TURKEY

Turkey is no better name for the Osmanli dominion or any part of it

than Normandy would be for Great Britain. It is a mediaeval error of

nomenclature sanctioned by long usage in foreign mouths, but without

any equivalent in the vernacular of the Osmanlis themselves. The real

‘Turkey’ is Turkestan, and the real Turks are the Turcomans. The

Osmanlis are the least typical Turks surviving. Only a very small

proportion of them have any strain of Turkish blood, and this is

diluted till it is rarely perceptible in their physiognomy: and if

environment rather than blood is to be held responsible for racial

features, it can only be said that the territory occupied by the

Osmanlis is as unlike the homeland of the true Turks as it can well be,

and is quite unsuited to typically Turkish life and manners.

While of course it would be absurd to propose at this time of day any

change in the terms by which the civilized world unanimously designates

the Osmanlis and their dominion, it is well to insist on their

incorrectness, because, like most erroneous names, they have bred

erroneous beliefs. Thanks in the main to them, the Ottoman power is

supposed to have originated in an overwhelming invasion of Asia Minor

by immense numbers of Central Asiatic migrants, who, intent, like the

early Arab armies, on offering to Asia first and Europe second the

choice of apostasy or death, absorbed or annihilated almost all the

previous populations, and swept forward into the Balkans as

single-minded apostles of Islam. If the composition and the aims of the

Osmanlis had been these, it would pass all understanding how they

contrived, within a century of their appearance on the western scene,

to establish in North-west Asia and South-east Europe the most

civilized and best-ordered state of their time. Who, then, are the

Osmanlis in reality? What have they to do with true Turks? and in

virtue of what innate qualities did they found and consolidate their

power?

1

_Origin of the Osmanlis_

We hear of Turks first from Chinese sources. They were then the

inhabitants, strong and predatory, of the Altai plains and valleys: but

later on, about the sixth century A.D., they are found firmly

established in what is still called Turkestan, and pushing westwards

towards the Caspian Sea. Somewhat more than another century passes,

and, reached by a missionary faith of West Asia, they come out of the

Far Eastern darkness into a dim light of western history. One Boja,

lord of Kashgar and Khan of what the Chinese knew as the people of

Thu-Kiu—probably the same name as ‘Turk’—embraced Islam and forced it

on his Mazdeist subjects; but other Turkish tribes, notably the

powerful Uighurs, remained intolerant of the new dispensation, and

expelled the Thu-Kiu _en masse_ from their holding in Turkestan into

Persia. Here they distributed themselves in detached hordes over the

north and centre. At this day, in some parts of Persia, e.g.

Azerbaijan, Turks make the bulk of the population besides supplying the

reigning dynasty of the whole kingdom. For the Shahs of the Kajar house

are not Iranian, but purely Turkish.

This, it should be observed, was the western limit of Turkish expansion

in the mass. Azerbaijan is the nearest region to us in which Turki

blood predominates, and the westernmost province of the true Turk

homeland. All Turks who have passed thence into Hither Asia have come

in comparatively small detachments, as minorities to alien majorities.

They have invaded as groups of nomads seeking vacant pasturage, or as

bands of military adventurers who, first offering their swords to

princes of the elder peoples, have subsequently, on several occasions

and in several localities, imposed themselves on their former masters.

To the first category belong all those Turcoman, Avshar, Yuruk, and

other Turki tribes, which filtered over the Euphrates into unoccupied

or sparsely inhabited parts of Syria and Asia Minor from the seventh

century onwards, and survive to this day in isolated patches,

distinguished from the mass of the local populations, partly by an

ineradicable instinct for nomadic life, partly by retention of the

pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of the first immigrants. In the

second category—military adventurers—fall, for example, the Turkish

praetorians who made and unmade not less than four caliphs at Bagdad in

the ninth century, and that bold _condottiere_, Ahmed ibn Tulun, who

captured a throne at Cairo. Even Christian emperors availed themselves

of these stout fighters. Theophilus of Constantinople anticipated the

Ottoman invasion of Europe by some five hundred years when he

established Vardariote Turks in Macedonia.

The most important members of the second category, however, were the

Seljuks. Like the earlier Thu-Kiu, they were pushed out of Turkestan

late in the tenth century to found a power in Persia. Here, in

Khorasan, the mass of the horde settled and remained: and it was only a

comparatively small section which went on westward as military

adventurers to fall upon Bagdad, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. This

first conquest was little better than a raid, so brief was the

resultant tenure; but a century later two dispossessed nephews of Melek

Shah of Persia set out on a military adventure which had more lasting

consequences. Penetrating with, a small following into Asia Minor, they

seized Konia, and instituted there a kingdom nominally feudatory to the

Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality independent and destined to last

about two centuries. Though numerically weak, their forces, recruited

from the professional soldier class which had bolstered up the Abbasid

Empire and formed the Seljukian kingdoms of Persia and Syria, were

superior to any Byzantine troops that could be arrayed in southern or

central Asia Minor. They constituted indeed the only compact body of

fighting men seen in these regions for some generations. It found

reinforcement from the scattered Turki groups introduced already, as we

have seen, into the country; and even from native Christians, who,

descended from the Iconoclasts of two centuries before, found the rule

of Moslem image-haters more congenial, as it was certainly more

effective, than that of Byzantine emperors. The creed of the Seljuks

was Islam of an Iranian type. Of Incarnationist colour, it repudiated

the dour illiberal spirit of the early Arabian apostles which

latter-day Sunnite orthodoxy has revived. Accordingly its professors,

backed by an effective force and offering security and privilege,

quickly won over the aborigines—Lycaonians, Phrygians, Cappadocians,

and Cilicians—and welded them into a nation, leaving only a few

detached communities here and there to cherish allegiance to Byzantine

Christianity. In the event, the population of quite two-thirds of the

Anatolian peninsula had already identified itself with a ruling Turki

caste before, early in the thirteenth century, fresh Turks appeared on

the scene—those Turks who were to found the Ottoman Empire.

They entered Asia Minor much as the earlier Turcomans had entered it—a

small body of nomadic adventurers, thrown off by the larger body of

Turks settled in Persia to seek new pastures west of the Euphrates.

There are divers legends about the first appearance and establishment

of these particular Turks: but all agree that they were of

inconsiderable number— not above four hundred families at most.

Drifting in by way of Armenia, they pressed gradually westward from

Erzerum in hope of finding some unoccupied country which would prove

both element and fertile. Byzantine influence was then at a very low

ebb. With Constantinople itself in Latin hands, the Greek writ ran only

along the north Anatolian coast, ruled from two separate centres, Isnik

(Nicaea) and Trebizond: and the Seljuk kingdom was run in reality much

more vigorous. Though apparently without a rival, it was subsisting by

consent, on the prestige of its past, rather than on actual power. The

moment of its dissolution was approaching, and the Anatolian peninsula,

two-thirds Islamized, but ill-organised and very loosely knit, was

becoming once more a fair field for any adventurer able to command a

small compact force.

The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme

north-western fringe of the Seljuk territory—in a region so near Nicaea

that their sword would be a better title to it than any which the

feudal authority of Konia could confer. In fact it was a debatable

land, an angle pushed up between the lake plain of Nicaea on the one

hand and the plain of Brusa on the other, and divided from each by not

lofty heights, Yenishehr, its chief town, which became the Osmanli

chief Ertogrul’s residence, lies, as the crow flies, a good deal less

than fifty miles from the Sea of Marmora, and not a hundred miles from

Constantinople itself. Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches,

to hold his territory for the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the

expense of Nicaea if he could. If he won through, so much the better

for Sultan Alaeddin; if he failed, _vile damnum!_

Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and

Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact. The

Tartar storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central

Asia, spent its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing,

left the Seljuks bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an

overlord. The feudatories were free everywhere to make or mar

themselves, and they spent the last half of the thirteenth century in

fighting for whatever might be saved from the Seljuk wreck before it

foundered for ever about 1300 A.D. In the south, the centre, and the

east of the peninsula, where Islam had long rooted itself as the

popular social system, various Turki emirates established themselves on

a purely Moslem basis—certain of these, like the Danishmand emirate of

Cappadocia, being restorations of tribal jurisdictions which had

existed before the imposition of Seljuk overlordship.

In the extreme north-west, however, where the mass of society was still

Christian and held itself Greek, no Turkish, potentate could either

revive a pre-Seljukian status or simply carry on a Seljukian system in

miniature. If he was to preserve independence at all, he must rely on a

society which was not yet Moslem and form a coalition with the

‘Greeks’, into whom the recent recovery of Constantinople from the

Latins had put fresh heart. Osman, who had succeeded Ertogrul in 1288,

recognized where his only possible chance of continued dominion and

future aggrandizement lay. He turned to the Greeks, as an element of

vitality and numerical strength to be absorbed into his nascent state,

and applied himself unremittingly to winning over and identifying with

himself the Greek feudal seigneurs in his territory or about its

frontiers. Some of these, like Michael, lord of Harmankaya, readily

enough stood in with the vigorous Turk and became Moslems. Others, as

the new state gained momentum, found themselves obliged to accept it or

be crushed. There are to this day Greek communities in the Brusa

district jealously guarding privileges which date from compacts made

with their seigneurs by Osman and his son Orkhan.

It was not till the Seljuk kingdom was finally extinguished, in or

about 1300 A.D. that Osman assumed at Yenishehr the style and title of

a sultan. Acknowledged from Afium Kara Hissar, in northern Phrygia, to

the Bithynian coast of the Marmora, beside whose waters his standards

had already been displayed, he lived on to see Brusa fall to his son

Orkhan, in 1326, and become the new capital. Though Nicaea still held

out, Osman died virtual lord of the Asiatic Greeks; and marrying his

son to a Christian girl, the famous Nilufer, after whom the river of

Brusa is still named, he laid on Christian foundations the strength of

his dynasty and his state. The first regiment of professional Ottoman

soldiery was recruited by him and embodied later by Orkhan, his son,

from Greek and other Christian-born youths, who, forced to apostatize,

were educated as Imperial slaves in imitation of the Mamelukes,

constituted more than a century earlier in Egypt, and now masters where

they had been bondmen. It is not indeed for nothing that Osman’s latest

successor, and all who hold by him, distinguish themselves from other

peoples by his name. They are Osmanlis (or by a European use of the

more correct form Othman, ‘Ottomans’), because they derived their being

as a nation and derive their national strength, not so much from

central Asia as from the blend of Turk and Greek which Osman promoted

among his people. This Greek strain has often been reinforced since his

day and mingled with other Caucasian strains.

It was left to Orkhan to round off this Turco-Grecian realm in

Byzantine Asia by the capture first of Ismid (Nicomedia) and then of

Isnik (Nicaea); and with this last acquisition the nucleus of a

self-sufficient sovereign state was complete. After the peaceful

absorption of the emirate of Karasi, which added west central Asia

Minor almost as far south as the Hermus, the Osmanli ruled in 1338 a

dominion of greater area than that of the Greek emperor, whose capital

and coasts now looked across to Ottoman shores all the way from the

Bosphorus to the Hellespont.

2

_Expansion of the Osmanli Kingdom_

If the new state was to expand by conquest, its line of advance was

already foreshadowed. For the present, it could hardly break back into

Asia Minor, occupied as this was by Moslem principalities sanctioned by

the same tradition as itself, namely, the prestige of the Seljuks. To

attack these would be to sin against Islam. But in front lay a rich but

weak Christian state, the centre of the civilization to which the

popular element in the Osmanli society belonged. As inevitably as the

state of Nicaea had desired, won, and transferred itself to,

Constantinople, so did the Osmanli state of Brusa yearn towards the

same goal; and it needed no invitation from a Greek to dispose an

Ottoman sultan to push over to the European shore.

