R. G. Latham

RUMELIA.—THE TURK STOCK.—ZONES OF CONQUEST.—EARLY INTRUSIONS OF TURK POPULATIONS WESTWARD.—THRACIANS.—THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS.—THE PELASGI OF MACEDONIA.—BOSNIA, HERZEGOVNA AND TURKISH CROATIA.—BULGARIA.

THE European population of the Ottoman Empire, laying aside Jews, Armenians, and other similarly non-indigenous populations, is fivefold—Turk, Greek, Slavonic, Rumanyo, and Albanian. The Albanian, however, it was necessary to consider in the first chapter.

Rumelia, the province which first comes into notice is, the true and proper area of the Turks, Ottomans, or Osmanlis; a family which, considered in respect to European ethnology, is as unimportant from its numerical magnitude, as it is recent in respect to its introduction. Yet this is a fact which we are slow to perceive at first; since the Turkish empire is so great, that, unless we separate its ethnological from its political elements, we fail to realize the extent to which the Osmanlis are not only intrusive, but inconsiderable. It is only in one of its provinces that the number of the Osmanli conquerors so nearly approaches that of the original Europeans, to give them the appearance of the natural occupants of the country; this being the province in question, coinciding, as nearly as possible, with the Valley of the ancient Hebrus, or the modern Maritza. It is a wide and fruitful plain, that Nature, perhaps, meant for tillage, but which the pastoral habits of its possessors have kept a grazing country. It is a plain, with the exception of the small mountain ridges on each side—the Despoto-Dagh and the Stanches-Dagh—a point worth remembering, because its physical conditions determine the probable permanence of its earlier populations—populations which, in all impracticable countries, are likely to have held their own in the mountains, and to have retreated before an invader in the plains.

As A.D. 1458 is the date of the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. it may also pass for the date of the commencement of the Osmanli sway in Europe, and the Osmanli preponderance in the particular occupation of the province of Rumelia; for the time, in short, when ancient Thrace became Turkish. But the preliminaries had been going on for some time before, and it was as early as A.D. 1360 that the Hellespont was crossed by Amurath I. Till then, the Osmanli belonged to Asia Minor, Anatolia, or Roum, as it was called from the declining power of the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. But they were not indigenous even there; since Roum or Anatolia was a conquered country, even as Rumelia was—conquered, too, from the same degenerate and fictitious Romans. Hence the stream of Ottoman blood that passed from Asia to Europe was by no means pure. The occupancy of Asia Minor was not the work of a day; on the contrary, the process of appropriation was upwards of four centuries in duration; since the conquest of the race of Seljuk began in A.D. 1074. And this again was an extension of frontier from Persia; and Persia was never truly Turk. The stream that spread and wasted itself in Europe is not discovered at its fountain-head until we have traced it from Rumelia to Anatolia, from Anatolia to Persia, and from Persia to either Turkistan or further. Then, indeed, we find amongst the most southern members of the great Turk stock, amongst those whose blood has been most mixed, and amongst those who are farthest from the country of the Mongols of Mongolia, the great great ancestors of the family and followers of Othman.

It must be remembered that all the recorded movements that thus brought a conquering population from the Oxus to the Hebrus were military—marches of armies consisting of hosts of warriors. That anything approaching a national migration wherein the females bore a reasonable proportion to the males ever took place in Turkish ethnology has not been shown; so that, on the mother’s side, the Osmanli must, in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, be other than Turk—sometimes Persian, sometimes Armenian, sometimes Georgian or Circassian, sometimes Anatolian (for some such adjective is required to denote the population of Asia Minor), sometimes European—and when European, Greek, Wallachian, Albanian, or Slavonic.

I have enlarged upon this because the majority of the travellers who, in Independent Tartary, Siberia, Turcomania, or Bokhara, meet with the other members of the Turk stock, in their original homes, are struck by the extent to which they differ in physiognomy from the Osmanli or Ottoman of Europe. They are often smooth-skinned and beardless, glabrous and glaucous, with high-cheek bones and oblique eyes, and other similar characteristics of the Mongol. The inference from this has, too often, been the wrong way; and an infusion of Mongolian blood been presumed. The truth is, that it is the Turks of Europe that have been modified; at any rate, it is only with the European that an intermixture of blood at all proportionate to the differences of physical conformation can be shown as an historical fact.

