You may think, Gentlemen, I have been very long in coming to the
Turks, and indeed I have been longer than I could have wished; but I
have thought it necessary, in order to your taking a just view of them,
that you should survey them first of all in their original condition.
When they first appear in history they are Huns or Tartars, and nothing
else; they are indeed in no unimportant respects Tartars even now; but,
had they never been made something more than Tartars, they never would
have had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they
would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have
swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful
to destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but
this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the
Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to
the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to this day,
still they, or at least great portions of the race, have been put under
education; they have been submitted to a slow course of change, with a
long history and a profitable discipline and fortunes of a peculiar
kind; and thus they have gained those qualities of mind, which alone
enable a nation to wield and to consolidate imperial power.
1.
I have said that, when first they distinctly appear on the scene of
history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high
metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only
in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound
there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is
said to be the most plentiful in the world. There have been iron works
there from time immemorial, and at the time that the Huns descended on
the Roman Empire (in the fifth century of the Christian era), we find
the Turks nothing more than a family of slaves, employed as workers of
the ore and as blacksmiths by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the
course of fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish power in
Europe, with the sudden development peculiar to Tartars, we find these
Turks spread from East to West, and lords of a territory so extensive,
that they were connected, by relations of peace or war, at once with
the Chinese, the Persians, and the Romans. They had reached Kamtchatka
on the North, the Caspian on the West, and perhaps even the mouth of
the Indus on the South. Here then we have an intermediate empire of
Tartars, placed between the eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this
sketch it has no place, except as belonging to Turkish history, because
it was contained within the limits of Asia, and, though it lasted for
200 years, it only faintly affected the political transactions of
Europe. However, it was not without some sort of influence on
Christendom, for the Romans interchanged embassies with its sovereign
in the reign of the then Greek Emperor Justin the younger (A.D. 570),
with the view of engaging him in a warlike alliance against Persia. The
account of one of these embassies remains, and the picture it presents
of the Turks is important, because it seems clearly to identify them
with the Tartar race.
For instance, in the mission to the Tartars from the Pope, which I
have already spoken of, the friars were led between two fires, when
they approached the Khan, and they at first refused to follow, thinking
they might be countenancing some magical rite. Now we find it recorded
of this Roman embassy, that, on its arrival, it was purified by the
Turks with fire and incense. As to incense, which seems out of place
among such barbarians, it is remarkable that it is used in the
ceremonial of the Turkish court to this day. At least Sir Charles
Fellows, in his work on the Antiquities of Asia Minor, in 1838, speaks
of the Sultan as going to the festival of Bairam with incense-bearers
before him. Again, when the Romans were presented to the great Khan,
they found him in his tent, seated on a throne, to which wheels were
attached and horses attachable, in other words, a Tartar waggon.
Moreover, they were entertained at a banquet which lasted the greater
part of the day; and an intoxicating liquor, not wine, which was sweet
and pleasant, was freely presented to them; evidently the Tartar
koumiss.[15] The next day they had a second entertainment in a
still more splendid tent; the hangings were of embroidered silk, and
the throne, the cups, and the vases were of gold. On the third day, the
pavilion, in which they were received, was supported on gilt columns; a
couch of massive gold was raised on four gold peacocks; and before the
entrance to the tent was what might be called a sideboard, only that it
was a sort of barricade of waggons, laden with dishes, basins, and
statues of solid silver. All these points in the description,—the silk
hangings, the gold vessels, the successively increasing splendour of
the entertainments,—remind us of the courts of Zingis and Timour, 700
and 900 years afterwards.
