XVIII
For thirty years Murad had guided the destinies of the Osmanlis with a political sagacity surpassed by no statesman of his age. It is only because we know so much more of Mohammed the Conqueror and of Soleiman the Magnificent that Murad has never received his proper place as the most remarkable and most successful statesman and warrior of the house of Osman. When we measure the difficulties which confronted him, the problems which he solved, and the results of his reign, against the deeds of his more dazzling successors, we see how easily he stands with them, if not above them. The transformation effected in his lifetime is one of the most wonderful records in all history. His conquests were to endure for five centuries, until the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878: some of them have survived the cataclysm of the recent Balkan wars.
His energy and zeal for fighting, so like his father’s, and yet put to the test of being extended over a field of action far wider than his father ever dreamed of, did not flag. He never had a disagreement with any of his generals or administrators. His system of conquest and of government, unsupported by tradition or the background of a gradual growth, fitted every condition for which it had been framed. His treatment of the Greeks showed superb skill in estimating their character. Although an infidel and enemy of Christ in the eyes of the Byzantine ecclesiastics, he handled them so much better than the popes that he won their sympathies. No more striking proof of his complete success in a problem of assimilation, at once racial as well as religious, can be found than the letter of the Orthodox patriarch written to Pope Urban VI in 1385, in which it is stated that Murad left to the Church entire liberty of action.[426] In the records of the Greek patriarchate from 1360 to 1389,[427] one does not find a single instance of complaint received of ill treatment of the priesthood by the Osmanlis.
Osman gathered around him a race, Orkhan created a state, but it was Murad who founded the empire.