day.
In the next two centuries the Ottoman Empire moved on toward the zenith
of its glory. Mohammed II conquered Constantinople in 1453. And in
1529 Suleyman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna. Suleyman's
reign forms the climax of Turkish history. The Turks had become a
central European power occupying Hungary and menacing Austria.
Suleyman's dominions extended from Mecca to Buda-Pesth and from Bagdad
to Algiers. He commanded the Mediterranean, the Euxine, {6} and the
Red Sea, and his navies threatened the coasts of India and Spain.
But the conquests of the Turks were purely military. They did nothing
for their subjects, whom they treated with contempt, and they wanted
nothing from them but tribute and plunder. As the Turks were always
numerically inferior to the aggregate number of the peoples under their
sway, their one standing policy was to keep them divided--_divide et
impera_. To fan racial and religious differences among their subjects
was to perpetuate the rule of the masters. The whole task of
government, as the Turks conceived it, was to collect tribute from the
conquered and keep them in subjection by playing off their differences
against one another.
But a deterioration of Turkish rulers set in soon after the time of
Suleyman with a corresponding decline in the character and efficiency
of the army. And the growth of Russia and the reassertion of Hungary,
Poland, and Austria {7} were fatal to the maintenance of an alien and
detested empire founded on military domination alone. By the end of
the seventeenth century the Turks had been driven out of Austria,
Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia, and the northern boundaries of
their Empire were fixed by the Carpathians, the Danube, and the Save.
How marked and rapid was the further decline of the Ottoman Empire may
be inferred from the fact that twice in the eighteenth century Austria
and Russia discussed the project of dividing it between them. But the
inevitable disintegration of the Turkish dominion was not to inure to
the glorification of any of the Great Powers, though Russia certainly
contributed to the weakening of the common enemy. The decline and
diminution of the Ottoman Empire continued throughout the nineteenth
century. What happened, however, was the revolt of subject provinces
and the creation out of the territory of European Turkey of the
independent states of Greece, Servia, {8} Roumania, and Bulgaria. And
it was Bulgarians, Greeks, and Servians, with the active assistance of
the Montenegrins and the benevolent neutrality of the Roumanians, who,
in the war of 1912-1913, drove the Turk out of Europe, leaving him
nothing but the city of Constantinople and a territorial fringe
bordered by the Chataldja line of fortifications.