This empire, then, of the Turks was of a Tartar character; yet it
was the first step of their passing from barbarism to that degree of
civilization which is their historical badge. And it was their first
step in civilization, not so much by what it did in its day, as (unless
it be a paradox to say so), by its coming to an end. Indeed it so
happens, that those Turkish tribes which have changed their original
character and have a place in the history of the world, have obtained
their status and their qualifications for it, by a process very
different from that which took place in the nations most familiar to
us. What this process has been I will say presently; first, however,
let us observe that, fortunately for our purpose, we have still
specimens existing of those other Turkish tribes, which were never
submitted to this process of education and change, and, in looking at
them as they now exist, we see at this very day the Turkish nationality
in something very like its original form, and are able to decide for
ourselves on its close approximation to the Tartar. You may recollect I
pointed out to you, Gentlemen, in the opening of these lectures, the
course which the pastoral tribes, or nomads as they are often called,
must necessarily take in their emigrations. They were forced along in
one direction till they emerged from their mountain valleys, and
descended their high plateau at the end of Tartary, and then they had
the opportunity of turning south. If they did not avail themselves of
this opening, but went on still westward, their next southern pass
would be the defiles of the Caucasus and Circassia, to the west of the
Caspian. If they did not use this, they would skirt the top of the
Black Sea, and so reach Europe. Thus in the emigration of the Huns from
China, you may recollect a tribe of them turned to the South as soon as
they could, and settled themselves between the high Tartar land and the
sea of Aral, while the main body went on to the furthest West by the
north of the Black Sea. Now with this last passage into Europe we are
not here concerned, for the Turks have never introduced themselves to
Europe by means of it;[16] but with those two southward passages which
are Asiatic, viz., that to the east of the Aral, and that to the west
of the Caspian. The Turkish tribes have all descended upon the
civilized world by one or other of these two roads; and I observe, that
those which have descended along the east of the Aral have changed
their social habits and gained political power, while those which
descended to the west of the Caspian remain pretty much what they ever
were. The former of these go among us by the general name of Turks; the
latter are the Turcomans or Turkmans.
2.
Now, first, I shall briefly mention the Turcomans, and dismiss them,
because, when they have once illustrated the original state of their
race, they have no place in this sketch. I have said, then, that the
ancient Turco-Tartar empire, to which the Romans sent their embassy in
the sixth century, extended to the Caspian and towards the Indus. It
was in the beginning of the next century that the Romans, that is, the
Greco-Romans of Constantinople, found them in the former of these
neighbourhoods; and they made the same use of them in the defence of
their territory, to which they had put the Goths before the overthrow
of the Western Empire. It was a most eventful era at which they
addressed themselves to these Turks of the Caspian. It was almost the
very year of the Hegira, which marks the rise of the Mahometan
imposture and rule. As yet, however, the Persians were in power, and
formidable enemies to the Romans, and at this very time in possession
of the Holy Cross, which Chosroes, their powerful king, had carried
away from Jerusalem twelve years before. But the successful Emperor
Heraclius was already in the full tide of those brilliant victories,
which in the course of a few years recovered it; and, to recall him
from their own soil, the Persians had allied themselves with the
barbarous tribes of Europe, (the Russians, Sclavonians, Bulgarians, and
others,) which, then as now, were pressing down close upon
Constantinople from the north. This alliance suggested to Heraclius the
counterstroke of allying himself with the Turkish freebooters, who in
like manner, as stationed above the Caspian, were impending over
Persia. Accordingly the horde of Chozars, as this Turkish tribe was
called, at the Emperor's invitation, transported their tents from the
plains of the Volga through the defiles of the Caucasus into Georgia.
Heraclius showed them extraordinary attention; he put his own diadem on
the head of the barbarian prince, and distributed gold, jewels, and
silk to his officers; and, on the other hand, he obtained from them an
immediate succour of 40,000 horse, and the promise of an irruption of
their brethren into Persia from the far East, from the quarter of the
Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of the passages by
which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South. Such were the
allies, with which Heraclius succeeded in utterly overthrowing and
breaking up the Persian power; and thus, strange to say, the greatest
of all the enemies of the Church among the nations of the earth, the
Turk, began his career in Christian history by coöperating with a
Christian Emperor in the recovery of the Holy Cross, of which a pagan,
the ally of Russia, had got possession. The religious aspect, however,
of this first era of their history, seems to have passed away without
improvement; what they gained was a temporal advantage, a settlement in
Georgia and its neighbourhood, which they have held from that day to
this.
This horde of Turks, the Chozars, was nomad and pagan; it consisted
of mounted shepherds, surrounded with their flocks, living in tents and
waggons. In the course of the following centuries, under the shadow of
their more civilized brethren, other similar hordes were introduced,
nomad and pagan still; they might indeed happen sometimes to pass down
from the east of the Caspian as well as from the west, hastening to the
south straight from Turkistan along the coast of the Aral;—either road
would lead them down to the position which the Chozars were the first
to occupy in Georgia and Armenia,—but still there would be but one
step in their journey between their old native sheep-walk and
horse-path and the fair region into which they came. It was a sudden
Tartar descent, accompanied with no national change of habits, and
promising no permanent stability. Nor would they have remained there, I
suppose, as they did remain, were it not that they have been protected,
as they were originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have
made use of them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to
this day, the successors of the Chozars, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia
Minor, even as far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its
maritime cities and ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand
years ago, except that they have taken up the loose profession of
Mahometanism, and have given up some of the extreme peculiarities of
their Tartar state, such as their attachment to horse-flesh and mares'
milk. These are the Turcomans.