As a general rule the Osmanli prefers pastoral to agricultural employment, and dominant idleness to either. There is a reason for his preference to flocks and herds rather than to corn and tillage. His own proper and original area, the parts to the east and north of the Caspian, is a steppe, fitted for the nomad, but unfitted for the husbandman. Here, and here only, he has not been an intruder and a conqueror. Here, and here only, has he been without a subject population to work for him. This he has in Europe, this he has in Bokhara, this he has in Egypt; so that his love for looking-on and enjoying the labour of others is what he shares with the rest of the world, whereas his preference of a shepherd’s life to a cultivator’s is a habit rather than instinct. In the few parts of the original Turk area, where the conditions of soil and climate are favourable to agriculture, and where he is no dominant lord, but only an ordinary occupant, the Turk is as good a farmer as the generality. If he be not so in Asia Minor it is due to the insecurity of the fruits of his industry. On the other hand, in the valley of the Gurgan (falling into the Caspian from the east) the pre-eminently Turk branch of the Goklan Turcomans is mainly employed upon agriculture—growing grain and rearing silkworms. This, it may be said, is a singular instance. It is so; but where, besides, does any member of the great Turk stock come under the conditions necessary for agricultural industry—a fit soil and climate, combined with security of possession, and the absence of a subject and inferior class? Like any other fact, however isolated, it sets aside the current notion of the unfitness of the Turk for regular and industrial labour; a habitude, which, like so many other points of ethnology, is connected with external circumstances far more than blood, pedigree, or race.

The intellectual development of the Turk stock in general has been that of the majority of the families of mankind—moderate, or less than moderate; for invention and originality are the exceptions rather than the rule. And here they are in the same predicament as they were in respect to their industry. In their original country they are far removed from the contact of any literature or science better than their own; for what are the models for the Turk of Independent Tartary? In the country of their conquests they have clever Greeks and Arabs to do their head-work for them. And we may add to these drawbacks, the unfavourable effects of their creed. The language that gave them the Koran can give them nothing useful for the Europe of the nineteenth century; whilst the Europe of the nineteenth century is, in their eyes, a Europe of infidels.

However much we may lament the bigotry, ignorance, and sensuality of the Osmanli, he is only what his creed, conquests, and other unfortunate conditions make him. Of the hardy and simple families of the world, as opposed to the effeminate and subtle, he belongs to the most typical. This is shown in his history. Of the material conquerors of the world, of the disturbers of things physical by physical force, the Turks are the greatest: since what they have won has been by hardihood of will and strength of arm far less than by diplomacy or the more indirect effects of their arts and literature—of which, indeed, they have had none. But because they have been thus material, they have not been permanent. Had they conquered, like the ancient Romans, Egypt and Barbary and Servia and Persia and Hindustan would be Turk, giving an area greater than that of the Anglo-Saxons or the Slavonians. Still, they are the great material conquerors of history.

Yet this is but a result of certain physical and geographical conditions:—no proof of any specific hardihood of nature. It is no fanciful imagination to say, that the areas of the great conquering nations of the world, are as definitely bounded by certain lines of latitude as are those of climate; and that such areas give us zones of conquest and subjugation as truly as the Temperate or the Frigid give us zones of climate. There are a priori reasons for this; and there are proofs of it in every page of history. The effects of a northern latitude are to stunt the population, after the fashion of the Laplander; those of the tropics to enervate. Between these extremes the peoples that are at once hardy and well-grown strike, as with a two-edged sword, both upwards and downwards, north and south. The Germans, Slavonians, Turks, and Algonkins verify this. Sometimes a superior civilization, sometimes undeveloped energies, referable to some new influences, counteract this natural disposition (one of the nearest approaches to a law in ethnology) but the general rule is, as has been stated,—apparent exceptions, as are the Romans and Arabians.

The Turks pressed forward in the direction of Europe, even as the Sarmatians did towards India, earlier than they have the credit of doing. The Skoloti have been already considered. But what do we find in the early history of Asia Minor? A mountain throughout the Turk area is Tagh or Dagh. The mountain from which the 10,000 Greeks saw the sea was Thekh-es. This, perhaps, is accidental. But who dwelt around it? The Skythini, the Anatolian equivalents to the Russian SkythÆ. But this proves too much, since SkythÆ was no native name, but one of Sarmatian origin, and, as such, indicative of Sarmatians in the parts about. Otherwise, how could it be used? These Sarmatians cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the name in the Anabasis of the king of the Paphlagonian neighbours of the Scythini, near the mountain Thekhes, is Korylas, and Kral is the Lithuanic for king. But king is a common, not a proper name. So is Zupan (=chief, lord, or superior) in the present Slavonic. Yet Gibbon speaks of Zupanus, as a king so-called, by certain Slavonians of the Middle Danube. All this may be accidental. Such accidents, however, are stranger than the facts which explain them away.

