But
with this skill the Turks' political capacity has
always ended; their Empire, even at its great
period, lacked all moral substance, just like
Machiavelli's ideal State.
with this skill the Turks' political capacity has
always ended; their Empire, even at its great
period, lacked all moral substance, just like
Machiavelli's ideal State.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
Nobody is any longer
deceived about France's European policy, and a
profound change has also occurred in current
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? 6 Turkey and the Great Nations
criticisms of England, which redounds to the
honour of the developing capacity of German
Liberalism.
What German Liberal has not in his young days
dreamt the glorious dream of the natural alliance
of free England with free Germany? We needed
a long series of painful experiences before we at
last learnt that the foreign politics of States
are not determined solely, or even mainly, by the
inner relations of their constitutions. However
highly you may think of British liberty, modern
England is undoubtedly a reactionary force in the
society of nations. Her position as a Power is an
obvious anachronism. It was created in those good
old times when wars were still decided by sea-fights
and hired mercenaries, and it was thought politic
in all dominating countries to seize piratical hold
of well-situated sea-fortresses and fleet-stations,
without any regard to nature and history. In a
century of national States and big national armies
such a cosmopolitan commercial Power can no
longer continue to endure ; the time will and must
come when Gibraltar will belong to the Spaniards,
Malta to the Italians, Heligoland to the Germans,
and the Mediterranean to the peoples of the
Mediterranean countries.
It is saying too much to compare modern
England with eighteenth century Holland; the
nation still exhibits powerful energy in the splendid
achievement of its social life, and it might easily
happen again that, should she believe herself
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 7
imperilled in her vital commercial interests, she
would yet stagger humanity by bold determination.
The vision of her statesmen, however, is quite as
narrow, her view of the world has become just as
patriarchally limited and obstinately conservative,
as were once the politics of the decaying Nether-
lands. Over-rich and over-satiated, vulnerable
at a hundred points of their far-flung possessions,
the Britons feel they have nothing more to desire
in the wide world, and can only oppose the young
forces of the century by the forcible methods of an
obsolete age; they therefore obstinately resist all
changes in the Society of States, however bene-
ficial they may be. England is to-day the shame-
less champion of barbarism in international law.
It is her fault that warfare by sea still bears the
character of privileged robbery -- to the disgrace of
mankind. At the Brussels Conference her opposi-
tion nullified the attempt of Germany and Russia
to set some limit to the excesses of war by land.
Apart from the feeble and entirely unhelpful
sympathy displayed by the English Press in
regard to Italian unity, the British nation during
the last two decades has simply shown bitter
enmity to every single new and hopeful Power
which has arisen in the world. She enthused for
the brutality of North American slave-holders;
she was the clamorous, but, God be thanked,
cowardly supporter of foreign Danish domination
in Schleswig-Holstein ; she reverenced the Diet and
the Guelph Empire; she allowed the French to
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? 8 Turkey and the Great Nations
attack united Germany, which she could have
prevented, and prolonged the war by her sales of
weapons. When M. de Lesseps conceived the
brilliant idea of the Suez Canal, which the ruler
of the East Indies ought to have seized with both
hands, the Britons stuck their heads into the sand
like the ostrich in order not to perceive the bless-
ings of the necessity, which was inconvenient just
at the first moment; they jeered and jibed until
the great enterprise was accomplished, and then
endeavoured to exploit for England's advantage
the innovation which had been achieved against
England's will. And after all these cumulative
proofs of the incompetence and narrow-minded
prejudice of British statesmanship, ought we
Germans to admire that State as the magnani-
mous defender of national freedom and of the
European balance of power? It is easy to hear
in the boastful words in which England loves to
veil her Eastern policy the echo of the anxious
cry of old: We are defending the Ganges at the
Bosphorus.
Every London newspaper proves that nobody
there has any suspicion of the enormous alteration
in all Russian conditions. They still speak as in
the days of the Czar Nicholas. The Emperor
Alexander, however, has not only opened new
paths for the social Hfe of his people by profoundly
radical reforms, but he has also given a quite
altered tendency to the Empire's foreign policy.
Only blind hatred can maintain that Russia is
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 9
even to-day oppressing Europe with a crippling dom-
ination. The Petersburg Government has proved
in North America, Italy, and Germany, as well as
in the struggle against Rome, that it knows how to
respect the Hving forces of the century ; after so
many proofs of its shrewdness and love of peace it
can at least expect that we should judge its Oriental
schemes according to the facts, not according to
the sensational stories of EngHsh Russophobes.
Taken all in all, the great Slavonic Power has
been the best ally Germany has ever had, and in
the face of that fact the question becomes urgent
whether it is really impossible for Germans and
Slavs to dwell in peace side by side. If our broad-
minded cosmopolitanism cherishes odious preju-
dices against any nation, it is certainly the Slavonic.
We have often fought against the Romanic
peoples, and sometimes felt in the heat of the fight
a quick outburst of national hatred; but the
near blood-kinship which unites all the peoples
that were affected by the migration of nations,
the common participation in classical education,
and the gratitude for so many gifts brought to us
by the older civilization of the West, always led
again after a brief estrangement to a good under-
standing. Hatred of the Slavs, on the other hand,
is deep in our blood, and it is also heartily recipro-
cated on the other side. For centuries we have
dealt with the nations of the East only as enemies,
as rulers, or as teachers; even to-day we still ex-
hibit to them all the harsh and domineering traits
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? lo Turkey and the Great Nations
of our character. Glad of our older civilization,
we glance beyond the Vistula and the Danube
with feelings such as the Roman had when he gazed
at the right bank of the Rhine, and we do not even
take the trouble to learn the Russian tongue --
which, by the way, is by no means an unimportant
phenomenon, because the educated Russian, by
his knowledge of languages, is gaining almost
exactly the same superiority over us which we
had over the French. To tell the truth, the Slav
seems to us a born slave. As soon as our conver-
sation turns to the interesting nationalities south
of the Danube, a German cannot help uttering
the winged words, "Swineherds and nose-muti-
lators" -- as if our ancestors in the olden times did
not also live with the proboscidians in cordial
intimacy, and carry on wars in which little
humane feeling was shown ! Should such arrogant
prejudices continue? It is not to be imagined
that we should ever feel for the unripe peoples
of the Balkan Peninsula so deep a sympathy as we
once did for the movement towards Italian unity.
But they are after all our Christian brothers;
the combat they are waging is after all only a
scene out of the ancient war between Cross and
Crescent. It surely does not become us, who
have only just shaken foreign domination from our
necks by a bloody fight, to put the question
with arrogant callousness whether an existence
worthy of a man is possible under the yoke of the
foreign domination of the Turk.
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? Turkey and the Great Nations ii
For fifteen hundred years the most beautiful
country in Europe has been in the possession of
two great empires which, although both of them
were quite unintellectual, maintained themselves
solely by the perfect technique of their governance,
by their skill in mastering and utilizing men;
a well-developed monetary economy and system-
atized finances, good soldiers, and a technically
well-schooled officialdom; lastly a policy without
ideas, which nevertheless knew how to inspire
all its subjects with a strenuously servile dis-
position -- those were the means to which the aged
Byzantine Empire owed its thousand years' du-
ration, whilst all around the youthfully vigorous
States of the Germans weakly collapsed. And
the successors of the Byzantines, the Osmans,
have similarly maintained their power solely by
their skill in ruling, not by any moral idea. Supe-
rior to the Western countries through their stand-
ing armies, to the Orientals by the strict order of
succession in the House of Osman, they subjugated
almost the whole of Alexander's dominions to the
Crescent; and nobody can regard without ad-
miration the ruling ability of those powerful first
Sultans, Murad and Mohammed, how they fast-
ened the new yoke so tightly and firmly on the
necks of the Rayahs, who had been trampled down
and unmanned by Byzantine, Venetian, and Geno-
ese governors, that a resurrection from the bottom-
less deep of their slavery seemed for a long time
quite unthinkable to the subject peoples.
