Our next side trip, after visiting Troy, was a short excursion to Brusa which—partly by steamer and partly by rail—is easily accessible from Constantinople. I was especially eager to see this famous place, for its historic associations are numerous and varied. It was to Brusa—anciently Prusa—that Hannibal fled after his defeat by the Romans. There are indeed, some authorities who maintain that the great Carthaginian general was the founder of Brusa. It was from this city, which was once large and prosperous, that Pliny the Younger, while governor of Bithynia, wrote his celebrated letter to Trajan, in which he asked for instructions concerning the policy to be pursued regarding “the stubborn sect of Christians” who were then rapidly increasing in numbers and who, by refusing to offer sacrifices to the gods and by persistently avoiding all pagan rites and observances, had made themselves specially obnoxious to Roman officialdom. This letter[82] is remarkable as being one of the first notices in Roman writers respecting the members of that incipient Church which was eventually to become mistress of the capital of Cæsars.

In Ottoman history Brusa is notable for having been the capital of Orkhan, the second ruler of the Osmanlis and for having long been the favorite resort of Moslem scholars, artists, poets, and dervishes who enjoyed a great reputation among their coreligionists for their reputed sanctity. And even after the transfer of the Ottoman capital to Adrianople and subsequently to Constantinople, Brusa continued to be one of the sacred cities of the Mohammedans. For here were buried the first six Osmanli sovereigns besides more than a score of Ottoman princes and here “more than five hundred pashas, theologians, teachers, and poets sleep their last sleep around their first Padishas.” Among the turbehs which particularly impressed me was that of the Serbian princess who, although the wife of a Sultan, was able to preserve untainted the religion of her Christian parents. Here were erected numerous medresses—colleges—mosques and public buildings whose size and grandeur were for centuries a favorite theme of Moslem poets and historians. In beauty of design, richness of material, and exquisite finish some of the mosques—especially the renowned Green Mosque—are even to-day regarded as the most perfect specimens of Osmanli architecture.

Our visit to Brusa was most enjoyable and was an ideal introduction to our long journey through the Ottoman possessions in Asia. For in this old capital of the sultans we find more strikingly exhibited than in noisy, metropolitan Constantinople those dominant characteristics of most Asiatic cities—apathetic immobility, undisturbed quietude, and dreamy repose.

But before taking the train at Haidar Pasha we spent a day in wandering through Scutari and Kadi Keui which are just across the Bosphorus from Stamboul. Like Brusa both of these places—especially Scutari—are distinctively Oriental in character and are well worthy of a visit. Both of them, too, have played prominent roles in the long, historic past and, although they are now so overshadowed by the great city of Constantine, they, nevertheless, offer many attractions that are well worthy of the attention of the student and the historian.

Scutari was formerly known as Chrysopolis—the Golden City. Its special attractions for tourists are the Howling Dervishes, whose peculiar devotional exercises take place every Thursday, and the Great Cemetery which is celebrated as the largest and most beautiful Moslem of burying places. It is a great forest of cypress trees, more than three miles in length. Each grave has its tombstone, usually a very modest one. Some of the epitaphs I observed were very touching, especially those that terminated with a prayer that a Fatihah—the first chapter of the Koran—might be said for the soul of the deceased.

This chapter [writes Sale, the learned translator of the Koran] is a prayer and held in great veneration by the Mohammedans.... They esteem it as the quintessence of the whole Koran, and often repeat it in their devotions, both public and private, as the Christians do the Lord’s Prayer.[83]

It is an integral part of each of the five daily prayers which are said by every good Mussulman. It is, moreover, recited over the sick, at the conclusion of an action of importance, but it is, above all, the favorite prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed taking, in this respect, the place of the Catholic requiescat. As translated by Rodwell it reads:

As we wandered along the pathways of this last resting place of so many myriads of Mohammedans—from Constantinople[84] as well as from Scutari—I was impressed by the number of men and women who were here absorbed in prayer for their dear departed,[85] or in tending the flowers which adorned the graves. These quiet mourners, with the countless turtledoves, which make their home in the branches of the funereal cypress trees and which seem to keep up continuously their subdued moan, give to this gloomy necropolis a solemnity and an impressiveness that are almost lacking in such ostentatious cities of the dead as Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo of Genoa.

