Turkey, by virtue of position, has always stood closely related to every section of the European mainland. The country’s fate has affected the destiny of every European nation. The modern importance of Turkish affairs in European international problems is a measure of the extensive influence of the Near East over Europe. A study of European nationalities cannot therefore be complete without reference to the empire of Turkish Sultans.
A strong contrast constantly engages attention in the history of Ottoman lands. Of old, the world’s highest civilizations, its purest religions, arose within their confines. In modern days decadence on the heels of a steady recessional marks their lot. The explanation usually advanced is that Mohammedanism has impeded Turkish progress. But this religion was no obstacle to cultural growth in the countries surrounding Turkey. In Egypt, as in Arabia, Persia and northern India, the thought of the natives grew to splendid maturity. The intellectual life of these Mohammedan countries is altogether beyond the grasp of the Turkish mind.
The foundation of Turkey’s weakness as a nation and the failure of the cause of civilization within its boundaries lie in the country’s situation. The land staggers under the load of misfortune which its central position in the eastern hemisphere has heaped upon it. Its native populations have never been able to develop freely. The country is an open road alongside or at the ends of which nationalities have blossomed. It has been the prey of invaders by which it has been overrun. The Turks find themselves on this land today because they are descendants of wanderers. They have occupied the road because they ignored the ways of stepping off its path. Having come in numbers sufficiently strong, they managed to subdue the original inhabitants, who in their groping for the higher life had given the world a number of great conceptions in learning, art and religion. But hardly had the easterners occupied the road before the process of clearing it began.
Turkey has been a highway of commerce and civilization between Europe on the one hand and Asia and Africa on the other. The history of this country and of its inhabitants cannot be understood unless one is thoroughly impressed by this fundamental fact. On the east the Persian Gulf followed by the Mesopotamian valley, its natural prolongation, formed a convenient channel for the northwesterly spread of human intercourse. To the west, land travel between Europe and Africa drained into the Syrian furrow. Both of these natural grooves led to the passes which carried the traveler into Asia Minor. The peninsula therefore was both an important center of human dispersal and a meeting place for men of all nations.
The through roads converging into Turkish territory are probably the oldest commercial routes of the world. At any rate they connected the sites on which the most ancient civilizations rose. The remotest past to which the history of humanity carries us centers around the large river valleys of the tropical and subtropical zone in the eastern hemisphere. The banks of the Nile, of the Euphrates, of the Indian rivers, or of the broad watercourses in Chinese lowlands were nurseries of human culture. Abundance of water, together with a profuse flora and fauna, gave early man ease of life. Hunters, fishermen and shepherds were naturally converted into farmers. A short wait and the seeds they planted would grow to maturity without exacting other attention than the preliminary act of sewing. The life men led afforded time for thought. Curiosity was awakened regarding lands beyond. Ample provision of natural products furnished them with stocks available for barter. These conditions favored the development of commerce and stimulated the creation of trade routes, which were coveted by many as they became more and more trodden.
Between Europe and Asia the great movements of peoples have followed two parallel directions north or south of the central belt of high Eurasian mountains extending from east to west. Men have traveled back and forth in these two lines from the earliest known period. But exchange of ideas has been practically confined to the southern avenue. In the cold of the Siberian or northern European lowlands men had little opportunity to acquire refinement. They were active and energetic, while the followers of the southern pathways were thinkers.
From the dawn of history to our day only two departures of importance have taken place from this east-west traffic. Both were modern events. One occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century as soon as the Turks acquired mastery of western Asia and the Balkan peninsula. The Christian sailor-trader of that time was then obliged to circumnavigate Africa in order to reach eastern seaports. The other change took place when the Suez Canal was completed. This waterway diverted to its channel much of the overland Asiatic traffic routed between the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. But even these two diversions failed to eliminate entirely the picturesque caravans which plied over Turkish roads. Thus it may be assumed that these routes have been used uninterruptedly for about 10,000 years at least, that is to say, before the time in which their known history begins.
The southeastern portal of these celebrated highways is situated at the head of the Persian Gulf. The broad Tigris and Euphrates thence mark the northerly extension of the routes. On the western river, the natural road leaves the valley above Mosul and penetrates into the Armenian highland through the gorges in the neighborhood of Diarbekir. The very name Mosul, a contraction of the Greek “Mesopylae” or Central Gates, suggests its origin. The city grew at the meeting point of routes from the Caspian, Black and Mediterranean seas and from the Persian Gulf. The through highway links once more with the Euphrates in its upper reaches around Keban Maden in order to reach the Anatolian plateau. The passes are precipitous and the waters flow southward closely hemmed in by steep and rocky barriers. Access to the billowy surface of Armenian mountain lands is obtained by means of either the Murad Su or the Kara Su. The union of these two rivers into the single watercourse known as the Euphrates at a short distance above Keban Maden has at all times attracted much of the traffic and travel between Armenia and Mesopotamia. The eastern affluents of the Tigris south of Lake Van, on the other hand, reach the uplifted core of Armenia where they are lost in the tangle of steep valleys and deeply broken surfaces.
