The Balkans Part 15

Had the immediate successors of Mohammed been content--or, rather, had they been able--to remain within his boundaries, they would have robbed Ottoman history of one century of sinister brilliance, but might have postponed for many centuries the subsequent sordid decay; for the seeds of this were undoubtedly sown by the three great sultans who followed the taker of Constantinople. Their ambitions or their necessities led to a great increase of the professional army which would entail many evils in time to come. Among these were praetorianism in the capital and the great provincial towns; subjection of land and peasantry to military seigneurs, who gradually detached themselves from the central control; wars undertaken abroad for no better reason than the employment of soldiery feared at home; consequent expansion of the territorial empire beyond the administrative capacity of the central government; development of the 'tribute-children' system of recruiting into a scourge of the _rayas_ and a continual offence to neighbouring states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service: lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems. To sum the matter up in other words: the omnipotence and indiscipline of the Janissaries; the contumacy of 'Dere Beys' ('Lords of the Valleys,' who maintained a feudal independence) and of provincial governors; the concentration of the official mind on things military and religious, to the exclusion of other interests; the degradation and embitterment of the Christian elements in the empire; the perpetual financial embarra.s.sment of the government with its inevitable consequence of oppression and neglect of the governed; and the constant provocation in Christendom of a hostility which was always latent and recurrently active-- all these evils, which combined to push the empire nearer and nearer to ruin from the seventeenth century onwards, can be traced to the brilliant epoch of Osmanli history a.s.sociated with the names of Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent.

At the same time Fate, rather than any sultan, must be blamed. It was impossible to forgo some further extension of the empire, and very difficult to arrest extension at any satisfactory static point. For one thing, as has been pointed out already, there were important territories in the proper Byzantine sphere still unredeemed at the death of Mohammed.

Rhodes, Krete, and Cyprus, whose possession carried with it something like superior control of the Levantine trade, were in Latin hands. Austrian as well as Venetian occupation of the best harbours was virtually closing the Adriatic to the masters of the Balkans. Nor could the inner lands of the Peninsula be quite securely held while the great fortress of Belgrade, with the pa.s.sage of the Danube, remained in Hungarian keeping, Furthermore, the Black Sea, which all masters of the Bosphorus have desired to make a Byzantine lake, was in dispute with the Wallachs and the Poles; and, in the reign of Mohammed's successor, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand came up above its northern horizon--the harbinger of the Muscovite.

As for the Asiatic part of the Byzantine sphere, there was only one little corner in the south-east to be rounded off to bring all the Anatolian peninsula under the Osmanli. But that corner, the Cilician plain, promised trouble, since it was held by another Islamic power, that of the Egyptian Mamelukes, which, claiming to be at least equal to the Osmanli, possessed vitality much below its pretensions. The temptation to poach on it was strong, and any lord of Constantinople who once gave way to this, would find himself led on to a.s.sume control of all coasts of the easternmost Levant, and then to push into inland Asia in quest of a scientific frontier at their back--perilous and costly enterprise which Rome had essayed again and again and had to renounce in the end. Bayezid II took the first step by summoning the Mameluke to evacuate certain forts near Tarsus, and expelling his garrisons _vi et armis_. Cilicia pa.s.sed to the Osmanli; but for the moment he pushed no farther. Bayezid, who was under the obligation always to lead his army in person, could make but one campaign at a time; and a need in Europe was the more pressing. In quitting Cilicia, however, he left open a new question in Ottoman politics--the Asiatic continental question--and indicated to his successor a line of least resistance on which to advance. Nor would this be his only dangerous legacy. The prolonged and repeated raids into Adriatic lands, as far north as Carniola and Carinthia, with which the rest of Bayezid's reign was occupied, brought Ottoman militarism at last to a point, whose eventual attainment might have been foreseen any time in the past century-- the point at which, strong in the possession of a new arm, artillery, it would a.s.sume control of the state.