Such an invitation, however, did in fact precede the first Osmanli

crossing in force. In 1345 John Cantacuzene solicited help of Orkhan

against the menace of Dushan, the Serb. Twelve years later came a

second invitation. Orkhan’s son, Suleiman, this time ferried a large

army over the Hellespont, and, by taking and holding Gallipoli and

Rodosto, secured a passage from continent to continent, which the

Ottomans would never again let go.

Such invitations, though they neither prompted the extension of the

Osmanli realm into Europe nor sensibly precipitated it, did

nevertheless divert the course of the Ottoman arms and reprieve the

Greek empire till Timur and his Tartars could come on the scene and,

all unconsciously, secure it a further respite. But for these

diversions there is little doubt Constantinople would have passed into

Ottoman hands nearly a century earlier than the historic date of its

fall. The Osmanli armies, thus led aside to make the Serbs and not the

Greeks of Europe their first objective, became involved at once in a

tangle of Balkan affairs from which they only extricated themselves

after forty years of incessant fighting in almost every part of the

peninsula except the domain of the Greek emperor. This warfare, which

in no way advanced the proper aims of the lords of Brusa and Nicaea,

not only profited the Greek emperor by relieving him of concern about

his land frontier but also used up strength which might have made head

against the Tartars. Constantinople then, as now, was detached from the

Balkans. The Osmanlis, had they possessed themselves of it, might well

have let the latter be for a long time to come. Instead, they had to

battle, with the help now of one section of the Balkan peoples, now of

another, till forced to make an end of all their feuds and treacheries

by annexations after the victories of Kosovo in 1389 and Nikopolis in

1396.

Nor was this all. They became involved also with certain peoples of the

main continent of Europe, whose interests or sympathies had been

affected by those long and sanguinary Balkan wars. There was already

bad blood and to spare between the Osmanlis on the one hand, and

Hungarians, Poles, and Italian Venetians on the other, long before any

second opportunity to attack Constantinople occurred: and the Osmanlis

were in for that age-long struggle to secure a ‘scientific frontier’

beyond the Danube, whence the Adriatic on the one flank and the Euxine

on the other could be commanded, which was to make Ottoman history down

to the eighteenth century and spell ruin in the end.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that the Osmanlis set out for Europe,

in the spirit of Arab apostles, to force their creed and dominion on

all the world. Both in Asia and Europe, from first to last, their

expeditions and conquests have been inspired palpably by motives

similar to those active among the Christian powers, namely, desire for

political security and the command of commercial areas. Such wars as

the Ottoman sultans, once they were established at Constantinople, did

wage again and again with knightly orders or with Italian republics

would have been undertaken, and fought with the same persistence, by

any Greek emperor who felt himself strong enough. Even the Asiatic

campaigns, which Selim I and some of his successors, down to the end of

the seventeenth century, would undertake, were planned and carried out

from similar motives. Their object was to secure the eastern basin of

the Mediterranean by the establishment of some strong frontier against

Iran, out of which had come more than once forces threatening the

destruction of Ottoman power. It does not, of course, in any respect

disprove their purpose that, in the event, this object was never

attained, and that an unsatisfactory Turco-Persian border still

illustrates at this day the failures of Selim I and Mohammed IV.

By the opening of the fifteenth century, when, all unlooked for, a most

terrible Tartar storm was about to break upon western Asia, the Osmanli

realm had grown considerably, not only in Europe by conquest, but also

in Asia by the peaceful effect of marriages and heritages. Indeed it

now comprised scarcely less of the Anatolian peninsula than the last

Seljuks had held, that is to say, the whole of the north as far as the

Halys river beyond Angora, the central plateau to beyond Konia, and all

the western coast-lands. The only emirs not tributary were those of

Karamania, Cappadocia, and Pontus, that is of the southern and eastern

fringes; and one detached fragment of Greek power survived in the

last-named country, the kingdom of Trebizond. As for Europe, it had

become the main scene of Osmanli operations, and now contained the

administrative capital, Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental

primacy. Sultan Murad, who some years after his succession in 1359 had

definitely transferred the centre of political gravity to Thrace, was

nevertheless carried to the Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria,

Serbia, and districts of both Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral

parts of an empire which had come to number at least as many Christian

as Moslem subjects, and to depend as much on the first as on the last.

Not only had the professional Osmanli soldiery, the Janissaries,

continued to be recruited from the children of native Christian races,

but contingents of adult native warriors, who still professed

Christianity, had been invited or had offered themselves to fight

Osmanli battles—even those waged against men of the True Faith in Asia.

A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad’s line at

the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body of

the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So

little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial

empires and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine

imperial type.

And just because it had come to be in Europe and of Europe, it was able

to survive the terrible disaster of Angora in 1402. Though the Osmanli

army was annihilated by Timur, and an Osmanli sultan, for the first and

last time in history, remained in the hands of the foe, the

administrative machinery of the Osmanli state was not paralysed. A new

ruler was proclaimed at Adrianople, and the European part of the realm

held firm. The moment that the Tartars began to give ground, the

Osmanlis began to recover it. In less than twenty years they stood

again in Asia as they were before Timur’s attack, and secure for the

time on the east, could return to restore their prestige in the west,

where the Tartar victory had bred unrest and brought both the

Hungarians and the Venetians on the Balkan scene. Their success was

once more rapid and astonishing: Salonika passed once and for all into

Ottoman hands: the Frank seigneurs and the despots of Greece were alike

humbled; and although Murad II failed to crush the Albanian,

Skanderbey, he worsted his most dangerous foe, John Hunyadi, with the

help of Wallach treachery at the second battle of Kosovo. At his death,

three years later, he left the Balkans quiet and the field clear for

his successor to proceed with the long deferred but inevitable

enterprise of attacking all that was left of Greek empire, the district

and city of Constantinople.

The doom of New Rome was fulfilled within two years. In the end it

passed easily enough into the hands of those who already had been in

possession of its proper empire for a century or more. Historians have

made more of this fall of Constantinople in 1453 than contemporary

opinion seems to have made of it. No prince in Europe was moved to any

action by its peril, except, very half-heartedly, the Doge. Venice

could not feel quite indifferent to the prospect of the main part of

that empire, which, while in Greek hands, had been her most serious

commercial competitor, passing into the stronger hands of the Osmanlis.

Once in Constantinople, the latter, long a land power only, would be

bound to concern themselves with the sea also. The Venetians made no

effort worthy of their apprehensions, though these were indeed

exceedingly well founded; for, as all the world knows, to the sea the

Osmanlis did at once betake themselves. In less than thirty years they

were ranging all the eastern Mediterranean and laying siege to Rhodes,

the stronghold of one of their most dangerous competitors, the Knights

Hospitallers.

In this consequence consists the chief historic importance of the

Osmanli capture of Constantinople. For no other reason can it he called

an epoch-marking event. If it guaranteed the Empire of the East against

passing into any western hands, for example, those of Venice or Genoa,

it did not affect the balance of power between Christendom and Islam;

for the strength of the former had long ceased to reside at all in

Constantinople. The last Greek emperor died a martyr, but not a

champion.

3

_Heritage and Expansion of Byzantine Empire_

On the morrow of his victory, Mohammed the Conqueror took pains to make

it clear that his introduction of a new heaven did not entail a new

earth. As little as might be would be changed. He had displaced a

Palaeologus by an Osmanli only in order that an empire long in fact

Osmanli should henceforth be so also _de jure_. Therefore he confirmed

the pre-existing Oecumenical patriarch in his functions and the

Byzantine Greeks in their privileges, renewed the rights secured to

Christian foreigners by the Greek emperors, and proclaimed that, for

his accession to the throne, there should not be made a Moslem the more

or a Christian the less. Moreover, during the thirty years left to him

of life, Mohammed devoted himself to precisely those tasks which would

have fallen to a Greek emperor desirous of restoring Byzantine power.

He thrust back Latins wherever they were encroaching on the Greek

sphere, as were the Venetians of the Morea, the Hospitallers of Rhodes,

and the Genoese of the Crimea: and he rounded off the proper Byzantine

holding by annexing, in Europe, all the Balkan peninsula except the

impracticable Black Mountain, the Albanian highlands, and the Hungarian

fortress of Belgrade; and, in Asia, what had remained independent in

the Anatolian peninsula, the emirates of Karamania and Cappadocia.

Before Mohammed died in 1481 the Osmanli Turco-Grecian nation may be

said to have come into its own. It was lord _de facto et de jure belli_

of the eastern or Greek Empire, that is of all territories and seas

grouped geographically round Constantinople as a centre, with only a

few exceptions unredeemed, of which the most notable were the islands

of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Krete, still in Latin hands. Needless to say,

the Osmanlis themselves differed greatly from their imperial

predecessors. Their official speech, their official creed, their family

system were all foreign to Europe, and many of their ideas of

government had been learned in the past from Persia and China, or were

derived from the original tribal organization of the true Turks. But if

they were neither more nor less Asiatics than the contemporary

Russians, they were quite as much Europeans as many of the Greek

emperors had been—those of the Isaurian dynasty, for instance. They had

given no evidence as yet of a fanatical Moslem spirit—this was to be

bred in them by subsequent experiences—and their official creed had

governed their policy hardly more than does ours in India or Egypt.

Mohammed the Conqueror had not only shown marked favour to Christians,

whether his _rayas_ or not, but encouraged letters and the arts in a

very un-Arabian spirit. Did he not have himself portrayed by Gentile

Bellini? The higher offices of state, both civil and military, were

confided (and would continue so to be for a century to come) almost

exclusively to men of Christian origin. Commerce was encouraged, and

western traders recognized that their facilities were greater now than

they had been under Greek rule. The Venetians, for example, enjoyed in

perfect liberty a virtual monopoly of the Aegean and Euxine trade. The

social condition of the peasantry seems to have been better than it had

been under Greek seigneurs, whether in Europe or in Asia, and better

than it was at the moment in feudal Christendom. The Osmanli military

organization was reputed the best in the world, and its fame attracted

adventurous spirits from all over Europe to learn war in the first

school of the age. Ottoman armies, it is worth while to remember, were

the only ones then attended by efficient medical and commissariat

services, and may be said to have introduced to Europe these

alleviations of the horrors of war.

Had the immediate successors of Mohammed been content—or, rather, had

they been able—to remain within his boundaries, they would have robbed

Ottoman history of one century of sinister brilliance, but might have

postponed for many centuries the subsequent sordid decay; for the seeds

of this were undoubtedly sown by the three great sultans who followed

the taker of Constantinople. Their ambitions or their necessities led

to a great increase of the professional army which would entail many

evils in time to come. Among these were praetorianism in the capital

and the great provincial towns; subjection of land and peasantry to

military seigneurs, who gradually detached themselves from the central

control; wars undertaken abroad for no better reason than the

employment of soldiery feared at home; consequent expansion of the

territorial empire beyond the administrative capacity of the central

government; development of the ‘tribute-children’ system of recruiting

into a scourge of the _rayas_ and a continual offence to neighbouring

states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and

every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service: lastly, revival

of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the

Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to

revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems. To sum the

matter up in other words: the omnipotence and indiscipline of the

Janissaries; the contumacy of ‘Dere Beys’ (‘Lords of the Valleys,’ who

maintained a feudal independence) and of provincial governors; the

concentration of the official mind on things military and religious, to

the exclusion of other interests; the degradation and embitterment of

the Christian elements in the empire; the perpetual financial

embarrassment of the government with its inevitable consequence of

oppression and neglect of the governed; and the constant provocation in

Christendom of a hostility which was always latent and recurrently

active— all these evils, which combined to push the empire nearer and

nearer to ruin from the seventeenth century onwards, can be traced to

the brilliant epoch of Osmanli history associated with the names of

Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent.