Because it is a region of water dispersal, Armenia is also the gathering-site of the heads of outflowing watercourses. If the distance at the divide between the uppermost reaches of two divergent watercourses be short, it is hardly a barrier to human intercourse. This condition prevails in the uppermost reaches of the Euphrates and of the Aras. The important town of Erzerum is the symbol of this union. Within its walled area the traffic of the central plateaus of Asia joined with Mesopotamian or Black Sea and Mediterranean freight, after having followed the easterly approach to Turkey through Tabriz and the southern affluents of the Aras, north of Urmiah Lake. Through this eastern avenue of penetration Asiatic peoples and products have been dumped century after century into Turkish territory.
The valley of the Euphrates, rather than that of the Tigris, is therefore the main artery of communication between north and south in eastern Turkey. It is the avenue through which the ideas of Iran came into contact with Semitic thought. But the uniting influence of the great river was far from being exerted on Oriental peoples alone. In its broad southern course, the river provided ancient merchants with a short-cut which greatly facilitated land travel between the Ægean or Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Another city, Aleppo, is the geographical monument which grew with the increase of travel in this stretch of the Euphrates or declined as the channel became less and less frequented. It is the western counterpart of Mosul in the sense that it also is a point of convergence for routes proceeding from every quarter of the compass.
The chief Turkish route leaves the Euphrates at the angular bend near Meskeneh. A two-days’ journey across the desert brought the traveler to Aleppo. Beyond, the ancient road hugged the shores of the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean and, passing over the dull gray of the broad Cilician plain, headed for the huge cleft in the limestones of the Taurus, known as the Cilician Gates. Past this breach it is the plateau of Anatolia—a region whose physical isolation has always influenced the life of its inhabitants. Today, south of the Cilician Gates, the land is Arabian in speech and Semitic in thought, while in the country to the north the prevailing language is Turkish, which differs from the refinement of Arabian as markedly as the crudity of the Turkish mind differs from the intellectuality of the Arabian.
Thus through mountain tract and mountain trough the east found its way into the Anatolian plateau. Conversely the west made several successful scalings of its slopes. The valleys leading westward into the Ægean or northward into the Black Sea acted as breaches which facilitated human travel. Among these the Meander, Gediz and Sakaria are noteworthy. The “Royal Road” of the Persian period connected Ephesus with Susa by way of the Cilician Gates. It is described by Herodotus. Official despatch-bearers traveled over it in the fulfilment of their missions. Ramsay places this road north of the desert center of Asia Minor[202] and considers the southern route as the highway of the Graeco-Roman period. This last road is the shortest and easiest between Ægean ports and the Cilician Gates.
The history of inland Asia Minor is the record of travel over the network of the region’s roads. Its chief events consist of military marches and trade travels. Urban life on this section of the peninsula had its origin in caravan halts. The cities of inner Anatolia represent successive stages of east-west travel. Their alignment serves to trace the course of the road. To our own day this part of Turkey has not been a land of settlement.
In the southeastern half of Turkey human life has also been confined to highway regions. This part of the world is known to us as Syria or Mesopotamia. Both are depressed regions—channels of human flows—bordering the western and eastern sides of the Great Syrian desert which, wedge-like, interposes its shifting solitude of sand between the two as far as the foothills of the mountains on the north. West of Syria lies the Mediterranean; east of Mesopotamia the mountains of Persia. With such a pattern of land carving, it was natural that life and activity should have gathered in the precise regions where the historian finds them.
A dominant fact recurs in every stage of the region’s history. Turkey is so placed that its possession is the goal of every nation which has risen to eminence in or around Turkish lands. Its control ushers in a period of great prosperity in every instance. Trade flows freely in the highways, carrying prosperity in its wake. The energy of the fortunate nation is spent to maintain the economic advantages secured. The loss of the highway zone is accompanied by national decline. A new nation rises and obtains the mastery of the road, and the cycle is repeated. The western Asiatic highway may aptly be named a highway of wealth or of misfortune.
At the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium the struggle for the possession of this highway was as keen and sanguinary as it is at present. The empires of the Nile and Mesopotamian basins, of the Syrian strip and of the Hittite mountain lands mustered the flower of their manhood in yearly arrays for the purpose of seizing or guarding the great arteries of west Asiatic traffic. The short-lived prosperity of the Jewish empire, at the time of Solomon, was attained immediately after the country’s boundaries extended from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Judea grew to splendor by becoming sole mistress of the international routes which traversed Syria and Mesopotamia. Her greatness was transmitted to Assyria with the loss of the land routes to that same empire in the eighth century B.C. A hundred years later the Chaldeans obtained possession of the highways. It is now their turn to impose their will on neighboring nations. Another century slips by and with it the greatness of Semitic states. In the east, men of Aryan speech, mostly Persians, have begun to value the present Turkish land routes. In 560 B.C. Cyrus is at the head of cohorts which soon after give him mastery of Turkish Asia from the Ægean to the Persian Gulf. To this conquest Darius adds Egypt and India.
