II THE TURK

The Tartar and the Turk

You may think, Gentlemen, I have been very long in coming to the Turks, and indeed I have been longer than I could have wished; but I have thought it necessary, in order to your taking a just view of them, that you should survey them{5} first of all in their original condition. When they first appear in history they are Huns or Tartars, and nothing else; they are indeed in no unimportant respects Tartars even now; but, had they never been made something more than Tartars,{10} they never would have had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy,{15} helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential{20} barbarism to this day, still they, or at least great portions of the race, have been put under education; they have been submitted to a slow course of change, with a long history and a profitable discipline and fortunes of a peculiar kind; and thus they have gained those qualities of mind, which alone enable a nation to wield and to consolidate imperial power.

I have said that, when first they distinctly{5} appear on the scene of history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound{10} there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to be the most plentiful in the world. There have been iron works there from time immemorial, and at the time that the Huns descended on the Roman Empire (in the{15} fifth century of the Christian era), we find the Turks nothing more than a family of slaves, employed as workers of the ore and as blacksmiths by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the course of fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish{20} power in Europe, with the sudden development peculiar to Tartars, we find these Turks spread from East to West, and lords of a territory so extensive, that they were connected, by relations of peace or war, at once with the Chinese, the{25} Persians, and the Romans. They had reached Kamtchatka on the North, the Caspian on the West, and perhaps even the mouth of the Indus on the South. Here then we have an intermediate empire of Tartars, placed between the{30} eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this sketch it has no place, except as belonging to Turkish history, because it was contained within the limits of Asia, and, though it lasted for 200 years, it only faintly affected the political transactions of Europe. However, it was not without some sort{5} of influence on Christendom, for the Romans interchanged embassies with its sovereign in the reign of the then Greek Emperor Justin the younger (A.D. 570), with the view of engaging him in a warlike alliance against Persia. The{10} account of one of these embassies remains, and the picture it presents of the Turks is important, because it seems clearly to identify them with the Tartar race.

For instance, in the mission to the Tartars{15} from the Pope, which I have already spoken of, the friars were led between two fires, when they approached the Khan, and they at first refused to follow, thinking they might be countenancing some magical rite. Now we find it recorded of{20} this Roman embassy, that, on its arrival, it was purified by the Turks with fire and incense. As to incense, which seems out of place among such barbarians, it is remarkable that it is used in the ceremonial of the Turkish court to this day.{25} At least Sir Charles Fellows, in his work on the Antiquities of Asia Minor, in 1838, speaks of the Sultan as going to the festival of Bairam with incense-bearers before him. Again, when the Romans were presented to the great Khan, they{30} found him in his tent, seated on a throne, to which wheels were attached and horses attachable, in other words, a Tartar wagon. Moreover, they were entertained at a banquet which lasted the greater part of the day; and an intoxicating liquor, not wine, which was sweet and pleasant,{5} was freely presented to them; evidently the Tartar koumiss.[32] The next day they had a second entertainment in a still more splendid tent; the hangings were of embroidered silk, and the throne, the cups, and the vases were of gold.{10} On the third day, the pavilion, in which they were received, was supported on gilt columns; a couch of massive gold was raised on four gold peacocks; and before the entrance to the tent was what might be called a sideboard, only that it was a{15} sort of barricade of wagons, laden with dishes, basins, and statues of solid silver. All these points in the description—the silk hangings, the gold vessels, the successively increasing splendor of the entertainments—remind us of the courts{20} of Zingis and Timour, 700 and 900 years afterwards.

This empire, then, of the Turks was of a Tartar character; yet it was the first step of their passing from barbarism to that degree of civilization{25} which is their historical badge. And it was their first step in civilization, not so much by what it did in its day, as (unless it be a paradox to say so) by its coming to an end. Indeed it so happens, that those Turkish tribes which have{30} changed their original character and have a place in the history of the world, have obtained their status and their qualifications for it, by a process very different from that which took place in the nations most familiar to us. What this process{5} has been I will say presently; first, however, let us observe that, fortunately for our purpose, we have still specimens existing of those other Turkish tribes, which were never submitted to this process of education and change, and, in{10} looking at them as they now exist, we see at this very day the Turkish nationality in something very like its original form, and are able to decide for ourselves on its close approximation to the Tartar. You may recollect I pointed out to{15} you, Gentlemen, in the opening of these lectures, the course which the pastoral tribes, or nomads as they are often called, must necessarily take in their emigrations. They were forced along in one direction till they emerged from their{20} mountain valleys, and descended their high plateau at the end of Tartary, and then they had the opportunity of turning south. If they did not avail themselves of this opening, but went on still westward, their next southern pass would{25} be the defiles of the Caucasus and Circassia, to the west of the Caspian. If they did not use this, they would skirt the top of the Black Sea, and so reach Europe. Thus in the emigration of the Huns from China, you may recollect a tribe of{30} them turned to the South as soon as they could, and settled themselves between the high Tartar land and the sea of Aral, while the main body went on to the furthest West by the north of the Black Sea. Now with this last passage into Europe we are not here concerned, for the Turks{5} have never introduced themselves to Europe by means of it;[33] but with those two southward passages which are Asiatic, viz., that to the east of the Aral, and that to the west of the Caspian. The Turkish tribes have all descended upon the{10} civilized world by one or other of these two roads; and I observe, that those which have descended along the east of the Aral have changed their social habits and gained political power, while those which descended to the west of the Caspian{15} remain pretty much what they ever were. The former of these go among us by the general name of Turks; the latter are the Turcomans or Turkmans.... At the very date at which Heraclius called the Turcomans into Georgia, at{20} the very date when their Eastern brethren crossed the northern border of Sogdiana, an event of most momentous import had occurred in the South. A new religion had arisen in Arabia. The impostor Mahomet, announcing himself the{25} Prophet of God, was writing the pages of that book, and molding the faith of that people, which was to subdue half the known world. The Turks passed the Jaxartes southward in A.D. 626; just four years before Mahomet had assumed the royal dignity, and just six years after, on his death, his followers began the conquest of the Persian Empire. In the course of 20 years they effected it; Sogdiana was at its very extremity, or its{5} borderland; there the last king of Persia took refuge from the south, while the Turks were pouring into it from the north. There was little to choose for the unfortunate prince between the Turk and the Saracen; the Turks were his{10} hereditary foe; they had been the giants and monsters of the popular poetry; but he threw himself into their arms. They engaged in his service, betrayed him, murdered him, and measured themselves with the Saracens in his stead.{15} Thus the military strength of the north and south of Asia, the Saracenic and the Turkish, came into memorable conflict in the regions of which I have said so much. The struggle was a fierce one, and lasted many years; the Turks striving to force{20} their way down to the ocean, the Saracens to drive them back into their Scythian deserts. They first fought this issue in Bactriana or Khorasan; the Turks got the worst of the fight, and then it was thrown back upon Sogdiana{25} itself, and there it ended again in favor of the Saracens. At the end of 90 years from the time of the first Turkish descent on this fair region, they relinquished it to their Mahometan opponents. The conquerors found it rich, populous,{30} and powerful; its cities, Carisme, Bokhara, and Samarcand, were surrounded beyond their fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains were well cultivated, and its commerce extended from China to Europe. Its riches were{5} proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort a tribute of two million gold pieces from the inhabitants; we read, moreover, of the crown jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of the buskin of another, which she dropt in her{10} flight from Bokhara, as being worth two thousand pieces of gold.[34] Such had been the prosperity of the barbarian invaders, such was its end; but not their end, for adversity did them service, as well as prosperity, as we shall see.{15}

