CHAPTER XII
SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE
Indifference of Europe to the growth of the Turkish power—Resistance to it local—Inherent defects of the Turks—Causes of their early successes—Beginning of their decline—The struggle for the Danube valley—Their antagonism to the House of Austria—Turkish misgovernment at the beginning of the century—Mohammed Kiuprili, grand vizier—Revival of Turkish power under the Kiuprili—Attack upon Hungary—Capture of Candia—Condition and institutions of Poland—Decline of its power—War with the Cossacks—Election of Michael—War with the Turks—Victories of John Sobieski—Election of John Sobieski—Risings in Hungary against the Emperor—War between the Emperor and the Turks—Relief of Vienna by John Sobieski—The Holy League—Conquest of the Danube valley and the Morea—The peace of Carlovitz—Reconquest of the Morea—Peace of Passarovitz.
Indifference of Europe to the establishment and growth of the Turkish power.
Few facts about European history are so strange as the want of interest shown by the great powers in the empire of the Ottoman Turks until the present century. The Eastern Question as a serious problem of European politics, affecting the peace and welfare of the world, has sprung into existence in consequence of the decay of the Ottoman empire. When the Ottoman Sultans were in the zenith of their power, when Turkish armies were marching up the Danube, when Turkish corsairs were plundering the coasts of Italy and Spain, when Christian communities were being enslaved, and compelled to pay to their conqueror a yearly tribute of children, Christian and civilised Europe took very little heed about the matter. Opposition to the advance of the infidel was mainly local. The Popes occasionally were enabled to fit out some small expeditions. Charles V. endeavoured to root out a troublesome nest of corsairs at Algiers. From time to time small contingents of French or German or Burgundian soldiers were sent to the assistance of the Emperor or the king of Hungary. But such efforts were at the best but fitful and self-interested, and the real work of stemming the tide of the Turkish advance was left to the half civilised tribes, mainly of Sclavonic blood, scattered along the valley of the Danube and the hill country of Bosnia and Albania. The Wallach and the Serb, the Albanian and the Magyar were the people who jeoparded their lives and sacrificed their liberty for the salvation of Europe, while the Roman Emperor was waging a death duel with the most Christian king, and the Vicar of Christ was dallying with pagan philosophy. Statesmen and princes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could not bring themselves to realise the danger of the crisis, could not understand that the East was about to avenge the days of the Crusades, and that the rude threat of Mohammed II., that he would stable his horses in S. Peter’s, might at any moment be translated into fact.
Resistance to the Turks mainly local.
Never was a struggle for life and death carried on in so haphazard a fashion. Resistance in the Mediterranean was purely local. The Knights-Hospitallers disputed for years with the conqueror for the possession of their island fortress of Rhodes, and hurled him back eventually in confusion from the rocks of Malta. The Venetians kept the whole Turkish fleet at bay before Candia for twenty years at a most critical period of Ottoman rule. The Pope and the Venetians entered into piratical competition with the corsairs of Greece and Africa, in which the desire to gain money was more conspicuous than the ambition to overcome the infidel. Even the great victory of Lepanto in 1571, at the news of which all Christendom rejoiced, was decisive, not so much because it marked the successful effort of allied Christian powers to resist a common danger, but because it happened to take place at the beginning of a period of intestine troubles within the bosom of the Ottoman empire itself. On land the story is a similar one. Piece by piece, leaf by leaf, the artichoke of the Balkan peninsula was eaten by the invader, but the process of digestion was a difficult one. The crescent was first seen in the plains of Hungary in the middle of the fifteenth century, yet at the time of their greatest power under Suleiman the Magnificent the Turks never acquired the whole country. Transylvania and Moldavia gave in their adherence to the Porte early in the sixteenth century, the Tartars of the Crimea acknowledged Mohammed II. fifty years earlier, yet they never became anything more than vassal states. Even in Bosnia and Servia, though the Turkish rule was everywhere established, a great deal of local independence was left. Nothing stands out clearer in the history of the Ottoman Turks in Europe than the fact that the limits of their conquests were fixed not by the prowess and skill of their adversaries but by their own inherent defects. When Sigismond of Hungary and the flower of the Franco-Hungarian chivalry went down before Bajazet I. on the field of Nicopolis in 1396, when the flag of Mohammed II. floated proudly over the ramparts of Otranto in 1480, there seemed nothing to prevent the triumphant march of the infidel to the heart of European civilisation, over the wasted lands of the king of Hungary and the ruins of the Christian Papacy.
