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

4.

The Catholic Church was in the first instance a wanderer on the earth, and had nothing to attach her to its soil; but no sooner did persecution cease, and territory was allowed to her, than she began to exert a beneficent influence upon the face of the land, and on its cultivators. She shed her consolations, and extended her protection, over the serf and the slave; and, while she gradually relaxed his fetters, she sent her own dearest children to bear his burden with him, and to aid him in the cultivation of the soil. Under the loving assiduity of the Benedictine Monk, the ravages of war were repaired, the plantation throve, the river diffused itself in rills and channels, and hill and dale and plain rejoiced in corn land and pasture. And when in a later time a world was to be created, not restored, when the deep forests of the North were to be cleared, and the unwholesome marsh to be drained, who but the missionaries from the same great Order were to be the ministers of temporal, as well as spiritual, benefits to the rude tribes they were converting? And then again, when history moved on into the era of the first Turkish outbreak, who but St. Bernard, the very preacher of the Crusade, who but he led on his peaceful Cistercians, after the pattern of his master, St. Stephen, to that laborious but cheerful husbandry, which they continue in the wild places of the earth even to this day? Never has Holy Church forgotten,—abhorrent, as she is, from the Pantheistic tendencies which in all ages have surrounded her,—never has she forgotten the interests of that mighty mother on whose bosom we feed in life, into whose arms we drop in death; never has she forgotten that that mother is the special creature of God, and to be honoured, in leaf and flower, in lofty tree and pleasant stream, for His sake, as well as for our own; that while it is our primeval penalty to till the earth, she lovingly repays us for our toil; that Adam was a gardener even in Paradise, and that Noe inaugurated his new world by "beginning to be a husbandman, and by planting a vineyard."

Such is the genius of the true faith; and it might have been thought, that, though not Christians, even of very gratitude, the barbarous race, which owed a part of whatever improvement of mind or manners they had received to the fair plains of Sogdiana, would, on seizing on their rich and beautiful lands on the north, east, and south of the Mediterranean, have felt some sort of reverence for their captive, and, while enjoying her gifts, would have been merciful to the giver. But the same selfish sensuality, with which they regard the rational creation of God, possesses them in their conduct towards physical nature. They have made the earth their paramour, and are heartless towards her dishonour and her misery. We have lately been reminded in this place of the Doge of Venice[48] making the Adriatic his bride, and claiming her by a ring of espousal; but the Turk does not deign to legitimatize his possession of the soil he has violently seized, or to gain a title to it by any sacred tie; caring for no better right to it than the pirate has to the jurisdiction of the high seas. Let the Turcoman ride up and down Asia Minor or Syria for a thousand years, how is the trampling of his horse-hoofs a possession of those countries, more than a Scythian raid or a Tartar gallop across it? The imperial Osmanli sits and smokes long days in his pavilion, without any thought at all of his broad domain except to despise and to plunder and impoverish its cultivators; and is his title made better thereby than the Turcoman's, to be the heir of Alexander and Seleucus, of the Ptolemies and Massinissa, of Constantine and Justinian? What claim does it give him upon Europe, Asia, and Africa, upon Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, that he has frustrated the munificence of nature and demolished the works of man?

5.

Asia Minor especially, the peninsula which lies between the Black Sea, the Archipelago, and the Mediterranean, was by nature one of the most beautiful, and had been made by art one of the most fertile of countries. It had for generations contained flourishing marts of commerce, and it had been studded with magnificent cities, the ruins of which now stand as a sepulchre of the past. No country perhaps has seen such a succession of prosperous states, and had such a host of historical reminiscences, under such distinct eras and such various distributions of territory. It is memorable in the beginning of history for its barbarian kings and nobles, whose names stand as commonplaces and proverbs of wealth and luxury. The magnificence of Pelops imparts lustre even to the brilliant dreams of the mythologist. The name of Crœsus, King of Lydia, whom I have already had occasion to mention, goes as a proverb for his enormous riches. Midas, King of Phrygia, had such abundance of the precious metals, that he was said by the poets to have the power of turning whatever he touched into gold. The tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was the same with the Greek colonies which were scattered along its coasts; they are renowned for opulence, for philosophy, and for the liberal and the fine arts. Homer among the poets, Thales among philosophers, Herodotus, the father of history, Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians, Apelles, the prince of painters, were among their citizens; and Pythius, who presented one of the Persian Kings with a plane-tree and a vine of massive gold, was in his day, after those kings, the richest man in the known world.

