When the Turks laid siege to Vienna in 1529 it was the period of their greatest prosperity. If at that time the entire Ottoman empire had been enclosed by a modest wall it would have taken a large army of workmen from that day to the present to tear down the old boundaries and reerect them upon the new lines. A most interesting feature of this constant change is that it has been almost uniformly a decrease in the area of the empire. At that time it was the most powerful realm in the world. It included all the states bordering upon the Mediterranean except Spain, France, Italy, and Morocco, the entire Black Sea coast, and nearly all that of the Red Sea, as well as the lower Danube district. Gradually province after province and state after state have slipped from the grasp of the sultan. The decline became decided in 1606 beginning with the treaties of the Sitavorok. With the treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 it amounted to actual dismemberment. The epithet, “The sick man of the East,” was applied to the sultan, after this loss of prestige from which he never recovered. The retrograde movement continued through the seventeenth century. While the Ottoman empire had been the object of extreme fear upon the part of the nations of Europe up to the beginning of that century, each of them vying with the rest in seeking the favor and good-will of the reigning sultan, at the beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey had reached a point where it was protected by its relative weakness. It no longer inspired fear in the hearts of European rulers, while its impotency and the mutual antagonism of its subject non-Moslem races rendered aggressive national action practically impossible. Parts of its territory became wholly lost, like the Danube provinces, the Caucasus and Tunis, while other sections became semi-independent like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Crete, and Egypt.
The Turkish empire may now be defined as covering Macedonia in Europe, extending west to Greece, northward to include Albania, Bulgaria, and Adrianople,—all of Asia Minor to the Russian and Persian borders upon the east, Syria and Arabia, with two small sections of Africa and a few islands in the Mediterranean. It exercises no actual control of Egypt, while its hold upon parts of Arabia is constantly contested by the people themselves.
The size and population of territory under direct control of Turkey are:
| Europe | 65,350 | sq. miles; | 6,130,200 | inhabitants |
| Asia | 693,610 | “ “ | 16,898,700 | “ |
| Africa | 398,900 | “ “ | 1,000,000 | “ |
| 1,157,860 | 24,028,900 |
Under indirect control:
| Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia | 37,200 | sq. miles; | 3,744,300 | inhabitants |
| Bosnia, etc. | 19,800 | “ “ | 1,591,100 | “ |
| Crete | 3,330 | “ “ | 310,400 | “ |
| Cyprus | 3,710 | “ “ | 237,000 | “ |
| Samos | 180 | “ “ | 54,840 | “ |
| Egypt | 400,000 | “ “ | 9,820,700 | “ |
| 464,220 | “ “ | 15,758,340 | “ |
This makes a total area covered by both the immediate and quasi possessions of the sultan 1,622,080 square miles, with a population of 39,787,240. These are the figures given by the Statesman’s Year-Book, the best attainable authority upon the subject; but even these must be taken largely as estimates and not as the results of a careful and reliable census,—something that never takes place in Turkey.
It may be said, therefore, that at the present time the sultan of Turkey actually rules over only Constantinople, the Macedonian provinces in Europe and Asia Minor to the borders of Russia and Persia, extending south through Syria and into Arabia. This includes an area of about 704,000 square miles, and a population of about 23,500,000.
These countries directly and indirectly governed by the Turkish empire command the interest of the Biblical, classical, and historical student beyond any other part of the earth. No other land possesses so many antiquities of such priceless worth. Turkey is the stage upon which many of the best-known characters of literature and history have lived and acted. It is the battle-field where, for more than thirty-five centuries, contending civilizations and hostile religions, under ambitious leadership, have met in bloody conflict. There is hardly a section of it that has not been connected directly with some well-known historical personage or race or that has not given the setting to some event of world-wide renown. This is true from Salonica on the Ægean Sea to Persia upon the east, and from Trebizond upon the Black Sea at the north to Aden at the southern point of Arabia. The ruins of massive castles and fortresses, moats and walled cities, that tell of former strength, of pride and of conflict, are found in almost every part of the empire. Inscriptions in many languages adorn the cliffs or are built into walls now crumbling to ruin. Fragments of ancient roads with arches of bridges and of aqueducts still standing, as old as our Christian era, tell of the engineering skill of the early possessors of the land.