The Balkans Part 14

From the point of view of practical politics only the issue of the conflict will determine the wisdom or otherwise of Rumania's att.i.tude.

But, though it is perhaps out of place to enlarge upon it here, it is impossible not to speak of the moral aspect of the course adopted. By giving heed to the unspoken appeal from Transylvania the Rumanian national spirit would have been quickened, and the people braced to a wholesome sacrifice. Many were the wistful glances cast towards the Carpathians by the subject Rumanians, as they were being led away to fight for their oppressors; but, wilfully unmindful, the leaders of the Rumanian state buried their noses in their ledgers, oblivious of the fact that in these times of internationalism a will in common, with aspirations in common, is the very life-blood of nationality. That sentiment ought not to enter into politics is an argument untenable in a country which has yet to see its national aspirations fulfilled, and which makes of these aspirations definite claims. No Rumanian statesman can contend that possession of Transylvania is necessary to the existence of the Rumanian state. What they can maintain is that deliverance from Magyar oppression is vital to the existence of the Transylvanians. The right to advance such a claim grows out of their very duty of watching over the safety of the subject Rumanians. 'When there are squabbles in the household of my brother-in-law,' said the late Ioan Bratianu when speaking on the Transylvanian question, 'it is no affair of mine; but when he raises a knife against his wife, it is not merely my right to intervene, it is my duty.' It is difficult to account for the obliquity of vision shown by so many Rumanian politicians. 'The whole policy of such a state [having a large compatriot population living in close proximity under foreign domination] must be primarily influenced by anxiety as to the fate of their brothers, and by the duty of emanc.i.p.ating them,' affirms one of the most ardent of Rumanian nationalist orators; and he goes on to a.s.sure us that 'if Rumania waits, it is not from hesitation as to her duty, but simply in order that she may discharge it more completely'.[1] Meantime, while Rumania waits, regiments composed almost completely of Transylvanians have been repeatedly and of set purpose placed in the forefront of the battle, and as often annihilated. Such could never be the simple-hearted Rumanian peasant's conception of his duty, and here, as in so many other cases in the present conflict, the nation at large must not be judged by the policy of the few who hold the reins.

[Footnote 1: _Quarterly Review_, London, April, 1915, pp. 449-50.]

Rumania's claims to Transylvania are not of an historical nature. They are founded upon the numerical superiority of the subject Rumanians in Transylvania, that is upon the 'principle of nationality', and are morally strengthened by the treatment the Transylvanians suffer at the hands of the Magyars. By its pa.s.sivity, however, the Rumanian Government has sacrificed the prime factor of the 'principle of nationality' to the attainment of an object in itself subordinate to that factor; that is, it has sacrificed the 'people' in order to make more sure of the 'land'. In this way the Rumanian Government has entered upon a policy of acquisition; a policy which Rumania is too weak to pursue save under the patronage of one or a group of great powers; a policy unfortunate inasmuch as it will deprive her of freedom of action in her external politics. Her policy will, in its consequences, certainly react to the detriment of the position acquired by the country two years ago, when independent action made her arbiter not only among the smaller Balkan States, but also among those and her late suzerain, Turkey.

Such, indeed, must inevitably be the fate of Balkan politics in general.

Pa.s.sing from Turkish domination to nominal Turkish suzerainty, and thence to independence within the sphere of influence of a power or group of powers, this gradual emanc.i.p.ation of the states of south-eastern Europe found its highest expression in the Balkan League. The war against Turkey was in effect a rebellion against the political tutelage of the powers.

But this emanc.i.p.ation was short-lived. By their greed the Balkan States again opened up a way to the intrusion of foreign diplomacy, and even, as we now see, of foreign troops. The first Balkan war marked the zenith of Balkan political emanc.i.p.ation; the second Balkan war was the first act in the tragic _debacle_ out of which the present situation developed. The interval between August 1913 (Peace of Bucarest) and August 1914 was merely an armistice during which Bulgaria and Turkey recovered their breath, and German and Austrian diplomacy had time to find a pretext for war on its own account.

