LECTURE IV.
The Turk and the Saracen.
1.
Mere occupation of a rich country is not enough for civilization, as I have granted already. The Turks came into the pleasant plains and valleys of Sogdiana; the Turcomans into the well-wooded mountains and sunny slopes of Asia Minor. The Turcomans were brought out of their dreary deserts, yet they retained their old habits, and they remain barbarians to this day. But why? it must be borne in mind, they neither subjugated the inhabitants of their new country on the one hand, nor were subjugated by them on the other. They never had direct or intimate relations with it; they were brought into it by the Roman Government at Constantinople as its auxiliaries, but they never naturalized themselves there. They were like gipseys in England, except that they were mounted freebooters instead of pilferers and fortune-tellers. It was far otherwise with their brethren in Sogdiana; they were there first as conquerors, then as conquered. First they held it in possession as their prize for 90 or 100 years; they came into the usufruct and enjoyment of it. Next, their political ascendancy over it involved, as in the case of the White Huns, some sort of moral surrender of themselves to it. What was the first consequence of this? that, like the White Huns, they intermarried with the races they found there. We know the custom of the Tartars and Turks; under such circumstances they would avail themselves of their national practice of polygamy to its full extent of licence. In the course of twenty years a new generation would arise of a mixed race; and these in turn would marry into the native population, and at the end of ninety or a hundred years we should find the great-grandsons or the great-great-grandsons of the wild marauders who first crossed the Jaxartes, so different from their ancestors in features both of mind and body, that they hardly would be recognized as deserving the Tartar name. At the end of that period their power came to an end, the Saracens became masters of them and of their country, but the process of emigration southward from the Scythian desert, which had never intermitted during the years of their domination, continued still, though that domination was no more.
Here it is necessary to have a clear idea of the nature of that association of the Turkish tribes from the Volga to the Eastern Sea, to which I have given the name of Empire:—it was not so much of a political as of a national character; it was the power, not of a system, but of a race. They were not one well-organized state, but a number of independent tribes, acting generally together, acknowledging one leader or not, according to circumstances, combining and coöperating from the identity of object which acted on them, and often jealous of each other and quarrelling with each other on account of that very identity. Each tribe made its way down to the south as it could; one blocked up the way of the other for a time; there were stoppages and collisions, but there was a continual movement and progress. Down they came one after another, like wolves after their prey; and as the tribes which came first became partially civilized, and as a mixed generation arose, these would naturally be desirous of keeping back their less polished uncles or cousins, if they could; and would do so successfully for awhile: but cupidity is stronger than conservatism; and so, in spite of delay and difficulty, down they would keep coming, and down they did come, even after and in spite of the overthrow of their Empire; crowding down as to a new world, to get what they could, as adventurers, ready to turn to the right or the left, prepared to struggle on anyhow, willing to be forced forward into countries farther still, careless what might turn up, so that they did but get down. And this was the process which went on (whatever were their fortunes when they actually got down, prosperous or adverse) for 400, nay, I will say for 700 years. The storehouse of the north was never exhausted; it sustained the never-ending run upon its resources.
2.
I was just now referring to a change in the Turks, which I have mentioned before, and which had as important a bearing as any other of their changes upon their subsequent fortunes. It was a change in their physiognomy and shape, so striking as to recommend them to their masters for the purposes of war or of display. Instead of bearing any longer the hideous exterior which in the Huns frightened the Romans and Goths, they were remarkable, even as early as the ninth century, when they had been among the natives of Sogdiana only two hundred years, for the beauty of their persons. An important political event was the result: hence the introduction of the Turks into the heart of the Saracenic empire. By this time the Caliphs had removed from Damascus to Bagdad; Persia was the imperial province, and into Persia they were introduced for the reason I have mentioned, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as captives taken in war, sometimes as mercenaries for the Saracenic armies: at length they were enrolled as guards to the Caliph, and even appointed to offices in the palace, to the command of the forces, and to governorships in the provinces. The son of the celebrated Harun al Raschid had as many as 50,000 of these troops in Bagdad itself. And thus slowly and silently they made their way to the south, not with the pomp and pretence of conquest, but by means of that ordinary intercommunion which connected one portion of the empire of the Caliphs with another. In this manner they were introduced even into Egypt.
This was their history for a hundred and fifty years, and what do we suppose would be the result of this importation of barbarians into the heart of a flourishing empire? Would they be absorbed as slaves or settlers in the mass of the population, or would they, like mercenaries elsewhere, be fatal to the power that introduced them? The answer is not difficult, considering that their very introduction argued a want of energy and resource in the rulers whom they served. To employ them was a confession of weakness; the Saracenic power indeed was not very aged, but the Turkish was much younger, and more vigorous;—then too must be considered the difference of national character between the Turks and the Saracens. A writer of the beginning of the present century,[35] compares the Turks to the Romans; such parallels are generally fanciful and fallacious; but, if we must accept it in the present instance, we may complete the picture by likening the Saracens and Persians to the Greeks, and we know what was the result of the collision between Greece and Rome. The Persians were poets, the Saracens were philosophers. The mathematics, astronomy, and botany were especial subjects of the studies of the latter. Their observatories were celebrated, and they may be considered to have originated the science of chemistry. The Turks, on the other hand, though they are said to have a literature, and though certain of their princes have been patrons of letters, have never distinguished themselves in exercises of pure intellect; but they have had an energy of character, a pertinacity, a perseverance, and a political talent, in a word, they then had the qualities of mind necessary for ruling, in far greater measure, than the people they were serving. The Saracens, like the Greeks, carried their arms over the surface of the earth with an unrivalled brilliancy and an unchequered success; but their dominion, like that of Greece, did not last for more than 200 or 300 years. Rome grew slowly through many centuries, and its influence lasts to this day; the Turkish race battled with difficulties and reverses, and made its way on amid tumult and complication, for a good 1,000 years from first to last, till at length it found itself in possession of Constantinople, and a terror to the whole of Europe. It has ended its career upon the throne of Constantine; it began it as the slave and hireling of the rulers of a great empire, of Persia and Sogdiana.