It is usual for historians to say, that the triumph of the South threw the Turks back again upon their northern solitudes; and this might easily be the case with some of the many hordes, which were ever passing the boundary and{20} flocking down; but it is no just account of the historical fact, viewed as a whole. Not often indeed do the Oriental nations present us with an example of versatility of character; the Turks, for instance, of this day are substantially what they{25} were four centuries ago. We cannot conceive, were Turkey overrun by the Russians at the present moment, that the fanatical tribes, which are pouring into Constantinople from Asia Minor, would submit to the foreign yoke, take service{30} under their conquerors, become soldiers, custom-officers, police, men of business, attaches, statesmen, working their way up from the ranks and from the masses into influence and power; but, whether from skill in the Saracens, or from {5} far-reaching sagacity in the Turks (and it is difficult to assign it to either cause), so it was, that a process of this nature followed close upon the Mahometan conquest of Sogdiana. It is to be traced in detail to a variety of accidents. Many{10} of the Turks probably were made slaves, and the service to which they were subjected was no matter of choice. Numbers had got attached to the soil; and inheriting the blood of Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal inhabitants for three{15} generations, had simply unlearned the wildness of the Tartar shepherd. Others fell victims to the religion of their conquerors, which ultimately, as we know, exercised a most remarkable influence upon them. Not all at once, but as{20} tribe descended after tribe, and generation followed generation, they succumbed to the creed of Mahomet; and they embraced it with the ardor and enthusiasm which Franks and Saxons so gloriously and meritoriously manifested in their{25} conversion to Christianity.

Here again was a very powerful instrument in modification of their national character. Let me illustrate it in one particular. If there is one peculiarity above another, proper to the savage{30} and to the Tartar, it is that of excitability and impetuosity on ordinary occasions; the Turks, on the other hand, are nationally remarkable for gravity and almost apathy of demeanor. Now there are evidently elements in the Mahometan creed, which would tend to change them from{5} the one temperament to the other. Its sternness, its coldness, its doctrine of fatalism; even the truths which it borrowed from Revelation, when separated from the truths it rejected, its monotheism untempered by mediation, its severe{10} view of the Divine attributes, of the law, and of a sure retribution to come, wrought both a gloom and also an improvement in the barbarian, not very unlike the effect which some forms of Protestantism produce among ourselves. But{15} whatever was the mode of operation, certainly it is to their religion that this peculiarity of the Turks is ascribed by competent judges. Lieutenant Wood in his journal gives us a lively account of a peculiarity of theirs, which he{20} unhesitatingly attributes to Islamism. "Nowhere," he says, "is the difference between European and Mahometan society more strongly marked than in the lower walks of life.... A Kasid, or messenger, for example, will come into a public{25} department, deliver his letters in full durbar, and demean himself throughout the interview with so much composure and self-possession, that an European can hardly believe that his grade in society is so low. After he has delivered his{30} letters, he takes his seat among the crowd, and answers, calmly and without hesitation, all the questions which may be addressed to him, or communicates the verbal instructions with which he has been intrusted by his employer, and which are often of more importance than the{5} letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even{10} children," he continues, "in Mahometan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these{15} little men will place their hands upon their breasts, and give the usual greeting. Frequently have I seen the children of chiefs approach their father's durbar, and stopping short at the threshold of the door, utter the shout of 'Salam{20} Ali-Kum,' so as to draw all eyes upon them; but nothing daunted, they marched boldly into the room, and sliding down upon their knees, folded their arms and took their seat upon the musnad with all the gravity of grown-up persons." {25}

As Islamism has changed the demeanor of the Turks, so doubtless it has in other ways materially innovated on their Tartar nature. It has given an aim to their military efforts, a political principle, and a social bond. It has laid them under{30} a sense of responsibility, has molded them into consistency, and taught them a course of policy and perseverance in it. But to treat this part of the subject adequately to its importance would require, Gentlemen, a research and a fullness of discussion unsuitable to the historical sketch{5} which I have undertaken. I have said enough for my purpose upon this topic; and indeed on the general question of the modification of national character to which the Turks were at this period subjected.{10}