All these events center around one of the greatest struggles ever fought between men. It is the conflict between Europeans and Asiatics immortalized in Hellenic literature,—the clash between two continents, each battling for the exclusive control of the highway connecting them. The contestants met on this Turkish highway, they fought over its plains and defiles, and battled for its possession in the realization that the economic prosperity upon which national wealth and greatness rest could be secured only by its conquest.
A significant fact of the celebrated struggle is revealed by the inability of the Greeks to conquer the Persians. They defeated them and checked their westerly advance. The Ægean and Eurasian waterways of Turkey proved an impassable moat to the Persian invaders. As long as the Persians retained control of the highways the menace of their brutal despotism faced the liberal spirit of the Greeks. The danger was dispelled by Alexander’s conquest of the highway. No better instance of the power vested in the effective hold of these lines of communication between the east and west can be found.
All the history of Turkish lands is conditioned by their location on the map. The region has occupied a conspicuous position on the stage of world events since the earliest known times. Faint rays of prehistoric light reveal it as the bridge over which the race of round-headed men crossed into Europe from Asia. During antiquity we find it to be the original seat of civilizations which radiate outward in every direction. In medieval times it is the great half-way station of the main artery of world trade. We know of it in modern days as the center of a mighty international struggle familiarly known as the Eastern Question.
A world relation of such an enduring character must obviously rest on exceedingly firm foundations. A search for its causes leads us straight into the field of geography. Three elements, namely, those of position, form and natural resources are primarily accountable for the extraordinary interest which Turkey has always awakened. The region is the Asiatic extension of Mediterranean lands nestling against the great central mountain mass of Asia. It is sharply separated from the rest of the continent by a mountain wall which extends continuously from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf and is made up of the Armenian and Zagros ranges. It is a peninsula, itself formed by two distinct peninsulas, and one of the unit divisions of the Asiatic continent in the sense that it is the only part of the entire Asiatic continent subject to Mediterranean climatic influences.
By position first, at the junction of three continents and therefore on the main field of history; secondly, as the site of convergence of the main avenues of continental travel and, thirdly, by its situation in one of the two regions in which climatic conditions proved most favorable for the early development of humanity, Turkey, at first glance, appears to have been eminently favored by nature. These advantages made it the meeting place of races which are generally associated with the three continents which the country unites. Aryan, Tatar and Semitic peoples therefore are strongly represented in the land.
In considering Turkey as the meeting place of three continents it is necessary that we should confine our conception of this fact to the strictly literal sense of the term. The country is a meeting place and nothing more. It has never been a transition zone physically and, as a consequence, there has been very little mingling of the different elements in its population. The very shape of the land prevents fusion of the inhabitants into a single people. The interior upland rises abruptly above a narrow fringe of coastal lowland. Its surface features, consisting partly of deserts and saline lakes, recall the typical aspect of central Asia. On the other hand, the rich vegetation of the maritime fringe reflects European characteristics. No better relic of Asia Minor’s former land connection with Europe exists than this strip of the west soldered to the eastern continent. But the physical union is clean-cut and, as a result, the change from the low-lying garniture of green scenery to the bare tracts of the uplands is sharp. These features make of Turkey a land of strange contrasts. Its coasts are washed by the waters of half a dozen seas and yet in places a journey of barely twenty-five miles from the shore lands the traveler squarely in the midst of a continental district.
So diversified a country could not be the land of patriotism, and as we pick up the thread of its troubled history we find a woeful absence of this spirit. In Byzantine times as in Ottoman a selfish bias towards local interests, a parochial attachment of the sordid type, pervades its population. A medley of peoples, each filling its particular geographical frame and animated by widely divergent ideals, are constantly engaged in looking abroad rather than toward the land for the attainment of their hopes. Nature fostered this condition. Communications between the different regions have always been difficult. From the narrow fringe of coastland to the interior plateau the ascent is steep. More than that the maritime dweller of the lowland dreaded the total lack of comfort which he knew awaited him on the arid highland. Conversely the indolent inhabitant of this elevated district realized that were he to settle near the coast he could not compete successfully with the more active seafarers. As time went on the coastal peoples—mainly Greeks—accustomed themselves to look beyond the sea for intercourse with the outside world while the Turkish tenants of the interior land still kept in their mind’s eye the vast Asiatic background out of which they had emerged.