At the same time Fate, rather than any sultan, must be blamed. It was

impossible to forgo some further extension of the empire, and very

difficult to arrest extension at any satisfactory static point. For one

thing, as has been pointed out already, there were important

territories in the proper Byzantine sphere still unredeemed at the

death of Mohammed. Rhodes, Krete, and Cyprus, whose possession carried

with it something like superior control of the Levantine trade, were in

Latin hands. Austrian as well as Venetian occupation of the best

harbours was virtually closing the Adriatic to the masters of the

Balkans. Nor could the inner lands of the Peninsula be quite securely

held while the great fortress of Belgrade, with the passage of the

Danube, remained in Hungarian keeping, Furthermore, the Black Sea,

which all masters of the Bosphorus have desired to make a Byzantine

lake, was in dispute with the Wallachs and the Poles; and, in the reign

of Mohammed’s successor, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came up

above its northern horizon—the harbinger of the Muscovite.

As for the Asiatic part of the Byzantine sphere, there was only one

little corner in the south-east to be rounded off to bring all the

Anatolian peninsula under the Osmanli. But that corner, the Cilician

plain, promised trouble, since it was held by another Islamic power,

that of the Egyptian Mamelukes, which, claiming to be at least equal to

the Osmanli, possessed vitality much below its pretensions. The

temptation to poach on it was strong, and any lord of Constantinople

who once gave way to this, would find himself led on to assume control

of all coasts of the easternmost Levant, and then to push into inland

Asia in quest of a scientific frontier at their back—perilous and

costly enterprise which Rome had essayed again and again and had to

renounce in the end. Bayezid II took the first step by summoning the

Mameluke to evacuate certain forts near Tarsus, and expelling his

garrisons _vi et armis_. Cilicia passed to the Osmanli; but for the

moment he pushed no farther. Bayezid, who was under the obligation

always to lead his army in person, could make but one campaign at a

time; and a need in Europe was the more pressing. In quitting Cilicia,

however, he left open a new question in Ottoman politics—the Asiatic

continental question—and indicated to his successor a line of least

resistance on which to advance. Nor would this be his only dangerous

legacy. The prolonged and repeated raids into Adriatic lands, as far

north as Carniola and Carinthia, with which the rest of Bayezid’s reign

was occupied, brought Ottoman militarism at last to a point, whose

eventual attainment might have been foreseen any time in the past

century— the point at which, strong in the possession of a new arm,

artillery, it would assume control of the state.

Bayezid’s seed was harvested by Selim. First in a long series of

praetorian creatures which would end only with the destroyer of the

praetorians themselves three centuries later, he owed his elevation to

a Janissary revolt, and all the eight bloody years of his reign were to

be punctuated by Janissary tumults. To keep his creators in any sort of

order and contentment he had no choice but to make war from his first

year to his last. When he died, in 1520, the Ottoman Empire had been

swelled to almost as wide limits in Asia and Africa as it has ever

attained since his day. Syria, Armenia, great part of Kurdistan,

northern Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, and last, but not least, Egypt,

were forced to acknowledge Osmanli suzerainty, and for the first time

an Osmanli sultan had proclaimed himself caliph. True that neither by

his birth nor by the manner of his appointment did Selim satisfy the

orthodox caliphial tradition; but, besides his acquisition of certain

venerated relics of the Prophet, such as the _Sanjak i-sherif_ or holy

standard, and besides a yet more important acquisition—the control of

the holy cities of the faith— he could base a claim on the unquestioned

fact that the office was vacant, and the equally certain fact that he

was the most powerful Moslem prince in the world. Purists might deny

him if they dared: the vulgar Sunni mind was impressed and disposed to

accept. The main importance, however, of Selim’s assumption of the

caliphate was that it consecrated Osmanli militarism to a religious

end—to the original programme of Islam. This was a new thing, fraught

with dire possibilities from that day forward. It marked the

supersession of the Byzantine or European ideal by the Asiatic in

Osmanli policy, and introduced a phase of Ottoman history which has

endured to our own time.

The inevitable process was continued in the next reign. Almost all the

military glories of Suleiman—known to contemporary Europe as ‘the

Magnificent’ and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli

sultans— made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire. His

earliest operations indeed, the captures of Rhodes from the Knights and

of Belgrade and Šabac from the Hungarians, expressed a legitimate

Byzantine policy; and the siege of Malta, one of his latest ventures,

might also be defended as a measure taken in the true interests of

Byzantine commerce. But the most brilliant and momentous of his

achievements bred evils for which military prestige and the material

profits to be gained from the oppression of an irreconcilable

population were inadequate compensation. This was the conquest of

Hungary. It would result in Buda and its kingdom remaining Ottoman

territory for a century and a half, and in the principalities of

Wallachia and Moldavia abiding under the Ottoman shadow even longer,

and passing for all time out of the central European into the Balkan

sphere; but also it would result in the Osmanli power finding itself on

a weak frontier face to face at last with a really strong Christian

race, the Germanic, before which, since it could not advance, it would

have ultimately to withdraw; and in the rousing of Europe to a sense of

its common danger from Moslem activity. Suleiman’s failure to take

Vienna more than made good the panic which had followed on his victory

at Mohacs. It was felt that the Moslem, now that he had failed against

the bulwark of central Europe, was to go no farther, and that the hour

of revenge was near.

[Illustration: The Ottoman Empire (Except the Arabian and African

provinces)]

It was nearer than perhaps was expected. Ottoman capacity to administer

the overgrown empire in Europe and Asia was strained already almost to

breaking-point, and it was in recognition of this fact that Suleiman

made the great effort to reorganize his imperial system, which has

earned him his honourable title of _El Kanun_, the Regulator. But if he

could reset and cleanse the wheels of the administrative machine, he

could not increase its capacity. New blood was beginning to fail for

the governing class just as the demands on it became greater. No longer

could it be manned exclusively from the Christian born. Two centuries

of recruiting in the Balkans and West Asia had sapped their resources.

Even the Janissaries were not now all ‘tribute-children’. Their own

sons, free men Moslem born, began to be admitted to the ranks. This

change was a vital infringement of the old principle of Osmanli rule,

that all the higher administrative and military functions should be

vested in slaves of the imperial household, directly dependent on the

sultan himself; and once breached, this principle could not but give

way more and more. The descendants of imperial slaves, free-born

Moslems, but barred from the glory and profits of their fathers’

function, had gradually become a very numerous class of country

gentlemen distributed over all parts of the empire, and a very

malcontent one. Though it was still subservient, its dissatisfaction at

exclusion from the central administration was soon to show itself

partly in assaults on the time-honoured system, partly in assumption of

local jurisdiction, which would develop into provincial independence.

The overgrowth of his empire further compelled Suleiman to divide the

standing army, in order that more than one imperial force might take

the field at a time. Unable to lead all his armies in person, he

elected, in the latter part of his reign, to lead none, and for the

first time left the Janissaries to march without a sultan to war.

Remaining himself at the centre, he initiated a fashion which would

encourage Osmanli sultans to lapse into half-hidden beings, whom their

subjects would gradually invest with religious character. Under these

conditions the ruler, the governing class (its power grew with this

devolution), the dominant population of the state, and the state itself

all grew more fanatically Moslem.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Ahmed I being on the

throne, the Ottoman Empire embraced the widest territorial area which

it was ever to cover at any one moment. In what may be called the

proper Byzantine field, Cyprus had been recovered and Krete alone stood

out. Outside that field, Hungary on the north and Yemen (since Selim’s

conquest in 1516) on the south were the frontier provinces, and the

Ottoman flag had been carried not only to the Persian Gulf but also far

upon the Iranian plateau, in the long wars of Murad III, which

culminated in 1588 with the occupation of Tabriz and half Azerbaijan.

4

_Shrinkage and Retreat_

The fringes of this vast empire, however, none too surely held, were

already involving it in insoluble difficulties and imminent dangers. On

the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish

military fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the

system which had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere. On the other

hand, in Europe, as we have seen, the empire had a very unsatisfactory

frontier, beyond which a strong people not only set limits to further

progress but was prepared to dispute the ground already gained. In a

treaty signed at Sitvatorok, in 1606, the Osmanli sultan was forced to

acknowledge definitely the absolute and equal sovereignty of his

northern neighbour, Austria; and although, less than a century later,

Vienna would be attacked once more, there was never again to be serious

prospect of an extension of the empire in the direction of central

Europe.

Moreover, however appearances might be maintained on the frontiers, the

heart of the empire had begun patently to fail. The history of the next

two centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, is one long record of

praetorian tumults at home; and ever more rarely will these be

compensated by military successes abroad. The first of these centuries

had not half elapsed ere the Janissaries had taken the lives of two

sultans, and brought the Grand Vizierate to such a perilous pass that

no ordinary holder of it, unless backed by some very powerful Albanian

or other tribal influence, could hope to save his credit or even his

life. During this period indeed no Osmanli of the older stocks ever

exercised real control of affairs. It was only among the more recently

assimilated elements, such as the Albanian, the Slavonic, or the Greek,

that men of the requisite character and vigour could be found. The

rally which marked the latter half of the seventeenth century was

entirely the work of Albanians or of other generals and admirals, none

of whom had had a Moslem grandfather. Marked by the last Osmanli

conquest made at the expense of Europe—that of Krete; by the definite

subjugation of Wallachia; by the second siege of Vienna; by the

recovery of the Morea from Venice; and finally by an honourable

arrangement with Austria about the Danube frontier—it is all to be

credited to the Kuprili ‘dynasty’ of Albanian viziers, which

conspicuously outshone the contemporary sovereigns of the dynasty of

Osman, the best of them, Mohammed IV, not excepted. It was, however, no

more than a rally; for greater danger already threatened from another

quarter. Agreement had not been reached with Austria at Carlowitz, in

1699, before a new and baleful planet swam into the Osmanli sky.

It was, this time, no central European power, to which, at the worst,

all that lay north of the proper Byzantine sphere might be abandoned;

but a claimant for part of that sphere itself, perhaps even for the

very heart of it. Russia, seeking an economic outlet, had sapped her

way south to the Euxine shore, and was on the point of challenging the

Osmanli right to that sea. The contest would involve a vital issue; and

if the Porte did not yet grasp this fact, others had grasped it. The

famous ‘Testament of Peter the Great’ may or may not be a genuine

document; but, in either case, it proves that certain views about the

necessary policy of Russia in the Byzantine area, which became

commonplaces of western political thinkers as the eighteenth century

advanced, were already familiar to east European minds in the earlier

part of that century.

Battle was not long in being joined. In the event, it would cost Russia

about sixty years of strenuous effort to reduce the Byzantine power of

the Osmanlis to a condition little better than that in which Osman had

found the Byzantine power of the Greeks four centuries before. During

the first two-thirds of this period the contest was waged not

unequally. By the Treaty of Belgrade, in 1739, Sultan Mahmud I appeared

for a moment even to have gained the whole issue, Russia agreeing to

her own exclusion from the Black Sea, and from interference in the

Danubian principalities. But the success could not be sustained.

Repeated effort was rapidly exhausting Osmanli strength, sapped as it

was by increasing internal disease: and when a crisis arrived with the

accession of the Empress Catherine, it proved too weak to meet it.

