INTRODUCTION✦

IDEAS CONSTITUTE A NATION

A nation, when considered from its earliest to its latest days, is much more a body of ideas than a race of men. Men die, families decay, the original stock tends to disappear; new individuals are admitted from without, new family groups take the lead, whole tribes are incorporated and absorbed; after centuries the anthropological result often bears but slight resemblance to the original type. Undoubtedly the fabric of ideas which a nation weaves as its history develops also undergoes changes of pattern; old principles pass out of sight, and new ones, born of circumstance, or brought in from without, come to controlling influence. But ideas are not, like men, mortal: they can be transmitted from man to man through ages; they can be stored in books and thus pass from the dead to the living; when built together into a solid and attractive structure, they impart to the whole something of their individual immortality. Singly they pass as readily to strangers as to kindred; when organized to rounded completeness as the culture of a great living nation, they have a power which lays hold of men of many races, alone or in masses, and in the absence of strong prejudice compels acceptance.

Such an assimilative force can clearly be seen in vigorous operation in the United States of America today. A system of ideas, woven of countless threads spun by Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Teuton, preserved and enlarged by Frank, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Englishman, recombined in a new and striking pattern by the founders of the republic, is thrown over men from every nation under heaven, who under its influence all become of one type, not to be mistaken wherever it is seen.

The history of the Ottoman Empire reveals the constant working of a like assimilative force. It was not merely, and not even mainly, the compulsion of the sword that built up and maintained the strongest national power of the sixteenth century. Swords must be wielded by men; and how were enough strong and capable men found and bound together in willing coöperation to conquer large sections of Europe, Asia, and Africa, to organize and govern their conquests in a fairly satisfactory fashion, and to establish a structure which, after more than three hundred years of decay, disaster, and disintegration, has yet enough strength to form the basis for a new departure? The only answer possible is that the attraction of a great body of national ideas gathered men from every direction and many races to unite in a common effort. Although much violence, injustice, and destructive passion was involved, the result was a great and on the whole a durable and useful empire.

The government of the Ottoman Empire when at the height of its power cannot be understood from a description of its court, costumes, ceremonies, and officials, with a catalogue of their provinces and duties. A thorough comprehension of the main political ideas that constituted the life of the empire is essential. Since most of these ideas were old and tried, and were wrought in a thousand ways into the general scheme, a complete treatment would demand that they should be considered historically from the time of their adoption. Nor would it be sufficient to go back to the beginning of the house of Osman. The Turkish nucleus which gathered around him, and the Mohammedans and Christians from near and far who joined his rising fortunes were already in possession, in a fairly systematic form, of most of the ideas of the completed Ottoman government. The inquiry should be begun farther back, among Byzantine Greeks, Seljuk Turks, Mohammedans of Persia and Arabia, and Turks of Central Asia. Many of the ideas, indeed, can be traced yet farther, through Tartary to China and through Parthia and Rome to Babylon and Egypt.

These origins, however, cannot be considered here except in the briefest possible fashion. All that can be done is to outline the background of Ottoman history, the general character of the Ottoman Empire and its service to the world, the racial descent of the Ottoman Turks, and the main influences which affected their institutions and culture.

THE BACKGROUND OF OTTOMAN HISTORY

From early times the developing Chinese civilization in the valley of the Yellow River had to contend with intermittent attacks from the barbarians of the north and west. In the latter half of the third century B.C. China’s work of domestic consolidation and centralization reached completeness, and foreign conquest began. The policy was then initiated which has never since been departed from,—the subjugation of the outlying lands and the cultural assimilation of their inhabitants.[1] Following up with armies, governors, and garrisons the nomads who fled to the west, by the beginning of the second century A.D. China held vassal all the population of the steppe country from the Great Wall to the Caspian Sea; her frontiers marched with those of Parthia. Early in the third century she entered upon four hundred years of weakness, and her western possessions fell away; but she regained strength and restored her western dominion just in time to confront the rising Saracen flood. During three brilliant centuries, the seventh, eight, and ninth of our era, she held the nomads in fairly constant subjection, and presumably taught them many of her orderly, organized ways. It was probably in part by the strength of her discipline that in the succeeding half-millennium the descendants of these nomads, Turks and Mongols, wrought their will from the Sea of Japan to the Adriatic, over most of Asia, half of Europe, and a goodly portion of Africa.

From the eighth century Turks drifted southwestward in ever-increasing numbers out of Chinese territory into the declining Saracen Empire. Early in the eleventh century an army followed this course and set up the vast but short-lived empire of the Seljuk Turks. These broke the eastern frontier of Asia Minor, which had protected the Greeks and Romans for fourteen hundred years, and pushed on until they could see the domes of Constantinople. The eastward pressure of the crusading period kept them from European shores for two centuries, near the close of which the Mongols overran their disintegrated lands. A remnant, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, struggled on in Asia Minor until the close of the thirteenth century, when it fell into ten parts. The East Roman, or Byzantine Empire, had by that time also been thoroughly wrecked, and the Balkan Peninsula was divided among Frank, Italian, and Catalan, Greek, Serb, Albanian, Wallach, and Bulgarian.

The people of one of the ten fragments of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm took the name of Osmanlis from their chief Osman. Located on the border of the Greek and Turkish groups of principalities, they drew men and governmental ideas from both. The rapidity of their growth from so small a beginning, and under such apparently unfavorable circumstances, into a durable state is one of the marvellous things of history. In about two and a quarter centuries from the time of their independence they were able to attempt for the last time to unite the entire Mediterranean civilization into one empire. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Armenia, Asia Minor, Greece, the Balkan Peninsula, a large part of modern Austria-Hungary and of modern Russia, were theirs; they threatened Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, and Persia. They thus held all three of the earliest centers of Mediterranean civilization, the western half of the Old Persian Empire, and all the dominions of Rome except the northwestern one-third. Apart from Spain and the lands east of the Zagros Mountains, they ruled the Saracen Empire. With the exception of Italy (with Illyricum and the adjacent islands) and the short-lived Byzantine conquests in Spain, the empire of Justinian lay within their boundaries. The later Byzantine Empire became the heart of their dominions, and its two chief supports—the trade which passed through the Bosphorus and the products and men of Asia Minor—became their own principal supports. The inheritance of lands and of institutions by the Ottoman Turks from the two great medieval empires of the Levant, the Saracen and the East Roman, is by all odds the most pregnant fact of their existence. They were the immediate heirs of a part of the territory and of the whole of the culture of the Seljuk Turks. The scene of the “world’s debate” formed but an insignificant part of their dominions. They gathered into one net all the shoal of feudal, royal, and imperial powers which made the Levant of the thirteenth century as decentralized as the Holy Roman Empire or the Italy of the fifteenth century.

CHARACTER AND MISSION OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

This rapid survey leads to a number of significant observations. First, the Ottoman Turks of the sixteenth century ruled countries wholly within the sphere of the Mediterranean civilization. The only possible exception was the steppe lands north of the Black Sea; but these had been almost as much under the sway of Rome and Constantinople as they ever were under that of Stamboul. Even communication with Eastern and Southern Asia was well-nigh cut off. The road to China north of the Caspian Sea alone remained open, but after the break-up of the Mongol Empire it had become long and dangerous. The rival and hostile New Persian power firmly closed the southern land route to India and China; and even the sea-way from Egypt eastward was blockaded by the newly-arrived Portuguese. Thus the Ottoman Empire, except in remote origins, which, indeed, profoundly influenced it, grew and flourished within what is commonly considered the main field of history. Accordingly, it has a greater claim upon the Western world on the score of kinship than has hitherto generally been allowed.