It has been shown in preceding chapters that the two great historic movements of the growth and decay of the Turkish Empire extended over periods not differing much in length. Reckoning its birth from the accession, in 1288, of Othman, as chief of a small tribe of Turks in Asia Minor, nearly three hundred years elapsed before the Empire reached its zenith. During these years ten eminent Sultans and one Grand Vizier (Sokolli) of a degenerate Sultan were concerned in its extension. It was a period of almost continuous victory and conquest. The Ottoman armies, during these years, met with only a single serious disaster, that at Angora in 1402 at the hands of Timur and a host of Mongolian invaders, which seemed at first to have struck a fatal blow to the Empire. But it soon rallied, and the process of aggrandizement was renewed. With this exception the Ottomans were almost uniformly successful. The number, however, of pitched battles in the field, which decided the fate of States successively invaded, was not great. Thrace was won by the defeat of the Byzantines by Murad I at Eski Baba in 1361. The Bulgarians were conquered at Samakof in 1371, and the Serbians at Kossova in 1389, by the same Sultan. The Hungarians were overthrown at Mohacz in 1529. The Persians were defeated at Calderan, 1514, near Tabriz, and the Egyptians at Aleppo, 1516, and Ridania, near Cairo, under Selim, 1516. The crusaders from Europe were defeated in three great battles—at the Maritza, 1363, Nicopolis, 1396, and Varna, 1444. At most of these battles the Ottomans had great superiority of numbers, and as against the Persians and Egyptians they were provided with a powerful artillery, of which their opponents were wholly deficient. The other very numerous campaigns consisted mainly of successions of sieges by invading armies of Ottomans, where the invaded, with inferior forces, protracted the defence, often over long terms of years.

The Ottomans were almost equally successful at sea, with one notable exception, at Lepanto, at the very end of the period we are referring to, when they met with a terrible disaster from the combined navies of Europe, much inferior in numbers of ships and men. But before this their naval supremacy had enabled them to extend the Empire over Algiers and Tunis. Nothing resulted from the great battle of Lepanto except loss of prestige to the Ottomans. The combination against them was dissolved, and for many years they maintained supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

At the close of this period of growth the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith and extended over the vast countries described in the chapter on the Grand Vizier Sokolli. The whole of its immense area, however, was not in full ownership of the Ottomans. Parts of it, such as North Hungary, were autonomous States with native rulers paying tribute to the Porte. Other parts, such as the Crimea, Wallachia, and Moldavia, were vassal States, whose princes were appointed by the Sultan, and which were bound to send contingents in support of the Ottoman armies when at war. The really integral parts of the Empire in Europe were Thrace, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, and Albania; in Asia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and a great part of Arabia; and in Africa, Tripoli. Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers very early acquired a practical autonomy under the suzerainty of the Porte, though they were still nominally integral parts of the Empire. The Empire thus constituted was one of the greatest in the then world. It may be worth while briefly to review the causes which led to its aggregation.

It was the common belief in Europe, confirmed by many historians, up to recent times, that the Ottoman armies which invaded Europe from Asia Minor were composed of pure Turks, and that the motive which impelled them in their conquest was the fanatical desire to extend Islam. But these views have been modified of late years. It has been shown that the armies which Sultans Orchan and Murad led across the Straits into Europe were not pure Turks, but were very largely composed of subjects of the East Roman Empire from the northern parts of Asia Minor, who, after the defeat there of the Byzantine armies, had embraced Islam. They were welded with the Turks by religion into something approaching to a nation. They called themselves Osmanlis, or Ottomans, from the founder of the Othman dynasty. It may be doubted whether the Turks alone were capable of effecting the conquests in Europe. It is certain that they could not have maintained the Empire when formed.

