VI
For dealing with Ottoman subjects and with those who might be conquered in war, certain principles were, however, adopted by the Osmanlis in the time of Orkhan. The foremost of these was complete religious toleration. This made possible, to a large measure it explains, the development of the Osmanlis into a powerful empire.
The propagation of Islam by the sword under the early Khalifs, the sudden and unparalleled spread of the new religion from the Arabian desert to Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, until the hordes of the invaders were stopped by Charles Martel at Tours, the terrible ravages of the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean—here were the sources of the deep impression of fanaticism and cruelty that the rise of Islam and the followers of Mohammed had made upon an equally fanatical and cruel Europe. That the recrudescence of the Islamic movement under the Osmanlis was represented in the same colours by the early European writers is explicable when we consider their lack of unbiased information and their confusion of the Osmanlis with the Asiatic conquerors, such as Attila and the Huns, Djenghiz Khan and the Mongols, Timur and the Tartars. We must take into account, too, the fact that these historians wrote at a time when the Osmanlis were beginning to be perverted by fanatical Arab influences, and were a real menace to the peace of Europe. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, ‘the Turk’ was a monster of iniquity and cruelty, from whom even the distant English in the security of their island home prayed to be delivered.[139] The recent history of the Ottoman Empire has unfortunately contributed much to keep alive this impression.
In spite of the accumulated evidence which on the surface points to a contrary conclusion, the Osmanli is not and never has been a religious fanatic like the Arab Moslem.[140] He is not by nature zealous or enthusiastic, nor is he by nature cruel. Docile, tractable, gentle, in a word, lovable—this is the verdict of the traveller who has had an opportunity of knowing that portion of the Moslem population of the Ottoman Empire which is popularly called Turkish. Other influences of their religion than hatred for the Christian have prevented the Osmanlis from winning and keeping a place among the civilized peoples of the world. Whatever one may claim in abstract theory for the Koran and the whole body of Moslem teaching, its practical concrete results have been ignorance, stagnation, immorality, subserviency of womanhood, indifference, paralysis of the will, absence of incentive to altruism. These are the causes of the irremediable decay of every Mohammedan empire, of every Mohammedan people.
The government and the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire are negatively rather than positively evil. There is nothing inherently bad about the Osmanli. He is inert, and has thus failed to reach the standards set by the progress of civilization. He lacks ideals, and has thus shocked the enlightened conscience of the modern world. By the law of the survival of the fittest, he has been cast aside.
But when we compare the early Osmanlis with the Byzantines and with the other elements in the Balkan peninsula, it is the Osmanlis who must be pronounced the fittest. They were fresh, enthusiastic, uncontaminated, energetic. They had ideals: they had a goal. As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. Ideals are lost when the goal is reached. Decay sets in when the struggle for existence ceases.
Pressed on the one side by his Turkish neighbours and on the other by the danger of including in his dominions a large and unassimilated mass of Christians, Orkhan was wise enough to desist from any attempt at forcible conversion. But some modus vivendi had to be arranged. A mere raider would have massacred and destroyed, and the empire he built would not have outlived the century of its birth. Orkhan was neither raider nor invader. He lived in the country of his father and of his grandfather. Many of his lieutenants—certainly his ablest ones[141]—were descendants of the oldest stock in Asia Minor. His nation, if it was to be a nation, depended upon at least a partial assimilation of the Byzantines. As his dominions increased, it became clear that there had to be some distinction between Moslem and Christian other than a profession of faith. He must devise some reward, which would be so attractive that the Christians, especially the higher classes among them, would change their faith in order to secure its benefits. This was the problem.
Orkhan solved this problem by establishing a system of rewards for military service, and then by restricting military service to Moslems. He divided the land he had conquered among his faithful warriors, and let it be known that in future conquests a large portion of the territory won, outside of the cities, would be bestowed upon soldiers who took part in his campaigns. These lands were to be held as military fiefs. The only obligation was that of military service, which could be performed either by actually putting into the field a number of men in proportion to the land held or by paying a sum sufficient to replace the quota by hired troops. So far this was but an adaptation of the European feudal system. But it was superior to the European system in that the holdings were small and that there was through two centuries an ever-present opportunity of winning new holdings.
Except in Albania and Bosnia, where the old nobility were to preserve their lands by conversion to Islam, there were no local traditions to prevent such a scheme by necessitating the dispossession of former great landowners. The Seljuks, the Crusaders, and the Mongols in Asia Minor, the Catalans, the Bulgarians, the Serbians and the civil wars between the emperors in Macedonia and Thrace, the hangers-on of the Fourth Crusade in Thessaly, Greece, and the Aegaean Islands, had made so clean a sweep of the old aristocracy, attached to the soil, that Orkhan’s idea was feasible. Through these small holdings and through the rapid increase of conquered territory, the Ottoman sultans were able, almost from the beginning, to exercise an absolute sovereignty over their expanding dominions, and to prevent the rise of a class of nobles. The Ottoman Empire has never known an hereditary nobility. In the later conquests, the Sublime Porte sometimes granted life rights of governorship, with a tacit understanding that the succession should go to the son, to local chieftains or to large landowners. But these concessions were in regions never fully conquered, and remote from Constantinople. Those to whom these privileges were given had no part in the central government and no rank outside of their immediate locality.