Bayezid's seed was harvested by Selim. First in a long series of praetorian creatures which would end only with the destroyer of the praetorians themselves three centuries later, he owed his elevation to a Janissary revolt, and all the eight b.l.o.o.d.y years of his reign were to be punctuated by Janissary tumults. To keep his creators in any sort of order and contentment he had no choice but to make war from his first year to his last. When he died, in 1520, the Ottoman Empire had been swelled to almost as wide limits in Asia and Africa as it has ever attained since his day. Syria, Armenia, great part of Kurdistan, northern Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, and last, but not least, Egypt, were forced to acknowledge Osmanli suzerainty, and for the first time an Osmanli sultan had proclaimed himself caliph. True that neither by his birth nor by the manner of his appointment did Selim satisfy the orthodox caliphial tradition; but, besides his acquisition of certain venerated relics of the Prophet, such as the _Sanjak i-sherif_ or holy standard, and besides a yet more important acquisition--the control of the holy cities of the faith-- he could base a claim on the unquestioned fact that the office was vacant, and the equally certain fact that he was the most powerful Moslem prince in the world. Purists might deny him if they dared: the vulgar Sunni mind was impressed and disposed to accept. The main importance, however, of Selim's a.s.sumption of the caliphate was that it consecrated Osmanli militarism to a religious end--to the original programme of Islam. This was a new thing, fraught with dire possibilities from that day forward. It marked the supersession of the Byzantine or European ideal by the Asiatic in Osmanli policy, and introduced a phase of Ottoman history which has endured to our own time.

The inevitable process was continued in the next reign. Almost all the military glories of Suleiman--known to contemporary Europe as 'the Magnificent' and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli sultans-- made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire. His earliest operations indeed, the captures of Rhodes from the Knights and of Belgrade and [)S]abac from the Hungarians, expressed a legitimate Byzantine policy; and the siege of Malta, one of his latest ventures, might also be defended as a measure taken in the true interests of Byzantine commerce. But the most brilliant and momentous of his achievements bred evils for which military prestige and the material profits to be gained from the oppression of an irreconcilable population were inadequate compensation. This was the conquest of Hungary. It would result in Buda and its kingdom remaining Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and in the princ.i.p.alities of Wallachia and Moldavia abiding under the Ottoman shadow even longer, and pa.s.sing for all time out of the central European into the Balkan sphere; but also it would result in the Osmanli power finding itself on a weak frontier face to face at last with a really strong Christian race, the Germanic, before which, since it could not advance, it would have ultimately to withdraw; and in the rousing of Europe to a sense of its common danger from Moslem activity. Suleiman's failure to take Vienna more than made good the panic which had followed on his victory at Mohacs. It was felt that the Moslem, now that he had failed against the bulwark of central Europe, was to go no farther, and that the hour of revenge was near.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Ottoman Empire (Except the Arabian and African provinces)]

It was nearer than perhaps was expected. Ottoman capacity to administer the overgrown empire in Europe and Asia was strained already almost to breaking-point, and it was in recognition of this fact that Suleiman made the great effort to reorganize his imperial system, which has earned him his honourable t.i.tle of _El Kanun_, the Regulator. But if he could reset and cleanse the wheels of the administrative machine, he could not increase its capacity. New blood was beginning to fail for the governing cla.s.s just as the demands on it became greater. No longer could it be manned exclusively from the Christian born. Two centuries of recruiting in the Balkans and West Asia had sapped their resources. Even the Janissaries were not now all 'tribute-children'. Their own sons, free men Moslem born, began to be admitted to the ranks. This change was a vital infringement of the old principle of Osmanli rule, that all the higher administrative and military functions should be vested in slaves of the imperial household, directly dependent on the sultan himself; and once breached, this principle could not but give way more and more. The descendants of imperial slaves, free-born Moslems, but barred from the glory and profits of their fathers' function, had gradually become a very numerous cla.s.s of country gentlemen distributed over all parts of the empire, and a very malcontent one. Though it was still subservient, its dissatisfaction at exclusion from the central administration was soon to show itself partly in a.s.saults on the time-honoured system, partly in a.s.sumption of local jurisdiction, which would develop into provincial independence.

