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

Now I call the era at which I have arrived the turning-point of their fortunes, because, when they had descended down to Khorasan and the countries below it, they might have turned to the East or to the West, as they chose. They were at liberty to turn their forces eastward against their kindred in Hindostan, whom they had driven out of Ghizni and Affghanistan, or to face towards the west, and make their way thither through the Saracens of Persia and its neighbouring countries. It was an era which determined the history of the world. I recollect once hearing a celebrated professor of geology attempt to draw out the consequences which would have occurred, had there not been an outlet for the Thames, which exists in fact, at a certain point of its course. He said that, had the range of hills been unbroken, it would have streamed off to the north-east, and have run into the sea at the Wash in Lincolnshire. An utter change in the political events which came after, another history of England, and nothing short of it, would have been the result. An illustration such as this will at least serve to express what I would say of the point at which we now stand in the history of the Turks. Mahmood turned to the east; and had the barbarian tribes which successively descended done the same, they might have conquered the Gaznevide dynasty, they might have settled themselves, like Timour, at Delhi, and their descendants might have been found there by the British in their conquests during the last century; but they would have been unknown to Europe, they would have been strange to Constantinople, they would have had little interest for the Church. They had rebelled against Mahmood, they had driven his family to the East; but they did not pursue him thither; he had strength enough to keep them off the rich territory he had appropriated; he was the obstacle which turned the stream westward; in consequence, they looked towards Persia, where their brethren had been so long settled, and they directed their course for good and all towards Europe.

But this era was a turning-point in their history in another and more serious respect. In Sogdiana and Khorasan, they had become converts to the Mahometan faith. You will not suppose I am going to praise a religious imposture, but no Catholic need deny that it is, considered in itself, a great improvement upon Paganism. Paganism has no rule of right and wrong, no supreme and immutable judge, no intelligible revelation, no fixed dogma whatever; on the other hand, the being of one God, the fact of His revelation, His faithfulness to His promises, the eternity of the moral law, the certainty of future retribution, were borrowed by Mahomet from the Church, and are steadfastly held by his followers. The false prophet taught much which is materially true and objectively important, whatever be its subjective and formal value and influence in the individuals who profess it. He stands in his creed between the religion of God and the religion of devils, between Christianity and idolatry, between the West and the extreme East. And so stood the Turks, on adopting his faith, at the date I am speaking of; they stood between Christ in the West, and Satan in the East, and they had to make their choice; and, alas! they were led by the circumstances of the time to oppose themselves, not to Paganism, but to Christianity. A happier lot indeed had befallen poor Sultan Mahmood than befell his kindred who followed in his wake. Mahmood, a Mahomedan, went eastward and found a superstition worse than his own, and fought against it, and smote it; and the sandal doors which he tore away from the idol temple and hung up at his tomb at Gazneh, almost seemed to plead for him through centuries as the soldier and the instrument of Heaven. The tribes which followed him, Moslem also, faced westward, and found, not error but truth, and fought against it as zealously, and in doing so, were simply tools of the Evil One, and preachers of a lie, and enemies, not witnesses of God. The one destroyed idol temples, the other Christian shrines. The one has been saved the woe of persecuting the Bride of the Lamb; the other is of all races the veriest brood of the serpent which the Church has encountered since she was set up. For 800 years did the sandal gates remain at Mahmood's tomb, as a trophy over idolatry; and for 800 years have Seljuk and Othman been our foe, singled out as such, and denounced by successive Vicars of Christ.

6.

