6.
The terrible races which I have been describing, like those giants of old, have ever been enemies of God and persecutors of His Church. Celts, Goths, Lombards, Franks, have been converted, and their descendants to this day are Christian; but, whether we consider Huns, Moguls, or Turks, up to this time they are in the outer darkness. And accordingly, to the innumerable Tartar tribes, and to none other, have been applied by commentators the solemn passages about Gog and Magog, who are to fight the battles of Antichrist against the faithful. "Satan shall go forth and seduce the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and shall collect them to battle, whose number is as the sea sand." From time to time the Holy See has fulfilled its apostolic mission of sending preachers to them, but without success. The only missionaries who have had any influence upon them have been those of the Nestorian heresy, who have in certain districts made the same sort of impression on them which the Greek schism has made upon the Russians. St. Louis too sent a friar to them on an embassy, when he wished to persuade them to turn their strength upon the Turks, with whom he was at war; other European monarchs afterwards followed his pattern; and sometimes European merchants visited them for the purposes of trade. However little influence as these various visitants, in the course of several centuries, had upon their minds, they have at least done us the service of giving us information concerning their habits and manners; and this so fully corroborates the historical account of them which I have been giving, that it will be worth while laying before you some specimens of it here.
I have said that some of these travellers were laymen travelling for gain or in secular splendour, and others were humble servants of religion. The contrast of their respective adventures is striking. The celebrated Marco Polo, who was one of a company of enterprising Venetian merchants, lived many years in Tartary in honour, and returned laden with riches; the poor friars met with hardships in plenty, and nothing besides. Not that the Poli were not good Catholics, not that they went out without a blessing from the Pope, or without friars of the order of St. Dominic of his selection; but so it was, that the Tartars understood the merchant well enough, but could not comprehend, could not set a value on the friar.
When the Pope's missionaries came in sight of the Tartar encampment on the northern frontier of Persia, they at once announced their mission and its object. It was from the Vicar of Christ upon earth, and the spiritual head of Christendom; and it was a simple exhortation addressed to the fierce conquerors before whom they stood, to repent and believe. The answer of the Tartars was equally prompt and equally intelligible. When they had fully mastered the business of their visitors, they sentenced them to immediate execution; and did but hesitate about the mode. They were to be flayed alive, their skins filled with hay, and so sent back to the Pope; or they were to be put in the first rank in the next battle with the Franks, and to die by the weapons of their own countrymen. Eventually one of the Khan's wives begged them off. They were kept in a sort of captivity for three years, and at length thought themselves happy to be sent away with their lives. So much for the friars; how different was the lot of the merchants may be understood by the scene which took place on their return to Venice, It is said that, on their arrival at their own city, after the absence of a quarter of a century, their change of appearance and poorness of apparel were such that even their nearest friends did not know them. Having with difficulty effected an entrance into their own house, they set about giving a splendid entertainment to the principal persons of the city. The banquet over, following the Oriental custom, they successively put on and then put off again, and distributed to their attendants, a series of magnificent dresses; and at length they entered the room in the same weather-stained and shabby dresses, in which, as travellers, they had made their first appearance at Venice. The assembled company eyed them with wonder; which you may be sure was not diminished, when they began to unrip the linings and the patches of those old clothes, and as the seams were opened, poured out before them a prodigious quantity of jewels. This had been their expedient for conveying their gains to Europe, and the effect of the discovery upon the world may be anticipated. Persons of all ranks and ages crowded to them, as the report spread, and they were the wonder of their day.[11]
7.
Savage cruelty, brutal gluttony, and barbarous magnificence, are the three principal ethical characteristics of a Tartar prince, as we may gather from what has come down to us in history, whether concerning the Scythians or the Huns. The first of these three qualities has also been illustrated, from the references which I have been making to the history of Zingis and Timour, so that I think we have heard enough of it, without further instances from the report of these travellers, whether ecclesiastical or lay. I will but mention one corroboration of a barbarity, which at first hearing it is difficult to credit. When the Spanish ambassador, then, was on his way to Timour, and had got as far as the north of Persia, he there actually saw a specimen of that sort of poll-tax, which I just now mentioned. It was a structure consisting of four towers, composed of human skulls, a layer of mud and of skulls being placed alternately; and he tells us that upwards of 60,000 men were massacred to afford materials for this building. Indeed it seems a demonstration of revenge familiar to the Tartar race. Selim, the Ottoman Sultan, reared a similar pyramid on the banks of the Nile.[12]
To return to our Spanish traveller. He proceeded to his destination, which was Samarcand, the royal city of Timour, in Sogdiana, the present Bukharia, and was presented to the great conqueror. He describes the gate of the palace as lofty, and richly ornamented with gold and azure; in the inner court were six elephants, with wooden castles on their backs, and streamers which performed gambols for the amusement of the courtiers. He was led into a spacious room, where were some boys, Timour's grandsons, and these carried the King of Spain's letters to the Khan. He then was ushered into Timour's presence, who was seated, like Attila's queen, on a sort of cushioned sofa, with a fountain playing before him. He was at that time an old man, and his eyesight was impaired.
At the entertainment which followed, the meat was introduced in leathern bags, so large as to be dragged along with difficulty. When opened, pieces were cut out and placed on dishes of gold, silver, or porcelain. One of the most esteemed, says the ambassador, was the hind quarter of a horse; I must add what I find related, in spite of its offending our ears:—our informant tells us that horse-tripe also was one of the delicacies at table. No dish was removed, but the servants of the guests were expected to carry off the remains, so that our ambassador doubtless had his larder provided with the sort of viands I have mentioned for some time to come. The drink was the famous Tartar beverage which we hear of so often, mares' milk, sweetened with sugar, or perhaps rather the koumiss or spirit which is distilled from it. It was handed round in gold and silver cups.
