Secrets of the Bosphorus

by Henry Morgenthau

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these tribes overran the cradle of modern civilisation, which has given Europe its religion and, to a large extent, its civilisation. At that time these territories were the seats of many peaceful and prosperous nations. The Mesopotamian valley supported a large industrious agricultural population; Bagdad was one of the largest and most flourishing cities in existence; Constantinople had a greater population than Rome, and the Balkan region and Asia Minor contained several powerful States. Over all this part of the world the Turk now swept like a huge, destructive force. Mesopotamia in a few years became a desert; the great cities of the East were reduced to misery, and the subject peoples became slaves.

Such graces of civilisation as the Turk has acquired in five centuries have practically all been taken from the subject peoples whom he so greatly despises. His religion comes from the Arabs; his language has acquired a certain literary value by borrowing certain Arabic and Persian elements; and his writing is Arabic. Constantinople’s finest architectural monument, the Mosque of St. Sophia, was originally a Christian church, and practically all Turkish architecture is derived from the Byzantine. The mechanism of business and industry has always rested in the hands of the subject peoples—Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Arabs. The Turks have learned little of European art or science, they have established very few educational institutions, and illiteracy is the prevailing rule. The result is that poverty has attained a degree of sordidness and misery in the Ottoman Empire which is almost unparalleled elsewhere. The Turkish peasant lives in a mud hut in which he sleeps; he has no chairs, no tables, no eating utensils, no clothes except the few scant garments which cover his back and which he usually wears for many years.

In the course of time these Turks might learn certain things from their European and Arabic neighbours, but there was one idea which they could never even faintly grasp. They could not understand that a conquered people were anything except slaves. When they took possession of a land, they found it occupied by a certain number of camels, horses, buffaloes, dogs, swine, and human beings. Of all these living things, the object that physically most resembled themselves they regarded as the least important. It became a common saying with them that a horse or a camel was far more valuable than a man; these animals cost money, whereas they could get all the “infidel Christians” they needed for nothing. The usual name applied to the Christian was rayah—meaning cattle. It is true that the early Sultans gave the subject peoples and the Europeans in the Empire certain rights, but these in themselves really reflected the contempt in which all non-Moslems were held.

I have already described the “capitulations,” under which foreigners in Turkey had their own courts, prison, post-offices, and other institutions. Yet the early Sultans gave these privileges not from a spirit of tolerance, but merely because they looked upon the Christian nations as unclean, and therefore unfit to have any contact with the Ottoman administrative and judicial system. The Sultans similarly erected the several peoples each as the Greeks and Armenians into separate “millets,” or nations, not because they desired to promote their independence and welfare, but because they regarded them as vermin, and therefore disqualified for membership in the Ottoman State. The attitude of the Government toward their Christian subjects was illustrated by certain regulations which limited their freedom of action. The buildings in which Christians lived should not be conspicuous, and their churches should have no belfry. Christians were not permitted to ride a horse, for that was the exclusive right of the noble Moslems. If a Turk in the street should ask a Christian to clean his shoes, the latter must do so under penalty of death. The Turk had the right to test the sharpness of his sword upon the neck of any Christian.

One of the most remarkable official documents ever devised is the burial permit which the Ottoman Government used to issue, up to a hundred years ago, for the interment of its Christian subjects. The following is a literal translation:—“Oh thou irreligious priest, who hast been expelled from the presence of God, thou that wearest the crown of the devil and black raiments, so and so of your congregation of polluted infidels having died—although his desecrated corpse is not acceptable to the earth, yet as its terrible stench will become a public nuisance, take the polluted dead one, open a ditch, throw him in it, trample him under foot, and come back, thou infidel swine!”