The Turks of Anatolia had many valuable qualities as soldiers. They were, and are to this day, brave, hardy, sober, frugal, and cleanly in their habits, as inculcated by their religion, a strong point in their favour in days when sanitary arrangements were completely ignored by armies. They bore the hardships of long campaigns without complaint. But they were deficient in intelligence and education, which count for much in war as in civil life. In this respect they were very inferior to subjects of the East Roman Empire and to many of the Christians with whom they came in conflict. But the Ottomans who first invaded Europe were not simply Turks. Later, the most effective corps in the Ottoman army was formed exclusively of the sons of Christian parents in the Balkans, conscripted at an early age and forcibly converted to Islam. It was with forces thus constituted that the Ottomans extended their Empire up to and beyond the Danube. The conquests of the larger part of Asia Minor, of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, were also effected, by composite forces, to which Serbia and Wallachia sent contingents by virtue of treaties with the Porte. The greater number of Ottoman generals who distinguished themselves in these early days of conquest were not of Turkish race, but were Greeks, Albanians, Slavs, and Italians, who had embraced Islam or whose forbears had done so. It was the same with almost all the naval commanders. They were of foreign origin, who had gained experience as pirates and had embraced Islam. The crews who manned the Ottoman navy were mainly Greeks from the islands in the Ægean Sea.

With respect to the objects and motives of the Ottoman conquests, a careful review of the history of the early Sultans has shown that there was very little, if any, of missionary enterprise on behalf of Islam. It will be admitted that there is no pretence for concluding that the vast conquests in Asia and Africa had any such motive. The populations there were already Moslems. The motives for conquest were the ambition to extend the Empire at the expense of neighbouring States and the hope of plunder on the part of the soldiers. Religious zeal had nothing to do with it. What reason is there to suppose that conquests in Europe had any different object than those in Asia? As a matter of fact, there was no very large extension of Islam in Europe as a result of Ottoman conquest. When cities were captured and their inhabitants were massacred, or when districts were conquered and the people were carried away as captives to be sold as slaves, they do not appear to have had the alternative offered to them of embracing Islam.

In some few districts, as in Bosnia and parts of Albania and the Morea, the landowners, or some of them, were allowed to avoid the confiscation of their property by becoming Mussulmans. But these were exceptions. The general rule was that the land of the conquered districts was confiscated without the option to the owners of changing their religion and saving their property. As regards the labouring people, the rayas, there does not appear to have been any desire that they should adopt the religion of their conquerors. They were wanted for the cultivation of the land as serfs or slaves. It seems to have been a matter of indifference what their religion was.

There is also nothing to show that the Ottoman soldiers were animated by any religious zeal in their campaigns in Europe. The main cause of their military efficiency was the organization of the army effected by Orchan and perfected by Murad I. It offered immense rewards to the soldiers for victories in battle and for personal valour, in the share of booty and plunder levied in the conquered districts, of captives to be sold as slaves, of women for wives or concubines or to be sold for harems, and of lands to be distributed as fiefs. These rewards appealed to the predatory instincts of the Moslem soldiers, whether Turks or others of alien origin. In the rare intervals of peace the soldiers soon wearied of life in barracks, and yearned for active campaigns. At such times the Janissaries and other soldiers were a danger to the State from their turbulence and disorder. It was necessary to find employment for them at a distance. This acted as a constant incitement to war and to fresh conquests. It was one of the causes of the continuous growth of the Empire.

A second main cause of success to the Ottoman armies in Europe was the want of union for resistance on the part of the people of the Balkan States. There can be little doubt that if the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbians had combined to resist the invading Moslems their efforts would have been successful. But Greeks and Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbians hated one another more than they feared and hated the Ottomans. In the six centuries dealt with in this volume there was only a single occasion when Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbians formed a combination against the Ottomans. This was not till 1912. The combination was successful and drove the Turks out of Macedonia, Epirus, Albania, and the greater part of Thrace. But we have shown that it broke down on the division of the spoil, with the result that the Turks recovered a small part of their lost territory. The case illustrates our contention that want of union of the Christian States was a main cause of the servitude of all of them for nearly five hundred years under Turkish rule.