The Turk and the Saracen

Mere occupation of a rich country is not enough for civilization, as I have granted already. The Turks came into the pleasant plains and valleys of Sogdiana; the Turcomans into the well-wooded mountains and sunny slopes of Asia{15} Minor. The Turcomans were brought out of their dreary deserts, yet they retained their old habits, and they remain barbarians to this day. But why? it must be borne in mind, they neither subjugated the inhabitants of their new country{20} on the one hand, nor were subjugated by them on the other. They never had direct or intimate relations with it; they were brought into it by the Roman Government at Constantinople as its auxiliaries, but they never naturalized themselves{25} there. They were like gypsies in England, except that they were mounted freebooters instead of pilferers and fortune tellers. It was far otherwise with their brethren in Sogdiana; they were there first as conquerors, then as conquered. First they held it in possession as their prize for 90 or 100 years; they came into the usufruct and enjoyment of it. Next, their political ascendancy{5} over it involved, as in the case of the White Huns, some sort of moral surrender of themselves to it. What was the first consequence of this? that, like the White Huns, they intermarried with the races they found there. We know the custom{10} of the Tartars and Turks; under such circumstances they would avail themselves of their national practice of polygamy to its full extent of license. In the course of twenty years a new generation would arise of a mixed race; and{15} these in turn would marry into the native population, and at the end of ninety or a hundred years we should find the great-grandsons or the great-great-grandsons of the wild marauders who first crossed the Jaxartes, so different from their{20} ancestors in features both of mind and body, that they hardly would be recognized as deserving the Tartar name. At the end of that period their power came to an end, the Saracens became masters of them and of their country, but the{25} process of emigration southward from the Scythian desert, which had never intermitted during the years of their domination, continued still, though that domination was no more.

Here it is necessary to have a clear idea of the{30} nature of that association of the Turkish tribes from the Volga to the Eastern Sea, to which I have given the name of Empire: it was not so much of a political as of a national character; it was the power, not of a system, but of a race. They were not one well-organized state, but a{5} number of independent tribes, acting generally together, acknowledging one leader or not, according to circumstances, combining and coöperating from the identity of object which acted on them, and often jealous of each other and{10} quarreling with each other on account of that very identity. Each tribe made its way down to the south as it could; one blocked up the way of the other for a time; there were stoppages and collisions, but there was a continual movement{15} and progress. Down they came one after another, like wolves after their prey; and as the tribes which came first became partially civilized, and as a mixed generation arose, these would naturally be desirous of keeping back their less polished{20} uncles or cousins, if they could; and would do so successfully for a while: but cupidity is stronger than conservatism; and so, in spite of delay and difficulty, down they would keep coming, and down they did come, even after and in spite of{25} the overthrow of their Empire; crowding down as to a new world, to get what they could, as adventurers, ready to turn to the right or the left, prepared to struggle on anyhow, willing to be forced forward into countries farther still,{30} careless what might turn up, so that they did but get down. And this was the process which went on (whatever were their fortunes when they actually got down, prosperous or adverse) for 400, nay, I will say for 700 years. The storehouse of the north was never exhausted; it{5} sustained the never ending run upon its resources.

I was just now referring to a change in the Turks, which I have mentioned before, and which had as important a bearing as any other of their changes upon their subsequent fortunes.{10} It was a change in their physiognomy and shape, so striking as to recommend them to their masters for the purposes of war or of display. Instead of bearing any longer the hideous exterior which in the Huns frightened the Romans and{15} Goths, they were remarkable, even as early as the ninth century, when they had been among the natives of Sogdiana only two hundred years, for the beauty of their persons. An important political event was the result: hence the{20} introduction of the Turks into the heart of the Saracenic empire. By this time the Caliphs had removed from Damascus to Bagdad; Persia was the imperial province, and into Persia they were introduced for the reason I have mentioned,{25} sometimes as slaves, sometimes as captives taken in war, sometimes as mercenaries for the Saracenic armies: at length they were enrolled as guards to the Caliph, and even appointed to offices in the palace, to the command of the forces,{30} and to governorships in the provinces. The son of the celebrated Harun al Raschid had as many as 50,000 of these troops in Bagdad itself. And thus slowly and silently they made their way to the south, not with the pomp and pretense of conquest, but by means of that ordinary{5} inter-communion which connected one portion of the empire of the Caliphs with another. In this manner they were introduced even into Egypt.

This was their history for a hundred and fifty years, and what do we suppose would be the{10} result of this importation of barbarians into the heart of a nourishing empire? Would they be absorbed as slaves or settlers in the mass of the population, or would they, like mercenaries elsewhere, be fatal to the power that introduced{15} them? The answer is not difficult, considering that their very introduction argued a want of energy and resource in the rulers whom they served. To employ them was a confession of weakness; the Saracenic power indeed was not{20} very aged, but the Turkish was much younger, and more vigorous; then too must be considered the difference of national character between the Turks and the Saracens. A writer of the beginning of the present century[35] compares{25} the Turks to the Romans; such parallels are generally fanciful and fallacious; but, if we must accept it in the present instance, we may complete the picture by likening the Saracens and Persians to the Greeks, and we know what was{30} the result of the collision between Greece and Rome. The Persians were poets, the Saracens were philosophers. The mathematics, astronomy, and botany were especial subjects of the studies of the latter. Their observatories were celebrated,{5} and they may be considered to have originated the science of chemistry. The Turks, on the other hand, though they are said to have a literature, and though certain of their princes have been patrons of letters, have never distinguished{10} themselves in exercises of pure intellect; but they have had an energy of character, a pertinacity, a perseverance, and a political talent, in a word, they then had the qualities of mind necessary for ruling, in far greater measure, than{15} the people they were serving. The Saracens, like the Greeks, carried their arms over the surface of the earth with an unrivaled brilliancy and an uncheckered success; but their dominion, like that of Greece, did not last for more than{20} 200 or 300 years. Rome grew slowly through many centuries, and its influence lasts to this day; the Turkish race battled with difficulties and reverses, and made its way on amid tumult and complication, for a good 1000 years from{25} first to last, till at length it found itself in possession of Constantinople, and a terror to the whole of Europe. It has ended its career upon the throne of Constantine; it began it as the slave and hireling of the rulers of a great empire,{30} of Persia and Sogdiana.

