In proportion as the knowledge derived from antiquity made progress among the Franks, Greece became for them a sacred country. The language of Plato and Demosthenes, in which the charms of liberty had been celebrated with so much eloquence, became more dear to them than their own maternal tongue. The poetical sites of Greece, which the love of letters rendered so familiar to the studious class, were for us like places in which we had passed our infancy. Europe had not a scholar in whom the city of Aristotle, that of Lycurgus, or that of Epaminondas, did not inspire something resembling the sentiments we feel for our own country. If the Greeks were degenerated; if they viewed with indifference the ruins of their country, ancient Greece still lived for every enlightened man, and was ever present, wherever a taste for the arts or a love of learning existed.
The warmer that the interest for the Greeks became, the more barbarous the Turks appeared. The Ottoman nation came and established itself in the richest countries of Europe, and remained in sight of all European people, without becoming acquainted with their languages, their laws, or their policy; like those troops of wild animals which sometimes stop in the neighbourhood of the dwellings of man, ignorant of that which is going on in these places, and having no means to seize their prey or defend themselves, but their activity, their natural strength, and the means which a gross instinct gives them. This state of things was opposed both to the laws of society and the laws of nature, which do not permit men or nations to live together and in the same place, except when they possess similar qualities, and are able to employ their faculties in common. The Turks may have been protected, at first by the fortune of their own arms, and afterwards by the policy of certain cabinets; but what real support could they have in the West, when they were repulsed by the manners, feelings, and opinions of the European nations, to whom they became every day more foreign?
On one side, the antipathy entertained for a barbarous people; on the other, the relations which united nations civilized by Christianity, were likely, sooner or later, to revive that spirit of fraternity which produced the crusades; and God has willed that this spirit, from which the holy wars were born, should manifest itself in the same century which had for a long time refused to acknowledge the effects or to admire the prodigies of them.
At the moment in which we are finishing this history, the Greeks have thrown forth a cry of alarm, and this cry has resounded throughout the Christian world. Is the moment of their deliverance arrived? When we examine the present state of Europe, we find a much greater force than would be necessary to conquer Byzantium; but on the other side, the diversity of interests and opinions will not permit the Christian republic to unite for this great enterprise. We have seen that the Turks really possess nothing but the soil of their vast empire; the riches that are there produced belong to the nations of Christendom, and these nations are for the Turkish provinces, which they cultivate to their profit, that which an active and industrious farmer is for the fields he ploughs and reaps. Add to this, that most of the Christian powers appear to fear that the displacing of a great empire may break the ties of the European confederation; they do not, as formerly, dread the strength of the Ottomans, but the difficulties and divisions that the conquest would produce. That which may add to their fears is that impatience for change, that ardent passion for novelty, which is spread all at once among the nations like a contagious fever; whilst the Greeks are imploring Europe for their liberty, restless and dissatisfied spirits look to the East for I do not know what signal for a revolution in Europe. Thus Christendom, divided by its various interests, tormented by a thousand different passions, and fearing for its own repose, awaits with anxiety the events that are preparing, and appears to recoil from victories which the superiority of her intelligence and her armies hold out to her.
What will be the issue of all the warlike demonstrations and all the pacific negotiations of which fame informs us every day? There is no doubt the cross will again arise in the East, and the fate of Christians residing there will receive some amelioration; but are we arrived at the moment which is to render Europe entirely Christian? Will the Ottoman empire, whose weakness now appears so great, yield to the power of its enemies, or will it hasten its own ruin? Will Greece, so long enslaved, resume that rank among nations from which she formerly descended so ingloriously, or will she fall into the hands of her liberators? A thousand other questions present themselves to the mind; but we will not forestall events; above all, we will avoid multiplying conjectures and hypotheses, or producing here the brilliant reveries of philosophers and poets, which the severity of history rejects. When we set a high value upon truth, and have sought it for a length of time in all that the remembrances of the past contain that is most positive, we learn to speak of the future with much circumspection and reserve.
It may be thought that we have dwelt too long upon the Ottoman empire; but the origin of that empire, its progress and its decline, are connected with all the events we have had to describe. The sketch we have traced of it may have been sometimes serviceable in making our readers acquainted with the spirit and the character of the wars against the infidels; and is this view our labour has not been useless.
At the period we have now gained, the passions which had given birth to the prodigies of the crusades had become speculative opinions, which occupied the attention of writers rather than that of kings or nations. Thus the holy wars, with their causes and effects, became the objects of the discussions of doctors and philosophers. We may remember the opinion of Luther; and although he had partly disavowed or retracted his first opinion upon the war against the Turks, most of his partisans continued to evince a great aversion for the crusades.
The minister Jurieu goes much further than Luther. That ardent apostle of the Reformation, far from thinking that war ought to be made against the Mussulmans, did not hesitate to consider the Turks as auxiliaries of the Protestants, and said that the fierce sectaries of Mahomet were sent to “labour with the Reformers in the great work of God,” which was the ruin of the papal empire. After the raising of the last siege of Vienna, in 1683, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the same Jurieu was afflicted at the disgrace of the Reformers and the defeat of the Turks; adding, at the same time, “that God had only abased them, in order to raise them together again, and make them the instruments of his vengeance against the popes.” Such is the excess of blindness to which the spirit of party or sect has power to carry us, when misled by hatred, and irritated by persecution.
Other writers, however, celebrated for their genius, and who also were connected with the Reformation, maintained that wars against the infidels ought to be carried on: they deplored the indifference of Christendom, and the wars that were breaking out daily among Christian nations, whilst they left in peace a people, a foe to all other peoples. Chancellor Bacon, in his dialogue de bello sacro, employs all his logic to prove that the Turks are excluded from the law of nations. He invokes, by turns, natural right, the rights of nations, and divine right, against the barbarians, to whom he refuses the name of a people, and maintains that war should be carried on against them as against pirates, anthropophagi, or wild animals. The illustrious chancellor quotes, in support of his opinion, maxims from Aristotle, maxims from the Bible, with examples from history, and even from fable. His manner of reasoning savours a little of the policy and philosophy of the sixteenth century, and we do not feel ourselves called upon to repeat arguments, of which many would not be of a nature to convince minds of the present century.