Nothing is more strange about the Tartars than the attachment they have shown to such coarse fare, from the earliest times till now. Timour, at whose royal table this most odious banquet was served, was lord of all Asia, and had the command of every refinement not only of luxury, but of gluttony. Yet he is faithful to the food which regaled the old Scythians in the heroic age of Greece, and which is prized by the Usbek of the present day. As Homer, in the beginning of the historic era, calls the Scythians "mares'-milk drinkers," so geographers of the present day describe their mode of distilling it in Russia. Tavernier speaks of it two centuries ago; the European visitors partook of it in the middle ages; and the Roman ambassadors, in the later times of the Empire. These tribes have had the command of the vine, yet they seem to have scorned or even abhorred its use; and we have a curious account in Herodotus, of a Scythian king who lost his life for presuming to take part secretly in the orgies of Bacchus. Yet it was not that they did not intoxicate themselves freely with the distillation which they had chosen; and even when they tolerated wine, they still adhered to their koumiss. That beverage is described by the Franciscan, who was sent by St. Louis, as what he calls biting, and leaving a taste like almond milk on the palate; though Elphinstone, on the contrary writing in this century, says "it is of a whitish colour and a sourish taste." And so of horse-flesh; I believe it is still put out for sale in the Chinese markets; Lieutenant Wood, in his journey to the source of the Oxus, speaks of it among the Usbeks as an expensive food. So does Elphinstone, adding that in consequence the Usbeks are "obliged to be content with beef." Pinkerton tells us that it is made into dried hams; but this seems to be a refinement, for we hear a great deal from various authors of its being eaten more than half raw. After all, horse-flesh was the most delicate of the Tartar viands in the times we are now considering. We are told that, in spite of their gold and silver, and jewels, they were content to eat dogs, foxes, and wolves; and, as I have observed before, the flesh of animals which had died of disease.
But again we have lost sight of the ambassador of Spain. After this banquet, he was taken about by Timour to other palaces, each more magnificent than the one preceding it. He speaks of the magnificent halls, painted with various colours, of the hangings of silk, of gold and silver embroidery, of tables of solid gold, and of the rubies and other precious stones. The most magnificent of these entertainments was on a plain; 20,000 pavilions being pitched around Timour's, which displayed the most gorgeous variety of colours. Two entertainments were given by the ladies of the court, in which the state queens of Timour, nine in number, sat in a row, and here pages handed round wine, not koumiss, in golden cups, which they were not slow in emptying.
The good friar, who went from St. Louis to the princes of the house of Zingis, several centuries earlier, gives us a similar account. When he was presented to the Khan, he went with a Bible and a Psalter in his hand; on entering the royal apartment, he found a curtain of felt spread across the room; it was lifted up, and discovered the great man at table with his wives about him, and prepared for drinking koumiss. The court knew something of Christianity from the Nestorians, who were about it, and the friar was asked to say a blessing on the meal; so he entered singing the Salve Regina. On another occasion he was present at the baptism of a wife of the Khan by a Nestorian priest. After the ceremony, she called for a cup of liquor, desired a blessing from the officiating minister, and drank it off. Then she drank off another, and then another; and continued this process till she could drink no more, and was put into her carriage, and taken home. At another entertainment the friar had to make a speech, in the name of the holy king he represented, to pray for health and long life to the Khan. When he looked round for his interpreter, he found him in a state of intoxication, and in no condition to be of service; then he directed his gaze upon the Khan himself, and found him intoxicated also.
I have made much mention of the wealth of the Tartars, from Attila to Timour; their foreign conquests would yield to them of course whatever of costly material their pride might require; but their native territory itself was rich in minerals. Altai in the north yielded the precious metals; the range of mountains which branches westward from the Himalaya on the south yielded them rubies and lapis lazuli. We are informed by the travellers whom I have been citing that they dressed in winter in costly furs; in summer in silk, and even in cloth of gold.[13] One of the Franciscans speaks of the gifts received by the Khan from foreign powers. They were more than could be numbered;—satin cloths, robes of purple, silk girdles wrought with gold, costly skins. We are told of an umbrella enriched with precious stones; of a train of camels covered with cloth of Bagdad; of a tent of glowing purple; of five hundred waggons full of silver, gold, and silk stuffs.
8.
It is remarkable that the three great conquerors, who have been our subject, all died in the fulness of glory. From the beginning of history to our own times, the insecurity of great prosperity has been the theme of poets and philosophers. Scripture points out to our warning in opposite ways the fortunes of Sennacherib, Nabuchodonosor, and Antiochus. Profane history tells us of Solon, the Athenian sage, coming to the court of Crœsus, the prosperous King of Lydia, whom in his fallen state I have already had occasion to mention; and, when he had seen his treasures and was asked by the exulting monarch who was the happiest of men, making answer that no one could be called happy before his death. And we may call to mind in confirmation the history of Cyrus, of Hannibal, of Mithridates, of Belisarius, of Bajazet, of Napoleon. But these Tartars finished a prosperous course without reverse; they died indeed and went to judgment, but, as far as the visible scene of their glory is concerned, they underwent no change. Attila was summoned suddenly, but the summons found him a triumphant king; and the case is the same with Zingis and Timour. These latter conquerors had glories besides of a different kind which increased the lustre of their rule. They were both lawgivers; it is the boast of Zingis that he laid down the principle of religious toleration with a clearness which modern philsophers have considered to rival the theory of Locke; and Timour, also established an efficient police in his dominions, and was a patron of literature. Their sun went down full and cloudless, with the merit of having shed some rays of blessing upon the earth, scorching and withering as had been its day. It is remarkable also that all three had something of a misgiving, or softening of mind, miserably unsatisfactory as it was, shortly before their deaths. Attila's quailing before the eye of the Vicar of Christ, and turning away from Italy, I have already spoken of. As to Zingis, as, laden at once with years and with the spoils of Asia, he reluctantly measured his way home at the impatient bidding of his veterans, who were tired of war, he seemed visited by a sense of the vanity of all things and a terror for the evil he had done. He showed some sort of pity for the vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities he had destroyed. Alas! it is ever easier to pull down than to build up. His wars continued; he was successful by his lieutenants when he could not go to battle himself; he left his power to his children and grandchildren, and he died.
9.