During the ten years following 1764 Osmanli hold on the Black Sea was

lost irretrievably. After the destruction of the fleet at Chesme the

Crimea became untenable and was abandoned to the brief mercies of

Russia: and with a veiled Russian protectorate established in the

Danubian principalities, and an open Russian occupation in Morean

ports, Constantinople had lost once more her own seas. When Selim III

was set on a tottering throne, in 1787, the wheel of Byzantine destiny

seemed to have come again almost full circle: and the world was

expecting a Muscovite succession to that empire which had acknowledged

already the Roman, the Greek, and the Osmanli.

Certainly history looked like repeating itself. As in the fourteenth

century, so in the eighteenth, the imperial provinces, having shaken

off almost all control of the capital, were administering themselves,

and happier for doing so. Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Trebizond

acknowledged adventurers as virtually independent lords. Asia Minor, in

general, was being controlled, in like disregard of imperial majesty,

by a group of ‘Dere Beys’, descended, in different districts, from

tribal chieftains or privileged tax-farmers, or, often, from both. The

latter part of the eighteenth century was the heyday of the Anatolian

feudal families—of such as the Chapanoghlus of Yuzgad, whose sway

stretched from Pontus to Cilicia, right across the base of the

peninsula, or the Karamanoghlus of Magnesia, Bergama, and Aidin, who

ruled as much territory as the former emirs of Karasi and Sarukhan, and

were recognized by the representatives of the great trading companies

as wielding the only effective authority in Smyrna. The wide and rich

regions controlled by such families usually contributed neither an

_asper_ to the sultan’s treasury nor a man to the imperial armies.

On no mountain of either Europe or Asia—and mountains formed a large

part of the Ottoman empire in both—did the imperial writ run. Macedonia

and Albania were obedient only to their local beys, and so far had gone

the devolution of Serbia and Bosnia to Janissary aghas, feudal beys,

and the Beylerbey of Rumili, that these provinces hardly concerned

themselves more with the capital. The late sultan, Mustapha III, had

lost almost the last remnant of his subjects’ respect, not so much by

the ill success of his mutinous armies as by his depreciation of the

imperial coinage. He had died bankrupt of prestige, leaving no visible

assets to his successor. What might become of the latter no one in the

empire appeared to care. As in 1453, it waited other lords.

5

_Revival_

It has been waiting, nevertheless, ever since—waiting for much more

than a century; and perhaps the end is not even yet. Why, then, have

expectations not only within but without the empire been so greatly at

fault? How came Montesquieu, Burke, and other confident prophets since

their time to be so signally mistaken? There were several co-operating

causes, but one paramount. Constantinople was no longer, as in 1453, a

matter of concern only to itself, its immediate neighbours, and certain

trading republics of Italy. It had become involved with the commercial

interests of a far wider circle, in particular of the great trading

peoples of western Europe, the British, the French, and the Dutch, and

with the political interests of the Germanic and Russian nations. None

of these could be indifferent to a revolution in its fortunes, and

least of all to its passing, not to a power out of Asia, but to a rival

power among themselves. Europe was already in labour with the doctrine

of the Balance of Power. The bantling would not be born at Vienna till

early in the century to come: but even before the end of the eighteenth

century it could be foreseen that its life would be bound up with the

maintenance of Constantinople in independence of any one of the parent

powers—that is, with the prolongation of the Osmanli phase of its

imperial fortunes. This doctrine, consistently acted upon by Europe,

has been the sheet anchor of the Ottoman empire for a century. Even to

this day its Moslem dynasty has never been without one powerful

Christian champion or another.

There were, however, some thirty years still to elapse after Selim’s

accession before that doctrine was fully born: and had her hands been

free, Russia might well have been in secure possession of the Byzantine

throne long before 1815. For, internally, the Osmanli state went from

bad to worse. The tumultuous insubordination of the Janissaries became

an ever greater scandal. Never in all the long history of their riots

was their record for the years 1807-9 equalled or even approached.

Never before, also, had the provinces been so utterly out of hand. This

was the era of Jezzar the Butcher at Acre, of the rise of Mehemet Ali

in Egypt, of Ali Pasha in Epirus, and of Pasvanoghlu at Vidin. When

Mahmud II was thrust on to the throne in 1809, he certainly began his

reign with no more personal authority and no more imperial prestige or

jurisdiction than the last Greek emperor had enjoyed on his accession

in 1448.

The great European war, however, which had been raging intermittently

for nearly twenty years, had saved Mahmud an empire to which he could

succeed in name and try to give substance. Whatever the Osmanlis

suffered during that war, it undoubtedly kept them in Constantinople.

Temporary loss of Egypt and the small damage done by the British attack

on Constantinople in 1807 were a small price to pay for the diversion

of Russia’s main energies to other than Byzantine fields, and for the

assurance, made doubly sure when the great enemy did again attack, that

she would not be allowed to settle the account alone. Whatever Napoleon

may have planned and signed at Tilsit, the aegis of France was

consistently opposed to the enemies of the Osmanlis down to the close

of the Napoleonic age.

Thus it came about that those thirty perilous years passed without the

expected catastrophe. There was still a successor of Osman reigning in

Constantinople when the great Christian powers, met in conclave at

Vienna, half unconsciously guaranteed the continued existence of the

Osmanli Empire simply by leaving it out of account in striking a

Balance of Power in Europe. Its European territory, with the capital

within it, was of quite enough importance to disturb seriously the nice

adjustment agreed at Vienna; and, therefore, while any one’s henceforth

to take or leave, it would become always some one’s to guard. A few

years had yet to pass before the phrase, the Maintenance of the

Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, would be a watchword of European

diplomacy: but, whether formulated thus or not, that principle became a

sure rock of defence for the Osmanli Empire on the birthday of the

doctrine of the Balance of Power.

Secure from destruction by any foes but those of his own household, as

none knew better than he, the reigning Osmanli was scheming to regain

the independence and dignity of his forefathers. Himself a creature of

the Janissaries, Mahmud had plotted the abolition of his creators from

the first year of his reign, but making a too precipitate effort after

the conclusion of peace with Russia, had ignominiously failed and

fallen into worse bondage than ever. Now, better assured of his

imperial position and supported by leading men of all classes among his

subjects, he returned not only to his original enterprise but to

schemes for removing other checks on the power of the sovereign which

had come into being in the last two centuries—notably the feudal

independence of the Dere Beys, and the irresponsibility of provincial

governors.

Probably Mahmud II—if he is to be credited with personal initiation of

the reforms always associated with his name—was not conscious of any

purpose more revolutionary than that of becoming master in his own

house, as his ancestors had been. What he ultimately accomplished,

however, was something of much greater and more lasting moment to the

Osmanli state. It was nothing less than the elimination of the most

Byzantine features in its constitution and government. The substitution

of national forces for mercenary praetorians: the substitution of

direct imperial government of the provinces for devolution to

seigneurs, tribal chiefs, and irresponsible officers: the substitution

of direct collection for tax-farming: and the substitution of

administration by bureaucrats for administration by household

officers—these, the chief reforms carried through under Mahmud, were

all anti-Byzantine. They did not cause the Osmanli state to be born

anew, but, at least, they went far to purge it of original sin.

That Mahmud and his advisers could carry through such reforms at all in

so old a body politic is remarkable: that they carried them through

amid the events of his reign is almost miraculous. One affront after

another was put on the Sultan, one blow after another was struck at his

empire. Inspired by echoes of the French Revolution and by Napoleon’s

recognition of the rights of nationalities, first the Serbs and then

the Greeks seized moments of Ottoman disorder to rise in revolt against

their local lords. The first, who had risen under Selim III, achieved,

under Mahmud, autonomy, but not independence, nothing remaining to the

sultan as before except the fortress of Belgrade with five other

strongholds. The second, who began with no higher hopes than the Serbs,

were encouraged, by the better acquaintance and keener sympathy of

Europe, to fight their way out to complete freedom. The Morea and

central Greece passed out of the empire, the first provinces so to pass

since the Osmanli loss of Hungary. Yet it was in the middle of that

fatal struggle that Mahmud settled for ever with the Janissaries, and

during all its course he was settling one after another with the Dere

Beys!

When he had thus sacrificed the flower of his professional troops and

had hardly had time to replace the local governments of the provinces

by anything much better than general anarchy, he found himself faced by

a Russian assault. His raw levies fought as no other raw levies than

the Turkish can, and, helped by manifestations of jealousy by the other

powers, staved off the capture of Constantinople, which, at one moment,

seemed about to take place at last. But he had to accept humiliating

terms, amounting virtually, to a cession of the Black Sea. Mahmud

recognized that such a price he must pay for crossing the broad stream

between Byzantinism and Nationalism, and kept on his way.

Finally came a blow at the hands of one of his own household and creed.

Mehemet Ali of Egypt, who had faithfully fought his sovereign’s battles

in Arabia and the Morea, held his services ill requited and his claim

to be increased beyond other pashas ignored, and proceeded to take what

had not been granted. He went farther than he had intended—more than

half-way across Asia Minor—after the imperial armies had suffered three

signal defeats, before he extorted what he had desired at first: and in

the end, after very brief enjoyment, he had to resign all again to the

mandate, not of his sovereign, but of certain European powers who

commanded his seas. Mahmud, however, who lived neither to see himself

saved by the _giaur_ fleets, nor even to hear of his latest defeat, had

gone forward with the reorganization of the central and provincial

administration, undismayed by Mehemet Ali’s contumacy or the insistence

of Russia at the gate of the Bosphorus.

As news arrived from time to time in the west of Mahmud’s disasters, it

was customary to prophesy the imminent dissolution of his empire. We,

however, looking backward now, can see that by its losses the Osmanli

state in reality grew stronger. Each of its humiliations pledged some

power or group of powers more deeply to support it: and before Mahmud

died, he had reason to believe that, so long as the European Concert

should ensue the Balance of Power, his dynasty would not be expelled

from Constantinople. His belief has been justified. At every fresh

crisis of Ottoman fortunes, and especially after every fresh Russian

attack, foreign protection has unfailingly been extended to his

successors.

It was not, however, only in virtue of the increasing solicitude of the

powers on its behalf that during the nineteenth century the empire was

growing and would grow stronger, but also in virtue of certain assets

within itself. First among these ranked the resources of its Asiatic

territories, which, as the European lands diminished, became more and

more nearly identified with the empire. When, having got rid of the old

army, Mahmud imposed service on all his Moslem subjects, in theory, but

in effect only on the Osmanlis (not the Arabs, Kurds, or other half

assimilated nomads and hillmen), it meant more than a similar measure

would have meant in a Christian empire. For, the life of Islam being

war, military service binds Moslems together and to their chiefs as it

binds men under no other dispensation; therefore Mahmud, so far as he

was able to enforce his decree, created not merely a national army but

a nation. His success was most immediate and complete in Anatolia, the

homeland of the Osmanlis. There, however, it was attained only by the

previous reduction of those feudal families which, for many

generations, had arrogated to themselves the levying and control of

local forces. Hence, as in Constantinople with the Janissaries, so in

the provinces with the Dere Beys, destruction of a drastic order had to

precede construction, and more of Mahmud’s reign had to be devoted to

the former than remained for the latter.