In the same way the imposing barrier of the Taurus prevented contact between the occupants of the districts lying north and south of the mountain. The significance of this range to Europeans cannot be overestimated. The mountain has proved to be the chief obstacle to the northward spread of Semitic peoples and their civilizations. Successive waves of southern invaders, invariably of Semitic descent whether highly civilized or drawn from tribes of savages, spent themselves in vain dashes against the rocky slopes. The fact is verified historically whether we consider the failure of Assyrians in antiquity, of the Saracens during Middle Ages, or of the Egyptians and Arabs led by Mehemet Ali in modern days. At present the linguistic boundary between Turkish and Arabic occurs in this mountain chain and Hogarth has expressed the fact in a realistic phrase by stating that, at an elevation of about 2,000 ft., the Arabic speech is chilled to silence.
To come back to the factor of Turkey’s geographical position, we find that while this feature has generated an attracting force the shape of the land, on the other hand, promoted a constantly repellent action. We have in this situation a remarkable conflict which has exerted itself to the detriment of the inhabitants. The centripetal action of position was always reduced to a minimum by the centrifugal effects of form. The mountainous core made up by the Anatolian table-land and the western highland of Armenia was a center of dispersal of waters, and hence to a large degree of peoples. Furthermore, however much the land was a single unit with reference to the broad divisions of Asia, the fact remains that it was greatly subdivided within itself. The six main compartments into which it may be laid off have fostered totally divergent civilizations. All of these conditions were fundamentally fatal to the formation of nationality. They only favored intercontinental travel and trade. In this respect the country has been of the highest importance in the history of the eastern hemisphere, and at present commands world-wide attention.
In only one respect did position and form operate harmoniously. Both agencies combined to create Turkey’s relation with the world beyond its borders. This relation was facilitated by the admirable set of natural routes which led in and out of the country. Beginning with the broad band of the Mediterranean Sea, land and water routes succeed each other in close sequence. The inland sea itself is prolonged through the Ægean and the Turkish straits into the Black Sea, the shores of which are closely dotted with the terminals of great avenues from northeastern Europe, as well as all of northern and central Asia. On the European mainland, the far-reaching Danube has an outlet into Turkey through the Morava-Maritza valleys in addition to its own natural termination. The Dnieper valley plays an exceedingly important share in connecting Turkey to northern lands. To the east the trough-like recesses in the folds of the mountains of Armenia and Kurdistan lead to the great Tabriz gate beyond which the Persian Gulf affords sea travel to centers of civilization of the monsoon lands or westward to the African coast. Land connection with this continent also exists in the rift valley of Syria where the beginning of the African rift system is found. Through the occurrence of all these channels of penetration the history of Turkey finds place as a special chapter in the history of the world’s great nations. A greater share of responsibility falls on the land for this relation than on the Turks themselves.
The world relation of Turkish lands antedates, however, the coming of the Turks by many a century. Problems summarized in the familiar term Eastern Question have their origin in the existence of the narrow waterways consisting of the Dardanelles, Marmora and Bosporus. This water gap has exerted profound influence in shaping the relation of Turkish territory to the outside world. The Eastern Question is as old as the history of civilization on this particular spot of the inhabited world. It could not be otherwise because, fundamentally, this momentous international problem is merely that of determining which people or nation shall control the strait. Who shall gather toll from the enormous transit trade of the region? This is the economic problem which has always deeply agitated the leading commercial nations of the world. Its continuity is a proof of its geographical character. As long as these straits exist at the point of nearest convergence of the Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, identical problems are bound to recur on their site. Beneath the shifting scenes of human events the abiding stage persists in directing them into its own channels.
Accordingly as early as in late Minoan times and surely in full Mycenean period, some fifteen hundred or two thousand years before our era, we find the Eastern Question already vexing the world. It centers first around Troy, because the city commanded the southwestern outlet of the straits and played the same leading part in the history of its day as Constantinople has played since then. The shifting of the site to the northeastern end of the waterway represents the gradual spread of Hellenic influence in northeastern maritime territory.
We can only come to an adequate conception of the rôle of Troy in history by a clear understanding of the value of its site. The city was a toll-station. Its citizens accumulated wealth in the manner in which the burghers of Byzantium laid the foundations of their vast fortunes. Schliemann’s excavations brought to light amazing treasures of precious metals and jewelry. These riches may well be regarded as the price paid for the right of the passage of vessels and their freight through the straits. Nor is it strange to find that coincident with the decline of the Homeric city, the earliest mention of Byzantium, its successor, appears. Consistently with this method of viewing Trojan history it becomes possible to reach a rational understanding of Homer’s classic epic as the account of a secular struggle for the possession of an eminently profitable site.[203] The testimony of history on the number of sieges which Constantinople has undergone is at least precise, although no literary masterpiece sheds lustre on the events. It is impossible to escape from the parallelism in the histories of Byzantium and Troy simply because the geographical background of both sites is similar in every respect. In the case of Troy, it meant convenient access to the Pontine rearland, probably the first El Dorado recorded by history—the land of fabulous treasures, in search of which the Argonautic expeditions were equipped. With Byzantium, it meant access to the luxuries which Asia could supply as far as the Pacific.