In place of military service, every adult Christian paid a special head-tax, to be used for the support of the army. The Christian was exempt from military service; the Mussulman was exempt from taxes.[142] This head-tax was heavy, and so gauged as to keep the Christian, unless he lived in a city, in economic dependence upon the Moslem landowner. As a general rule, during the first century and a half of Ottoman conquest, those who held to the old faith went to the cities and large towns. The Moslem thus became, without any attempt at forcible conversion or need to massacre, the undisputed possessor of the country districts.
Aside from the onerous head-tax, there were grave inequalities for the Christian in matters of law and in intermarriage. After the fall of Constantinople, Mohammed the Conqueror gave the Christians a large measure of self-government by putting them in millets (nations) under the headship of the ecclesiastical authorities. But the inequality in the matter of intermarriage has never been done away with. A Moslem may marry a Christian woman, but a Christian is forbidden to marry a Mohammedan woman. In the earliest days, when there was neither racial nor religious antipathy and Christian and Moslem lived in close social intercourse, this law was a powerful proselytizing agency. It furnished a temptation to a change of faith which, whenever it arose, was far stronger than the temptation of lands, of power, of economic independence, or of civil equality.
The moment one professed Islam he became an Osmanli. Religion has always been the test of nationality in the Ottoman Empire.[143] The Osmanlis increased from the thousands to the millions, in Macedonia, in Thrace, and in Asia Minor. Ancestry was quickly forgotten in the midst of ever-changing conditions and the founding of a new social order. It is still a characteristic of the Osmanli that he has no surname. The most widely-read English writer of the seventeenth century on the ‘Turks’ emphasized the mixture of blood in the Osmanli, when he wrote: ‘At present the blood of the Turks is so mixed with that of all sorts of Languages and Nations, that none of them can derive his Lineage from the ancient blood of the Saracens.’[144]
A majority of the Byzantines whom Orkhan, Murad, and Bayezid conquered must have become Osmanlis. Once the change of religion was made, the development of the new race was not difficult. There was much in common between the Turk of Asia Minor and the Byzantine. An Armenian contemporary wrote of them as if they were alike.[145] The Greeks did not take to heart the new régime,[146] for the fiscal evils of the Byzantine system reconciled them in advance to a change. Nothing could be worse than that which they had suffered.[147]
Of course, the love of woman, the desire for adventure, hope of economic independence through rewards of land and removal of onerous taxes, disgust with the Byzantine administration and with the lack of support from their rulers and ecclesiastical authorities—these influences did not cause the conversion of all the Christians. In the cities, where the inequality and the inconvenience of remaining true to the old faith was minimized, and where Christianity has always been able to make itself felt and heard,[148] there was no great temptation to a change of religion. After the Osmanlis became stronger, and entered into the aggressive period of conquest, they resorted to other means to swell their numbers. The institution of the Janissaries, and the permission to enslave those whom they conquered, gave the Osmanlis more potent and immediately pressing arguments.
From the completion of the conquest of Bithynia by Orkhan, the Osmanlis can be called a distinct race with a national consciousness and a desire for expansion. They can be distinguished from the Turks of the emirates of Asia Minor and from the Byzantines. The Turk did not absorb the Greek, nor did the Greek absorb the Turk. Both had taken a new religion, and if the Turkish language was adopted, it was rather the customs and laws of the Byzantines which prevailed until the influence of the Arabs, enhanced as it was with the prestige of centuries of Islam, gained the ascendancy over Turkish and Byzantine tradition alike. But this did not occur until the Osmanlis invaded Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
It must be remembered that the Greeks were not the only element added to the Turkish stock. The adoption of the Turkish language by the Osmanlis was due not only to the fact that from the beginning it was the military and governmental language, but to its being the simplest and most vigorous medium of communication for the different peoples who became Osmanlis.
Calling the Osmanlis Turks, and regarding them as invaders upon the soil of Europe, is an historical error which has persisted so long that the Osmanlis themselves have fallen into it! They have always distinguished themselves from the Turks. This is proved by their own use of that word to describe a people as different from themselves as were the Greeks. Evliya effendi spoke of the ‘harsh language of the Turks’, and said of Turbeli Koïlik, which was conquered by Osman in 1312, ‘Though its inhabitants are Turks, it is a sweet town.’[149] Hadji Khalfa regarded the Turks as synonymous with the Tartars, and an altogether foreign race.[150]
Whether their tolerance was actuated by policy, by genuine kindly feeling, or by indifference,[151] the fact cannot be gainsaid that the Osmanlis were the first nation in modern history to lay down the principle of religious freedom as the corner-stone in the building up of their nation. During the centuries that bear the stain of unremitting persecution of the Jew and the responsibility for official support of the Inquisition, Christian and Moslem lived together in harmony under the rule of the Osmanlis. This was generally, though not universally, the case throughout the fourteenth century in the Turkish emirates of Asia Minor.[152]