Ideas Constitute a Nation

A nation, when considered from its earliest to its latest days, is much more a body of ideas than a race of men. Men die, families decay, the original stock tends to disappear; new individuals are admitted from without, new family groups take the lead, whole tribes are incorporated and absorbed; after centuries the anthropological result often bears but slight resemblance to the original type. Undoubtedly the fabric of ideas which a nation weaves as its history develops also undergoes changes of pattern; old principles pass out of sight, and new ones, born of circumstance, or brought in from without, come to controlling influence. But ideas are not, like men, mortal: they can be transmitted from man to man through ages; they can be stored in books and thus pass from the dead to the living; when built together into a solid and attractive structure, they impart to the whole something of their individual immortality. Singly they pass as readily to strangers as to kindred; when organized to rounded completeness as the culture of a great living nation, they have a power which lays hold of men of many races, alone or in masses, and in the absence of strong prejudice compels acceptance.

Such an assimilative force can clearly be seen in vigorous operation in the United States of America today. A system of ideas, woven of countless threads spun by Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Teuton, preserved and enlarged by Frank, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Englishman, recombined in a new and striking pattern by the founders of the republic, is thrown over men from every nation under heaven, who under its influence all become of one type, not to be mistaken wherever it is seen.

The history of the Ottoman Empire reveals the constant working of a like assimilative force. It was not merely, and not even mainly, the compulsion of the sword that built up and maintained the strongest national power of the sixteenth century. Swords must be wielded by men; and how were enough strong and capable men found and bound together in willing coöperation to conquer large sections of Europe, Asia, and Africa, to organize and govern their conquests in a fairly satisfactory fashion, and to establish a structure which, after more than three hundred years of decay, disaster, and disintegration, has yet enough strength to form the basis for a new departure? The only answer possible is that the attraction of a great body of national ideas gathered men from every direction and many races to unite in a common effort. Although much violence, injustice, and destructive passion was involved, the result was a great and on the whole a durable and useful empire.

The government of the Ottoman Empire when at the height of its power cannot be understood from a description of its court, costumes, ceremonies, and officials, with a catalogue of their provinces and duties. A thorough comprehension of the main political ideas that constituted the life of the empire is essential. Since most of these ideas were old and tried, and were wrought in a thousand ways into the general scheme, a complete treatment would demand that they should be considered historically from the time of their adoption. Nor would it be sufficient to go back to the beginning of the house of Osman. The Turkish nucleus which gathered around him, and the Mohammedans and Christians from near and far who joined his rising fortunes were already in possession, in a fairly systematic form, of most of the ideas of the completed Ottoman government. The inquiry should be begun farther back, among Byzantine Greeks, Seljuk Turks, Mohammedans of Persia and Arabia, and Turks of Central Asia. Many of the ideas, indeed, can be traced yet farther, through Tartary to China and through Parthia and Rome to Babylon and Egypt.

These origins, however, cannot be considered here except in the briefest possible fashion. All that can be done is to outline the background of Ottoman history, the general character of the Ottoman Empire and its service to the world, the racial descent of the Ottoman Turks, and the main influences which affected their institutions and culture.

The Background of Ottoman History

From early times the developing Chinese civilization in the valley of the Yellow River had to contend with intermittent attacks from the barbarians of the north and west. In the latter half of the third century B.C. China’s work of domestic consolidation and centralization reached completeness, and foreign conquest began. The policy was then initiated which has never since been departed from,—the subjugation of the outlying lands and the cultural assimilation of their inhabitants.[1] Following up with armies, governors, and garrisons the nomads who fled to the west, by the beginning of the second century A.D. China held vassal all the population of the steppe country from the Great Wall to the Caspian Sea; her frontiers marched with those of Parthia. Early in the third century she entered upon four hundred years of weakness, and her western possessions fell away; but she regained strength and restored her western dominion just in time to confront the rising Saracen flood. During three brilliant centuries, the seventh, eight, and ninth of our era, she held the nomads in fairly constant subjection, and presumably taught them many of her orderly, organized ways. It was probably in part by the strength of her discipline that in the succeeding half-millennium the descendants of these nomads, Turks and Mongols, wrought their will from the Sea of Japan to the Adriatic, over most of Asia, half of Europe, and a goodly portion of Africa.