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? 12 Turkey and the Great Nations
Their government, like almost all governments
in the Orient, was a theocracy, the Koran the
unchangeable statute-book both in political and
religious life. High above the whole Empire was
enthroned the Sultan, girt with Osman's sword,
the Shadow of God on earth, bound to nothing
but the word of the Prophet. Under him were his
tools, the great officials, who mostly came out of
the ranks of the Christian renegades during the
brilliant period of the Osman State, and the hordes
of the Janissaries, all children of Christians, who
had been robbed from their parents at a tender age
and then inspired by a Spartan education with the
whole ferocity of the Islamic faith. Under them
were the ruling people of True Believers. Lastly
under those were the polyglot herd of Christians,
"pigs with similar bristles, dogs with similar
tails," condemned to drudge and pay taxes, to
purchase their exhausted lives anew every year
by means of the poll-tax, the haraj, to strengthen
ever anew the army of the ruling race by the toll
of their boys -- if sometimes it was not preferred to
put them themselves among the troops of the
Arabs, in which they were then used as cannon-
fodder or were even thrown in heaps into the
trenches of besieged Christian fortresses, as a living
bridge for Allah's storming fighters. Thus were
the Rayahs forced to forge ever closer the fetters
of their slavery with their own hands.
Skill in enslavement had here produced an in-
comparable masterpiece which is only explicable
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 13
by the servility of the subjects of Byzantium, and
by the ancient traditions of Oriental policy; for
since Asia Minor knew of no national States, but
only a powerfully welded medley of national
wrecks, the capacity for ruling by dividing de-
veloped here to a degree of virtuosity almost incom-
prehensible to a Westerner. Whilst Christendom
burnt its heretics, everybody under the Crescent
might live according to his Faith ; and only a short
time ago Lord Shaftesbury quite seriously asserted
amid the applause of the enlightened House of
Lords that Turkey had done more for Christendom
in a decade than Russia in nine centuries! This
much-vaunted tolerance of the Turks also proves
as a fact merely how skilfully the system of en-
slavement was devised; they did not desire the
conversion of the subject races, because the
Mussulman could put his foot on their necks only
if the Rayahs remained unbelieving dogs. Whilst
everywhere in Europe a strict class-distinction kept
the lower orders under, the meanest slave at the
Bosphorus might hope to rise to the highest
offices in the Empire by luck and energy ; therefore
in the seventeenth century the toil-worn peasants
of Central Europe sometimes welcomed the
Prophet's approaching standard with similar
feelings as they did later the armies of the French
Revolution. However, that complete social
equality, which constitutes everywhere the foot-
stool of Oriental despotism, existed actually only
for the ruling race of the Believers. Between
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? 1 4 Turkey and the Great Nations
them and the Rayahs stretched a boundless gulf;
the extremest insolence of the old French aristo-
cratic arrogance is not within even measurable
distance of those feehngs of cold contempt and
bodily disgust which the believing Turk ex-
periences even to-day against the pork-eating
Giaour.
The conqueror found himself in the presence
of a population utterly divided by raving race-
hatred and gloomy religious passions. The Greek
hated the Serb more fiercely than the Turk, and
yet more shocking than the sight of the man
turning his face towards Mecca in prayer was
it for an Orthodox son of the Eastern Church to
behold an altar of the Latins, where the Saviour
hangs on the Cross with His feet nailed one above
the other, instead of side by side. Such a dis-
position among the Rayahs afforded firm ground
for that shrewd system of keeping the races and
creeds apart to which the ruling minority owed
its security. As the government of the ruling
race was itself theocratic, the elders of every
Christian Church were provided with jurisdiction
and powers of police over those of their faith, and
were at the same time obliged to take responsibility
for the taxes of the Rayahs. The Orthodox formed
a Greek subordinate State within the Turkish
Empire under their Patriarch. Their bishops dealt
as they pleased with the popes and congregations,
but seldom disturbed by a wildly energetic pasha ;
they boasted that, compared with their social
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 15
equals in other lands, "You are only parsons, we
are pashas! " That is what English worshippers
of the Turk praise as the incomparable self-
government of the Osmans! The Rayahs* venal
servility next became itself responsible for the
fact that whilst the high clergy fleeced their
flocks thoroughly well, they never became dan-
gerous to the Turkish lords. What a horrible
page of Christian history is covered by the fates
of the Patriarchs of Constantinople ! The dignity
lasted for life, and could be forfeited only for high
treason or on appeal of the Orthodox themselves.
And yet this well-assured office, which might have
been a prop of national independence for the
Greeks, became a useful tool of enslavement for
the Turks. Since time immemorial no Patriarch
has kept his seat longer than three years. The
spirit of simony penetrated the whole Church;
scarcely had a prince of the Church won the votes
of his fellow-believers by bribery, than others
started working against him with the same method,
till he was at last accused before the Porte and
deposed. And the same unworthy game kept
going on for centuries ! To crown all, the big
merchants of the Fanar carried on the monetary
transactions of the Porte, and the commerce of
the Christians was preferred before that of the
Turks because it had to pay higher taxes, just as
the fiscal policy of the landowners in our Middle
Age sometimes patronized Jewish usury. Thus
the shameful name of Rayah became a literal,
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? 1 6 Turkey and the Great Nations
fearful truth. So long as they did not "gnaw at
the collar of subjection," they might settle their
disputes among themselves, just as stupid cattle
are left to themselves; but as soon as they became
engaged in quarrel with a Mussulman they were
made to feel that the word of the Prophet formally
gives the True Believer the right to tread the
Giaour underfoot. The complete absence of rights
on the part of the Rayahs was only made endur-
able to some extent by the fact that each com-
munity and each urban quarter was usually
inhabited solely by fellow-believers, and so dis-
putes between Christians and Moslems were not
too frequent.
The same unparalleled ignorance which ensured
the mastery of the Rayahs by the Moslems, also
inspired their foreign policy. Never, not even
when they watered their horses in the Leitha
and beheld the rich abodes of German culture
at their feet, did any idea of the superiority of
Western civilization enter the Osmans' heads.
The Frank was and is regarded by them as the
paragon of frivolous stupidity ; to make the Prank-
ish bear dance a fool's dance at a rope's end was
and is the finest spice of existence for the worthy
Eff endis of the Seraglio. Yet with what clarity and
assurance did the one-sided narrow-mindedness
of Oriental fanaticism meet the disharmony of
the divided European world! The Mussulman
knew but two kingdoms on earth, the House
of Islam and the House of War; "the whole of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 17
heathendom is only a nation," to conquer which
was the immutable duty of the Moslems. The
Western countries meanwhile became defenceless
against the barbarians through the rich mani-
f oldness of their culture ; the want of unity among
the European Powers, the superabundance of
contradictions which is included in our portion
of the world, were the best allies of the Osmans,
beginning from the day when the Genoese calmly
looked on at the conquest of Byzantium from
the ramparts of Galata, up to the contemporary
Christian heroisms of Benjamin Disraeli. And
again, from the Council of Mantua, when res
orientales were first put among the orders of the
day for European diplomats, down to the war
of dispatches in our own days, the unity of Europe
has ever been nullified by the particular impedi-
ment that whilst, if needful, some understanding
could have been reached about everything else,
it was impossible in the case of the mighty capital,
which signifies more than the whole of the Balkan
Peninsula. It was not feasible to find a way out
with the superficial advice of banishing the Turks
from Europe, for the simple reason that their
ruling stronghold itself half belongs to Asia. The
Bosphorus is the high street of Constantinople;
the Asiatic suburb of Scutari is hardly farther from
Stamboul than the European suburbs of Pera and
Galata. On the Asiatic shore at Anadoli Fanar lie
the ruins of the Temple of Gerokoi, w^here the
Hellenic sailor used once to say good-bye to his
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? 1 8 Turkey and the Great Nations
beloved home before he began his voyage to the
barbarian countries on the Bosphorus. So far
as the history of that region goes, the south-east
coast of Europe and the north-west coast of
Asia have always belonged to the same Greek
civilization. It was and is an enigma how a new
Power could ever arise in Stamboul which should
not at the same time be master of the most valu-
able strip of Asia Minor.