A short drive from the Great Cemetery brings us to the modern town of Kadi Keui which, like Scutari, is also a part of the municipality of Constantinople. It was formerly known as Chalcedon and was founded seventeen years before Byzantium. By the oracle of Delphi it was designated as “the city of the blind,” because its founders were blind to the superior position of the tongue of land on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, on which the City of Constantinople now stands.

Like most other cities in this part of the world it has witnessed many vicissitudes and has been repeatedly captured and sacked by invading armies from both Asia and Europe. Famed in antiquity for its temple of Apollo and for having been the birthplace of Xenocrates, the most distinguished of Plato’s disciples, its temples and palaces, after its capture by the Ottomans, served the sultans as a stone quarry when they required building material for their mosques in Constantinople.

But, although not a vestige of Chalcedon’s former grandeur now remains, it will always be remembered as the city in which was held in 451 the fourth œcumenical council of the Church, in which was condemned the teaching of Eutyches and the Monophysites respecting the human and the divine nature in Christ. When I recalled the fact that this council, including the representatives of the absent bishops, was attended by six hundred and thirty bishops; that more than six hundred of these belonged to the Eastern Church, and remembered the very small number of the episcopate that is now found in this part of the world, it was easy to understand the present backward condition of civilization and culture in Asia Minor and Syria. What a change, indeed, since the days of those great doctors of the Oriental Church—the Cyrils, the Gregories, the Basils, the Ephrems, the Chrysostoms—whose learning and eloquence have from their time been the admiration and edification of the whole of Christendom.

A short distance to the north of Kadi Keui is the Haidar Pasha military hospital which was the scene of Florence Nightingale’s heroic labors during the Crimean War. The rooms which she occupied while here are still preserved intact and as I passed through them, I recalled Longfellow’s beautiful tribute to her in the verses:

It is but a few minutes’ walk from Florence Nightingale’s hospital to the Haidar Pasha railway station. On the way thither we passed through the well-kept British Cemetery where rest eight thousand British soldiers who died of wounds and disease during the Crimean War. The large granite obelisk here by Marochetti is a conspicuous object and is visible at a great distance. The Haidar Pasha station, the north-western terminus of the Anatolia[87] Railway was, before its partial destruction during the war, a most imposing building and compared favorably with the best of similar structures in Europe.

Shortly after we take a seat in a cozy corridor car our train swings towards the picturesque shore of the Marmora. From the window of our compartment we have the most lovely views of the Princes Islands, and of the quaint little fishing villages which sprinkle the eastern shore of the Marmora and which are so perfectly mirrored in its placid waters. For hours, as our train moves alternately along the verge of lofty cliffs and near the level of the emerald expanse of the Propontis, we have a succession of panoramas that are scarcely less fascinating than those seen along the famous driveway between Sorrento and Amalfi.

The dancing waves of the Marmora, as they gently lap along its curving shore, are as soothing as a lullaby to a cradled child. And all the while they are murmuring the same old story that greeted the ears of the seafaring Megarians as they passed by nearly three thousand years ago and which reached the crews of the trim Venetian argosies whose arms proudly floated on their flags and pennants as they conveyed the treasures of India and China from the ports of the Euxine to the gem-blue haven of the peerless Queen of the Adriatic. The noonday sun, playing over the rippling waters, changes them in rapid succession from the delicate color of the lapis lazuli to the scintillating iridescence of the opal.

