Scientific anticipations are commonly either truisms or failures;
failures, if, as is usually the case, they are made upon insufficient
data; and truisms, if they succeed, for conclusions, being always
contained in their premisses, never can be discoveries. Yet, as mixed
mathematics correct, without superseding, the pure science, so I do not
see why I may not allowably take a sort of pure philosophical view of
the Turks and their position, though it be but abstract and
theoretical, and require correction when confronted by the event. There
is a use in investigating what ought to be, under given suppositions
and conditions, even though speculation and fact do not happen to keep
pace together.
As to myself, having laid down my premisses, as drawn from
historical considerations, I must needs go on, whether I will or no, to
the conjectures to which they lead; and that shall be my business in
this concluding discussion. My line of argument has been as
follows:—First, I stated some peculiarities of civilized and of
barbarian communities; I said that it is a general truth that civilized
states are destroyed from within, and barbarian states from without;
that the very causes, which lead to the greatness of civilized
communities, at length by continuing become their ruin, whereas the
causes of barbarian greatness uphold that greatness, as long as they
continue, and by ceasing to act, not by continuing, lead the way to its
overthrow. Thus the intellect of Athens first was its making and then
its unmaking; while the warlike prowess of the Spartans maintained
their pre-eminence, till it succumbed to the antagonist prowess of
Thebes.
1.
I laid down this principle as a general law of human society, open
to exceptions and requiring modifications in particular cases, but true
on the whole. Next, I went on to show that the Ottoman power was of a
barbarian character. The conclusion is obvious; viz., that it has
risen, and will fall, not by anything within it, but by agents external
to itself; and this conclusion, I certainly think, is actually
confirmed by Turkish history, as far as it has hitherto gone. The
Ottoman state seems, in matter of fact, to be most singularly
constructed, so as to have nothing inside of it, and to be moved solely
or mainly by influences from without. What a contrast, for instance, to
the German race! In the earliest history of that people, we discern an
element of civilization, a vigorous action of the intellect residing in
the body, independent of individuals, and giving birth to great men,
rather than created by them. Again, in the first three centuries of the
Church, we find martyrs indeed in plenty, as the Turks might have
soldiers; but (to view the matter humanly) perhaps there was not one
great mind, after the Apostles, to teach and to mould her children. The
highest intellects, Origen, Tertullian, and Eusebius, were
representatives of a philosophy not hers; her greatest bishops, such as
St. Gregory, St. Dionysius, and St Cyprian, so little exercised a
doctor's office, as to incur, however undeservedly, the imputation of
doctrinal inaccuracy. Vigilant as was the Holy See then, as in every
age, yet there is no Pope, I may say, during that period, who has
impressed his character upon his generation; yet how well instructed,
how precisely informed, how self-possessed an oracle of truth,
nevertheless, do we find the Church to be, when the great internal
troubles of the fourth century required it! how unambiguous, how bold
is the Christianity of the great Pontiffs, St. Julius, St. Damasus, St.
Siricius, and St. Innocent; of the great Doctors, St. Athanasius; St.
Basil, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine! By what channels, then, had the
divine philosophy descended down from the Great Teacher through three
centuries of persecution? First through the See and Church of Peter,
into which error never intruded (though Popes might be little more than
victims, to be hunted out and killed, as soon as made), and to which
the faithful from all quarters of the world might have recourse when
difficulties arose, or when false teachers anywhere exalted themselves.
But intercommunion was difficult, and comparatively rare in days like
those, and of nothing is there less pretence of proof than that the
Holy See, while persecution raged, imposed a faith upon the ecumenical
body. Rather, in that earliest age, it was simply the living spirit of
the myriads of the faithful, none of them known to fame, who received
from the disciples of our Lord, and husbanded so well, and circulated
so widely, and transmitted so faithfully, generation after generation,
the once delivered apostolic faith; who held it with such sharpness of
outline and explicitness of detail, as enabled even the unlearned
instinctively to discriminate between truth and error, spontaneously to
reject the very shadow of heresy, and to be proof against the
fascination of the most brilliant intellects, when they would lead them
out of the narrow way. Here, then, is a luminous instance of what I
mean by an energetic action from within.