It is astounding with what cleverness the
Osmans in their great period knew how to utilize
this favourable position and those dissensions in
Europe. Although they had only the vaguest
conception of the geographical positions and the
history of the heathen countries, they yet divined,
with the fine sense for power peculiar to Orientals,
where in each case they had to look for their allies.
Correct insight and diplomatic tact, those ancient
privileges of masterful aristocracies, were also a
heritage among the ruling race in the Balkan
Peninsula. As the behever in the Koran may
regard every treaty of peace with the heathen
merely as a revocable armistice, the Porte dealt
with the Western countries with imperturbable
calm. She understood how to expect everything
from time, and waited patiently, with the fatalistic
quietness of the Moslem, until the hour came to
tear up all treaties and to let loose against the
Giaours the still unbroken, fierce natural forces
of the Janissaries and Spahis. Since France first
drew the great Suleiman into the quarrels of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 19
Christendom, the Turks began to perceive that
they were at least welcome to one of the Christian
Powers; and thenceforth the State of the Osmans
has so often and so unctuously been praised by
the wiseacre statesmen of the Western countries
as an indispensable weight in the scales of Euro-
pean balance, that we ought not to be surprised if
to-day all the supports of the Turkish Empire,
the valis, mullahs, and ulemas, the black and the
white eunuchs, the odalisques, and the seraglio
boys, are all penetrated by the glad belief that
Allah's wonderful mercifulness has struck the
stupid Franks' eyes with an incurable blindness.
With good reason in truth has Machiavelli
eulogized the proud beginnings of the Osman
State; because that which represented policy
to the Florentine, namely, skill in governing, in
maintaining and enhancing the power of the State,
was practised here with a rare cleverness.
But
with this skill the Turks' political capacity has
always ended; their Empire, even at its great
period, lacked all moral substance, just like
Machiavelli's ideal State. Might was self-interest ;
the question as to what moral purposes it should
aim at was never put. It was thought a matter
of course that the State should exist for the
benefit of the rulers; and if we inquire what the
ruling skill of that long series of strong statesmen
and generals has brought forth for the well-being
and civilization of mankind, only one answer is
possible : Nothing, simply nothing. When the con-
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? 20 Turkey and the Great Nations
quering Mohammed bestrode the desert palace of
the Comneni, the feeling of the transitoriness of
earthly greatness overcame him, and he uttered
the verse of the Oriental poet :
Before the gates in Emperors* castles
The spider, as chamberlain, is weaving curtains,
And in Afrasiab's columned halls
Echoes the cry of the nesting owl.
He did not imagine he was predicting the fate
of his own Empire. Like a huge avalanche,
Turkish despotism fell upon those blessed lands
which once witnessed the classic age of Christian
Church history. The interior of the Peninsula is
to-day as Httle known as the deserts of Australia ;
it was not till Diebitsch's expedition to Adrianople
that science gained some sort of notion of the
formation of Balkan mountain ranges. The rise
of the Turkish power compelled the Western
countries to brace themselves to vigorous action.
As the Osman occupied the flower of the com-
mercial centres in the Mediterranean, the Euro-
pean sought the sea route to India. In the fight
with the Asiatics arose the new Austria, which dis-
covered a firm bond of unity for its polyglot
nations in the fighting renown they had won
together. In so far even the Osman Empire has
borne witness to the truth that every great his-
torical phenomenon leaves some positive result
in the course of human development. But where
are the traces of the civilizing work of the
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 21
Turks themselves? What remained in Hungary
after the long one hundred and fifty years
during which the Pashas dwelt on the Koenigs-
burg at Buda? A few crude mutilations of
beautiful Christian churches and the warm baths
of Ofen. What now reminds one of the domina-
tion of the Crescent in Greece? Hardly any-
thing but the ruins of destroyed Christian
habitations. The ruination of the system of gov-
ernment did not consist in the brutal outrages of
individual magnates -- because the impaling and
drowning in sacks, the violating and pillaging, and
similar amusements customary to the country, did
not, according to Oriental standard, happen too
frequently -- but in that indescribable intellectual
laziness, in that profound slumber of the soul,
which was always peculiar to the Osmans even in
the days of their warlike greatness, and caused
them to appear as barbarians even in the eyes of
the Arabs. Just as the Turk truly loves only
three vocations, the career of a soldier, an official,
or a priest, his State has never shown any under-
standing of art or science or commerce. His
political economy, if the expression be allowed,
simply pursued the purpose of assuring comfortable
provision for the ruling race ; he therefore lightened
the taxes on imports and increased those on
exports -- just as in the Spain of Philip H, which
exhibits altogether several striking similarities to
the State of the Crescent.
And that idiotic system, which destroyed Spain's
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? 22 Turkey and the Great Nations
Empire in a few decades, has been burdening the
Balkan lands for nearly five hundred years ! The
Osmans, even in the glory of their victories and
in the superabundance of pillaged wealth, were
an Asiatic cavalry horde which never became
at home on the soil of Western civilization, and
never got beyond the standpoint of nomadic
warriors. A national migration which fell asleep
encamped over the Christian peoples of the
south-east. The Turkish Empire always re-
mained a mighty foreign despotism to the Rayahs.
The venal Fanariots might fawn for the favours
of the Osmanli, and the petty chieftains of the
Bosniaks, abjuring their fathers' faith, might join
the ruling nation's plundering campaign; but the
masses of the Southern Slavs have for five hundred
years been bewailing, in innumerable songs and
tales, the battle on the field of the Amsel as the
fatal day for the ancient freedom; the masses of
the Greeks have never ceased imploring God's
vengeance for that day of shame when the con-
queror rode into the Hagia Sophia and his horse's
hoofs violated the most beautiful God's house in
Eastern Christendom. Likewise, the conscience of
the European world has never recognized the ex-
istence of the Turkish realm as a morally justified
necessity. The conscience of nations knows of no
superannuation of what is wrong. War and con-
quest are only means towards the right ; they can
only prove that the victor possesses the mcral
superiority whereon the right to rule is based, but
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 23
they alone cannot base a right to rule on physical
domination. As long as the victor has not proved
that his power is countenanced by the moral
forces of history, his success remains an injustice
which may be expiated, an actuality which may
be abolished by other actualities. Dense weeds
have long been growing over the countless deeds of
violence which were needful for the foundation of
the governmental unity of all Europe's great
nations. The wrong done during the agitations
for unity among the Germans and Italians is nowa-
days, after but a few years, hardly felt, because
the nations' sense of right says to itself that those
revolutions only buried the dead and exalted the
living. But those wounds which a mentally sterile
Asiatic horde inflicted on Christian civilization still
bleed after five hundred years as if the blows had
fallen yesterday. And they will never scar over
so long as Europe still possesses free and cour-
ageous men who, unmoved by Russophobia and
English cant, dare to call the historic unrighteous-
ness by its true name; and however much self-
complacent narrow-heartedness may mock, it has
finally ever been idealism which has divined the
tendency of history.
But, however firmly and securely all the institu-
tions of the old Turkish Empire fitted together,
the State lacked what has been lacking in all theo-
cracies, capability of development. Its might
rested on the Osmans' governing skill and the
Rayahs' servility. If one of those two supports
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? 24 Turkey and the Great Nations
began to waver, inevitable decay would threaten
the State, and the natural progress of European
culture soon threaten both at the same time. A
powerful movement of economic and intellectual
life, in which Turkey took no part, gradually
strengthened the military and political forces of
the neighbouring Christian States to such a degree
that the balance of power was entirely displaced.