Inherent defects of the Turks.
But fortunately for Europe the Turk had two inherent defects, which effectually prevented him from establishing himself permanently among civilised nations. He could not assimilate, he could not govern. Foresight, perseverance, organisation are denied to him, and they are among the primary and essential faculties of civilised government. The Turks swept down upon Europe as a mighty river flood pours itself out from its mountain gates into the plain below. With an impetuous, irresistible rush it spreads itself wide among the fields and the gardens, submerging one by one all the accustomed landmarks of hedge and tree and hillock, till all the horizon is but a vast waste of hurrying water. But the further the flood finds its way from the bed of the stream the quieter is its course, the less the damage which it causes. Eddies and back currents check the whirling tide, and even turn its headlong course at the extreme limit of the flood into gentle, fertilising rills which irrigate the meadows in obedience to the will of man. For days or even weeks the flood may last and the swirl of waters boil along, but in the end it wears itself out, the fountains of the hills above dry up, the stream falls quickly back into its accustomed channel, and one by one again the old familiar scenes reappear. Trees and hedges, fields and buildings, greet the eye, but how different indeed from what they were. Torn, ragged, desolate, choked with sand and debris, preserving a faint life amid the desolation, all seems so unlike the once smiling valley. So unlike and yet the same, the same fields, the same trees, the same vigorous life, only for the moment obscured by the sudden catastrophe. In the light and warmth of God’s sun, with a little aid from the forethought of man, the promise of rich harvest will soon be seen again. So it has been with the Turkish power in Europe. Want of assimilation. The Turks submerged the civilisation of south-eastern Europe, they did not uproot it. They injured it, they did not destroy it. They had nothing better to put in its place, and so it lived on, damaged and maimed, but alive. They imposed their own government over the conquered lands, but underneath, the old laws, the old religion, the old customs were still observed. In the extreme districts beyond the Danube they were content merely to exact tribute, and left their tributaries far more independence than the British government in India allows to the native states. To the larger part of the Turkish dominions in Europe conquest chiefly meant the imposition of a new governing class and of a new dominant religion, a governing class which was intermittently tyrannical, but a religion which was seldom persecuting. Consequently many Christians, who laboured under the taint of heresy or schism, found themselves actually better off under Mussulman than under Christian rule, and it frequently happened in the wars between Venice and the Sultans that the orthodox Christians of Greece and the islands fought strenuously on behalf of their infidel conquerors, in order to avoid falling into the hands of their Latin persecutors.
Want of governance.
To this inability to assimilate the peoples which he conquered, the Turk added an inability to govern them. He could neither weld together the varied materials of which his loosely jointed empire was composed, nor govern the separate parts. It is singular how few administrators the Ottoman race has produced. It does not possess faculties for government, or for trade, or for art. No sooner had the Turks conquered south-eastern Europe than they found themselves obliged to intrust the administration of their provinces to the children of the people whom they had overcome. Turkish art was but a faint and spoiled copy of Christian and Arab models. Trade remained in the hands of Christian merchants, or fell into the clutches foreign of Christian powers. When the Turks ceased to conquer they ceased to prosper. They became idle, luxurious and inert, lying like an incubus upon the country, deadening and crushing its civilisation and its spirit, hindering all growth, stopping all progress, just as incapable of calling out the resources of a people as of rooting out their national life.