As to Sogdiana, we have already reviewed one season of power and then in turn of reverse which there befell the Turks; and next a more remarkable outbreak and its reaction mark their presence in Persia. I have spoken of the formidable force,{5} consisting of Turks, which formed the guard of the Caliphs immediately after the time of Harun al Raschid: suddenly they rebelled against their master, burst into his apartment at the hour of supper, murdered him, and cut his body{10} into seven pieces. They got possession of the symbols of imperial power, the garment and the staff of Mahomet, and proceeded to make and unmake Caliphs at their pleasure. In the course of four years they had elevated, deposed, and{15} murdered as many as three. At their wanton caprice, they made these successors of the false prophet the sport of their insults and their blows. They dragged them by the feet, stripped them, and exposed them to the burning sun, beat them{20} with iron clubs, and left them for days without food. At length, however, the people of Bagdad were roused in defense of the Caliphate, and the Turks for a time were brought under; but they remained in the country, or rather, by the {25} short-sighted policy of the moment, were dispersed throughout it, and thus became in the sequel ready-made elements of revolution for the purposes of other traitors of their own race, who, at a later period, as we shall presently see, descended{30} on Persia from Turkistan.

Indeed, events were opening the way slowly, but surely, to their ascendancy. Throughout the whole of the tenth century, which followed, they seem to disappear from history; but a silent revolution was all along in progress, leading them{5} forward to their great destiny. The empire of the Caliphate was already dying in its extremities, and Sogdiana was one of the first countries to be detached from his power. The Turks were still there, and, as in Persia, filled the ranks of the{10} army and the offices of the government; but the political changes which took place were not at first to their visible advantage. What first occurred was the revolt of the Caliph's viceroy, who made himself a great kingdom or empire out{15} of the provinces around, extending it from the Jaxartes, which was the northern boundary of Sogdiana, almost to the Indian Ocean, and from the confines of Georgia to the mountains of Afghanistan. The dynasty thus established{20} lasted for four generations and for the space of ninety years. Then the successor happened to be a boy; and one of his servants, the governor of Khorasan, an able and experienced man, was forced by circumstances to rebellion against him.{25} He was successful, and the whole power of this great kingdom fell into his hands; now he was a Tartar or Turk; and thus at length the Turks suddenly appear in history, the acknowledged masters of a southern dominion.{30}

This is the origin of the celebrated Turkish dynasty of the Gaznevides, so called after Gazneh, or Ghizni, or Ghuznee, the principal city, and it lasted for two hundred years. We are not particularly concerned in it, because it has no direct relations with Europe; but it falls into our{5} subject, as having been instrumental to the advance of the Turks towards the West. Its most distinguished monarch was Mahmood, and he conquered Hindostan, which became eventually the seat of the empire. In Mahmood the{10} Gaznevide we have a prince of true Oriental splendor. For him the title of Sultan or Soldan was invented, which henceforth became the special badge of the Turkish monarchs; as Khan is the title of the sovereign of the Tartars, and Caliph of the{15} sovereign of the Saracens. I have already described generally the extent of his dominions: he inherited Sogdiana, Carisme, Khorasan, and Cabul; but, being a zealous Mussulman, he obtained the title of Gazi, or champion, by his reduction of{20} Hindostan, and his destruction of its idol temples. There was no need, however, of religious enthusiasm to stimulate him to the war: the riches, which he amassed in the course of it, were a recompense amply sufficient. His Indian{25} expeditions in all amounted to twelve, and they abound in battles and sieges of a truly Oriental cast....

We have now arrived at what may literally be called the turning point of Turkish history. We have seen them gradually descend from the north,{30} and in a certain degree become acclimated in the countries where they settled. They first appear across the Jaxartes in the beginning of the seventh century; they have now come to the beginning of the eleventh. Four centuries or thereabout have they been out of their deserts, gaining{5} experience and educating themselves in such measure as was necessary for playing their part in the civilized world. First they came down into Sogdiana and Khorasan, and the country below it, as conquerors; they continued in it as{10} subjects and slaves. They offered their services to the race which had subdued them; they made their way by means of their new masters down to the west and the south; they laid the foundations for their future supremacy in Persia, and{15} gradually rose upwards through the social fabric to which they had been admitted, till they found themselves at length at the head of it. The sovereign power which they had acquired in the line of the Gaznevides, drifted off to Hindostan;{20} but still fresh tribes of their race poured down from the north, and filled up the gap; and while one dynasty of Turks was established in the peninsula, a second dynasty arose in the former seat of their power.{25}

Now I call the era at which I have arrived the turning point of their fortunes, because, when they had descended down to Khorasan and the countries below it, they might have turned to the East or to the West, as they chose. They were{30} at liberty to turn their forces eastward against their kindred in Hindostan, whom they had driven out of Ghizni and Afghanistan, or to face towards the west, and make their way thither through the Saracens of Persia and its neighboring countries. It was an era which determined the history of the{5} world....