He did, however, live to see not only the germ of a nation emerge from

chaos, but also the framework of an organization for governing it well

or ill. The centralized bureaucracy which he succeeded in initiating

was, of course, wretchedly imperfect both in constitution and

equipment. But it promised to promote the end he had in view and no

other, inasmuch as, being the only existent machine of government, it

derived any effective power it had from himself alone. Dependent on

Stambul, it served to turn thither the eyes and prayers of the

provincials. The naturally submissive and peaceful population of Asia

Minor quickly accustomed itself to look beyond the dismantled

strongholds of its fallen beys. As for the rest— contumacious and

bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian steppes—their

hour of surrender was yet to come.

The eventual product of Mahmud’s persistency was the ‘Turkey’ we have

seen in our own time—that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under

a semi-European system of administration, which has governed

despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with

slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by

little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its

weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none

the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully

but surely getting its grip, and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and

Kurdish beys, first in the Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the

mountains of Armenia, finally in the wildest Alps of the Persian

borderland. We have marked its stealthy movement into the steppes and

deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia— now drawn back, now pushed

farther till it has reached and held regions over which Mahmud could

claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge how far the shrinkage

of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its

Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as

it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our

own time.

It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed

and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself

after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the

Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter

must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the

former. What can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer

this question at the present juncture, since those springs, if they

existed a hundred years ago, can hardly now be dry.

In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as

Islam acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast

majority of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the

European empire, in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah,

whatever might be felt about his government. Thus had it acted with

special efficacy in Asia Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors,

unlike the Greek, had always been at some pains to attach to

themselves. The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support

from the population of his empire’s heart, and had at his disposal the

resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or

malign, has ever been able to exhaust.

In the second place the Osmanli ‘Turks’, however fallen away from the

virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either ‘the will to power’ or

their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never

succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how

to rule as soldiers.

In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but

valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its

pretension to religious influence throughout a much larger area than

its proper dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was

in great measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign’s actual

position.

In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty

the Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong

unexhausted elements, especially in Anatolia. There are few more

vigorous and enduring peoples than the peasants of the central plateau

of Asia Minor, north, east, and south. With this rock of defence to

stand upon, the sultan could draw also on the strength of other more

distant races, less firmly attached to himself, but not less vigorous,

such, for example, as the Albanians of his European mountains and the

Kurds of his Asiatic. However decadent might be the Turco-Grecian

Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the lion’s share of office), those

other elements had suffered no decline in physical or mental

development. Indeed, one cannot be among them now without feeling that

their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the most part, yet to

be.

Such were latent assets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly

by the prophets of its dissolution. Thanks to them, that empire

continued not only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century

but, in some measure, to consolidate itself. Even when the protective

fence, set up by European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia

several times—in 1829, in 1854, and in 1877—the nation, which Mahmud

had made, always proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the

enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to

its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms

consistent with its continued existence. It was an existence, of

course, of sufferance, but one which grew better assured the longer it

lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was

administered, the stronger became its international guarantee. No

better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies.

When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government,

supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from Europe. He

became, _ipso facto_, the cherished protégé of every power whose

nationals had lent his country money.

Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud instituted, the

stage at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it

had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been

followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first

was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful

sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part

of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct

little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely

forcible—of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli

character—and partly by circumstances but more by his natural

sympathies, he had been identified from first to last with military

enterprises. Though he was known to contemplate the eventual supremacy

of civil law, and the equality of all sorts and conditions of his

subjects before it, he did nothing to open this vista to public view.

Consequently he encountered little or no factious opposition. Very few

held briefs for either the Janissaries or the Dere Beys; and fewer

regretted them when they were gone. Osmanli society identified itself

with the new army and accepted the consequent reform of the central or

provincial administration. Nothing in these changes seemed to affect

Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in the empire.

It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his

reign, promulgated an imperial decree—the famous Tanzimat or Hatti

Sherif of Gulkhaneh—which, amid many excellent and popular provisions

for the continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality

of Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the

law. The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going

temperament, had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution,

which had only just begun, could be anticipated _per saltum_, and that

he and all his subjects would live happily together ever after. His

counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good

and bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country,

involved in potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar

Skelessi (1833), and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha’s victory at

Nizib; and they looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian

mess. Partly also Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who

set more store by ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed,

than by the evidence of facts. There were then, as since, ‘young men in

a hurry’ among the more Europeanized Osmanlis. The net result of the

sultan’s precipitancy was to set against himself and his policy all who

wished that such it consummation of the reform process might never come

and all who knew it would never come, if snatched at thus—that is, both

the ‘Old Turks’ and the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for

the worse the spirit in which the new machine of government was being

worked and in which fresh developments of it would be accepted.

To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform.

The organization of the army into corps—the foundation of the existing

system—and the imposition of five years’ service on all subjects of the

empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly

realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also,

on the civil side, the institution of responsible councils of state and

formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education. To

his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law.

He had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative

security from external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled

in his favour by Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price

of a guarantee of hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali.

Thanks to the same support, war with Persia was avoided and war with

Russia postponed.

But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon

in the early ‘forties’, were not), proved far from content. If the form

of Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed

little, and defective communications militated against the

responsibility of officials to the centre. Money was scarce, and the

paper currency—an ill-omened device of Mahmud’s—was depreciated,

distrusted, and regarded as an imperial betrayal of confidence.

Finally, the hostility of Russia, notoriously unabated, and the

encouragement of aspiring _rayas_ credited to her and other foreign

powers made bad blood between creeds and encouraged opposition to the

execution of the pro-Christian Tanzimat. When Christian turbulence at

last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which developed into the

Crimean War, and Christian allies, though they frustrated that attack,

made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing, the latter were in

no mood to welcome the repetition of the Tanzimat, which Abdul Mejid

consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris. The reign closed amid

turbulence and humiliations—massacre and bombardment at Jidda, massacre

and Franco-British coercion in Syria—from all of which the sultan took

refuge with women and wine, to meet in 1861 a drunkard’s end.

His successor, Abdul Aziz, had much the same intentions, the same

civilian sympathies, the same policy of Europeanization, and a

different, but more fatal, weakness of character. He was, perhaps,

never wholly sane; but his aberration, at first attested only by an

exalted conviction of his divine character and inability to do wrong,

excited little attention until it began to issue in fantastic

expenditure. By an irony of history, he is the one Osmanli sultan upon

the roll of our Order of the Garter, the right to place a banner in St,

George’s Chapel having been offered to this Allah-possessed caliph on

the occasion of his visit to the West in 1867.

Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself—as sincere as can be

credited to a disordered brain—-and despite more than one minister of

outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire

went to the bad in this unhappy reign. The administration settled down

to lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption: the national army was

starved: the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue

declined and the sultan’s household and personal extravagance

increased. Encouraged by the inertia of the imperial Government, the

Christians of the European provinces waxed bold. Though Montenegro was

severely handled for contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their

penultimate stage towards freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of

the last Ottoman garrisons from their fortresses. Krete stood at bay

for three years and all but won her liberty. Bosnia rose in arms, but

divided against herself. Pregnant with graver trouble than these,

Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long sleep. In 1870 she obtained

recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman Empire, her Church being

detached from the control of the Oecumenical Patriarch of the Greeks

and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her peasantry growing ever more

restive, passed from protest to revolt against the Circassian

refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the land. The

sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose

irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they

committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His

own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high

officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active

dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein

two days later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned

three months as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same

king-makers whom his uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his

brother Abdul Hamid, a man of affairs and ability, who was to be the

most conspicuous, or rather, the most notorious Osmanli sultan since

Suleiman.

6

_Relapse_

The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in

perilous case. Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of

Europe, he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an

undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers. Should the Concert

be dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free

to foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end.

Internally it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest

stagnant and slowly rotting. The thrice-foiled claimant to its

succession, who six years before had denounced the Black Sea clause of

the Treaty of Paris and so freed its hands for offence, was manifestly

preparing a fresh assault. Something drastic must be done; but what?

This danger of the empire’s international situation, and also the

disgrace of it, had been evident for some time past to those who had

any just appreciation of affairs; and in the educated class, at any

rate, something like a public opinion, very apprehensive and very much

ashamed, had struggled into being. The discovery of a leader in Midhat

Pasha, former governor-general of Bagdad, and a king-maker of recent

notoriety, induced the party of this opinion to take precipitate

action. Murad had been deposed in August. Before the year was out

Midhat presented himself before Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for

the promulgation of a Constitution, proposing not only to put into

execution the pious hopes of the two Hatti Sherifs of Abdul Mejid but

also to limit the sovereign and govern the empire by representative

institutions. The new sultan, hardly settled on his uneasy throne,

could not deny those who had deposed his two predecessors, and,

shrewdly aware that ripe facts would not be long in getting the better

of immature ideas, accepted. A parliament was summoned; an electorate,

with only the haziest notions of what it was about, went through the

form of sending representatives to Constantinople; and the sittings

were inaugurated by a speech from the throne, framed on the most

approved Britannic model, the deputies, it is said, jostling and

crowding the while to sit, as many as possible, on the right, which

they understood was always the side of powers that be.

It is true this extemporized chamber never had a chance. The Russians

crossed the Pruth before it had done much more than verify its powers,

and the thoughts and energies of the Osmanlis were soon occupied with

the most severe and disastrous struggle in which the empire had ever

engaged. But it is equally certain that it could not have turned to

account any chance it might have had. Once more the ‘young men in a

hurry’ had snatched at the end of an evolution hardly begun, without

taking into account the immaturity of Osmanli society in political

education and political capacity. After suspension during the war, the

parliament was dissolved unregretted, and its creator was tried for his

life, and banished. In failing, however, Midhat left bad to become so

much worse that the next reformers would inevitably have a more

convinced public opinion behind them, and he had virtually destroyed

the power of Mahmud’s bureaucracy. If the only immediate effect was the

substitution of an unlimited autocracy, the Osmanli peoples would be

able thenceforward to ascribe their misfortunes to a single person,

meditate attack, on a single position, and dream of realizing some day

an ideal which had been definitely formulated.

The Russian onslaught, which began in both Europe and Asia in the

spring of 1877, had been brought on, after a fashion become customary,

by movements in the Slavonic provinces of the Ottoman Empire and in

Rumania; and the latter province, now independent in all but name and,

in defiance of Ottoman protests, disposing of a regular army, joined

the invader. In campaigns lasting a little less than a year, the

Osmanli Empire was brought nearer to passing than ever before, and it

was in a suburb of Constantinople itself that the final armistice was

arranged. But action by rival powers, both before the peace and in the

revision of it at Berlin, gave fresh assurance that the end would not

be suffered to come yet; and, moreover, through the long series of

disasters, much latent strength of the empire and its peoples had been

revealed.

When that empire had emerged, shorn of several provinces—in Europe, of

Rumania, Serbia, and northern Greece, with Bulgaria also well on the

road they had travelled to emancipation, and in Asia, of a broad slice

of Caucasia—Abdul Hamid cut his losses, and, under the new guarantee of

the Berlin Treaty, took heart to try his hand at reviving Osmanli

power. He and his advisers had their idea, the contrary of the idea of

Midhat and all the sultans since Mahmud. The empire must be made, not

more European, but more Asiatic. In the development of Islamic spirit

to pan-Islamic unity it would find new strength; and towards this end

in the early eighties, while he was yet comparatively young, with

intelligence unclouded and courage sufficient, Abdul Hamid patiently

set himself. In Asia, naturally sympathetic to autocracy, and the home

of the faith of his fathers, he set on foot a pan-Islamic propaganda.

He exalted his caliphate; he wooed the Arabs, and he plotted with

extraneous Moslems against whatever foreign government they might have

to endure.

