Ottomar

“ The losses which the Ottoman power has undergone at the hands of its independent neighbours, Russia, Montenegro, and Austria or Hungary, must be distinguished from the liberation of certain lands from Turkish rule to form new or revived European states. ”

“ They exhibit the empire of the Ottomans as once occupying a proud station among the greater powers—as forming a boundary and preserving a balance between the East and West—as a firm check on Muscovite ambition—and as, from her consequence, possessing great weight in the councils of nations; and it is apparent that she cannot fall without important political consequences. ”

“ Turkey is already a province of Germany! William II and his Ambassador are the rulers there and govern the country as sovereigns. The flood-gate of German emigration, secretly unlocked, will soon be thrown wide open; 200,000 Germans will be able to make their way into the Ottoman Empire every year. Before long their numbers will tell, they will assert their rights, and the Slav provinces in the Balkans and in Austria will find themselves out off by the flood. ”

“ Constantinople had been the tutor and polisher of the Turks. So long as the Ottomans could draw science, learning, philosophy, art, and tolerance from a living fountain of civilization in the heart of their dominions, so long had the Ottomans not only brute force, but intellectual power. So long as the Ottoman Empire had in Constantinople a free port, a market, a centre of world finance, a pool of gold, an exchange, so long did the Ottomans never lack for money and financial support. ”

“ The story of the early Ottomans is one of wasteful and inexorable conquest, unrelieved by any touches of humanity, or any impulses towards a higher civilization. To the ferocious and impetuous pride of the barbarian they added an almost inconceivable wariness and patience ”

“ In the east of Europe, the Ottomans—Asiatics from Turkestan and other countries—maintained an incessant and savage warfare against the subjects of the Emperor of Germany.
There was but one peaceful spot in all Christendom, and that the “right little, tight little island” of our forefathers. ”

“ Beyond his Teutonic kingdom the kings of the barbarous north and east paid Otto an increasing obedience. The marauding heathens of an earlier generation were now becoming settled cultivators of the soil, Christian and civilised. Their dukes looked up to Otto as an exemplar of the policy which they themselves aspired to realise. The dukes of Poland and Bohemia performed homage to Otto as Emperor. Ambassadors from distant lands, France, Denmark, Hungary, Russia, and Bulgaria, flocked around his throne. He intervened with powerful effect in the West Frankish kingdom. ”

“ And though such part of the native populations as is not of use to Germany may be starving, Turkey’s value as a military, an industrial, and an economic asset is vastly greater to-day than it ever has been, for Germany has set the Ottoman house in order since it is an annexe in the plans of her own world-wide palace, and Anatolian soldiers are a wheel in the great German war-machine, which shall Juggernaut its way over the entire globe. ”

“ Seaman's grin was almost sardonic.
"Austria," he said, "must already feel her doom creeping upon her. There is no room in middle Europe for two empires, and the House of Hapsburg must fall before the House of Hohenzollern. Austria, body and soul, must become part of the German Empire. Then further down, mark you. Roumania must become a vassal state or be conquered. Bulgaria is already ours. Turkey, with Constantinople, is pledged. Greece will either join us or be wiped out. ”

“ Their Majesties the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Emperor of the French, the Emperor of all the Russias, the King of Sardinia, and the Emperor of the Ottomans, animated by the desire of putting an end to the calamities of war, and wishing to prevent the return of the complications which occasioned it, resolve to come to an understanding with His Majesty the Emperor of Austria as to the bases on which peace might be re-established and consolidated, by securing, through effectual and reciprocal guarantees, the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. ”

“ We here turn aside for a brief hour from the stream of historical narrative to consider some of the results of Ottoman misrule which has for more than four centuries controlled an empire in Eastern Europe almost as large as France, in one of the most delightful and beautifully varied regions on the continent and which yet holds its peoples in the relentless grip of the Dark Ages. ”

