Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 3

instinct and tradition most resembled her.
Spiritual blood, no less than physical blood, is thicker than water, and
Gott and Allah, hand-in-hand, pledged each other in the cups they had
filled with the blood that poured 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