'Exhausted but not vanquished we have had to furl our glorious standards in order to await better days,' said Ferdinand of Bulgaria to his soldiers after the conclusion of the Peace of Bucarest; and Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin have no doubt done their best to keep this spirit of revenge alive and to prevent a renascence of the Balkan Alliance. They have succeeded.

They have done more: they have succeeded in causing the 'principle of nationality'--that idea which involves the disruption of Austria--to be stifled by the very people whom it was meant to save. For whilst the German peoples are united in this conflict, the majority of the southern Slavs, in fighting the German battles, are fighting to perpetuate the political servitude of the subject races of Austria-Hungary.

However suspicious Rumania may be of Russia, however bitter the quarrels between Bulgars, Greeks, and Serbs, it is not, nor can it ever be natural, that peoples who have groaned under Turkish despotism for centuries should, after only one year of complete liberation, join hands with an old and dreaded enemy not only against their fellow sufferers, but even against those who came 'to die that they may live'. These are the Dead Sea fruits of dynastic policy. Called to the thrones of the small states of the Near East for the purpose of creating order and peace, the German dynasties have overstepped their function and abused the power entrusted to them. As long as, in normal times, political activities were confined to the diplomatic arena there was no peril of rousing the ma.s.ses out of their ignorant indolence; but, when times are abnormal, it is a different and a dangerous thing to march these peoples against their most intimate feelings. When, as the outcome of the present false situation, sooner or later the dynastic power breaks, it will then be for the powers who are now fighting for better principles not to impose their own views upon the peoples, or to place their own princes upon the vacant thrones. Rather must they see that the small nations of the Near East are given a chance to develop in peace and according to their proper ideals; that they be not again subjected to the disintegrating influence of European diplomacy; and that, above all, to the nations in common, irrespective of their present att.i.tude, there should be a just application of the 'principle of nationality'.

TURKEY

Turkey is no better name for the Osmanli dominion or any part of it than Normandy would be for Great Britain. It is a mediaeval error of nomenclature sanctioned by long usage in foreign mouths, but without any equivalent in the vernacular of the Osmanlis themselves. The real 'Turkey'

is Turkestan, and the real Turks are the Turcomans. The Osmanlis are the least typical Turks surviving. Only a very small proportion of them have any strain of Turkish blood, and this is diluted till it is rarely perceptible in their physiognomy: and if environment rather than blood is to be held responsible for racial features, it can only be said that the territory occupied by the Osmanlis is as unlike the homeland of the true Turks as it can well be, and is quite unsuited to typically Turkish life and manners.

While of course it would be absurd to propose at this time of day any change in the terms by which the civilized world unanimously designates the Osmanlis and their dominion, it is well to insist on their incorrectness, because, like most erroneous names, they have bred erroneous beliefs. Thanks in the main to them, the Ottoman power is supposed to have originated in an overwhelming invasion of Asia Minor by immense numbers of Central Asiatic migrants, who, intent, like the early Arab armies, on offering to Asia first and Europe second the choice of apostasy or death, absorbed or annihilated almost all the previous populations, and swept forward into the Balkans as single-minded apostles of Islam. If the composition and the aims of the Osmanlis had been these, it would pa.s.s all understanding how they contrived, within a century of their appearance on the western scene, to establish in North-west Asia and South-east Europe the most civilized and best-ordered state of their time.

Who, then, are the Osmanlis in reality? What have they to do with true Turks? and in virtue of what innate qualities did they found and consolidate their power?