So much for the antiquity of the Eastern Question. Passing to another phase of Turkey’s world relation we find that the land’s influence has even affected the discovery of America. We now stand on the threshold of modern history and deal with a broad economic problem which affected late medieval commerce and which is an ever recurrent theme in that splendid period of active human enterprise known as the Age of Discovery. The dominant idea of the day was to find means of facilitating east-west trade in the eastern hemisphere.
From earliest times commercial relations between the land of Cathay and Europe had been one-sided. The east sold and the west purchased. There was very little exchange. The products which came from the east could all be classed as luxuries. They constituted freight of small volume such as precious stones, fine woods, essence and spices, the value of which generally ran high. These commodities had been shipped to Europe for about two millenniums prior to the fourteenth century of our era. Overland the caravans plowed their way across the southern expanse of Russia’s interminable steppeland and penetrated finally into the plateaus of Iran and Anatolia. Their home stretch lay in Turkey. By sea the traders were accustomed to end their journeys at the head of the Persian Gulf, whence the valuable wares would be shipped farther west via Mesopotamia. In this case again the home stretch is found on Turkish soil. It was not until about the end of the fourth century B.C. when the Egyptian hamlet of Rhaecotis changed its name into that of Alexandria, that this sea route was extended into the Red Sea and Mediterranean. At this time the vision of acquiring wealth through the eastern trade began to dawn on the minds of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean seaboard. Many centuries were to elapse, however, before westerners realized that fortunes could be made by venturing into eastern fields. The profits and the splendor of the eastern trade were popularized by Christendom when the accounts of Marco Polo and the friar travelers of his time became available. Then the ambition of every adventurous merchant was to act as middleman in the trade with Cathay.
The bulk of the east-west trade in medieval time flowed through the same two main arteries. The northern land route from China through central Asia passed through the Tabriz and Erzerum gates and ended at Trebizond, the rest of the journey being made by sea through the Bosporus-Dardanelles passage. The southerly course was an all-water route from the sea of China to the Mediterranean.
The incentive to reduce cost of transportation was as strong in those days as it is at present. The northern route being mainly overland was a source of incessant worry to the trader. The unrest which followed the appearance of Mohammedanism, the reluctance of the adherents of Islam to deal with infidels, rendered commerce more and more risky. Transportation by land was slower and less profitable than by sea, as it is now. Caravans could not avoid brigands as easily as ships could escape pirates. It was not only a case of argosies reaching port but also of camels escaping highwaymen. In addition, duties had to be paid at four or five different points of transshipment. If we examine the pepper and ginger trade alone—the supply of both of which came from the east—we find that from Calicut, the great emporium of trade on the Malabar coast, these spices were carried by the Arabs to Jiddah and thence to Tor, on the Sinaitic peninsula. Overland journeys began at the last point and extended to Cairo. From the city a river journey on the Nile to Rosetta followed, after which the freight was packed on camels and sent to Alexandria. All these conditions made for the increase of cost of the eastern wares which were supplied to Europe.
With the cost of eastern commodities rising higher and higher, as land transportation became more and more hazardous, the minds of navigators naturally turned to the possibility of discovering a sea-way to India and Cathay. The discovery of America in the course of these endeavors to lower prevailing freight rates was an inevitable consequence of economic conditions. The chief point of interest resides in the fact that the discovery which immortalized Columbus’ name was accelerated by fully half a century through the falling of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks in 1453.
The capture of the Byzantine capital came as the death-blow to an already declining commercial intercourse. Henceforth the Moslem was to stand guard at the western gate through which east-to-west intercontinental trade had passed; and there seemed to be no doubt that he was firmly resolved to prevent the Christian from traveling back and forth through his dominions. It meant the definite closing of the western gate to eastern commerce. The first evil effects of the Turkish conquest were felt by the Venetians and Genoese. The Venetians especially incurred the wrath of Mohammed the Conqueror on account of the aid they had rendered to the beleaguered capital. Greater leniency was shown by the Turks to the Genoese, who had refrained from open manifestations of sympathy with the Byzantines.
The Sultans themselves as well as their ministers were willing to foster the trade which traversed their lands. It left a share of its proceeds in the Turkish treasury. As a matter of fact, commerce between Turkish lands under Mohammedan rule and the west existed only because of the income it brought to the Turkish government. But the Turk could not compete successfully with the Christian in the markets of the world and this proved a barrier to commerce. The significance of the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire is to be found therefore in the fact that it practically cut off land communications between western Europe and eastern Asia. Incentive to western exploration was intensified. Before the fall of Constantinople the discovery of a western sea route to the east was regarded as highly desirable. It now became a necessity.
