Osmanlis

“ He was fighting for the possession of this country, for the wealth and the prestige that it would give him. He had no intention of destroying what he knew would be his to enjoy, nor did he desire to alienate the Serbian peasantry by unnecessary harshness. Here, as elsewhere, new Osmanlis rather than Ottoman subjects were the desiderata: they could be won only by kindness. Since the clemency of the Osmanlis in dealing with the vanquished after the battle is frankly recorded by the Serbians themselves, we cannot doubt that the wise and far-seeing provisions of the conqueror were carried out. ”

“ It seems to be a pretty generally accepted idea that the Osmanlis were a Turkish Moslem race, who invaded Asia Minor, and, having established themselves there, pushed on into Europe and overthrew the Byzantine Empire. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Osmanlis were masters of the whole Balkan peninsula before they had subjugated Asia Minor as far as Konia! ”

“ The Osmanlis faced fighting men who were fully their equals in courage, in resourcefulness, in strength, and in willingness to engage in a hand-to-hand struggle to death. The issue was long in doubt, and the victory costly. Balsa and his ally and guest, Ivanitch, son of krai Vukasin, were killed. [375] The Osmanlis gained one important result from this battle. Albanian renegades joined their army in great numbers. [376] From that day to this the Albanian element in the Ottoman army, especially among its officers, has been a source of strength which cannot be over-estimated. ”

“ No student can have any doubt whatever upon the position of Turkish women during the fourteenth century. As among all vigorous peoples, the women of the Osmanlis held a high place, and were never secluded. It was not until Murad II that even the sovereign had a harem. The Moslem conception of the inferiority of women was not prevalent among the Osmanlis until after the reign of Soleiman the Magnificent. Immediately it became prevalent, the race began its decline.
So universal did veiling become in the seventeenth century that it was adopted by Christian and Jewish women in Turkey as well. ”

“ The Osmanlis, or house of Osman, the founders of the present Turkish Empire, appear to have been a clan similar to the early Seljuks or the present Turkomans of Transcaspia, who migrated into Asia Minor from Khorasan and made the neighbourhood of Brusa their headquarters. Their conspicuous position in history is mainly due to the fact that they attained pre-eminence very late and in districts very near Europe. Except for the invasion of Timur they did not suffer from the attacks of other Turks and they were able to concentrate their strength on the conquest of the decrepit Byzantine Empire. ”

“ Many, if not most of the erroneous notions which have been obtained respecting the Osmanlis have had their origin, at least in the minds of the great majority of people, in the ludicrous conceptions which have long been current regarding the harem life of these much maligned people. ”

“ Calling the Osmanlis Turks, and regarding them as invaders upon the soil of Europe, is an historical error which has persisted so long that the Osmanlis themselves have fallen into it! They have always distinguished themselves from the Turks. This is proved by their own use of that word to describe a people as different from themselves as were the Greeks. ”

“ The widows of the fallen, and the daughters of Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians,{117} became the instruments of increasing the Ottoman race. In the hundred years from Murad I to Mohammed II, the Osmanlis became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, and Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis who, under Soleiman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. ”

“ If the European nations regarded the adherents of the Orthodox Church (the term Greek in its religious sense must be taken to include all the Balkan races) as ‘worse than enemies’, that is, than the Osmanlis, it is equally true that the Osmanlis found from 1350 to 1500 that the hatred of the Balkan races for the Latin Church was their most potent ally, not only in the actual conquest, but in reconciling the conquered to their fate. ”

“ What Constantinople means for the Osmanlis is implied in that name Roum by which the western dominions of the Turks have been known ever since the Seljuks won Asia Minor. Apart from the prestige of their own early conquests, the Osmanlis inherited, and in a measure retain in the Near East, the traditional prestige of the greatest empire which ever held it. They stand not only for their own past but also for whatever still lives of the prestige of Rome. Theirs is still the repute of the imperial people par excellence, chosen and called to rule. ”

“ In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.
But this indirect method of conversion as an alternative to slavery did not immediately increase the masculine element among the Osmanlis. In a city taken by assault the more virile portion of the male population was killed off, and those who remained were able to buy life and freedom. Male slaves were an embarrassment to the ever-moving armies of Murad. Ransom money was welcomed by the captors. ”

“ All the peoples submitted to the Empire are designated under the name “Osmanlis”, and they do not understand why they are called Turks by Europeans. As they attach to this word the idea of the most marked insult, no foreigner in the Empire ever allows himself to use it in speaking to them.’ [35] {30}
V
Nor were the Osmanlis, until the reign of Bayezid, one hundred years later, the strongest military and political factor in Asia Minor. The Turkish emirates of Sarukhan, of Kermian, and especially of Karaman, could match the Osmanlis in extent of territory and ability to defend it. ”

