It was in 1299 that the petty Turkish feudal prince, Osman, broke through the fortified region of the Sangarios, and after sixteen years of desperate fighting succeeded in forcing his way through to Nicæa, the chief defensive point of the Greeks, in order to lay the foundations of that great Ottoman Empire that was to be the mighty successor to the Byzantine Empire. He still met with almost invincible resistance; Nicæa with its mighty walls could not be forced, and it was only in 1326, the year of his death, that Prusa, after a ten-year siege, fell, and under the name of Brussa became the first Ottoman capital. In 1330, and after a siege of fifteen years, came the fall of Nicæa, and later that of Nicomedia. The hardest part of the task had thus been done, the first great breach had been made in the stronghold of the Greek Empire, and the conquerors now turned to the south. Pergamon fell in 1335, Sardis in 1369, and Philadelphia (Alashehr), the last of the Greek cities of the interior, which, according to the expression of a Greek chronicler, stands like a star in a clouded sky, was captured in 1391. Smyrna, the old Greek acropolis, had already fallen a prey early in the 14th century to the Seljuks, who had found in Aïdin, the ancient Tralles, a last support for their sinking power. Apart from Trebizond in the extreme northeast, which up to 1461 maintained itself as the capital of the little coast state which was also called Trebizond, all Asia Minor was now in the hands of the Turks. The Greeks, as a political factor, had ceased to play any part. The question as to whether they had ceased to be of any importance as a civilizing and cultural factor we must now attempt to investigate.
Byzantine sources show clearly enough that Asia Minor, even in the 11th century, was suffering from decrease in its population. This was caused partly by the endless levies of troops, necessitated by the struggles against the Bulgarians in the Balkans, and partly by agrarian conditions in Asia Minor, of which I have yet to speak. The consequences of this systematic depopulation first became evident when the country collapsed under the inroads of Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans; for the defensive military strength that was for a while maintained could not disguise the fact that the national strength of the Greeks was already broken when the inroads of these peoples began. Furthermore, there was no longer any means at hand to renew this strength which had been for centuries so systematically drained. On the contrary, the depopulation went on from bad to worse, and it took place in different ways according to the varying character of the three conquering peoples.
The Seljuks, who were bent chiefly on gaining new pasturing grounds, seem to have drawn the Greek population closer to themselves and to have made them of some service, instead of attempting to drive them out by force. This is proven by the accounts of voluntary or forced submission to the conquerors, into which the inhabitants were driven by the unsound agrarian conditions in Asia Minor, which were characterized by an ever-growing tendency toward larger and larger estates, a tendency against which, even in the 10th century, the clear-sighted emperors had vainly enacted the strictest laws. The consequences appeared at the time of the inroads of the Seljuks; evidently with full knowledge of these conditions, they promised the oppressed peasants in the conquered regions complete freedom in return for the payment of a head tax, if they would yield to their control. Thus great masses of the Greek population went over to the Turks and were lost to Hellenism. Emperor John Comnenos, on one of his campaigns against the Seljuks of Iconium (1120), was forced first to fight bitterly with the Greeks of that region, who had either been already half Turkified, or were, at any rate, strongly Turcophile. We see, then, that at that time large intermixtures of the native Greeks (or of the Hellenized native population) with the Seljuks must have taken place, for only through such intermixture is the fact to be explained that the Anatolian population of today, both Christian and Mohammedan, instead of showing a distinct racial stamp, rather presents strongly modified features which cannot be described as either Aryan or Mongolian.[17]
The Ottomans were less bent on peaceful assimilation than on forcible subjection and extermination. In their character as masters they sought to make the conquered as harmless as possible, and they used to this end a means that they had learned from the Byzantine emperors; they transplanted, from the conquered cities that had a large Greek population, large numbers of these Greeks to other cities where the Greeks were less numerous, so that everywhere the Greeks were forced into a minority. Furthermore, the Greeks were no longer permitted to live in the large cities that were at that time still strongly walled, but were compelled to settle outside in the suburbs. From these suburbs there gradually developed later, as the Greek population increased, entirely new towns, which crowded the old city-center from its predominating position and established itself in its place. This system, as we shall see, resulted in strengthening rather than weakening the Greek element. And yet, in this Turkish conquest, a great part of the Greeks in the towns were constantly being forced to leave Asia Minor and to take refuge in the European part of the Empire, for the Byzantine historians of that time (the 14th century) tell of mass emigrations to Europe, of homeless refugees crowded in and around Constantinople, and of growing insecurity in the neighborhood of the capital. This exodus from the towns betokens a second essential difference as compared with what had happened in the Balkan Peninsula. While, in the Balkans, the cities appear as the supporting centers, the bulwarks, of the Greeks against the Slav inundation, forming a base of operations for winning back the open country that had become Slav, in Asia Minor not only the country regions but the towns as well fell into the hands of the conquerors, evidently because the Turks were better trained soldiers and more familiar with the art of besieging towns than were the Slavs, who were accustomed only to campaigns in the open. The degree to which the Greek communities of Asia Minor suffered under the Turkish conquest is shown by the old Church Acts which are still preserved in the Patriarchate in Constantinople.[18] While Asia Minor before the Turkish invasion counted no less than fifty seats of Metropolitans (the highest church dignitaries) it has today only twenty.[19] Of these, twelve alone are distributed in the western provinces, while the other provinces have only eight. Even of these the greater part are maintained only for the sake of the names. These numbers show better than anything else how seriously the Greek town-population in the interior of Asia Minor melted away as a result of the Turkish conquest, for every withdrawal of the seat of a Metropolitan, and every uniting of several such seats in one, presupposes a decided decrease in the population of a district.