1

_Origin of the Osmanlis_

We hear of Turks first from Chinese sources. They were then the inhabitants, strong and predatory, of the Altai plains and valleys: but later on, about the sixth century A.D., they are found firmly established in what is still called Turkestan, and pus.h.i.+ng westwards towards the Caspian Sea. Somewhat more than another century pa.s.ses, and, reached by a missionary faith of West Asia, they come out of the Far Eastern darkness into a dim light of western history. One Boja, lord of Kashgar and Khan of what the Chinese knew as the people of Thu-Kiu--probably the same name as 'Turk'--embraced Islam and forced it on his Mazdeist subjects; but other Turkish tribes, notably the powerful Uighurs, remained intolerant of the new dispensation, and expelled the Thu-Kiu _en ma.s.se_ from their holding in Turkestan into Persia. Here they distributed themselves in detached hordes over the north and centre. At this day, in some parts of Persia, e.g. Azerbaijan, Turks make the bulk of the population besides supplying the reigning dynasty of the whole kingdom. For the Shahs of the Kajar house are not Iranian, but purely Turkish.

This, it should be observed, was the western limit of Turkish expansion in the ma.s.s. Azerbaijan is the nearest region to us in which Turki blood predominates, and the westernmost province of the true Turk homeland. All Turks who have pa.s.sed thence into Hither Asia have come in comparatively small detachments, as minorities to alien majorities. They have invaded as groups of nomads seeking vacant pasturage, or as bands of military adventurers who, first offering their swords to princes of the elder peoples, have subsequently, on several occasions and in several localities, imposed themselves on their former masters. To the first category belong all those Turcoman, Avshar, Yuruk, and other Turki tribes, which filtered over the Euphrates into unoccupied or spa.r.s.ely inhabited parts of Syria and Asia Minor from the seventh century onwards, and survive to this day in isolated patches, distinguished from the ma.s.s of the local populations, partly by an ineradicable instinct for nomadic life, partly by retention of the pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of the first immigrants. In the second category--military adventurers--fall, for example, the Turkish praetorians who made and unmade not less than four caliphs at Bagdad in the ninth century, and that bold _condottiere_, Ahmed ibn Tulun, who captured a throne at Cairo. Even Christian emperors availed themselves of these stout fighters. Theophilus of Constantinople antic.i.p.ated the Ottoman invasion of Europe by some five hundred years when he established Vardariote Turks in Macedonia.

The most important members of the second category, however, were the Seljuks. Like the earlier Thu-Kiu, they were pushed out of Turkestan late in the tenth century to found a power in Persia. Here, in Khorasan, the ma.s.s of the horde settled and remained: and it was only a comparatively small section which went on westward as military adventurers to fall upon Bagdad, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. This first conquest was little better than a raid, so brief was the resultant tenure; but a century later two dispossessed nephews of Melek Shah of Persia set out on a military adventure which had more lasting consequences. Penetrating with, a small following into Asia Minor, they seized Konia, and inst.i.tuted there a kingdom nominally feudatory to the Grand Seljuk of Persia, but in reality independent and destined to last about two centuries. Though numerically weak, their forces, recruited from the professional soldier cla.s.s which had bolstered up the Abbasid Empire and formed the Seljukian kingdoms of Persia and Syria, were superior to any Byzantine troops that could be arrayed in southern or central Asia Minor. They const.i.tuted indeed the only compact body of fighting men seen in these regions for some generations. It found reinforcement from the scattered Turki groups introduced already, as we have seen, into the country; and even from native Christians, who, descended from the Iconoclasts of two centuries before, found the rule of Moslem image-haters more congenial, as it was certainly more effective, than that of Byzantine emperors. The creed of the Seljuks was Islam of an Iranian type. Of Incarnationist colour, it repudiated the dour illiberal spirit of the early Arabian apostles which latter-day Sunnite orthodoxy has revived. Accordingly its professors, backed by an effective force and offering security and privilege, quickly won over the aborigines--Lycaonians, Phrygians, Cappadocians, and Cilicians--and welded them into a nation, leaving only a few detached communities here and there to cherish allegiance to Byzantine Christianity. In the event, the population of quite two-thirds of the Anatolian peninsula had already identified itself with a ruling Turki caste before, early in the thirteenth century, fresh Turks appeared on the scene--those Turks who were to found the Ottoman Empire.

