How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past?
And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns—marbles which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which they formed a part.
But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters, they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic—Græcia barbariæ lento collisa duello—Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela; the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is embraced in the term “Ancient History.”
The cradle of the Osmanlis was the small village of Sugut about a day’s ride on horseback to the south of Nicæa and about the same distance to the east of the Mysian Olympus. For it was here that Osman, the founder of the Osmanli dynasty, first saw in 1258 the light of day. The first thirty years of his life was that of a village chieftain of a pastoral community, who lived in peace among his neighbors and whose fighting men did not number more than four hundred. He was then fired with the ambition to extend his boundaries and at the end of ten years he found himself at the head of four thousand warriors and in direct contact with the decadent and moribund Byzantine Empire.
When Osman died in 1326 his emirate of Sugut had been extended to the Marmora and the Euxine and included in the conquered territory the important cities of Brusa, Nicomedia, and Nicæa. This was the beginning of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. The same emir of Sugut was also the founder of a dynasty whose male succession has endured uninterruptedly for more than six centuries and the first ruler of a people in which there is so complete a blending of Asiatic and European blood that they have been called a distinct race.
No other dynasty can boast such a succession of brilliant sovereigns as those who conducted the Ottomans to the height of renown in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. First there was Osman, the originator of a race, next came his son Orkhan, the founder of a state, and then Osman’s grandson, the creator of an empire. These founders of an empire were succeeded by Bayazid who, on account of his rapid movements, was called Ilderim—lightning; Mohammed, who retrieved the losses inflicted by Timur; Murad II, the antagonist of Hunyady and Skanderberg; Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople; Selim I, who annexed Kurdistan, Syria, and Egypt, and Solyman the Magnificent, the victor on the field of Mohacs and the besieger of Vienna. Never did eight such sovereigns succeed one another—save for the feeble Bayazid II—in unbroken succession in any other country; never was an empire founded and extended during two so splendid centuries by such a series of great rulers. In the hour of dismay, as well as in the moment of triumph, the Turkish Sultan was master of the situation.[93]
But not only were the Ottoman Emirs and Sultans of this period eminent as rulers and empire builders. With few exceptions, they, as well as many of their successors, possessed, like Napoleon, the rare faculty of choosing the right men for the right place. This is especially noteworthy in their choice of generals, admirals, and grand viziers who were selected for the high positions, which they filled with such distinction, without regard to their nationality or accidents of birth. Among them were Jews and eunuchs, Greek and Italian, German and Polish renegades.[94] There was the Italian Cicala, the victor of Karestes; the German Mehemet Sli, son of a Magdeburg musician, who commanded the main army in Bulgaria; Omar who from a Croatian clerk became the leader of the Turkish army in the Crimea. Chief among the great admirals were the Italian Ululj Ali, the Greeks Kheyr-ed-din and Urug Barbarossa from the island of Lesbos; Piali Pasha, from Croatia. It was chiefly through the aid of the last three that Solyman the Magnificent, was able to secure control of the Mediterranean and the Arab states of Northern Africa and to extend his devastating raids not only to the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain but even beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, to waylay the argosies which were returning to Cadix laden with the gold and jewels of the Indians.[95]
But more distinguished than the Sultan’s noted generals and his corsair admirals was the long series of men who occupied the Grand Vizierate. The most famous of these were the Abyssinian eunuch Bashir; the renegade Jew, Kiamil Pasha; the Herzegovinan, Mohammed Sokalovich; the Albanian, Mohammed, Kiuprili, who, from a kitchen-boy in the Sultan’s palace, became the most noted grand vizier that ever ruled the great Ottoman Empire. He was succeeded in the Grand Vizierate by his son Ahmed who, as a statesman, was scarcely less celebrated than his father. A short interval after Ahmed’s death, Mustafa Kiuprili, a second son of Mohammed became grand vizier and his rule was marked by the same consummate statesmanship that so distinguished the rule of his father and brother. Their rise is especially interesting for, as observes Von Hammer, “the history of the empires of the Orient offers only four instances of members of the same family succeeding one another in the dignity of the Grand Vizierate.”[96]