The greatest story in the world, period 2 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

CHAPTER XXIII
THE TURKS IN EUROPE

I have now tried to tell you the story—up to the year 1500 and the beginning of that century which was to see the new birth of learning and the reformation in the Church—of the way in which most of the countries of Europe settled down nearly into the shape in which we see them now, or see them in maps made before the Great War. There remains one corner of the picture, the south-eastern corner, which we still have to look at; and there we find that a people entirely strange to Europe entered into possession during the fifteenth century. That people were the Ottoman Turks who had succeeded to the rule of the Mahommedan world, which they had wrested from their own kinsmen the Seljuk Turks.

The story of this branch of the Turkish nation is the common story of a people coming West by reason of pressure of other tribes from the East. Mongols, from the borders of China, seem to have been the oppressors, from the East, of the Ottomans.

Before the middle of the thirteenth century they were settled near Angora, in what was then called the Kingdom of Rum. It was in the possession of the Seljuk Turks. But the Seljuk kingdom was breaking up. The Greeks of the Eastern Empire were attacking it heavily. The Ottomans, perhaps a hardier people than the Seljuks, because they had more lately been leading the nomadic, wandering life, supported their kinsmen and hosts, and it ended in the Ottomans becoming the leaders of the Turks in Asia Minor. The Greeks were only a little more united and efficient than the Seljuks, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had the whole of Asia Minor in their hands.

Their fighting force was much increased by the formation of a standing army, called the Janissaries. They numbered some 12,000 at this time, though this number was more than quadrupled in later centuries. The force was chiefly composed of Christian captives. But these troops had such large privileges allowed them that there was no difficulty in filling their ranks.

Mayors of the Palace

And then happened that which we have seen occurring again and again in course of the story. Just as the Vandals were invited into Africa, just as the Moslems were invited into Spain, and just as both these guests stayed a great deal longer and made themselves much more at home than their hosts had expected, so now the Ottomans were invited into Europe to assist the Mayor of the Palace, as he was called, in Constantinople, who had seized the Government. This title of Mayor of the Palace, for the chief officer or prime minister, was taken from the Frankish court. The power of these Mayors of the Palace became, as we have seen, very great among the Franks, and the office often passed from father to son. The first of the Capets had been Mayor of the Palace to the last Carolingian.

The Ottomans accepted the invitation. They crossed into Europe. They established the usurper on the throne. They drove his enemies right up into the Balkans. And, for the time being, they returned to their own land. But they had learnt that this corner of Europe was a desirable territory and that it was undefended by any effective force. Bulgarians, Serbians, Bosnians, and Albanians held the lands, or nearly those same lands, that you will see marked under their names on any map of Europe made before the Great War. By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had overrun all these countries and had organised them under Turkish rule. They had taken Adrianople, the city of second importance in the Eastern Empire. They had spread terror westerly in Europe by a great victory won over a Christian army of twice the number of the Ottoman force at Kossovo. and again by a victory, in which many crusading knights were killed, at Nicopolis. At the very end of the century they were besieging Constantinople itself: but for a while the capital of the Empire was delivered from their hands. Partly by the stubborn courage of the besieged forces in the city, partly by bribery, and partly by a new danger appearing on the eastern border of their own kingdom in Asia, they were induced to raise the siege.

The new danger came, as ever, from the east. It was really Timur, or Tamerlane, with his Tartar hordes, who saved Constantinople, the capital city of Eastern Christendom, for another half-century from the Turks.