3.
The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and
western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concerned, he tells us
that[17] “they are tall and robust, with square flat faces, as well as
the western; only they are more swarthy, and have a greater resemblance
to the Tartars. Some of them have betaken themselves to husbandry. They
are all Mohammedans; they are very turbulent, very brave, and good
horsemen.” And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the
neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that
they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue
their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without
fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its
duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are
governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay
tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with
horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare
with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three
hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a
space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that
of firearms.
This account is drawn up from writers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Precisely the same report of their habits is
made by Dr. Chandler in his travels in Asia Minor in the middle of the
last century; he fell in with them in his journey between Smyrna and
Ephesus. “We were told here,” he says, “that the road farther on was
beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the
Nomades Scythæ: or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding
and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not
forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from
place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing
their stations, and overspreading without control the vast neglected
pastures of this desert empire.... We set out, and ... soon after came
to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of
the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and
herds and horses and poultry feeding round them.”[18]
I may seem to be making unnecessary extracts, but I have two reasons
for multiplying them; in order, first, to show the identity in
character of the various tribes of the Tartar and the Turkish stock,
and next, in order to impress upon your imagination what that character
is; for it is not easy to admit into the mind the very idea of a people
of this kind, dwelling too, and that for ages, in some of the most
celebrated and beautiful regions of the world, such as Syria and Asia
Minor. With this view I will read what Volney says of them, as he found
them in Syria towards the close of the last century. “The Turkmans,” he
says,[19] “are of the number of those Tartar hordes, who, in the great
revolutions of the Empire of the Caliphs, emigrated from the eastward
of the Caspian Sea, and spread themselves over the vast plains of
Armenia and Asia Minor. Their language is the same as that of the
Turks, and their mode of life nearly resembles that of the Bedouin
Arabs. Like them, they are shepherds, and consequently obliged to
travel over immense tracts of land to procure subsistence for their
numerous herds.... Their whole occupation consists in smoking and
looking after their flocks. Perpetually on horseback, with their lances
on their shoulders, their crooked sabres by their sides, and their
pistols in their belts, they are expert horsemen and indefatigable
soldiers.... A great number of these tribes pass in the summer into
Armenia and Caramania, where they find grass in great abundance, and
return to their former quarters in the winter. The Turkmans are reputed
to be Moslem ... but they trouble themselves little about religion.”
While I was collecting these passages, a notice of these tribes
appeared in the columns of the Times newspaper, sent home by its
Constantinople correspondent, apropos of the present concentration of
troops in that capital in expectation of a Russian war. His Statement
enables us to carry down our specimens of the Tartar type of the
Turkish race to the present day “From the coast of the Black Sea,” he
writes home, “to the Taurus chain of mountains, a great part of the
population is nomad, and besides the Turks or Osmanlis,” that is, the
Ottoman or Imperial Turks, “consists of two distinct races;—the
Turcomans, who possessed themselves of the land before the advent of
the Osmanlis, and who wander with their black tents up to the shores of
the Bosphorus; and the Curds.” With the Curds we are not here
concerned. He proceeds: “The Turcomans, who are spread over the whole
of Asia Minor, are a most warlike people. Clans, numbering many
thousand, acknowledge the Sultan as the representative of the Caliphs
and the Sovereign Lord of Islam, from whom all the Frank kings receive
their crowns; but they are practically independent of him, and pay no
taxes but to their own chiefs. In the neighbourhood of Cæsarea, Kusan
Oghlou, a Turcoman chief, numbers 20,000 armed horsemen, rules
despotically over a large district, and has often successfully resisted
the Sultan's arms. These people lead a nomad life, are always engaged
in petty warfare, are well mounted, and armed with pistol, scimitar,
spear, or gun, and would always be useful as irregular troops.”
4.
