An enlightened progressive government might have done something to remedy the social ills, but of all governments that the world has ever seen, the most ineffectual and pernicious was the Polish. Since the sixteenth century, the monarchy had been elective, with the result that the reign of every sovereign was disfigured by foreign intrigues and domestic squabbles over the choice of his successor, and also that the noble electors were able not only to secure liberal bribes but to wring from the elect such concessions as gradually reduced the kingship to an ornamental figurehead. Most of the later kings were foreigners who used what little power was left to them in furtherance of their native interests rather than of the welfare of Poland. Thus the kings in the first half of the eighteenth century were German electors of Saxony, who owed their new position to the interested friendship of Austria, Prussia, or Russia, and to the large sums of money which they lavished upon the Polish magnates; these same Saxon rulers cheerfully applied the Polish resources to their German policies.
Another absurdity of the Polish constitution was the famous "liberum veto," a kind of gentlemen's agreement among the magnates, whereby no law whatsoever could be enacted by the Diet if a single member felt it was prejudicial to his interests, and objected. In the course of the seventeenth century the principle of the liberum veto had been so far extended as to recognize the lawful right of any one of the ten thousand noblemen of Poland to refuse to obey a law which he had not approved. This amounted to anarchism. And anarchism, however beautiful it might appear as an ideal, was hardly a trustworthy weapon with which to oppose the greedy, hard-hearted, despotic monarchs who governed all the surrounding countries.
[Sidenote: Steady Decline of Ottoman Power during Seventeenth Century]
The Ottoman Empire was not in such sore straits as Poland, but its power and prestige were obviously waning. In another place we have reviewed the achievements of the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—how they overran the Balkan peninsula, captured Constantinople, put an end to the ancient Græco-Roman Empire and under Suleiman the Magnificent extended their conquests along the northern coast of Africa and in Europe across the Danube into the very heart of Hungary. Although the sea-power of the Turks suffered a serious reverse at Lepanto (1571), their continued land advances provoked in Christendom the liveliest apprehension throughout the seventeenth century. After a twenty-five-years conflict they took Crete from Venice. They subjugated to their dominion the Tatars and Russians immediately north of the Black Sea. They exacted homage from the princes of Rumania and Transylvania. They annexed Hungary. For a time they received tribute from the king of Poland. In 1683 they laid siege to the city of Vienna and would have taken it had not the patriotic Polish monarch, John Sobieski, brought timely aid to the beleaguered Austrians. That was the high-water mark of the Mohammedan advance in Europe.
Thenceforth the Turkish boundaries gradually receded. An alliance of Venice, Poland, the pope, and Austria waged long and arduous warfare with the Ottomans, and the resulting treaty of Karlowitz, signed at the very close of the seventeenth century, gave the greater part of Hungary, including Transylvania, to the Austrian Habsburgs, extended the southern boundary of Poland to the Dniester River, and surrendered important trading centers on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts to the Venetians. Two subsequent wars between the sultan and the Habsburgs definitely freed the whole of Hungary from the Ottoman yoke. The reasons for the wane of Turkey's power are scarcely to be sought in the inherent strength of her neighbors, for, with the possible exception of Austria and Russia, they were notoriously weak and had seldom been able or willing to work together in behalf of any common cause. The real reasons lay rather in the character and nature of the Turkish power itself. Domestic, not foreign, difficulties prepared the way for future disasters.
[Sidenote: Nature of the Turkish Conquests]
It should be borne in mind that the Turks never constituted a majority of the population of their European possessions. They were a mere body of conquerors, who in frenzies of religious or martial enthusiasm, inspired with the idea that Divine Providence was using them as agents for the spread of Mohammedanism, had fought valiantly with the sword or cunningly taken advantage of their enemies' quarrels to plant over wide areas the crescent in place of the cross. In the conquered regions, the native Christian peoples were reduced to serfdom, and the Turkish conquerors became great landholders and the official class. To extend, even to maintain, such an artificial order of things, the Turks would be obliged to keep their military organization always at the highest pitch of excellence and to preserve their government from weakness and corruption. In neither of these respects did the Turks ultimately succeed.
[Sidenote: Corruption In the Turkish Government]
The sultans of the eighteenth century were not of the stuff of which a Suleiman the Magnificent had been made. To the grim risks of battle they preferred the cushioned ease of the palace, and all their powers of administration and government were quite consumed in the management of the household and the harem. Actual authority was gradually transferred to the Divan, or board of ministers, whose appointments or dismissals were the results of palace intrigues, sometimes petty but more often bloody. Corruption ate its way through the entire office- holding element of the Ottoman state: positions were bought and sold from the Divan down to the obscure village, and office was held to exist primarily for financial profit and secondarily as a means of oppressing the subject people.
The army, on which so much in the Turkish state depended, naturally reflected the demoralized condition of the government. While Peter the Great was organizing a powerful army in Russia, and Frederick the Great was perfecting the Prussian military machine, the Ottoman army steadily declined. It failed to keep pace with the development of tactics and of firearms in western Europe, and fell behind the times. The all- prevalent corruption ruined its discipline, and its regularly organized portion—the "janissaries"—became the masters rather than the servants of the sultans and of the whole Turkish government.