Take again the history of the Saracenic schools and parties, on
which I have already touched. Mr. Southgate considers the absence of
religious controversy among the Turks, contrasted with its frequency of
old among the Saracens, as a proof of the decay of the spirit of Islam.
I should rather refer the present apathy to the national temperament of
the Turks, and set it down, with other instances I shall mention
presently, as a result of their barbarism. Saracenic Mahometanism, on
the contrary, gives me an apposite illustration of what I mean by an
“interior” people, if I may borrow a devotional word to express a
philosophical idea. A barbarous nation has no “interior,” but the
Saracens show us what a national “interior” is. “In former ages,” says
the author to whom I have referred, Mr. Southgate, “the bosom of
Islamism was riven with numerous feuds and schisms, some of which have
originated from religious controversy, and others from political
ambition. During the first centuries of its existence, and while
Mussulman learning flourished under the patronage of the Caliphs,
religious questions were discussed by the learned with all the
proverbial virulence of theological hatred. The chief of these
questions respected the origin of the Koran, the nature of God,
predestination and free will, and the grounds of human salvation. The
question, whether the Koran was created or eternal, rent for a time the
whole body of Islamism into twain, and gave rise to the most violent
persecutions.... Besides these religious contentions, which divided the
Mussulmans into parties, but seldom gave birth to sects, there have
sprung up, at different periods, avowed heresies, which flourished for
a time, and for the most part died with their authors. Others,
stimulated by ambition only, have reared the standard of revolt, and
under cover of some new religious dogma, propounded only to shield a
selfish end, have sought to raise themselves to power. Most of these,
whether theological disputes, heresies, or civil rebellions, cloaked
under the name of religion, arose previously to the sixteenth
century.”[87]
2.
Such is that internal peculiarity, the presence of which constitutes
a civilized, the absence a barbarous people; which makes a people
great, and small again; and which, just consistently with the notion of
their being barbarians, I cannot discern, for strength or for weakness,
in the Turks. On the contrary, almost all the elements of their
success, and instruments of their downfall, are external to themselves.
For instance, their religion, one of their principal bonds, owes
nothing to them; it is, not only in substance, but in concrete shape,
just what it was when it came to them. I cannot find that they have
commented upon it; I cannot find that they are the channels of any of
those famous traditions by which the Koran is interpreted, and which
they themselves accept; or that they have exercised their minds upon it
at all, except so far as they have been obliged, in a certain degree,
to do so in the administration of the law. It is true also that they
have been obliged to choose to be Sunnites and not Shiahs; but,
considering the latter sect arose in Persia, since the date of the
Turkish occupation of Constantinople, it was really no choice at all.
They have but remained as they were. Besides, the Shiahs maintain the
hereditary transmission of the Caliphate, which would exclude the line
of Othman from the succession—good reason then the Turks should be
Sunnites; and the dates of the two events so nearly coincide, that one
could even fancy that the Shiahs actually arose in consequence of the
Sultan Selim's carrying off the last of the Abassides from Egypt, and
gaining the transference of the Caliphate from his captive. Besides, if
it is worth while pursuing the point, did they not remain Sunnites,
they would have to abandon the traditional or oral law, and must cease
to use the labours of its four great doctors, which would be to bring
upon themselves an incalculable extent of intellectual toil; for
without recognized comments on the Koran, neither the religion nor the
civil state could be made to work.
The divine right of the line of Othman is another of their special
political bonds, and this too is shown by the following extract from a
well-known historian,[88] if it needs showing, to be simply external to
themselves: “The origin of the Sultans,” he says, “is obscure; but this
sacred and indefeasible right” to the throne, “which no time can erase,
and no violence can infringe, was soon and unalterably implanted in the
minds of their subjects. A weak or vicious Sultan may be deposed and
strangled, but his inheritance devolves to an infant or an idiot; nor
has the most daring rebel presumed to ascend the throne of his lawful
sovereign. While the transient dynasties of Asia have been continually
subverted by a crafty visir in the palace, or a victorious general in
the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of
five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle of the
Turkish nation.” Here we have on the one hand the imperial succession
described as an element of the political life of the Osmanlis—on the
other as an appointment over which they have no power; and obviously it
is from its very nature independent of them. It is a form of life
external to the community it vivifies.