And now I have said enough, and more than enough, of the original
state of the Turkish race, as exhibited in the Chozars and
Turcomans:—it is time to pursue the history of that more important
portion of it with which we are properly engaged, which received some
sort of education, and has proved itself capable of social and
political union. I observed just now, that that education was very
different in its mode and circumstances from that which has been the
lot of the nations with which we are best acquainted. Other nations
have been civilized in their own homes, and, by their social progress,
have immortalized a country as well as a race. They have been educated
by their conquests, or by subjugation, or by the intercourse with
foreigners which commerce or colonization has opened; but in every case
they have been true to their fatherland, and are children of the soil.
The Greeks sent out their colonies to Asia Minor and Italy, and those
colonies reacted upon the mother country. Magna Græcia and Ionia showed
their mother country the way to her intellectual supremacy. The Romans
spread gradually from one central city, and when their conquests
reached as far as Greece, “the captive,” in the poet's words,
“captivated her wild conqueror, and introduced arts into unmannered
Latium.”[20] England was converted by the Roman See and conquered by
the Normans, and was gradually civilized by the joint influences of
religion and of chivalry. Religion indeed, though a depraved religion,
has had something to do, as we shall see, with the civilization of the
Turks; but the circumstances have been altogether different from those
which we trace in the history of England, Rome, or Greece. The Turks
present the spectacle of a race poured out, as it were, upon a foreign
material, interpenetrating all its parts, yet preserving its
individuality, and at length making its way through it, and
reappearing, in substance the same as before, but charged with the
qualities of the material through which it has been passed, and
modified by them. They have been invaded by no conqueror, they have
brought no captive arts or literature home, they have undergone no
conversion in mass, they have been taught by no commerce, by no
international relationship; but they have in the course of centuries
slowly soaked or trickled, if I may use the words, through the
Saracenic populations with which they came in contact, and after being
nationally lost to the world, as far as history goes, for long periods
and through different countries, eventually they have come to the face
of day with that degree of civilization which they at present possess,
and at length have usurped a place within the limits of the great
European family. And this is why the path southwards to the east of the
Aral was, in matter of fact, the path of civilization, and that by the
Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the
former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have
remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way
of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country
which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course,
leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan,
Zabulistan, and Persia,—with many fortunes, under many masters, for
many hundred years, before they came round to the region to which their
Turcoman brethren attained so easily, but with so little eventual
advantage. My meaning will be clearer, as I proceed.
5.
1. First of all, we may say that the very region into which they
came, tended to their civilization. Of course the peculiarities of
soil, climate, and country are not by themselves sufficient for a
social change, else the Turcomans would have the best right to
civilization; yet, when other influences are present too, climate and
country are far from being unimportant. You may recollect that I have
spoken more than once of the separation of a portion of the Huns from
the main body, when they were emigrating from Tartary into Europe, in
the time of the Goths.[21] These turned off sharp to the South
immediately on descending the high table-land; and, crossing the
Jaxartes, found themselves in a fertile and attractive country, between
the Aral and their old country, where they settled. It is a peculiarity
of Asia that its regions are either very hot or very cold. It has the
highest mountains in the world, bleak table-lands, vast spaces of
burning desert, tracts stretched out beneath the tropical sun. Siberia
goes for a proverb for cold: India is a proverb for heat. It is not
adequately supplied with rivers, and it has little of inland sea. In
these respects it stands in singular contrast with Europe. If then the
tribes which inhabit a cold country have, generally speaking, more
energy than those which are relaxed by the heat, it follows that you
will have in Asia two descriptions of people brought together in
extreme, sometimes in sudden, contrariety with each other, the strong
and the weak. Here then, as some philosophers have argued,[22] you have
the secret of the despotisms and the vast empires of which Asia has
been the seat; for it always possesses those who are naturally fitted
to be tyrants, and those also whose nature it is to tremble and obey.
But we may take another, perhaps a broader, view of the phenomenon. The
sacred writer says: “Give me neither riches nor beggary:” and, as the
extremes of abundance and of want are prejudicial to our moral
well-being, so they seem to be prejudicial to our intellectual nature
also. Mental cultivation is best carried on in temperate regions. In
the north men are commonly too cold, in the south too hot, to think,
read, write, and act. Science, literature, and art refuse to germinate
in the frost, and are burnt up by the sun.