Such was the end of Zingis, a pagan, who had some notion of Christianity in a corrupted form, and who once almost gave hopes of becoming a Christian, but who really had adopted a sort of indifference towards religious creeds altogether. Timour was a zealous Mahometan, and had been instructed in more definite notions of moral duty. He too felt some misgivings about his past course towards the end of his life; and the groans and shrieks of the dying and the captured in the sack of Aleppo awoke for a while the stern monitor within him. He protested to the cadhi his innocence of the blood which he had shed. "You see me here," he said, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal; yet by my arm it has pleased the Almighty to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Touran, and Hindostan. I am not a man of blood; I call God to witness, that never, in all my wars, have I been the aggressor, but that my enemies have ever been the authors of the calamities which have come upon them."[14]
This was the feeling of a mind sated with conquest, sated with glory, aware at length that he must go further and look deeper, if he was to find that on which the soul could really feed and live, and startled to find the entrance to that abode of true greatness and of glory sternly shut against him. He looked towards the home of his youth, and the seat of his long prosperity, across the Oxus, to Sogdiana, to Samarcand, its splendid capital, with its rich groves and smiling pastures, and there the old man went to die. Not that he directly thought of death; for still he yearned after military success: and he went thither for but a short repose, between his stupendous victories in Asia Minor and a projected campaign in China. But Samarcand was a fitting halt in that long march; and there for the last time he displayed the glory of his kingdom, receiving the petitions or appeals of his subjects, ostentatiously judging between the deserving and the guilty, inspecting plans for the erection of palaces and temples, and giving audience to ambassadors from Russia, Spain, Egypt, and Hindostan. An English historian, whom I have already used, has enlarged upon this closing scene, and I here abridge his account of it. "The marriage of six of the Emperor's grandsons," he says, "was esteemed an act of religion as well as of paternal tenderness; and the pomp of the ancient caliphs was revived in their nuptials. They were celebrated in the garden of Canighul, where innumerable tents and pavilions displayed the luxury of a great city and the spoils of a victorious camp. Whole forests were cut down to supply fuel for the kitchens; the plain was spread with pyramids of meat and vases of every liquor, to which thousands of guests were courteously invited. The orders of the state and the nations of the earth were marshalled at the royal banquet. The public joy was testified by illuminations and masquerades; the trades of Samarcand passed in review; and every trade was emulous to execute some quaint device, some marvellous pageant, with the materials of their peculiar art. After the marriage contracts had been ratified by the cadhies, nine times, according to the Asiatic fashion, were the bridegrooms and their brides dressed and undressed; and at each change of apparel, pearls and rubies were showered on their heads, and contemptuously abandoned to their attendants."
You may recollect the passage in Milton's Paradise Lost, which has a reference to the Oriental ceremony here described. It is in his account of Satan's throne in Pandemonium. "High on a throne," the poet says,
"High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exulting sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence."
So it is; the greatest magnificence of this world is but a poor imitation of the flaming throne of the author of evil. But let us return to the history:—"A general indulgence was proclaimed, and every law was relaxed, every pleasure was allowed; the people were free, the sovereign was idle; and the historian of Timour may remark, that after devoting fifty years to the attainment of empire, the only happy period of his life was the two months in which he ceased to exercise his power. But he was soon awakened to the cares of government and war. The standard was unfurled for the invasion of China; the emirs made the report of 200,000, the select and veteran soldiers of Iran and Touran; the baggage and provisions were transported by 500 great waggons, and an immense train of horses and camels; and the troops might prepare for a long absence, since more than six months were employed in the tranquil journey of a caravan from Samarcand to Pekin. Neither age, nor the severity of winter, could retard the impatience of Timour; he mounted on horseback, passed the Sihun" (or Jaxartes) "on the ice, marched 300 miles from his capital, and pitched his last camp at Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of death. Fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water accelerated the progress of his fever; and the conqueror of Asia expired in the seventieth year of his age; his designs were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved."
But the wonderful course of human affairs rolled on. Timour's death was followed at no long interval by the rise of John Basilowich in Russia, who succeeded in throwing of the Mogul yoke, and laid the foundation of the present mighty empire. The Tartar sovereignty passed from Samarcand to Moscow.
II.
THE DESCENT OF THE TURKS,
LECTURE III.
The Tartar and the Turk.
You may think, Gentlemen, I have been very long in coming to the Turks, and indeed I have been longer than I could have wished; but I have thought it necessary, in order to your taking a just view of them, that you should survey them first of all in their original condition. When they first appear in history they are Huns or Tartars, and nothing else; they are indeed in no unimportant respects Tartars even now; but, had they never been made something more than Tartars, they never would have had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they would have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to this day, still they, or at least great portions of the race, have been put under education; they have been submitted to a slow course of change, with a long history and a profitable discipline and fortunes of a peculiar kind; and thus they have gained those qualities of mind, which alone enable a nation to wield and to consolidate imperial power.
1.
I have said that, when first they distinctly appear on the scene of history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to be the most plentiful in the world. There have been iron works there from time immemorial, and at the time that the Huns descended on the Roman Empire (in the fifth century of the Christian era), we find the Turks nothing more than a family of slaves, employed as workers of the ore and as blacksmiths by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the course of fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish power in Europe, with the sudden development peculiar to Tartars, we find these Turks spread from East to West, and lords of a territory so extensive, that they were connected, by relations of peace or war, at once with the Chinese, the Persians, and the Romans. They had reached Kamtchatka on the North, the Caspian on the West, and perhaps even the mouth of the Indus on the South. Here then we have an intermediate empire of Tartars, placed between the eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this sketch it has no place, except as belonging to Turkish history, because it was contained within the limits of Asia, and, though it lasted for 200 years, it only faintly affected the political transactions of Europe. However, it was not without some sort of influence on Christendom, for the Romans interchanged embassies with its sovereign in the reign of the then Greek Emperor Justin the younger (A.D. 570), with the view of engaging him in a warlike alliance against Persia. The account of one of these embassies remains, and the picture it presents of the Turks is important, because it seems clearly to identify them with the Tartar race.