Probably it was the wonderful continuity of so many great Sultans in
their early ages, which wrought in their minds the idea of a divine
mission as the attribute of the dynasty; and its acquisition of the
Caliphate would fix it indelibly within them. And here again, we have
another special instrument of their imperial greatness, but still an
external one. I have already had occasion to observe, that barbarians
make conquests by means of great men, in whom they, as it were, live;
ten successive monarchs, of extraordinary vigour and talent, carried on
the Ottomans to empire. Will any one show that those monarchs can be
fairly called specimens of the nation, any more than Zingis was the
specimen of the Tartars? Have they not rather acted as the Deus è
machinâ, carrying on the drama, which has languished or stopped,
since the time when they ceased to animate it? Contrast the Ottoman
history in this respect with the rise of the Anglo-Indian Empire, or
with the military successes of Great Britain under the Regency; or
again with the literary eminence of England under Charles the Second or
even Anne, which owed little to those monarchs. Kings indeed at various
periods have been most effective patrons of art and science; but the
question is, not whether English or French literature has ever been
indebted to royal encouragement, but whether the Ottomans can do
anything at all, as a nation, without it.
Indeed, I should like it investigated what internal history the
Ottomans have at all; what inward development of any kind they have
made since they crossed Mount Olympus and planted themselves in
Broussa; how they have changed shape and feature, even in lesser
matters, since they were a state, or how they are a year older than
when they first came into being. We see among them no representative of
Confucius, Chi-hoagti, and the sect of Ta-osse; no magi; no Pisistratus
and Harmodius; no Socrates and Alcibiades; no patricians and plebeians;
no Cæsar; no invasion or adoption of foreign mysteries; no mythical
impersonation of an Ali; no Suffeeism; no Guelphs and Gibellines;
nothing really on the type of Catholic religious orders; no Luther;
nothing, in short, which, for good or evil, marks the presence of a
life internal to the political community itself. Some authors indeed
maintain they have a literature; but I cannot ascertain what the
assertion is worth. Rather the tenor of their annals runs thus:—Two
Pachas make war against each other, and a kat-sherif comes from
Constantinople for the head of the one or the other; or a Pacha exceeds
in pillaging his province, or acts rebelliously, and is preferred to a
higher government and suddenly strangled on his way to it; or he
successfully maintains himself, and gains an hereditary settlement,
still subject, however, to the feudal tenure, which is the principle of
the political structure, continuing to send his contingent of troops,
when the Sultan goes to war, and remitting the ordinary taxes through
his agent at Court. Such is the staple of Turkish history, whether amid
the hordes of Turkistan, or the feudatory Turcomans of Anatolia, or the
imperial Osmanlis.
3.
The remark I am making applies to them, not only as a nation, but as
a body politic. When they descended on horseback upon the rich
territories which they occupy, they had need to become agriculturists,
and miners, and civil engineers, and traders; all which they were not;
yet I do not find that they have attempted any of these functions
themselves. Public works, bridges, and roads, draining, levelling,
building, they seem almost entirely to have neglected; where, however,
to do something was imperative, instead of applying themselves to their
new position, and manifesting native talent for each emergency, they
usually have had recourse to foreign assistance to execute what was
uncongenial or dishonourable to themselves. The Franks were their
merchants, the Armenians their bankers, the subject races their field
labourers, and the Greeks their sailors. “Almost the whole business of
the ship,” says Thornton, “is performed by the slaves, or by the Greeks
who are retained upon wages.”