From the eighth century Turks drifted southwestward in ever-increasing numbers out of Chinese territory into the declining Saracen Empire. Early in the eleventh century an army followed this course and set up the vast but short-lived empire of the Seljuk Turks. These broke the eastern frontier of Asia Minor, which had protected the Greeks and Romans for fourteen hundred years, and pushed on until they could see the domes of Constantinople. The eastward pressure of the crusading period kept them from European shores for two centuries, near the close of which the Mongols overran their disintegrated lands. A remnant, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, struggled on in Asia Minor until the close of the thirteenth century, when it fell into ten parts. The East Roman, or Byzantine Empire, had by that time also been thoroughly wrecked, and the Balkan Peninsula was divided among Frank, Italian, and Catalan, Greek, Serb, Albanian, Wallach, and Bulgarian.

The people of one of the ten fragments of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm took the name of Osmanlis from their chief Osman. Located on the border of the Greek and Turkish groups of principalities, they drew men and governmental ideas from both. The rapidity of their growth from so small a beginning, and under such apparently unfavorable circumstances, into a durable state is one of the marvellous things of history. In about two and a quarter centuries from the time of their independence they were able to attempt for the last time to unite the entire Mediterranean civilization into one empire. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Armenia, Asia Minor, Greece, the Balkan Peninsula, a large part of modern Austria-Hungary and of modern Russia, were theirs; they threatened Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, and Persia. They thus held all three of the earliest centers of Mediterranean civilization, the western half of the Old Persian Empire, and all the dominions of Rome except the northwestern one-third. Apart from Spain and the lands east of the Zagros Mountains, they ruled the Saracen Empire. With the exception of Italy (with Illyricum and the adjacent islands) and the short-lived Byzantine conquests in Spain, the empire of Justinian lay within their boundaries. The later Byzantine Empire became the heart of their dominions, and its two chief supports—the trade which passed through the Bosphorus and the products and men of Asia Minor—became their own principal supports. The inheritance of lands and of institutions by the Ottoman Turks from the two great medieval empires of the Levant, the Saracen and the East Roman, is by all odds the most pregnant fact of their existence. They were the immediate heirs of a part of the territory and of the whole of the culture of the Seljuk Turks. The scene of the “world’s debate” formed but an insignificant part of their dominions. They gathered into one net all the shoal of feudal, royal, and imperial powers which made the Levant of the thirteenth century as decentralized as the Holy Roman Empire or the Italy of the fifteenth century.

Character and Mission of the Ottoman Empire

This rapid survey leads to a number of significant observations. First, the Ottoman Turks of the sixteenth century ruled countries wholly within the sphere of the Mediterranean civilization. The only possible exception was the steppe lands north of the Black Sea; but these had been almost as much under the sway of Rome and Constantinople as they ever were under that of Stamboul. Even communication with Eastern and Southern Asia was well-nigh cut off. The road to China north of the Caspian Sea alone remained open, but after the break-up of the Mongol Empire it had become long and dangerous. The rival and hostile New Persian power firmly closed the southern land route to India and China; and even the sea-way from Egypt eastward was blockaded by the newly-arrived Portuguese. Thus the Ottoman Empire, except in remote origins, which, indeed, profoundly influenced it, grew and flourished within what is commonly considered the main field of history. Accordingly, it has a greater claim upon the Western world on the score of kinship than has hitherto generally been allowed.

Second, within the Mediterranean civilization the Ottoman Empire combined regions of both Orient and Occident. The classical world knew chiefly Romans, Greeks, and Orientals. The Ottoman Turk succeeded to two-thirds of this world, the lands of Greece and the East. From the day of Issus to the day of Menzikert, Asia Minor had to all intents and purposes been a part of Europe. After Menzikert it became a center of Turkish rule, to which, in the course of time, territories from both Asia and Europe were added in widening circles. No deep knowledge of historical forces is necessary to suggest that neither in Southern Europe nor in Asia Minor itself could the teachings of fourteen centuries or more be obliterated in five centuries or less, or even in an eternity; nor would they fail to exert a profound influence from the moment of conquest. To regard the Ottoman Empire as a mere Oriental state would be to misread history and to misunderstand human nature. Its lands were of both Orient and Occident, so also were its people, so also were its culture and its government.

