Osmanli

“ The government and the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire are negatively rather than positively evil. There is nothing inherently bad about the Osmanli. He is inert, and has thus failed to reach the standards set by the progress of civilization. He lacks ideals, and has thus shocked the enlightened conscience of the modern world. By the law of the survival of the fittest, he has been cast aside.
But when we compare the early Osmanlis with the Byzantines and with the other elements in the Balkan peninsula, it is the Osmanlis who must be pronounced the fittest. ”

“ It is no wonder that the example set by many officers of the Sultan’s army had discouraged the troops, who, seeing everything going against them, starving, diseased, turned their weary eyes homeward to the East, to Asia, the Turk’s real home, and dragged their tired, wounded limbs over the incredibly bad roads till the soaring minarets and their rivals the cypresses, the domes of mosques built to commemorate the conquests of former warrior Osmanli, gladdened their sight. ”

“ However much we may lament the bigotry, ignorance, and sensuality of the Osmanli, he is only what his creed, conquests, and other unfortunate conditions make him. Of the hardy and simple families of the world, as opposed to the effeminate and subtle, he belongs to the most typical. ”

“ Every thing is referred to the Great First Cause. There is none of that haughty self-dependence, that overweening morgue, so strongly marked in Europeans. Among men, the Osmanli considers himself the first, but only among men; when he puts off his slippers at the door of the mosque, he carries no pomp with him into the presence of his God. ”

“ But a European, long resident in the latter country, who has groaned under Turkish administration, where it has always been most oppressive, bore witness that the rule of the native Imam only served to replace oppressive government by oppressive anarchy.
As for the Osmanli’s courage as a fighting man, that has often been exemplified, and never better than in the Gallipoli peninsula. It is admitted. The European and Anatolian Osmanlis yield little one to the other in this virtue; but the palm, if awarded at all, must be given to the levies from northern and central Asia Minor. ”

“ It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire. [100]
Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have been classed as raiders like the devastating [113] hordes of Timur and Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists and empire builders. ”

“ To persons of this class, every social change offers at least the prospect of advantage; but, throughout the Ottoman empire, nearly every man is the owner of a plot of land, and is enabled to trim his own vine, and to sit under the shadow of his own fig-tree—he has an interest in the soil—and thus, although popular commotions are of frequent occurrence, they merely agitate, without exasperating the feelings of the people.
The Osmanli is, moreover, mentally, as well as physically, indolent—he is an enemy to all unnecessary exertion ”

“ Scythian raid or a Tartar gallop across it? The imperial Osmanli sits and smokes long days in his pavilion, without any thought at all of his broad domain except to despise and to plunder and impoverish its cultivators; and is his title made better thereby than the Turcoman's, to be the heir of Alexander and Seleucus, of the Ptolemies and Massinissa, of Constantine and Justinian? What claim does it give him upon Europe, Asia, and Africa, upon Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, that he has frustrated the munificence of nature and demolished the works of man? ”

“ The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but you might search long before you found one among its inhabitants. These Osmanlis are a governing class, indigenous only in Constantinople and a few neighbouring towns, but planted here and there, as officers and officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of Christendom, and crossed with the blood of slave-women from all the world. They are hardly a race. ”

“ The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support from the population of his empire’s heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been able to exhaust.
In the second place the Osmanli ‘Turks’, however fallen away from the virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either ‘the will to power’ or their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to rule as soldiers. ”

“ But they were not the Turks of Osman. Until the students of the later Byzantine Empire, and of the Italian commercial cities in their relations with the Levant, make a clear distinction between Turk and Osmanli, there will always be confusion upon this point. Ertogrul had about four hundred fighting men. [32] There is no reason to believe that Osman had more. His relations with his neighbours were those of perfect amity. [33] There is no question of believer and unbeliever. ”

“ Let not individual bad faith, however, be too harshly blamed in a people who have suffered so severely as the Turks from the same vice, in their best and dearest interests; on the part, not only of individuals, but of nations—of those civilized and enlightened nations, to which they looked alike for precept and example; and which they have found wanting.
Naturally haughty and self-centered, the Osmanli placed his honour and his liberty in the hands of his European allies. They were pledged to preserve both—and it was not until the Banner of the Crescent was trailing in the dust ”

“ The founder of the Mevlevi dancing dervishes, the poet Mahommed Jelal-ed-Din (Rumi) , in 1307, though tempted to assume the inheritance along with the empire of the Seljuk sultan Ala ed-dīn Kaikobad III., who died without heirs, preferred to pass on the power to Osman, son of Ertogrul, and with his own hands invested Osman and girt him with the sword: this investiture was the legitimate beginning of the Osmanli authority. ”

“ In the earliest days, when there was neither racial nor religious antipathy and Christian and Moslem lived in close social intercourse, this law was a powerful proselytizing agency. It furnished a temptation to a change of faith which, whenever it arose, was far stronger than the temptation of lands, of power, of economic independence, or of civil equality.
The moment one professed Islam he became an Osmanli. Religion has always been the test of nationality in the Ottoman Empire. [143] The Osmanlis increased from the thousands to the millions, in Macedonia, in Thrace, and in Asia Minor. ”