But this era was a turning point in their history in another and more serious respect. In Sogdiana and Khorasan, they had become converts to the Mahometan faith. You will not{10} suppose I am going to praise a religious imposture, but no Catholic need deny that it is, considered in itself, a great improvement upon Paganism. Paganism has no rule of right and wrong, no supreme and immutable judge, no intelligible{15} revelation, no fixed dogma whatever; on the other hand, the being of one God, the fact of His revelation, His faithfulness to His promises, the eternity of the moral law, the certainty of future retribution, were borrowed by Mahomet from the{20} Church, and are steadfastly held by his followers. The false prophet taught much which is materially true and objectively important, whatever be its subjective and formal value and influence in the individuals who profess it. He stands in his{25} creed between the religion of God and the religion of devils, between Christianity and idolatry, between the West and the extreme East. And so stood the Turks, on adopting his faith, at the date I am speaking of; they stood between{30} Christ in the West, and Satan in the East, and they had to make their choice; and, alas! they were led by the circumstances of the time to oppose themselves, not to Paganism, but to Christianity. A happier lot indeed had befallen poor Sultan Mahmood than befell his kindred{5} who followed in his wake. Mahmood, a Mahometan, went eastward and found a superstition worse than his own, and fought against it, and smote it; and the sandal doors which he tore away from the idol temple and hung up at his{10} tomb at Gazneh, almost seemed to plead for him through centuries as the soldier and the instrument of Heaven. The tribes which followed him, Moslem also, faced westward, and found, not error but truth, and fought against it as zealously,{15} and in doing so, were simply tools of the Evil One, and preachers of a lie, and enemies, not witnesses of God. The one destroyed idol temples, the other Christian shrines. The one has been saved the woe of persecuting the Bride of the Lamb;{20} the other is of all races the veriest brood of the serpent which the Church has encountered since she was set up. For 800 years did the sandal gates remain at Mahmood's tomb, as a trophy over idolatry; and for 800 years have Seljuk{25} and Othman been our foe.

The year 1048 of our era is fixed by chronologists as the date of the rise of the Turkish power, as far as Christendom is interested in its history.[36] Sixty-three years before this date, a Turk of high{30} rank, of the name of Seljuk, had quarreled with his native prince in Turkistan, crossed the Jaxartes with his followers, and planted himself in the territory of Sogdiana. His father had been a chief officer in the prince's court, and was the{5} first of his family to embrace Islamism; but Seljuk, in spite of his creed, did not obtain permission to advance into Sogdiana from the Saracenic government, which at that time was in possession of the country. After several successful encounters,{10} however, he gained admission into the city of Bokhara, and there he settled. As time went on, he fully recompensed the tardy hospitality which the Saracens had shown him; for his feud with his own countrymen, whom he had left, took the{15} shape of a religious enmity, and he fought against them as pagans and infidels, with a zeal, which was both an earnest of the devotion of his people to the faith of Mahomet, and a training for the exercise of it....{20}

For four centuries the Turks are little or hardly heard of; then suddenly in the course of as many tens of years, and under three Sultans, they make the whole world resound with their deeds; and, while they have pushed to the East through{25} Hindostan, in the West they have hurried down to the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, have taken Jerusalem, and threatened Constantinople. In their long period of silence they had been sowing the seeds of future{30} conquests; in their short period of action they were gathering the fruit of past labors and sufferings. The Saracenic empire stood apparently as before; but, as soon as a Turk showed himself at the head of a military force within its territory, he found himself surrounded by the armies of his kindred{5} which had been so long in its pay; he was joined by the tribes of Turcomans, to whom the Romans in a former age had shown the passes of the Caucasus; and he could rely on the reserve of innumerable swarms, ever issuing out of his{10} native desert, and following in his track. Such was the state of Western Asia in the middle of the eleventh century.

Alp Arslan, the second Sultan of the line of Seljuk, is said to signify in Turkish "the{15} courageous lion": and the Caliph gave its possessor the Arabic appellation of Azzaddin, or "Protector of Religion." It was the distinctive work of his short reign to pass from humbling the Caliph to attacking the Greek Emperor. Togrul had{20} already invaded the Greek provinces of Asia Minor, from Cilicia to Armenia, along a line of 600 miles, and here it was that he had achieved his tremendous massacres of Christians. Alp Arslan renewed the war; he penetrated to Cæesarea in{25} Cappadocia, attracted by the gold and pearls which incrusted the shrine of the great St. Basil. He then turned his arms against Armenia and Georgia, and conquered the hardy mountaineers of the Caucasus, who at present give such trouble{30} to the Russians. After this he encountered, defeated, and captured the Greek Emperor. He began the battle with all the solemnity and pageantry of a hero of romance. Casting away his bow and arrows, he called for an iron mace and scimeter; he perfumed his body with musk, as{5} if for his burial, and dressed himself in white, that he might be slain in his winding sheet. After his victory, the captive Emperor of New Rome was brought before him in a peasant's dress; he made him kiss the ground beneath his{10} feet, and put his foot upon his neck. Then, raising him up, he struck or patted him three times with his hand, and gave him his life and, on a large ransom, his liberty.

At this time the Sultan was only forty-four{15} years of age, and seemed to have a career of glory still before him. Twelve hundred nobles stood before his throne; two hundred thousand soldiers marched under his banner. As if dissatisfied with the South, he turned his arms against his{20} own paternal wildernesses, with which his family, as I have related, had a feud. New tribes of Turks seem to have poured down, and were wresting Sogdiana from the race of Seljuk, as the Seljukians had wrested it from the{25} Gaznevides. Alp had not advanced far into the country, when he met his death from the hand of a captive. A Carismian chief had withstood his progress, and, being taken, was condemned to a lingering execution. On hearing the sentence, he{30} rushed forward upon Alp Arslan; and the Sultan, disdaining to let his generals interfere, bent his bow, but, missing his aim, received the dagger of his prisoner in his breast. His death, which followed, brings before us that grave dignity of the Turkish character, of which we have already had{5} an example in Mahmood. Finding his end approaching, he has left on record a sort of dying confession: "In my youth," he said, "I was advised by a sage to humble myself before God, to distrust my own strength, and never to despise{10} the most contemptible foe. I have neglected these lessons, and my neglect has been deservedly punished. Yesterday, as from an eminence, I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under{15} my feet, and I said in my heart, Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors. These armies are no longer mine; and, in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an{20} assassin." On his tomb was engraven an inscription, conceived in a similar spirit. "O ye, who have seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, repair to Maru, and you will behold it buried in the dust." [37] Alp Arslan was adorned{25} with great natural qualities both of intellect and of soul. He was brave and liberal: just, patient, and sincere: constant in his prayers, diligent in his alms, and, it is added, witty in his conversation; but his gifts availed him not.{30}

