1.
And now, having dwelt upon the broad contrast which exists between Christendom and Turkey, I proceed to give you some general idea of the Ottoman Turks, who are at present in power, as I have already sketched the history of the Seljukian. We left off with the Crusaders victorious in the Holy Land, and the Seljukian Sultan, the cousin of Malek Shah, driven back from his capital over against Constantinople, to an obscure town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman, who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso’s celebrated Poem of “Jerusalem Delivered,”—
That Solyman, than whom there was not any
Of all God’s foes more rebel an offender;
Nay, nor a giant such, among the many
Whom earth once bore, and might again engender;
The Turkish Prince, who first the Greeks expelling,
Fixed at Nicæa his imperial dwelling.
And then he made his infidel advances
From Phrygian Sangar to Meander’s river;
Lydia and Mysia, humbled in war’s chances,
Bithynia, Pontus, hymned the Arch-deceiver;
But when to Asia passed the Christian lances,
To battle with the Turk and misbeliever,
He, in two fields, encountered two disasters,
And so he fled, and the vexed land changed masters.
Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest seemed over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It seemed as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as the Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath of the last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders had broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of July, 1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his death-bed.
2.
Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the name of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or Turcoman, who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took the prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political improvement. His son, Othman’s father, came into the service of the last Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a horde of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in alliance with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism of the desert, and, when he succeeded to his father’s power, he proclaimed a gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity. Suddenly, like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain heights which separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan conquests, and he pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which remained from that time the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for Adrianople and Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series of conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of the first, if not the first power, not only of Asia, but of the world.
These conquests were achieved during the reigns of ten great Sultans, the average length of whose reigns is as much as twenty-six years, an unusual period for military sovereigns, and both an evidence of the stability, and a means of the extension, of their power. Then came the period of their decline, and we are led on through the space of another 270 years, up to our own day, when they seem on the verge of some great reverse or overthrow. In this second period they have had as many as twenty-one Sultans, whose average reigns are only half the length of those who preceded them, and afford as cogent an argument of their national disorder and demoralization. Of these twenty-one, five have been strangled, three have been deposed, and three have died of excess; of the remaining ten, four only have attained the age of man, and these come together in the course of the last century; two others have died about the age of thirty, and three about the age of fifty. The last, the thirty-first from Othman, is the present Sultan, who came to the throne as a boy, and is described at that time by an English traveller, as one of the most “sickly, pale, inanimate, and unmanly youths he ever saw,” 1 and who has this very year just reached the average length of the reign of his twenty predecessors.
The names of the Ottoman Sultans are more familiar to us and more easy to recollect than other Oriental sovereigns, partly from their greater euphony as Europeans read them, partly from their recurrence again and again in the catalogue. There are four Mahomets, four Mustaphas, four Amuraths or Murads, three Selims, three Achmets, three Othmans, two Mahmoods, two Solimans, and two Bajazets 2.