The most remarkable instance of this reluctance to develop from
within—remarkable, both for the originality, boldness, success, and
permanence of the policy adopted, and for its appositeness to my
purpose—is the institution of the Janizaries, detestable as it was in
a moral point of view. I enlarge upon it here because it is at the same
time a palmary instance of the practical ability and wisdom of their
great Sultans, exerted in compensation of the resourceless impotence of
the barbarians whom they governed. The Turks were by nature nothing
better than horsemen; infantry they could not be; an infantry their
Sultans hardly attempted to form out of them; but since infantry was
indispensable in European warfare, they availed themselves of passages
in their own earlier history, and provided themselves with a perpetual
supply of foot soldiers from without. Of this procedure they were not,
strictly speaking, the originators; they took the idea of it from the
Saracens. You may recollect that, when their ancestors were defeated by
the latter people in Sogdiana, instead of returning to their deserts,
they suffered themselves to be diffused and widely located through the
great empire of the Caliphs. Whether as slaves, or as captives, or as
mercenaries, they were taken into favour by the dominant nation, and
employed as soldiers or civilians. They were chosen as boys or youths
for their handsome appearance, turned into Mahometans, and educated for
the army or other purposes. And thus the strength of the empire which
they served was always kept fresh and vigorous, by the continual
infusion into it of new blood to perform its functions; a skilful
policy, if the servants could be hindered from becoming masters.
Masters in time they did become, and then they adopted a similar
system themselves; we find traces of it even in the history of the
Gaznevide dynasty. In the reign of the son of the great Mahmood, we
read of an insurrection of the slaves; who, conspiring with one of his
nobles, seized his best horses, and rode off to his enemies. “By
slaves,” says Dow, in translating this history, “are meant the captives
and young children, bought by kings, and educated for the offices of
state. They were often adopted by the Emperors, and very frequently
succeeded to the Empire. A whole dynasty of these possessed afterwards
the throne in Hindostan.”
The same system appears in Egypt, about or soon after the time of
the celebrated Saladin. Zingis, in his dreadful expedition from
Khorasan to Syria and Russia, had collected an innumerable multitude of
youthful captives, who glutted, as we may say, the markets of Asia.
This gave the conquerors of Egypt an opportunity of forming a mercenary
or foreign force for their defence, on a more definite idea than seems
hitherto to have been acted upon. Saladin was a Curd, and, as such, a
neighbour of the Caucasus; hence the Caucasian tribes became for many
centuries the store-houses of Egyptian mercenaries. A detestable slave
trade has existed with this object, especially among the Circassians,
since the time of the Moguls; and of these for the most part this
Egyptian force, Mamlouks, as they are called, has consisted. After a
time, these Mamlouks took matters into their own hands, and became a
self-elective body, or sort of large corporation. They were masters of
the country, and of its nominal ruler, and they recruited their ranks
continually, and perpetuated their power, by means of the natives of
the Caucasus, slaves like themselves, and of their own race.
“During the 500 or 600 years,” says Volney, “that there have been
Mamlouks in Egypt, not one of them has left subsisting issue; there
does not exist one single family of them in the second generation; all
their children perish in the first and second descent. The means
therefore by which they are perpetuated and multiplied were of
necessity the same by which they were first established.” These troops
have been massacred and got rid of in the memory of the last
generation; towards the end of last century they formed a body of above
8,500 men. The writer I have just been quoting adds the following
remarks:—“Born for the most part in the rites of the Greek Church, and
circumcised the moment they are bought, they are considered by the
Turks themselves as renegades, void of faith and of religion. Strangers
to each other, they are not bound by those natural ties which unite the
rest of mankind. Without parents, without children, the past has
nothing to do for them, and they do nothing for the future. Ignorant
and superstitious from education, they become ferocious from the
murders they commit, and corrupted by the most horrible debauchery.” On
the other hand, they had every sort of incentive and teaching to prompt
them to rapacity and lawlessness. “The young peasant, sold in Mingrelia
or Georgia, no sooner arrives in Egypt, than his ideas undergo a total
alteration. A new and extraordinary scene opens before him, where
everything conduces to awaken his audacity and ambition. Though now a
slave, he seems destined to become a master, and already assumes the
spirit of his future condition. No sooner is a slave enfranchised, than
he aspires to the principal employments; and who is to oppose his
pretensions? and he will be no less able than his betters in the art of
governing, which consists only in taking money, and giving blows with
the sabre.”