For instance, in the mission to the Tartars from the Pope, which I have already spoken of, the friars were led between two fires, when they approached the Khan, and they at first refused to follow, thinking they might be countenancing some magical rite. Now we find it recorded of this Roman embassy, that, on its arrival, it was purified by the Turks with fire and incense. As to incense, which seems out of place among such barbarians, it is remarkable that it is used in the ceremonial of the Turkish court to this day. At least Sir Charles Fellows, in his work on the Antiquities of Asia Minor, in 1838, speaks of the Sultan as going to the festival of Bairam with incense-bearers before him. Again, when the Romans were presented to the great Khan, they found him in his tent, seated on a throne, to which wheels were attached and horses attachable, in other words, a Tartar waggon. Moreover, they were entertained at a banquet which lasted the greater part of the day; and an intoxicating liquor, not wine, which was sweet and pleasant, was freely presented to them; evidently the Tartar koumiss.[15] The next day they had a second entertainment in a still more splendid tent; the hangings were of embroidered silk, and the throne, the cups, and the vases were of gold. On the third day, the pavilion, in which they were received, was supported on gilt columns; a couch of massive gold was raised on four gold peacocks; and before the entrance to the tent was what might be called a sideboard, only that it was a sort of barricade of waggons, laden with dishes, basins, and statues of solid silver. All these points in the description,—the silk hangings, the gold vessels, the successively increasing splendour of the entertainments,—remind us of the courts of Zingis and Timour, 700 and 900 years afterwards.
This empire, then, of the Turks was of a Tartar character; yet it was the first step of their passing from barbarism to that degree of civilization which is their historical badge. And it was their first step in civilization, not so much by what it did in its day, as (unless it be a paradox to say so), by its coming to an end. Indeed it so happens, that those Turkish tribes which have changed their original character and have a place in the history of the world, have obtained their status and their qualifications for it, by a process very different from that which took place in the nations most familiar to us. What this process has been I will say presently; first, however, let us observe that, fortunately for our purpose, we have still specimens existing of those other Turkish tribes, which were never submitted to this process of education and change, and, in looking at them as they now exist, we see at this very day the Turkish nationality in something very like its original form, and are able to decide for ourselves on its close approximation to the Tartar. You may recollect I pointed out to you, Gentlemen, in the opening of these lectures, the course which the pastoral tribes, or nomads as they are often called, must necessarily take in their emigrations. They were forced along in one direction till they emerged from their mountain valleys, and descended their high plateau at the end of Tartary, and then they had the opportunity of turning south. If they did not avail themselves of this opening, but went on still westward, their next southern pass would be the defiles of the Caucasus and Circassia, to the west of the Caspian. If they did not use this, they would skirt the top of the Black Sea, and so reach Europe. Thus in the emigration of the Huns from China, you may recollect a tribe of them turned to the South as soon as they could, and settled themselves between the high Tartar land and the sea of Aral, while the main body went on to the furthest West by the north of the Black Sea. Now with this last passage into Europe we are not here concerned, for the Turks have never introduced themselves to Europe by means of it;[16] but with those two southward passages which are Asiatic, viz., that to the east of the Aral, and that to the west of the Caspian. The Turkish tribes have all descended upon the civilized world by one or other of these two roads; and I observe, that those which have descended along the east of the Aral have changed their social habits and gained political power, while those which descended to the west of the Caspian remain pretty much what they ever were. The former of these go among us by the general name of Turks; the latter are the Turcomans or Turkmans.
2.
Now, first, I shall briefly mention the Turcomans, and dismiss them, because, when they have once illustrated the original state of their race, they have no place in this sketch. I have said, then, that the ancient Turco-Tartar empire, to which the Romans sent their embassy in the sixth century, extended to the Caspian and towards the Indus. It was in the beginning of the next century that the Romans, that is, the Greco-Romans of Constantinople, found them in the former of these neighbourhoods; and they made the same use of them in the defence of their territory, to which they had put the Goths before the overthrow of the Western Empire. It was a most eventful era at which they addressed themselves to these Turks of the Caspian. It was almost the very year of the Hegira, which marks the rise of the Mahometan imposture and rule. As yet, however, the Persians were in power, and formidable enemies to the Romans, and at this very time in possession of the Holy Cross, which Chosroes, their powerful king, had carried away from Jerusalem twelve years before. But the successful Emperor Heraclius was already in the full tide of those brilliant victories, which in the course of a few years recovered it; and, to recall him from their own soil, the Persians had allied themselves with the barbarous tribes of Europe, (the Russians, Sclavonians, Bulgarians, and others,) which, then as now, were pressing down close upon Constantinople from the north. This alliance suggested to Heraclius the counterstroke of allying himself with the Turkish freebooters, who in like manner, as stationed above the Caspian, were impending over Persia. Accordingly the horde of Chozars, as this Turkish tribe was called, at the Emperor's invitation, transported their tents from the plains of the Volga through the defiles of the Caucasus into Georgia. Heraclius showed them extraordinary attention; he put his own diadem on the head of the barbarian prince, and distributed gold, jewels, and silk to his officers; and, on the other hand, he obtained from them an immediate succour of 40,000 horse, and the promise of an irruption of their brethren into Persia from the far East, from the quarter of the Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of the passages by which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South. Such were the allies, with which Heraclius succeeded in utterly overthrowing and breaking up the Persian power; and thus, strange to say, the greatest of all the enemies of the Church among the nations of the earth, the Turk, began his career in Christian history by coöperating with a Christian Emperor in the recovery of the Holy Cross, of which a pagan, the ally of Russia, had got possession. The religious aspect, however, of this first era of their history, seems to have passed away without improvement; what they gained was a temporal advantage, a settlement in Georgia and its neighbourhood, which they have held from that day to this.