The Crescent lost the rich provinces on the other
side of the Danube by humiliating defeats, whilst
the Western countries regained full consciousness
of their superiority. The Osman Empire dropped
to a second-rate Power, and the name of Turk,
instead of being a bogey for children, became their
butt. The age of the Revolution next woke up
even the Rayah nations. Since then the decline
of the ruling people has been slowly and steadily
accomplishing itself, like the operation of na-
tural laws, whilst the national masses have con-
tinually grown in development. The strengthening
self -consciousness, and the increasing well-being
of the Rayahs, daily widen the gulf between the
rulers and subjects, and make reconciliation and
assimilation quite unthinkable. The Osmanli
are decaying, body and soul. Their generative
strength is being extinguished in the sodomy and
voluptuousness of the harem. Of the great
features of the national character almost nothing
remains but pride, fatalistic confidence, and inca-
pacity for any sympathy ; only now and then do the
bravery and the clever ruling sense of better days
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 25
break through the thick veil of measureless idleness
which has pitched its camp on the souls of the
satiated masters.
Orderliness and resolute manliness likewise
vanished with the might of the Empire; the wild
greed for plunder, which under the great Sultans of
old dared to satisfy itself only on the Rayahs, has
now for a long time done so shamelessly on the
State itself: "The Padishah's treasure is a sea,
and he who does not draw from it is a pig. " The
Rayahs, on the other hand, are indebted to Christen-
dom for the still tolerable purity of their domestic
life, and therewith their reproductiveness, which is
generally decisive in such racial struggles. What
really lives and works in Turkey is Christian.
Since the peace of Kutchuk-Kainarji the Greeks
have almost monopolized the traffic of the ^gean
Sea ; their wealth is growing, not only in the har-
bours of their small kingdom, in Patras, and at
Syra, but they are also multiplying and flour-
ishing in the coastal towns of Asia Minor, in
Smyrna, Aivalu, and Pergamos, whilst the Turks
are growing poorer and vanishing. It is true
the Rumanian and the Southern Slav are many
miles from being able to compete with the
activity of the exceedingly astute Greek, but
they also are far more energetic than the Turk.
The Osmans themselves admit that "by Allah's
will the Giaours become rich, and we poor"; the
gloomy prediction of the ultimate triumph of the
Cross lives in their nation, and many a distinguished
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? 26 Turkey and the Great Nations
Turk prudently orders his grave on safe Asiatic
soil. Sooner or later, in this instance as in that of
Poland's aristocratic Republic, the historical law
shall be fulfilled, which enjoins on our toiling
century that there is no longer a place in Europe
for a race of horsemen and consumers of income.
Let us not be led astray by the darling assurance
of English tourists that the Turk is nevertheless
the only gentleman among the inhabitants of the
Peninsula. That he certainly is. He who would
spend a pleasant hour with coffee and chibouk, will
undoubtedly find himself more comfortable in the
society of the dignified, distinguished, clean, and
honourable Turks than among the greedy vulture-
faces of the Rayahs. The truth is, the vices
of masters are different from those of servants;
dirt, servility, and thorough-going mendacity flour-
ish only in a state of slavery. But can supe-
riority in the social decencies be decisive in great
historical struggles? The slave-lords of Virginia
and Carolina assuredly displayed in casual inter-
course pleasanter social manners than the hard-
faced farmers and business men of the North,
or even than the negroes. And yet the German
people will always gladly remember that we did
not, like the English, let ourselves be so seduced by
a superficial preference for the gentlemen of the
South as to defend an unworthy cause, but with
moral earnestness we acknowledged the better
right of the North. In like manner, the Turks'
quiet dignity should not deceive us as to the fact
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 27
that the industry of the Greeks and the reproduc-
tiveness of the Slavs are leaving effete Osmandom
far behind in every respect. The Rayahs' Ortho-
dox faith is certainly the immaturest of all forms
of Christianity. He who judges merely by fleeting
impressions of travel will probably assign a higher
place to the Mohammedans' strict monotheism
than to the picture-worship of many a crude
Rayah tribe, which regard their crucifix almost in
the same way as the negroes their fetiches; and if
the tourist has also witnessed in the grave-church
at Jerusalem the way in which the Turkish cavasses
enforce peace with their sticks between the brawl-
ing, raging adherents of the religion of love, he
thinks himself justified in condemning the whole
of Oriental Christendom. He who, on the other
hand, surveys the concatenation of centuries,
cannot but admit that even there in the East, as
everywhere else, Christian civilization disposes of
an endless power of rejuvenation and self -renewal,
whilst all the peoples of Islam infallibly reach a
point at last at which the word of the Koran is ful-
filled. "Change is innovation, innovation is the
path to hell. " Even the most intellectually gifted
of all the Mohammedan nations, which founded the
glorious State of the Ommiads and created the
wonderful edifices of Granada and Cordova,
suddenly stood still at a certain point in its path
as if bewitched ; and this congelation of Islam gave
the Spanish Christians the power and the right to
conquer the Ommiads, although at the time of
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? 28 Turkey and the Great Nations
the Cid they were even more inferior to the Moors
than the Rayahs are to-day to the Osmans.
The Turks, for their part, have already long gone
past the zenith of the culture attainable by their
capacities ; in the case of the Greeks, however, and
even of the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Rumanians,
only a biassed mind can dispute that they are no
longer to-day what they were a century ago ; their
strength, after a long, death-like slumber, is again
unmistakably, if slowly, resurrecting. The in-
crease among the Franks at the Bosphorus is also
becoming a peril to the Osman Empire. Under
the protection of their Ambassadors they form
States within the State; besides how could it be
possible to subject Europeans to Turkish juris-
diction? Their privileged position shatters re-
spect for the authorities, even as their practically
almost complete freedom from taxation damages
the State revenue; and compared with the seven-
teen Embassies which attack the " Sick Man " with
advice, threats, intrigues of every kind, the Sul-
tan appears to his own subjects almost like an
irresponsible person whom Europe has put
under observation.
With their strength, likewise grew the Rayahs'
self-consciousness, which often seems wearisome
to us Germans, and still oftener absurd, because
national pride is generally wont to be the more
bragging and boastful in inverse ratio to a nation's
might and deeds. But we must not on that
account misunderstand either the necessity of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 29
this persistent national agitation, or its connection
with the decisive forces of the century. Was it not
altogether natural that the reawakening impulse
towards culture should again hold the mother
language in honour, the basis of all culture-- that
Bulgaria found her Karadzic, Greece her Rhigas
and the long series of her national apostles; that
the Serbs learnt to value their fine old national
poetry, and that the great actions of their fathers,
real and imaginary, were again eulogized every-
where? You may believe as much as you please of
Fallmerayer's brilliant hypotheses, which, in point
of fact, only partially survive a strict scientific
investigation, but the Neo-Greeks have absorbed
the Slav and Skypetarian elements, which their
nationality embraces, and filled them with Greek
culture; a strong national self -consciousness has
grown up in them as the result of hard struggles
and the memories of an ancient past ; they possess
living traditions, a civilized tongue, and a consider-
able literature; in short, they are a small nation
still extremely immature, but of indestructibly
developed individuality. A paltry cunning it is,
worthy of the demagogic judges of the late-
lamented Bundestag, that would try to explain this
persistent change in the popular life simply as
arising from the machinations of Russian agents !