In describing the Mamlouks I have been in a great measure describing
the Janizaries, and have little to add to the picture. When Amurath,
one of the ten Sultans, had made himself master of the territory round
Constantinople, as far as the Balkan, he passed northwards, and subdued
the warlike tribes which possessed Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and the
neighbouring provinces. These countries had neither the precious metals
in their mountains, nor marts of commerce; but their inhabitants were a
brave and hardy race, who had been for ages the terror of
Constantinople. It was suggested to the Sultan, that, according to the
Mahometan law, he was entitled to a fifth part of the captives, and he
made this privilege the commencement of a new institution. Twelve
thousand of the strongest and handsomest youths were selected as his
share; he formed them into a military force; he made them abjure
Christianity, he consecrated them with a religious rite, and named them
Janizaries. The discipline to which they were submitted was peculiar,
and in some respects severe. They were in the first instance made over
to the peasantry to assist them in the labours of the field, and thus
were prepared by penury and hard fare for the privations of a military
life. After this introduction, they were drafted into the companies of
the Janizaries, but only in order to commence a second noviciate.
Sometimes they were employed in the menial duties of the palace,
sometimes in the public works, sometimes in the dockyards, and
sometimes in the imperial gardens. Meanwhile they were taught their new
religion, and were submitted to the drill. When at length they went on
service, the road to promotion was opened upon them; nor were military
honours the only recompense to which they might aspire. There are
examples in history, of men from the ranks attaining the highest
dignities in the state, and at least of one of them marrying the sister
of the Sultan.
This corps has constituted the main portion of the infantry of the
Ottoman armies for a period of nearly five hundred years; till, in our
own day, on account of its repeated turbulence, it was annihilated, as
the Mamlouks before it, by means of a barbarous massacre. Its end was
as strange as its constitution; but here it comes under our notice as a
singular exemplification of the unproductiveness, as I may call it, of
the Turkish intellect. It was nothing else but an external institution
devised to supply a need which a civilized state would have supplied
from its own resources; and it fell perhaps without any essential
prejudice to the integrity of the power which it had served. That power
is just what it was before the Janizaries were formed. They may still
fall back upon the powerful cavalry, which carried them all the way
from Turkistan; or they may proceed to employ a mercenary force; anyhow
their primitive social type remains inviolate.
Such is the strange phenomenon, or rather portent, presented to us
by the barbarian power which has been for centuries seated in the very
heart of the old world; which has in its brute clutch the most famous
countries of classical and religious antiquity, and many of the most
fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth; which stretches along the
course of the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile; which embraces the
Pindus, the Taurus, the Caucasus, Mount Sinai, the Libyan mountains,
and the Atlas, as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and which, having no
history itself, is heir to the historical names of Constantinople and
Nicæa, Nicomedia and Cæsarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineveh and
Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding
in possession one-half of the history of the whole world. There it lies
and will not die, and has not in itself the elements of death, for it
has the life of a stone, and, unless pounded and pulverized, is
indestructible. Such is it in the simplicity of its national existence,
while that mode of existence remains, while it remains faithful to its
religion and its imperial line. Should its fidelity to either fail, it
would not merely degenerate or decay; it would simply cease to be.
4.
