Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 3

from the wine-presses of Belgium and of Armenia.
For centuries before the Osmanli Turks made their appearance in Asia Minor, there had come from out of the misty East numerous bodies of Turks, pushing westwards, and spreading over the Euphrates valley and over Persia, in nomadic or military colonisations, and it is not until the thirteenth century that we find the Osmanli Turks, who give their name to that congregation of races known as the Ottoman Empire, established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor. Like all previous Turkish immigrations, they came not in any overwhelming horde, with sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but as a small compact body with a genius for military organisation, and the gift, which they retain to this day, of stalwart fighting. The policy to which they owed their growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl, Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. They took Christian youths from the families of Greek dwellers, forced them to apostatise, gave them military training, and married them to Turkish girls. It was out of this blend of Greek and Turkish blood, as Mr. D.G. Hogarth points out, that they derived their national being and their national strength. This system of recruiting they steadily pursued not only among the Christian peoples with whom they came in contact, but among the settlements of Turks who had preceded them in this process of pushing westwards, and formed out of them the professional soldiery known as Janissaries. They did not fight for themselves alone, but as mercenaries lent their arms to other peoples, Moslem and Christian alike, who would hire their services. This was a policy that paid well, for, after having delivered some settlement from the depredations of an inconvenient neighbour, and with their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned on those who had hired their arms, took their toll of youths, and finally incorporated them in their growing empire. Like an insatiable sponge, they mopped up the sprinklings of disconnected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia Minor, and swelled and prospered. But as yet the extermination of these was not part of their programme: they absorbed the strength and manhood of their annexations into their own soldiery, and came back for more. They did not levy those taxes paid in the persons of soldiers for their armies from their co-religionists, since Islam may not fight against Islam, but by means of peaceful penetration (a policy long since abandoned) they united scattered settlements of Turks to themselves by marriages and the bond of a common tongue and religion.
Their expansion into Europe began in the middle of the fourteenth century, when, as mercenaries, they fought against the Serbs, and fifty years later they had a firm hold over Bulgaria as well. Greece was their next prey; they penetrated Bosnia and Macedonia, and in 1453 attacked and took Constantinople under Mohammed the Conqueror. Still true to the policy of incorporation they continued to mop up the remainder of the Balkan Peninsula, and at the same time consolidated themselves further in Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seventeenth century their expansion reached its utmost geographical limits, but already the Empire held within it the seeds of its own decay, and by a curious irony the force that should still keep it together was derived not from its own strength, but from the jealousies of the European Powers among themselves, who would willingly have dismembered it, but feared the quarrels that would surely result from the apportionment of its territories. The Ottoman Empire from then onwards has owed its existence to its enemies.
Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very loosely knit together, and no bond, whether of blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the assembly of Christian and Jewish and non-Moslem races of which it was so largely composed. The Empire never grew (as, for instance, the British Empire grew) by the emigration and settlement of the Osmanli stock in the territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only took. From the beginning right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it has been a military despotism, imposing itself on unwilling and alien tribes whom it drained of their blood, and then left in neglect until some further levy was needed. None of its conquered peoples was ever given a share in the government; they were left unorganised and, so to speak, undigested elements under the Power which had forced them into subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included in that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control. Turkey in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to