They entered Asia Minor much as the earlier Turcomans had entered it--a small body of nomadic adventurers, thrown off by the larger body of Turks settled in Persia to seek new pastures west of the Euphrates. There are divers legends about the first appearance and establishment of these particular Turks: but all agree that they were of inconsiderable number-- not above four hundred families at most. Drifting in by way of Armenia, they pressed gradually westward from Erzerum in hope of finding some unoccupied country which would prove both element and fertile. Byzantine influence was then at a very low ebb. With Constantinople itself in Latin hands, the Greek writ ran only along the north Anatolian coast, ruled from two separate centres, Isnik (Nicaea) and Trebizond: and the Seljuk kingdom was run in reality much more vigorous. Though apparently without a rival, it was subsisting by consent, on the prestige of its past, rather than on actual power. The moment of its dissolution was approaching, and the Anatolian peninsula, two-thirds Islamized, but ill-organised and very loosely knit, was becoming once more a fair field for any adventurer able to command a small compact force.

The newly come Turks were invited finally to settle on the extreme north-western fringe of the Seljuk territory--in a region so near Nicaea that their sword would be a better t.i.tle to it than any which the feudal authority of Konia could confer. In fact it was a debatable land, an angle pushed up between the lake plain of Nicaea on the one hand and the plain of Brusa on the other, and divided from each by not lofty heights, Yenishehr, its chief town, which became the Osmanli chief Ertogrul's residence, lies, as the crow flies, a good deal less than fifty miles from the Sea of Marmora, and not a hundred miles from Constantinople itself.

Here Ertogrul was to be a Warden of the Marches, to hold his territory for the Seljuk and extend it for himself at the expense of Nicaea if he could.

If he won through, so much the better for Sultan Alaeddin; if he failed, _vile d.a.m.num!_

Hardly were his tribesmen settled, however, among the Bithynians and Greeks of Yenishehr, before the Seljuk collapse became a fact. The Tartar storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord. The feudatories were free everywhere to make or mar themselves, and they spent the last half of the thirteenth century in fighting for whatever might be saved from the Seljuk wreck before it foundered for ever about 1300 A.D.

In the south, the centre, and the east of the peninsula, where Islam had long rooted itself as the popular social system, various Turki emirates established themselves on a purely Moslem basis--certain of these, like the Danishmand emirate of Cappadocia, being restorations of tribal jurisdictions which had existed before the imposition of Seljuk overlords.h.i.+p.

In the extreme north-west, however, where the ma.s.s of society was still Christian and held itself Greek, no Turkish, potentate could either revive a pre-Seljukian status or simply carry on a Seljukian system in miniature.

If he was to preserve independence at all, he must rely on a society which was not yet Moslem and form a coalition with the 'Greeks', into whom the recent recovery of Constantinople from the Latins had put fresh heart.

Osman, who had succeeded Ertogrul in 1288, recognized where his only possible chance of continued dominion and future aggrandizement lay. He turned to the Greeks, as an element of vitality and numerical strength to be absorbed into his nascent state, and applied himself unremittingly to winning over and identifying with himself the Greek feudal seigneurs in his territory or about its frontiers. Some of these, like Michael, lord of Harmankaya, readily enough stood in with the vigorous Turk and became Moslems. Others, as the new state gained momentum, found themselves obliged to accept it or be crushed. There are to this day Greek communities in the Brusa district jealously guarding privileges which date from compacts made with their seigneurs by Osman and his son Orkhan.

It was not till the Seljuk kingdom was finally extinguished, in or about 1300 A.D. that Osman a.s.sumed at Yenishehr the style and t.i.tle of a sultan.