“ In the perpetual struggle between the herdsmen and the tillers of the soil which has been waged from remote ages on the continents of Europe and Asia, the advance of the Ottomans was a decisive victory for the children of the steppes. ”

“ The history of the Ottoman Empire makes the most exciting fairy tale seem colorless. Perhaps you do not know that, when Henry the Eighth of England and Francis the First of France were forming a mutual-admiration society of their two kingdoms on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, there was another king, as great as either of them, in the southeast of Europe, carving great pieces out of other countries for his empire. ”

“ This resulted in the establishment of various Turkish dynasties in that country. At the close of the thirteenth century the paramount power over these was exercised by Osman (or Othman, whence the name Ottoman) , who seized all that remained of the ancient Roman world in Asia, and thus practically founded the Ottoman Empire. In the middle of the fourteenth century the way was opened for the Ottomans to advance into Europe. They were invited by one of the rival factions at Constantinople to undertake their cause. ”

“ And those tottering Ottomans, whose existence in Europe is already tolerated with too much indulgence, and who must be aware, notwithstanding the high opinion they entertain of their own importance, how much they are at the mercy of Christian 197powers, would they have ventured to combat any decisions of the congress which deprived them of a comparatively small extent of territory to enable them to preserve the remainder of their possessions in Europe? ”

“ From the west of Europe to the east, this is found to be true, and the farther east one goes the more mixed do the states become. Austria is the most mixed of all the states. There is no Austrian language, but there are nine languages, and six smaller nations or remnants of nations. In all of Germany there are eight nationalities besides the Germans, who have been independent, and who have their own literature. Turkey is an anomaly, a combination of various nations overthrown and kept down. ”

“ The hesitating and fearful Ottoman, feeling his way cautiously amid the mazes of European diplomacy, and seeking opportunities to find an advantage for himself in the divided counsels of the European powers, gave place to an upstanding, almost dashing figure, proud and assertive, determined to live his own life and absolutely contemptuous of his Christian foes. ”

“ Striving to the utmost to discover some principle, some object, or even some formula which might expand the purely defensive basis accepted by Austria and Prussia into a common policy of reconstructive action, the Western Powers could obtain nothing more definite from the Conference at Vienna than the following shadowy engagement:-"The Four Governments engage to endeavour in common to discover the guarantees most likely to attach the existence of the Ottoman Empire to the general equilibrium of Europe. ”

“ Meanwhile the ambition of Catherine of Russia, and the war with Turkey by which the empire of the tsars was advanced to the Black Sea and threatened to establish itself south of the Danube, were productive of consequences of enormous importance to Austria in the East. Russian Russia, Austria and the Ottoman Empire.control of the Danube was a far more serious menace to Austria than the neighbourhood of the decadent Ottoman power; and for a while the policy of Austria towards the Porte underwent a change that foreshadowed her attitude towards the Eastern Question in the 19th century. ”

“ France is cutting her way up with the purse instead of the sword. The great Triad might alter the map of Europe. 'The sons of Hermann' would absorb Belgium and Holland; the Muscovite swallow Constantinople with its neighbouring appendages, and Austria convey ('the wise call it') the remainder of Turkey's Slavonic provinces. But they will do nothing of the kind. Germany has proved herself the natural guardian of the Eastern frontier of Europe. ”

“ With him expired the dynasty of the Saxon Emperors, less pitifully, however, than either the Merovingian or Carolingian line.
When Otto the Great, towards the close of his reign, neglected Germany and occupied himself with establishing his dominion in Italy, he prepared the way for the rapid decline of the Imperial power at home, in the hands of his successors. The reigning Dukes, Counts, and even the petty feudal lords, no longer watched and held subordinate, soon became practically independent: except in Friesland, Saxony and the Alps, the people had no voice in political matters ”