It cannot be denied that this idea was based on the logic of facts,

and, if it could be realized, promised better than Midhat’s for escape

from shameful dependence. Indeed, Abdul Hamid, an autocrat bent on

remaining one, could hardly have acted upon any other. By far the

greater part of the territorial empire remaining to him lay in Asia.

The little left in Europe would obviously soon be reduced to less. The

Balkan lands were waking, or already awake, to a sense of separate

nationality, and what chance did the Osmanli element, less progressive

than any, stand in them? The acceptance of the Ottoman power into the

Concert of Europe, though formally notified to Abdul Mejid, had proved

an empty thing. In that galley there was no place for a sultan except

as a dependent or a slave. As an Asiatic power, however, exerting

temporal sway over some eighteen million bodies and religious influence

over many times more souls, the Osmanli caliph might command a place in

the sun.

The result belied these hopes. Abdul Hamid’s failure was owed in the

main to facts independent of his personality or statecraft. The

expansion of Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples

living in incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse

political and social conditions, has probably made any universal

caliphial authority for ever impossible. The original idea of the

caliphate, like that of the _jehad_ or holy war of the faithful,

presupposed that all Moslems were under governments of their own creed,

and, perhaps, under one government. Moreover, if such a caliph were

ever to be again, an Osmanli sultan would not be a strong candidate.

Apart from the disqualification of his blood, he being not of the

Prophet’s tribe nor even an Arab, he is lord of a state irretrievably

compromised in purist eyes (as Wahabis and Senussis have testified once

and again) by its Byzantine heritage of necessary relations with

infidels. Abdul Hamid’s predecessors for two centuries or more had been

at no pains to infuse reality into their nominal leadership of the

faithful. To call a real caliphate out of so long abeyance could hardly

have been effected even by a bold soldier, who appealed to the general

imagination of Moslems; and certainly was beyond the power of a timid

civilian.

When Abdul Hamid had played this card and failed, he had no other; and

his natural pusillanimity and shiftiness induced him to withdraw ever

more into the depths of his palace, and there use his intelligence in

exploiting this shameful dependence of his country on foreign powers.

Unable or unwilling to encourage national resistance, he consoled

himself, as a weak malcontent will, by setting one power against

another, pin-pricking the stronger and blustering to the weaker. The

history of his reign is a long record of protests and surrenders to the

great in big matters, as to Great Britain in the matter of Egypt in

1881, to Russia in that of Eastern Rumelia in 1885, to France on the

question of the Constantinople quays and other claims, and to all the

powers in 1881 in the matter of the financial control. Between times he

put in such pin-pricks as he could, removing his neighbours’ landmarks

in the Aden _hinterland_ or the Sinaitic peninsula. He succeeded,

however, in keeping his empire out of a foreign war with any power for

about thirty years, with the single exception of a brief conflict with

Greece in 1897. While in the first half of his reign he was at pains to

make no European friend, in the latter he fell more and more under the

influence of Germany, which, almost from the accession of Kaiser

Wilhelm II, began to prepare a southward way for future use, and alone

of the powers, never browbeat the sultan.

Internally, the empire passed more and more under the government of the

imperial household. Defeated by the sheer geographical difficulty of

controlling directly an area so vast and inadequately equipped with

means of communication, Abdul Hamid soon relaxed the spasmodic efforts

of his early years to better the condition of his subjects; and,

uncontrolled and demoralized by the national disgrace, the

administration went from bad to much worse. Ministers irresponsible;

officials without sense of public obligation; venality in all ranks;

universal suspicion and delation; violent remedies, such as the

Armenian massacres of 1894, for diseases due to neglect; the peasantry,

whether Moslem or Christian, but especially Christian, forced

ultimately to liquidate all accounts; impoverishment of the whole

empire by the improvidence and oppression of the central power— such

phrasing of the conventional results of ‘Palace’ government expresses

inadequately the fruits of Yildiz under Abdul Hamid II.

_Pari passu_ with this disorder of central and provincial

administration increased the foreign encroachments on the empire. The

nation saw not only rapid multiplication of concessions and

hypothecations to aliens, and of alien persons themselves installed in

its midst under extra-territorial immunity from its laws, secured by

the capitulations, but also whole provinces sequestered, administered

independently of the sultan’s government, and prepared for eventual

alienation. Egypt, Tunisia, Eastern Rumelia, Krete—these had all been

withdrawn from Ottoman control since the Berlin settlement, and now

Macedonia seemed to be going the same way. Bitter to swallow as the

other losses had been—pills thinly sugared with a guarantee of

suzerainty—the loss of Macedonia would be more bitter still; for, if it

were withdrawn from Ottoman use and profit, Albania would follow and so

would the command of the north Aegean and the Adriatic shores; while an

ancient Moslem population would remain at Christian mercy.

It was partly Ottoman fault, partly the fault of circumstances beyond

Ottoman control, that this district had become a scandal and a

reproach. In the days of Osmanli greatness Macedonia had been neglected

in favour of provinces to the north, which were richer and more nearly

related to the ways into central Europe. When more attention began to

be paid to it by the Government, it had already become a cockpit for

the new-born Christian nationalities, which had been developed on the

north, east, and south. These were using every weapon, material and

spiritual, to secure preponderance in its society, and had created

chronic disorder which the Ottoman administration now weakly encouraged

to save itself trouble, now violently dragooned. Already the powers had

not only proposed autonomy for it, but begun to control its police and

its finance. This was the last straw. The public opinion which had

slowly been forming for thirty years gained the army, and Midhat’s seed

came to fruit.

By an irony of fate Macedonia not only supplied the spectacle which

exasperated the army to revolt, but by its very disorder made the

preparation of that revolt possible; for it was due to local

limitations of Ottoman sovereignty that the chief promoters of

revolution were able to conspire in safety. By another irony, two of

the few progressive measures ever encouraged by Abdul Hamid contributed

to his undoing. If he had not sent young officers to be trained abroad,

the army, the one Ottoman institution never allowed wholly to decay,

would have remained outside the conspiracy. If he had never promoted

the construction of railways, as he began to do after 1897, the

Salonika army could have had no such influence on affairs in

Constantinople as it exerted in 1908 and again in 1909. As it was, the

sultan, at a mandate from Resna in Macedonia, re-enacted Midhat’s

Constitution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive to

uphold that Constitution against the reaction he had fostered, and to

send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come.

7

_Revolution_

Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences,

we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for

humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ programme which its authors put forward

(a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted,

and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express

the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course. The essence

of that movement was militant nationalism. The empire was to be

regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it. The Osmanli,

the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to

be of the nation, were to conform. Such as did not so wish must be

eliminated by the rest.

The revolutionary Committee in Salonika, called ‘of Union and

Progress’, held up its cards at first, but by 1910 events had forced

its hand on the table. The definite annexation of Bosnia and

Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the declaration of

independence and assumption of the title Tsar by the ruler of Bulgaria,

since they were the price to be paid by the revolutionaries for a

success largely made in Germany, were opposed officially only _pro

forma_; but when uninformed opinion in the empire was exasperated

thereby against Christendom, the Committee, to appease reactionaries,

had to give premature proof of pan-Osmanli and pro-Moslem intentions by

taking drastic action against _rayas_. The Greeks of the empire, never

without suspicions, had failed to testify the same enthusiasm for

Ottoman fraternity which others, e.g. the Armenians, had shown; now

they resumed their separatist attitude, and made it clear that they

still aspired, not to Ottoman, but to Hellenic nationality. Nor were

even the Moslems of the empire unanimous for fraternity among

themselves. The Arab-speaking societies complained of

under-representation in the councils and offices of the state, and made

no secret of their intention not to be assimilated by the Turk-speaking

Osmanlis. To all suggestions, however, of local home-rule and

conciliation of particularist societies in the empire, the Committee

was deaf. Without union, it believed in no progress, and by union it

understood the assimilation of all societies in the empire to the

Osmanli.

Logic was on the side of the Committee in its choice of both end and

means. In pan-Ottomanism, if it could be effected, lay certainly the

single chance of restoring Osmanli independence and power to anything

like the position they had once held. In rule by a militarist oligarchy

for some generations to come, lay the one hope of realizing the

pan-Ottoman idea and educating the resultant nation to self-government.

That end, however, it was impossible to realize under the circumstances

in which past history had involved the Ottoman Empire. There was too

much bad blood between different elements of its society which Osmanli

rulers had been labouring for centuries rather to keep apart than to

unite; and certain important elements, both Moslem and Christian, had

already developed too mature ideas of separate nationality. With all

its defects, however, the new order did undoubtedly rest on a wider

basis than the old, and its organization was better conceived and

executed. It retained some of the sympathy of Europe which its

beginnings had excited, and the western powers, regarding its

representative institutions as earnests of good government, however ill

they might work at the first, were disposed to give it every chance.

Unfortunately the Young Turks were in a hurry to bring on their

millennium, and careless of certain neighbouring powers, not formidable

individually but to be reckoned with if united, to whom the prospect of

regenerated Osmanlis assimilating their nationals could not be welcome.

Had the Young Turks been content to put their policy of Ottomanization

in the background for awhile, had they made no more than a show of

accepting local distinctions of creed and politics, keeping in the

meantime a tight rein on the Old Turks, they might long have avoided

the union of those neighbours, and been in a better position to resist,

should that union eventually be arrayed against themselves.

But a considerable and energetic element among them belonged to the

nervous Levantine type of Osmanli, which is as little minded to

compromise as any Old Turk, though from a different motive. It elected

to deal drastically and at once with Macedonia, the peculiar object not

only of European solicitude but also of the interest of Bulgaria,

Serbia, and Greece. If ever a province required delicate handling it

was this. It did not get it. The interested neighbours, each beset by

fugitives of its oppressed nationals, protested only to be ignored or

browbeaten. They drew towards one another; old feuds and jealousies

were put on one side; and at last, in the summer of 1912, a Holy League

of Balkan States, inspired by Venezelos, the new Kretan Prime Minister

of Greece, and by Ferdinand of Bulgaria, was formed with a view to

common action against the oppressor of Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian

nationals in Macedonia. Montenegro, always spoiling for a fight, was

deputed to fire the train, and at the approach of autumn the first

Balkan war blazed up.

8

_Balkan War_

The course of the struggle is described elsewhere in this volume. Its

event illustrates the danger of an alliance succeeding beyond the

expectations in which it was formed. The constituent powers had looked

for a stiff struggle with the Ottoman armies, but for final success

sufficient to enable them, at the best, to divide Macedonia among

themselves, at the worst, to secure its autonomy under international

guarantee. Neither they nor any one else expected such an Ottoman

collapse as was in store. Their moment of attack was better chosen than

they knew. The Osmanli War Office was caught fairly in the middle of

the stream. Fighting during the revolution, subsequently against

Albanians and other recalcitrant provincials, and latterly against the

Italians, who had snatched at Tripoli the year before, had reduced the

_Nizam_, the first line of troops, far below strength. The _Redif_, the

second line, had received hardly more training, thanks to the

disorganization of Abdul Hamid’s last years and of the first years of

the new order, than the _Mustafuz_, the third and last line. Armament,

auxiliary services, and the like had been disorganized preparatory to a

scheme for thorough reorganization, which had been carried, as yet, but

a very little way. A foreign (German) element, introduced into the

command, had had time to impair the old spirit of Ottoman soldiers, but

not to create a new one. The armies sent against the Bulgarians in

Thrace were so many mobs of various arms; those which met the Serbs, a

little better; those which opposed the Greeks, a little worse.