Imagine a great Government, year in and year out, maintaining this attitude toward many millions of its own subjects! And for centuries the Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems, took Christian male infants by the hundreds of thousands and brought them up as Moslem soldiers. I have no intention of describing the terrible vassalage and oppression that went on for five centuries; my purpose is merely to emphasise this innate attitude of the Moslem Turk to people not of his own race and religion—that they are not human beings with rights, but merely chattels, which may be permitted to live when they promote the interest of their masters, but which may be pitilessly destroyed when they have ceased to be useful. This attitude is intensified by a disregard for human life and an intense delight in physical human suffering which are the not unusual attributes of primitive peoples.

Such were the mental characteristics of the Turk in his days of military greatness. In recent times his attitude toward foreigners and his subject peoples had superficially changed. His own military decline, and the ease with which the infidel nations defeated his finest armies, had apparently given the haughty descendants of Osman a respect at least for their prowess.

The rapid disappearance of his own Empire in a hundred years the creation out of the Ottoman Empire of new States like Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and the wonderful improvement which had followed the destruction of the Turkish yoke in these benighted lands, may have increased the Ottoman hatred for the unbeliever, but at least they had a certain influence in opening his eyes to his importance. Many Turks also now received their education in European universities, they studied in their professional schools, and they became physicians, surgeons, lawyers, engineers, and chemists of the modern kind. However much the more progressive Moslems might despise their Christian associates, they could not ignore the fact that the finest things, in this temporal world at least, were the products of European and American civilisation. And now that one development of modern history which seemed to be least understandable to the Turk began to force itself upon the consciousness of the more intelligent and progressive. Certain leaders arose who began to speak surreptitiously of such things as “Constitutionalism,” “Liberty,” “Self-Government,” and to whom the Declaration of Independence contained certain truths that might have a value even for Islam. These daring spirits began to dream of overturning the autocratic Sultan and of substituting a parliamentary system for his irresponsible rule. I have already described the rise and fall of this Young Turk movement under such leaders as Talaat, Enver, Djemal, and their associates in the Committee of Union and Progress. The point which I am emphasising here is that this movement presupposed a complete transformation of Turkish mentality, especially in its attitude toward subject peoples. No longer, under the reformed Turkish State, were Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Jews to be regarded as “filthy Giaours.” All these peoples were henceforth to have equal rights and equal duties.

A general love-feast now followed the establishment of the new régime, and scenes of almost frenzied reconciliation, in which Turks and Armenians embraced each other publicly, apparently signalised the absolute union of the once antagonistic peoples. The Turkish leaders, such as Talaat and Enver, visited Christian churches and sent forth prayers of thanksgiving for the new order, and went to Armenian cemeteries to shed tears of retribution over the bones of the martyred Armenians who lay there. Armenian priests reciprocally paid their tributes to the Turks in Mohammedan mosques. Enver Pasha visited several Armenian schools, telling the children that the old days of Moslem-Christian strife had passed for ever and that the two peoples were now to live together as brothers and sisters.

There were cynics who smiled at all these demonstrations, and yet one development encouraged even them to believe that an earthly Paradise had arrived. All through the period of domination only the master Moslem had been permitted to bear arms and serve in the Ottoman Army. To be a soldier was an occupation altogether too manly and glorious for the despised Armenian. But now the Young Turks encouraged all Armenians to arm, and enrolled them in the Army on an equality with Moslems. These Armenians fought, both as officers and soldiers, in the Italian and the Balkan Wars, winning high praise from the Turkish Generals for their valour and skill. Armenian leaders had figured conspicuously in the Young Turk movement; these men apparently believed that a constitutional Turkey was possible, and they preferred such a Turkey to the suzerainty of the great European Powers or even to an independent State of their own. They were conscious of their own intellectual and industrial superiority to the Turks, and knew that they could prosper in the Ottoman Empire if left alone, whereas, under European control, they would have greater difficulty in meeting competition of the more rigorous European colonists who might come in. With the deposition of the Red Sultan, Abdul Hamid, and the establishment of a constitutional system, the Armenians now for the first time in several centuries felt themselves to be free men.