Such is that internal peculiarity, the presence of which constitutes a civilized, the absence a barbarous people; which makes a people great, and small again; and which, just consistently with the notion of their being barbarians, I cannot discern, for strength or for weakness, in the Turks. On the contrary, almost all the elements of their success, and instruments of their downfall, are external to themselves. For instance, their religion, one of their principal bonds, owes nothing to them; it is, not only in substance, but in concrete shape, just what it was when it came to them. I cannot find that they have commented upon it; I cannot find that they are the channels of any of those famous traditions by which the Koran is interpreted, and which they themselves accept; or that they have exercised their minds upon it at all, except so far as they have been obliged, in a certain degree, to do so in the administration of the law. It is true also that they have been obliged to choose to be Sunnites and not Shiahs; but, considering the latter sect arose in Persia, since the date of the Turkish occupation of Constantinople, it was really no choice at all. They have but remained as they were. Besides, the Shiahs maintain the hereditary transmission of the Caliphate, which would exclude the line of Othman from the succession—good reason then the Turks should be Sunnites; and the dates of the two events so nearly coincide, that one could even fancy that the Shiahs actually arose in consequence of the Sultan Selim's carrying off the last of the Abassides from Egypt, and gaining the transference of the Caliphate from his captive. Besides, if it is worth while pursuing the point, did they not remain Sunnites, they would have to abandon the traditional or oral law, and must cease to use the labours of its four great doctors, which would be to bring upon themselves an incalculable extent of intellectual toil; for without recognized comments on the Koran, neither the religion nor the civil state could be made to work.
The divine right of the line of Othman is another of their special political bonds, and this too is shown by the following extract from a well-known historian,[88] if it needs showing, to be simply external to themselves: "The origin of the Sultans," he says, "is obscure; but this sacred and indefeasible right" to the throne, "which no time can erase, and no violence can infringe, was soon and unalterably implanted in the minds of their subjects. A weak or vicious Sultan may be deposed and strangled, but his inheritance devolves to an infant or an idiot; nor has the most daring rebel presumed to ascend the throne of his lawful sovereign. While the transient dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a crafty visir in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle of the Turkish nation." Here we have on the one hand the imperial succession described as an element of the political life of the Osmanlis—on the other as an appointment over which they have no power; and obviously it is from its very nature independent of them. It is a form of life external to the community it vivifies.
Probably it was the wonderful continuity of so many great Sultans in their early ages, which wrought in their minds the idea of a divine mission as the attribute of the dynasty; and its acquisition of the Caliphate would fix it indelibly within them. And here again, we have another special instrument of their imperial greatness, but still an external one. I have already had occasion to observe, that barbarians make conquests by means of great men, in whom they, as it were, live; ten successive monarchs, of extraordinary vigour and talent, carried on the Ottomans to empire. Will any one show that those monarchs can be fairly called specimens of the nation, any more than Zingis was the specimen of the Tartars? Have they not rather acted as the Deus è machinâ, carrying on the drama, which has languished or stopped, since the time when they ceased to animate it? Contrast the Ottoman history in this respect with the rise of the Anglo-Indian Empire, or with the military successes of Great Britain under the Regency; or again with the literary eminence of England under Charles the Second or even Anne, which owed little to those monarchs. Kings indeed at various periods have been most effective patrons of art and science; but the question is, not whether English or French literature has ever been indebted to royal encouragement, but whether the Ottomans can do anything at all, as a nation, without it.
Indeed, I should like it investigated what internal history the Ottomans have at all; what inward development of any kind they have made since they crossed Mount Olympus and planted themselves in Broussa; how they have changed shape and feature, even in lesser matters, since they were a state, or how they are a year older than when they first came into being. We see among them no representative of Confucius, Chi-hoagti, and the sect of Ta-osse; no magi; no Pisistratus and Harmodius; no Socrates and Alcibiades; no patricians and plebeians; no Cæsar; no invasion or adoption of foreign mysteries; no mythical impersonation of an Ali; no Suffeeism; no Guelphs and Gibellines; nothing really on the type of Catholic religious orders; no Luther; nothing, in short, which, for good or evil, marks the presence of a life internal to the political community itself. Some authors indeed maintain they have a literature; but I cannot ascertain what the assertion is worth. Rather the tenor of their annals runs thus:—Two Pachas make war against each other, and a kat-sherif comes from Constantinople for the head of the one or the other; or a Pacha exceeds in pillaging his province, or acts rebelliously, and is preferred to a higher government and suddenly strangled on his way to it; or he successfully maintains himself, and gains an hereditary settlement, still subject, however, to the feudal tenure, which is the principle of the political structure, continuing to send his contingent of troops, when the Sultan goes to war, and remitting the ordinary taxes through his agent at Court. Such is the staple of Turkish history, whether amid the hordes of Turkistan, or the feudatory Turcomans of Anatolia, or the imperial Osmanlis.
3.