Third, the Ottoman Turks drew men and ideas from both Mohammedans and Christians. They have commonly been regarded as wholly Mohammedan, and therefore they have been shut off by a well-nigh impenetrable barrier from the sympathies of a world still possessed by the prejudices of crusading days. The foundations of such prejudices are easily open to attack. The main religious ideas of Mohammedanism are not, except as to the divinity of Christ, inharmonious with those of Christianity; they were, indeed, in all probability drawn chiefly from the religious teachings of the Old Testament. The social system of Mohammedanism is also much like that of the Old Testament. Its most objectionable features, the seclusion of women, polygamy, and slavery, may be regarded as survivals from an older condition of mankind out of which a portion of the human race has emerged—not without frequent cases of atavism—and which Mohammedans themselves are tending to abandon. But, leaving aside the question of the kinship of Christianity and Mohammedanism, no one can deny that the Ottomans ruled over many Christians, that many of their ablest men and families were of Christian ancestry, and that, according to the nature of humanity, as much of their civilization and ruling ideas may have come from Christian as from Mohammedan sources.

It is true that as a nation the Ottoman Turks remained Mohammedan; this has constituted the real “tragedy of the Turk.” Bound hand and foot by that scholastic Mohammedanism which was reaching rigid perfection at the time when the Turks first became prominent in the Saracen Empire, and which only in very recent days seems tending toward a Reformation, they could not amalgamate the subject Christian peoples, already confirmed in nationalism by the events of centuries. The deadening system stilled their active spirits, imprisoned their extraordinary adaptability, and held them at a stage of culture which, though in some respects it distinctly led Europe in the sixteenth century, was before long passed through and left behind by the progressive West. Nevertheless, the Turks were no more limited to Mohammedan ideas than to Mohammedan men, and they are entitled to be considered in the light of their double origin.

Fourth and last, the great task before the Ottoman Turks was a work of unification. Lands which had been united under the great Theodosius, and then during eleven centuries had been more and more disintegrated by invasion of German, Slav, Arab, Tatar, and Turk, by war of Byzantine, Persian, Moslem, Crusader, and Mongol, by destruction of roads and safe water-routes, and by general decay of civilization, until confusion and disorder reigned and anarchy seemed not far ahead—these lands were once more brought under a single control. Was it their destiny to be genuinely reunited, not merely in a common subjection, not merely by an external shell of authority, but in the pulsing life of a vigorous nation, harmonious in every part and run through by patriotism? This was the well-nigh insoluble problem which the Ottoman Turks attempted bravely. How they solved the administrative and governmental phase of it the present treatise will try to show. Religious unity was out of the question; and in the sixteenth century, in East and West alike, social and cultural unity waited upon the religious. Had the Ottoman Empire been able four hundred years ago to set apart religious considerations as matters for the individual—a process which affords the chief hope of the new Turkey of the twentieth century—her whole subsequent history must have been very different.

But in the measure in which unity was attained in the Levant under the Ottoman authority, in that measure did the Ottoman Empire render service to civilization and humanity. After the close of the thirteenth century Western Europe, absorbed in its own affairs, was able to give little attention to the East. Two centuries were taken up with the consolidation of national powers, chiefly at the expense of feudalism and the medieval church. By the sixteenth century a measure of internal solidarity had been attained and the struggle for external supremacy over the West had been begun. The whole situation was complicated by the actively leavening force of the New Learning and the explosively rending force of the Reformation. Under such circumstances even the advance of the Turks into Central Europe could only temporarily divert attention from absorbing problems and direct it toward the East. To what a state of minute division and infinite disorder the Levant would have come by that time, had the Ottoman Empire not grown up, can only be imagined. Egypt, the only Levantine power of consequence after the close of the crusades, had reached the natural limits of her dominion, and had she aimed at wider conquests the Mameluke government would scarcely have been capable of imperial sway. No other of the countless principalities of the eastern Mediterranean showed enough life to accomplish unity. But the Ottoman Turks, cruelly and destructively, imperfectly and clumsily, yet surely and effectively, built up and maintained a single authority, to which the world probably owes most of that measure of enlightenment, culture, and order which can be found in the Levant today.

