The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 | Page 8

1361 Adrianople succumbed to the attacks of Orkhan's son,
Murad I, whose sway was soon acknowledged in Thrace and
Macedonia, and who was destined to lead the victorious Ottoman
armies as far north as the Danube.
But though the provinces of the corrupt and effete Byzantine Empire
were falling into the hands of the Turks, the Slavs were still unsubdued.
Lazar the Serb threw down the gauntlet to Murad. On the memorable
field of Kossovo, in 1389, the opposing forces met--Murad supported
by his Asiatic and European vassals and allies, and Lazar with his
formidable army of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Poles, Magyars, and
Vlachs. Few battles in the world have produced such a deep and lasting
impression as this battle of Kossovo, in which the Christian nations
after long and stubborn resistance were vanquished by the Moslems.
The Servians still sing ballads which cast a halo of pathetic romance
round their great disaster. And after more than five centuries the
Montenegrins continue to wear black on their caps in mourning for that
fatal day.
In the next two centuries the Ottoman Empire moved on toward the
zenith of its glory. Mohammed II conquered Constantinople in 1453.
And in 1529 Suleyman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna.
Suleyman's reign forms the climax of Turkish history. The Turks had
become a central European power occupying Hungary and menacing
Austria. Suleyman's dominions extended from Mecca to Buda-Pesth
and from Bagdad to Algiers. He commanded the Mediterranean, the
Euxine, and the Red Sea, and his navies threatened the coasts of India
and Spain.
But the conquests of the Turks were purely military. They did nothing
for their subjects, whom they treated with contempt, and they wanted
nothing from them but tribute and plunder. As the Turks were always

numerically inferior to the aggregate number of the peoples under their
sway, their one standing policy was to keep them divided--divide et
impera. To fan racial and religious differences among their subjects
was to perpetuate the rule of the masters. The whole task of
government, as the Turks conceived it, was to collect tribute from the
conquered and keep them in subjection by playing off their differences
against one another.
But a deterioration of Turkish rulers set in soon after the time of
Suleyman with a corresponding decline in the character and efficiency
of the army. And the growth of Russia and the reassertion of Hungary,
Poland, and Austria were fatal to the maintenance of an alien and
detested empire founded on military domination alone. By the end of
the seventeenth century the Turks had been driven out of Austria,
Hungary, Transylvania, and Podolia, and the northern boundaries of
their Empire were fixed by the Carpathians, the Danube, and the Save.
How marked and rapid was the further decline of the Ottoman Empire
may be inferred from the fact that twice in the eighteenth century
Austria and Russia discussed the project of dividing it between them.
But the inevitable disintegration of the Turkish dominion was not to
inure to the glorification of any of the Great Powers, though Russia
certainly contributed to the weakening of the common enemy. The
decline and diminution of the Ottoman Empire continued throughout
the nineteenth century. What happened, however, was the revolt of
subject provinces and the creation out of the territory of European
Turkey of the independent states of Greece, Servia, Roumania, and
Bulgaria. And it was Bulgarians, Greeks, and Servians, with the active
assistance of the Montenegrins and the benevolent neutrality of the
Roumanians, who, in the war of 1912-1913, drove the Turk out of
Europe, leaving him nothing but the city of Constantinople and a
territorial fringe bordered by the Chataldja line of fortifications.
THE EARLIER SLAV EMPIRES
There is historic justice in the circumstance that the Turkish Empire in
Europe met its doom at the hands of the Balkan nations themselves. For
these nationalities had been completely submerged and even their
national consciousness annihilated under centuries of Moslem
intolerance, misgovernment, oppression, and cruelty.
None suffered worse than Bulgaria, which lay nearest to the capital of

the Mohammedan conqueror. Yet Bulgaria had had a glorious, if
checkered, history long before there existed any Ottoman Empire either
in Europe or in Asia. From the day their sovereign Boris accepted
Christianity in 864 the Bulgarians had made rapid and conspicuous
progress in their ceaseless conflicts with the Byzantine Empire. The
Bulgarian church was recognized as independent by the Greek patriarch
at Constantinople; its primates subsequently received the title of
patriarch, and their see was established at Preslav, and then
successively westward at Sofia, Vodena, Presba, and finally Ochrida,
which looks out on the mountains of Albania. Under Czar Simeon, the
son of Boris, "Bulgaria," says Gibbon, "assumed a rank among the
civilized powers of the earth." His dominions extended from