Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

With the death of Tamerlane all his further designs were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved; and fourteen years after his decease, the most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce to the court of Pekin. But far different was the fate of the Ottoman monarchy. The massive trunk was bent to the ground, but no sooner had the hurricane passed than it again rose with fresh vigor and more luxuriant foliage.

The province of Anatolia was desolated; the cities without walls or palaces, without treasures or rulers: while the open country was overspread with hordes of shepherds of Tartar or Turcoman origin. The five living sons of Bajazet were soon fighting for the spoils of their father’s empire: finally the favorite son Mohammed I., stood forth as the sole heir of the empire. He obtained Anatolia by treaty and Roumania by force of arms and the eight years of his peaceful reign were spent in banishing the vices of civil discord and placing on a firmer basis the fabric of the Ottoman monarchy. The wisest Turks were devoted to the unifying of the empire and from Anatolia to Roumania one spirit seemed to animate them all. The Christian powers of Europe might have emulated their example, but the bitter schism between the Greek and the Latin divisions of the church, the factions and the wars of France and England, blinded them to the danger that was threatening in the East.

Had a confederate fleet occupied the straits of the Dardanelles and a strong fort been built on the west side at Gallipoli, the Ottoman power must speedily have been annihilated; but as it was the dissensions and the indifference of the other powers of Europe first yielded up the Greek Empire to the Turks as they have since sustained it—an alien power—race and religion in one of the fairest regions of the earth.

In sheerest folly did Manuel the Emperor of Constantinople enter into an alliance with Mohammed I., whereas his policy should have been to prolong the division of the Ottoman powers. The Sultan and his troops were transported over the Bosphorus, and were hospitably entertained in the capital. Not long after he unsheathed a sword of revenge in delivering the true or the false Mustapha, real or pretended son of Bajazet I., on his promise of delivering up the keys of Gallipoli, or rather of Europe, so soon as he was placed on the throne of Roumania. But no sooner was he established than he dismissed the Greek ambassadors with a smile of contempt, saying in a pious tone that at the day of judgment he would rather answer for the violation of an oath than for having delivered up a Mussulman city into the hands of an infidel.

The Emperor was thus at once the hated of the two rivals for the Ottoman throne; and the victory of Amurath over Mustapha was followed by the siege of Constantinople, the following spring (A. D. 1422, June 10, Aug. 24). The strength of the walls successfully resisted an army of two hundred thousand Turks for some two months, when the army was drawn off to quell some domestic revolt, and the fall of the city was delayed for thirty years under the disgraceful conditions of the payment of tribute to Turkey.

Meantime the Ottomans were with cruel severity, organizing a terrible power for further conquest. The captured provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Servia, became the perpetual recruiting ground for the Turkish army. After the royal fifth of the captives was diminished by conquest, an inhuman tax of the fifth child or of every fifth year was rigorously levied on the Christian families. At the age of twelve or fourteen, the most robust youths were torn away from their parents to be trained for the army or for civil service. They might pass through four successive schools according to their development or promise and then found themselves without friendships, outside their own number, without parents, without homes, dependent on the will of the despot on the throne, whose hand, on the slightest displeasure could break in pieces “these statues of glass.”

Thus with satanic craftiness and cruelty were the stolen children of Christian races trained to become the destroyers of a Christian empire, which, for more than a thousand years had stayed the flood of barbarism from sweeping over all Europe.

Freeman, the historian, declares that we may take Mohammed II., as the ideal of his race, the embodiment in their fullest form of Ottoman greatness and Ottoman wickedness. A general and a statesman of the highest order, he was also a man of intellectual cultivation in other ways, a master of many languages and a patron of the art and the literature of his time. At the same time the three abiding Ottoman vices, cruelty, lust and faithlessness, stand forth in terrible preëminence. His first act was the murder of his infant brother and he made the murder of brothers the standing law of his empire. He made the Ottoman power what it has been ever since. He defined its northern and western boundaries. “The Ottoman Empire as our age has to deal with it, is before all things the work of Mohammed the Conqueror.”

His reign was from 1451 to 1481. Coming to the throne at the early age of twenty-one, he had read Plutarch assiduously and studied the careers of Alexander, Cæsar and other great conquerors; causing also the biographies of illustrious men to be translated into Turkish, to give to himself and to his people the emulation of glory.

On returning to Adrianople, this thirst of glory and of conquest devoured him as it had devoured his ancient models. He coveted Constantinople with a consuming avidity that often woke him with a bound from his sleep. The phantom of Constantinople beset by day and night the young conqueror. He tried to conceal his impatience for fear of exciting before the hour the emotions of the Christian West. He could not restrain it. He sent for his grand vizier, Khalil, at night. Alarmed, the vizier embraced as in a last farewell his wife and daughter, made his death prayer and appeared before the Sultan. He prostrated himself as if to redeem his life by a ransom and presented to Mohammed II. the golden cup. “Do not fear, my lala, (familiar term as father), do not fear, it is not thy gold nor thy life I want: what I want that thou shouldest give me is Constantinople.” Then showing him his eyes, fatigued with sleeplessness, and his couch disordered, he added, “I cannot sleep unless you promise me what I dream of night and day.”