The Racial Descent of the Ottoman Turks

The question as to the origin of the Ottoman Turks was raised in Western Europe as soon as the race began to appear upon the stage of history. There seemed to be something mysterious and uncanny about their rise to power. If an innumerable horde of strange barbarians, a second invasion of Attila, had overrun the Levant and settled down to rule its conquests, cause and effect would have been apparent. But this nation seemed to arise out of the earth. Organized and disciplined beyond any parallel in the West, it seemed to come from nowhere and to begin at once to take a very real part in human affairs.[2] The problem of its origin is by no means completely solved as yet, but the main elements can perhaps be outlined. A search for these carries the inquiry to the steppe lands.

The great band of open country which stretches with hardly a break across the whole of Asia and far into Europe resembles the ocean both in its vastness and in its character as an intermediate region through which the travel of commerce, statesmanship, religion, learning, and curiosity can pass between more thickly-settled lands. It differs from the ocean, however, in being everywhere more or less habitable. The ethnic relations of its families, tribes, and nations are by no means clear. China, with a markedly Mongolian population, lay at the east and southeast; Indo-Europeans of the Caucasian race dwelt at the southwest and west. The tribes between seem from the earliest recorded times to have presented every intermediate stage of physical type, as they do now; and in general the shading from yellow to white appears to have proceeded regularly from east to west, a circumstance that may have been due largely to climatic influence, but was probably far more the result of admixture.[3] These peoples were given to frequent warfare, one of whose objects was the capture of men, women, and children as the most valuable booty. They seem to have had no race aversions that would hinder inter-mixture, and no race pride that would prevent captives, in the course of time, from attaining full equality in any rank to which their abilities could carry them. Accordingly, the process of admixture that can be observed in historic times has probably been followed from the remote past.

The name Tatars may be used to designate all the inhabitants of the steppe-ocean who were not distinctly Caucasian. By geographical designation they are properly called the Ural-Altaic peoples, while ethnically they constitute the Mongolo-Turki group.[4] Included perhaps among those unclassified peoples who were known of old to the Greek as Scythians, to the Persians as Turanians, and to the Chinese as Hiung-nu, the Tatars, despite many differences, show unmistakable kinship, usually in their physical features, always in their language and institutions. They have been grouped since medieval times into two great divisions, the Mongols and the Turks. This division may be said to correspond in a very general way to their greater and lesser resemblance to the Chinese, and to a narrower and wider geographical separation from China. Many tribes possess such intermediate characteristics that they cannot easily be classified as Turks or Mongols;[5] but a tribe that is markedly like the Chinese is clearly Mongol, and a tribe that differs widely from the Chinese is clearly Turkish. If these explanations be adopted, the Turkish peoples are then in general those Tatars who have had the greatest admixture of Caucasian blood. Their original seat seems to have been in Mongolia, but in historic times they had come to occupy the whole central part of the steppe region, from the Desert of Gobi to the Volga, in contact with their Mongol kindred on the east and with Iranians on the south and Slavs on the west. The theory of admixture receives support from the fact that the peoples of the Mediterranean civilization found Mongolians repulsive in appearance, but prized Turkish slaves for their beauty.[6]

The name Turk does not appear prominently in the Byzantine and Chinese annals before the fifth century A.D., when the people of a Tatar empire were designated Τοῦρκοι and Tu-kiu.[7] The word Turcae was used by classical writers soon after the beginning of the Christian era.[8] The name has been suspected of lying hidden in the Targitaos of Herodotus and the Togharmah of Scriptures. However this may be, ancestral peoples possessing the characteristics of the Turks of course existed, and perhaps appeared in history, in very early times.

