In this brief reference to the men who achieved such distinction in building up and extending the Ottoman Empire, we must not forget the women who played so important a rôle in the history of Turkish politics and statecraft. Three of the most notable of these were the Muscovite Roxalana, who passed from a public slave market to the imperial harem to become the wife of Solyman the Magnificent, the greatest of the Ottoman Sultans; the Venetian Safia who at an early age was abducted from her home on the Grand Canal, taken to Constantinople and sold to the Sultan Murad III, by whom she had a son who, after his father’s death, became Sultan Mohammed III; Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, who, like the Empress Josephine, was born in the little island of Martinique and who, in her youth, was an intimate of the future consort of Napoleon Bonaparte, but who eventually fell into the hands of Algerian pirates by whom she was sold in the slave market of Algiers. Thence she was conveyed to Constantinople as a present to the Sultan, Abdul Hamid I, to whom she bore a son who became Mahmud II, the grandfather of the late Abdul Hamid II.
By their beauty, wit, and fascinating manners these three women gained an unbounded influence over the Sultans with whom their lives were cast and, what is more remarkable, they were able, notwithstanding their numerous antagonists in the harem, to retain their ascendancy in the affections of their lords long after the season of youth and beauty had passed. In overweening ambition, diplomatic finesse, unfailing resourcefulness in high resolve, in achieving success in the face of the greatest obstacles, these three Christian captives were worthy rivals of their more fortunate sisters of the West—Bianca Capello, Catherine de’ Medici, and the Marquise de Pompadour.
From the preceding pages, it is clear, as Freeman points out that,[97]
the institution of the tribute children was the very keystone of the Ottoman dominion. They won the empire for the Turk and they kept it for him.... During the most brilliant days of Ottoman greatness the native Turks were well-nigh brought down to the condition of a subject caste. Manumitted bondmen from the East, voluntary renegades from the West, Greek and Slavonic tribute-children directed the councils and commanded the armies of the Sultans. A Grand Vizier or a Captain Pasha born in the faith of Islam was indeed noted as a portent. Never did the craft and subtlety of devil or man devise such a tremendous engine of tyranny. The chains of the conquered nations were riveted by their own hands. Their best blood was drawn away to provide against any degeneracy in the blood of their conquerors. Their strongest and fairest children, the most vigorous frames and the most precocious intellects, those whom nature had marked out as chiefs and liberators of their own race, were carried off to become the special instruments of their degradation. This fearful institution, combined with the possession of Constantinople, and with the marvelous hereditary greatness of the ruling family, preserved the House of Othman from the common fate of Oriental dynasties.
According to a long prevalent opinion, the Osmanlis are a Turkish race who achieved the conquest of Asia Minor before they invaded Europe and before they became masters of the Byzantine Empire. The fact is they had subjugated the entire Balkan peninsula before they obtained possession of more than the northwest corner of Anatolia, and had maintained Adrianople as the Ottoman capital eighty-seven years before Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, transferred it to its present location on the Bosphorus.
Nor were the Osmanlis, even in their earliest days, composed entirely, as is so often asserted, of Turkish nomads from the East. Far from it. They were welded from the heterogeneous elements—Greeks, Carians, Phrygians, Galatians, the followers of Osman, and other peoples who then inhabited the north-western part of Asia Minor. And, as early as the reign of Orkhan, the son and successor of Osman, this complex blending of peoples became not only a distinct race but a race with a national consciousness.
So far are the Osmanlis from regarding themselves as heirs of the Seljukian Turks or as transformed Turkomans that they have always endeavored to remove this erroneous impression which has so long prevailed concerning their people. The distinguished historian, Mouradja d’ Ohsson, declares:
The Osmanlis employ the word “Turk” when referring to a coarse and brutal man. According to the Osmanlis, the epithet Turk belongs only to the peoples of Turkestan and to those vagabond hordes who lead a stagnant life in the deserts of Khorassan. All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the collective name of Osmanlis from Osman I, the founder of the Monarchy, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.[98]
The Osmanlis, as we have seen, were of mixed blood, even while still confined to Asia Minor. But after their conquests in Europe and further expansion in Asia they “became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis, who, under Solyman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.”[99] It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire.[100]