There certainly was, and is, no lack of such agents,
although Liberal pessimists have garbled astound-
ing stories even on that point. Why, how long
is it since Bakunin was considered by the whole
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? 30 Turkey and the Great Nations
Liberal world to be a Russian spy; and who will
nowadays defend that idiotic supposition? The
Russians' despotic methods of government and
energetic patriotism brought it about that in
former years almost every educated Russian
communicated of his own free will or by command
to the Government, the observations he had
gathered together during his travels in Europe;
that old custom has assuredly not become quite
obsolete to-day. That Pan-Slavist fanatics carry
on their intrigues among all the South- Slav popu-
lations is beyond doubt; and if we consider the
strange personality of Mr. Wesselitzky Bogidar-
ovic, who first appeared as a Russian secret agent,
and then as a Bosnian leader of rebels, the question
forces itself even upon childlike temperaments,
whether the connections of such people do not
extend to very high circles in Petersburg. Only
do not let any one imagine that a long-lasting
national agitation could be kept going by these
means. If the Russians in Petersburg and Mos-
cow build a few Bulgarian schools for their kins-
men and Orthodox Believers, where is the wrong
in it? And would those schools flourish and have
influence if self-consciousness and a tendency to
education had not long been awakened in the
Bulgarian nation?
Perhaps there was yet another way whereby the
domination of the ruling people could have been
maintained amid the growing strength of the Ra-
yahs. The Empire might perhaps have kept alive,
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 31
if it further developed, according to the altered
circumstances, the well-tried, shrewd system of
separating the nations and churches, extended the
privileges of individual peoples and creeds, and
carefully protected the Christians from the inter-
ference of Mohammedan officials by a well-assured
provincial independence. This way was full of
danger; it might easily have led to the formation
of semi-sovereign tributary states. In order to
adopt it the Porte must needs have possessed
an unusual measure of self-knowledge and self-
denial. Meanwhile it was the only possible one,
and it was therefore always recommended by
Russia, the best judge of Turkish conditions; be-
cause the old truth, that the might of empires is
maintained by the same methods as created them,
is even more true of unchangeable theocracies
than of other states. But as the Porte cherished
a well-grounded suspicion of Russian advice,
it at last, after long inactivity, chose the method
which was directly opposed to the views of Peters-
burg. Owing to the rising influence of the Western
Powers there began, with Mahmud II, the aston-
ishing attempt to alter Turkey according to the
pattern of the unified Western States. Sultan
Mahmud created an army on the European model,
Rashid Pasha the mechanism of a uniformly
centralized government, the Hatti-Shereef of
Gulhane and Abdul -Mejid's Hat-Humayum
promised equality of justice to all subjects of the
Great Lord, Fuad Pasha and Ali Pasha introduced
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? 32 Turkey and the Great Nations
the Neo-Napoleonic phrase into the blessed Turk-
ish Empire and announced that the time for
grandes agglomerations nationales had also arrived
for the East, that a unified Ottoman nation must
be created. Lastly, the enlightened Neo-Turk-
dom has likewise drunk to-day of the Constitu-
tional poison -- which acts upon such peoples like
brandy on the Redskins -- and demands a national
Parliamentary Council side by side with the
Sultan.
There is, unfortunately, merely a trifle lacking
for such a national council: viz. , a nation. The
Greeks and Slavs are not Turks; they can not
and will not be Turks; and the Turks can never
seriously allow them to be so. These so-called
reform-politics, which have now been trying for
several decades to abolish the racial hatreds and
religious fanaticisms of the Eastern world by a few
crumbs fallen from the table of Parisian constitu-
tion-makers, are nothing but a gigantic falsehood ;
and the patronage bestowed now by France, now
by England, on Turkish enlightenment, simply
shows that these Western Powers, in their self-com-
placent ignorance, have become quite incapa-
ble of understanding a foreign population. In
order to foresee the fate of the Neo-Turkish
reforms only a little honesty is needed, certainly
not any seer's gift ; for the same problem which is
to-day arising on the Bosphorus occupied the
astute minds of the whole world once before for
many years, when well-meaning diplomats hoped
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deceived about France's European policy, and a
profound change has also occurred in current
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? 6 Turkey and the Great Nations
criticisms of England, which redounds to the
honour of the developing capacity of German
Liberalism.
What German Liberal has not in his young days
dreamt the glorious dream of the natural alliance
of free England with free Germany? We needed
a long series of painful experiences before we at
last learnt that the foreign politics of States
are not determined solely, or even mainly, by the
inner relations of their constitutions. However
highly you may think of British liberty, modern
England is undoubtedly a reactionary force in the
society of nations. Her position as a Power is an
obvious anachronism. It was created in those good
old times when wars were still decided by sea-fights
and hired mercenaries, and it was thought politic
in all dominating countries to seize piratical hold
of well-situated sea-fortresses and fleet-stations,
without any regard to nature and history. In a
century of national States and big national armies
such a cosmopolitan commercial Power can no
longer continue to endure ; the time will and must
come when Gibraltar will belong to the Spaniards,
Malta to the Italians, Heligoland to the Germans,
and the Mediterranean to the peoples of the
Mediterranean countries.
It is saying too much to compare modern
England with eighteenth century Holland; the
nation still exhibits powerful energy in the splendid
achievement of its social life, and it might easily
happen again that, should she believe herself
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 7
imperilled in her vital commercial interests, she
would yet stagger humanity by bold determination.
The vision of her statesmen, however, is quite as
narrow, her view of the world has become just as
patriarchally limited and obstinately conservative,
as were once the politics of the decaying Nether-
lands. Over-rich and over-satiated, vulnerable
at a hundred points of their far-flung possessions,
the Britons feel they have nothing more to desire
in the wide world, and can only oppose the young
forces of the century by the forcible methods of an
obsolete age; they therefore obstinately resist all
changes in the Society of States, however bene-
ficial they may be. England is to-day the shame-
less champion of barbarism in international law.
It is her fault that warfare by sea still bears the
character of privileged robbery -- to the disgrace of
mankind. At the Brussels Conference her opposi-
tion nullified the attempt of Germany and Russia
to set some limit to the excesses of war by land.
Apart from the feeble and entirely unhelpful
sympathy displayed by the English Press in
regard to Italian unity, the British nation during
the last two decades has simply shown bitter
enmity to every single new and hopeful Power
which has arisen in the world. She enthused for
the brutality of North American slave-holders;
she was the clamorous, but, God be thanked,
cowardly supporter of foreign Danish domination
in Schleswig-Holstein ; she reverenced the Diet and
the Guelph Empire; she allowed the French to
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? 8 Turkey and the Great Nations
attack united Germany, which she could have
prevented, and prolonged the war by her sales of
weapons. When M. de Lesseps conceived the
brilliant idea of the Suez Canal, which the ruler
of the East Indies ought to have seized with both
hands, the Britons stuck their heads into the sand
like the ostrich in order not to perceive the bless-
ings of the necessity, which was inconvenient just
at the first moment; they jeered and jibed until
the great enterprise was accomplished, and then
endeavoured to exploit for England's advantage
the innovation which had been achieved against
England's will. And after all these cumulative
proofs of the incompetence and narrow-minded
prejudice of British statesmanship, ought we
Germans to admire that State as the magnani-
mous defender of national freedom and of the
European balance of power? It is easy to hear
in the boastful words in which England loves to
veil her Eastern policy the echo of the anxious
cry of old: We are defending the Ganges at the
Bosphorus.
Every London newspaper proves that nobody
there has any suspicion of the enormous alteration
in all Russian conditions. They still speak as in
the days of the Czar Nicholas. The Emperor
Alexander, however, has not only opened new
paths for the social Hfe of his people by profoundly
radical reforms, but he has also given a quite
altered tendency to the Empire's foreign policy.
Only blind hatred can maintain that Russia is
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 9
even to-day oppressing Europe with a crippling dom-
ination. The Petersburg Government has proved
in North America, Italy, and Germany, as well as
in the struggle against Rome, that it knows how to
respect the Hving forces of the century ; after so
many proofs of its shrewdness and love of peace it
can at least expect that we should judge its Oriental
schemes according to the facts, not according to
the sensational stories of EngHsh Russophobes.