Now it so happened that the region in which this party of Huns
settled themselves was one of the fairest and most fruitful in Asia. It
is bounded by deserts, it is in parts encroached on by deserts; but
viewed in its length and breadth, in its produce and its position, it
seems a country equal, or superior, to any which that vast continent,
as at present known, can show. Its lower portion is the extensive
territory of Khorasan, the ancient Bactriana; going northwards across
the Oxus, we come into a spacious tract, stretching to the Aral and to
the Jaxartes, and measuring a square of 600 miles. It was called in
ancient times Sogdiana; in the history of the middle ages Transoxiana,
or “beyond the Oxus;” by the Eastern writers Maver-ul-nere, or
Mawer-al-nahar, which is said to have the same meaning; and it is now
known by the name Bukharia. To these may be added a third province, at
the bottom of the Aral, between the mouth of the Oxus and the Caspian,
called Kharasm. These, then, were the regions in which the Huns in
question took up their abode.
The two large countries I first mentioned are celebrated in all ages
for those characteristics which render a spot desirable for human
habitation. As to Sogdiana, or Maver-ul-nere, the region with which we
are specially concerned, the Orientals, especially the Persians, of the
medieval period do not know how to express in fit terms their
admiration of its climate and soil. They do not scruple to call it the
Paradise of Asia. “It may be considered,” says a modern writer,[23] “as
almost the only example of the finest temperate climate occurring in
that continent, which presents generally an abrupt transition from
burning tropical heat to the extreme cold of the north.” According to
an Arabian author, there are just three spots in the globe which
surpass all the rest in beauty and fertility; one of them is near
Damascus, another seems to be the valley of a river on the Persian
Gulf, and the third is the plain of Sogdiana. Another writer says: “I
have cast my eyes around Bokhara, and never have I seen a verdure more
fresh or of wider extent. The green carpet mingles in the horizon with
the azure of the sky.”[24] Abulfeda in like manner calls it “the most
delightful of all places God has created.” Some recent writer, I think,
speaks in disparagement of it.[25] And I can quite understand, that the
deserts which must be passed to reach it from the south or the north
may betray the weary traveller into an exaggerated praise, which is the
expression both of his recruited spirits and of his gratitude. But all
things are good only by comparison; and I do not see why an Asiatic,
having experience of the sands which elsewhere overspread the face of
his continent, should for that reason be ill qualified to pronounce
that Sogdiana affords a contrast to them. Moreover, we have the
experience of other lands, as Asia Minor, which have presented a very
different aspect in different ages. A river overflows and turns a
fruitful plain into a marsh; or it fails, and turns it into a sandy
desert. Sogdiana is watered by a number of great rivers, which make
their way across it from the high land on its east to the Aral or
Caspian. Now we read in history of several instances of changes,
accidental or artificial, in the direction or the supply of these great
water-courses. I think I have read somewhere, but cannot recover my
authority, of some emigration of the inhabitants of those countries,
caused by a failure of the stream on which they depended. And we know
for certain that the Oxus has been changed in its course, accidentally
or artificially, more than once. Disputes have arisen before now
between the Russian Government and the Tartars, on the subject of one
of these diversions of the bed of a river.[26] One province of
Khorasan, which once was very fertile, is in consequence now a desert
It may be questioned, too, whether the sands of the adjacent deserts,
which are subject to violent agitation from the action of the wind, may
not have encroached upon Sogdiana. Nor should it be overlooked that
this rich country has been subjected to the same calamities which have
been the desolation of Asia Minor; for, as the Turcomans have
devastated the latter, so, as I have already had occasion to mention,
Zingis swept round the sea of Aral, and destroyed the fruits of a long
civilization.
Even after the ravages of that conqueror, however, Timour and the
Emperor Baber, who had a right to judge of the comparative excellence
of the countries of the East, bear witness to the beauty of Sogdiana.
Timour, who had fixed his imperial seat in Samarcand, boasted he had a
garden 120 miles in extent. Baber expatiates on the grain and fruit and
game of its northern parts; of the tulips, violets, and roses of
another portion of it; of the streams and gardens of another. Its
plains are said by travellers to abound in wood, its rivers in fish,
its valleys in fruit-trees, in wheat and barley, and in cotton.[27] The
quince, pomegranate, fig, apricot, and almond all flourish in it. Its
melons are the finest in the world. Mulberries abound, and provide for
a considerable manufacture of silk. No wine, says Baber, is equal to
the wine of Bokhara. Its atmosphere is so clear and serene, that the
stars are visible even to the verge of the horizon. A recent Russian
traveller says he came to a country so smiling, well cultivated, and
thickly peopled, with fields, canals, avenues of trees, villages, and
gardens, that he thought himself in an enchanted country. He speaks in
raptures of its melons, pomegranates, and grapes.[28] Its breed of
horses is celebrated; so much so that a late British traveller[29]
visited the country with the special object of substituting it for the
Arab in our Indian armies. Its mountains abound in useful and precious
produce. Coal is found there; gold is collected from its rivers; silver
and iron are yielded by its hills; we hear too of its mines of
turquoise, and of its cliffs of lapis lazuli,[30] and its mines of
rubies, which to this day are the object of the traveller's
curiosity.[31] I might extend my remarks to the country south of the
Oxus and of its mountain range, the modern Affghanistan. Though Cabul
is 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, it abounds in pomegranates,
mulberries, apples, and fruit of every kind. Grapes are so plentiful,
that for three months of the year they are given to the cattle.