The greatest direct losses of the Greeks were caused by the two great Mongolian invasions of the years 1241 and 1402, especially the latter under the much-feared Timur. These hordes found their only joy in burning, murdering and pillaging, and poured forth like a plague of locusts “in separate bands over Galatia, Phrygia, Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the coast region of Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia in such a way that it seemed as if the whole Tartar army was billeted in every separate province, so numerous were they.” So says one of the last Byzantine historians (Dukas), who pictures also, in vivid colors, the consequences of this predatory incursion in the words, “Timur left neither living men, nor weeping children, nor barking dogs, nor crowing cocks, but everywhere nothing but the stillness of death.” Thus every one of these three Turkish inundations had in its own way contributed to decimate the Greek population of Asia Minor.
Only in two greater districts have compact groups of Greeks of considerable extent preserved their nationality, their speech and, in part, their religion, that is, in Middle Cappadocia, in the interior of eastern Asia Minor, and in Pontus, in the extreme northern coast region; in the former as a relic of the old church settlements and in the latter as the last remains of that latest Greek effort at establishing a state in Asia Minor, the Empire of Trapezus. The Greek population of these two districts can therefore serve to bring clearly before us the Asia Minor Greeks of the Middle Ages, in their physical as well as their linguistic character.
Before proceeding further I must state that these peoples, like those of the Balkan Peninsula, must already have acquired their present physical stamp in the early Middle Ages, at any rate, before the Seljuk-Turkish conquest, for the modified, ethnically but slightly distinguished type of the western Anatolian peasant population is not characteristic of these Greeks. Rather do the Cappadocian Greeks show unmistakable Armenian influence, especially in the broad and extraordinarily high skull, and the large fleshy nose, as well as in their compact and sturdy build, while those of the mountainous coast region of Pontus have retained the more finely cut features of the Greeks and their more graceful form. Some claim to find a third type in the Greeks of south-eastern Asia Minor, a type which shows strikingly Semitic features, and which is probably to be traced back to the numerous Syrian immigrations into Asia Minor during the supremacy of the Isaurian Dynasty of Byzantium, 717–867. In the same way the Armenian type of the inland Greeks is to be traced back to the extensive intermingling of Byzantine Greeks and Armenians during the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Byzantine Empire received a strong quickening of Armenian blood. A dynasty of Armenian origin at that time gave the Byzantine imperial throne a new hold and lent renewed strength to the new kingdom and a great Byzantine province of Asia Minor was called “the Armenian Province.” In any case, we must be on our guard against deriving our present ethnographical picture of Asia Minor directly from the old racial divisions into Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians. The fact that Asia Minor served as a bridge between Asia and Europe prevented such a preservation of the old ethnical relations, as had been the case in the Balkan Peninsula, that great reservoir of people in migration; here as there, in judging of ethnological characteristics, we should, far more than has up to now been the case, start out from Byzantine times, which completely transformed the ancient ethnological nature of both peninsulas.[20] That we have to do, however, in the case of the Cappadocian and Pontic Greeks with autochthonous remains of pre-Turkish times, and not with later immigrants, is shown not only by their racial type but by their dialect. This belongs to the very oldest forms of the Modern Greek language, if one leaves out of account the still more ancient Tzakonian, and enables us to conclude that it broke away from other Greek at a very early period, and followed a separate development of its own. This is particularly true of the Pontic dialect of Samsun (Amisos), Œnoe (Unieh) and Ophis; there is in the phonetics of the dialect, as well as in the vocabulary, so much that is peculiar that it is almost unintelligible to those conversant with the ordinary Modern Greek. But this holds true also of the dialect of some twenty Cappadocian towns—for with only twenty are we here concerned—a dialect which is still quite on the level of the Greek of the early Middle Ages, evidently going back to the time of the settlements in the country of the old monks, which can be proved, in the region of Cæsarea, to go back in many cases as far as the 4th century B.C. These dialects,[21] however, are, as compared with those larger and continuous regions where common Greek is spoken, only small and distinct islands of the Greek speech, which are constantly wearing away and giving up ground, more and more, although the proportion of Greeks in these regions is much higher than elsewhere. The ratio is highest in Pontus, where there are nearly 250,000 Greeks (25 to 30 per cent of the population), and where they form a large percentage even of the city population, especially in Trebizond and Samsun. On the contrary, in Cappadocia they are to be found settled only in a large number of villages, comprising altogether something like 40,000 souls.