The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

RUMELIA.—THE TURK STOCK.—ZONES OF CONQUEST.—EARLY INTRUSIONS OF TURK POPULATIONS WESTWARD.—THRACIANS.—THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS.—THE PELASGI OF MACEDONIA.—BOSNIA, HERZEGOVNA AND TURKISH CROATIA.—BULGARIA.

THE European population of the Ottoman Empire, laying aside Jews, Armenians, and other similarly non-indigenous populations, is fivefold—Turk, Greek, Slavonic, Rumanyo, and Albanian. The Albanian, however, it was necessary to consider in the first chapter.

Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. It is only in one of its provinces that the number of the Osmanli conquerors so nearly approaches that of the original Europeans, to give them the appearance of the natural occupants of the country; this being the province in question, coinciding, as nearly as possible, with the Valley of the ancient Hebrus, or the modern Maritza. It is a wide and fruitful plain, that Nature, perhaps, meant for tillage, but which the pastoral habits of its possessors have kept a grazing country. It is a plain, with the exception of the small mountain ridges on each side—the Despoto-Dagh and the Stanches-Dagh—a point worth remembering, because its physical conditions determine the probable permanence of its earlier populations—populations which, in all impracticable countries, are likely to have held their own in the mountains, and to have retreated before an invader in the plains.

As A.D. 1458 is the date of the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. it may also pass for the date of the commencement of the Osmanli sway in Europe, and the Osmanli preponderance in the particular occupation of the province of Rumelia; for the time, in short, when ancient Thrace became Turkish. But the preliminaries had been going on for some time before, and it was as early as A.D. 1360 that the Hellespont was crossed by Amurath I. Till then, the Osmanli belonged to Asia Minor, Anatolia, or Roum, as it was called from the declining power of the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. But they were not indigenous even there; since Roum or Anatolia was a conquered country, even as Rumelia was—conquered, too, from the same degenerate and fictitious Romans. Hence the stream of Ottoman blood that passed from Asia to Europe was by no means pure. The occupancy of Asia Minor was not the work of a day; on the contrary, the process of appropriation was upwards of four centuries in duration; since the conquest of the race of Seljuk began in A.D. 1074. And this again was an extension of frontier from Persia; and Persia was never truly Turk. The stream that spread and wasted itself in Europe is not discovered at its fountain-head until we have traced it from Rumelia to Anatolia, from Anatolia to Persia, and from Persia to either Turkistan or further. Then, indeed, we find amongst the most southern members of the great Turk stock, amongst those whose blood has been most mixed, and amongst those who are farthest from the country of the Mongols of Mongolia, the great great ancestors of the family and followers of Othman.

It must be remembered that all the recorded movements that thus brought a conquering population from the Oxus to the Hebrus were military—marches of armies consisting of hosts of warriors. That anything approaching a national migration wherein the females bore a reasonable proportion to the males ever took place in Turkish ethnology has not been shown; so that, on the mother’s side, the Osmanli must, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, be other than Turk—sometimes Persian, sometimes Armenian, sometimes Georgian or Circassian, sometimes Anatolian (for some such adjective is required to denote the population of Asia Minor), sometimes European—and when European, Greek, Wallachian, Albanian, or Slavonic.

I have enlarged upon this because the majority of the travellers who, in Independent Tartary, Siberia, Turcomania, or Bokhara, meet with the other members of the Turk stock, in their original homes, are struck by the extent to which they differ in physiognomy from the Osmanli or Ottoman of Europe. They are often smooth-skinned and beardless, glabrous and glaucous, with high-cheek bones and oblique eyes, and other similar characteristics of the Mongol. The inference from this has, too often, been the wrong way; and an infusion of Mongolian blood been presumed. The truth is, that it is the Turks of Europe that have been modified; at any rate, it is only with the European that an intermixture of blood at all proportionate to the differences of physical conformation can be shown as an historical fact.

As a general rule the Osmanli prefers pastoral to agricultural employment, and dominant idleness to either. There is a reason for his preference to flocks and herds rather than to corn and tillage. His own proper and original area, the parts to the east and north of the Caspian, is a steppe, fitted for the nomad, but unfitted for the husbandman. Here, and here only, he has not been an intruder and a conqueror. Here, and here only, has he been without a subject population to work for him. This he has in Europe, this he has in Bokhara, this he has in Egypt; so that his love for looking-on and enjoying the labour of others is what he shares with the rest of the world, whereas his preference of a shepherd’s life to a cultivator’s is a habit rather than instinct. In the few parts of the original Turk area, where the conditions of soil and climate are favourable to agriculture, and where he is no dominant lord, but only an ordinary occupant, the Turk is as good a farmer as the generality. If he be not so in Asia Minor it is due to the insecurity of the fruits of his industry. On the other hand, in the valley of the Gurgan (falling into the Caspian from the east) the pre-eminently Turk branch of the Goklan Turcomans is mainly employed upon agriculture—growing grain and rearing silkworms. This, it may be said, is a singular instance. It is so; but where, besides, does any member of the great Turk stock come under the conditions necessary for agricultural industry—a fit soil and climate, combined with security of possession, and the absence of a subject and inferior class? Like any other fact, however isolated, it sets aside the current notion of the unfitness of the Turk for regular and industrial labour; a habitude, which, like so many other points of ethnology, is connected with external circumstances far more than blood, pedigree, or race.

The intellectual development of the Turk stock in general has been that of the majority of the families of mankind—moderate, or less than moderate; for invention and originality are the exceptions rather than the rule. And here they are in the same predicament as they were in respect to their industry. In their original country they are far removed from the contact of any literature or science better than their own; for what are the models for the Turk of Independent Tartary? In the country of their conquests they have clever Greeks and Arabs to do their head-work for them. And we may add to these drawbacks, the unfavourable effects of their creed. The language that gave them the Koran can give them nothing useful for the Europe of the nineteenth century; whilst the Europe of the nineteenth century is, in their eyes, a Europe of infidels.

However much we may lament the bigotry, ignorance, and sensuality of the Osmanli, he is only what his creed, conquests, and other unfortunate conditions make him. Of the hardy and simple families of the world, as opposed to the effeminate and subtle, he belongs to the most typical. This is shown in his history. Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. Still, they are the great material conquerors of history.

Yet this is but a result of certain physical and geographical conditions:—no proof of any specific hardihood of nature. It is no fanciful imagination to say, that the areas of the great conquering nations of the world, are as definitely bounded by certain lines of latitude as are those of climate; and that such areas give us zones of conquest and subjugation as truly as the Temperate or the Frigid give us zones of climate. There are a priori reasons for this; and there are proofs of it in every page of history. The effects of a northern latitude are to stunt the population, after the fashion of the Laplander; those of the tropics to enervate. Between these extremes the peoples that are at once hardy and well-grown strike, as with a two-edged sword, both upwards and downwards, north and south. The Germans, Slavonians, Turks, and Algonkins verify this. Sometimes a superior civilization, sometimes undeveloped energies, referable to some new influences, counteract this natural disposition (one of the nearest approaches to a law in ethnology) but the general rule is, as has been stated,—apparent exceptions, as are the Romans and Arabians.