Then come the many splendid cities founded by the successors of Alexander, through its extent; and the powerful and opulent kingdoms, Greek or Barbarian, of Pontus, and Bithynia, and Pergamus—Pergamus, with its library of 200,000 choice volumes. Later still, the resources of the country were so well recognised, that it was the favourite prey of the Roman statesmen, who, after involving themselves in enormous debts in the career of ambition, needed by extortion and rapine to set themselves right with their creditors. Next it became one of the first seats of Christianity; St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles relates to us the apostolic labours of St. Paul there in town and country; St. John wrote the Apocalypse to the Churches of seven of its principal cities; and St. Peter, his first Epistle to Christians scattered through its provinces. It was the home of some of the greatest Saints, Martyrs, and Doctors of the early ages: there first, in Bithynia, the power of Christianity manifested itself over a heathen population; there St. Polycarp was martyred, there St. Gregory Thamaturgus converted the inhabitants of Pontus; there St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen, St. Basil, and St. Amphilochius preached and wrote. There were held three of the first four Councils of the Church, at Chalcedon, at Ephesus, and at Nicæa, the very city afterwards profaned by the palace of the Sultan. It abounded in the gifts of nature, for food, utility, or ornament; its rivers ran with gold, its mountains yielded the most costly marbles; it had mines of copper, and especially of iron; its plains were fruitful in all kinds of grain, in broad pastures and luxuriant woods, while its hills were favourable to the olive and the vine.

Such was that region, once celebrated for its natural advantages, for its arts, its splendour, as well as for its gifts of grace; and the misery and degradation which are at present imprinted on the very face of the soil are the emblems of that worse ruin which has overtaken the souls of its children. I have already referred to the journal of Dr. Chandler, who saw it, even in its western coast, overrun by the hideous tents of the Turcomans. Another traveller of late years[49] tells us of that ancient Bithynia, which runs along the Black Sea, a beautiful and romantic country, intersected with lofty mountains and fertile valleys, and abounding in rivers and forests. The luxuriance of the pastures, he says, and the richness of the woods, often reminded him of an English gentleman's park. Such is it as nature has furnished it for the benefit of man; but he found its forests covered with straggling Turcomans and numerous flocks of goats. As he was passing through Phrygia, the inhabitants smiled, when he asked for ruins, assuring him that the whole country was overspread with them. There too again he found a great part of its face covered with the roving Turcomans, "a boisterous and ignorant race, though much more honourable and hospitable," he adds, "than the inhabitants of the towns." Mr. Alison tells us that when the English fleet, in 1801, was stationed on the southern coast, some sailors accidentally set fire to a thick wood, and the space thus left bare was studded all along with the ruins of temples and palaces.

A still more recent traveller[50] corroborates this testimony. Striking inland from Smyrna, he found "the scenery extremely beautiful, and the land," he continues, "which is always rich, would be valuable, if sufficiently cultivated, but it is much neglected." In another part of the country, he "rode for at least three miles through a ruined city, which was one pile of temples, theatres, and buildings, vying with each other in splendour." Now here, you will observe, I am not finding fault with the mere circumstance that the scenes of ancient grandeur should abound in ruins. Buildings will decay; old buildings will not answer new uses; there are ruins enough in Europe; but the force of the argument lies in this, that in these countries there are ruins and nothing else; that the old is gone, and has not been replaced by the new. So was it about Smyrna; and so too about Sardis: "Its situation," he says, "is very beautiful, but the country over which it looks is now almost deserted, and the valley is become a swamp. Its little rivers of clear water, after turning a mill or two, serve only to flood, instead of draining and beautifying the country." His descriptions of the splendour of the scenery, yet of the desolation of the land, are so frequent that I should not be able to confine my extracts within bounds, did I attempt to give them all. He speaks of his route as lying through "a rich wilderness" of ruins. Sometimes the landscape "so far exceeded the beauty of nature, as to seem the work of magic." Again, "the splendid view passed like a dream; for the continual turns in the road, and the increasing richness of the woods and vegetation, soon limited my view to a mere foreground. Nor was this without interest; on each projecting rock stood an ancient sarcophagus; and the trees half concealed the lids and broken sculpture of innumerable tombs."

The gifts of nature remain; he was especially struck with the trees. "We traversed the coast," he says, "through woods of the richest trees, the planes being the handsomest to be found in this or perhaps any other part of the world. I have never seen such stupendous arms to any trees." Everything was running wild; "the underwood was of myrtle, growing sometimes twenty feet high, the beautiful daphne laurel, and the arbutus; and they seemed contending for preëminence with the vine, clematis, and woodbine, which climbed to the very tops, and in many instances bore them down into a thicket of vegetation, impervious except to the squirrels and birds, which, sensible of their security in these retreats, stand boldly to survey the traveller." Elsewhere he found the ground carpeted with the most beautiful flowers. A Protestant Missionary,[51] in like manner, travelling in a different part of the country, speaks of the hedges of wild roses, the luxuriant gardens and fruit-trees, principally the cherry, the rich soil, the growth of beech, oak, and maple, the level meadows and swelling hills covered with the richest sward, and the rivulets of the purest water. No wonder that, as he tells us, "sitting down under a spreading walnut-tree, by the side of a murmuring mill stream, he was led by the charming woodland scenery around to reflect upon that mysterious Providence, by which so beautiful a country has been placed under such a blighting government, in the hands of so ignorant and barbarous a people."

The state of the population is in keeping with the neglected condition of the country. It is, down to the present time, wasting away; and that there are inhabitants at all seems in the main referable to merely accidental causes. On the road from Angora to Constantinople there were old people, twenty years since, who remembered as many as forty or fifty villages, where now there are none; and in the middle of the last century two hundred places had become forsaken in the tract lying between those two cities and Smyrna.[52]