Some have suggested that the Sumero-Accadians of Babylonia were Turks, but this question hardly bears on the present subject. The relations of Turks and Persians on the Central Asian frontier is much more apropos. The legends of the long wars of Iran and Turan, however little detailed historical value they may have, illustrate the circumstances of continual contact both in war and in peace.[9] Princes and nobles whose lives were forfeit in their own country fled over the border; princesses were exchanged in marriage; and unnumbered thousands of less exalted folk passed the frontier as captives or slaves. The frontier itself was not fixed, but left great regions now to the rule of the Persian and now to the rule of the Turk. The Parthians may have been Turks.[10] After their downfall the lines of Persian and Turk were drawn sharply by the nationalist Sassanians. From the middle of the fifth century, indeed, the Persians had their fill of wars with the Ephthalites, whose appellation of White Huns may indicate their mixed Mongolian and Caucasian origin; the Chinese annals specify the kinship of the Tie-le with the Tu-kiu. No sooner had the Arabs engulfed Persia than they began to welcome the Turks whom they found to the north, and whose semi-nomadic culture was singularly like their own. The Saracen Empire was administered for about a century chiefly by Arabs, for another century chiefly by Persians, and after that chiefly by Turks, who rose rapidly through slavery and military service to the rule of provinces and even of kingdoms. Thus great numbers of Turks came or were brought into many parts of Western Asia. When Toghrul, grandson of Seljuk, led the first great Turkish invasion into the heart of the Saracen Empire, he found his kindred everywhere. Under the Seljuk Sultans large numbers of Turks streamed in and were settled in Persia, Azerbaijan, Syria, and Asia Minor.

The Turkish occupation of Asia Minor has been called the most thorough piece of work done by the race.[11] Few details of it have been recorded, but one great fact stands out: under the Byzantine Empire, Asia Minor was Greek, Christian, and the home of the empire’s most vigorous and loyal citizens; under the Ottoman Empire, Asia Minor is Turkish, Mohammedan, and the home of the empire’s most vigorous and faithful subjects. The process of this transformation, so far as it is known, deserves examination.

Seljuk and Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor

The Seljuk Turks were orthodox, and often fanatical, Moslems; accordingly they put great pressure upon the inhabitants of the peninsula to make them exchange Christ for Mohammed. “Great numbers apostatized, ‘many thousand children were marked by the knife of circumcision; and many thousand captives were devoted to the service or the pleasures of their masters.[12]’”

The Seljuk Turks were already a mixed race, and had no greater objection than their ancestors to the reception of new members. They had come as a Turkish army followed by a host of Turcoman nomads.[13] The soldiers took wives from the women of the land and servants from the men and children, and the nomads filled the gaps left among their women and children after the long, hard journey. Those of the adult Anatolians who were left free found a thousand temporal advantages in following the Prophet, whose simple faith and consoling doctrines, moreover, suited both their temperament and their circumstances. Christianity had sat lightly upon many of them, and Mohammedanism seems to have been accepted as lightly; for traces of Christian and perhaps of pre-Christian practices and beliefs can be seen among the Moslems of Asia Minor today.[14] To turn Moslem was then, as ever since, to turn Turk. In the course of three centuries the process of settlement and conversion reached virtual completion; nearly all the plateau of Asia Minor became Mohammedan and Turkish. Nothing approaching the nature of statistics is available for determining what the proportion was between invading Turks and converted Christians. The probabilities, based on the known character of Turkish invasions and the length and difficulty of the journey from the steppe lands, point to a relatively small number of Turkish settlers.[15] Yet this doubly-mixed people has contributed those subjects of the Ottoman Empire who are accounted the most characteristically Turkish.