The year 1048 of our era is fixed by chronologists as the date of the rise of the Turkish power, as far as Christendom is interested in its history.[41] Sixty-three years before this date, a Turk of high rank, of the name of Seljuk, had quarrelled with his native prince in Turkistan, crossed the Jaxartes with his followers, and planted himself in the territory of Sogdiana. His father had been a chief officer in the prince's court, and was the first of his family to embrace Islamism; but Seljuk, in spite of his creed, did not obtain permission to advance into Sogdiana from the Saracenic government, which at that time was in possession of the country. After several successful encounters, however, he gained admission into the city of Bokhara, and there he settled. As time went on, he fully recompensed the tardy hospitality which the Saracens had shown him; for his feud with his own countrymen, whom he had left, took the shape of a religious enmity, and he fought against them as pagans and infidels, with a zeal, which was both an earnest of the devotion of his people to the faith of Mahomet, and a training for the exercise of it. He died, it is said, in battle against the pagans, and at the wonderful age of 107. Of his five sons, whom he left behind him, one, Michael, was cut off prematurely in battle against the infidels also, and has obtained the name of Shadid or the Martyr; for in a religion where the soldier is the missionary, the soldier is the martyr also. The other sons became rich and powerful; they had numerous flocks and fertile pastures in Sogdiana, till at length they attracted the notice of the Sultan Mahmood, who, having dispossessed the Saracens of the country where Seljuk had placed himself, looked about for mercenary troops to keep his possession of it. It was one of Seljuk's family, who at a later date alarmed Mahmood by telling him he could bring 200,000 horsemen from the Scythian wilderness, if he sent round his bow to summon them; it was Seljuk's horde and retainers that ultimately forced back Mahmood's son into the south and the east, and got possession of Sogdiana and Khorasan. Having secured this acquisition, they next advanced into Persia, and this was the event, which is considered to fix the date of their entrance into ecclesiastical history. It was the date of their first steadily looking westward; it determined their destiny; they began to be enemies of the Cross in the year 1048, under the leading of Michael the Martyr's son, Togrul Beg.

It is the inconvenience of any mere sketch of historical transactions, that a multiplicity of objects successively passes over the field of view, not less independent in themselves, though not less connected in the succession of events, than the pictures of a magic lantern. I am aware of the weariness and the perplexity which are in consequence inflicted on the attention and the memory of the hearer; but what can I do but ask your indulgence, Gentlemen, for a circumstance which is inherent in any undertaking like the present? I have in the course of an hour to deal with a series of exploits and fortunes, which begin in the wilds of Turkistan, and conclude upon the Bosphorus; in which, as I may say, time is no measure of events, one while from the obscurity in which they lie, at another from their multitude and consequent confusion. For four centuries the Turks are little or hardly heard of; then suddenly in the course of as many tens of years, and under three Sultans, they make the whole world resound with their deeds; and, while they have pushed to the East through Hindostan, in the West they have hurried down to the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, have taken Jerusalem, and threatened Constantinople. In their long period of silence they had been sowing the seeds of future conquests; in their short period of action they were gathering the fruit of past labours and sufferings. The Saracenic empire stood apparently as before; but, as soon as a Turk showed himself at the head of a military force within its territory, he found himself surrounded by the armies of his kindred which had been so long in its pay; he was joined by the tribes of Turcomans, to whom the Romans in a former age had shown the passes of the Caucasus; and he could rely on the reserve of innumerable swarms, ever issuing out of his native desert, and following in his track. Such was the state of Western Asia in the middle of the eleventh century.

7.

I have said there were three great Sultans of the race of Seljuk, by whom the conquest of the West of Asia was begun and completed; their names are Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan, and Malek Shah. I have not to write their histories, but I may say a few words of their characters and their actions.

1. The first, Togrul, was the son and grandson of Mahometan Martyrs, and he inherited that fanaticism, which made the old Seljuk and the young Michael surrender their lives in their missionary warfare against the enemies of their faith. Each day he repeated the five prayers prescribed for the disciples of Islam; each week he gave two days to fasting; in every city which he made his own, he built a mosque before he built his palace. He introduced vast numbers of his wild countrymen into his provinces, and suffered their nomadic habits, on the condition of their becoming proselytes to his creed. He was the man suited to his time; mere material power was not adequate to the overthrow of the Saracenic sovereignty: rebellion after rebellion had been successful against the Caliph; and at the very time I speak of he was in subjection to a family of the old Persian race. But then he was spiritual head of the Empire as well as temporal; and, though he lay in his palace wallowing in brutal sensuality, he was still a sort of mock-Pope, even after his armies and his territories had been wrested from his hands; but it was the reward of Togrul's zeal to gain from him this spiritual prerogative, retaining which the Caliph could never have fallen altogether. He gave to Togrul the title of Rocnoddîn, or "the firm pillar of religion;" and, what was more to the purpose, he made him his vicegerent over the whole Moslem world. Armed with this religious authority, which was temporal in its operation, he went to war against the various insurgents who troubled the Caliph's repose, and substituted himself for them, a more powerful and insidious enemy than any or all. But even Mahomet, the Caliph's predecessor, would not have denied that Togrul was worthy of his hire; he turned towards Armenia and Asia Minor, and began that terrible war against the Cross, which was to last 500 years. The prodigious number of 130,000 Christians, in battle or otherwise, is said to be the sacrifice he offered up to the false prophet. On his victorious return, he was again recognized by his grateful master as his representative. He made his public entry into the imperial city on horseback. At the palace gate he showed the outward deference to the Caliph's authority which was his policy. He dismounted, his nobles laid aside their arms, and thus they walked respectfully into the recesses of the palace. According to the Saracenic ceremonial, the Caliph received them behind his black veil, the black garment of his family was cast over his shoulders, and the staff of Mahomet was in his hand. Togrul kissed the ground, and waited modestly, till he was led to the throne, and was there allowed to seat himself, and to hear the commission publicly declaring him invested with the authority of the Vicar of the Arch-deceiver. He was then successively clothed in seven robes of honour, and presented with seven slaves, the natives of the seven climates of the Saracenic Empire. His veil was perfumed with musk; two crowns were set upon his head; two scimitars were girded on his side, in token of his double reign over East and West. He twice kissed the Caliph's hand; and his titles were proclaimed by the voice of heralds and the applause of the Moslem.