6.
This region, favoured in soil and climate, is favoured also in
position. Lying at the mouth of the two great roads of emigration from
the far East, the valleys of the Jaxartes and the Oxus, it is the
natural mart between High Asia and Europe, receiving the merchandize of
East and North, and transporting it by its rivers, by the Caspian, the
Kur, and the Phasis, to the Black Sea. Thus it received in former days
the silk of China, the musk of Thibet, and the furs of Siberia, and
shipped them for the cities of the Roman Empire. To Samarcand, its
metropolis, we owe the art of transforming linen into paper, which the
Sogdian merchants are said to have gained from China, and thence
diffused by means of their own manufacturers over the western world. A
people so circumstanced could not be without civilization; but that
civilization was of a much earlier date. It must not be forgotten that
the celebrated sage, Zoroaster, before the times of history, was a
native, and, as some say, king of Bactriana. Cyrus had established a
city in the same region, which he called after his name. Alexander
conquered both Bactriana and Sogdiana, and planted Grecian cities
there. There is a long line of Greco-Bactrian kings; and their coins
and pateræ have been brought to light within the last few years.
Alexander's name is still famous in the country; not only does Marco
Polo in the middle ages speak of his descendants as still found there,
but even within the last fifteen years Sir Alexander Burns found a man
professing that descent in the valley of the Oxus, and Lieutenant Wood
another in the same neighbourhood.
Nor was Greek occupation the only source of the civilization of
Sogdiana. Centuries rolled on, and at length the Saracens renewed, on
their own peculiar basis, the mental cultivation which Sogdiana had
received from Alexander. The cities of Bokhara and Samarcand have been
famous for science and literature. Bokhara was long celebrated as the
most eminent seat of Mahometan learning in central Asia; its colleges
were, and are, numerous, accommodating from 60 to 600 students each.
One of them gained the notice and the pecuniary aid of the Russian
Empress Catharine.[32] Samarcand rivals Bokhara in fame; its university
even in the last century was frequented by Mahometan youth from foreign
countries. There were more than 300 colleges for students, and there
was an observatory, celebrated in the middle ages, the ruins of which
remain. Here lies the body of Timour, under a lofty dome, the sides of
which are enriched with agate. “Since the time of the Holy Prophet,”
that is, Mahomet, says the Emperor Baber, “no country has produced so
many Imaums and eminent divines as Mawar-al-nahar,” that is, Sogdiana.
It was celebrated for its populousness. At one time it boasted of being
able to send out 300,000 foot, and as many horse, without missing them.
Bridges and caravansaries abounded; the latter, in the single province
attached to its capital, amounted to 2,000. In Bactriana, the very
ruins of Balkh extend for a circuit of 20 miles, and Sir A. Burns wound
through three miles of them continuously.
Such is the country, seated at present between the British and the
Russian Empires, and such as regards its previous and later state,
which the savage Huns, in their emigration from Tartary, had
necessarily encountered; and it cannot surprise us that one of their
many tribes had been persuaded to settle there, instead of seeking
their fortunes farther west. The effect upon these settlers in course
of time was marvellous. Though it was not of course the mere climate of
Sogdiana that changed them, still we cannot undervalue the influence
which is necessarily exerted on the mind by the idea of property, when
once recognised and accepted, by the desire of possession and by the
love of home, and by the sentiment of patriotism which arises in the
mind, especially with the occupation of a rich and beautiful country.