The invasion of Western Asia by the Mongols of Genghis Khan in the early part of the thirteenth century drove an unknown number of Persians and Turks to take refuge in Asia Minor. Among these is said to have been a group led by a chief named Suleiman, whose grandson Osman gave the Ottomans their name.[16] This group reached the Seljuk kingdom of Rûm, and was allowed by good custom of the time to proceed to the Christian frontier and conquer what it could. About the time of settlement tradition specifies the number as four hundred families, or 444 horsemen, a figure which has clearly been shaped with reference to the sacred number four, but which shows the belief that the group was not large.[17] The growth of this band was far more rapid than could have been accomplished by natural increase. A part of the additional membership was supplied by Turks and other Moslems of adventurous spirit who sought the fighting and booty of the border-land. But these were by no means all. The Ottoman traditions and history reveal at countless places the hospitable incorporating spirit of the embryonic nation, which rapidly increased its numbers from the Christian population by conversion, marriage, and capture, and most strikingly by the tribute tax of Christian male children. The Ottoman conquests to the eastward brought gradually into the brotherhood all the Seljuk Turks of Asia Minor, and as many as were or became Mohammedan from the various conquered peoples—Greeks of Trebizond, Armenians, Syrians, and others. The conquests in Europe converted en masse some sections of Bulgarians and Albanians, who still show evidence of their origin; a very great number of individuals among the subject Christians, however, were so completely incorporated as to lose all trace of their source. Thousands upon thousands of captives from the whole of Southeastern Europe, from all of Southern Russia and Poland, from the Caucasus region, from Central Europe as far as Regensburg and Friule, and from the shores and islands of the Mediterranean were likewise incorporated; till, as a result of all this Western admixture, the ruling nationality of the Ottoman Empire, though called Turkish today, retains no physical trace whatever of Mongolian ancestry.[18] Many of its members undoubtedly have no Tatar blood in their veins; as for the rest, they are, if the above discussion be well founded, a mixture of Europeans chiefly with Turks of Asia Minor, who were themselves a mixture of the former Christian population with Seljuk Turks, while these again were a mixture dating back through countless ages of contact between the white and the yellow races. A simple computation will illustrate the matter. Osman is said to have captured a fair Greek lady named Nenuphar, or Nilufer, the Lotus-flower, and to have given her as bride to his son Orchan, the first of the Ottoman sultans.[19] From that time it became increasingly the policy of the sultans to take their wives from the Caucasian race.[20] If Orchan be set down as of pure Mongolian descent, and if it be supposed, as is certainly very near the truth, that all the mothers of succeeding sultans were not of Turkish blood, and if the mother be assumed to contribute to the child an influence equal to the father’s, the proportion of Mongolian blood in the veins of the reigning sultan, who is of the twentieth generation from Orchan, can readily be calculated,—about one part in one million.[21] Similar proportions would hold good for many of the Osmanli Turks. Probably the nation as a whole has no more of Tatar blood than the American nation has of Norman.

The Sources of Ottoman Culture

The question at once arises: What significance, then, has the name Turk as applied to modern Turkey? To this query a general answer only can be given here, as part of a rough statement in regard to the derivation of the main elements of Ottoman culture.

Of the whole body of ideas and institutions and intangible inheritances possessed by the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century, no small number of the most fundamental ones were derived from the remote Tatar ancestors of a part of the nation, from whom even this part was far separated in time and space. Foremost among these inheritances is the Turkish language, which in its principles of monosyllabic stem, inflexion by postfixes alone, and assonance, and in its general system of grammar and body of words of ordinary life, has survived from the early days through all vicissitudes.[22] Old Turkish is the Anglo-Saxon of the Osmanli, as Persian is his Greek and Arabic his Latin. Somewhat more hospitable than those who use Western languages, the Turk has nearly always accepted with a foreign thing its foreign name; and the great majority of the foreign words and phrases so accepted he has not changed in any way, except to modify the pronunciation of some sounds about which the tongue does not readily curl. Among other Tatar bequests to the Osmanlis may be named the hospitable assimilative tendency to which reference has already been made; a predisposition to war and conquest, accompanied by an openness of mind as to the best methods and means of prevailing; an ability and inclination to govern, combined with great adaptability as to methods and means; and some acquaintance with systematic and bureaucratic methods of government impressed upon the nation by the Chinese. Again, the Tatars, possessed of the tenacious conservatism of a primitive people, predisposed the Ottomans to a close adherence to custom—to the doctrine that, when a thing had been done once in a certain way, it should always thereafter be done in the same way. Finally, the Tatars contributed various elements of the national character, such as a touch of the old love of nomad life, a certain stolidity of spirit and calm sobriety of temper (taught, perhaps, by the vastness of the steppe in comparison with the littleness of man), and a lack of originality which hindered the construction of freely-borrowed ideas into new forms of higher relation. In general, therefore, the foundations of the national character of the Ottomans were laid in the early days, in a body of ideas which was passed down continuously from man to man, not so much through blood-relationship as through willing acceptance or enforced adoption.