This horde of Turks, the Chozars, was nomad and pagan; it consisted of mounted shepherds, surrounded with their flocks, living in tents and waggons. In the course of the following centuries, under the shadow of their more civilized brethren, other similar hordes were introduced, nomad and pagan still; they might indeed happen sometimes to pass down from the east of the Caspian as well as from the west, hastening to the south straight from Turkistan along the coast of the Aral;—either road would lead them down to the position which the Chozars were the first to occupy in Georgia and Armenia,—but still there would be but one step in their journey between their old native sheep-walk and horse-path and the fair region into which they came. It was a sudden Tartar descent, accompanied with no national change of habits, and promising no permanent stability. Nor would they have remained there, I suppose, as they did remain, were it not that they have been protected, as they were originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have made use of them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to this day, the successors of the Chozars, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, even as far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its maritime cities and ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand years ago, except that they have taken up the loose profession of Mahometanism, and have given up some of the extreme peculiarities of their Tartar state, such as their attachment to horse-flesh and mares' milk. These are the Turcomans.
3.
The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concerned, he tells us that[17] "they are tall and robust, with square flat faces, as well as the western; only they are more swarthy, and have a greater resemblance to the Tartars. Some of them have betaken themselves to husbandry. They are all Mohammedans; they are very turbulent, very brave, and good horsemen." And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that of firearms.
This account is drawn up from writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Precisely the same report of their habits is made by Dr. Chandler in his travels in Asia Minor in the middle of the last century; he fell in with them in his journey between Smyrna and Ephesus. "We were told here," he says, "that the road farther on was beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the Nomades Scythæ: or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing their stations, and overspreading without control the vast neglected pastures of this desert empire.... We set out, and ... soon after came to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and herds and horses and poultry feeding round them."[18]
I may seem to be making unnecessary extracts, but I have two reasons for multiplying them; in order, first, to show the identity in character of the various tribes of the Tartar and the Turkish stock, and next, in order to impress upon your imagination what that character is; for it is not easy to admit into the mind the very idea of a people of this kind, dwelling too, and that for ages, in some of the most celebrated and beautiful regions of the world, such as Syria and Asia Minor. With this view I will read what Volney says of them, as he found them in Syria towards the close of the last century. "The Turkmans," he says,[19] "are of the number of those Tartar hordes, who, in the great revolutions of the Empire of the Caliphs, emigrated from the eastward of the Caspian Sea, and spread themselves over the vast plains of Armenia and Asia Minor. Their language is the same as that of the Turks, and their mode of life nearly resembles that of the Bedouin Arabs. Like them, they are shepherds, and consequently obliged to travel over immense tracts of land to procure subsistence for their numerous herds.... Their whole occupation consists in smoking and looking after their flocks. Perpetually on horseback, with their lances on their shoulders, their crooked sabres by their sides, and their pistols in their belts, they are expert horsemen and indefatigable soldiers.... A great number of these tribes pass in the summer into Armenia and Caramania, where they find grass in great abundance, and return to their former quarters in the winter. The Turkmans are reputed to be Moslem ... but they trouble themselves little about religion."
While I was collecting these passages, a notice of these tribes appeared in the columns of the Times newspaper, sent home by its Constantinople correspondent, apropos of the present concentration of troops in that capital in expectation of a Russian war. His Statement enables us to carry down our specimens of the Tartar type of the Turkish race to the present day "From the coast of the Black Sea," he writes home, "to the Taurus chain of mountains, a great part of the population is nomad, and besides the Turks or Osmanlis," that is, the Ottoman or Imperial Turks, "consists of two distinct races;—the Turcomans, who possessed themselves of the land before the advent of the Osmanlis, and who wander with their black tents up to the shores of the Bosphorus; and the Curds." With the Curds we are not here concerned. He proceeds: "The Turcomans, who are spread over the whole of Asia Minor, are a most warlike people. Clans, numbering many thousand, acknowledge the Sultan as the representative of the Caliphs and the Sovereign Lord of Islam, from whom all the Frank kings receive their crowns; but they are practically independent of him, and pay no taxes but to their own chiefs. In the neighbourhood of Cæsarea, Kusan Oghlou, a Turcoman chief, numbers 20,000 armed horsemen, rules despotically over a large district, and has often successfully resisted the Sultan's arms. These people lead a nomad life, are always engaged in petty warfare, are well mounted, and armed with pistol, scimitar, spear, or gun, and would always be useful as irregular troops."
4.
And now I have said enough, and more than enough, of the original state of the Turkish race, as exhibited in the Chozars and Turcomans:—it is time to pursue the history of that more important portion of it with which we are properly engaged, which received some sort of education, and has proved itself capable of social and political union. I observed just now, that that education was very different in its mode and circumstances from that which has been the lot of the nations with which we are best acquainted. Other nations have been civilized in their own homes, and, by their social progress, have immortalized a country as well as a race. They have been educated by their conquests, or by subjugation, or by the intercourse with foreigners which commerce or colonization has opened; but in every case they have been true to their fatherland, and are children of the soil. The Greeks sent out their colonies to Asia Minor and Italy, and those colonies reacted upon the mother country. Magna Græcia and Ionia showed their mother country the way to her intellectual supremacy. The Romans spread gradually from one central city, and when their conquests reached as far as Greece, "the captive," in the poet's words, "captivated her wild conqueror, and introduced arts into unmannered Latium."[20] England was converted by the Roman See and conquered by the Normans, and was gradually civilized by the joint influences of religion and of chivalry. Religion indeed, though a depraved religion, has had something to do, as we shall see, with the civilization of the Turks; but the circumstances have been altogether different from those which we trace in the history of England, Rome, or Greece. The Turks present the spectacle of a race poured out, as it were, upon a foreign material, interpenetrating all its parts, yet preserving its individuality, and at length making its way through it, and reappearing, in substance the same as before, but charged with the qualities of the material through which it has been passed, and modified by them. They have been invaded by no conqueror, they have brought no captive arts or literature home, they have undergone no conversion in mass, they have been taught by no commerce, by no international relationship; but they have in the course of centuries slowly soaked or trickled, if I may use the words, through the Saracenic populations with which they came in contact, and after being nationally lost to the world, as far as history goes, for long periods and through different countries, eventually they have come to the face of day with that degree of civilization which they at present possess, and at length have usurped a place within the limits of the great European family. And this is why the path southwards to the east of the Aral was, in matter of fact, the path of civilization, and that by the Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia,—with many fortunes, under many masters, for many hundred years, before they came round to the region to which their Turcoman brethren attained so easily, but with so little eventual advantage. My meaning will be clearer, as I proceed.
