3.
2. But whatever be the natural excellences of the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy with the character of the Turks," he says, "which has led me to think so highly of their moral excellence, has not given me the same favourable impression of the development of their mental powers. Their refinement is of manners and affections; there is little cultivation or activity of mind among them." This admission implies a great deal, and brings us to a fresh consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century of their political existence when Thornton and Volney lived among them, and these authors report of them as follows:—"Their buildings," says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions, bad in detail, both in taste and execution, fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius. Their cities are not decorated with public monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish." Their religion forbids them every sort of painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts cannot exist among them. They have no music but vocal; and know of no accompaniment except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe. Their singing is in a great measure recitative, with little variation of note. They have scarcely any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do not allow of anatomy. As to science, the telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are unknown, except as playthings. The compass is not universally employed in their navy, nor are its common purposes thoroughly understood. Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry, are either not known, or practised only on antiquated and exploded principles. As to their civil and criminal codes of law, these are unalterably fixed in the Koran. Their habits require very little furniture; "the whole inventory of a wealthy family," says Volney, "consists in a carpet, mats, cushions, mattresses, some small cotton clothes, copper and wooden platters for the table, a mortar, a portable mill, a little porcelain, and some plates of copper tinned. All our apparatus of tapestry, wooden bedsteads, chairs, stools, glasses, desks, bureaus, closets, buffets with their plate and table services, all our cabinet and upholstery-work are unknown." They have no clocks, though they have watches. In short, they are hardly more than dismounted Tartars still; and, if pressed by the Powers of Christendom, would be able, at very short warning, to pack up and turn their faces northward to their paternal deserts. You find in their cities barbers and mercers; saddlers and gunsmiths; bakers and confectioners; sometimes butchers; whitesmiths and ironmongers; these are pretty nearly all their trades. Their inheritance is their all; their own acquisition is nought. Their stuffs are from the classical Greeks; their dyes are the old Tyrian; their cement is of the age of the Romans; and their locks may be traced back to Solomon. They do not commonly engage either in agriculture or in commerce; of the cultivators of the soil I have said quite enough in a foregoing Lecture, and their commerce seems to be generally in the hands of Franks, Greeks, or Armenians, as formerly in the hands of the Jews.[82]
The White Huns took to commerce and diplomacy in the course of a century or two; the Saracens in a shorter time unlearned their barbarism, and became philosophers and experimentalists; what have the Turks to show to the human race for their long spell of prosperity and power?
As to their warfare, their impracticable and unprogressive temperament showed itself even in the era of their military and political ascendancy, and had much to do, as far as human causes are concerned, with their defeat at Lepanto. "The signal for engaging was no sooner given," says the writer in the "Universal History," "than the Turks with a hideous cry fell on six galeasses, which lay at anchor near a mile ahead of the confederate fleet." "With a hideous cry,"—this was the true barbarian onset; we find it in the Red Indians and the New Zealanders; and it is noticed of the Seljukians, the predecessors of the Ottomans, in their celebrated engagement with the Crusaders at Dorylæum. "With horrible howlings," says Mr. Turner, "and loud clangour of drums and trumpets, the Turks rushed on;" and you may recollect, the savage who would have murdered the Bishop of Bamberg, began with a shriek. However, as you will see directly, such an onset was as ignorant as it was savage, for it was made with a haughty and wilful blindness to the importance of firearms under their circumstances. The Turks, in the hey-day of their victories and under their most sagacious leaders, had scorned and ignored the use of the then newly invented instruments of war. In truth, they had shared the prejudice against firearms which had been in the first instance felt by the semi-barbarous chivalry of Europe. The knight-errant, as Ariosto draws and reflects him, disdained so dishonourable a means of beating a foe. He looked upon the use of gunpowder, as Mr. Thornton reminds us, as "cruel, cowardly, and murderous;" because it gave an unfair and disgraceful advantage to the feeble or the unwarlike. Such was the sentiment of the Ottomans even in the reign of their great Soliman. Shortly before the battle of Lepanto, a Dalmatian horseman rode express to Constantinople, and reported to the Divan, that 2,500 Turks had been surprised and routed by 500 musqueteers. Great was the indignation of the assembly against the unfortunate troops, of whom the messenger was one. But he was successful in his defence of himself and his companions. "Do you not hear," he said, "that we were overcome by guns? We were routed by fire, not by the enemy. It would have been otherwise, had it been a contest of courage. They took fire to their aid; fire is one of the elements; what is man that he should resist their shock?" They did not dream of the apophthegm that knowledge is power; and that we become strong by subduing nature to our will.