The remark I am making applies to them, not only as a nation, but as a body politic. When they descended on horseback upon the rich territories which they occupy, they had need to become agriculturists, and miners, and civil engineers, and traders; all which they were not; yet I do not find that they have attempted any of these functions themselves. Public works, bridges, and roads, draining, levelling, building, they seem almost entirely to have neglected; where, however, to do something was imperative, instead of applying themselves to their new position, and manifesting native talent for each emergency, they usually have had recourse to foreign assistance to execute what was uncongenial or dishonourable to themselves. The Franks were their merchants, the Armenians their bankers, the subject races their field labourers, and the Greeks their sailors. "Almost the whole business of the ship," says Thornton, "is performed by the slaves, or by the Greeks who are retained upon wages."
The most remarkable instance of this reluctance to develop from within—remarkable, both for the originality, boldness, success, and permanence of the policy adopted, and for its appositeness to my purpose—is the institution of the Janizaries, detestable as it was in a moral point of view. I enlarge upon it here because it is at the same time a palmary instance of the practical ability and wisdom of their great Sultans, exerted in compensation of the resourceless impotence of the barbarians whom they governed. The Turks were by nature nothing better than horsemen; infantry they could not be; an infantry their Sultans hardly attempted to form out of them; but since infantry was indispensable in European warfare, they availed themselves of passages in their own earlier history, and provided themselves with a perpetual supply of foot soldiers from without. Of this procedure they were not, strictly speaking, the originators; they took the idea of it from the Saracens. You may recollect that, when their ancestors were defeated by the latter people in Sogdiana, instead of returning to their deserts, they suffered themselves to be diffused and widely located through the great empire of the Caliphs. Whether as slaves, or as captives, or as mercenaries, they were taken into favour by the dominant nation, and employed as soldiers or civilians. They were chosen as boys or youths for their handsome appearance, turned into Mahometans, and educated for the army or other purposes. And thus the strength of the empire which they served was always kept fresh and vigorous, by the continual infusion into it of new blood to perform its functions; a skilful policy, if the servants could be hindered from becoming masters.
Masters in time they did become, and then they adopted a similar system themselves; we find traces of it even in the history of the Gaznevide dynasty. In the reign of the son of the great Mahmood, we read of an insurrection of the slaves; who, conspiring with one of his nobles, seized his best horses, and rode off to his enemies. "By slaves," says Dow, in translating this history, "are meant the captives and young children, bought by kings, and educated for the offices of state. They were often adopted by the Emperors, and very frequently succeeded to the Empire. A whole dynasty of these possessed afterwards the throne in Hindostan."
The same system appears in Egypt, about or soon after the time of the celebrated Saladin. Zingis, in his dreadful expedition from Khorasan to Syria and Russia, had collected an innumerable multitude of youthful captives, who glutted, as we may say, the markets of Asia. This gave the conquerors of Egypt an opportunity of forming a mercenary or foreign force for their defence, on a more definite idea than seems hitherto to have been acted upon. Saladin was a Curd, and, as such, a neighbour of the Caucasus; hence the Caucasian tribes became for many centuries the store-houses of Egyptian mercenaries. A detestable slave trade has existed with this object, especially among the Circassians, since the time of the Moguls; and of these for the most part this Egyptian force, Mamlouks, as they are called, has consisted. After a time, these Mamlouks took matters into their own hands, and became a self-elective body, or sort of large corporation. They were masters of the country, and of its nominal ruler, and they recruited their ranks continually, and perpetuated their power, by means of the natives of the Caucasus, slaves like themselves, and of their own race.
"During the 500 or 600 years," says Volney, "that there have been Mamlouks in Egypt, not one of them has left subsisting issue; there does not exist one single family of them in the second generation; all their children perish in the first and second descent. The means therefore by which they are perpetuated and multiplied were of necessity the same by which they were first established." These troops have been massacred and got rid of in the memory of the last generation; towards the end of last century they formed a body of above 8,500 men. The writer I have just been quoting adds the following remarks:—"Born for the most part in the rites of the Greek Church, and circumcised the moment they are bought, they are considered by the Turks themselves as renegades, void of faith and of religion. Strangers to each other, they are not bound by those natural ties which unite the rest of mankind. Without parents, without children, the past has nothing to do for them, and they do nothing for the future. Ignorant and superstitious from education, they become ferocious from the murders they commit, and corrupted by the most horrible debauchery." On the other hand, they had every sort of incentive and teaching to prompt them to rapacity and lawlessness. "The young peasant, sold in Mingrelia or Georgia, no sooner arrives in Egypt, than his ideas undergo a total alteration. A new and extraordinary scene opens before him, where everything conduces to awaken his audacity and ambition. Though now a slave, he seems destined to become a master, and already assumes the spirit of his future condition. No sooner is a slave enfranchised, than he aspires to the principal employments; and who is to oppose his pretensions? and he will be no less able than his betters in the art of governing, which consists only in taking money, and giving blows with the sabre."