[140] I do not mean to assert that religious feeling has played no part in the massacres of our own day. But these massacres were arranged by the government, who incited the Moslems to attack their Christian neighbours, inflaming the ignorant mind more by an appeal to racial hatred, to loot, to lust, than to defence of the sacred faith. In the Armenian massacres it was represented to the ignorant village Moslem that the Armenians were plotting to set up an independent government or to betray the fatherland to some European power. I was in Adana during the terrible massacre of 1909, and make this statement from personal experience and observation.
[141] Michail Koëzé, Marco, and Evrenos were Greeks. Cf. Leunclavius, Pandectes, p. 125.
[142] Up to the time of the Tanzimat, in 1849, Christians were called raïas. The original meaning of raïa was a flock, and was not a term of contempt, but a recognition of the fact that Christians were a taxable asset to the nation, at so much per head.
[143] In western Asia Minor, in Macedonia and Thrace, up to the present day the convert to Islam, no matter of what race, is immediately classified before the law as a Turk. When the Sublime Porte, after the reoccupation of Adrianople in the summer of 1913, laid a memorial before the Powers, it was claimed that the large majority of the population of the vilayet of Thrace was ‘Turkish’. This word had absolutely no racial significance. Every Mohammedan in Thrace, no matter what his race or language, would be considered a Turk. The Young Turks, when they established the Constitution in 1908, tried to revive the word ‘Osmanli’ as a term including all Ottoman subjects. But they not only failed to convince the nation—they failed to convince themselves—that a Christian could really be an Osmanli, with the full rights and privileges enjoyed by the Moslems.
[144] Ricaut, ed. 1682, p. 148. For confusion of the name ‘Turk’ with ‘Saracen’ by early western writers, see Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis, Géraud ed., i. 46, 86-8; Mémoires d’Olivier de la Marche, Beaune and d’Arbaumont ed., i. 22-5, iv. 83; Gilles le Muisit, Lemaître ed., p. 196. The mistake of Ricaut is common with many of the fifteenth-to seventeenth-century writers on the Crusades.
[145] Matthew of Edessa (Urfa), fol. 8 of MS. Bibl. Nat., Paris, fonds arménien, No. 95, quoted in Notices et Extraits, ix, 1^[ère] partie, p. 281, speaks of ‘les calamités que des peuples barbares et corrompus, tels que les Turcs et les Grecs, LEURS SEMBLABLES, ont causées’.
[146] This was true even of the conquest of Constantinople, which caused much more dismay and regret in Europe than among the Greeks. See the remarkable letter of Francis Fielphus to Mohammed II in Bibl. de l’École des langues vivantes orientales, série 3, xii. 63-6, 211-14.
[147] Cf. Rambaud in Hist. Générale, ii. 816.
[148] In Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonika, and the lesser coast cities of the Ottoman Empire, as well as in many of the cities of the interior, one feels the atmosphere of Sabbath rest much more on a Sunday than on a Friday.
[149] Evliya effendi, ii. 241.