Moreover, they became the guests or masters of a people, who, however
rude, at least had far higher claims to be called civilized than they
themselves, and possessed among them the remains of a more civilized
era. They found a race, too, not Tartar, more capable of civilization,
more gifted with intellect, and more comely in person. Settling down
among the inhabitants, and intermarrying with them, in the course of
generations their Tartar characteristics were sensibly softened. For a
thousand years this restless people remained there, as if chained to
the soil. They still had the staple of barbarism in them, but so
polished were they for children of a Tartar stock, that they are called
in history the White Huns of Sogdiana. They took to commerce, they took
to literature; and when, at the end of a few centuries, the Turks, as I
have already described, spread abroad from the iron works and forges of
Mount Altai to Kamtchatka, the Volga, and the Indus, and overran these
White Huns in the course of their victories, they could find no parties
more fitted than them to act as their diplomatists and correspondents
in their negotiations with the Romans.
Such was the influence of Sogdiana on the Huns; is it wonderful that
it exerted some influence on the Turks, when they in turn got
possession of it? History justifies the anticipation; as the Huns of
the second or third centuries settled around the Aral, so the Turks in
the course of the sixth or seventh centuries overran them, and
descended down to the modern Affghanistan and the Indus; and as the
fair region and its inhabitants, which they crossed and occupied, had
begun at the former era the civilization of the first race of Tartars,
so did it at the latter era begin the education of the second.
7.
2. But a more direct and effective instrument of social education
was accorded to the Turks on their occupation of Sogdiana. You may
recollect I spoke of their first empire as lasting for only 200
years,[33] about 90 of which measures the period of that occupation.
Their power then came to an end; what was the consequence of their
fall? were they driven out of Sogdiana again? were they massacred? did
they take refuge in the mountains or deserts? were they reduced to
slavery? Thus we are introduced to a famous passage of history: the
case was as follows:—At the very date at which Heraclius called the
Turcomans into Georgia, at the very date when their Eastern brethren
crossed the northern border of Sogdiana, an event of most momentous
import had occurred in the South. A new religion had arisen in Arabia.
The impostor Mahomet, announcing himself the Prophet of God, was
writing the pages of that book, and moulding the faith of that people,
which was to subdue half the known world. The Turks passed the Jaxartes
southward in A.D. 626; just four years before Mahomet had assumed the
royal dignity, and just six years after, on his death, his followers
began the conquest of the Persian Empire. In the course of 20 years
they effected it; Sogdiana was at its very extremity, or its
borderland; there the last king of Persia took refuge from the south,
while the Turks were pouring into it from the north. There was little
to choose for the unfortunate prince between the Turk and the Saracen;
the Turks were his hereditary foe; they had been the giants and
monsters of the popular poetry; but he threw himself into their arms.
They engaged in his service, betrayed him, murdered him, and measured
themselves with the Saracens in his stead. Thus the military strength
of the north and south of Asia, the Saracenic and the Turkish, came
into memorable conflict in the regions of which I have said so much.
The struggle was a fierce one, and lasted many years; the Turks
striving to force their way down to the ocean, the Saracens to drive
them back into their Scythian deserts. They first fought this issue in
Bactriana or Khorasan; the Turks got the worst of the fight, and then
it was thrown back upon Sogdiana itself, and there it ended again in
favour of the Saracens. At the end of 90 years from the time of the
first Turkish descent on this fair region, they relinquished it to
their Mahometan opponents. The conquerors found it rich, populous, and
powerful; its cities, Carisme, Bokhara, and Samarcand, were surrounded
beyond their fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which
was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains were well
cultivated, and its commerce extended from China to Europe. Its riches
were proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort a tribute
of two million gold pieces from the inhabitants; we read, moreover, of
the crown jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of the buskin of
another, which she dropt in her flight from Bokhara, as being worth two
thousand pieces of gold.[34] Such had been the prosperity of the
barbarian invaders, such was its end; but not their end, for
adversity did them service, as well as prosperity, as we shall see.
It is usual for historians to say, that the triumph of the South
threw the Turks back again upon their northern solitudes; and this
might easily be the case with some of the many hordes, which were ever
passing the boundary and flocking down; but it is no just account of
the historical fact, viewed as a whole. Not often indeed do the
Oriental nations present us with an example of versatility of
character; the Turks, for instance, of this day are substantially what
they were four centuries ago. We cannot conceive, were Turkey overrun
by the Russians at the present moment, that the fanatical tribes, which
are pouring into Constantinople from Asia Minor, would submit to the
foreign yoke, take service under their conquerors, become soldiers,
custom-officers, police, men of business, attachés, statesmen, working
their way up from the ranks and from the masses into influence and
power; but, whether from skill in the Saracens, or from far-reaching
sagacity in the Turks (and it is difficult to assign it to either
cause), so it was, that a process of this nature followed close upon
the Mahometan conquest of Sogdiana. It is to be traced in detail to a
variety of accidents. Many of the Turks probably were made slaves, and
the service to which they were subjected was no matter of choice.