It often happens in the history of states and races, in which there is found first a rise and then a decline, that the greatest glories take place just then when the reverse is beginning or begun. Thus, for instance, in the history of the{5} Ottoman Turks, to which I have not yet come, Soliman the Magnificent is at once the last and greatest of a series of great Sultans. So was it as regards this house of Seljuk. Malek Shah, the son of Alp Arslan, the third sovereign, in whom{10} its glories ended, is represented to us in history in colors so bright and perfect, that it is difficult to believe we are not reading the account of some mythical personage. He came to the throne at the early age of seventeen; he was well-shaped,{15} handsome, polished both in manners and in mind; wise and courageous, pious and sincere. He engaged himself even more in the consolidation of his empire than in its extension. He reformed abuses; he reduced the taxes; he{20} repaired the highroads, bridges, and canals; he built an imperial mosque at Bagdad; he founded and nobly endowed a college. He patronized learning and poetry, and he reformed the calendar. He provided marts for commerce; he{25} upheld the pure administration of justice, and protected the helpless and the innocent. He established wells and cisterns in great numbers along the road of pilgrimage to Mecca; he fed the pilgrims, and distributed immense sums{30} among the poor.

He was in every respect a great prince; he extended his conquests across Sogdiana to the very borders of China. He subdued by his lieutenants Syria and the Holy Land, and took Jerusalem. He is said to have traveled round{5} his vast dominions twelve times. So potent was he, that he actually gave away kingdoms, and had for feudatories great princes. He gave to his cousin his territories in Asia Minor, and planted him over against Constantinople, as an{10} earnest of future conquests; and he may be said to have finally allotted to the Turcomans the fair regions of Western Asia, over which they roam to this day.

All human greatness has its term; the more{15} brilliant was this great Sultan's rise, the more sudden was his extinction; and the earlier he came to his power, the earlier did he lose it. He had reigned twenty years, and was but thirty-seven years old, when he was lifted up with pride{20} and came to his end. He disgraced and abandoned to an assassin his faithful vizir, at the age of ninety-three, who for thirty years had been the servant and benefactor of the house of Seljuk. After obtaining from the Caliph the peculiar{25} and almost incommunicable title of "the commander of the faithful," unsatisfied still, he wished to fix his own throne in Bagdad, and to deprive his impotent superior of his few remaining honors. He demanded the hand of the{30} daughter of the Greek Emperor, a Christian, in marriage. A few days, and he was no more; he had gone out hunting, and returned indisposed; a vein was opened, and the blood would not flow. A burning fever took him off, only eighteen days after the murder of his vizir, and{5} less than ten before the day when the Caliph was to have been removed from Bagdad.

Such is human greatness at the best, even were it ever so innocent; but as to this poor Sultan, there is another aspect even of his glorious deeds.{10} If I have seemed here or elsewhere in these Lectures to speak of him or his with interest or admiration, only take me, Gentlemen, as giving the external view of the Turkish history, and that as introductory to the determination of its true{15} significance. Historians and poets may celebrate the exploits of Malek; but what were they in the sight of Him who has said that whoso shall strike against His cornerstone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, shall be ground to{20} powder? Looking at this Sultan's deeds as mere exhibitions of human power, they were brilliant and marvelous; but there was another judgment of them formed in the West, and other feelings than admiration roused by them in the{25} faith and the chivalry of Christendom. Especially was there one, the divinely appointed shepherd of the poor of Christ, the anxious steward of His Church, who from his high and ancient watch tower, in the fullness of apostolic{30} charity, surveyed narrowly what was going on at thousands of miles from him, and with prophetic eye looked into the future age; and scarcely had that enemy, who was in the event so heavily to smite the Christian world, shown himself, when he gave warning of the danger, and prepared{5} himself with measures for averting it. Scarcely had the Turk touched the shores of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, when the Pope detected and denounced him before all Europe. The heroic Pontiff, St. Gregory the Seventh, was{10} then upon the throne of the Apostle; and though he was engaged in one of the severest conflicts which Pope has ever sustained, not only against the secular power, but against bad bishops and priests, yet at a time when his very life was not{15} his own, and present responsibilities so urged him, that one would fancy he had time for no other thought, Gregory was able to turn his mind to the consideration of a contingent danger in the almost fabulous East. In a letter written during{20} the reign of Malek Shah, he suggested the idea of a crusade against the misbeliever, which later popes carried out. He assures the Emperor of Germany, whom he was addressing, that he had 50,000 troops ready for the holy war, whom he{25} would fain have led in person. This was in the year 1074.

In truth, the most melancholy accounts were brought to Europe of the state of things in the Holy Land. A rude Turcoman ruled in{30} Jerusalem; his people insulted there the clergy of every profession; they dragged the patriarch by the hair along the pavement, and cast him into a dungeon, in hopes of a ransom; and disturbed from time to time the Latin Mass and office in the Church of the Resurrection. As to the pilgrims,{5} Asia Minor, the country through which they had to travel in an age when the sea was not yet safe to the voyager, was a scene of foreign incursion and internal distraction. They arrived at Jerusalem exhausted by their sufferings, and{10} sometimes terminated them by death, before they were permitted to kiss the Holy Sepulchre.