5.
1. First of all, we may say that the very region into which they came, tended to their civilization. Of course the peculiarities of soil, climate, and country are not by themselves sufficient for a social change, else the Turcomans would have the best right to civilization; yet, when other influences are present too, climate and country are far from being unimportant. You may recollect that I have spoken more than once of the separation of a portion of the Huns from the main body, when they were emigrating from Tartary into Europe, in the time of the Goths.[21] These turned off sharp to the South immediately on descending the high table-land; and, crossing the Jaxartes, found themselves in a fertile and attractive country, between the Aral and their old country, where they settled. It is a peculiarity of Asia that its regions are either very hot or very cold. It has the highest mountains in the world, bleak table-lands, vast spaces of burning desert, tracts stretched out beneath the tropical sun. Siberia goes for a proverb for cold: India is a proverb for heat. It is not adequately supplied with rivers, and it has little of inland sea. In these respects it stands in singular contrast with Europe. If then the tribes which inhabit a cold country have, generally speaking, more energy than those which are relaxed by the heat, it follows that you will have in Asia two descriptions of people brought together in extreme, sometimes in sudden, contrariety with each other, the strong and the weak. Here then, as some philosophers have argued,[22] you have the secret of the despotisms and the vast empires of which Asia has been the seat; for it always possesses those who are naturally fitted to be tyrants, and those also whose nature it is to tremble and obey. But we may take another, perhaps a broader, view of the phenomenon. The sacred writer says: "Give me neither riches nor beggary:" and, as the extremes of abundance and of want are prejudicial to our moral well-being, so they seem to be prejudicial to our intellectual nature also. Mental cultivation is best carried on in temperate regions. In the north men are commonly too cold, in the south too hot, to think, read, write, and act. Science, literature, and art refuse to germinate in the frost, and are burnt up by the sun.
Now it so happened that the region in which this party of Huns settled themselves was one of the fairest and most fruitful in Asia. It is bounded by deserts, it is in parts encroached on by deserts; but viewed in its length and breadth, in its produce and its position, it seems a country equal, or superior, to any which that vast continent, as at present known, can show. Its lower portion is the extensive territory of Khorasan, the ancient Bactriana; going northwards across the Oxus, we come into a spacious tract, stretching to the Aral and to the Jaxartes, and measuring a square of 600 miles. It was called in ancient times Sogdiana; in the history of the middle ages Transoxiana, or "beyond the Oxus;" by the Eastern writers Maver-ul-nere, or Mawer-al-nahar, which is said to have the same meaning; and it is now known by the name Bukharia. To these may be added a third province, at the bottom of the Aral, between the mouth of the Oxus and the Caspian, called Kharasm. These, then, were the regions in which the Huns in question took up their abode.
The two large countries I first mentioned are celebrated in all ages for those characteristics which render a spot desirable for human habitation. As to Sogdiana, or Maver-ul-nere, the region with which we are specially concerned, the Orientals, especially the Persians, of the medieval period do not know how to express in fit terms their admiration of its climate and soil. They do not scruple to call it the Paradise of Asia. "It may be considered," says a modern writer,[23] "as almost the only example of the finest temperate climate occurring in that continent, which presents generally an abrupt transition from burning tropical heat to the extreme cold of the north." According to an Arabian author, there are just three spots in the globe which surpass all the rest in beauty and fertility; one of them is near Damascus, another seems to be the valley of a river on the Persian Gulf, and the third is the plain of Sogdiana. Another writer says: "I have cast my eyes around Bokhara, and never have I seen a verdure more fresh or of wider extent. The green carpet mingles in the horizon with the azure of the sky."[24] Abulfeda in like manner calls it "the most delightful of all places God has created." Some recent writer, I think, speaks in disparagement of it.[25] And I can quite understand, that the deserts which must be passed to reach it from the south or the north may betray the weary traveller into an exaggerated praise, which is the expression both of his recruited spirits and of his gratitude. But all things are good only by comparison; and I do not see why an Asiatic, having experience of the sands which elsewhere overspread the face of his continent, should for that reason be ill qualified to pronounce that Sogdiana affords a contrast to them. Moreover, we have the experience of other lands, as Asia Minor, which have presented a very different aspect in different ages. A river overflows and turns a fruitful plain into a marsh; or it fails, and turns it into a sandy desert. Sogdiana is watered by a number of great rivers, which make their way across it from the high land on its east to the Aral or Caspian. Now we read in history of several instances of changes, accidental or artificial, in the direction or the supply of these great water-courses. I think I have read somewhere, but cannot recover my authority, of some emigration of the inhabitants of those countries, caused by a failure of the stream on which they depended. And we know for certain that the Oxus has been changed in its course, accidentally or artificially, more than once. Disputes have arisen before now between the Russian Government and the Tartars, on the subject of one of these diversions of the bed of a river.[26] One province of Khorasan, which once was very fertile, is in consequence now a desert It may be questioned, too, whether the sands of the adjacent deserts, which are subject to violent agitation from the action of the wind, may not have encroached upon Sogdiana. Nor should it be overlooked that this rich country has been subjected to the same calamities which have been the desolation of Asia Minor; for, as the Turcomans have devastated the latter, so, as I have already had occasion to mention, Zingis swept round the sea of Aral, and destroyed the fruits of a long civilization.