Numbers had got attached to the soil; and inheriting the blood of
Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal inhabitants for three generations,
had simply unlearned the wildness of the Tartar shepherd. Others fell
victims to the religion of their conquerors, which ultimately, as we
know, exercised a most remarkable influence upon them. Not all at once,
but as tribe descended after tribe, and generation followed generation,
they succumbed to the creed of Mahomet; and they embraced it with the
ardour and enthusiasm which Franks and Saxons so gloriously and
meritoriously manifested in their conversion to Christianity.
8.
3. Here again was a very powerful instrument in modification of
their national character. Let me illustrate it in one particular. If
there is one peculiarity above another, proper to the savage and to the
Tartar, it is that of excitability and impetuosity on ordinary
occasions; the Turks, on the other hand, are nationally remarkable for
gravity and almost apathy of demeanour. Now there are evidently
elements in the Mahometan creed, which would tend to change them from
the one temperament to the other. Its sternness, its coldness, its
doctrine of fatalism; even the truths which it borrowed from
Revelation, when separated from the truths it rejected, its monotheism
untempered by mediation, its severe view of the divine attributes, of
the law, and of a sure retribution to come, wrought both a gloom and
also an improvement in the barbarian, not very unlike the effect which
some forms of Protestantism produce among ourselves. But whatever was
the mode of operation, certainly it is to their religion that this
peculiarity of the Turks is ascribed by competent judges. Lieutenant
Wood in his journal gives us a lively account of a peculiarity of
theirs, which he unhesitatingly attributes to Islamism. “Nowhere,” he
says, “is the difference between European and Mahomedan society more
strongly marked than in the lower walks of life.... A Kasid, or
messenger, for example, will come into a public department, deliver his
letters in full durbar, and demean himself throughout the interview
with so much composure and self-possession, that an European can hardly
believe that his grade in society is so low. After he has delivered his
letters, he takes his seat among the crowd, and answers, calmly and
without hesitation, all the questions which may be addressed to him, or
communicates the verbal instructions with which he has been entrusted
by his employer, and which are often of more importance than the
letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate
self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far
from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an
English clown.” ... “Even children,” he continues, “in Mahomedan
countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The
boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion
of the national character. In passing through a village, these little
men will place their hands upon their breasts, and give the usual
greeting. Frequently have I seen the children of chiefs approach their
father's durbar, and stopping short at the threshold of the door, utter
the shout of 'Salam Ali-Kum,' so as to draw all eyes upon them; but
nothing daunted, they marched boldly into the room, and sliding down
upon their knees, folded their arms and took their seat upon the musnad
with all the gravity of grown-up persons.”
As Islamism has changed the demeanour of the Turks, so doubtless it
has in other ways materially innovated on their Tartar nature. It has
given an aim to their military efforts, a political principle, and a
social bond. It has laid them under a sense of responsibility, has
moulded them into consistency, and taught them a course of policy and
perseverance in it. But to treat this part of the subject adequately to
its importance would require, Gentlemen, a research and a fulness of
discussion unsuitable to the historical sketch which I have undertaken.
I have said enough for my purpose upon this topic; and indeed on the
general question of the modification of national character to which the
Turks were at this period subjected.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Univ. Hist. Modern, vol. iii. p. 346.
[16] I am here assuming that the Magyars are not of the Turkish
stock; vid. Gibbon and Pritchard.
[17] Vol. v. p. 248.
[18] P. 127, ed. 1817.
[19] Travels in Syria, vol. i. p. 369, ed. 1787.
[20] Hor. Epist. ii 1, 155.
[21] Supr. p. 26.
[22] Montesquieu.
[23] Murray.
[24] Caldecott's Baber.
[25] Vid. Quarterly Review, vol. lii. p. 396-7.
[26] Univ. Hist. mod. vol. v. p. 262, etc.
[27] Ibid. vol. iv. p. 353.
[28] Meyendorff.
[29] Moorcroft.
[30] Vid. Elphinstone.
[31] Wood's Oxus.
[32] Elphinstone's Cabul.
[33] Supr. p. 59.
[34] Gibbon.