FROM the land of the Turks—Turkestan in Central Asia—there descended beginning in A.D. 800 a series of hordes and armies which overran and gradually took possession of that portion of South-Eastern Europe and Western Asia once known as Turkey. After five hundred years Mohammed II seized upon Constantinople, and that city became the capital of the Turkish Empire;—for the next two hundred years the dominion spread until it became an immense and important world-power. Then began a period of decline; and vice and prodigality in harem and seraglio brought about disruption and war. Russia saw her opportunity to extend her borders towards the sea—and went on gaining Turkish territory from early in the 18th until the middle of the 19th century when the Crimean war crippled her power in that corner of Europe. But Turkey could not hold the heterogeneous populations of her European provinces. Insurrection after insurrection broke out and one by one she lost many of the more important of them. She became bankrupt and a concert of the European Powers proposed and partially carried out a scheme for her reform. But she proved stubborn and went to war with Russia in 1877-1878; this ended disastrously for her and more territory was lost. In 1897, came the war with Greece in which she was successful. In recent years after many vicissitudes the spread of the great awakening of the people of Oriental lands has reached Turkey, and the story of the newer political and social life in that country is related in this volume in full and complete detail, from its inception until the famous Revolution of 1908.
No one is better qualified to tell this story than Edward F. Knight, who as a noted correspondent for one of the leading papers of London has seen service in all the wars since 1895, his work having taken him to South America, Africa, and Asia. In 1908, he was specially commissioned to visit Turkey to study the conditions of the recent revolution, and this book is the result of his exhaustive study.
The important position which Turkey occupies on the highway to the Farther East from Europe has made it the subject of continuous political intrigue by the nations of that continent. Its interesting and romantic people and their despotic government; its natural products, some of them unique; its picturesque and poetical language and literature, are full of peculiar and absorbing interest, and no one who wishes to keep abreast of the great world movements of our time can afford to neglect this stirring work.
Charles Welsh.
TURKEY
CHAPTER I
THE TURKISH PEOPLE
TURKEY, once so vast and powerful, has been undergoing a gradual dismemberment for the last two centuries. Possession after possession has been wrested from her in Europe, Asia, and Africa. On the mainland of Europe, having lost Greece, Bulgaria, Roumania, Servia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Herzegovina, as well as those regions on the northern shores of the Black Sea (once a Turkish lake) which now form part of Southern Russia, Turkey is left with but a narrow strip of territory stretching across the centre of the Balkan Peninsula from the Black Sea to the Adriatic.
The despotic system of government in Turkey worked well enough so long as she was a conquering and expanding nation; but so soon as she ceased to be this, and was hemmed in by Christian Powers strong enough to check her advance, the system, being incompatible with progress, failed to hold the Empire together and disintegration set in. The internal disorders caused by the evils of her administration and the cupidity and treachery of her powerful European neighbours threatened Turkey with extinction. Russia and Austria waged successful wars against her and possessed themselves of her frontier provinces, and at the same time the disaffected Christian populations of European Turkey were encouraged to rise and gain their independence. So it came about that Greece, Bulgaria, and other kingdoms and principalities were carved out of Turkey, and up to within a few months ago Christian peoples within and without her frontiers were quarrelling over a further projected act of spoliation that would indeed have been for Turkey the beginning of the end—the partition of Macedonia.