The overgrowth of his empire further compelled Suleiman to divide the standing army, in order that more than one imperial force might take the field at a time. Unable to lead all his armies in person, he elected, in the latter part of his reign, to lead none, and for the first time left the Janissaries to march without a sultan to war. Remaining himself at the centre, he initiated a fashion which would encourage Osmanli sultans to lapse into half-hidden beings, whom their subjects would gradually invest with religious character. Under these conditions the ruler, the governing cla.s.s (its power grew with this devolution), the dominant population of the state, and the state itself all grew more fanatically Moslem.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Ahmed I being on the throne, the Ottoman Empire embraced the widest territorial area which it was ever to cover at any one moment. In what may be called the proper Byzantine field, Cyprus had been recovered and Krete alone stood out.

Outside that field, Hungary on the north and Yemen (since Selim's conquest in 1516) on the south were the frontier provinces, and the Ottoman flag had been carried not only to the Persian Gulf but also far upon the Iranian plateau, in the long wars of Murad III, which culminated in 1588 with the occupation of Tabriz and half Azerbaijan.

4

_Shrinkage and Retreat_

The fringes of this vast empire, however, none too surely held, were already involving it in insoluble difficulties and imminent dangers. On the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish military fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the system which had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere. On the other hand, in Europe, as we have seen, the empire had a very unsatisfactory frontier, beyond which a strong people not only set limits to further progress but was prepared to dispute the ground already gained. In a treaty signed at Sitvatorok, in 1606, the Osmanli sultan was forced to acknowledge definitely the absolute and equal sovereignty of his northern neighbour, Austria; and although, less than a century later, Vienna would be attacked once more, there was never again to be serious prospect of an extension of the empire in the direction of central Europe.

Moreover, however appearances might be maintained on the frontiers, the heart of the empire had begun patently to fail. The history of the next two centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, is one long record of praetorian tumults at home; and ever more rarely will these be compensated by military successes abroad. The first of these centuries had not half elapsed ere the Janissaries had taken the lives of two sultans, and brought the Grand Vizierate to such a perilous pa.s.s that no ordinary holder of it, unless backed by some very powerful Albanian or other tribal influence, could hope to save his credit or even his life. During this period indeed no Osmanli of the older stocks ever exercised real control of affairs. It was only among the more recently a.s.similated elements, such as the Albanian, the Slavonic, or the Greek, that men of the requisite character and vigour could be found. The rally which marked the latter half of the seventeenth century was entirely the work of Albanians or of other generals and admirals, none of whom had had a Moslem grandfather.

Marked by the last Osmanli conquest made at the expense of Europe--that of Krete; by the definite subjugation of Wallachia; by the second siege of Vienna; by the recovery of the Morea from Venice; and finally by an honourable arrangement with Austria about the Danube frontier--it is all to be credited to the Kuprili 'dynasty' of Albanian viziers, which conspicuously outshone the contemporary sovereigns of the dynasty of Osman, the best of them, Mohammed IV, not excepted. It was, however, no more than a rally; for greater danger already threatened from another quarter. Agreement had not been reached with Austria at Carlowitz, in 1699, before a new and baleful planet swam into the Osmanli sky.

It was, this time, no central European power, to which, at the worst, all that lay north of the proper Byzantine sphere might be abandoned; but a claimant for part of that sphere itself, perhaps even for the very heart of it. Russia, seeking an economic outlet, had sapped her way south to the Euxine sh.o.r.e, and was on the point of challenging the Osmanli right to that sea. The contest would involve a vital issue; and if the Porte did not yet grasp this fact, others had grasped it. The famous 'Testament of Peter the Great' may or may not be a genuine doc.u.ment; but, in either case, it proves that certain views about the necessary policy of Russia in the Byzantine area, which became commonplaces of western political thinkers as the eighteenth century advanced, were already familiar to east European minds in the earlier part of that century.

