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

5.

Now I have thrown the various inhabitants of the Asiatic plain together, under one description, not as if I overlooked, or undervalued, the distinction of races, but because I have no intention of committing myself to any statements on so intricate and interminable a subject as ethnology. In spite of the controversy about skulls, and skins, and languages, by means of which man is to be traced up to his primitive condition, I consider place and climate to be a sufficiently real aspect under which he may be regarded, and with this I shall content myself. I am speaking of the inhabitants of those extended plains, whether Scythians, Massagetæ, Sarmatians, Huns, Moguls, Tartars, Turks, or anything else; and whether or no any of them or all of them are identical with each other in their pedigree and antiquities. Position and climate create habits; and, since the country is called Tartary, I shall call them Tartar habits, and the populations which have inhabited it and exhibited them, Tartars, for convenience-sake, whatever be their family descent. From the circumstances of their situation, these populations have in all ages been shepherds, mounted on horseback, roaming through trackless spaces, easily incited to war, easily formed into masses, easily dissolved again into their component parts, suddenly sweeping across continents, suddenly descending on the south or west, suddenly extinguishing the civilization of ages, suddenly forming empires, suddenly vanishing, no one knows how, into their native north.

Such is the fearful provision for havoc and devastation, when the Divine Word goes forth for judgment upon the civilized world, which the North has ever had in store; and the regions on which it has principally expended its fury, are those, whose fatal beauty, or richness of soil, or perfection of cultivation, or exquisiteness of produce, or amenity of climate, makes them objects of desire to the barbarian. Such are China, Hindostan, Persia, Syria, and Anatolia or the Levant, in Asia; Greece, Italy, Sicily, and Spain, in Europe; and the northern coast of Africa.

These regions, on the contrary, have neither the inducement nor the means to retaliate upon their ferocious invaders. The relative position of the combatants must always be the same, while the combat lasts. The South has nothing to win, the North nothing to lose; the North nothing to offer, the South nothing to covet. Nor is this all: the North, as in an impregnable fortress, defies the attack of the South. Immense trackless solitudes; no cities, no tillage, no roads; deserts, forests, marshes; bleak table-lands, snowy mountains; unlocated, flitting, receding populations; no capitals, or marts, or strong places, or fruitful vales, to hold as hostages for submission; fearful winters and many months of them;—nature herself fights and conquers for the barbarian. What madness shall tempt the South to undergo extreme risks without the prospect or chance of a return? True it is, ambition, whose very life is a fever, has now and then ventured on the reckless expedition; but from the first page of history to the last, from Cyrus to Napoleon, what has the Northern war done for the greatest warriors but destroy the flower of their armies and the prestige of their name? Our maps, in placing the North at the top, and the South at the bottom of the sheet, impress us, by what may seem a sophistical analogy, with the imagination that Huns or Moguls, Kalmucks or Cossacks, have been a superincumbent mass, descending by a sort of gravitation upon the fair territories which lie below them. Yet this is substantially true;—though the attraction towards the South is of a moral, not of a physical nature, yet an attraction there is, and a huge conglomeration of destructive elements hangs over us, and from time to time rushes down with an awful irresistible momentum. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world. Never, since history began, has there been so long a cessation of this law of human society, as in the period in which we live. The descent of the Turks on Europe was the last instance of it, and that was completed four hundred years ago. They are now themselves in the position of those races, whom they themselves formerly came down upon.

6.

As to the instances of this conflict between North and South in the times before the Christian era, we know more of them from antiquarian research than from history. The principal of those which ancient writers have recorded are contained in the history of the Persian Empire. The wandering Tartar tribes went at that time by the name of Scythians, and had possession of the plains of Europe as well as of Asia. Central Europe was not at that time the seat of civilized nations; but from the Chinese Sea even to the Rhine or Bay of Biscay, a course of many thousand miles, the barbarian emigrant might wander on, as necessity or caprice impelled him. Darius assailed the Scythians of Europe; Cyrus, his predecessor, the Scythians of Asia.