Along the coast line one contemplates with ever-increasing delight countless views of entrancing beauty and interest—gray moss-covered rocks which are ever of tender loveliness and reposeful silence; trembling vines and waving figs and olives and oranges; picturesque adobe cottages adorned with graceful creepers; romping children who make the air ring with their joyous shouts; men and women in the most colorful garbs quietly performing their daily tasks and all the while completely immune from the feverish haste that so distracts the toiling millions of Europe and America and converts their life into a long and troubled nightmare. The secret is that the normal Osmanli peasant is satisfied with little. Permit him to cultivate his small plot of ground in peace and to remain undisturbed in the bosom of his family and he is perfectly happy. Under such conditions he would find nothing to envy even in the lot of the denizens of the Happy Valley.

On our arrival at Ismid we were reminded that we were traveling over classic ground. For this small Turkish town was under the Roman Empire one of the largest cities in Asia Minor. It was here that Diocletian had his seat of Government; it was here that he began his sanguinary persecutions against the Christians and it was here that he abdicated the throne. It was in his imperial villa near here that death claimed Constantine the Great and it was in a neighboring castle that Hannibal committed suicide. And Nicomedia was the birthplace of Arrian, the illustrious disciple of Epictetus, who, from notes of his master’s lectures, prepared the famed Discourses of Epictetus. He also wrote the scarcely less celebrated Anabasis of Alexander the Great.

Our first stop, however, was at the little town of Lefke where we found waiting for us an araba which we had ordered the day previously to take us to Isnik—about four hours’ drive from the railroad—which is but a small village of mud houses, but which during Roman and Byzantine times was, under the name of Nicæa, the rival of Nicomedia. Even while in the possession of the Sultans of Rum it was as a center of art, poetry, and science scarcely less renowned than Cordova and Bagdad. And while Constantinople was in the possession of the Latins, after its capture by the Crusaders, Nicæa served as the temporary capital of the Byzantine Empire.

There are few places in Anatolia which make a stronger appeal to the student than the ancient city of Nicæa. Its ivy and fern-covered ruins, walls, baths, theaters, churches, mosques, towers, gates, aqueducts, sarcophagi, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions of all kinds are in the highest degree interesting and offer a mine of most precious material for the antiquary or the historian.

To us Nicæa was a

and, as we wandered among the ruin-covered streets of the once famous city, we seemed to hear the monitory words

But my object in visiting this famous place was not knowledge so much as impressions. I was attracted thither by the same magnet that drew me to Troy and Chalcedon. I wished to get the local color and secure a local picture of a place which has filled an important page in history and which for centuries was the goal of contending armies—Asiatics and Europeans, Moslems and Christians. But the predominant reason for my visit to this scene of ruins was the fact that it had been a witness of two of the Church’s most noted œcumenical councils.

The first council which was held here in 325 was likewise the first General Council of the Church. It is noted for its condemnation of Arianism and for the formation of the Nicene Creed which, as subsequently amplified by the Council of Constantinople, has ever since been the symbol of faith used not only by the Catholic Church but also by those Eastern Churches which are no longer in communion with Rome and by many of the Protestant Churches as well.

In the second council of Nicæa, which was the seventh of the Church’s general councils and which convened in 787, was condemned the doctrine of the Iconoclasts, which so long agitated the Eastern Church and which was the cause of so many relentless persecutions throughout the whole of the Byzantine Empire. Even Moslems, who regard every kind of representation of the human form as an execrable idol, could not have been more fanatical and pitiless in their dealings with anti-Iconoclasts than were Leo the Isaurian, who was suspected of favoring Islamism, and his son Constantine Copronymus. During their reigns, not to speak of those of several of their successors, the churches of the Byzantine Empire were as bare of images and statues as were the mosques of Medina and Damascus.[88]

By a peculiar combination of events it fell to the lot of two women—the Empresses Irene and Theodora—to undo the work of the Iconoclastic emperors and to put a stop to the persecutions which had caused the exile, the imprisonment, or the death of countless numbers of the noblest men and women of the empire, whose only offense was fidelity to the faith of their fathers.

Few things in Anatolia are more competent to awaken memories of the past glories of Asia Minor than a visit to the spot that on two momentous occasions witnessed the assemblage of hundreds of bishops from both the Orient and the Occident. What a contrast between the present condition of Nicæa and that at the time when the assembled fathers subscribed to that creed which has ever since been accepted as the symbol of faith of nearly the whole of Christendom!

