Neglected as the Eastern Christians have been by their Christian brethren in the West, unarmed for the most part and utterly defenceless, it would have been easy for any of the powerful rulers of Islam to have utterly rooted out their Christian subjects or banished them from their dominions as the Spaniards did the Moors, or the English the Jews, for nearly four centuries. It would have been perfectly possible for Selim I (in 1514) or Ibrahim (in 1646) to have put into execution the barbarous notion they conceived of exterminating their Christian subjects, just as the former had massacred forty thousand Shiahs with the aim of establishing uniformity of religious belief among his Mohammedan subjects. The muftis who turned the minds of their masters from such a cruel purpose did so as the exponents of Muslim law and Muslim tolerance.[110]
“The very survival,” therefore, “of the Christian Churches to the present day, is,” as the same author pertinently observes, “a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Mohammedan governments towards them.”[111]
Ecclesiastical writers of the epoch of the Mohammedan conquest give still another explanation of the rapid progress of Moslem armies, which was quite in accord with the spirit of the time. God wished, they declared, to chastize the Christians for their infidelity and to compel them to do penance for their manifold heresies. In their view it was not the astounding conquests of the Mussulmans that led to the apostasy of such vast numbers of Christians. It was rather the numerous and widespread defections of heretical churches which rendered the conquest of Islam so easy that it surprised the victors as much as the vanquished. Moslem arms, then, according to these writers were but an instrument of divine vengeance, or, as one of them expressed it, peccatis exigentibus victi sunt Christiani.[112]
As one traverses the small territory which was the cradle of the Osmanlis and reflects that the people to whom the insignificant emir of Sugut gave his name were, from their first appearance in history, almost within sight of the City of Constantine, one cannot help admiring their marvelous transformation from retainers of a village chieftain to heirs of the empire of the Cæsars, to masters of vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe.[113] From the humblest beginnings they gradually became a people who can boast of the longest continued dynasty in Europe; and who can point in their early history to a rare series of brilliant rulers and a line of sovereigns who have occupied a throne which has been immovable from the days of Mohammed the Conqueror, nearly five centuries ago, and which, notwithstanding menaces from many quarters, seems destined to remain immovable for many long generations to come.