“ Part of Thrace, Chalkidikê, part of Thessaly, a few scattered points in Asia, are left to the Empire; in Peloponnêsos alone is it an advancing power; everywhere else its frontiers have fallen back. The Servian Tzar rules from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth. The Ottoman Emir has left but a few fragments to the Empire in Asia, and has already fixed his grasp on Europe. ♦1400.♦ Before the century is ended, neither Constantinople, nor Servia, nor any other Christian power, is dominant in the south-eastern peninsula. The Ottoman rules in their stead. ”

“ Otto I. gave his own brother, the Archbishop of Köln, the duchy of Lorraine and made him Count of Brandenburg and Magdeburg. Otto III. and Henry III. also made many such grants to churchmen. These higher clergy were married in many cases, or lived with mistresses, and had families. [421] After the time of Otto I. they began to counteract the power of the nobles, hence they were made more and more dependent upon kings, who claimed the right to appoint them, who invested them with their power, and to whom they swore allegiance. ”

“ Russia, apart from her desire to protect the Orthodox nationalities subject to the Ottoman power, aimed at owning or controlling the straits by which alone she could find an outlet to the Mediterranean and the ocean beyond. Austria, once the champion of Europe against the Turk, saw in the Russian advance on the Danube a greater peril than any to be feared from the moribund Ottoman power, and made the maintenance of the integrity of Turkey a prime object of her policy. ”

“ In the middle of the tenth century the northern and eastern boundaries of Germany were as yet very ill defined. The Slavic peoples across the Elbe, many of whom were still pagans, were engaged in continual attacks upon the borders of Saxony. Otto I did more than fight these tribes; he established dioceses, such as Brandenburg, Havelberg, etc., in a district which is now the political center of the German empire, and greatly forwarded the Christianizing and colonization of the tract between the Elbe and the Oder. ”

“ The Ottoman empire, in its exact discipline, in its terrible concentration of purpose, in its contempt for all arts and sciences, and all human occupation save the trade of war and the pursuit of military dominion, offered a strong contrast to the distracted condition of the holy Roman empire, where an intellectual and industrious people, distracted by half a century of religious controversy and groaning under one of the most elaborately perverse of all the political systems ever invented by man, seemed to offer itself an easy prey to any conqueror. ”

“ While the sultan's cannon were vainly bombarding its walls, Europe was gathering around Vienna in defence. From every side troops hurried to the salvation of Austria from the Turks. Italy, the Netherlands, Bohemia. Poland, Germany, sent their quotas, till an army of one hundred and thirty thousand men were gathered around Vienna, thirty thousand of them being cavalry. ”

“ It was the descendants of those Persianized Seljūḳs whom the early Ottomans found ruling in Asia Minor on their arrival there. What had happened to the Seljūḳs two centuries before happened to the Ottomans now: the less civilized race adopted the culture of the more civilized; and, as the Seljūḳ Empire fell to pieces and the Ottoman came gradually to occupy its place, the sons of men who had called themselves Seljūḳs began thenceforth to look upon themselves as Ottomans. ”

“ This is the special characteristic of the Ottoman power. Asiatic in everything else, it is geographically European; most of its Asiatic and all its African dominion was won from an European centre. ♦Break-up and reunion of the Ottoman power.♦ Already a power in Europe, but not yet in possession of the Imperial city, the new Ottoman power was for a moment utterly broken in pieces by the second flood of Mongol invasion. That the shattered dominion came together again is an event without a parallel in Eastern history. ”

“ The Ottoman Empire is made up of Turkey in Europe—the strip of territory stretching across from the Black Sea to the Adriatic—Turkey in Asia, which includes Arabia, Syria, and Palestine, and provinces in the isles of Samos and Cyprus are also under the sultan’s rule. ”

“ Whilst the only defence of Europe consisted in feudal troops which were assembled at certain periods, and could not be held beneath their banners for any length of time together, the Ottomans were the only people who had a regular army always under arms. Their warriors, always animated by one same spirit, had moreover the advantage of discipline over the insubordinate chivalry of the Franks, who were constantly agitated by discord, and were put in action by a thousand different passions. ”