Note 39 — Chapter V · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIANS OF SPAIN.

But if we except the tribute of the children, to which the conquered Greeks seem to have submitted with so little show of resistance, and which owed its abolition, not to any revolt or insurrection against its continuance, but to the increase of the Turkish population and of the number of the renegades who were constantly entering the Sultan’s service,39—the treatment of their Christian subjects by the Ottoman emperors—at least for two centuries after their conquest of Greece—exhibits a toleration such as was at that time quite unknown in the rest of Europe. The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania, and the Unitarians of the latter country, long preferred to submit to the Turks rather than fall into the hands of the fanatical house of Hapsburg;40 and the Protestants of Silesia looked with longing eyes towards Turkey, and would gladly have purchased religious freedom at the price of submission to the Muslim rule.41 It was to Turkey that the persecuted Spanish Jews fled for refuge in enormous numbers at the end of the fifteenth century,42 and the Cossacks who belonged to the sect of the Old Believers and were persecuted by the Russian State Church, found in the dominions of the Sultan the toleration which their Christian brethren denied them.43 Well might Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch in the seventeenth century, congratulate himself when he saw the fearful atrocities that the Catholic Poles inflicted on the Russians of the Orthodox Eastern Church: “We all wept much over the thousands of martyrs who were killed by those impious wretches, the enemies of the faith, in these forty or fifty years. The number probably amounted to seventy or eighty thousand souls. O you infidels! O you monsters of impurity! O you hearts of stone! What had the nuns and women done? What the girls and boys and infant children, that you should murder them?… And why do I pronounce them (the Poles) accursed? Because they have shown themselves more debased and wicked than the corrupt worshippers of idols, by their cruel treatment of Christians, thinking to abolish the very name of Orthodox. God perpetuate the empire of the Turks for ever and ever! For they take their impost, and enter into no account of religion, be their subjects Christians or Nazarenes, Jews or Samarians: whereas these accursed Poles were not content with taxes and tithes from the brethren of Christ, though willing to serve them; but they subjected them to the authority of the enemies of Christ, the tyrannical Jews, who did not even permit them to build churches, nor leave them any priests that knew the mysteries of their faith.”44 Even in Italy there were men who turned longing eyes towards the Turks in the hope that as their subjects they might enjoy the freedom and the toleration they despaired of enjoying under a Christian government.45 It would seem, then, that Islam was not spread by force in the dominion of the Sultan of Turkey, and though the want of even-handed justice and the oppression of unscrupulous officials in the days of the empire’s decline, may have driven some Christians to attempt to better their condition by a change of faith, such cases were rare in the first two centuries of the Turkish rule in Europe, to which period the mass of conversions belong. It would have been wonderful indeed if the ardour of proselytising that animated the Ottomans at this time had never carried them beyond the bounds of toleration established by their own laws. Yet it has been said by one who was a captive among them for twenty-two years that the Turks “compelled no one to renounce his faith.”46 Similar testimony is borne by others: an English gentleman who visited Turkey in the early part of the seventeenth century, tells us that “There is seldom any compulsion of conscience, and then not by death, where no criminal offence gives occasion.”47 Writing about thirty years later (in 1663), the author48 of a Türcken-Schrifft says: “Meanwhile he (i.e. the Turk) wins (converts) by craft more than by force, and snatches away Christ by fraud out of the hearts of men. For the Turk, it is true, at the present time compels no country by violence to apostatise; but he uses other means whereby imperceptibly he roots out Christianity.… What then has become of the Christians? They are not expelled from the country, neither are they forced to embrace the Turkish faith: then they must of themselves have been converted into Turks.”