The nature of a Tatar nation in the steppe lands, manifesting many of the elements mentioned above, is extremely significant as foreshadowing some features of the Ottoman government. A Tatar nation was a voluntary association, independent of kinship, formed about a promising leader, and interested in war and conquest; thus it might grow with extreme rapidity until the geographical extent of its dominion would be marvellous. The empire of the Tu-kiu, for example, gathered in about twenty-five years after its foundation territories which reached from China proper to the confines of the Byzantine Empire. The leader of such a nation maintained his control by the right voluntarily given him to punish treason and conspiracy by death;[23] when his controlling hand grew weak, the nation went to pieces. “A Turkish tribe could maintain a political organization and a compact grouping only by war; without benefits from pillage and tributes, it would be obliged to dissolve and to disperse by clans, whose fractions would group themselves anew, and form another nation about the strongest man.... In regard to empires like those of the Huns, or the Turks, military associations without ethnic bonds, one cannot say that they dissolve; they disband. Reversing the custom of other peoples, with the Turks it is the king who feeds his people, who clothes them, who pays them.”[24] Add to this system a loyalty to a hereditary leader which makes the bonds of union permanent, and the description would apply fairly well to the growing Ottoman nation. A passage from the Kudatku Bilik applies yet more closely, since it shows a military government in the midst of a subject population:[25]—

The ancient Persian seems to have given the Ottoman at long range a number of his ideas of government, such as the exaltation of the monarch, the separation of officials of the court from those of the government proper, the division of the ministry into five departments, the council of state, the giving of large powers to local governors, and the beginnings of the so-called “legal” system of taxation.[26] From him also seems to have come the policy of allowing subjects who professed alien religions to form separate organizations, which lived in a measure under their own laws. One writer goes so far as to say: “All investigations into the oldest state regulations of the Orient, into the origin of monarchical forms and constitutions, into the ceremonial of courts and the hierarchy of officials, lead back to the great kingdom of the ancient Persians, from whom they have come down more or less modified, to the Arabs, who sat as caliphs on the thrones of the three continents, to the Seljuk Turks and the Byzantines, who at the same time grew up on the ruins of the Saracen and Roman kingdoms in Asia and Europe, and through both to the Ottomans who swallowed up the kingdoms of Iconium and Byzantium.”[27] The Sassanian Persians handed down through the Moslems the completed “legal” system of a land tax of two sorts based on cadasters, and a capitation tax levied on those who practised a foreign religion. They may also have contributed many features of the Ottoman feudal system. During the Abbassid period the Persians and the Turks who gradually displaced the Arabs in the civil and military administration of the Saracen Empire were thrown into very close contact with each other. It was only natural, therefore, that the Persians, who possessed the more advanced culture, should influence the Turks in many directions. Their chief direct gift lay in the domain of poetry and literature, a field in which they added a vast number of words and ideas to the original Turkish stock.

The Saracens gave the Ottomans a complete religious and social system, united under a Sacred Law which professed to provide for all relations of life, and which became more and more rigid as time went on. Into this had been wrought slowly by generations of learned men most of the Persian governmental ideas that have been mentioned, together with others from Arabian and Byzantine sources, such as a species of laws of inheritance and a system of juristic responses. The Saracens gave also their alphabet and a large stock of Arabic words. All that the Moslems gave the Ottomans was embodied in one great, complex institution, which was founded upon an elaborate system of education and supported by the revenues from a large part of the land of the empire, and which possessed great solidity and an almost changeless permanence. In the Ottoman Empire, as in all other Moslem lands, the influence of this completed institution was ultimately very injurious; when added to the Tatar love of custom, it laid a heavy hand on all movements toward improvement and progress. Its ultimate attitude toward earthly affairs is well expressed in the following couplet:—

