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

Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest seemed over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It seemed as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as the Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath of the last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders had broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of July, 1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his death-bed.

2.

Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the name of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or Turcoman, who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took the prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political improvement. His son, Othman's father, came into the service of the last Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a horde of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in alliance with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism of the desert, and, when he succeeded to his father's power, he proclaimed a gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity. Suddenly, like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain heights which separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan conquests, and he pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which remained from that time the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for Adrianople and Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series of conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of the first, if not the first power, not only of Asia, but of the world.

These conquests were achieved during the reigns of ten great Sultans, the average length of whose reigns is as much as twenty-six years, an unusual period for military sovereigns, and both an evidence of the stability, and a means of the extension, of their power. Then came the period of their decline, and we are led on through the space of another 270 years, up to our own day, when they seem on the verge of some great reverse or overthrow. In this second period they have had as many as twenty-one Sultans, whose average reigns are only half the length of those who preceded them, and afford as cogent an argument of their national disorder and demoralization. Of these twenty-one, five have been strangled, three have been deposed, and three have died of excess; of the remaining ten, four only have attained the age of man, and these come together in the course of the last century; two others have died about the age of thirty, and three about the age of fifty. The last, the thirty-first from Othman, is the present Sultan, who came to the throne as a boy, and is described at that time by an English traveller, as one of the most "sickly, pale, inanimate, and unmanly youths he ever saw,"[57] and who has this very year just reached the average length of the reign of his twenty predecessors.

The names of the Ottoman Sultans are more familiar to us and more easy to recollect than other Oriental sovereigns, partly from their greater euphony as Europeans read them, partly from their recurrence again and again in the catalogue. There are four Mahomets, four Mustaphas, four Amuraths or Murads, three Selims, three Achmets, three Othmans, two Mahmoods, two Solimans, and two Bajazets.[58]

I have already described Othman, the founder of the line, as a soldier of fortune in the Seljukian service; and, in spite of the civilizing influences of the country, the people, and the religion, to which he had attached himself, he had not as yet laid aside the habits of his ancestors, but was half shepherd, half freebooter. Nor is it likely that any of his countrymen would be anything else, as long as they were still in war and in subordinate posts. Peace must precede the enjoyment, and power the arts of government; and the very readiness with which his followers left their nomad life, as soon as they had the opportunity, shows that the means of civilization which they had enjoyed, had not been thrown away on them. The soldiers of Zingis, when laden with booty, and not till then, cried out to be led back, and would fight no more; Tamerlane, at the end of fifty years, began to be a magnificent king. In like manner, Othman observed the life of a Turcoman, till he became a conqueror; but, as soon as he had crossed Mount Olympus, and found himself in the Greek territory as a master, he was both willing and able to accommodate himself to a pomp and luxury to which a mere Turcoman was unequal. He bade adieu to his fastnesses in the heights, and he began to fortify the towns and castles which he had heretofore pillaged. Conquest and civilization went hand in hand; his successor, Orchan, selected a capital, which he ornamented with a mosque, a hospital, a mint, and a college; he introduced professors of the sciences, and, what was as great a departure from Tartar habits, he raised a force of infantry, among his captives (in anticipation of the Janizaries, formed soon after), and he furnished himself with a train of battering engines. More strange still, he gained the Greek Emperor's daughter in marriage, a Christian princess; and lastly, he crossed over into Europe under cover of friendship to the court of Constantinople, and possessed himself of Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont. His successors gained first Roumelia, that is, the country round Constantinople, as far as the Balkan, with Adrianople for a capital; then they successively swept over Moldavia, Servia, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Morea. Then they gained a portion of Hungary; then they took Constantinople, just 400 years ago this very year. Meanwhile they had extended their empire into Syria, Egypt, and along the coast of Africa. And thus at length they more than half encompassed the Mediterranean, from the straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Venice, and reigned in three quarters of the world.

3.

Now you may ask me, what were Christians doing in Europe all this while? What was the Holy Father about at Rome, if he did not turn his eyes, as heretofore, on the suffering state of his Asiatic provinces, and oppose some rampart to the advance of the enemy upon Constantinople? and how has he been the enduring enemy of the Turk, if he acquiesced in the Turk's long course of victories? Alas! he often looked towards the East, and often raised the alarm, and often, as I have said, attempted by means of the powers of Christendom, what his mission did not give him arms to do himself. But he was impeded and embarrassed by so many and such various difficulties, that, if I proposed to go through them, I should find myself engaged in a history of Europe during those centuries. I will suggest some of them, though I can do no more.

1. First of all, then, I observe generally, that the Pope, in attempting to save Constantinople and its Empire, was attempting to save a fanatical people, who had for ages set themselves against the Holy See and the Latin world, and who had for centuries been under a sentence of excommunication. They hated and feared the Catholics, as much as they hated and feared the Turks, and they contemned them too, for their comparative rudeness and ignorance of literature; and this hatred and fear and contempt were grafted on a cowardly, crafty, insincere, and fickle character of mind, for which they had been notorious from time immemorial. It was impossible to save them without their own cordial coöperation; it was impossible to save them in spite of themselves.

These odious traits and dispositions had, in the course of the two hundred years during which the Crusades lasted, borne abundant fruits and exhibited themselves in results intolerable to the warlike multitudes who had come to their assistance. For two hundred years "each spring and summer had produced a new emigration of pilgrim warriors for the defence of the Holy Land;"[59] and what had been the effect upon the Greeks of such prodigality of succour? what satisfaction, what gratitude had they shown for an undertaking on the part of the West, which ought properly to have been their own, and which the West commenced, because the East asked it? When the celebrated Peter the Hermit was in Constantinople, he would have addressed himself first of all to its imperial master; and not till the Patriarch of the day showed the hopelessness of seeking help from a vicious and imbecile court, did he cry out: "I will rouse the nations of Europe in your cause." The Emperors sought help themselves instead of lending it. Again and again, in the course of the Holy Wars, did they selfishly betake themselves to the European capitals; and they made their gain of the successes of the Crusaders, as far as they had opportunity, as the jackal follows the lion; but from the very first, their pride was wounded, and their cowardice alarmed, at the sight of their protectors in their city and provinces, and they took every means to weaken and annoy the very men whom they had invited. In the great council of Placentia, summoned by Urban the Second, before the Crusades were yet begun, in the presence of 200 Latin Bishops, 4,000 inferior clergy, and 30,000 laity, the ambassadors of the Greek Emperor had been introduced, and they pleaded the distress of their sovereign and the danger of their city, which the misbelievers already were threatening.[60] They insisted on its being the policy of the Latin princes to repel the barbarian in Asia rather than when he was in the heart of Europe, and drew such a picture of their own miseries, that the vast assembly burst into tears, and dismissed them with the assurance of their most zealous coöperation.