In Asia Minor alone there were, in the fifth century, no fewer than four hundred and fifty episcopal sees. And an imperial law was enacted that every city should have its own bishop—unaquœque civitas proprium episcopum habeto.[89] But what a change has come over this once flourishing portion of the Christian Church. The famous cities—Nicæa, Chalcedon, and Ephesus—in which four general councils were held and which in Roman times were all capitals of provinces—have long since been reduced to ruins. So completely, indeed, had Ephesus disappeared from sight that little was known even about its topography until the Austrian Archæological Institute began its excavations there but little more than two decades ago.

And so it is throughout the length and the breadth of Anatolia.[90] Great and popular cities, which, in the heyday of the Roman Empire were noted for their splendid temples, baths, gymnasia, colonnades, Greek theaters, and Roman amphitheaters, which were all graced by masterpieces of art in marble and bronze—frequently replicas of matchless Greek originals—are now either entirely deserted or tenanted by a few nomadic shepherds or poor tillers of the soil whose only homes are small mud hovels that barely protect them from the elements.

Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia. In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that galaxy of philosophers—Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has ever known.[91]

In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society which a French writer has happily named le printemps de la Grèce.

Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,” first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets, while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”

But where Homer, Sappho, and Alcæus lived and labored and where once their immortal works were used as textbooks in the schools of Asia Minor; where Zeuxis and Appelles and Parrhasius were surrounded by crowds of admiring pupils; where Hippocrates and Galen of Pergamon, long the supreme authorities in medical science, were born; where Hipparchus of Nicæa, founder of scientific astronomy, first became famous; where Aristarchus of Samothrace, the most celebrated critic and grammarian of antiquity, began his brilliant career, there is now little more than an intellectual wilderness and but scant knowledge even of the names of those who were once the glory of Hellas, as well as of Anatolia. The erstwhile homes of art, science, and literature in Asia Minor have shared the same fate as Olympia, Carthage, and Syracuse. Only a few broken columns and mutilated statues remain of what were once the great cultural centers of the ancient world.

How often does not the explorer in Anatolia unexpectedly come upon a dead city on a mountain slope or in a hidden hollow, which was abandoned a thousand years ago, whose streets are choked with brushwood, whose palaces and theaters are covered with a tangle of vegetation, whose marble tombs are hidden by brambles, where the only human being ever seen is a wandering shepherd who is absolutely indifferent to these marvelous vestiges of a marvelous past?

And what traveler in Anatolia has not frequently seen mutilated columns and statues built into walls and houses, and beautifully carved friezes and capitals put to the most ignoble uses? Nor is this all. Everywhere in this land of countless Pompeis untold treasures of the most delicately chiseled marbles have been cast into lime kilns—marbles which in the days of the art-loving Greeks and Romans were above price and which, for generations, were the pride of the cities which they embellished and the chief adornment of the superb structures of which they formed a part.

But, if the ruins of Anatolia awake memories of the former grandeur of cities which were once renowned centers of art, science, and letters, they likewise carry us back to the days when the Osmanli chieftains became the heirs of the Eastern Cæsars and when they gained the mastery of that portion of the world which from the dawn of history has transcended all others in human interest; the territory in which were located the proud cities of Tyre and Sidon, Nineveh, Babylon, Thebes, and Memphis, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria; the lands which witnessed the decisive battles of Greek against Asiatic—Græcia barbariæ lento collisa duello—Salamis, Platæa, Marathon, Arbela; the regions, in a word, in which was enacted nearly all of what is embraced in the term “Ancient History.”

The cradle of the Osmanlis was the small village of Sugut about a day’s ride on horseback to the south of Nicæa and about the same distance to the east of the Mysian Olympus. For it was here that Osman, the founder of the Osmanli dynasty, first saw in 1258 the light of day. The first thirty years of his life was that of a village chieftain of a pastoral community, who lived in peace among his neighbors and whose fighting men did not number more than four hundred. He was then fired with the ambition to extend his boundaries and at the end of ten years he found himself at the head of four thousand warriors and in direct contact with the decadent and moribund Byzantine Empire.