But we have dwelt long enough on the internal peculiarities of the
Ottomans; now let us shift the scene, and view them in the presence of
their enemies, and in their external relations both above and below
them; and then at once a very different prospect presents itself for
our contemplation. However, the first remark I have to make is one
which has reference still to their internal condition, but which does
not properly come into consideration, till we place them in the
presence of rival and hostile nations and races. Moral degeneracy is
not, strictly speaking, a cause of political ruin, as I have already
said; but its existence is of course a point of the gravest importance,
when we would calculate the chance which a people has of standing the
brunt of war and insurrection. It is a natural question to ask whether
the Osmanlis, after centuries of indulgence, have the physical nerve
and mental vigour which carried them forward through such a course of
fortunes, till it enthroned them in three quarters of the world. Their
numbers are diminished and diminishing; their great cities are half
emptied; their villages have disappeared; I believe that even out of
the fraction of Mahometans to be found amid their European population,
but a miserable minority are Osmanlis. Too much stress, however, must
not be laid on this circumstance. Though the Osmanlis are the
conquering race, it requires to be shown that they have ever had much
to do, as a race, with the executive of the Empire. While there are
some vigorous minds at the head of affairs, while there is a constant
introduction of foreigners into posts of authority and power, while
Curd and Turcoman supply the cavalry, while Egypt and other Pachalics
send their contingents, while the government can manage to combine, or
to steer between, the fanaticism of its subjects and the claims of
European diplomacy, there is a certain counterbalance in the State to
the depravity and worthlessness, whatever it be, of those who have the
nominal power.
A far more formidable difficulty, when we survey their external
prospects, is that very peculiarity, which, internally considered, is
so much in their favour—the simplicity of their internal unity, and
the individuality of their political structure. The Turkish races, as
being conquerors, of course are only a portion of the whole population
of their empire; for four centuries they have remained distinct from
Slavonians, Greeks, Copts, Armenians, Curds, Arabs, Jews, Druses,
Maronites, Ansarians, Motoualis; and they never can coalesce with them.
Like other Empires, they have kept their sovereign position by the
insignificance, degeneracy, or mutual animosities of the several
countries and religions which they rule, and by the ruthless tyranny of
their government. Were they to relax that tyranny, were they to
relinquish their ascendancy, were they to place their Greek subjects,
for instance, on a civil equality with themselves, how in the nature of
things could two incommunicable races coexist beside each other in one
political community? Yet if, on the other hand, they refuse this
enfranchisement of their subjects, they will have to encounter the
displeasure of united Christendom.
Nor is it a mere question of political practicability or expedience:
will the Koran, in its laxest interpretation, admit of that toleration,
on which the Frank kingdoms insist? yet what and where are they without
the Koran?
Nor do we understand the full stress of the dilemma in which they
are placed, until we have considered what is meant by the demands and
the displeasure of the European community. Pledged by the very
principle of their existence to barbarism, the Turks have to cope with
civilized governments all around them, ever advancing in the material
and moral strength which civilization gives, and ever feeling more and
more vividly that the Turks are simply in the way. They are in the way
of the progress of the nineteenth century. They are in the way of the
Russians, who wish to get into the Mediterranean; they are in the way
of the English, who wish to cross to the East; they are in the way of
the French, who, from the Crusades to Napoleon, have felt a romantic
interest in Syria; they are in the way of the Austrians, their
hereditary foes. There they lie, unable to abandon their traditionary
principles, without simply ceasing to be a state; unable to retain
them, and retain the sympathy of Christendom;—Mahometans, despots,
slave merchants, polygamists, holding agriculture in contempt, Europe
in abomination, their own wretched selves in admiration, cut off from
the family of nations,[89] existing by ignorance and fanaticism, and
tolerated in existence by the mutual jealousies of Christian powers as
well as of their own subjects, and by the recurring excitement of
military and political combinations, which cannot last for ever.
5.
And, last of all, as if it were not enough to be unable to procure
the countenance of any Christian power, except on specific conditions
prejudicial to their existence, still further, as the alternative of
their humbling themselves before the haughty nations of the West whom
they abhor, they have to encounter the direct cupidity, hatred, and
overpowering pressure of the multitudinous North, with its fanaticism
almost equal, and its numbers superior, to their own; a peril more
awful in imagination, from the circumstance that its descent has been
for so many centuries foretold and commenced, and of late years so
widely acquiesced in as inevitable. Seven centuries and a half have
passed, since, at the very beginning of the Crusades, a Greek writer
still extant turns from the then menacing inroads of the Turks in the
East, and the long centuries of their triumph which lay in prospect, to
record a prophecy, old in his time, relating to the North, to the
effect that in the last days the Russians should be masters of
Constantinople. When it was uttered no one knows; but it was written on
an equestrian statue, in his day one of the special monuments of the
Imperial City, which had one time been brought thither from Antioch.