Even after the ravages of that conqueror, however, Timour and the Emperor Baber, who had a right to judge of the comparative excellence of the countries of the East, bear witness to the beauty of Sogdiana. Timour, who had fixed his imperial seat in Samarcand, boasted he had a garden 120 miles in extent. Baber expatiates on the grain and fruit and game of its northern parts; of the tulips, violets, and roses of another portion of it; of the streams and gardens of another. Its plains are said by travellers to abound in wood, its rivers in fish, its valleys in fruit-trees, in wheat and barley, and in cotton.[27] The quince, pomegranate, fig, apricot, and almond all flourish in it. Its melons are the finest in the world. Mulberries abound, and provide for a considerable manufacture of silk. No wine, says Baber, is equal to the wine of Bokhara. Its atmosphere is so clear and serene, that the stars are visible even to the verge of the horizon. A recent Russian traveller says he came to a country so smiling, well cultivated, and thickly peopled, with fields, canals, avenues of trees, villages, and gardens, that he thought himself in an enchanted country. He speaks in raptures of its melons, pomegranates, and grapes.[28] Its breed of horses is celebrated; so much so that a late British traveller[29] visited the country with the special object of substituting it for the Arab in our Indian armies. Its mountains abound in useful and precious produce. Coal is found there; gold is collected from its rivers; silver and iron are yielded by its hills; we hear too of its mines of turquoise, and of its cliffs of lapis lazuli,[30] and its mines of rubies, which to this day are the object of the traveller's curiosity.[31] I might extend my remarks to the country south of the Oxus and of its mountain range, the modern Affghanistan. Though Cabul is 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, it abounds in pomegranates, mulberries, apples, and fruit of every kind. Grapes are so plentiful, that for three months of the year they are given to the cattle.
6.
This region, favoured in soil and climate, is favoured also in position. Lying at the mouth of the two great roads of emigration from the far East, the valleys of the Jaxartes and the Oxus, it is the natural mart between High Asia and Europe, receiving the merchandize of East and North, and transporting it by its rivers, by the Caspian, the Kur, and the Phasis, to the Black Sea. Thus it received in former days the silk of China, the musk of Thibet, and the furs of Siberia, and shipped them for the cities of the Roman Empire. To Samarcand, its metropolis, we owe the art of transforming linen into paper, which the Sogdian merchants are said to have gained from China, and thence diffused by means of their own manufacturers over the western world. A people so circumstanced could not be without civilization; but that civilization was of a much earlier date. It must not be forgotten that the celebrated sage, Zoroaster, before the times of history, was a native, and, as some say, king of Bactriana. Cyrus had established a city in the same region, which he called after his name. Alexander conquered both Bactriana and Sogdiana, and planted Grecian cities there. There is a long line of Greco-Bactrian kings; and their coins and pateræ have been brought to light within the last few years. Alexander's name is still famous in the country; not only does Marco Polo in the middle ages speak of his descendants as still found there, but even within the last fifteen years Sir Alexander Burns found a man professing that descent in the valley of the Oxus, and Lieutenant Wood another in the same neighbourhood.
Nor was Greek occupation the only source of the civilization of Sogdiana. Centuries rolled on, and at length the Saracens renewed, on their own peculiar basis, the mental cultivation which Sogdiana had received from Alexander. The cities of Bokhara and Samarcand have been famous for science and literature. Bokhara was long celebrated as the most eminent seat of Mahometan learning in central Asia; its colleges were, and are, numerous, accommodating from 60 to 600 students each. One of them gained the notice and the pecuniary aid of the Russian Empress Catharine.[32] Samarcand rivals Bokhara in fame; its university even in the last century was frequented by Mahometan youth from foreign countries. There were more than 300 colleges for students, and there was an observatory, celebrated in the middle ages, the ruins of which remain. Here lies the body of Timour, under a lofty dome, the sides of which are enriched with agate. "Since the time of the Holy Prophet," that is, Mahomet, says the Emperor Baber, "no country has produced so many Imaums and eminent divines as Mawar-al-nahar," that is, Sogdiana. It was celebrated for its populousness. At one time it boasted of being able to send out 300,000 foot, and as many horse, without missing them. Bridges and caravansaries abounded; the latter, in the single province attached to its capital, amounted to 2,000. In Bactriana, the very ruins of Balkh extend for a circuit of 20 miles, and Sir A. Burns wound through three miles of them continuously.
Such is the country, seated at present between the British and the Russian Empires, and such as regards its previous and later state, which the savage Huns, in their emigration from Tartary, had necessarily encountered; and it cannot surprise us that one of their many tribes had been persuaded to settle there, instead of seeking their fortunes farther west. The effect upon these settlers in course of time was marvellous. Though it was not of course the mere climate of Sogdiana that changed them, still we cannot undervalue the influence which is necessarily exerted on the mind by the idea of property, when once recognised and accepted, by the desire of possession and by the love of home, and by the sentiment of patriotism which arises in the mind, especially with the occupation of a rich and beautiful country. Moreover, they became the guests or masters of a people, who, however rude, at least had far higher claims to be called civilized than they themselves, and possessed among them the remains of a more civilized era. They found a race, too, not Tartar, more capable of civilization, more gifted with intellect, and more comely in person. Settling down among the inhabitants, and intermarrying with them, in the course of generations their Tartar characteristics were sensibly softened. For a thousand years this restless people remained there, as if chained to the soil. They still had the staple of barbarism in them, but so polished were they for children of a Tartar stock, that they are called in history the White Huns of Sogdiana. They took to commerce, they took to literature; and when, at the end of a few centuries, the Turks, as I have already described, spread abroad from the iron works and forges of Mount Altai to Kamtchatka, the Volga, and the Indus, and overran these White Huns in the course of their victories, they could find no parties more fitted than them to act as their diplomatists and correspondents in their negotiations with the Romans.
Such was the influence of Sogdiana on the Huns; is it wonderful that it exerted some influence on the Turks, when they in turn got possession of it? History justifies the anticipation; as the Huns of the second or third centuries settled around the Aral, so the Turks in the course of the sixth or seventh centuries overran them, and descended down to the modern Affghanistan and the Indus; and as the fair region and its inhabitants, which they crossed and occupied, had begun at the former era the civilization of the first race of Tartars, so did it at the latter era begin the education of the second.
7.