Acknowledged from Afium Kara Hissar, in northern Phrygia, to the Bithynian coast of the Marmora, beside whose waters his standards had already been displayed, he lived on to see Brusa fall to his son Orkhan, in 1326, and become the new capital. Though Nicaea still held out, Osman died virtual lord of the Asiatic Greeks; and marrying his son to a Christian girl, the famous Nilufer, after whom the river of Brusa is still named, he laid on Christian foundations the strength of his dynasty and his state. The first regiment of professional Ottoman soldiery was recruited by him and embodied later by Orkhan, his son, from Greek and other Christian-born youths, who, forced to apostatize, were educated as Imperial slaves in imitation of the Mamelukes, const.i.tuted more than a century earlier in Egypt, and now masters where they had been bondmen. It is not indeed for nothing that Osman's latest successor, and all who hold by him, distinguish themselves from other peoples by his name. They are Osmanlis (or by a European use of the more correct form Othman, 'Ottomans'), because they derived their being as a nation and derive their national strength, not so much from central Asia as from the blend of Turk and Greek which Osman promoted among his people. This Greek strain has often been reinforced since his day and mingled with other Caucasian strains.

It was left to Orkhan to round off this Turco-Grecian realm in Byzantine Asia by the capture first of Ismid (Nicomedia) and then of Isnik (Nicaea); and with this last acquisition the nucleus of a self-sufficient sovereign state was complete. After the peaceful absorption of the emirate of Karasi, which added west central Asia Minor almost as far south as the Hermus, the Osmanli ruled in 1338 a dominion of greater area than that of the Greek emperor, whose capital and coasts now looked across to Ottoman sh.o.r.es all the way from the Bosphorus to the h.e.l.lespont.

2

_Expansion of the Osmanli Kingdom_

If the new state was to expand by conquest, its line of advance was already foreshadowed. For the present, it could hardly break back into Asia Minor, occupied as this was by Moslem princ.i.p.alities sanctioned by the same tradition as itself, namely, the prestige of the Seljuks. To attack these would be to sin against Islam. But in front lay a rich but weak Christian state, the centre of the civilization to which the popular element in the Osmanli society belonged. As inevitably as the state of Nicaea had desired, won, and transferred itself to, Constantinople, so did the Osmanli state of Brusa yearn towards the same goal; and it needed no invitation from a Greek to dispose an Ottoman sultan to push over to the European sh.o.r.e.

Such an invitation, however, did in fact precede the first Osmanli crossing in force. In 1345 John Cantacuzene solicited help of Orkhan against the menace of Dushan, the Serb. Twelve years later came a second invitation. Orkhan's son, Suleiman, this time ferried a large army over the h.e.l.lespont, and, by taking and holding Gallipoli and Rodosto, secured a pa.s.sage from continent to continent, which the Ottomans would never again let go.

Such invitations, though they neither prompted the extension of the Osmanli realm into Europe nor sensibly precipitated it, did nevertheless divert the course of the Ottoman arms and reprieve the Greek empire till Timur and his Tartars could come on the scene and, all unconsciously, secure it a further respite. But for these diversions there is little doubt Constantinople would have pa.s.sed into Ottoman hands nearly a century earlier than the historic date of its fall. The Osmanli armies, thus led aside to make the Serbs and not the Greeks of Europe their first objective, became involved at once in a tangle of Balkan affairs from which they only extricated themselves after forty years of incessant fighting in almost every part of the peninsula except the domain of the Greek emperor. This warfare, which in no way advanced the proper aims of the lords of Brusa and Nicaea, not only profited the Greek emperor by relieving him of concern about his land frontier but also used up strength which might have made head against the Tartars. Constantinople then, as now, was detached from the Balkans. The Osmanlis, had they possessed themselves of it, might well have let the latter be for a long time to come. Instead, they had to battle, with the help now of one section of the Balkan peoples, now of another, till forced to make an end of all their feuds and treacheries by annexations after the victories of Kosovo in 1389 and Nikopolis in 1396.