Lastly, in appreciating the causes of the wonderful growth of the Ottoman Empire, we must not lose sight of the personal element, of the fact that, for ten generations, the Othman family produced men capable of leading their armies in the field to victory, and almost equally remarkable as administrators and statesmen. This succession of a single family, father and son, for ten generations without a break, culminating in the greatest of them, Solyman the Magnificent, is quite without precedent or example in history. The Othman family were pure Turks in their origin. But the Turkish blood was very soon diluted. The mothers of future Sultans were either captives taken by corsairs or slaves bought on account of their beauty. They were of every race—Greeks, Slavs, Italians, or Russians. But in spite of this mixed blood the type of Sultans remained much the same for ten generations. The prestige acquired by the family in these three hundred years, as founders and maintainers of the Empire and as generals who led their armies to victory, was such that it has impressed itself on the imagination of all Ottomans, and has survived to this day, in spite of the long subsequent degeneration of the family. Unquestionably, the foundation and growth of the Empire were largely due to the personal qualities of the Othman dynasty.

After the death in 1578 of Grand Vizier Sokolli, who carried on the traditions of the first ten Sultans for a few years under the worthless Selim II, the pendulum of Empire swung in the opposite direction. Thenceforth, down to the present time, there were successions of defeats and disasters to the Turkish Empire, with but few intermissions. Provinces were torn from it periodically, like leaves from an artichoke, till all but a small fraction of it in Europe, the whole of its possessions in Africa, and a large part in Asia have been lost to the Empire. What remains to it is the core of Turkish and Arabic provinces in Asia, and in Europe only its capital, Constantinople, and a small portion of Thrace to the north of it.

Five of the Great Powers of Europe have had their share of the spoils, and six independent States have been resuscitated out of the remaining dÉbris of it. It is hard to say which of the Great Powers gained most. Austria recovered by force of arms Hungary, Transylvania, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, and by artful policy Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russia obtained by conquest the Crimea, Bessarabia, Podolia, and a part of the Ukraine in Europe, and the Caucasus, and a great part of Armenia, in Asia. France has possessed itself of Algiers and Tunis. England has secured the suzerainty and practical possession of Egypt and complete possession of Cyprus and Aden. Italy has seized Tripoli. Of the six smaller independent States, Bulgaria and Roumania owe their revival solely to Russia, Greece mainly to Great Britain and France, Albania to the concert of the Balkan States in 1912, and Serbia and Montenegro alone owe their freedom mainly to their own valour. It need not be said that gratitude forms no part of the ethics of modern statecraft, and a few only of the above States have recognized that they owe anything to the Powers who rescued them from Turkish rule.

During the last three hundred years, when these vast changes were being effected, the Ottoman army lost all the prestige it had acquired during the previous three hundred years. With the single exception of the battle of Cerestes, fought against the Hungarians in 1646, when a dÉbÂcle of the Turkish army was averted by the splendid cavalry charge of Cicala Pasha, which saved to the Ottoman Empire the larger part of Hungary for another term of seventy-two years, its armies were defeated in almost every battle of any importance. In nearly all of them the Ottomans had the advantage of very superior numbers, but this did not save them from disaster. The armies opposed to them were led by a succession of generals who were masters of the art of war, such as Sobieski, King of Poland, Prince EugÈne of Savoy, Prince Charles of Lorraine, Generals Munnich, Loudon, Kutusoff, Suvorov, Diebitsch, Paskievitch, Skobeleff, and Gourko. Compared with these, the Turks had not a single general of eminence and only a few valiant leaders in battle.

To what causes, then, are we to attribute the decay and dismemberment of the vast Empire, and the complete failure of its armies to maintain prestige for victory and valour? It is more easy perhaps to suggest causes for downfall than for the birth and growth of the Empire. First and foremost of the causes has unquestionably been the degeneracy of the Othman dynasty. It could not have been by a mere chance coincidence that the growth of Empire was synchronous with the reign of the first ten Sultans, and that its decay and dismemberment were extended through the reign of twenty-five successors, of whom all but two, or possibly three, were degenerates and wholly incompetent to rule. The Ottoman State was an autocracy in which all military, civil, and religious faculties were centred in its head. It needed autocrats competent for the task, and in the absence of such it was certain that the State would take the road to ruin. Whether the degeneracy of the dynasty was due, as has been hinted, to a break in the true succession, and the introduction of alien blood after Solyman the Magnificent, or not, the fact remains that we can discern no trace of the eminent qualities of the family in those who succeeded him.

