TURKEY AND THE STATES OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA.
Historical.
Officer of the Dorobanze
(full dress).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the inhabitants of Europe were several times alarmed by a common danger, that of invasion of their territories by a foreign race, Asiatic by extraction, and connected primarily with the Mongols. This race, known as Turks or Osmanli, had made itself master of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453, and set up its government there under a Padishah or Sultan. From this point they extended their empire further and further to the north-west, over Hungary and the intervening lands, and took possession of the Hungarian capital, Buda, or Ofen. In 1683 they actually besieged Vienna, and this city would undoubtedly have fallen if it had not been for its heroic defence by Field-Marshal Rüdiger von Starhemberg, who held out till he was succoured by Duke Charles of Lorraine with the Army of the Austrian Empire, and John Sobieski, King of Poland.
The Turkish power now began to wane, and its forces gradually declined in strength during the wars with Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One by one the provinces of the Turkish Empire became detached from Turkish rule and proclaimed their independence under their own sovereigns. In this way arose the independent kingdoms of Greece, Servia, and Roumania, and the principality of Bulgaria (under Turkish suzerainty), all of them during the present century. Eastern Roumelia is still in the hands of the Turks, but she has her own administration. The Turkish Empire—once the terror of Christendom—is now fighting for very existence, and to retain her hold over the small remnants of her European possessions. Russia, who considers herself the champion of the Greek-Catholic Church in the East, would by this time have undoubtedly seized the lands of the “Sick Man” on the Bosphorus, if it were not that the ambition of other Powers has secured a frail but fleeting life for him. Since, however, Turkey is determined not to let go of her European possessions without a stiff fight for them, and since no one can foretell what far-reaching consequences such a war would entail, we must not skip her over, but must give a short account of her Army as well as of the others.