When Osman died in 1326 his emirate of Sugut had been extended to the Marmora and the Euxine and included in the conquered territory the important cities of Brusa, Nicomedia, and Nicæa. This was the beginning of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. The same emir of Sugut was also the founder of a dynasty whose male succession has endured uninterruptedly for more than six centuries and the first ruler of a people in which there is so complete a blending of Asiatic and European blood that they have been called a distinct race.

No other dynasty can boast such a succession of brilliant sovereigns as those who conducted the Ottomans to the height of renown in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. First there was Osman, the originator of a race, next came his son Orkhan, the founder of a state, and then Osman’s grandson, the creator of an empire. These founders of an empire were succeeded by Bayazid who, on account of his rapid movements, was called Ilderim—lightning; Mohammed, who retrieved the losses inflicted by Timur; Murad II, the antagonist of Hunyady and Skanderberg; Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople; Selim I, who annexed Kurdistan, Syria, and Egypt, and Solyman the Magnificent, the victor on the field of Mohacs and the besieger of Vienna. Never did eight such sovereigns succeed one another—save for the feeble Bayazid II—in unbroken succession in any other country; never was an empire founded and extended during two so splendid centuries by such a series of great rulers. In the hour of dismay, as well as in the moment of triumph, the Turkish Sultan was master of the situation.[93]

But not only were the Ottoman Emirs and Sultans of this period eminent as rulers and empire builders. With few exceptions, they, as well as many of their successors, possessed, like Napoleon, the rare faculty of choosing the right men for the right place. This is especially noteworthy in their choice of generals, admirals, and grand viziers who were selected for the high positions, which they filled with such distinction, without regard to their nationality or accidents of birth. Among them were Jews and eunuchs, Greek and Italian, German and Polish renegades.[94] There was the Italian Cicala, the victor of Karestes; the German Mehemet Sli, son of a Magdeburg musician, who commanded the main army in Bulgaria; Omar who from a Croatian clerk became the leader of the Turkish army in the Crimea. Chief among the great admirals were the Italian Ululj Ali, the Greeks Kheyr-ed-din and Urug Barbarossa from the island of Lesbos; Piali Pasha, from Croatia. It was chiefly through the aid of the last three that Solyman the Magnificent, was able to secure control of the Mediterranean and the Arab states of Northern Africa and to extend his devastating raids not only to the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain but even beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, to waylay the argosies which were returning to Cadix laden with the gold and jewels of the Indians.[95]

But more distinguished than the Sultan’s noted generals and his corsair admirals was the long series of men who occupied the Grand Vizierate. The most famous of these were the Abyssinian eunuch Bashir; the renegade Jew, Kiamil Pasha; the Herzegovinan, Mohammed Sokalovich; the Albanian, Mohammed, Kiuprili, who, from a kitchen-boy in the Sultan’s palace, became the most noted grand vizier that ever ruled the great Ottoman Empire. He was succeeded in the Grand Vizierate by his son Ahmed who, as a statesman, was scarcely less celebrated than his father. A short interval after Ahmed’s death, Mustafa Kiuprili, a second son of Mohammed became grand vizier and his rule was marked by the same consummate statesmanship that so distinguished the rule of his father and brother. Their rise is especially interesting for, as observes Von Hammer, “the history of the empires of the Orient offers only four instances of members of the same family succeeding one another in the dignity of the Grand Vizierate.”[96]

In this brief reference to the men who achieved such distinction in building up and extending the Ottoman Empire, we must not forget the women who played so important a rôle in the history of Turkish politics and statecraft. Three of the most notable of these were the Muscovite Roxalana, who passed from a public slave market to the imperial harem to become the wife of Solyman the Magnificent, the greatest of the Ottoman Sultans; the Venetian Safia who at an early age was abducted from her home on the Grand Canal, taken to Constantinople and sold to the Sultan Murad III, by whom she had a son who, after his father’s death, became Sultan Mohammed III; Aimée Dubuc de Rivery, who, like the Empress Josephine, was born in the little island of Martinique and who, in her youth, was an intimate of the future consort of Napoleon Bonaparte, but who eventually fell into the hands of Algerian pirates by whom she was sold in the slave market of Algiers. Thence she was conveyed to Constantinople as a present to the Sultan, Abdul Hamid I, to whom she bore a son who became Mahmud II, the grandfather of the late Abdul Hamid II.