“ But at the first glance you saw that the carriage was not that of a Turk, for the painted hoops were plainly covered by a white awning, the symbol of the raïah. The haughty Osmanli has reserved to himself the privilege of seating his wives beneath draperies of crimson, blue, or purple, fringed with gold; while the Armenian, the Greek, and the Jew, when making use of this popular conveyance, are obliged to content themselves with a simple awning of white linen. Here galloped a reckless Greek, urging his good hack to the top of its speed ”

“ They owed their greatness mainly to a long line of able sultans, who gradually absorbed the neighbouring Turkish tribes and used this consolidated strength for ambitious conquests both to east and west. In 1453 the Osmanli extinguished the old Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople, and within a century thereafter they had conquered the Moslem East from Persia to Morocco, had subjugated the whole Balkan Peninsula, and had advanced through Hungary to the walls of Vienna. Unlike their Mongol cousins, the Ottoman Turks built up a durable empire. ”

“ He is quite convinced that he is born to rule, and the foreign nations which surround him to obey,—just in the same way as the Osmanli thinks with regard to Bulgarians, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabians. His love for independence is boundless, and is also the chief cause why he cannot long remain under the chieftain whom he loves in many respects ”

“ For centuries before the Osmanli Turks made their appearance in Asia Minor, there had come from out of the misty East numerous bodies of Turks, pushing westwards, and spreading over the Euphrates valley and over Persia, in nomadic or military colonisations, and it is not until the thirteenth century that we find the Osmanli Turks, who give their name to that congregation of races known as the Ottoman Empire, established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor. ”

“ Osmanli and Moslem were synonymous terms, just as to-day in the Balkan peninsula, where the Ottoman Empire was really founded, Turk and Moslem are synonymous terms. When once this is understood, the student and traveller is freed from his preconceived notion that the ‘Turks’, as that expression is to-day understood in Turkey, are an Asiatic race, who have held the country as conquering invaders. ”

“ In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty the Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong unexhausted elements, especially in Anatolia. There are few more vigorous and enduring peoples than the peasants of the central plateau of Asia Minor, north, east, and south. With this rock of defence to stand upon, the sultan could draw also on the strength of other more distant races, less firmly attached to himself, but not less vigorous, such, for example, as the Albanians of his European mountains and the Kurds of his Asiatic. ”

“ The decision of Murad was accepted by his successors. Even after the capture of Constantinople, many an Ottoman sultan felt more at home in Adrianople than in the imperial city. For more than a century the Osmanlis directed their energies almost exclusively to European conquests. Whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. ”

“ The free and equal Osmanlis were all to take their cue from men of the Byzantine sort which the European provinces, and especially the city of Constantinople, breed. After the revolution, nothing in Turkey struck one so much as the apparition on the top of things everywhere of a type of Osmanli who has the characteristic qualities of the Levantine Greek. Young officers, controlling their elders, only needed a change of uniform to pass in an Athenian crowd. Spare and dapper officials, presiding in seats of authority over Kurds and Arabs, reminded one of Greek journalists. ”

“ Individuals have been cited as examples of a body, with which they probably possessed not210 one common feature, save that of country; and the vices that were seared into the spirit of one degenerate Osmanli have, by the heedless chroniclers who may have suffered from his delinquencies, been branded on the brow of a whole nation ”

“ One is compelled to dissent from the consensus of opinion of European historians on the organization of the janissaries. Their scathing criticisms are best summed up in the words of a French historian: ‘It is the most fearful tribute of human flesh that has ever been levied by victors upon the vanquished.... It justifies the execration of which the Osmanlis have been the object on the part of Europeans during centuries. ”

“ Take them for all in all, there pro199bably exist no people upon earth more worthy of national prosperity than the great mass of the Turkish population; nor better qualified, alike by nature and by social feeling, to earn it for themselves.
The Osmanli is unostentatiously religious. He makes the great principles of his belief the rule of his conduct, and refers every thing to a higher power than that of man. ”

“ Give them a more becoming head-dress, and their costume is surpassingly graceful; but their advantages are all external; their dreams are all of piastres; they have no soul. If you talk to them of their subjection to the Osmanli, what do they reply? “All that you say may be very true, but it does not concern me—my affairs are in a most prosperous condition.”
It is impossible to make them sensible of their own social position ”

“ The uninterrupted chain of thirty years of Ottoman victories had been broken. The slavery and horror of military service with the Osmanlis, price of their vassalage, so vividly depicted by the survivors of the Karamanian campaign, had made the Slavs desperate. This victory, following closely upon the moral revolt against the Osmanlis, gave them hope.{170} The South Slavs are like children in the extremes of their emotions. Tears to laughter—laughter to tears: easily despairing, as easily hopeful, and from as little cause. ”

“ In the south-east of Europe it seems certain that the Turk will sooner or later die out or cross back into Asia. His failure to establish himself permanently is incidental evidence how hard it is to change the population of a country. The Osmanli made life almost unendurable to the subject people for centuries, but though he depopulated the country, and paralysed its progress, he stopped short of extermination. The inevitable result has been that the industrial races have increased, while the military race has declined ”