Taken all in all, the great Slavonic Power has
been the best ally Germany has ever had, and in
the face of that fact the question becomes urgent
whether it is really impossible for Germans and
Slavs to dwell in peace side by side. If our broad-
minded cosmopolitanism cherishes odious preju-
dices against any nation, it is certainly the Slavonic.
We have often fought against the Romanic
peoples, and sometimes felt in the heat of the fight
a quick outburst of national hatred; but the
near blood-kinship which unites all the peoples
that were affected by the migration of nations,
the common participation in classical education,
and the gratitude for so many gifts brought to us
by the older civilization of the West, always led
again after a brief estrangement to a good under-
standing. Hatred of the Slavs, on the other hand,
is deep in our blood, and it is also heartily recipro-
cated on the other side. For centuries we have
dealt with the nations of the East only as enemies,
as rulers, or as teachers; even to-day we still ex-
hibit to them all the harsh and domineering traits
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? lo Turkey and the Great Nations
of our character. Glad of our older civilization,
we glance beyond the Vistula and the Danube
with feelings such as the Roman had when he gazed
at the right bank of the Rhine, and we do not even
take the trouble to learn the Russian tongue --
which, by the way, is by no means an unimportant
phenomenon, because the educated Russian, by
his knowledge of languages, is gaining almost
exactly the same superiority over us which we
had over the French. To tell the truth, the Slav
seems to us a born slave. As soon as our conver-
sation turns to the interesting nationalities south
of the Danube, a German cannot help uttering
the winged words, "Swineherds and nose-muti-
lators" -- as if our ancestors in the olden times did
not also live with the proboscidians in cordial
intimacy, and carry on wars in which little
humane feeling was shown ! Should such arrogant
prejudices continue? It is not to be imagined
that we should ever feel for the unripe peoples
of the Balkan Peninsula so deep a sympathy as we
once did for the movement towards Italian unity.
But they are after all our Christian brothers;
the combat they are waging is after all only a
scene out of the ancient war between Cross and
Crescent. It surely does not become us, who
have only just shaken foreign domination from our
necks by a bloody fight, to put the question
with arrogant callousness whether an existence
worthy of a man is possible under the yoke of the
foreign domination of the Turk.
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? Turkey and the Great Nations ii
For fifteen hundred years the most beautiful
country in Europe has been in the possession of
two great empires which, although both of them
were quite unintellectual, maintained themselves
solely by the perfect technique of their governance,
by their skill in mastering and utilizing men;
a well-developed monetary economy and system-
atized finances, good soldiers, and a technically
well-schooled officialdom; lastly a policy without
ideas, which nevertheless knew how to inspire
all its subjects with a strenuously servile dis-
position -- those were the means to which the aged
Byzantine Empire owed its thousand years' du-
ration, whilst all around the youthfully vigorous
States of the Germans weakly collapsed. And
the successors of the Byzantines, the Osmans,
have similarly maintained their power solely by
their skill in ruling, not by any moral idea. Supe-
rior to the Western countries through their stand-
ing armies, to the Orientals by the strict order of
succession in the House of Osman, they subjugated
almost the whole of Alexander's dominions to the
Crescent; and nobody can regard without ad-
miration the ruling ability of those powerful first
Sultans, Murad and Mohammed, how they fast-
ened the new yoke so tightly and firmly on the
necks of the Rayahs, who had been trampled down
and unmanned by Byzantine, Venetian, and Geno-
ese governors, that a resurrection from the bottom-
less deep of their slavery seemed for a long time
quite unthinkable to the subject peoples.
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? 12 Turkey and the Great Nations
Their government, like almost all governments
in the Orient, was a theocracy, the Koran the
unchangeable statute-book both in political and
religious life. High above the whole Empire was
enthroned the Sultan, girt with Osman's sword,
the Shadow of God on earth, bound to nothing
but the word of the Prophet. Under him were his
tools, the great officials, who mostly came out of
the ranks of the Christian renegades during the
brilliant period of the Osman State, and the hordes
of the Janissaries, all children of Christians, who
had been robbed from their parents at a tender age
and then inspired by a Spartan education with the
whole ferocity of the Islamic faith. Under them
were the ruling people of True Believers. Lastly
under those were the polyglot herd of Christians,
"pigs with similar bristles, dogs with similar
tails," condemned to drudge and pay taxes, to
purchase their exhausted lives anew every year
by means of the poll-tax, the haraj, to strengthen
ever anew the army of the ruling race by the toll
of their boys -- if sometimes it was not preferred to
put them themselves among the troops of the
Arabs, in which they were then used as cannon-
fodder or were even thrown in heaps into the
trenches of besieged Christian fortresses, as a living
bridge for Allah's storming fighters. Thus were
the Rayahs forced to forge ever closer the fetters
of their slavery with their own hands.
Skill in enslavement had here produced an in-
comparable masterpiece which is only explicable
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 13
by the servility of the subjects of Byzantium, and
by the ancient traditions of Oriental policy; for
since Asia Minor knew of no national States, but
only a powerfully welded medley of national
wrecks, the capacity for ruling by dividing de-
veloped here to a degree of virtuosity almost incom-
prehensible to a Westerner. Whilst Christendom
burnt its heretics, everybody under the Crescent
might live according to his Faith ; and only a short
time ago Lord Shaftesbury quite seriously asserted
amid the applause of the enlightened House of
Lords that Turkey had done more for Christendom
in a decade than Russia in nine centuries! This
much-vaunted tolerance of the Turks also proves
as a fact merely how skilfully the system of en-
slavement was devised; they did not desire the
conversion of the subject races, because the
Mussulman could put his foot on their necks only
if the Rayahs remained unbelieving dogs. Whilst
everywhere in Europe a strict class-distinction kept
the lower orders under, the meanest slave at the
Bosphorus might hope to rise to the highest
offices in the Empire by luck and energy ; therefore
in the seventeenth century the toil-worn peasants
of Central Europe sometimes welcomed the
Prophet's approaching standard with similar
feelings as they did later the armies of the French
Revolution. However, that complete social
equality, which constitutes everywhere the foot-
stool of Oriental despotism, existed actually only
for the ruling race of the Believers. Between
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? 1 4 Turkey and the Great Nations
them and the Rayahs stretched a boundless gulf;
the extremest insolence of the old French aristo-
cratic arrogance is not within even measurable
distance of those feehngs of cold contempt and
bodily disgust which the believing Turk ex-
periences even to-day against the pork-eating
Giaour.
The conqueror found himself in the presence
of a population utterly divided by raving race-
hatred and gloomy religious passions. The Greek
hated the Serb more fiercely than the Turk, and
yet more shocking than the sight of the man
turning his face towards Mecca in prayer was
it for an Orthodox son of the Eastern Church to
behold an altar of the Latins, where the Saviour
hangs on the Cross with His feet nailed one above
the other, instead of side by side. Such a dis-
position among the Rayahs afforded firm ground
for that shrewd system of keeping the races and
creeds apart to which the ruling minority owed
its security. As the government of the ruling
race was itself theocratic, the elders of every
Christian Church were provided with jurisdiction
and powers of police over those of their faith, and
were at the same time obliged to take responsibility
for the taxes of the Rayahs. The Orthodox formed
a Greek subordinate State within the Turkish
Empire under their Patriarch. Their bishops dealt
as they pleased with the popes and congregations,
but seldom disturbed by a wildly energetic pasha ;
they boasted that, compared with their social
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 15
equals in other lands, "You are only parsons, we
are pashas! " That is what English worshippers
of the Turk praise as the incomparable self-
government of the Osmans! The Rayahs* venal
servility next became itself responsible for the
fact that whilst the high clergy fleeced their
flocks thoroughly well, they never became dan-
gerous to the Turkish lords. What a horrible
page of Christian history is covered by the fates
of the Patriarchs of Constantinople ! The dignity
lasted for life, and could be forfeited only for high
treason or on appeal of the Orthodox themselves.