Ottomans, Greeks, Romans, Goths, and Slavonians have all modified the original blood of Thrace; yet the present blood of Ottoman Rumelia is, probably, more Thracian than aught else, Thracian on the mothers’ side.

The old Thracian affinities are difficult; but not beyond investigation. A series of statements on the part of good classical authors tell us, that the Daci were what the GetÆ were, and the Thracians what the GetÆ; also, that the Phrygians spoke the same language as the Thracians, and the Armenians as the Phrygians. If so, either the ancient language of Hungary must have been spoken as far as the Caspian, or the ancient Armenian as far as the Theiss. Many facts are against this: indeed the evidence must be dealt with by attributing two languages to Phrygia, one approaching the nearest tongue on the East, which would be the Armenian, and another standing in the same relation to the Thracian, on the west. This distinction being drawn, the rest is probable.

The evidence as to there having been members of the Thracian stock on both sides the Hellespont, is not limited to the Phrygians of Mysia. The Bithyni and others are in the same category. Which way was the migration? It is generally believed to have been from Asia to Europe; but the deduction of the Greeks from Italy, and that of the Sanskrit language from Europe, modifies this view. In truth, the present writer reads the whole history of Thrace backwards; seeing in the majority of the populations akin to the Thracians on the eastern side of the Hellespont signs of European intrusion. Signs, too, of European intrusion he sees in the world-wide tale of Troy; the historical basis of the great Homeric poems being not the struggle between the Greek and the Asiatic, but that between the Greek and Thracian, each fighting for a footing in Asia Minor. Perhaps the beginning of the Greek colonization was the end of the Sarmatian; for the ancient Thracians I believe to have belonged to this stock. Like the Lithuanians of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, they have effected their share of achievements in India; their conquests having been Bacchic, Thracian, and Slavonic, just as the Cimmerian inroads were Lithuanic. So that there was a double origin to the so-called Indo-Europeans of Hindostan and Persia; a trace of which may possibly,—I do not say probably—exists at the present moment in the name Jat.[23]

Between the original Thracian basis and the present dominant population of Osmanlis, there have been the following elements of intermixture: Pelasgic (whatever that was), Semitic, Hellenic, Roman, Gothic, Slavonic, and Bulgarian.

So far as the Macedonians were other than Hellenic, they were either Skipetar or Slavonian, i.e., in the category of the ancient Albanians, or in the category of the ancient Thracians; or they may have been mixed in some unascertained manner. Even if we suppose them to have pressed southwards and eastwards from the head-waters of the Axius, and from the southern boundary of Servia, a place for them in the same great class with the Thracians is admissible; and, in all probability, southern Servia was their original locality. That they, too, pressed forwards in Asia is likely. That words so radically alike as Mygdon-es and Macedon-es, are wholly unconnected, and that they resemble each other by accident, is what I am slow to believe; but that the line of demarcation between the Thracians and Macedonians is broad and trenchant for members of the same stock, is likely, since each was an encroaching population, and, as such, a population which obliterated transitional and intermediate varieties.

It is well known that of the three localities of the Pelasgian stock, known under that name within the period of authentic history, two are in Macedonia: one of these we get from Herodotus, the other from Thucydides.

1. Herodotus mentions the Pelasgi of Khreston—above the TyrsÊnians.

2. Thucydides, those of CleonÆ, Dium, and Olophyxus on the peninsula of Mount Athos.

The Pelasgi of the third locality, the Asiatic Pelasgi, or the Herodotean Pelasgi of the parts about Plakia and Skylake, near Cyzicus, may reasonably be considered as settlers of comparatively recent origin, both from the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, and the most scientific interpretation of the few data we possess for the ancient ethnology of Asia Minor.

But the Pelasgi of Chreston and Mount Athos, are in localities wherein they may as easily be aboriginal as intrusive. Which were they? I cannot make up my mind; I can only exhaust the two alternatives. If aboriginal, they were one of three things, Skipetar, Slavonic, or members of an extinct stock; if intrusive, members of some extinct stock, Asiatic or Italian. How they may have been, this is easily understood.

