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,
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 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, 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 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, 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.