Battle was not long in being joined. In the event, it would cost Russia about sixty years of strenuous effort to reduce the Byzantine power of the Osmanlis to a condition little better than that in which Osman had found the Byzantine power of the Greeks four centuries before. During the first two-thirds of this period the contest was waged not unequally. By the Treaty of Belgrade, in 1739, Sultan Mahmud I appeared for a moment even to have gained the whole issue, Russia agreeing to her own exclusion from the Black Sea, and from interference in the Danubian princ.i.p.alities. But the success could not be sustained. Repeated effort was rapidly exhausting Osmanli strength, sapped as it was by increasing internal disease: and when a crisis arrived with the accession of the Empress Catherine, it proved too weak to meet it. During the ten years following 1764 Osmanli hold on the Black Sea was lost irretrievably. After the destruction of the fleet at Chesme the Crimea became untenable and was abandoned to the brief mercies of Russia: and with a veiled Russian protectorate established in the Danubian princ.i.p.alities, and an open Russian occupation in Morean ports, Constantinople had lost once more her own seas. When Selim III was set on a tottering throne, in 1787, the wheel of Byzantine destiny seemed to have come again almost full circle: and the world was expecting a Muscovite succession to that empire which had acknowledged already the Roman, the Greek, and the Osmanli.

Certainly history looked like repeating itself. As in the fourteenth century, so in the eighteenth, the imperial provinces, having shaken off almost all control of the capital, were administering themselves, and happier for doing so. Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Trebizond acknowledged adventurers as virtually independent lords. Asia Minor, in general, was being controlled, in like disregard of imperial majesty, by a group of 'Dere Beys', descended, in different districts, from tribal chieftains or privileged tax-farmers, or, often, from both. The latter part of the eighteenth century was the heyday of the Anatolian feudal families--of such as the Chapanoghlus of Yuzgad, whose sway stretched from Pontus to Cilicia, right across the base of the peninsula, or the Karamanoghlus of Magnesia, Bergama, and Aidin, who ruled as much territory as the former emirs of Karasi and Sarukhan, and were recognized by the representatives of the great trading companies as wielding the only effective authority in Smyrna. The wide and rich regions controlled by such families usually contributed neither an _asper_ to the sultan's treasury nor a man to the imperial armies.

On no mountain of either Europe or Asia--and mountains formed a large part of the Ottoman empire in both--did the imperial writ run. Macedonia and Albania were obedient only to their local beys, and so far had gone the devolution of Serbia and Bosnia to Janissary aghas, feudal beys, and the Beylerbey of Rumili, that these provinces hardly concerned themselves more with the capital. The late sultan, Mustapha III, had lost almost the last remnant of his subjects' respect, not so much by the ill success of his mutinous armies as by his depreciation of the imperial coinage. He had died bankrupt of prestige, leaving no visible a.s.sets to his successor.

What might become of the latter no one in the empire appeared to care. As in 1453, it waited other lords.

5

_Revival_

It has been waiting, nevertheless, ever since--waiting for much more than a century; and perhaps the end is not even yet. Why, then, have expectations not only within but without the empire been so greatly at fault? How came Montesquieu, Burke, and other confident prophets since their time to be so signally mistaken? There were several co-operating causes, but one paramount. Constantinople was no longer, as in 1453, a matter of concern only to itself, its immediate neighbours, and certain trading republics of Italy. It had become involved with the commercial interests of a far wider circle, in particular of the great trading peoples of western Europe, the British, the French, and the Dutch, and with the political interests of the Germanic and Russian nations. None of these could be indifferent to a revolution in its fortunes, and least of all to its pa.s.sing, not to a power out of Asia, but to a rival power among themselves. Europe was already in labour with the doctrine of the Balance of Power. The bantling would not be born at Vienna till early in the century to come: but even before the end of the eighteenth century it could be foreseen that its life would be bound up with the maintenance of Constantinople in independence of any one of the parent powers--that is, with the prolongation of the Osmanli phase of its imperial fortunes. This doctrine, consistently acted upon by Europe, has been the sheet anchor of the Ottoman empire for a century. Even to this day its Moslem dynasty has never been without one powerful Christian champion or another.