It followed that the Bulgarians, who had proposed to do no more in

Thrace than block Adrianople and immobilize the Constantinople forces,

were carried by their own momentum right down to Chataldja, and there

and at Adrianople had to prosecute siege operations when they ought to

have been marching to Kavala and Salonika. The Serbs, after hard

fighting, broke through not only into Macedonia but into Albania, and

reached the Adriatic, but warned off this by the powers, consoled

themselves with the occupation of much more Macedonian territory than

the concerted plans of the allies had foreseen. The Greeks, instead of

hard contests for the Haliacmon Valley and Epirus—their proper

Irredenta—pushed such weak forces before them that they got through to

Salonika just in time to forestall a Bulgarian column. Ottoman collapse

was complete everywhere, except on the Chataldja front. It remained to

divide the spoil. Serbia might not have Adriatic Albania, and therefore

wanted as much Macedonia as she had actually overrun. Greece wanted the

rest of Macedonia and had virtually got it. Remained Bulgaria who, with

more of Thrace than she wanted, found herself almost entirely crowded

out of Macedonia, the common objective of all.

Faced with division _ex post facto_, the allies found their _a priori_

agreement would not resolve the situation. Bulgaria, the predominant

partner and the most aggrieved, would neither recognize the others’

rights of possession nor honestly submit her claims to the only

possible arbiter, the Tsar of Russia. Finding herself one against two,

she tried a _coup de main_ on both fronts, failed, and brought on a

second Balkan war, in which a new determining factor, Rumania,

intervened at a critical moment to decide the issue against her. The

Ottoman armies recovered nearly all they had lost in eastern and

central Thrace, including Adrianople, almost without firing a shot, and

were not ill pleased to be quit of a desperate situation at the price

of Macedonia, Albania, and western Thrace.

Defeated and impoverished, the Ottoman power came out of the war

clinging to a mere remnant of its European empire—one single mutilated

province which did not pay its way. With the lost territories had gone

about one-eighth of the whole population and one-tenth of the total

imperial revenue. But when these heavy losses had been cut, there was

nothing more of a serious nature to put to debit, but a little even to

credit. Ottoman prestige had suffered but slightly in the eyes of the

people. The obstinate and successful defence of the Chataldja lines and

the subsequent recovery of eastern Thrace with Adrianople, the first

European seat of the Osmanlis, had almost effaced the sense of Osmanli

disgrace, and stood to the general credit of the Committee and the

individual credit of its military leader, Enver Bey. The loss of some

thousands of soldiers and much material was compensated by an

invaluable lesson in the faultiness of the military system, and

especially the _Redif_ organization. The way was now clearer than

before for re-making the army on the best European model, the German.

The campaign had not been long, nor, as wars go, costly to wage. In the

peace Turkey gained a new lease of life from the powers, and,

profligate that she was, the promise of more millions of foreign money.

Over and above all this an advantage, which she rated above

international guarantees, was secured to her—the prospective support of

the strongest military power in Europe. The success of Serbia so

menaced Germano-Austrian plans for the penetration of the Balkans, that

the Central Powers were bound to woo Turkey even more lavishly than

before, and to seek alliance where they had been content with

influence. In a strong Turkey resided all their hope of saving from the

Slavs the way to the Mediterranean. They had kept this policy in view

for more than twenty years, and in a hundred ways, by introduction of

Germans into the military organization, promotion of German financial

enterprise, pushing of German commerce, pressure on behalf of German

concessions which would entail provincial influence (for example, the

construction of a transcontinental railway in Asia), those powers had

been manifesting their interest in Turkey with ever-increasing

solicitude. Now they must attach her to themselves with hoops of steel

and, with her help, as soon as might be, try to recast the Balkan

situation.

The experience of the recent war and the prospect in the future made

continuance and accentuation of military government in the Ottoman

Empire inevitable. The Committee, which had made its way back to power

by violent methods, now suppressed its own Constitution almost as

completely as Abdul Hamid had suppressed Midhat’s parliament.

Re-organization of the military personnel, accumulation of war

material, strengthening of defences, provision of arsenals, dockyards,

and ships, together with devices for obtaining money to pay for all

these things, make Ottoman history for the years 1912-14. The bond with

Germany was drawn lighter. More German instructors were invited, more

German engineers commissioned, more munitions of war paid for in French

gold. By 1914 it had become so evident that the Osmanlis must array

themselves with Austro-Germany in any European war, that one wonders

why a moment’s credit was ever given to their protestations of

neutrality when that war came at last in August 1914. Turkey then

needed other three months to complete her first line of defences and

mobilize. These were allowed to her, and in the late autumn she entered

the field against Great Britain, France, and Russia, armed with German

guns, led by German officers, and fed with German gold.

9

_The Future_

Turkey’s situation, therefore, in general terms has become this. With

the dissolution of the Concert of Europe the Ottoman Empire has lost

what had been for a century its chief security for continued existence.

Its fate now depends on that of two European powers which are at war

with the rest of the former Concert. Among the last named are Turkey’s

two principal creditors, holding together about seventy-five per cent.

of her public debt. In the event of the defeat of her friends, these

creditors will be free to foreclose, the debtor being certainly in no

position to meet her obligations. Allied with Christian powers, the

Osmanli caliph has proved no more able than his predecessors to unite

Islam in his defence; but, for what his title is worth, Mohammed V is

still caliph, no rival claim having been put forward. The loyalty of

the empire remains where it was, pending victory or defeat, the

provinces being slow to realize, and still slower to resent, the

disastrous economic state to which the war is reducing them.

The present struggle may leave the Osmanli Empire in one of three

situations: (1) member of a victorious alliance, reinforced, enlarged,

and lightened of financial burdens, as the wages of its sin; (2) member

of a defeated alliance, bound to pay the price of blood in loss of

territory, or independence, or even existence; (3) party to a

compromise under which its territorial empire might conceivably remain

Ottoman, but under even stricter European tutelage than of old.

The first alternative it would be idle to discuss, for the result of

conditions so novel are impossible to foresee. Nor, indeed, when

immediate events are so doubtful an at the present moment, is it

profitable to attempt to forecast the ultimate result of any of the

alternatives. Should, however, either the second or the third become

fact, certain general truths about the Osmanlis will govern the

consequences; and these must be borne in mind by any in whose hands the

disposal of the empire may lie.

The influence of the Osmanlis in their empire to-day resides in three

things: first, in their possession of Constantinople; second, in the

sultan’s caliphate and his guardianship of the holy cities of Islam;

third, in certain qualities of Osmanli character, notably ‘will to

power’ and courage in the field.

What Constantinople means for the Osmanlis is implied in that name

_Roum_ by which the western dominions of the Turks have been known ever

since the Seljuks won Asia Minor. Apart from the prestige of their own

early conquests, the Osmanlis inherited, and in a measure retain in the

Near East, the traditional prestige of the greatest empire which ever

held it. They stand not only for their own past but also for whatever

still lives of the prestige of Rome. Theirs is still the repute of the

imperial people _par excellence_, chosen and called to rule.

That this repute should continue, after the sweeping victories of

Semites and subsequent centuries of Ottoman retreat before other heirs

of Rome, is a paradox to be explained only by the fact that a large

part of the population of the Near East remains at this day in about

the same stage of civilization and knowledge as in the time of, say,

Heraclius. The Osmanlis, be it remembered, were and are foreigners in a

great part of their Asiatic empire equally with the Greeks of Byzantium

or the Romans of Italy; and their establishment in Constantinople

nearly five centuries ago did not mean to the indigenous peoples of the

Near East what it meant to Europe—a victory of the East over the

West—so much as a continuation of immemorial ‘Roman’ dominion still

exercised from the same imperial centre. Since Rome first spread its

shadow over the Near East, many men of many races, whose variety was

imperfectly realised, if realised at all, by the peasants of Asia

Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, have ruled in its name; the

Osmanlis, whose governmental system was in part the Byzantine, made but

one more change which meant the same old thing. The peasants know, of

course, about those Semitic victories; but they know also that if the

Semite has had his day of triumph and imposed, as was right and proper,

his God and his Prophet on Roum—even on all mankind as many believed,

and some may be found in remoter regions who still believe—he has

returned to his own place south of Taurus; and still Roum is Roum,

natural indefeasible Lord of the World.

Such a belief is dying now, of course; but it dies slowly and hard. It

still constitutes a real asset of the Osmanlis, and will not cease to

have value until they lose Constantinople. On the possession of the old

imperial city it depends for whatever vitality it has. You may

demonstrate, as you will, and as many publicists have done since the

Balkan War and before, what and how great economic, political, and

social advantages would accrue to the Osmanlis, if they could bring

themselves to transfer their capital to Asia. Here they would be rid of

Rumelia, which costs, and will always cost them, more than it yields.

Here they could concentrate Moslems where their co-religionists are

already the great majority, and so have done with the everlasting

friction and weakness entailed in jurisdiction over preponderant

Christian elements. Here they might throw off the remnants of their

Byzantinism as a garment and, no longer forced to face two ways, live

and govern with single minds as the Asiatics they are.

Vain illusion, as Osmanli imperialists know! It is their empire that

would fall away as a garment so soon as the Near East realized that

they no longer ruled in the Imperial City. Enver Pasha and the

Committee were amply justified in straining the resources of the

Ottoman Empire to cracking-point, not merely to retain Constantinople

but also to recover Adrianople and a territory in Europe large enough

to bulk as Roum. Nothing that happened in that war made so greatly for

the continuation of the old order in Asiatic Turkey as the reoccupation

of Adrianople. The one occasion on which Europeans in Syria had reason

to expect a general explosion was when premature rumours of the entry

of the Bulgarian army into Stambul gained currency for a few hours.

That explosion, had the news proved true or not been contradicted in

time, would have been a panic-stricken, ungovernable impulse of

anarchy—of men conscious that an old world had passed away and ignorant

what conceivable new world could come to be.

But the perilous moment passed, to be succeeded by general diffusion of

a belief that the inevitable catastrophe was only postponed. In the

breathing-time allowed, Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians discussed and

planned together revolt from the moribund Osmanli, and, separately, the

mutual massacre and plundering of one another. Arab national

organizations and nationalist journals sprang to life at Beirut and

elsewhere. The revival of Arab empire was talked of, and names of

possible capitals and kings were bandied about. One Arab province, the

Hasa, actually broke away. Then men began to say that the Bulgarians

would not advance beyond Chataldja: the Balkan States were at war among

themselves: finally, Adrianople had been re-occupied. And all was as in

the beginning. Budding life withered in the Arab movement, and the Near

East settled down once more in the persistent shadow of Roum.

Such is the first element in Osmanli prestige, doomed to disappear the

moment that the Ottoman state relinquishes Europe. Meanwhile there it

is for what it is worth; and it is actually worth a tradition of

submission, natural and honourable, to a race of superior destiny,

which is instinctive in some millions of savage simple hearts.

What of the second element? The religious prestige of the Ottoman power

as the repository of caliphial authority and trustee for Islam in the

Holy Land of Arabia, is an asset almost impossible to estimate. Would a

death struggle of the Osmanlis in Europe rouse the Sunni world? Would

the Moslems of India, Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, and Malaya take up

arms for the Ottoman sultan as caliph? Nothing but the event will prove

that they would. Jehad, or Holy War, is an obsolescent weapon difficult

and dangerous for Young Turks to wield: difficult because their own

Islamic sincerity is suspect and they are taking the field now as

clients of _giaur_ peoples; dangerous because the Ottoman nation itself

includes numerous Christian elements, indispensable to its economy.