And yet this well-assured office, which might have
been a prop of national independence for the
Greeks, became a useful tool of enslavement for
the Turks. Since time immemorial no Patriarch
has kept his seat longer than three years. The
spirit of simony penetrated the whole Church;
scarcely had a prince of the Church won the votes
of his fellow-believers by bribery, than others
started working against him with the same method,
till he was at last accused before the Porte and
deposed. And the same unworthy game kept
going on for centuries ! To crown all, the big
merchants of the Fanar carried on the monetary
transactions of the Porte, and the commerce of
the Christians was preferred before that of the
Turks because it had to pay higher taxes, just as
the fiscal policy of the landowners in our Middle
Age sometimes patronized Jewish usury. Thus
the shameful name of Rayah became a literal,
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? 1 6 Turkey and the Great Nations
fearful truth. So long as they did not "gnaw at
the collar of subjection," they might settle their
disputes among themselves, just as stupid cattle
are left to themselves; but as soon as they became
engaged in quarrel with a Mussulman they were
made to feel that the word of the Prophet formally
gives the True Believer the right to tread the
Giaour underfoot. The complete absence of rights
on the part of the Rayahs was only made endur-
able to some extent by the fact that each com-
munity and each urban quarter was usually
inhabited solely by fellow-believers, and so dis-
putes between Christians and Moslems were not
too frequent.
The same unparalleled ignorance which ensured
the mastery of the Rayahs by the Moslems, also
inspired their foreign policy. Never, not even
when they watered their horses in the Leitha
and beheld the rich abodes of German culture
at their feet, did any idea of the superiority of
Western civilization enter the Osmans' heads.
The Frank was and is regarded by them as the
paragon of frivolous stupidity ; to make the Prank-
ish bear dance a fool's dance at a rope's end was
and is the finest spice of existence for the worthy
Eff endis of the Seraglio. Yet with what clarity and
assurance did the one-sided narrow-mindedness
of Oriental fanaticism meet the disharmony of
the divided European world! The Mussulman
knew but two kingdoms on earth, the House
of Islam and the House of War; "the whole of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 17
heathendom is only a nation," to conquer which
was the immutable duty of the Moslems. The
Western countries meanwhile became defenceless
against the barbarians through the rich mani-
f oldness of their culture ; the want of unity among
the European Powers, the superabundance of
contradictions which is included in our portion
of the world, were the best allies of the Osmans,
beginning from the day when the Genoese calmly
looked on at the conquest of Byzantium from
the ramparts of Galata, up to the contemporary
Christian heroisms of Benjamin Disraeli. And
again, from the Council of Mantua, when res
orientales were first put among the orders of the
day for European diplomats, down to the war
of dispatches in our own days, the unity of Europe
has ever been nullified by the particular impedi-
ment that whilst, if needful, some understanding
could have been reached about everything else,
it was impossible in the case of the mighty capital,
which signifies more than the whole of the Balkan
Peninsula. It was not feasible to find a way out
with the superficial advice of banishing the Turks
from Europe, for the simple reason that their
ruling stronghold itself half belongs to Asia. The
Bosphorus is the high street of Constantinople;
the Asiatic suburb of Scutari is hardly farther from
Stamboul than the European suburbs of Pera and
Galata. On the Asiatic shore at Anadoli Fanar lie
the ruins of the Temple of Gerokoi, w^here the
Hellenic sailor used once to say good-bye to his
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? 1 8 Turkey and the Great Nations
beloved home before he began his voyage to the
barbarian countries on the Bosphorus. So far
as the history of that region goes, the south-east
coast of Europe and the north-west coast of
Asia have always belonged to the same Greek
civilization. It was and is an enigma how a new
Power could ever arise in Stamboul which should
not at the same time be master of the most valu-
able strip of Asia Minor.
It is astounding with what cleverness the
Osmans in their great period knew how to utilize
this favourable position and those dissensions in
Europe. Although they had only the vaguest
conception of the geographical positions and the
history of the heathen countries, they yet divined,
with the fine sense for power peculiar to Orientals,
where in each case they had to look for their allies.
Correct insight and diplomatic tact, those ancient
privileges of masterful aristocracies, were also a
heritage among the ruling race in the Balkan
Peninsula. As the behever in the Koran may
regard every treaty of peace with the heathen
merely as a revocable armistice, the Porte dealt
with the Western countries with imperturbable
calm. She understood how to expect everything
from time, and waited patiently, with the fatalistic
quietness of the Moslem, until the hour came to
tear up all treaties and to let loose against the
Giaours the still unbroken, fierce natural forces
of the Janissaries and Spahis. Since France first
drew the great Suleiman into the quarrels of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 19
Christendom, the Turks began to perceive that
they were at least welcome to one of the Christian
Powers; and thenceforth the State of the Osmans
has so often and so unctuously been praised by
the wiseacre statesmen of the Western countries
as an indispensable weight in the scales of Euro-
pean balance, that we ought not to be surprised if
to-day all the supports of the Turkish Empire,
the valis, mullahs, and ulemas, the black and the
white eunuchs, the odalisques, and the seraglio
boys, are all penetrated by the glad belief that
Allah's wonderful mercifulness has struck the
stupid Franks' eyes with an incurable blindness.
With good reason in truth has Machiavelli
eulogized the proud beginnings of the Osman
State; because that which represented policy
to the Florentine, namely, skill in governing, in
maintaining and enhancing the power of the State,
was practised here with a rare cleverness.
But
with this skill the Turks' political capacity has
always ended; their Empire, even at its great
period, lacked all moral substance, just like
Machiavelli's ideal State. Might was self-interest ;
the question as to what moral purposes it should
aim at was never put. It was thought a matter
of course that the State should exist for the
benefit of the rulers; and if we inquire what the
ruling skill of that long series of strong statesmen
and generals has brought forth for the well-being
and civilization of mankind, only one answer is
possible : Nothing, simply nothing. When the con-
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? 20 Turkey and the Great Nations
quering Mohammed bestrode the desert palace of
the Comneni, the feeling of the transitoriness of
earthly greatness overcame him, and he uttered
the verse of the Oriental poet :
Before the gates in Emperors* castles
The spider, as chamberlain, is weaving curtains,
And in Afrasiab's columned halls
Echoes the cry of the nesting owl.
He did not imagine he was predicting the fate
of his own Empire. Like a huge avalanche,
Turkish despotism fell upon those blessed lands
which once witnessed the classic age of Christian
Church history. The interior of the Peninsula is
to-day as Httle known as the deserts of Australia ;
it was not till Diebitsch's expedition to Adrianople
that science gained some sort of notion of the
formation of Balkan mountain ranges. The rise
of the Turkish power compelled the Western
countries to brace themselves to vigorous action.
As the Osman occupied the flower of the com-
mercial centres in the Mediterranean, the Euro-
pean sought the sea route to India. In the fight
with the Asiatics arose the new Austria, which dis-
covered a firm bond of unity for its polyglot
nations in the fighting renown they had won
together. In so far even the Osman Empire has
borne witness to the truth that every great his-
torical phenomenon leaves some positive result
in the course of human development. But where
are the traces of the civilizing work of the
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 21
Turks themselves? What remained in Hungary
after the long one hundred and fifty years
during which the Pashas dwelt on the Koenigs-
burg at Buda? A few crude mutilations of
beautiful Christian churches and the warm baths
of Ofen. What now reminds one of the domina-
tion of the Crescent in Greece? Hardly any-
thing but the ruins of destroyed Christian
habitations. The ruination of the system of gov-
ernment did not consist in the brutal outrages of
individual magnates -- because the impaling and
drowning in sacks, the violating and pillaging, and
similar amusements customary to the country, did
not, according to Oriental standard, happen too
frequently -- but in that indescribable intellectual
laziness, in that profound slumber of the soul,
which was always peculiar to the Osmans even in
the days of their warlike greatness, and caused
them to appear as barbarians even in the eyes of
the Arabs. Just as the Turk truly loves only
three vocations, the career of a soldier, an official,
or a priest, his State has never shown any under-
standing of art or science or commerce. His
political economy, if the expression be allowed,
simply pursued the purpose of assuring comfortable
provision for the ruling race ; he therefore lightened
the taxes on imports and increased those on
exports -- just as in the Spain of Philip H, which
exhibits altogether several striking similarities to
the State of the Crescent.