1. An eastern extension of the oldest Skipetar area would carry a population akin to the ancestors of the present Albanians as far as the Ægean.

2. A southern extension of the Thracian area would carry the ancient Thracian stock as far as Thessaly.

3. Semitic, or other Asiatic colonies, would give us a series of maritime settlements.

4. So would a series of very early Italian colonizations. These we may deduce from some part of Italy, different from the mother-country of the true Hellenic Greeks; and we may, also, assume a difference in the date of the movement. In such a case the Pelasgi may have been Hellenic, as the Anglo-Saxons were Scandinavian; in other words, out of two Italian colonizations one (the Pelasgic) may have been the analogue to the Angle, the other (the Hellenic) to the Danish invasion of Britain.

Of these alternatives I prefer the second and fourth to the first and third.

The name itself seems to have been applied to one stock only, not to several—though the evidence of this is by no means conclusive.

It seems not to have been native. Native names are, usually, more specific and less general. It was a name which A gave to B, not one which B gave itself.

It seems to have been originally other than Greek.

With a strong inclination to see in the Œnotrian conquest of Greece a third rather a second stream of population, and with the belief that the earliest displacement of the original Skipetar population was effected by movements from Thrace and Macedon (by members of the great Slavonic stock), the Greek occupancy being later than this; favouring, too, the idea that the Pelasgi of Macedon were, at one and the same time, indigenous to the soil, and members of the same stock as the Thracians (the stock being the Slavonic); I am opposed to the broad line of demarcation which so many recent authors have drawn between the Hellenic civilization and the Thracian, a line of demarcation which has led them, in many cases, to explain away rather than admit the evidence of several good writers of antiquity, as to the influence of the Thracian music and the Thracian poetry on early Greece.

To claim for the Homeric poems the same amount of Thracian elements that the Welshman claims for those of the cycle of King Arthur, would be to illustrate the obscurum per obscurius, inasmuch as the Welshman’s claim is of a somewhat impalpable nature. It cannot attach to the poems themselves, in any known form. They are all in Norman-French, or German, or English, or Italian—none in Welsh. Neither are they translations of a Welsh original now lost. Neither is their subject-matter Welsh to the amount of one-third. Yet, the germ of the fiction is, in some way or other, Welsh, and the claim of the Welshman is, up to a certain point, valid.

Mutatis mutandis, let us ask whether the Trojan cycle may not, in the same sense, be Slavonic—assuming the Thracians to have belonged to that stock?

I. a. When we find the name of a non-historical person coincide with that of an historical people or an historical locality, it is a fair inference, all the world over, to consider that form as an epÔnymus.

b. It is also fair to connect such legends as attach to the name with the people or the locality.

c. Now several names in the early Greek epic cycles are thus eponymic—thus localized in Thracian and other similar localities—Teucer, Æneas, Dardanus, &c.

II. Again—the national poetry of the existing Slavonic nations, more nearly approaches—longo intervallo, I admit—that of the Homeric Greeks than does that of any other families of mankind.

III. The metres do the same.

IV. The Sanskrit metres are in the same category with the Slavonic; so that—the European origin of the Sanskrit being admitted—the similarity must be of great antiquity.

These points cannot be enlarged on. They form, however, the basis of some claim for the existence of Slavonic elements in the old heroic poetry of Greece; which—it must be remembered—originated on the Helleno-Slavonic debatable land of Æolic Asia.

The propounder of an hypothesis has no right to lay down, peremptorily, the laws by which his doctrine is to be tested. At the same time, he may fairly claim that the objections to it should rest on the same broad grounds on which it is based. The Homeric poems are Greek; and the Orlando Furioso is Italian. Yet there are Welsh and other non-Italian elements in the latter, and, it is submitted, that there are Slavonic and non-Hellenic elements in the former. Their amount I do not profess to measure.

Bosnia, Herzegovna, Turkish Croatia,—Slavonic in speech, and Slavonic in blood, the Bosnians and Herzegovnians differ from the Servians only in a few details—the chief being their Mahometan creed. Equally slight is the difference between the Turkish and Austrian Croatians.

Bulgaria is Slavonic and Rumanyo in speech, Moesian, Gothic, Turk, and Slavonic in blood.