By their beauty, wit, and fascinating manners these three women gained an unbounded influence over the Sultans with whom their lives were cast and, what is more remarkable, they were able, notwithstanding their numerous antagonists in the harem, to retain their ascendancy in the affections of their lords long after the season of youth and beauty had passed. In overweening ambition, diplomatic finesse, unfailing resourcefulness in high resolve, in achieving success in the face of the greatest obstacles, these three Christian captives were worthy rivals of their more fortunate sisters of the West—Bianca Capello, Catherine de’ Medici, and the Marquise de Pompadour.

From the preceding pages, it is clear, as Freeman points out that,[97]

According to a long prevalent opinion, the Osmanlis are a Turkish race who achieved the conquest of Asia Minor before they invaded Europe and before they became masters of the Byzantine Empire. The fact is they had subjugated the entire Balkan peninsula before they obtained possession of more than the northwest corner of Anatolia, and had maintained Adrianople as the Ottoman capital eighty-seven years before Mohammed II, after the conquest of Constantinople, transferred it to its present location on the Bosphorus.

Nor were the Osmanlis, even in their earliest days, composed entirely, as is so often asserted, of Turkish nomads from the East. Far from it. They were welded from the heterogeneous elements—Greeks, Carians, Phrygians, Galatians, the followers of Osman, and other peoples who then inhabited the north-western part of Asia Minor. And, as early as the reign of Orkhan, the son and successor of Osman, this complex blending of peoples became not only a distinct race but a race with a national consciousness.

So far are the Osmanlis from regarding themselves as heirs of the Seljukian Turks or as transformed Turkomans that they have always endeavored to remove this erroneous impression which has so long prevailed concerning their people. The distinguished historian, Mouradja d’ Ohsson, declares:

The Osmanlis, as we have seen, were of mixed blood, even while still confined to Asia Minor. But after their conquests in Europe and further expansion in Asia they “became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis, who, under Solyman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.”[99] It would, indeed, require an ethnological analyst of superhuman power to determine the percentage of Osmanli blood in the present inhabitants of the western part of the Ottoman Empire.[100]

Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have been classed as raiders like the devastating hordes of Timur and Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists and empire builders. This was the secret of their success and the explanation of the marvelous development of the Empire of the Sultans, which, as the eminent Austrian historian, Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall, has declared “was more rapid in its rise than Rome, more enduring than that of Alexander.”

The causes which contributed to the rapid development of the Osmanlis from the four hundred warriors of Osman into the vast armies of his successors and to the achievement of such extraordinary results in so short a period of time were, as the historian Finlay points out, “in some degree similar to those which had enabled small tribes of Goths and Germans to occupy and subdue the Western Roman Empire.”[101]

But there were other contributory causes which enabled the Osmanlis so quickly to become masters of the Byzantine Empire and to make themselves a menace to the whole of Europe. Chief among these were the conflicting ambitions of numerous aspirants to the Byzantine throne and the rivalries of the petty chieftains of the Balkan Peninsula and the commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa. All these purely secular aims made anything like joint action against the followers of the Crescent quite impossible.

It was Cantacuzenos, a traitor to his empress, the widow of Andronicus II, who introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. After usurping the Byzantine throne, he gave his daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the emir Orkhan in exchange for six thousand soldiers to aid him in his struggle against his legitimate sovereign. By his infamous betrayal of his empress and country he contributed more than any single factor to the ultimate downfall of the Byzantine Empire.