The possibility of reaching the Far East by a voyage through the pillars of Hercules had suggested itself to the active intellect of the Greeks and Romans, yet the incentive to undertake exploration did not acquire intensity until the latter half of the fifteenth century. The Turkish advance into western Asia came, therefore, as a shock whose impact forced trade out of the Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar into the wide Atlantic.
But there was another important result of the Turk’s conquests in the Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas. The diversion of the eastern trade from European land routes into sea lanes impoverished the German-speaking inhabitants dependent on the Danube artery of continental life. The land on either side of this main highway was blessed with natural wealth, but its treasures had been drained by the Vatican. The reformation, which combined religious and political aspirations, was an excellent opportunity for the chiefs of the small states scattered in the long valley of the great river to pounce upon the landed property owned by the Roman church and establish economic conditions favorable to themselves.
The present world relations of Turkey may be summarized by the statement that the country lies squarely in the path of both Teutonic and Slavic advance. A natural course of expansion is leading Germany to the southeast across the Balkan peninsula into Turkey. The extension of frontiers required by Russia likewise impels Slavic conquest of Turkey. Overpopulation in the one case and the need of access to ice-free waters in the other make the contest inevitable. The Teuton is answering the call of the land, the Slav that of climate. In both the problem is mainly economic. At bottom it is the modern phase of the Homeric struggle idealized in the Iliad.
The dismemberment of Turkey into European colonies is the goal steadily held in view since the loss of the Holy Land to Christendom. It will be the last chapter in the long history of Europe’s commercial conquest of western Asia. Three causes militate in favor of an eventual partition. The country is rich in natural resources. It is held by a people whose incompetence to convert nature’s gifts into use or profit is historically patent. It also happens to occupy a commanding situation with reference to the trade of Europe with Asia and Africa. These three points are fundamental in the solution of the Turkish problem.
The European nations most vitally concerned in the dismemberment of the Sultan’s dominions are four in number. Great Britain’s interest is born of the Empire’s relation to Egypt and India. The cause of Russian progress depends on the country’s access to warm seaports. Germany is the newcomer on the scene and, as a land power, is engaged in extending her land area. To her sons Turkey offers an attractive colonization area and at the same time the land route which will render them independent of the sea-way passing through Suez to the east. As a colonial power of the first magnitude, no less than on account of her millions of Mohammedan subjects, France cannot be disinterested in the fate of the corelands of Islam.
Turkey is the Asiatic pendant of the intercontinental highway represented in Europe by the Balkan peninsula. Through Asia Minor the land provides a convenient causeway between Asia and Europe. Through Arabia it connects Asia to Africa. Again, through the combined position of Asia Minor and Syria it becomes possible to maintain continuous land travel from Europe to Africa. Turkey is thus the ideal center of the eastern hemisphere. Mastery of its territory is bound to turn the flow of intercontinental trade into the lap of its holders. The entire history of European conflict over Turkish lands is wrapped up in this geographical fact.
Italians were the pioneers of European trade with Turkey after the consolidation of Ottoman power. In this Genoese and Venetian traders merely followed in the footsteps of their fathers, whose dealings with the Byzantines had been considerable. French merchants were not slow to compete with Italians. In the fifteenth century British drapers and commissioners begin to appear in the Levant. Germans show signs of activity a hundred years later, but confine their operation mainly to the European dominions of the Sultans. From these beginnings to the twentieth-century territorial claims of the great powers is but a natural economic unfolding.
Turkey’s remarkably central position in the eastern hemisphere makes the country the threshold of Great Britain’s Asiatic dominions as well as the natural land connection between British Africa and British Asia. From India westward and from the British zone in southern Persia as defined by the Anglo-Russian convention of 1907, to the Sultanate of Egypt, southern Turkey, represented by Lower Mesopotamia and Arabia, is the only stretch of territory in which the British government does not exercise direct control; and the task of consolidating British influence in these two regions of the Turkish Empire is well advanced.
In the economic life of modern Mesopotamia British influence is paramount. About 90 per cent of the trade of Basra and Bagdad is in British hands. Steam navigation on the Euphrates and Tigris with its attendant privileges of transportation is a monopoly exercised by the British. This means that all the Persian trade which enters or leaves the country through its southern Turkish border must pay toll to British capital. Most important of all, the stupendous task of reclaiming the great twin-river valley has been undertaken by British enterprise.
The area of agricultural lands in Lower Mesopotamia is generally calculated at ten times the total surface of farming land in Egypt. The territory suited for cultivation extends northward from the Persian Gulf roughly to a line drawn from the bend of the Euphrates at Anah to Tekrit on the Tigris. Its eastern boundary is defined by the Zagros and Pusht-i-Koh mountains. On the west it reaches the Great Syrian desert as far as its junction with the plateau of Arabia. Thus defined the region is the great alluvial plain of Mesopotamia. A stretch of land remarkably rich in humus, it only needs a just rule and competent engineers in order to become highly productive.