2. But a more direct and effective instrument of social education was accorded to the Turks on their occupation of Sogdiana. You may recollect I spoke of their first empire as lasting for only 200 years,[33] about 90 of which measures the period of that occupation. Their power then came to an end; what was the consequence of their fall? were they driven out of Sogdiana again? were they massacred? did they take refuge in the mountains or deserts? were they reduced to slavery? Thus we are introduced to a famous passage of history: the case was as follows:—At the very date at which Heraclius called the Turcomans into Georgia, at the very date when their Eastern brethren crossed the northern border of Sogdiana, an event of most momentous import had occurred in the South. A new religion had arisen in Arabia. The impostor Mahomet, announcing himself the Prophet of God, was writing the pages of that book, and moulding the faith of that people, which was to subdue half the known world. The Turks passed the Jaxartes southward in A.D. 626; just four years before Mahomet had assumed the royal dignity, and just six years after, on his death, his followers began the conquest of the Persian Empire. In the course of 20 years they effected it; Sogdiana was at its very extremity, or its borderland; there the last king of Persia took refuge from the south, while the Turks were pouring into it from the north. There was little to choose for the unfortunate prince between the Turk and the Saracen; the Turks were his hereditary foe; they had been the giants and monsters of the popular poetry; but he threw himself into their arms. They engaged in his service, betrayed him, murdered him, and measured themselves with the Saracens in his stead. Thus the military strength of the north and south of Asia, the Saracenic and the Turkish, came into memorable conflict in the regions of which I have said so much. The struggle was a fierce one, and lasted many years; the Turks striving to force their way down to the ocean, the Saracens to drive them back into their Scythian deserts. They first fought this issue in Bactriana or Khorasan; the Turks got the worst of the fight, and then it was thrown back upon Sogdiana itself, and there it ended again in favour of the Saracens. At the end of 90 years from the time of the first Turkish descent on this fair region, they relinquished it to their Mahometan opponents. The conquerors found it rich, populous, and powerful; its cities, Carisme, Bokhara, and Samarcand, were surrounded beyond their fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains were well cultivated, and its commerce extended from China to Europe. Its riches were proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort a tribute of two million gold pieces from the inhabitants; we read, moreover, of the crown jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of the buskin of another, which she dropt in her flight from Bokhara, as being worth two thousand pieces of gold.[34] Such had been the prosperity of the barbarian invaders, such was its end; but not their end, for adversity did them service, as well as prosperity, as we shall see.
It is usual for historians to say, that the triumph of the South threw the Turks back again upon their northern solitudes; and this might easily be the case with some of the many hordes, which were ever passing the boundary and flocking down; but it is no just account of the historical fact, viewed as a whole. Not often indeed do the Oriental nations present us with an example of versatility of character; the Turks, for instance, of this day are substantially what they were four centuries ago. We cannot conceive, were Turkey overrun by the Russians at the present moment, that the fanatical tribes, which are pouring into Constantinople from Asia Minor, would submit to the foreign yoke, take service under their conquerors, become soldiers, custom-officers, police, men of business, attachés, statesmen, working their way up from the ranks and from the masses into influence and power; but, whether from skill in the Saracens, or from far-reaching sagacity in the Turks (and it is difficult to assign it to either cause), so it was, that a process of this nature followed close upon the Mahometan conquest of Sogdiana. It is to be traced in detail to a variety of accidents. Many of the Turks probably were made slaves, and the service to which they were subjected was no matter of choice. Numbers had got attached to the soil; and inheriting the blood of Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal inhabitants for three generations, had simply unlearned the wildness of the Tartar shepherd. Others fell victims to the religion of their conquerors, which ultimately, as we know, exercised a most remarkable influence upon them. Not all at once, but as tribe descended after tribe, and generation followed generation, they succumbed to the creed of Mahomet; and they embraced it with the ardour and enthusiasm which Franks and Saxons so gloriously and meritoriously manifested in their conversion to Christianity.
8.
3. Here again was a very powerful instrument in modification of their national character. Let me illustrate it in one particular. If there is one peculiarity above another, proper to the savage and to the Tartar, it is that of excitability and impetuosity on ordinary occasions; the Turks, on the other hand, are nationally remarkable for gravity and almost apathy of demeanour. Now there are evidently elements in the Mahometan creed, which would tend to change them from the one temperament to the other. Its sternness, its coldness, its doctrine of fatalism; even the truths which it borrowed from Revelation, when separated from the truths it rejected, its monotheism untempered by mediation, its severe view of the divine attributes, of the law, and of a sure retribution to come, wrought both a gloom and also an improvement in the barbarian, not very unlike the effect which some forms of Protestantism produce among ourselves. But whatever was the mode of operation, certainly it is to their religion that this peculiarity of the Turks is ascribed by competent judges. Lieutenant Wood in his journal gives us a lively account of a peculiarity of theirs, which he unhesitatingly attributes to Islamism. "Nowhere," he says, "is the difference between European and Mahomedan society more strongly marked than in the lower walks of life.... A Kasid, or messenger, for example, will come into a public department, deliver his letters in full durbar, and demean himself throughout the interview with so much composure and self-possession, that an European can hardly believe that his grade in society is so low. After he has delivered his letters, he takes his seat among the crowd, and answers, calmly and without hesitation, all the questions which may be addressed to him, or communicates the verbal instructions with which he has been entrusted by his employer, and which are often of more importance than the letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these little men will place their hands upon their breasts, and give the usual greeting. Frequently have I seen the children of chiefs approach their father's durbar, and stopping short at the threshold of the door, utter the shout of 'Salam Ali-Kum,' so as to draw all eyes upon them; but nothing daunted, they marched boldly into the room, and sliding down upon their knees, folded their arms and took their seat upon the musnad with all the gravity of grown-up persons."
As Islamism has changed the demeanour of the Turks, so doubtless it has in other ways materially innovated on their Tartar nature. It has given an aim to their military efforts, a political principle, and a social bond. It has laid them under a sense of responsibility, has moulded them into consistency, and taught them a course of policy and perseverance in it. But to treat this part of the subject adequately to its importance would require, Gentlemen, a research and a fulness of discussion unsuitable to the historical sketch which I have undertaken. I have said enough for my purpose upon this topic; and indeed on the general question of the modification of national character to which the Turks were at this period subjected.