[22] The number of these Greeks in Pontus as well as in Cappadocia is, furthermore, all the harder to fix accurately, because there are among them many communities of Christians who conceal the fact that they are Christians, and, for political reasons, pass as adherents of Islam (even making use of the Turkish language), but who are really devoted to Christianity and have kept up their Greek national feeling. In Pontus they are especially to be found in the districts of Tonia and Ophis, where in the seventies of the last century they were estimated at about 14,000, while in other districts, as in Krom and Torul, a strong process of Christianizing them anew has taken place.[23]
Apart from these two isolated areas of Greeks, the Turks have inundated the whole peninsula, subjecting it to the Turkish nationality and to the Turkish language, while Hellenism, though not entirely destroyed, has been so seriously broken up and shattered that it has been obliged to give up even its language and its religion, that is to say, has completely lost its national consciousness. The numerous Greek names of rivers, villages and mountains have, with very few exceptions, all disappeared, being replaced by Turkish names.[24] As far as administration and ways of living were concerned, the Turkish conquest produced very few radical changes. The very towns which under Greek control had formed commercial and administrative centers, continued to be such under the Turks, keeping, for the most part, their old Greek names as a proof of the strength of 1500-year-old traditions. Towns like Smyrna, Prusa, Pergamon, Magnesia, Attalia, Adana, Tarsus, Iconium, Ancyra, Cæsarea, Amasia, Castamuni, Trapezus, Sinope, Amisos and others experienced a new quickening under their old names, which the Turks altered only slightly. Not only did they continue to be the capitals of their various districts for purposes of administration, but their names were extended so as to apply to the entire districts of which they were centers. Practically all the vilayets and sanjaks of Asia Minor received their names from these old centers of city-civilization and comparatively few have Turkish names, the ancient Tralles, Philadelphia and Dorylæum, for example, bearing the Turkish names Aïdin, Alashehr and Eskishehr respectively. On this weighty point, therefore, the Turks, as an unhistoric people, have been as little able to interrupt the continuity of civilization as in the Balkan Peninsula, where the larger towns likewise have kept their Greek names.
Just as the Turks in Asia Minor have taken over the way of living of their predecessors in power, so too have they accepted almost unchanged their social relations. Two points alone deserve special mention here, the possession of large landed estates and the feudal system. The Turkish landowners, the Beys, are nothing but the direct successors of the Byzantine archontes, and the Turkish peasants have been forced to render compulsory service to the Beys just as the Christian peasants did to the archontes. That strongly developed feudal system, too, which has existed from Byzantine times, especially ever since the 11th century, with its distinction between the little and large fiefs for foot soldiers and cavaliers, respectively, was taken over by the Turks, and was by them even more highly developed.
In this accommodation to the conditions and institutions of the subject peoples did the strength, as well as the weakness, of the new masters consist: in so far as they found before them fast-bound customs, which they simply took over, they were obliged to accept, along with their advantages, their drawbacks as well. The only real advantage that they received came from their acceptance of feudalism, while the retention of cultural and social conditions in town and country was bound gradually to weaken their power, because these conditions either outlived them or, at any rate, were not suited to them. The first statement applies to agrarian relations, and the latter to commercial relations in the towns. This free shepherd and peasant race (for this they had previously been) lost its free character through taking over the Byzantine provincial nobility without, however, in doing this, developing a genuinely urban civilization, which is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for trade-activity. Thus the Turkish peasantry went backward without a Turkish bourgeoisie arising. At any rate, only a limited town-folk arose which made its living by handicraft but did not know how to conquer economically the regions that it had subdued politically. There existed here, therefore, a twofold, dangerous breach in the social organism of Mohammedanism, and into this breach sprang the ever-alive and ever-enterprising Greek, first the Greek trader, and then the Greek farmer. Both had in the west coast of Asia Minor and in the islands, regions where Greeks have always lived, a field for their activity that, though at first modest, has slowly but steadily broadened out.