In olden days the entire district was one vast field. Its fertility had earned it the name of granary of the world. Herodotus extols its productivity: “ ... In grain it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two-hundred fold. The blade of the wheat plant and barley plant is often four fingers in breadth.”[204] In their present state the once productive lands present the appearance of a desert. The old irrigation ditches are in ruins. Mile upon mile of parched, cloggy soil or dreary marsh take the place of ancient fields.
The reclamation of this arid country was undertaken in 1908 by British engineers headed by Sir William Willcocks. In the Delta region of Mesopotamia, comprising the entire drainage valley extending south of Hit on the Euphrates and of Samarra on the Tigris, between 12 and 13 million acres of first-class irrigation land were to be converted into productive areas. In spite of Turkish opposition the work advanced with sufficient rapidity for the Hindiyeh Barrage to be inaugurated in 1914. At a distance of twenty centuries a handful of plucky northerners had, notwithstanding well-nigh insurmountable obstacles, put the last touches to a drainage project begun on the same spot by Alexander the Great, the construction of a new head for the Hindiyeh branch or Pallocopas having been that monarch’s first public work in Babylonia.[205]
In the Persian Gulf British influence advanced by great strides during the present century. Within the last ten years the policing of the gulf waters and harbors has been undertaken by Britain’s men-of-war. An appreciable curtailment of the trade in firearms followed the tracking of gun-runners by British captains. The important towns of the Persian and Arabian coast are virtually British possessions. Bushire[206] on the eastern shore, Koweit on the west are protectorates. The trend of it all is to advance India’s western frontier to the line of the Euphrates.
For Great Britain’s attitude toward Turkish politics is dictated by Delhi rather than London. As ruler of the most numerous political group of Mohammedans in the world, the king of England’s residence in his European capital cannot affect India’s geographical needs, among which the maintenance of a clear road from its shores to the mother island is of prime import. Thus the establishment of a British zone in southern Persia and the attempt to substitute British law in Mesopotamia where, after all, the Sultan’s authority is most precarious in character, merely reveal England’s necessity of consolidating her power over the approaches to her great Asiatic colony.
In dealing with Indian geography and the vast body of Mohammedan Hindus, attention is necessarily riveted on the question of Arabia. British stewardship of the peninsular table-land seems inevitable. Not that those huge wastes of burning sand contain resources convertible into profit; but Arabia represents a wedge of barbarism driven in between the civilizing influences exerted by Great Britain in Egypt and India. The danger of its becoming a generating center of revolutionary currents involving British colonial policies in destruction is not mythical. Millions of Indian Moslems turn daily in prayer toward the direction of the Kaaba. A glance at India’s history suffices to reveal the extent to which the Sea of Oman has linked the two peninsulas.
To detach Arabia from a shadowy allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey and bring it within the uplifting sphere of British activity was part of the political program elaborated at Downing Street after the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. In pursuance of this policy British influence is now markedly felt along Arabia’s three coasts. It is firmly planted on the southeast, where Arabia is nearest to India. From Koweit to Muscat every petty potentate exercising an antiquated patriarchial authority has learned to rely on British protection against Turkish encroachments. Aden, on the southwest coast, is a lone outpost of civilization from which western ideas radiate and occasionally reach the plateau land of Yemen or the niggardly wastes of Hadramut. This British seaport is the natural outlet of Yemen. Products of the favored districts around Kataba, as well as between this town and Sana’a, can be transported with greater facility to Aden than by the arduous routes which lead to Red Sea harbors.
The question of Arabia involves other considerations. Mecca and Medina, its holy cities, are essentially the religious center of the Islamic world. From their sites Mohammedanism has spread about 4,000 miles both east and west. Among Arabs as well as the majority of Mohammedans outside of Turkey desire for the restoration of the Caliphate at Mecca is strong. Arabs especially consider the Sultans as usurpers of the title. Selim I had been the first to adopt it after the conquest of Egypt and Arabia in 1517. Arabs however refuse to recognize the right of any but descendants of the Prophet’s family to this supreme post of the Mohammedan ecclesiastical hierarchy. According to Islamic traditions the Caliph must be a member of the Koreishit tribe. This explains why any ambitious leader who succeeds in circulating the report of his relationship with Mohammed’s progeny has always secured a following among his co-religionists in Asia or Africa.
The Arabs have aired this chief grievance of theirs in English ears. They found ready sympathy among British officials no less than among the leaders of their faith in Egypt or India. The complete severance of the Mohammedan Caliphate from the Turkish Sultanate will, therefore, be a probable result of Franco-British success in the present war. The reëstablishment of the Prophet’s family in its hereditary right and capital will have the advantage of providing Islam with a geographical center at the very point of its birth.