Nor was this all. They became involved also with certain peoples of the main continent of Europe, whose interests or sympathies had been affected by those long and sanguinary Balkan wars. There was already bad blood and to spare between the Osmanlis on the one hand, and Hungarians, Poles, and Italian Venetians on the other, long before any second opportunity to attack Constantinople occurred: and the Osmanlis were in for that age-long struggle to secure a 'scientific frontier' beyond the Danube, whence the Adriatic on the one flank and the Euxine on the other could be commanded, which was to make Ottoman history down to the eighteenth century and spell ruin in the end.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that the Osmanlis set out for Europe, in the spirit of Arab apostles, to force their creed and dominion on all the world. Both in Asia and Europe, from first to last, their expeditions and conquests have been inspired palpably by motives similar to those active among the Christian powers, namely, desire for political security and the command of commercial areas. Such wars as the Ottoman sultans, once they were established at Constantinople, did wage again and again with knightly orders or with Italian republics would have been undertaken, and fought with the same persistence, by any Greek emperor who felt himself strong enough. Even the Asiatic campaigns, which Selim I and some of his successors, down to the end of the seventeenth century, would undertake, were planned and carried out from similar motives. Their object was to secure the eastern basin of the Mediterranean by the establishment of some strong frontier against Iran, out of which had come more than once forces threatening the destruction of Ottoman power. It does not, of course, in any respect disprove their purpose that, in the event, this object was never attained, and that an unsatisfactory Turco-Persian border still ill.u.s.trates at this day the failures of Selim I and Mohammed IV.

By the opening of the fifteenth century, when, all unlooked for, a most terrible Tartar storm was about to break upon western Asia, the Osmanli realm had grown considerably, not only in Europe by conquest, but also in Asia by the peaceful effect of marriages and heritages. Indeed it now comprised scarcely less of the Anatolian peninsula than the last Seljuks had held, that is to say, the whole of the north as far as the Halys river beyond Angora, the central plateau to beyond Konia, and all the western coast-lands. The only emirs not tributary were those of Karamania, Cappadocia, and Pontus, that is of the southern and eastern fringes; and one detached fragment of Greek power survived in the last-named country, the kingdom of Trebizond. As for Europe, it had become the main scene of Osmanli operations, and now contained the administrative capital, Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental primacy. Sultan Murad, who some years after his succession in 1359 had definitely transferred the centre of political gravity to Thrace, was nevertheless carried to the Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria, Serbia, and districts of both Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral parts of an empire which had come to number at least as many Christian as Moslem subjects, and to depend as much on the first as on the last. Not only had the professional Osmanli soldiery, the Janissaries, continued to be recruited from the children of native Christian races, but contingents of adult native warriors, who still professed Christianity, had been invited or had offered themselves to fight Osmanli battles--even those waged against men of the True Faith in Asia. A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad's line at the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body of the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial empires and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine imperial type.

And just because it had come to be in Europe and of Europe, it was able to survive the terrible disaster of Angora in 1402. Though the Osmanli army was annihilated by Timur, and an Osmanli sultan, for the first and last time in history, remained in the hands of the foe, the administrative machinery of the Osmanli state was not paralysed. A new ruler was proclaimed at Adrianople, and the European part of the realm held firm.

The moment that the Tartars began to give ground, the Osmanlis began to recover it. In less than twenty years they stood again in Asia as they were before Timur's attack, and secure for the time on the east, could return to restore their prestige in the west, where the Tartar victory had bred unrest and brought both the Hungarians and the Venetians on the Balkan scene. Their success was once more rapid and astonis.h.i.+ng: Salonika pa.s.sed once and for all into Ottoman hands: the Frank seigneurs and the despots of Greece were alike humbled; and although Murad II failed to crush the Albanian, Skanderbey, he worsted his most dangerous foe, John Hunyadi, with the help of Wallach treachery at the second battle of Kosovo. At his death, three years later, he left the Balkans quiet and the field clear for his successor to proceed with the long deferred but inevitable enterprise of attacking all that was left of Greek empire, the district and city of Constantinople.