That statue, whether of Christian or pagan origin is not known, has a
name in history, for it was one of the works of art destroyed by the
Latins in the taking of Constantinople; and the prediction engraven on
it bears at least a remarkable evidence of the congruity in itself, if
I may use the word; of that descent of the North upon Constantinople,
which, though not as yet accomplished, generation after generation
grows more probable.
It is now a thousand years since this famous prophecy has been
illustrated by the actual incursions of the Russian hordes. Such was
the date of their first expedition against Constantinople; their
assaults continued through two centuries; and, in the course of that
period, they seemed to be nearer the capture of the city than they have
been at any time since. They descended the Dnieper in boats, coasted
along the East of the Black Sea, and so came round by Trebizond to the
Bosphorus, plundering the coast as they advanced. At one time their
sovereign had got possession of Bulgaria, to the south of the Danube.
Barbarians of other races flocked to his standard; he found himself
surrounded by the luxuries of the East and West, and he marched down as
far as Adrianople, and threatened to go further. Ultimately he was
defeated; then followed the conversion of his people to Christianity,
which for a period restrained their barbarous rapacity; after this, for
two centuries, they were under the yoke and bondage of the Tartars; but
the prophecy, or rather the omen, remains, and the whole world has
learned to acquiesce in the probability of its fulfilment. The wonder
rather is, that that fulfilment has been so long delayed. The Russians,
whose wishes would inspire their hopes, are not solitary in their
anticipations: the historian from whom I have borrowed this sketch of
their past attempts,[90] writing at the end of last century, records
his own expectation of the event. “Perhaps,” he says, “the present
generation may yet behold the accomplishment of a rare prediction, of
which the style is unambiguous and the date unquestionable.” The Turks
themselves have long been under the shadow of its influence; even as
early as the middle of the seventeenth century, when they were
powerful, and Austria and Poland also, and Russia distant and
comparatively feeble, a traveller tells us that, “of all the princes of
Christendom, there was none whom the Turks so much feared as the Czar
of Muscovy.” This apprehension has ever been on the increase; in favour
of Russia, they made the first formal renunciation of territory which
had been consecrated to Islam by the solemnities of religion,—a
circumstance which has sunk deep into their imaginations; there is an
enigmatical inscription on the tomb of the Great Constantine, to the
effect that “the yellow-haired race shall overthrow Ismael;” moreover,
ever since their defeats by the Emperor Leopold, they have had a
surmise that the true footing of their faith is in Asia; and so strong
is the popular feeling on the subject, that in consequence their
favourite cemetery is at Scutari on the Asiatic coast.[91]
6.
It seems likely, then, at no very remote day, to fare ill with the
old enemy of the Cross. However, we must not undervalue what is still
the strength of his position. First, no well-authenticated tokens come
to us of the decay of the Mahometan faith. It is true that in one or
two cities, in Constantinople, perhaps, or in the marts of commerce,
laxity of opinion and general scepticism may to a certain extent
prevail, as also in the highest class of all, and in those who have
most to do with Europeans; but I confess nothing has been brought home
to me to show that this superstition is not still a living, energetic
principle in the Turkish population, sufficient to bind them together
in one, and to lead to bold and persevering action. It must be
recollected that a national and local faith, like the Mahometan, is
most closely connected with the sentiments of patriotism, family
honour, loyalty towards the past, and party spirit; and this the more
in the case of a religion which has no articles of faith at all, except
those of the Divine Unity and the mission of Mahomet. To these must be
added more general considerations: that they have ever prospered under
their religion, that they are habituated to it, that it suits them,
that it is their badge of a standing antagonism to nations they abhor,
and that it places them, in their own imagination, in a spiritual
position relatively to those nations, which they would simply forfeit
if they abandoned it. It would require clear proof of the fact, to
credit in their instance the report of a change of mind, which
antecedently is so improbable.