Undoubtedly, however, the Ottoman sultanate can count on its religious

prestige appealing widely, overriding counteracting sentiments, and, if

it rouses to action, rousing the most dangerous temper of all. It is

futile to ignore the caliph because he is not of the Koreish, and owes

his dignity to a sixteenth-century transfer. These facts are either

unknown or not borne in mind by half the Sunnites on whom he might

call, and weigh far less with the other half than his hereditary

dominion over the Holy Cities, sanctioned by the prescription of nearly

four centuries.

One thing can be foretold with certainty. The religious prestige of an

Ottoman sultan, who had definitely lost control of the Holy Places,

would cease as quickly and utterly as the secular prestige of one who

had evacuated Constantinople: and since the loss of the latter would

probably precipitate an Arab revolt, and cut off the Hejaz, the

religious element in Ottoman prestige may be said to depend on

Constantinople as much as the secular. All the more reason why the

Committee of Union and Progress should not have accepted that

well-meant advice of European publicists! A successful revolt of the

Arab-speaking provinces would indeed sound the death-knell of the

Ottoman Empire. No other event would be so immediately and surely

catastrophic.

The third element in Osmanli prestige, inherent qualities of the

Osmanli ‘Turk’ himself, will be admitted by every one who knows him and

his history. To say that he has the ‘will to power’ is not, however, to

say that he has an aptitude for government. He wishes to govern others;

his will to do so imposes itself on peoples who have not the same will;

they give way to him and he governs them indifferently, though often

better than they can govern themselves. For example, bad as, according

to our standards, Turkish government is, native Arab government, when

not in tutelage to Europeans, has generally proved itself worse, when

tried in the Ottoman area in modern times. Where it is of a purely

Bedawi barbaric type, as in the emirates of central Arabia, it does

well enough; but if the population be contaminated ever so little with

non-Arab elements, practices, or ideas, Arab administration seems

incapable of producing effective government. It has had chances in the

Holy Cities at intervals, and for longer periods in the Yemen. But a

European, long resident in the latter country, who has groaned under

Turkish administration, where it has always been most oppressive, bore

witness that the rule of the native Imam only served to replace

oppressive government by oppressive anarchy.

As for the Osmanli’s courage as a fighting man, that has often been

exemplified, and never better than in the Gallipoli peninsula. It is

admitted. The European and Anatolian Osmanlis yield little one to the

other in this virtue; but the palm, if awarded at all, must be given to

the levies from northern and central Asia Minor.

If Constantinople should be lost, the Arab-speaking parts of the empire

would in all likelihood break away, carrying the Holy Cities with them.

When the constant risk of this consummation, with the cataclysmic

nature of its consequences is considered, one marvels why the

Committee, which has shown no mean understanding of some conditions

essential to Osmanli empire, should have done so little hitherto to

conciliate Arab susceptibilities. Neither in the constitution of the

parliament nor in the higher commands of the army have the

Arab-speaking peoples been given anything like their fair share; and

loudly and insistently have they protested. Perhaps the Committee,

whose leading members are of a markedly Europeanized type, understands

Asia less well than Europe. Certainly its programme of Ottomanization,

elaborated by military ex-attachés, by Jew bankers and officials from

Salonika, and by doctors, lawyers, and other _intellectuels_ fresh from

Paris, was conceived on lines which offered the pure Asiatic very

little scope. The free and equal Osmanlis were all to take their cue

from men of the Byzantine sort which the European provinces, and

especially the city of Constantinople, breed. After the revolution,

nothing in Turkey struck one so much as the apparition on the top of

things everywhere of a type of Osmanli who has the characteristic

qualities of the Levantine Greek. Young officers, controlling their

elders, only needed a change of uniform to pass in an Athenian crowd.

Spare and dapper officials, presiding in seats of authority over Kurds

and Arabs, reminded one of Greek journalists. Osmanli journalists

themselves treated one to rhodomontades punctuated with restless

gesticulation, which revived memories of Athenian cafés in war-time. It

was the Byzantine triumphing over the Asiatic; and the most Asiatic

elements in the empire were the least likely to meet with the

appreciation or sympathy of the Byzantines.

Are the Arab-speaking peoples, therefore, likely to revolt, or be

successful in splitting the Ottoman Empire, if they do? The present

writer would like to say, in parenthesis, that, in his opinion, this

consummation of the empire is not devoutly to be wished. The

substitution of Arab administration for Osmanli would necessarily

entail European tutelage of the parts of the Arab-speaking area in

which powers, like ourselves, have vital interests—Syria, for example,

southern Mesopotamia, and, probably, Hejaz. The last named, in

particular, would involve us in so ticklish and thankless a task, that

one can only be thankful for the Turkish caretaker there to-day, and

loth to see him dismissed.

An Arab revolt, however, might break out whether the Triple Entente

desired its success or not. What chance of success would it have? The

peoples of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire are a congeries of

differing races, creeds, sects, and social systems, with no common bond

except language. The physical character of their land compels a good

third of them to be nomadic, predatory barbarians, feared by the other

two-thirds. The settled folk are divided into Moslem and Christian (not

to mention a large Jewish element), the cleavage being more abrupt than

in western Turkey and the tradition and actual spirit of mutual enmity

more separative. Further, each of those main creed-divisions is

subdivided. Even Islam in this region includes a number of incompatible

sects, such as the Ansariye, the Metawali, and the Druses in the Syrian

mountains, Shiite Arabs on the Gulf coast and the Persian border, with

pagan Kurds and Yezidis in the latter region and north Mesopotamia. As

for the Christians, their divisions are notorious, most of these being

subdivided again into two or more hostile communions apiece. It is

almost impossible to imagine the inhabitants of Syria concerting a

common plan or taking common action. The only elements among them which

have shown any political sense or capacity for political organization

are Christian. The Maronites of the Lebanon are most conspicuous among

these; but neither their numbers nor their traditional relations with

their neighbours qualify them to form the nucleus of a free united

Syria. The ‘Arab Movement’ up to the present has consisted in little

more than talk and journalese. It has not developed any considerable

organization to meet that stable efficient organization which the

Committee of Union and Progress has directed throughout the Ottoman

dominions.

As for the rest of the empire, Asia Minor will stand by the Osmanli

cause, even if Europe and Constantinople, and even if the Holy Places

and all the Arab-speaking provinces be lost. Its allegiance does not

depend on either the tradition of Roum or the caliphate, but on

essential unity with the Osmanli nation. Asia Minor is the nation.

There, prepared equally by Byzantine domination and by Seljukian

influence, the great mass of the people long ago identified itself

insensibly and completely with the tradition and hope of the Osmanlis.

The subsequent occupation of the Byzantine capital by the heirs of the

Byzantine system, and their still later assumption of caliphial

responsibility, were not needed to cement the union. Even a military

occupation by Russia or by another strong power would not detach

Anatolia from the Osmanli unity; for a thing cannot be detached from

itself. But, of course, that occupation might after long years cause

the unity itself to cease to be.

Such an occupation, however, would probably not be seriously resisted

or subsequently rebelled against by the Moslem majority in Asia Minor,

supposing Osmanli armaments to have been crushed. The Anatolian

population is a sober, labouring peasantry, essentially agricultural

and wedded to the soil. The levies for Yemen and Europe, which have

gone far to deplete and exhaust it of recent years, were composed of

men who fought to order and without imagination, steadily and

faithfully, as their fathers had fought. They have no lust for war, no

Arabian tradition of fighting for its own sake, and little, if any,

fanaticism. Attempts to inspire Anatolian troops with religious rage in

the Balkan War were failures. They were asked to fight in too modern a

way under too many Teutonic officers. The result illustrated a prophecy

ascribed to Ghasri Mukhtar Pasha. When German instructors were first

introduced into Turkey, he foretold that they would be the end of the

Ottoman army. No, these Anatolians desire nothing better than to follow

their plough-oxen, and live their common village life, under any master

who will let them be.

Elements of the Christian minority, however, Armenian and Greek, would

give trouble with their developed ideas of nationality and

irrepressible tendency to ‘Europize’. They would present, indeed,

problems of which at present one cannot foresee the solution. It seems

inevitable that an autonomous Armenia, like an autonomous Poland, must

be constituted ere long; but where? There is no geographical unit of

the Ottoman area in which Armenians are the majority. If they cluster

more thickly in the vilayets of Angora, Sivas, Erzerum, Kharput, and

Van, i.e. in easternmost Asia Minor, than elsewhere, and form a village

people of the soil, they are consistently a minority in any large

administrative district. Numerous, too, in the trans-Tauric vilayets of

Adana and Aleppo, the seat of their most recent independence, they are

townsmen in the main, and not an essential element of the agricultural

population. Even if a considerable proportion of the Armenians, now

dispersed through towns of western Asia Minor and in Constantinople,

could be induced to concentrate in a reconstituted Armenia (which is

doubtful, seeing how addicted they are to general commerce and what may

be called parasitic life), they could not fill out both the Greater and

the Lesser Armenias of history, in sufficient strength to overbear the

Osmanli and Kurdish elements. The widest area which might he

constituted an autonomous Armenia with good prospect of

self-sufficiency would be the present Russian province, where the

head-quarters of the national religion lie, with the addition of the

provinces of Erzerum, Van, and Kharput.

But, if Russia had brought herself to make a self-denying ordinance,

she would have to police her new Armenia very strongly for some years;

for an acute Kurdish problem would confront it, and no concentration of

nationals could be looked for from the Armenia Irredenta of Diarbekr,

Urfa, Aleppo, Aintab, Marash, Adana, Kaisariyeh, Sivas, Angora, and

Trebizond (not to mention farther and more foreign towns), until public

security was assured in what for generations has been a cockpit. The

Kurd is, of course, an Indo-European as much as the Armenian, and

rarely a true Moslem; but it would be a very long time indeed before

these facts reconciled him to the domination of the race which he has

plundered for three centuries. Most of the Osmanlis of eastern Asia

Minor are descendants of converted Armenians; but their assimilation

would be slow and doubtful. Islam, more rapidly and completely than any

other creed, extinguishes racial sympathies and groups its adherents

anew.

The Anatolian Greeks are less numerous but not less difficult to

provide for. The scattered groups of them on the plateau—in Cappadocia,

Pontus, the Konia district—and on the eastward coast-lands would offer

no serious difficulty to a lord of the interior. But those in the

western river-basins from Isbarta to the Marmora, and those on the

western and north-western littorals, are of a more advanced and

cohesive political character, imbued with nationalism, intimate with

their independent nationals, and actively interested in Hellenic

national politics. What happens at Athens has long concerned them more

than what happens at Constantinople; and with Greece occupying the

islands in the daily view of many of them, they are coming to regard

themselves more and more every day as citizens of Graecia Irredenta.

What is to be done with these? What, in particular, with Smyrna, the

second city of the Ottoman Empire and the first of ‘Magna Graecia’? Its

three and a half hundred thousand souls include the largest Greek urban

population resident in any one city. Shall it be united to Greece?

Greece herself might well hesitate. It would prove a very irksome

possession, involving her in all sorts of continental difficulties and

risks. There is no good frontier inland for such an _enclave_. It could

hardly be held without the rest of westernmost Asia, from Caria to the

Dardanelles, and in this region the great majority of the population is

Moslem of old stocks, devotedly attached both to their faith and to the

Osmanli tradition.

The present writer, however, is not among the prophets. He has but

tried to set forth what may delay and what may precipitate the collapse

of an empire, whose doom has been long foreseen, often planned,

invariably postponed; and, further, to indicate some difficulties

which, being bound to confront heirs of the Osmanlis, will be better

met the better they are understood before the final agony—If this is,

indeed, to be!