A development which took place among the Turks within the Saracen Empire was of the profoundest significance to Ottoman history. From some date in the early ninth century, Turkish youth were brought to Bagdad in large numbers as purchased, but by no means unwilling, slaves. Having been trained as soldiers, they became generals and local governors, and after no great length of time the central government also passed into their hands. The training of such young Turkish slaves in the palaces of caliphs and governors clearly foreshadowed Ottoman methods. The account that perhaps looks farthest back in relation to the Turks is found in the Siasset Namèh, and refers to the time of the Samanid dynasty, which ruled in East Persia from 874 to 999. It describes the external aspect of the system of education, such as promotion and marks of honor, but leaves the severe work which lay behind to be inferred:—

“This is the rule that was followed at the court of the Samanids:

“They advanced slaves gradually, taking account of their services, their courage, and their merit. Thus a slave who had just been purchased served for one year on foot. Clothed in a cotton tunic, he walked beside the stirrup of his chief; they did not have him mount on horseback either in public or in private, and he would be punished if it were learned that he had done so. When his first year of service was ended, the head of the chamber informed the chamberlain, and the latter gave the slave a Turkish horse which had only a rope in its mouth, a bridle and a halter in one. When he had served one year on horseback, whip in hand, he was given a leathern girth to put about the horse. The fifth year they gave him a better saddle, a bridle ornamented with stars, a tunic of cotton mixed with silk, and a mace which he suspended by a ring from his saddle-bow. In the sixth year he received a garment of a more splendid color; and in the seventh year, they gave him a tent held up by a pole and fixed by sixteen pegs: he had three slaves in his suite, and he was honored with the title of head of a chamber; he wore on his head a hat of black felt embroidered with silver and he was clothed with a silk robe. Every year he was advanced in place and dignity; his retinue and his escort were increased until the time when he reached the rank of chief of squadron and finally that of chamberlain. Though his capacity and merit might be generally recognized, though he had done some noteworthy deed and had acquired universal esteem and the affection of his sovereign, he was obliged nevertheless to wait until the age of thirty-five years before obtaining the title of emir and a government.”[29]

In this system of the training of slaves for war and government lay the nucleus of the fundamental institution of the Ottoman state, which, together with the institution based on the Sacred Law, was to sum up practically the entire organized life of the Ottoman nation. Under the Samanids it was Turkish boys who were thus educated by Arabs and Persians, but the Ottomans were later to apply the same principle to the education of Christian youth.

The Seljuk Turks brought most of the ideas that have been mentioned into Asia Minor. They served chiefly as mediators between the older Turkish, Persian, and Mohammedan systems and that of the Ottomans. Besides adding some features out of their own experience, such as a method of book-keeping, and handing on a taste for constructing public buildings like caravanserais, khans, and mosques, they gave rise to several important religious orders which were to have a place in Ottoman life.

What was left for the Byzantines to contribute to the Ottoman? He had received already the main features of his national character,—language, literary influences, law, and religion. One of his two leading institutions was already almost fully developed in Moslem lands, and required only transplantation. The other, however, the institution of war and government, could still be modified considerably; and this was to incorporate much from the Byzantines.[30] Many details of governmental organization, both imperial and local, a supplementary system of taxation, a greatly elaborated taste for court ceremonial and splendor, a plan of organizing foreign residents under a special law, and a host of lesser usages and customs were to be taken over by the Ottomans. The Ottoman feudal system also probably owed its final form to the Byzantines; and perhaps it was from them that the Ottomans learned their abnormal love for fees and gifts. The matchless structure of Saint Sophia served as a model for the superb mosques that lift the shapely masses of their great gray domes, supported by clusters of semidomes and lesser domes, above the cypress trees and gardens of the rounded hills which in Constantine’s city slope down to the blue waters of the Sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn.

This sketch of the origin of the elements of Ottoman culture does not profess to be in any sense complete. So great a subject is worthy of separate and extended treatment. No more has been attempted here than partly to prepare the way for an understanding of the strange system of government which the Ottoman Turks developed, and to show that that system was no new creation, but was made of elements which in their origins reached far back into the past. Out of old and tried ideas was built up a double structure which was individual, conservative, and efficient, strong, durable, and useful.