As to Cyrus, writers are not concordant on the subject; but the celebrated Greek historian, Herodotus, whose accuracy of research is generally confessed, makes the great desert, which had already been fatal, according to some accounts, to the Assyrian Semiramis, the ruin also of the founder of the Persian Empire. He tells us that Cyrus led an army against the Scythian tribes (Massagetæ, as they were called), who were stationed to the east of the Caspian; and that they, on finding him prepared to cross the river which bounded their country to the South, sent him a message which well illustrates the hopelessness of going to war with them. They are said to have given him his choice of fighting them either three days' march within their own territory, or three days' march within his; it being the same to them whether he made himself a grave in their inhospitable deserts, or they a home in his flourishing provinces. He had with him in his army a celebrated captive, the Lydian King Crœsus, who had once been head of a wealthy empire, till he had succumbed to the fortunes of a more illustrious conqueror; and on this occasion he availed himself of his advice. Crœsus cautioned him against admitting the barbarians within the Persian border, and counselled him to accept their permission of his advancing into their territory, and then to have recourse to stratagem. "As I hear," he says in the simple style of the historian, which will not bear translation, "the Massagetæ have no experience of the good things of life. Spare not then to serve up many sheep, and add thereunto stoups of neat wine, and all sorts of viands. Set out this banquet for them in our camp, leave the refuse of the army there, and retreat with the body of your troops upon the river. If I am not mistaken, the Scythians will address themselves to all this good cheer, as soon as they fall in with it, and then we shall have the opportunity of a brilliant exploit." I need not pursue the history further than to state the issue. In spite of the immediate success of his ruse de guerre, Cyrus was eventually defeated, and lost both his army and his life. The Scythian Queen Tomyris, in revenge for the lives which he had sacrificed to his ambition, is related to have cut off his head and plunged it into a vessel filled with blood, saying, "Cyrus, drink your fill." Such is the account given us by Herodotus; and, even if it is to be rejected, it serves to illustrate the difficulties of an invasion of Scythia; for legends must be framed according to the circumstances of the case, and grow out of probabilities, if they are to gain credit, and if they have actually succeeded in gaining it.

7.

Our knowledge of the expedition of Darius in the next generation, is more certain. This fortunate monarch, after many successes, even on the European side of the Bosphorus, impelled by that ambition, which holy Daniel had already seen in prophecy to threaten West and North as well as South, towards the end of his life directed his arms against the Scythians who inhabited the country now called the Ukraine. His pretext for this expedition was an incursion which the same barbarians had made into Asia, shortly before the time of Cyrus. They had crossed the Don, just above the sea of Azoff, had entered the country now called Circassia, had threaded the defiles of the Caucasus, and had defeated the Median King Cyaxares, the grandfather of Cyrus. Then they overran Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and part of Lydia, that is, a great portion of Anatolia or Asia Minor; and managed to establish themselves in the country for twenty-eight years, living by plunder and exaction. In the course of this period, they descended into Syria, as far as to the very borders of Egypt. The Egyptians bought them off, and they turned back; however, they possessed themselves of a portion of Palestine, and gave their name to one town, Scythopolis, in the territory of Manasses. This was in the last days of the Jewish monarchy, shortly before the captivity. At length Cyaxares got rid of them by treachery; he invited the greater number of them to a banquet, intoxicated, and massacred them. Nor was this the termination of the troubles, of which they were the authors; and I mention the sequel, because both the office which they undertook and their manner of discharging it, their insubordination and their cruelty, are an anticipation of some passages in the early history of the Turks. The Median King had taken some of them into his pay, made them his huntsmen, and submitted certain noble youths to their training. Justly or unjustly they happened one day to be punished for leaving the royal table without its due supply of game: without more ado, the savages in revenge murdered and served up one of these youths instead of the venison which had been expected of them, and made forthwith for the neighbouring kingdom of Lydia. A war between the two states was the consequence.

But to return to Darius:—it is said to have been in retaliation for these excesses that he resolved on his expedition against the Scythians, who, as I have mentioned, were in occupation of the district between the Danube and the Don. For this purpose he advanced from Susa in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf, through Assyria and Asia Minor to the Bosphorus, just opposite to the present site of Constantinople, where he crossed over into Europe. Thence he made his way, with the incredible number of 700,000 men, horse and foot, to the Danube, reducing Thrace, the present Roumelia, in his way. When he had crossed that stream, he was at once in Scythia; but the Scythians had adopted the same sort of strategy, which in the beginning of this century was practised by their successors against Napoleon. They cut and carried off the green crops, stopped up their wells or spoilt their water, and sent off their families and flocks to places of safety. Then they stationed their outposts just a day's journey before the enemy, to entice him on. He pursued them, they retreated; and at length he found himself on the Don, the further boundary of the Scythian territory. They crossed the Don, and he crossed it too, into desolate and unknown wilds; then, eluding him altogether, from their own knowledge of the country, they made a circuit, and got back into their own land again.