The doom of New Rome was fulfilled within two years. In the end it pa.s.sed easily enough into the hands of those who already had been in possession of its proper empire for a century or more. Historians have made more of this fall of Constantinople in 1453 than contemporary opinion seems to have made of it. No prince in Europe was moved to any action by its peril, except, very half-heartedly, the Doge. Venice could not feel quite indifferent to the prospect of the main part of that empire, which, while in Greek hands, had been her most serious commercial compet.i.tor, pa.s.sing into the stronger hands of the Osmanlis. Once in Constantinople, the latter, long a land power only, would be bound to concern themselves with the sea also. The Venetians made no effort worthy of their apprehensions, though these were indeed exceedingly well founded; for, as all the world knows, to the sea the Osmanlis did at once betake themselves. In less than thirty years they were ranging all the eastern Mediterranean and laying siege to Rhodes, the stronghold of one of their most dangerous compet.i.tors, the Knights Hospitallers.

In this consequence consists the chief historic importance of the Osmanli capture of Constantinople. For no other reason can it he called an epoch-marking event. If it guaranteed the Empire of the East against pa.s.sing into any western hands, for example, those of Venice or Genoa, it did not affect the balance of power between Christendom and Islam; for the strength of the former had long ceased to reside at all in Constantinople.

The last Greek emperor died a martyr, but not a champion.

3

_Heritage and Expansion of Byzantine Empire_

On the morrow of his victory, Mohammed the Conqueror took pains to make it clear that his introduction of a new heaven did not entail a new earth. As little as might be would be changed. He had displaced a Palaeologus by an Osmanli only in order that an empire long in fact Osmanli should henceforth be so also _de jure_. Therefore he confirmed the pre-existing Oec.u.menical patriarch in his functions and the Byzantine Greeks in their privileges, renewed the rights secured to Christian foreigners by the Greek emperors, and proclaimed that, for his accession to the throne, there should not be made a Moslem the more or a Christian the less.

Moreover, during the thirty years left to him of life, Mohammed devoted himself to precisely those tasks which would have fallen to a Greek emperor desirous of restoring Byzantine power. He thrust back Latins wherever they were encroaching on the Greek sphere, as were the Venetians of the Morea, the Hospitallers of Rhodes, and the Genoese of the Crimea: and he rounded off the proper Byzantine holding by annexing, in Europe, all the Balkan peninsula except the impracticable Black Mountain, the Albanian highlands, and the Hungarian fortress of Belgrade; and, in Asia, what had remained independent in the Anatolian peninsula, the emirates of Karamania and Cappadocia.

Before Mohammed died in 1481 the Osmanli Turco-Grecian nation may be said to have come into its own. It was lord _de facto et de jure belli_ of the eastern or Greek Empire, that is of all territories and seas grouped geographically round Constantinople as a centre, with only a few exceptions unredeemed, of which the most notable were the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Krete, still in Latin hands. Needless to say, the Osmanlis themselves differed greatly from their imperial predecessors.

Their official speech, their official creed, their family system were all foreign to Europe, and many of their ideas of government had been learned in the past from Persia and China, or were derived from the original tribal organization of the true Turks. But if they were neither more nor less Asiatics than the contemporary Russians, they were quite as much Europeans as many of the Greek emperors had been--those of the Isaurian dynasty, for instance. They had given no evidence as yet of a fanatical Moslem spirit--this was to be bred in them by subsequent experiences--and their official creed had governed their policy hardly more than does ours in India or Egypt. Mohammed the Conqueror had not only shown marked favour to Christians, whether his _rayas_ or not, but encouraged letters and the arts in a very un-Arabian spirit. Did he not have himself portrayed by Gentile Bellini? The higher offices of state, both civil and military, were confided (and would continue so to be for a century to come) almost exclusively to men of Christian origin. Commerce was encouraged, and western traders recognized that their facilities were greater now than they had been under Greek rule. The Venetians, for example, enjoyed in perfect liberty a virtual monopoly of the Aegean and Euxine trade. The social condition of the peasantry seems to have been better than it had been under Greek seigneurs, whether in Europe or in Asia, and better than it was at the moment in feudal Christendom. The Osmanli military organization was reputed the best in the world, and its fame attracted adventurous spirits from all over Europe to learn war in the first school of the age. Ottoman armies, it is worth while to remember, were the only ones then attended by efficient medical and commissariat services, and may be said to have introduced to Europe these alleviations of the horrors of war.