Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) / The Turks in Their Relation to Europe; Marcus Tullius Cicero; Apollonius of Tyana; Primitive Christianity

by John Henry Newman

1.

I have said that, when first they distinctly appear on the scene of history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to be the most plentiful in the world. There have been iron works there from time immemorial, and at the time that the Huns descended on the Roman Empire (in the fifth century of the Christian era), we find the Turks nothing more than a family of slaves, employed as workers of the ore and as blacksmiths by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the course of fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish power in Europe, with the sudden development peculiar to Tartars, we find these Turks spread from East to West, and lords of a territory so extensive, that they were connected, by relations of peace or war, at once with the Chinese, the Persians, and the Romans. They had reached Kamtchatka on the North, the Caspian on the West, and perhaps even the mouth of the Indus on the South. Here then we have an intermediate empire of Tartars, placed between the eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this sketch it has no place, except as belonging to Turkish history, because it was contained within the limits of Asia, and, though it lasted for 200 years, it only faintly affected the political transactions of Europe. However, it was not without some sort of influence on Christendom, for the Romans interchanged embassies with its sovereign in the reign of the then Greek Emperor Justin the younger (A.D. 570), with the view of engaging him in a warlike alliance against Persia. The account of one of these embassies remains, and the picture it presents of the Turks is important, because it seems clearly to identify them with the Tartar race.

For instance, in the mission to the Tartars from the Pope, which I have already spoken of, the friars were led between two fires, when they approached the Khan, and they at first refused to follow, thinking they might be countenancing some magical rite. Now we find it recorded of this Roman embassy, that, on its arrival, it was purified by the Turks with fire and incense. As to incense, which seems out of place among such barbarians, it is remarkable that it is used in the ceremonial of the Turkish court to this day. At least Sir Charles Fellows, in his work on the Antiquities of Asia Minor, in 1838, speaks of the Sultan as going to the festival of Bairam with incense-bearers before him. Again, when the Romans were presented to the great Khan, they found him in his tent, seated on a throne, to which wheels were attached and horses attachable, in other words, a Tartar waggon. Moreover, they were entertained at a banquet which lasted the greater part of the day; and an intoxicating liquor, not wine, which was sweet and pleasant, was freely presented to them; evidently the Tartar koumiss.[15] The next day they had a second entertainment in a still more splendid tent; the hangings were of embroidered silk, and the throne, the cups, and the vases were of gold. On the third day, the pavilion, in which they were received, was supported on gilt columns; a couch of massive gold was raised on four gold peacocks; and before the entrance to the tent was what might be called a sideboard, only that it was a sort of barricade of waggons, laden with dishes, basins, and statues of solid silver. All these points in the description,—the silk hangings, the gold vessels, the successively increasing splendour of the entertainments,—remind us of the courts of Zingis and Timour, 700 and 900 years afterwards.

This empire, then, of the Turks was of a Tartar character; yet it was the first step of their passing from barbarism to that degree of civilization which is their historical badge. And it was their first step in civilization, not so much by what it did in its day, as (unless it be a paradox to say so), by its coming to an end. Indeed it so happens, that those Turkish tribes which have changed their original character and have a place in the history of the world, have obtained their status and their qualifications for it, by a process very different from that which took place in the nations most familiar to us. What this process has been I will say presently; first, however, let us observe that, fortunately for our purpose, we have still specimens existing of those other Turkish tribes, which were never submitted to this process of education and change, and, in looking at them as they now exist, we see at this very day the Turkish nationality in something very like its original form, and are able to decide for ourselves on its close approximation to the Tartar. You may recollect I pointed out to you, Gentlemen, in the opening of these lectures, the course which the pastoral tribes, or nomads as they are often called, must necessarily take in their emigrations. They were forced along in one direction till they emerged from their mountain valleys, and descended their high plateau at the end of Tartary, and then they had the opportunity of turning south. If they did not avail themselves of this opening, but went on still westward, their next southern pass would be the defiles of the Caucasus and Circassia, to the west of the Caspian. If they did not use this, they would skirt the top of the Black Sea, and so reach Europe. Thus in the emigration of the Huns from China, you may recollect a tribe of them turned to the South as soon as they could, and settled themselves between the high Tartar land and the sea of Aral, while the main body went on to the furthest West by the north of the Black Sea. Now with this last passage into Europe we are not here concerned, for the Turks have never introduced themselves to Europe by means of it;[16] but with those two southward passages which are Asiatic, viz., that to the east of the Aral, and that to the west of the Caspian. The Turkish tribes have all descended upon the civilized world by one or other of these two roads; and I observe, that those which have descended along the east of the Aral have changed their social habits and gained political power, while those which descended to the west of the Caspian remain pretty much what they ever were. The former of these go among us by the general name of Turks; the latter are the Turcomans or Turkmans.