Such was Togrul Beg, and such was his reward. After these exploits, he marched against his brother (for these Turkish tribes were always quarrelling over their prey), deposed him, strangled him and put to death a number of his adherents, married the Caliph's daughter, and then died without children. His power passed to his nephew Alp Arslan.

2. Alp Arslan, the second Sultan of the line of Seljuk, is said to signify in Turkish "the courageous lion:" and the Caliph gave its possessor the Arabic appellation of Azzaddin, or "Protector of Religion." It was the distinctive work of his short reign to pass from humbling the Caliph to attacking the Greek Emperor. Togrul had already invaded the Greek provinces of Asia Minor, from Cilicia to Armenia, along a line of 600 miles, and here it was that he had achieved his tremendous massacres of Christians. Alp Arslan renewed the war; he penetrated to Cæsarea in Cappadocia, attracted by the gold and pearls which encrusted the shrine of the great St. Basil. He then turned his arms against Armenia and Georgia, and conquered the hardy mountaineers of the Caucasus, who at present give such trouble to the Russians. After this he encountered, defeated, and captured the Greek Emperor. He began the battle with all the solemnity and pageantry of a hero of romance. Casting away his bow and arrows, he called for an iron mace and scimitar; he perfumed his body with musk, as if for his burial, and dressed himself in white, that he might be slain in his winding-sheet. After his victory, the captive Emperor of New Rome was brought before him in a peasant's dress; he made him kiss the ground beneath his feet, and put his foot upon his neck. Then, raising him up, he struck or patted him three times with his hand, and gave him his life and, on a large ransom, his liberty. At this time the Sultan was only forty-four years of age, and seemed to have a career of glory still before him. Twelve hundred nobles stood before his throne; two hundred thousand soldiers marched under his banner. As if dissatisfied with the South, he turned his arms against his own paternal wildernesses, with which his family, as I have related, had a feud. New tribes of Turks seem to have poured down, and were wresting Sogdiana from the race of Seljuk, as the Seljukians had wrested it from the Gaznevides. Alp had not advanced far into the country, when he met his death from the hand of a captive. A Carismian chief had withstood his progress, and, being taken, was condemned to a lingering execution. On hearing the sentence, he rushed forward upon Alp Arslan; and the Sultan, disdaining to let his generals interfere, bent his bow, but, missing his aim, received the dagger of his prisoner in his breast. His death, which followed, brings before us that grave dignity of the Turkish character, of which we have already had an example in Mahmood. Finding his end approaching, he has left on record a sort of dying confession:—"In my youth," he said, "I was advised by a sage to humble myself before God, to distrust my own strength, and never to despise the most contemptible foe. I have neglected these lessons, and my neglect has been deservedly punished. Yesterday, as from an eminence, I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet, and I said in my heart, Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors. These armies are no longer mine; and, in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin." On his tomb was engraven an inscription, conceived in a similar spirit. "O ye, who have seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, repair to Maru, and you will behold it buried in the dust."[42] Alp Arslan was adorned with great natural qualities both of intellect and of soul. He was brave and liberal: just, patient, and sincere: constant in his prayers, diligent in his alms, and, it is added, witty in his conversation;—but his gifts availed him not.