The deterioration of the race, which began with Selim ‘the Sot,’ was confirmed and accentuated by what occurred after three more Sultans had succeeded father to son—all of them equally unfit to fill the throne. The original law of succession, which had been set aside by the cruel practice of fratricide, was then reverted to, and the eldest male of the family, and not the eldest son of a defunct Sultan, was recognized as his successor. Thenceforth, by way of precaution against conspiracy and rebellion, the reigning Sultans, in lieu of putting their brothers to death, immured them as virtual prisoners in the building of the Seraglio known as the Cage, where they were allowed little or no communication with the world. They were permitted to maintain their harems, but by some abominable process the women were sterilized so as to prevent their giving birth to possible claimants to the throne. Of twenty successors to Mahomet IV, seventeen were subjected to this degrading treatment, and only left prison on succeeding to the throne. Three Sultans escaped this treatment, two of them by succeeding their fathers, in default of other male heirs of an older age. Only one of these three was better equipped to fill the throne than the average of the other seventeen. It is evident, therefore, that the dynasty was worn out. It would have been well for the Empire if the Othman race had long ago come to an end, and had been replaced by some more virile and competent stock.

It followed, from the degeneracy of this long succession of Sultans, that the supreme power of the State fell into other hands, either of viziers who were able to dominate the reigning Sultans and to secure themselves against intrigues of all kinds, or more often of the harem. It would be difficult to exaggerate the evils which resulted from the intervention of the Sultan’s harem in affairs of State. The harem consisted of a vast concourse of women and slaves, of concubines and eunuchs, maintained at a huge expense—a nest of extravagance and corruption. It was always in antagonism to the official administration of the Porte, which ostensibly carried on the administration of the State under the direction of the Sultan. The favourite concubine for the time being, or the ambitious mother of a Sultan, or not infrequently the principal eunuch, gained the ear of the Sultan and overruled the more experienced advisers of the Porte. The harem was the centre from which corruption spread throughout the Turkish Empire, as officials of every degree, from the highest to the lowest, found it expedient to secure their interest with its inmates by heavy bribes. It has been shown in previous pages that the sale of offices, civil and military, became universal. This was largely responsible for the decay and dismemberment of the State. An illustration of this was to be found in the cases of Egypt, Algiers, and Tunis. The incompetent pashas, who had obtained by purchase the governorships of these important provinces, were unable to control the local Mamelukes in Egypt, or the local Janissaries in Algiers and Tunis, with the result that these provinces became practically independent and later were lost to the Empire.

A second main cause of the decadence of the Empire was undoubtedly the deterioration of its armies. We miss altogether in the many great battles of the last three hundred years the Élan and the daring spirit by which the Ottomans won their many victories in the period of accretion of the Empire. Two main explanations may be offered for this. The one that the armies in the later period were formed more exclusively from the Turkish and Arabic subjects of the Empire, and that the proportion of men of Greek or Slav descent was far less, if it was not wholly absent. When the Empire was extended over the whole of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Syria, the Moslem population was enormously increased. In 1648 the corps of Janissaries ceased to be levied from Christian youths and was recruited from Moslems. There was wanting, therefore, to the army the spirit given to it in the past by the Greeks and other Christian races. This difference was probably more serious in the case of the officers than with the rank and file. The Turks supplied very poor material for officers.

The other explanation is to be found in the absence of incentive to military ardour in the later period. If we have been justified in the conclusion that there was little or no motive for the Turkish army in the shape of religious fanaticism and the desire to spread Islam, but that plunder and the hope of acquiring lands for distribution among the soldiers was its main inducement, it followed that this incentive to victory and valour was almost entirely absent in the later period when the Empire was on the defensive, when it was no longer a question of making fresh conquests, but of retaining what had already been won. The army could not expect to get loot and plunder or captives for sale as slaves, or land to be confiscated for fiefs, when engaged in war for the defence of some tributary or vassal State or of some more integral part of the Empire. Nor could there be the feeling of fighting for their own homes and property when defending a subject Christian province. Yet another partial explanation is to be found in the fact that the general corruption had infected the army, as well as the civil administration of the State. Promotions through all the ranks went not to merit, but to the highest bidders. The civil branches of the army also, such as the commissariat and those for the supply of munitions, which in the earlier period were well provided for, fell into disorder and confusion owing to the universal spread of corruption.