Modern German ascendancy in Turkey has constituted the gravest menace to the British project of uniting Egypt to India by a broad band of British territory. German diplomacy has exerted its best efforts during the past generation in the attempt to defeat this design. In overcrowded Germany the need of land for colonization is felt as keenly as the necessity of providing new markets for the country’s busy industries. Germany does not contain within its borders an agricultural area of sufficient extent for the requirements of its fast-growing populations. Against this it has been estimated that with adequate irrigation Asia Minor can turn out a million tons of wheat annually, as well as at least 200,000 tons of cotton. The basis of Teutonic southeasterly expansion lies in these facts. The immediate aim of German imperialism is to spread through Austria and the Balkan peninsula into Turkey down to the Gulf of Alexandretta and the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. But its realization implies the shattering of British projects.
This rivalry in the west Asian field became inevitable from the moment that men of German speech became conscious of the power they had acquired in 1870 by banding together in a single state. The task of national consolidation once accomplished, the thought of German leaders naturally turned eastward in the direction in which land extended. Eight years later the prestige acquired by the newborn empire gave it a decisive voice in the treaty of Berlin. The first peg in the line of the Teutons’ southeasterly march was driven then by the revision of Bulgarian frontiers delimited by the treaty of San Stefano. The Slavic obstacle seemed removed from the Teutons’ path and its place filled by the more easily negotiable Turkish obstruction.
From the date of that treaty to the events of these years of war Germany’s conduct in Turkey has been determined entirely by the call of the land. In 1882 a German military commission undertakes to reorganize the Turkish army. In 1889 the Deutsche Bank—whose directors are leaders of Germany’s oversea affairs—is granted a concession for a through line from Constantinople to Konia. This concession has since been modified so as to comprise the trans-Anatolian trunk railway which connects the capital with Bagdad. In 1898 the Kaiser visits Damascus in person, there solemnly to proclaim assurances of his unalterable good-will to the millions of Mohammedans scattered over the surface of the earth. In 1902 the Bagdad line is definitely awarded to a group of capitalists, among whom Germans represent the majority of investors. From that date on, railroad, mining and irrigation concessions in Turkey seemed to have been reserved exclusively for Germans. The transfer of Turkey’s unexploited riches to German ownership became almost an accomplished fact.
It was the “Drang nach Osten,” a movement directed primarily by the valleys of the Danube and the Morava, and forking out subsequently along the Vardar and Maritza gaps. To clear this road to Turkey, Serbia was wiped off the map of Europe in the fall of 1915 by Teutonic armies. For this too had Serbian nationality been split into three separate bodies at the behest of Teutonic diplomatists. Bosnia and Herzegovina, lands Serbian in heart and logic, were administered by Austria, an empire in name like Turkey but virtually ruled by Prussia since the day of Sadowa. Montenegro, of old the refuge of martyred Serbia, had always been prevented by Austria from uniting with its sister state. In truth Serbia lay under the bane of a geographical curse. It was always in the way.
The misfortune of position is shared fully by Turkey. Coming at right angles to Germany’s southeasterly drive, Russia’s steady southwesterly advances in the nineteenth century foreshadowed the conversion of all the Black Sea and its Bosporus entrance into Russian waters. With the most inaccessible parts of the Armenian mountains in Russian hands since 1878, further expansion through western Armenia into Anatolia cannot be delayed much longer.
The Russian viewpoint deserves every consideration. Russia lies benumbed by the cold of her frozen land. She has had one long winter since the dawn of her nationality. The chief reason why her sons have been laggards in the liberal progress of the past hundred years must be sought in this simple fact of geography. Russia does not need more land or fresh resources. She only seeks the warmth of the sun’s rays. Geographically it is Russia rather than Germany who is entitled to “her place under the sun.” Today more than ever, and because of her newly-won liberty and democratic institutions, Russia needs a window on the sunny side of her national dwelling.
Russian access to the open sea in the southwest can be secured either at Constantinople or Alexandretta. The Bosporus route is the more advantageous, as the markets for products of the plains of southern Russia are strewn along Mediterranean coasts. But mastery of the Bosporus is of little value to Russia without possession of the Dardanelles strait. The Marmora is but the lobby of the Black Sea. The entire Bosporus-Dardanelles waterway must, therefore, be Russian in order to allow the country to reap the full advantages of attaining ice-free seas. If fifty years ago the question was merely one of political foresight, today it has assumed vital importance, for southwestern Russia’s economic development, in the present century, has made the country absolutely dependent on Balkan and Mediterranean markets.
As an alternative, the harbor of Alexandretta finds favor among Russians. It lies at a distance of only 450 miles from the southern Caucasus frontiers. Moreover, it is part of the ancient land of Armenia, which sooner or later is destined to become a Russian province in its entirety. Such an extension of Russian territory to blue water on the Mediterranean has significance in two ways. It would redeem a land that has remained Christian in spite of centuries of Mohammedan yoke and it might effectively bar German access to the Persian Gulf.