2.

Now, first, I shall briefly mention the Turcomans, and dismiss them, because, when they have once illustrated the original state of their race, they have no place in this sketch. I have said, then, that the ancient Turco-Tartar empire, to which the Romans sent their embassy in the sixth century, extended to the Caspian and towards the Indus. It was in the beginning of the next century that the Romans, that is, the Greco-Romans of Constantinople, found them in the former of these neighbourhoods; and they made the same use of them in the defence of their territory, to which they had put the Goths before the overthrow of the Western Empire. It was a most eventful era at which they addressed themselves to these Turks of the Caspian. It was almost the very year of the Hegira, which marks the rise of the Mahometan imposture and rule. As yet, however, the Persians were in power, and formidable enemies to the Romans, and at this very time in possession of the Holy Cross, which Chosroes, their powerful king, had carried away from Jerusalem twelve years before. But the successful Emperor Heraclius was already in the full tide of those brilliant victories, which in the course of a few years recovered it; and, to recall him from their own soil, the Persians had allied themselves with the barbarous tribes of Europe, (the Russians, Sclavonians, Bulgarians, and others,) which, then as now, were pressing down close upon Constantinople from the north. This alliance suggested to Heraclius the counterstroke of allying himself with the Turkish freebooters, who in like manner, as stationed above the Caspian, were impending over Persia. Accordingly the horde of Chozars, as this Turkish tribe was called, at the Emperor's invitation, transported their tents from the plains of the Volga through the defiles of the Caucasus into Georgia. Heraclius showed them extraordinary attention; he put his own diadem on the head of the barbarian prince, and distributed gold, jewels, and silk to his officers; and, on the other hand, he obtained from them an immediate succour of 40,000 horse, and the promise of an irruption of their brethren into Persia from the far East, from the quarter of the Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of the passages by which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South. Such were the allies, with which Heraclius succeeded in utterly overthrowing and breaking up the Persian power; and thus, strange to say, the greatest of all the enemies of the Church among the nations of the earth, the Turk, began his career in Christian history by coöperating with a Christian Emperor in the recovery of the Holy Cross, of which a pagan, the ally of Russia, had got possession. The religious aspect, however, of this first era of their history, seems to have passed away without improvement; what they gained was a temporal advantage, a settlement in Georgia and its neighbourhood, which they have held from that day to this.

This horde of Turks, the Chozars, was nomad and pagan; it consisted of mounted shepherds, surrounded with their flocks, living in tents and waggons. In the course of the following centuries, under the shadow of their more civilized brethren, other similar hordes were introduced, nomad and pagan still; they might indeed happen sometimes to pass down from the east of the Caspian as well as from the west, hastening to the south straight from Turkistan along the coast of the Aral;—either road would lead them down to the position which the Chozars were the first to occupy in Georgia and Armenia,—but still there would be but one step in their journey between their old native sheep-walk and horse-path and the fair region into which they came. It was a sudden Tartar descent, accompanied with no national change of habits, and promising no permanent stability. Nor would they have remained there, I suppose, as they did remain, were it not that they have been protected, as they were originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have made use of them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to this day, the successors of the Chozars, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, even as far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its maritime cities and ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand years ago, except that they have taken up the loose profession of Mahometanism, and have given up some of the extreme peculiarities of their Tartar state, such as their attachment to horse-flesh and mares' milk. These are the Turcomans.

3.

The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concerned, he tells us that[17] "they are tall and robust, with square flat faces, as well as the western; only they are more swarthy, and have a greater resemblance to the Tartars. Some of them have betaken themselves to husbandry. They are all Mohammedans; they are very turbulent, very brave, and good horsemen." And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that of firearms.

This account is drawn up from writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Precisely the same report of their habits is made by Dr. Chandler in his travels in Asia Minor in the middle of the last century; he fell in with them in his journey between Smyrna and Ephesus. "We were told here," he says, "that the road farther on was beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the Nomades Scythæ: or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing their stations, and overspreading without control the vast neglected pastures of this desert empire.... We set out, and ... soon after came to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and herds and horses and poultry feeding round them."[18]