In view of these many serious changes, it is not difficult to appreciate the causes for the falling off of the morale of the Ottoman army and for its failure to maintain the reputation it had achieved in the three centuries of conquest and extension of the Empire. The war which is now raging in the Near East has shown that the Ottoman soldiers, when organized, and in part led, by competent foreign officers, when fighting pro aris et focis, and especially when in defence of well fortified lines, have a great military value.

A third cause, however, for the failure of the Ottomans to maintain their Empire in Europe is undoubtedly to be found in the continually worsening conditions of the Christian populations subject to it. In the earlier period there is good reason to conclude that the average condition of the rayas in the Christian provinces subjected to Ottoman rule and law was somewhat better than that of the peasants in some neighbouring States, such as Hungary, Austria, and Russia. There was something in the way of fixity of tenure accorded to the rayas which was absent from the feudal serfs.

It was alleged that peasants from Hungary not infrequently migrated into the Balkan States in order to enjoy this better treatment, and it is certain that the Greeks of the Morea and Crete preferred the rule of the Ottomans, bad as it was, to that of the Venetians, who were even more cruel and rapacious. However that may have been, it is certain that everywhere under Turkish rule, during the last three hundred years, the conditions of the Christian populations became more wretched and intolerable, and relatively far worse than in neighbouring States. This was greatly due to the degeneracy and corruption of the central Government at Constantinople, and to its evil example and influence throughout the Empire. Governors of provinces and all local officials became more corrupt and rapacious. There was no security for life or property. Justice was not obtainable in the local tribunals. Arbitrary exactions were levied on the peasantry. Brigandage everywhere increased. Money levied in the provinces was never expended for the benefit of their populations. Turkish rule acted as a blight on the districts subject to it. Provinces liberated from it improved in condition beyond recognition. The comparison with them was an ever present object-lesson to those who remained under Turkish rule. The efforts of the combined Powers of Europe to induce or compel the Porte to effect improvements in the government of its subjects proved to be futile and impotent. Treaty obligations with this object were habitually disregarded by the Porte and were treated as waste-paper. Provinces thus conditioned were always on the brink of rebellion. They were kept in subjection, not by the maintenance of any large armed forces there, but by periodic massacres of a ruthless character. These were not the product of religious fanaticism, as has often been suggested, but of deliberate policy, and were instigated by orders direct from the Porte, with the hope of inspiring terror in the minds of the subject races.

Foreign intervention, incited not so much by territorial ambition as by popular sympathy for the oppressed, was resorted to for the purpose of redressing grievous wrongs and for preserving the peace of Europe. As a result of these causes, extending over more than three hundred years, the Turkish Empire, so far as Europe is concerned, and in the sense of a dominant Power over subject races, has ceased to exist. In countries which it held in subjection for over five hundred years it has left no trace that it ever existed. The very few Turks and the Tartars and Circassians who had been planted there by the Porte when the Crimea and the Caucasus were subjected by Russia have departed bag and baggage from Europe. They have migrated to Asia Minor at the instigation of their mollahs. The few Moslems who remain behind in these districts are not of Ottoman or Turkish descent; they are of the same races as their neighbours. Their ancestors adopted Islam to save their property.

The Young Turks, who of late years have controlled the Empire, have signally failed to arrest the great movement which we have above described. They have further developed their policy of Turkifying what remains to them of the Empire during the existing war. Their massacres and deportations of Armenians in Asia Minor have been on a scale and with a cruelty without precedent in history. Whether responsibility for this indelible crime will be enforced on them, and whether, as it richly deserves, the Turkish Empire will suffer further reductions, will depend on the issue of the colossal struggle in which the nations of Europe are now engaged. Whatever the future may have in store in these respects, there is one certain moral to be drawn from the story which has been told in these pages, namely that an Empire originally founded on the predatory instincts of an alien military caste, and whose rulers during the last four hundred years have never recognized that they had any responsibility for the good government and well-being of the races subject to them, could not, if there be any law of human progress in the world, be permanent, and was destined ultimately to perish by the sword.