And next it must be borne in mind that, few as may be the Osmanlis,
yet the raw material of the Turkish nation, represented principally by
the Turcomans, extends over half Asia; and, if it is what it ever has
been, might under circumstances be combined or concentrated into a
formidable Power. It extends at this day from Asia Minor, in a
continuous tract, to the Lena, towards Kamtchatka, and from Siberia
down to Khorasan, the Hindu Cush, and China. The Nogays on the
north-east of the Danube, the inhabitants of the Crimea, the
populations on each side of the Don and Wolga, the wandering Turcomans
who are found from the west of Asia, along the Euxine, Caspian, and so
through Persia into Bukharia, the Kirghies on the Jaxartes, are said to
speak one tongue, and to have one faith.[92] Religion is a bond of
union, and language is a medium of intercourse; and, what is still
more, they are all Sunnites, and recognize in the Sultan the successor
of Mahomet.
Without a head, indeed, to give them a formal unity, they are only
one in name. Nothing is less likely than a resuscitation of the effete
family of Othman; still, supposing the Ottomans driven into Asia, and a
Sultan of that race to mount the throne, such as Amurath, Mahomet, or
Selim, it is not easy to set bounds to the influence the Sovereign
Pontiff of Islam might exert, and to the successes he might attain, in
rallying round him the scattered members of a race, warlike, fanatical,
one in faith, in language, in habits, and in adversity. Nay, even
supposing the Turkish Caliph, like the Saracenic of old, still to
slumber in his seraglio, he might appoint a vicegerent, Emir-ul-Omra,
or Mayor of the Palace, such as Togrul Beg, to conquer with his
authority in his stead.
But, supposing great men to be wanting to the Turkish race, and the
despair, natural to barbarians, to rush upon them, and defeat,
humiliation, and flight to be their lot; supposing the rivalries and
dissensions of Pachas, in themselves arguing no disaffection to their
Sultan and Caliph, should practically lead to the success of their too
powerful foes, to the divulsion of their body politic, and the
partition of their territory; should this be the distant event to which
the present complications tend, then the fiercer spirits, I suppose,
would of their free will return into the desert, as a portion of the
Kalmucks have done within the last hundred years. Those, however, who
remained, would lead the easiest life under the protection of Russia.
She already is the sovereign ruler of many barbarian populations, and,
among them, Turks and Mahometans; she lets them pursue their wandering
habits without molestation, satisfied with such service on their part
as the interests of the empire require. The Turcomans would have the
same permission, and would hardly be sensible of the change of masters.
It is a more perplexing question how England or France, did they on the
other hand become their masters, would be able to tolerate them in
their reckless desolation of a rich country. Rather, such barbarians,
unless they could be placed where they would answer some political
purpose, would eventually share the fate of the aboriginal inhabitants
of North America; they would, in the course of years, be surrounded,
pressed upon, divided, decimated, driven into the desert by the force
of civilization, and would once more roam in freedom in their old home
in Persia or Khorasan, in the presence of their brethren, who have long
succeeded them in its possession.
* * * * *
Many things are possible; one thing is inconceivable,—that the
Turks should, as an existing nation, accept of modern civilization;
and, in default of it, that they should be able to stand their ground
amid the encroachments of Russia, the interested and contemptuous
patronage of Europe, and the hatred of their subject populations.
FOOTNOTES:
[87] Tour through Armenia, etc.
[88] Gibbon.
[89] Since this was written, they have been taken into the European
family by the Treaty of 1856, and the Sultan has become a Knight of the
Garter. This strange phenomenon is not for certain to the advantage of
their political position.
[90] Gibbon.
[91] Thornton, ii. 89; Formby, p. 24; Eclectic Rev., Dec., 1828.
[92] Pritchard.