There were, however, some thirty years still to elapse after Selim's accession before that doctrine was fully born: and had her hands been free, Russia might well have been in secure possession of the Byzantine throne long before 1815. For, internally, the Osmanli state went from bad to worse. The tumultuous insubordination of the Janissaries became an ever greater scandal. Never in all the long history of their riots was their record for the years 1807-9 equalled or even approached. Never before, also, had the provinces been so utterly out of hand. This was the era of Jezzar the Butcher at Acre, of the rise of Mehemet Ali in Egypt, of Ali Pasha in Epirus, and of Pasvanoghlu at Vidin. When Mahmud II was thrust on to the throne in 1809, he certainly began his reign with no more personal authority and no more imperial prestige or jurisdiction than the last Greek emperor had enjoyed on his accession in 1448.

The great European war, however, which had been raging intermittently for nearly twenty years, had saved Mahmud an empire to which he could succeed in name and try to give substance. Whatever the Osmanlis suffered during that war, it undoubtedly kept them in Constantinople. Temporary loss of Egypt and the small damage done by the British attack on Constantinople in 1807 were a small price to pay for the diversion of Russia's main energies to other than Byzantine fields, and for the a.s.surance, made doubly sure when the great enemy did again attack, that she would not be allowed to settle the account alone. Whatever Napoleon may have planned and signed at Tilsit, the aegis of France was consistently opposed to the enemies of the Osmanlis down to the close of the Napoleonic age.

Thus it came about that those thirty perilous years pa.s.sed without the expected catastrophe. There was still a successor of Osman reigning in Constantinople when the great Christian powers, met in conclave at Vienna, half unconsciously guaranteed the continued existence of the Osmanli Empire simply by leaving it out of account in striking a Balance of Power in Europe. Its European territory, with the capital within it, was of quite enough importance to disturb seriously the nice adjustment agreed at Vienna; and, therefore, while any one's henceforth to take or leave, it would become always some one's to guard. A few years had yet to pa.s.s before the phrase, the Maintenance of the Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, would be a watchword of European diplomacy: but, whether formulated thus or not, that principle became a sure rock of defence for the Osmanli Empire on the birthday of the doctrine of the Balance of Power.

Secure from destruction by any foes but those of his own household, as none knew better than he, the reigning Osmanli was scheming to regain the independence and dignity of his forefathers. Himself a creature of the Janissaries, Mahmud had plotted the abolition of his creators from the first year of his reign, but making a too precipitate effort after the conclusion of peace with Russia, had ignominiously failed and fallen into worse bondage than ever. Now, better a.s.sured of his imperial position and supported by leading men of all cla.s.ses among his subjects, he returned not only to his original enterprise but to schemes for removing other checks on the power of the sovereign which had come into being in the last two centuries--notably the feudal independence of the Dere Beys, and the irresponsibility of provincial governors.

Probably Mahmud II--if he is to be credited with personal initiation of the reforms always a.s.sociated with his name--was not conscious of any purpose more revolutionary than that of becoming master in his own house, as his ancestors had been. What he ultimately accomplished, however, was something of much greater and more lasting moment to the Osmanli state. It was nothing less than the elimination of the most Byzantine features in its const.i.tution and government. The subst.i.tution of national forces for mercenary praetorians: the subst.i.tution of direct imperial government of the provinces for devolution to seigneurs, tribal chiefs, and irresponsible officers: the subst.i.tution of direct collection for tax-farming: and the subst.i.tution of administration by bureaucrats for administration by household officers--these, the chief reforms carried through under Mahmud, were all anti-Byzantine. They did not cause the Osmanli state to be born anew, but, at least, they went far to purge it of original sin.