It is commonly said that the Crusades failed in their object; that they were nothing else but a lavish expenditure of men and treasure; and{15} that the possession of the Holy Places by the Turks to this day is a proof of it. Now I will not enter here into a very intricate controversy; this only will I say, that, if the tribes of the desert, under the leadership of the house of Seljuk, turned{20} their faces to the West in the middle of the eleventh century; if in forty years they had advanced from Khorasan to Jerusalem and the neighborhood of Constantinople; and if in consequence they were threatening Europe and{25} Christianity; and if, for that reason, it was a great object to drive them back or break them to pieces; if it were a worthy object of the Crusades to rescue Europe from this peril and to reassure the anxious minds of Christian multitudes; then were the Crusades no failure in their issue, for this object was fully accomplished. The Seljukian Turks were hurled back upon the East, and then broken up, by the hosts of the{5} Crusaders. The lieutenant of Malek Shah, who had been established as Sultan of Roum (as Asia Minor was called by the Turks), was driven to an obscure town, where his dynasty lasted, indeed, but gradually dwindled away. A similar fate {10} attended the house of Seljuk in other parts of the Empire, and internal quarrels increased and perpetuated its weakness. Sudden as was its rise, as sudden was its fall; till the terrible Zingis, descending on the Turkish dynasties, like{15} an avalanche, coöperated effectually with the Crusaders and finished their work; and if Jerusalem was not protected from other enemies, at least Constantinople was saved, and Europe was placed in security, for three hundred years.{20}

The Past and Present of the Ottomans

I think it is clear, that, if my account be only in the main correct, the Turkish power certainly is not a civilized, and is a barbarous power. The barbarian lives without principle and without aim; he does but reflect the successive{25} outward circumstances in which he finds himself, and he varies with them. He changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another. He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the{5} world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and after. No generation can say what it has been doing; it has not made the state of things better{10} or worse; for retrogression there is hardly room; for progress, no sort of material. Now I shall show that these characteristics of the barbarian are rudimental points, as I may call them, in the picture of the Turks, as drawn by those who{15} have studied them. I shall principally avail myself of the information supplied by Mr. Thornton and M. Volney, men of name and ability, and for various reasons preferable as authorities to writers of the present day.{20}

"The Turks," says Mr. Thornton, who, though not blind to their shortcomings, is certainly favorable to them, "the Turks are of a grave and saturnine cast ... patient of hunger and privations, capable of enduring the hardships of{25} war, but not much inclined to habits of industry.... They prefer apathy and indolence to active enjoyments; but when moved by a powerful stimulus they sometimes indulge in pleasures in excess." "The Turk," he says elsewhere,{30} "stretched at his ease on the banks of the Bosphorus, glides down the stream of existence without reflection on the past, and without anxiety for the future. His life is one continued and unvaried reverie. To his imagination the whole universe appears occupied in procuring him{5} pleasures.... Every custom invites to repose, and every object inspires an indolent voluptuousness. Their delight is to recline on soft verdure under the shade of trees, and to muse without fixing the attention, lulled by the trickling of a{10} fountain or the murmuring of a rivulet, and inhaling through their pipe a gently inebriating vapor. Such pleasures, the highest which the rich can enjoy, are equally within the reach of the artisan or the peasant."{15}

M. Volney corroborates this account of them: "Their behavior," he says, "is serious, austere, and melancholy; they rarely laugh, and the gayety of the French appears to them a fit of delirium. When they speak, it is with{20} deliberation, without gestures and without passion; they listen without interrupting you; they are silent for whole days together, and they by no means pique themselves on supporting conversation. If they walk, it is always leisurely, and{25} on business. They have no idea of our troublesome activity, and our walks backwards and forwards for amusement. Continually seated, they pass whole days smoking, with their legs crossed, their pipes in their mouths, and almost{30} without changing their attitude." Englishmen present as great a contrast to the Ottoman as the French; as a late English traveler brings before us, apropos of seeing some Turks in quarantine: "Certainly," he says, "Englishmen are the least able to wait, and the Turks the most so, of any{5} people I have ever seen. To impede an Englishman's locomotion on a journey, is equivalent to stopping the circulation of his blood; to disturb the repose of a Turk on his, is to reawaken him to a painful sense of the miseries of life. The{10} one nation at rest is as much tormented as Prometheus, chained to his rock, with the vulture feeding on him; the other in motion is as uncomfortable as Ixion tied to his ever-moving wheel."[38]

However, the barbarian, when roused to action,{15} is a very different being from the barbarian at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is usually placid, hypochondriac, and unimpassioned; but, when the customary sedateness of his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are{20} furious and uncontrollable. The individual seems possessed with all the ungovernable fury of a multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all natural and moral obligations, are forgotten or despised, till his rage subsides." A similar{25} remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk on horseback has no resemblance to the Turk reclining on his carpet. He there assumes a vigor, and displays a dexterity, which few Europeans would be capable of emulating; no{30} horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the indolence of which they are accused, no people are more fond of the violent exercise of riding."

So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars; now dosing on their horses or their wagons, now{5} galloping over the plains from morning to night. However, these successive phases of Turkish character, as reported by travelers, have seemed to readers as inconsistencies in their reports; Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The{10} national character of the Turks," he says, "is a composition of contradictory qualities. We find them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and{15} indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing, liberal and sordid." [39] What is this but to say in one word that we find them barbarians?

According to these distinct moods or phases{20} of character, they will leave very various impressions of themselves on the minds of successive beholders. A traveler finds them in their ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised and startled to find them so different from what {25} he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the prejudice which has slandered them to the European world. He finds them mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as becomes the, children of a Tartar shepherd, kind{30} and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the lowest classes sociable with each other, and the children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as playful as the fireside cat. Our traveler observes{5} all this;[40] and seems to forget that from the humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from the cat to the lion, the most wanton and tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous{10} tribes also have their innocent aspects—from the Scythians in the classical poets and historians down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of Basil Hall.

