The Turks
The appearance and establishment of the Turks in a land which was not that of their origin follows their life as nomad tribesmen of the vast steppeland of central Asia. They were men at large upon the world’s largest continent, the northerners of the east who naturally and unconsciously went forth in quest of the greater comforts afforded by southern regions. The flatlands which gave birth to their race lie open to the frozen gales of the north. Their continental climate, icy cold or burning hot in turn, is cut off from the tempering influences prevailing behind the folds of tertiary mountain piles to the south. As the steppemen migrated southward their gradually swelling numbers imparted density to the mass they formed because expansion on the east or west was denied them. China and the Chinese, admirably sheltered by barriers of deserts and mountains, stopped their easterly extension. Christian Russia stopped them on the west, though at a heavy cost to herself, for no obstacle had been raised by nature to meet their advance. The open plain of central Asia merges insensibly into that of north Europe. That is why incidentally Russia is half Tatar today. The Asiatic was forced upon her. She sacrificed herself by absorbing him into her bosom, saving Europe thereby from this eastern scourge, but forfeiting the advantages of progress.
Fig. 58—A group of Turks who have none of the racial traits indicated by their name. The seated members in the foreground are typical inhabitants of the Anatolian plateau. The Greek type, closely resembling the Italian, appears in the background.
Cut off from east and west in this manner, the only alternative left to the Turk was to scale the plateau region of western Asia and to swarm into the avenues that led him to conquered territory where he succeeded in attaining power and organizing his undisciplined hosts into the semblance of a state. The presence of the Turk upon the land to which he conferred his Mongolian name and the very foundation of the Turkish state can in this manner be attributed to outward causes rather than to local development. It was essentially a process of transplantation. The consolidation and rise to power of the Ottoman Empire between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries were largely due to foreign conditions, for during that interval Europe was busily engaged in extirpating feudalism and the objectionable phases of medieval clerical influences from its soil.
The Turks and their name were first known to the western world in the sixth century of our era. But their invasion of Asia Minor should rather be considered as a gradual infiltration begun in prehistoric times. Hittite carvings represent, among others, a recognizable Mongoloid type of Tatar soldiers who fought as allies of the great mountain state.[222] Pig-tails, high cheek-bones and oblique eyes have been conspicuously modeled by the sculptor. Tatar migrations are thus discerned in the morning of the history of Asia Minor. The early invaders were steadily reinforced from the east by their kinsmen. The rise of the Seljuk Turks to dominance was the explosion of energy accumulated in the course of the centuries in which this movement of Altaic tribes had persisted. The consolidation of Ottoman power marked its culmination. A single tribe could never have acquired sufficient strength to establish a mighty empire had not its ranks been swollen by members of kindred groups encountered during its migration. This is what actually happened when Jenghiz Khan and Timur appeared on the stage of history. Turkish accounts describe both as fiery leaders, men who could command the adherence of the vast swarm of descendants of their kinsmen, in whose footsteps they marched. Sultan Osman, the founder of the present Turkish dynasty and reputed to be of the same caliber, likewise drew on a human legacy of centuries for the accomplishment of his designs.
Unfortunately, the Turks bear a name which is utterly void of significance. They themselves apply it to every Mohammedan inhabitant of Asia Minor without discrimination of race or origin. But for fully eight centuries they have stocked their harems with women seized from conquered populations. It is no exaggeration to say that this human tax has been levied on almost every family of the Caucasus, western Asia and the countries of the Balkan peninsula. Today the net result of this variegated intermixture is that the Tatar origin of the average Turk, so called, is entirely concealed by the mingling with Mediterranean, Armenoid-Alpine and even Nordic elements. Except in a few isolated instances the Turki type of central Asia is rarely met within Turkish boundaries. Clearly no valid claim to racial distinctiveness can be set up by the Turks.
In religion the Turk is no innovator. He has merely taken unto himself the idealism of Arabia. And yet his efficient wield of the fine edge of Mohammedan fanaticism failed to sever the ties which bind Islam to this land. Even his language is not his own. The splendor of Arabian syntax and the supple elegance of Persian style alone confer literary flavor upon it. Over 70 per cent of the words in Turkish are Arabic retained in unalloyed purity. A scant sprinkling of Tatar words merely recalls by their sound the raucous articulations which form the nomad’s speech, while their paucity is a true measure of the limited range of concepts which find lodgment in his mind.
Turkish nationality is equally meaningless. The descendants of Asiatic nomads became masters of western Asia without ever conferring the boon of government or of nationality upon the land and its peoples. In Gibbon’s mordant words “the camp and not the soil is the country of the genuine Tatar.” And Turkey is still a vast field in which the Turk has pitched his tent and merely waits, knowing that the day is not far off when he will have to break camp and seek new pasturages for his herds and flocks. But the site on which he has settled for the past five centuries had been the seat of a highly organized government. Seeing himself master of this estate the Turk unhesitatingly adopted its institutions. Thus, under the mantle of Islamic theocracy, Byzantine government and customs have continued to flourish in Ottoman dominions. Barring special features belonging to Mohammedanism, the ceremonials of the Sultan’s court may be traced, step by step, to Byzantine forms. The very absolutism of the caliphs is alien to the fundamentally democratic character of both Tatar societies and Koranic teaching. It is Byzantine and a relic of the despotism of the Roman Caesars.
In speaking of the Turks it is necessary to carry two distinct types in mind. The pure Tatar vagrant, true to his native indolence, which unfits him for sedentary occupation, is in the minority. The mass of the Turkish population consists of a mixed element in which the racial strain of given localities persists along with characteristics imparted by fusion with Turki conquerors. This mingling is indicated further by the spirit which moves this people in the performance of their daily tasks. Its members are recruited among the plodding, gentle-mannered and kind-hearted peasants of the land. Local influence accounts for these qualities. Occasionally, however, the foreign strain will crop out. Then, like their nomad ancestors, who, from peaceful shepherds roaming leisurely from patch to patch of green, are transformed into fiends incarnate by the approach of a thief or a beast of prey, or whom a passing storm will throw into fits of uncontrollable rage which vents itself in passionate outbursts of shrieking and gesticulation, the Turkish peasants can cast their natural softness of character to the winds and become either bloodthirsty murderers smiting unarmed Christians or else heroes performing gallant deeds on the battlefield.
The majority of this Turkish population finds a congenial home on the Anatolian upland. Their ancestors beheld here an environment in which the physical characteristics of the plateaus of central Asia were reproduced. They took to it naturally. The table-land is a rolling expanse mournfully devoid of vegetation, save for rare clusters of stunted trees. Scanty plots of grass, surrounding sickly pools or streams, resemble holes in a ragged garment spread over its surface. Sun-baked in summer, chilled in winter, with a climate too deficient in moisture for the favorable development of human societies, the land could only appeal to Asiatic sons of semi-arid areas. In recent years, the tendency of Turks to retire to this region is observable wherever the industry of Christian populations of the encircling coastland has rendered life too arduous for Turkish love of ease.
The penetration of this table-land by nomads from the heart of Asia goes on today as in the past, albeit with abated intensity. It is no rare occurrence in Asia Minor to meet Tatars or Turkomans who have been on a slow westerly march for periods of from five to ten years at a time. Most of them come from the Kirghiz steppes. A vague desire to change their residence from a Christian to a Mohammedan country impels their wanderings, according to their own accounts. Constantinople looms as an objective nebulously impressed in their minds. But the goal is rarely attained. In reality their migration is as unconscious as that of their forefathers and merely carries them out of sheer necessity from pasturage to pasturage in the manner it affected former generations.