The wars they prosecuted at the same time against Christian Europe and Persia, were the principal causes of the decay of the military power of the Turks. The efforts they made against the Persians, diverted their forces from their expeditions against the Christians; and their expeditions against the Christians crippled their means for the wars in Asia. In these two kinds of war they had a very different manner of fighting. After having for any length of time contended with the warriors of the Oxus or Caucasus, they were incapacitated for making war in Europe. They were never able to triumph completely over either Persia or the Christian nations; and remained at last pressed between two enemies, equally interested in their ruin, and equally animated by religious passions.
The Turks, like all the hordes from the north of Asia, brought with them the feudal government. The first thing to be done by all nomadic nations, who established themselves in conquered countries, was the division of the lands, with certain conditions of protection and obedience. From this division naturally emanated feudalism. The difference, however, which existed between the Turks and the other barbarians who conquered the West, was, that the jealous despotism of the sultans never allowed fiefs to become hereditary, or that an aristocracy should grow up round it, as in the monarchies of Christendom. Thus in the Turkish empire nothing was to be seen on one side, but the authority of an absolute master; and on the other, nothing but a military democracy. The Ottoman monarchy was thus built upon that which is weakest in political societies—the will of a single man, or that of the multitude.
The Turks have been compared to the Romans. Both nations began in the same manner; for both were nothing but bands of brigands. What distinguishes them in history is, that the Turks have remained the same as they were in their origin; whilst the Romans, in their conquests, never rejected the knowledge, the customs, or even the gods of the people they conquered. The Turks, on the contrary, took nothing from other nations, and made it their pride to continue barbarians.
We have said above, that hereditary aristocracy has never been established by the side of despotism; and this is, perhaps, the reason why the Ottoman nation has remained in a state of barbarism. They who have studied the march of human societies know that it is by the aristocracy that the manners and morals of a people are formed, and that it is in the middle classes that knowledge has its birth, and civilization begins.[88] The absence of an aristocracy in oriental governments, not only explains to us the fragility of those governments, but it assists us also in explaining why progress has not been made in a country where nothing distinguished the men from each other, where no one had sufficient influence to guide the crowd, or was sufficiently elevated to serve as an example or model.
In consequence of the indifference of the Turks for the arts and sciences, the labours of industry, agriculture, and navigation, were confided to their slaves, who were their enemies. As they held in horror everything new, or that they had not brought from Asia with them, they were obliged to have recourse to foreigners for everything that was invented or perfected in Europe. Thus the sources of prosperity and power, the strength of their armies and their fleets, were not at all in their own hands. Every one knows what the Turks have lost by neglecting to learn or to follow the progress of the military tactics of the Europeans. At the battle of Lepanto, disorder was introduced into their fleet entirely from their having promised liberty to their sailors, who were all Christians.
Some modern writers, seeking everywhere for similitudes, have compared the janissaries to the pretorian cohorts. This comparison has nothing exact in it: among the Romans, the empire was elective, and the pretorians got possession of it for the purpose of putting it up to sale. Among the Turks, the idea of choosing their prince never suggested itself to the minds of either the people or the soldiery. The janissaries contented themselves with disturbing the government, and keeping it in such a state of disorder, that they could never be dismissed, and might always remain masters. All their opposition consisted in preventing any amelioration whatever in discipline or military usages. The abuses and prejudices the most difficult to be destroyed in a nation, are those which adhere to a body or a class in which power happens to be placed. All-powerful despotism was never able to overcome the opposition of the janissaries and spahis; and those redoubtable corps, which had so effectively contributed to ancient conquests, became the greatest obstacle to the making of new ones.
The Turks established in Greece had more respect for old usages and old prejudices, than they had of love for the country they inhabited. Masters of Stamboul, they had their eyes constantly fixed upon the places of their origin, and appeared to be but travellers, or passing conquerors of Europe. They preserved the manners of Asia, the laws of Asia, the remembrances of Asia; and the West was, in their estimation, less a country than a theatre for their exploits.
Amidst their decline, nothing was more fatal to the Turks than the memory of their past glory; nothing was more injurious to them than that national pride which was no longer in harmony with their fortune, or in proportion with their strength. The illusions of a power that no longer existed prevented them from foreseeing the obstacles they were likely to meet with in their enterprises, or the dangers with which they were threatened. When the Ottomans made an unsuccessful war, or an unfavourable treaty, they never failed to lay the blame on their leaders, whom popular vengeance devoted to death or exile; and whilst they thus immolated victims to their vanity, their reverses became the more irreparable, from their persisting in mistaking the true causes of them.
Tacitus somewhere expresses the joy he felt in seeing barbarians making war upon one another; and we experience something of this joy when we see despotism threatened by its own institutions, and tormented by the very instruments of its power. Another spectacle, no less consoling to all who love humanity and justice, is to behold this family of fierce despots, before whom the entire East trembled, devouring itself. It is well known what victims each sultan, on ascending the throne, was compelled to offer to the suspicious genius of despotism. But Heaven does not permit the most sacred laws of nature to be constantly violated with impunity; and the Ottoman dynasty, in expiation of so many crimes against family ties, sunk at last into a species of degradation. The Ottoman princes, brought up in subjection and fear, lost the energy and the faculties necessary for conducting the government of a great empire. Soliman II. only increased the evil by decreeing a constitutional law, that no son of the sultan’s should command armies or govern provinces. From that time none but effeminate princes, timid and senseless men, occupied the Ottoman throne.