But whatever be the natural excellences of{15} the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy with the character of the Turks," he says, "which has led me to think so highly of their moral excellence, has not given me the same favorable{20} impression of the development of their mental powers. Their refinement is of manners and affections; there is little cultivation or activity of mind among them." This admission implies a great deal, and brings us to a fresh{25} consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century of their political existence when Thornton and Volney lived among them, and these authors report of them as follows: "Their buildings," says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions,{30} bad in detail, both in taste and execution, fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius. Their cities are not decorated with public monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish." Their religion forbids them every sort of {5} painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts cannot exist among them. They have no music but vocal; and know of no accompaniment except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe. Their singing is in a great measure recitative,{10} with little variation of note. They have scarcely any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do not allow of anatomy. As to science, the telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are unknown, except as playthings. The compass {15} is not universally employed in their navy, nor are its common purposes thoroughly understood. Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry, are either not known, or practiced only on antiquated and exploded principles. As to their{20} civil and criminal codes of law, these are unalterably fixed in the Koran....

Compare the Rome of Junius Brutus to the Rome of Constantine, 800 years afterwards. In each of these polities there was a continuous{25} progression, and the end was unlike the beginning; but the Turks, except that they have gained the faculty of political union, are pretty much what they were when they crossed the Jaxartes and Oxus. Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the{30} Greek schism also took place; now from Michael Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853, Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a longer time has passed in China of a similar political inertness: yet China has preserved at{5} least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical science, with which they respectively passed into their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are still in the less than infancy of art, literature, philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may{10} fairly conclude that, if they have not learned the very alphabet of science in eight hundred years, they are not likely to set to work on it in the nine hundredth.

It is true that in the last quarter of a century{15} efforts have been made by the government of Constantinople to innovate on the existing condition of its people; and it has addressed itself in the first instance to certain details of daily Turkish life. We must take it for granted that it{20} began with such changes as were easiest; if so, its failure in these small matters suggests how little ground there is for hope of success in other advances more important and difficult. Every one knows that in the details of dress, carriage,{25} and general manners, the Turks are very different from Europeans: so different, and so consistently different, that the contrariety would seem to arise from some difference of essential principle. "This dissimilitude," says Mr. Thornton, "which pervades the whole of their habits, is so general, even in things of apparent insignificance, as almost to indicate design rather than accident...."{5}

To learn from others, you must entertain a respect for them; no one listens to those whom he contemns. Christian nations make progress in secular matters, because they are aware they have many things to learn, and do not mind from{10} whom they learn them, so that he be able to teach. It is true that Christianity, as well as Mahometanism, which imitated it, has its visible polity, and its universal rule, and its especial prerogatives and powers and lessons, for its disciples.{15} But, with a Divine wisdom, and contrary to its human copyist, it has carefully guarded (if I may use the expression) against extending its revelations to any point which would blunt the keenness of human research or the activity of{20} human toil. It has taken those matters for its field in which the human mind, left to itself, could not profitably exercise itself, or progress, if it would; it has confined its revelations to the province of theology, only indirectly touching{25} on other departments of knowledge, so far as theological truth accidentally affects them; and it has shown an equally remarkable care in preventing the introduction of the spirit of caste or race into its constitution or administration.{30} Pure nationalism it abhors; its authoritative documents pointedly ignore the distinction of Jew and Gentile, and warn us that the first often becomes the last; while its subsequent history has illustrated this great principle, by its awful, and absolute, and inscrutable, and irreversible{5} passage from country to country, as its territory and its home. Such, then, it has been in the Divine counsels, and such, too, as realized in fact; but man has ways of his own, and, even before its introduction into the world, the inspired{10} announcements, which preceded it, were distorted by the people to whom they were given, to minister to views of a very different kind. The secularized Jews, relying on the supernatural favors locally and temporally bestowed on{15} themselves, fell into the error of supposing that a conquest of the earth was reserved for some mighty warrior of their own race, and that, in compensation of the reverses which befell them, they were to become an imperial nation.{20}

What a contrast is presented to us by these different ideas of a universal empire! The distinctions of race are indelible; a Jew cannot become a Greek, or a Greek a Jew; birth is an event of past time; according to the Judaizers,{25} their nation, as a nation, was ever to be dominant; and all other nations, as such, were inferior and subject. What was the necessary consequence? There is nothing men more pride themselves on than birth, for this very reason,{30} that it is irrevocable; it can neither be given to those who have it not, nor taken away from those who have. The Almighty can do anything which admits of doing; He can compensate every evil; but a Greek poet says that there is one thing impossible to Him—to undo what is{5} done. Without throwing the thought into a shape which borders on the profane, we may see in it the reason why the idea of national power was so dear and so dangerous to the Jew. It was his consciousness of inalienable superiority that{10} led him to regard Roman and Greek, Syrian and Egyptian, with ineffable arrogance and scorn. Christians, too, are accustomed to think of those who are not Christians as their inferiors; but the conviction which possesses them, that they have{15} what others have not, is obviously not open to the temptation which nationalism presents. According to their own faith, there is no insuperable gulf between themselves and the rest of mankind; there is not a being in the whole world but is{20} invited by their religion to occupy the same position as themselves, and, did he come, would stand on their very level, as if he had ever been there. Such accessions to their body they continually receive, and they are bound under{25} obligation of duty to promote them. They never can pronounce of any one, now external to them, that he will not some day be among them; they never can pronounce of themselves that, though they are now within, they may not some day{30} be found outside, the Divine polity. Such are the sentiments inculcated by Christianity, even in the contemplation of the very superiority which it imparts; even there it is a principle, not of repulsion between man and man, but of good fellowship; but as to subjects of secular{5} knowledge, since here it does not arrogate any superiority at all, it has in fact no tendency whatever to center its disciple's contemplation on himself, or to alienate him from his kind. He readily acknowledges and defers to the superiority in{10} art or science of those, if so be, who are unhappily enemies to Christianity. He admits the principle of progress on all matters of knowledge and conduct on which the Creator has not decided the truth already by revealing it; and he is at{15} all times ready to learn, in those merely secular matters, from those who can teach him best. Thus it is that Christianity, even negatively, and without contemplating its positive influences, is the religion of civilization.{20}