Ottoman

“ For it is not in the large cities of Turkey, where there is always such a heterogeneous population, that the Ottoman is found at his best but in the small towns and villages of the interior of the country and particularly in that portion of the Ottoman Empire which formerly constituted the emirates of Osman and Orkhan.
No people in the world, it is safe to say, have ever been more misunderstood or more misrepresented than the Osmanlis. For generations they have been regarded as a nation guilty of every crime and steeped in every vice. ”

“ 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 organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its creators, and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European blood that it became partly Europeanized in its inner tissues—sufficiently to partake, at any rate, in that faculty of indefinite organic growth which has so far revealed itself in European life. ”

“ The confining of the Ottoman Empire to its Asiatic possessions, with Constantinople as a bridgehead in Europe, was a solution regarded at Berlin during the whole winter, after and even before the capture of Adrianople, as eminently acceptable. The abandonment of her European provinces, which had become a serious burden on the Ottoman Treasury, would leave Turkey free to devote all her resources to exploiting her neglected domains in Anatolia and Syria, where her real wealth lay. The Crescent would shine with more dazzling radiance in the sky of Asia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ No troops ever more powerfully affected the imagination of friends and foes. Among the Turks they were always the leaders, the forlorn hope. Among Christians the terror of their name spread over Europe. In every war they gained new laurels, and from the moment when they stormed the walls of Constantinople they began to be, slowly but certainly, the sole strength of the Ottoman power. At first the absolute servants of the Sultan, before two centuries were over they became his masters. ”

“ While the transient dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a crafty vizier in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle of the Turkish nation. ”

“ But, fortunately for those who are able to read the signs of the times, there are well-grounded hopes for a change for the better—for a return to the position among nations which the Ottoman Empire occupied when its schools and scholars were as famed as were its achievements on land and sea—when the followers of Osman shall be as far in the van of civilization as they are now in the rear. ”

“ The Ottoman empire was not so called from Othman, the third khalif, but from Ottoman, the successful chief, who conquered a small part of the Grecian empire in Asia, and thus laid the foundation for the Turkish. ”

“ It is with Othman's son Orkhan that the Ottoman Empire really begins. He threw off his nominal allegiance to the Sultan [of Iconium] , though he still bore only the title of Emir. And in his time the Ottomans first made good their footing in Europe. But while his dominion was still only Asiatic, Orkhan began one institution which did more than anything else firmly to establish the Ottoman power. This was the institution of the tribute children. By the law of Mahomet ... the unbeliever is allowed to purchase life, property, and the exercise of his religion, by the payment of tribute. ”

“ Turkey and Egypt in particular have long been favourite themes; and indeed the Ottoman empire in every point of view, whether topographical, historical, ivadministrative, religious, moral, political, military, or commercial, offers an inexhaustible subject for investigation, and an endless excitement to curiosity. ”

“ The Ottoman dynasty which began with the Turkish nation and gave its name to it, that dynasty, always the object of veneration, and respected by revolt itself, has presented by its stability a new spectacle in the East. It has exhibited to the world a succession of great princes, who have in history almost all the same physiognomy, and resemble each other in their pride, their ambition and their military genius: which proves that all these barbarian heroes were formed by their national manners, and that among the [122] Turks, there is but one single road to greatness. ”

“ Turcophiles in Germany were enthusiastic over Ottoman participation in the Great War. The Turkish military contribution to a Teutonic victory might not be decisive, but neither would it be insignificant. And German coöperation in Ottoman military ventures would certainly strengthen German economic penetration in the Near East, even though Turkish arms might not drive Britain out of Egypt or Russia out of the Caucasus. “Over there in Turkey,” wrote Dr. Ernest Jäckh, “stretch Anatolia and Mesopotamia—Anatolia, the ‘land of sunrise,’ Mesopotamia, an ancient paradise. ”

