As news arrived from time to time in the west of Mahmud’s disasters, it was customary to prophesy the imminent dissolution of his empire. We, however, looking backward now, can see that by its losses the Osmanli state in reality grew stronger. Each of its humiliations pledged some power or group of powers more deeply to support it: and before Mahmud died, he had reason to believe that, so long as the European Concert should ensue the Balance of Power, his dynasty would not be expelled from Constantinople. His belief has been justified. At every fresh crisis of Ottoman fortunes, and especially after every fresh Russian attack, foreign protection has unfailingly been extended to his successors.
It was not, however, only in virtue of the increasing solicitude of the powers on its behalf that during the nineteenth century the empire was growing and would grow stronger, but also in virtue of certain assets within itself. First among these ranked the resources of its Asiatic territories, which, as the European lands diminished, became more and more nearly identified with the empire. When, having got rid of the old army, Mahmud imposed service on all his Moslem subjects, in theory, but in effect only on the Osmanlis (not the Arabs, Kurds, or other half assimilated nomads and hillmen), it meant more than a similar measure would have meant in a Christian empire. For, the life of Islam being war, military service binds Moslems together and to their chiefs as it binds men under no other dispensation; therefore Mahmud, so far as he was able to enforce his decree, created not merely a national army but a nation. His success was most immediate and complete in Anatolia, the homeland of the Osmanlis. There, however, it was attained only by the previous reduction of those feudal families which, for many generations, had arrogated to themselves the levying and control of local forces. Hence, as in Constantinople with the Janissaries, so in the provinces with the Dere Beys, destruction of a drastic order had to precede construction, and more of Mahmud’s reign had to be devoted to the former than remained for the latter.
He did, however, live to see not only the germ of a nation emerge from chaos, but also the framework of an organization for governing it well or ill. The centralized bureaucracy which he succeeded in initiating was, of course, wretchedly imperfect both in constitution and equipment. But it promised to promote the end he had in view and no other, inasmuch as, being the only existent machine of government, it derived any effective power it had from himself alone. Dependent on Stambul, it served to turn thither the eyes and prayers of the provincials. The naturally submissive and peaceful population of Asia Minor quickly accustomed itself to look beyond the dismantled strongholds of its fallen beys. As for the rest— contumacious and bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian steppes—their hour of surrender was yet to come.
The eventual product of Mahmud’s persistency was the ‘Turkey’ we have seen in our own time—that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip, and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland. We have marked its stealthy movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia— now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our own time.
It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer this question at the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years ago, can hardly now be dry.
In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as Islam acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire, in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be felt about his government. Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had always been at some pains to attach to themselves. The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support from the population of his empire’s heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been able to exhaust.
In the second place the Osmanli ‘Turks’, however fallen away from the virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either ‘the will to power’ or their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to rule as soldiers.
In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its pretension to religious influence throughout a much larger area than its proper dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was in great measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign’s actual position.
In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty the Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong unexhausted elements, especially in Anatolia. There are few more vigorous and enduring peoples than the peasants of the central plateau of Asia Minor, north, east, and south. With this rock of defence to stand upon, the sultan could draw also on the strength of other more distant races, less firmly attached to himself, but not less vigorous, such, for example, as the Albanians of his European mountains and the Kurds of his Asiatic. However decadent might be the Turco-Grecian Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the lion’s share of office), those other elements had suffered no decline in physical or mental development. Indeed, one cannot be among them now without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the most part, yet to be.
Such were latent assets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly by the prophets of its dissolution. Thanks to them, that empire continued not only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century but, in some measure, to consolidate itself. Even when the protective fence, set up by European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia several times—in 1829, in 1854, and in 1877—the nation, which Mahmud had made, always proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which grew better assured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its international guarantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government, supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from Europe. He became, ipso facto, the cherished protégé of every power whose nationals had lent his country money.