That Mahmud and his advisers could carry through such reforms at all in so old a body politic is remarkable: that they carried them through amid the events of his reign is almost miraculous. One affront after another was put on the Sultan, one blow after another was struck at his empire.

Inspired by echoes of the French Revolution and by Napoleon's recognition of the rights of nationalities, first the Serbs and then the Greeks seized moments of Ottoman disorder to rise in revolt against their local lords.

The first, who had risen under Selim III, achieved, under Mahmud, autonomy, but not independence, nothing remaining to the sultan as before except the fortress of Belgrade with five other strongholds. The second, who began with no higher hopes than the Serbs, were encouraged, by the better acquaintance and keener sympathy of Europe, to fight their way out to complete freedom. The Morea and central Greece pa.s.sed out of the empire, the first provinces so to pa.s.s since the Osmanli loss of Hungary.

Yet it was in the middle of that fatal struggle that Mahmud settled for ever with the Janissaries, and during all its course he was settling one after another with the Dere Beys!

When he had thus sacrificed the flower of his professional troops and had hardly had time to replace the local governments of the provinces by anything much better than general anarchy, he found himself faced by a Russian a.s.sault. His raw levies fought as no other raw levies than the Turkish can, and, helped by manifestations of jealousy by the other powers, staved off the capture of Constantinople, which, at one moment, seemed about to take place at last. But he had to accept humiliating terms, amounting virtually, to a cession of the Black Sea. Mahmud recognized that such a price he must pay for crossing the broad stream between Byzantinism and Nationalism, and kept on his way.

Finally came a blow at the hands of one of his own household and creed.

Mehemet Ali of Egypt, who had faithfully fought his sovereign's battles in Arabia and the Morea, held his services ill requited and his claim to be increased beyond other pashas ignored, and proceeded to take what had not been granted. He went farther than he had intended--more than half-way across Asia Minor--after the imperial armies had suffered three signal defeats, before he extorted what he had desired at first: and in the end, after very brief enjoyment, he had to resign all again to the mandate, not of his sovereign, but of certain European powers who commanded his seas.

Mahmud, however, who lived neither to see himself saved by the _giaur_ fleets, nor even to hear of his latest defeat, had gone forward with the reorganization of the central and provincial administration, undismayed by Mehemet Ali's contumacy or the insistence of Russia at the gate of the Bosphorus.

As news arrived from time to time in the west of Mahmud's disasters, it was customary to prophesy the imminent dissolution of his empire. We, however, looking backward now, can see that by its losses the Osmanli state in reality grew stronger. Each of its humiliations pledged some power or group of powers more deeply to support it: and before Mahmud died, he had reason to believe that, so long as the European Concert should ensue the Balance of Power, his dynasty would not be expelled from Constantinople. His belief has been justified. At every fresh crisis of Ottoman fortunes, and especially after every fresh Russian attack, foreign protection has unfailingly been extended to his successors.

It was not, however, only in virtue of the increasing solicitude of the powers on its behalf that during the nineteenth century the empire was growing and would grow stronger, but also in virtue of certain a.s.sets within itself. First among these ranked the resources of its Asiatic territories, which, as the European lands diminished, became more and more nearly identified with the empire. When, having got rid of the old army, Mahmud imposed service on all his Moslem subjects, in theory, but in effect only on the Osmanlis (not the Arabs, Kurds, or other half a.s.similated nomads and hillmen), it meant more than a similar measure would have meant in a Christian empire. For, the life of Islam being war, military service binds Moslems together and to their chiefs as it binds men under no other dispensation; therefore Mahmud, so far as he was able to enforce his decree, created not merely a national army but a nation.