It was the despot Theodore Paleologus who invited the Osmanlis into Greece to support him in his contest with the Greeks and the Franks. It was the Serbian prince Stephen Bukcovitz who formed an alliance with the emir Bayazid to whom he gave his sister as wife and for whom he commanded a contingent in the Ottoman Army—even against his coreligionists. When the Osmanli forces, after their signal defeat by Timur at Angora, were faced with annihilation at the hands of the victorious Tartars, it was the Greeks, Genoese, and Venetians who saved them from destruction by transporting them across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to Europe where their relentless pursuers were unable to follow them.

But these are only a few instances of the aid which the Ottoman conquerors received from the Christian nations of Europe. “In their conquest of the Balkan peninsula it is remarkable,” declares a recent writer, “that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke.”[102] The victories of Bayazid in the region of the Danube were largely due to the coöperation of his Christian vassals. And in his invasion of Hungary he was more beholden to the Wallachians than to his famed corps of Janissaries.[103]

Yet more. For, contrary to a common opinion, he received no assistance whatever from Saracens or Persians, for the simple reason that these peoples did not join forces with the Ottomans until a much later date.

The Osmanlis did not cross the Taurus until more than a century after they had passed the Balkans and did not become “masters of Asia Minor until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded in Europe as a fait accompli.”[104]

And it is equally true that “whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.”[105]

Besides the causes just enumerated, there were others of quite a different nature that made for the phenomenal military achievements of Osmanlis in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. They were the same causes which had so greatly favored the ready submission of the peoples of Syria and northern Africa and which had so potently contributed towards the rapid diffusion of Islam in all countries which bordered the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Byzantine Empire had long been afflicted by incompetent and decadent rulers. The tyranny and the vexations of exarchs had become intolerable. The people were overburdened with taxes and their property was in a large measure confiscated. Under such conditions the Saracens and the Ottomans came as liberators to the long-suffering, down-trodden populations. By embracing Islam, the Christians of the Orient were relieved from the oppressive taxes of Byzantium and entered again into the possession of their sequestrated property. Even when they refused to accept the Koran they recovered their lands by the payment of a moderate capitation tax and were thus enabled to live under the protection of Moslem law which took no notice of the religious controversies of rival Christian sects. This liberal policy of Islam towards its Christian subjects—a policy which safeguarded their persons and property—following as it did on the heels of the odious tyranny of the Lower Empire—was an important factor in the marvelously rapid extension of Islam and in the easy domination of the conquering Ottomans and Saracens. In Asia Minor, particularly, Mohammedanism achieved an easy triumph because it was opposed to Byzantine despotism which was the object of universal execration.

But nothing, probably, contributed more towards the rapid conquest of the Osmanlis than their spirit of tolerance in matters of religion. This will, I know, seem strange to those who, from their youth, have listened to the story of the atrocities of that mythical personage, “the Moslem warrior with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other.”

To one who is familiar with the teachings of the Koran and the policy of Islam since the days of Mohammed there is nothing surprising in this tolerance and religious freedom which Osmanlis and Moslems have always accorded their Christian subjects. “Let there be no compulsion in religion,”[107] declares the Prophet, and again it is written, “Wilt thou compel men to become believers? No soul can believe but by the permission of God.”[108]

Nor were these and numerous other declarations of the Koran of similar import ever ignored by the leaders of Islam in their dealings with their non-Moslem subjects. There have been, it is true, frequent outbursts of fanaticism, even of persecution among Mohammedans, which resulted in much suffering on the part of the Christian population and in putting in force against them very intolerant measures. But the persecutions and harsh ordinances were not so much the result of religious antagonism as of political conditions at the time. Not a few of them are traceable to a distrust of the loyalty of Christians towards their Moslem rulers or to the intrigues of Christian nations like Russia whose secret emissaries have been responsible for so much of the agitation in Asia Minor for generations past. Others again may be traced to the bad faith of certain European powers in their dealings with Moslem rulers, or to the “harsh and insolent behavior of Christian officials” in the service of Mohammedan sovereigns.[109]