Accordingly, their tactics by sea was a sort of land engagement on deck, as it was with our ancestors, and with the ancients. First, they charged the adverse vessel, with a view of taking it; if that would not do, they boarded it. They fought hand to hand, and each captain might pretty much exercise his own judgment which ship to attack, as Homer's heroes chose their combatants on the field of Troy. However, the Christian galeasses at Lepanto,—for to these we must at length return,—were vessels of larger dimensions than the Ottomans had ever built; they were fortified, like castles, with heavy ordnance, and were so disposed as to cover the line of their own galleys. The consequence was, that as the Turks advanced in order of battle, these galeasses kept up a heavy and destructive fire upon them, and their barbarian energy availed them as little as their howlings. It was the triumph of civilization over brute force, as well as of faith over misbelief. "While discipline and attention to the military exercises could insure success in war, the Turks," says Thornton, "were the first of military nations. When the whole art of war was changed, and victory or defeat became matter of calculation, the rude and illiterate Turkish warriors experienced the fatal consequences of ignorance without suspecting the cause; accustomed to employ no other means than force, they sunk into despondency, when force could no longer avail."
Another half century has passed since this was written, and the Turkish power has now completed its eighth century since Togrul Beg, the first Seljukian Sultan; and what has been the fruit of so long a duration? Just about the time of Togrul Beg, flourished William, Duke of Normandy; he passed over to take possession of England; compare the England of the Conquest with the England of this day. Again, compare the Rome of Junius Brutus to the Rome of Constantine, 800 years afterwards. In each of these polities there was a continuous progression, and the end was unlike the beginning; but the Turks, except that they have gained the faculty of political union, are pretty much what they were when they crossed the Jaxartes and Oxus. Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the Greek schism also took place; now from Michael Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853, Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a longer time has passed in China of a similar political inertness: yet China has preserved at least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical science, with which they respectively passed into their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are still in the less than infancy of art, literature, philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may fairly conclude that, if they have not learned the very alphabet of science in eight hundred years, they are not likely to set to work on it in the nine hundredth.
Moreover, it is remarkable that with them, as with the ancient Medes and Persians, change of law and government is distinctly prohibited. The greatest of their Sultans, and the last of the great ten, Soliman, known in European history as the Magnificent, is called by his compatriots the Regulator, on account of the irreversible sanction which he gave to the existing administration of affairs. "The magnitude and the splendour of the military achievements of Soliman," says Mr. Thornton, "are surpassed in the judgment of his people by the wisdom of his legislation. He has acquired the name of Canuni, or institutor of rules ... on account of the order and police which he established in his Empire. He caused a compilation to be made of all the maxims and regulations of his predecessors on subjects of political and military economy. He strictly defined the duties, the powers, and the privileges of all governors, commanders, and public functionaries, He regulated the levies, the services, the equipments, and the pay of the military and maritime force of the Empire. He prescribed the mode of collecting, and of applying, the public revenue. He assigned to every officer his rank at court, in the city, and in the army; and the observance of his regulations was enforced on his successors by the sanction of his authority. The work, which his ancestors had begun, and which his care had completed, seemed to himself and his contemporaries the compendium of human wisdom. Soliman contemplated it with the fondness of a parent; and, conceiving it not to be susceptible of further improvement, he endeavoured to secure its perpetual duration." The author, after pointing out that this was done at the very time when a new hemisphere was in course of exploration, when the telescope was mapping for mankind the heavens, when the Baconian philosophy was about to convert discovery and experiment into instruments of science, printing was carrying knowledge and literature into the heart of society, and the fine arts were receiving one of their most remarkable developments, proceeds: "The institutions of Soliman placed a barrier between his subjects and future improvement. He beheld with complacency and exultation the eternal fabric which his hands had reared; and the curse denounced against pride has reduced the nation, which participated in his sentiments, to a state of inferiority to the present level of civilized men." The result is the same, though we say that Soliman only recognized and affirmed that barbarism was the law of the Ottoman power.