“ Suddenly we find Osman attacking his neighbours and capturing their castles. During the decade from 1290 to 1300 he extends his boundaries until he comes into contact{29} with the Byzantines. His four hundred warriors grow to four thousand. We begin to hear of a people called, not Turks, but Osmanlis, after a leader whose own name first appears at the same time as that of his people. [34] They are foes of Greeks and Tartars alike. They are definitely allied to Islam. They possess a missionary spirit and a desire to proselytize such as one always finds in new converts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is not by nature zealous or enthusiastic, nor is he by nature cruel. Docile, tractable, gentle, in a word, lovable—{75}this is the verdict of the traveller who has had an opportunity of knowing that portion of the Moslem population of the Ottoman Empire which is popularly called Turkish. Other influences of their religion than hatred for the Christian have prevented the Osmanlis from winning and keeping a place among the civilized peoples of the world. ”

“ In the exercise of their avocation as hamals, they are often intrusted with bags of money untold; they are generally the watchmen or guardians to the stores and mercantile houses of the Franks, and in any deficiency or robbery, their character and integrity are never questioned or suspected.
The Osmanlis possess the domestic virtues of kindness and affection in a remarkable degree; their love of offspring is very great, and their patient endurance of the whims and caprices of their women quite exemplary. ”

“ For the Osmanlis men and women are proverbially fond of display, they say “Sense belongs to Europe—wealth to India, beauty to Georgia—but show and display are the attributes of the Osmanlis alone.”
They therefore delight in all the appendages of luxury, and surround themselves with crowds of attendants. This Oriental propensity has even been sustained by the Prophet himself, who says, that “the very meanest in Paradise will have 80,000 servants,” &c. ”

“ Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unity was the first striking characteristic of the Ottoman army.{84}
The second characteristic was readiness. We have already seen how Andronicus III ‘gathered in haste’ the army which he tried to oppose to the Osmanlis. Lack of time for preparation is the excuse for many a Byzantine disaster. An early and competent traveller wrote that the Osmanlis knew beforehand just when the Christian armies were coming and where they could be met to the best advantage. For they were always on a war footing, and their tchaousches and spies knew how and where to lead. ”

“ Among these witnesses to the virtues of the Osmanlis are French, English, and American men whose competence is as incontrovertible as their authority is unimpeachable. It were easy to add to the number and among them we should find French, Italian, and German priests and bishops, Sisters of Charity and religieuses of the various teaching orders who have spent long years among the Osmanlis in all parts of the Ottoman Empire and their testimony would confirm that already introduced. ”

“ The religious prestige of the Ottoman power as the repository of caliphial authority and trustee for Islam in the Holy Land of Arabia, is an asset almost impossible to estimate. Would a death struggle of the Osmanlis in Europe rouse the Sunni world? Would the Moslems of India, Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, and Malaya take up arms for the Ottoman sultan as caliph? ”

“ He pointed out to Urosh most eloquently the paucity of numbers of the Osmanlis, their insecure position, and the danger that would overwhelm the Serbians if they waited until the Osmanlis were firmly grounded in Thrace. Urged by Pope Urban V, the princes of Wallachia and Bosnia, together with King Louis of Hungary, joined the Serbians in upper Macedonia. Under the guidance of the Greek refugee, they started on a swift{123} march to win back Adrianople. It was an expedition undertaken as a crusade. The allies mustered at least twenty thousand. ”

“ In a letter to Pope Urban, Petrarch spoke with approval of the policy of using the Ottoman menace to stamp out the{133} Eastern heresy. ‘The Osmanlis are merely enemies,’ he wrote, ‘but the schismatic Greeks are worse than enemies. The Osmanlis hate us less, for they fear us less. The Greeks, however, both fear and hate us with all their soul.’ [287] These words of Petrarch epitomize the feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches during his own day, and, if what one can see with his own eyes in Jerusalem and elsewhere is a fair example, up to the twentieth century. ”

“ The war over Tenedos had kept open the Straits, but it helped Murad in an inestimable degree to tighten the grip of the Osmanlis upon Thrace and Macedonia. The Italian republics thought no more of driving the Osmanlis out of Europe. From now on until they themselves see their possessions wrested from them and their commerce in the Levant ruined by the successors of Murad, the Venetians and Genoese are suitors for favours at the door of the tent of the Moslem conqueror. ”

“ When the Osmanlis captured Brusa and Nicaea, they found many Moslems who had been there for three generations. Simple-minded, tolerant of others, totally unconscious of the privileges as well as of the obligations of an organized society, the Turks of the earlier immigration neither opposed nor aided in the political changes which have so frequently been the lot of Asia Minor since their coming. ”

“ 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. ”