His success was most immediate and complete in Anatolia, the homeland of the Osmanlis. There, however, it was attained only by the previous reduction of those feudal families which, for many generations, had arrogated to themselves the levying and control of local forces. Hence, as in Constantinople with the Janissaries, so in the provinces with the Dere Beys, destruction of a drastic order had to precede construction, and more of Mahmud's reign had to be devoted to the former than remained for the latter.

He did, however, live to see not only the germ of a nation emerge from chaos, but also the framework of an organization for governing it well or ill. The centralized bureaucracy which he succeeded in initiating was, of course, wretchedly imperfect both in const.i.tution and equipment. But it promised to promote the end he had in view and no other, inasmuch as, being the only existent machine of government, it derived any effective power it had from himself alone. Dependent on Stambul, it served to turn thither the eyes and prayers of the provincials. The naturally submissive and peaceful population of Asia Minor quickly accustomed itself to look beyond the dismantled strongholds of its fallen beys. As for the rest-- contumacious and bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian steppes--their hour of surrender was yet to come.

The eventual product of Mahmud's persistency was the 'Turkey' we have seen in our own time--that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one cla.s.s, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip, and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland. We have marked its stealthy movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia-- now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our own time.

It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however b.u.t.tressed and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconst.i.tuted itself after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer this question at the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years ago, can hardly now be dry.

In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as Islam acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire, in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be felt about his government. Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had always been at some pains to attach to themselves. 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.

In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its pretension to religious influence throughout a much larger area than its proper dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was in great measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign's actual position.

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. However decadent might be the Turco-Grecian Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the lion's share of office), those other elements had suffered no decline in physical or mental development. Indeed, one cannot be among them now without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the most part, yet to be.

Such were latent a.s.sets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly by the prophets of its dissolution. Thanks to them, that empire continued not only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century but, in some measure, to consolidate itself. Even when the protective fence, set up by European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia several times--in 1829, in 1854, and in 1877--the nation, which Mahmud had made, always proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which grew better a.s.sured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its international guarantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government, supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from Europe. He became, _ipso facto_, the cherished protege of every power whose nationals had lent his country money.

Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud inst.i.tuted, the stage at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible--of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character--and partly by circ.u.mstances but more by his natural sympathies, he had been identified from first to last with military enterprises. Though he was known to contemplate the eventual supremacy of civil law, and the equality of all sorts and conditions of his subjects before it, he did nothing to open this vista to public view. Consequently he encountered little or no factious opposition. Very few held briefs for either the Janissaries or the Dere Beys; and fewer regretted them when they were gone. Osmanli society identified itself with the new army and accepted the consequent reform of the central or provincial administration. Nothing in these changes seemed to affect Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in the empire.

It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his reign, promulgated an imperial decree--the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif of Gulkhaneh--which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law.

The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going temperament, had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution, which had only just begun, could be antic.i.p.ated _per saltum_, and that he and all his subjects would live happily together ever after. His counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good and bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country, involved in potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi (1833), and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha's victory at Nizib; and they looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian mess. Partly also Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of facts. There were then, as since, 'young men in a hurry' among the more Europeanized Osmanlis. The net result of the sultan's precipitancy was to set against himself and his policy all who wished that such it consummation of the reform process might never come and all who knew it would never come, if s.n.a.t.c.hed at thus--that is, both the 'Old Turks' and the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for the worse the spirit in which the new machine of government was being worked and in which fresh developments of it would be accepted.

To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform.

The organization of the army into corps--the foundation of the existing system--and the imposition of five years' service on all subjects of the empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also, on the civil side, the inst.i.tution of responsible councils of state and formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education. To his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law. He had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative security from external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled in his favour by Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price of a guarantee of hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali. Thanks to the same support, war with Persia was avoided and war with Russia postponed.