“ There is no coronation in Turkey; instead the Sultans gird on the sword of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Dynasty, which is kept in the mosque of Ayoob, in Constantinople. When a Sultan is proclaimed, he goes to that mosque with great pomp, and all the members of the Sublime Porte, the civil officers, the generals, commanders, soldiers, patriarchs of different religions, and the Sheik-ul-Islam, the Mohammedan religious head, follow him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mohammed the Conqueror had established the Ottoman Empire in Europe by means of a well-trained, Koran-disciplined army, his successor Bajazet II increased and strengthened it. Great attention was paid to all matters of artillery and military engineering, in which the Turks of those days outshone all other nations, and which made the hastily levied undisciplined armies of the West, the bands of hired condottieri, or enthusiastic swarms of Christian knights, go under before the sword of Othman. The conquered provinces provided recruits for the corps of Janissaries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She valued that ottoman for his sake, and would not have suffered it to go into the sale had she possessed any place she could regard as her own where to put it. She needed no such article to remind her of the dear father—the thought of him would be forever present to her without the assistance of ottomans to refresh her memory. ”

“ Finally, but not least, there is the spacious outlook afforded by the political situation, of which Constantinople has long been the centre. The question of the continued existence of the Ottoman rule in Europe, if not also in Asia, has been a burning question for many generations, affecting both the destiny of the peoples subject to that rule and the interests and relations of all the Great Powers of Europe. ”

“ One does not want to detract from the genius of the early Ottoman sovereigns and from the reputation for superb fighting ability so honestly won by the Ottoman armies. But it must not be forgotten that each separate race in the Balkans preferred the rule of the Osmanlis to that of their neighbours, and that the one point in which the Balkan races were of the same mind was that Ottoman domination was preferable to that of the Hungarians and the Italians. ”

“ The rapid disappearance of his own empire in a hundred years, the creation out of the Ottoman Empire of new states like Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and the wonderful improvement which had followed the destruction of the Turkish yoke in these benighted lands, may have increased the Ottoman hatred for the unbeliever, but at least they had a certain influence in opening his eyes to his importance. Many Turks also now received their education in European universities ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The population of the Ottoman Empire is of a most heterogeneous character, embracing Turks, Greeks, Slavs, Albanians, Armenians, Syrians, Arabs, Tartars, &c. The government is a pure despotism, and the Sultan is regarded as the Caliph or head of Islam; military service is compulsory, and the army on a war footing numbers not less than 750,000, but the navy is small ”

“ Had he started to persecute Christians, the Greek Church would have taken a new lease of life, and Osman could not have gained the converts who made possible the Ottoman race.
Attila, Djenghiz Khan, Timur, the greatest conquerors of the stock from which Osman came, utilized a race already made. They were leaders of a united people. In spite of their dazzling exploits, they were mere raiders, and their empires were the territories of an unassimilated path of conquest. ”

“ Turkey. Or the Ottoman empire, called by the Turks Osmanli Vilayeti, includes large portions of the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and consists of Turkey Proper, which is under the direct rule of the sultan, and of numerous dependent and tributary states, governed by their own princes. The existing Turkish empire dates only from the end of the 13th century, when it was founded by Osman, or Othman, a Turk of noble family, who had been driven westward from Khorasan by the invasion of Genghis Khan. Osman first invaded the Greek territory of Nicomedia on July 27, 1299 ”

“ In the Turkish days, he was the spiritual, and in many respects the political, head, not only of the Greek subjects of the Sultan, but of all the Orthodox Christians within his dominions, Bulgarians, Serbs [659] , Albanians, and Armenians of the Orthodox rite, who, as well as Greeks, were all collectively described as Romaîoi—for in those days religion and not race was the mark by which Ottoman subjects were distinguished. ”

“ The peoples of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire are a congeries of differing races, creeds, sects, and social systems, with no common bond except language. The physical character of their land compels a good third of them to be nomadic, predatory barbarians, feared by the other two-thirds. The settled folk are divided into Moslem and Christian (not to mention a large Jewish element) , the cleavage being more abrupt than in western Turkey and the tradition and actual spirit of mutual enmity more separative. Further, each of those main creed-divisions is subdivided. ”