And that idiotic system, which destroyed Spain's
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? 22 Turkey and the Great Nations
Empire in a few decades, has been burdening the
Balkan lands for nearly five hundred years ! The
Osmans, even in the glory of their victories and
in the superabundance of pillaged wealth, were
an Asiatic cavalry horde which never became
at home on the soil of Western civilization, and
never got beyond the standpoint of nomadic
warriors. A national migration which fell asleep
encamped over the Christian peoples of the
south-east. The Turkish Empire always re-
mained a mighty foreign despotism to the Rayahs.
The venal Fanariots might fawn for the favours
of the Osmanli, and the petty chieftains of the
Bosniaks, abjuring their fathers' faith, might join
the ruling nation's plundering campaign; but the
masses of the Southern Slavs have for five hundred
years been bewailing, in innumerable songs and
tales, the battle on the field of the Amsel as the
fatal day for the ancient freedom; the masses of
the Greeks have never ceased imploring God's
vengeance for that day of shame when the con-
queror rode into the Hagia Sophia and his horse's
hoofs violated the most beautiful God's house in
Eastern Christendom. Likewise, the conscience of
the European world has never recognized the ex-
istence of the Turkish realm as a morally justified
necessity. The conscience of nations knows of no
superannuation of what is wrong. War and con-
quest are only means towards the right ; they can
only prove that the victor possesses the mcral
superiority whereon the right to rule is based, but
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 23
they alone cannot base a right to rule on physical
domination. As long as the victor has not proved
that his power is countenanced by the moral
forces of history, his success remains an injustice
which may be expiated, an actuality which may
be abolished by other actualities. Dense weeds
have long been growing over the countless deeds of
violence which were needful for the foundation of
the governmental unity of all Europe's great
nations. The wrong done during the agitations
for unity among the Germans and Italians is nowa-
days, after but a few years, hardly felt, because
the nations' sense of right says to itself that those
revolutions only buried the dead and exalted the
living. But those wounds which a mentally sterile
Asiatic horde inflicted on Christian civilization still
bleed after five hundred years as if the blows had
fallen yesterday. And they will never scar over
so long as Europe still possesses free and cour-
ageous men who, unmoved by Russophobia and
English cant, dare to call the historic unrighteous-
ness by its true name; and however much self-
complacent narrow-heartedness may mock, it has
finally ever been idealism which has divined the
tendency of history.
But, however firmly and securely all the institu-
tions of the old Turkish Empire fitted together,
the State lacked what has been lacking in all theo-
cracies, capability of development. Its might
rested on the Osmans' governing skill and the
Rayahs' servility. If one of those two supports
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? 24 Turkey and the Great Nations
began to waver, inevitable decay would threaten
the State, and the natural progress of European
culture soon threaten both at the same time. A
powerful movement of economic and intellectual
life, in which Turkey took no part, gradually
strengthened the military and political forces of
the neighbouring Christian States to such a degree
that the balance of power was entirely displaced.
The Crescent lost the rich provinces on the other
side of the Danube by humiliating defeats, whilst
the Western countries regained full consciousness
of their superiority. The Osman Empire dropped
to a second-rate Power, and the name of Turk,
instead of being a bogey for children, became their
butt. The age of the Revolution next woke up
even the Rayah nations. Since then the decline
of the ruling people has been slowly and steadily
accomplishing itself, like the operation of na-
tural laws, whilst the national masses have con-
tinually grown in development. The strengthening
self -consciousness, and the increasing well-being
of the Rayahs, daily widen the gulf between the
rulers and subjects, and make reconciliation and
assimilation quite unthinkable. The Osmanli
are decaying, body and soul. Their generative
strength is being extinguished in the sodomy and
voluptuousness of the harem. Of the great
features of the national character almost nothing
remains but pride, fatalistic confidence, and inca-
pacity for any sympathy ; only now and then do the
bravery and the clever ruling sense of better days
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 25
break through the thick veil of measureless idleness
which has pitched its camp on the souls of the
satiated masters.
Orderliness and resolute manliness likewise
vanished with the might of the Empire; the wild
greed for plunder, which under the great Sultans of
old dared to satisfy itself only on the Rayahs, has
now for a long time done so shamelessly on the
State itself: "The Padishah's treasure is a sea,
and he who does not draw from it is a pig. " The
Rayahs, on the other hand, are indebted to Christen-
dom for the still tolerable purity of their domestic
life, and therewith their reproductiveness, which is
generally decisive in such racial struggles. What
really lives and works in Turkey is Christian.
Since the peace of Kutchuk-Kainarji the Greeks
have almost monopolized the traffic of the ^gean
Sea ; their wealth is growing, not only in the har-
bours of their small kingdom, in Patras, and at
Syra, but they are also multiplying and flour-
ishing in the coastal towns of Asia Minor, in
Smyrna, Aivalu, and Pergamos, whilst the Turks
are growing poorer and vanishing. It is true
the Rumanian and the Southern Slav are many
miles from being able to compete with the
activity of the exceedingly astute Greek, but
they also are far more energetic than the Turk.
The Osmans themselves admit that "by Allah's
will the Giaours become rich, and we poor"; the
gloomy prediction of the ultimate triumph of the
Cross lives in their nation, and many a distinguished
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? 26 Turkey and the Great Nations
Turk prudently orders his grave on safe Asiatic
soil. Sooner or later, in this instance as in that of
Poland's aristocratic Republic, the historical law
shall be fulfilled, which enjoins on our toiling
century that there is no longer a place in Europe
for a race of horsemen and consumers of income.
Let us not be led astray by the darling assurance
of English tourists that the Turk is nevertheless
the only gentleman among the inhabitants of the
Peninsula. That he certainly is. He who would
spend a pleasant hour with coffee and chibouk, will
undoubtedly find himself more comfortable in the
society of the dignified, distinguished, clean, and
honourable Turks than among the greedy vulture-
faces of the Rayahs. The truth is, the vices
of masters are different from those of servants;
dirt, servility, and thorough-going mendacity flour-
ish only in a state of slavery. But can supe-
riority in the social decencies be decisive in great
historical struggles? The slave-lords of Virginia
and Carolina assuredly displayed in casual inter-
course pleasanter social manners than the hard-
faced farmers and business men of the North,
or even than the negroes. And yet the German
people will always gladly remember that we did
not, like the English, let ourselves be so seduced by
a superficial preference for the gentlemen of the
South as to defend an unworthy cause, but with
moral earnestness we acknowledged the better
right of the North. In like manner, the Turks'
quiet dignity should not deceive us as to the fact
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 27
that the industry of the Greeks and the reproduc-
tiveness of the Slavs are leaving effete Osmandom
far behind in every respect. The Rayahs' Ortho-
dox faith is certainly the immaturest of all forms
of Christianity. He who judges merely by fleeting
impressions of travel will probably assign a higher
place to the Mohammedans' strict monotheism
than to the picture-worship of many a crude
Rayah tribe, which regard their crucifix almost in
the same way as the negroes their fetiches; and if
the tourist has also witnessed in the grave-church
at Jerusalem the way in which the Turkish cavasses
enforce peace with their sticks between the brawl-
ing, raging adherents of the religion of love, he
thinks himself justified in condemning the whole
of Oriental Christendom. He who, on the other
hand, surveys the concatenation of centuries,
cannot but admit that even there in the East, as
everywhere else, Christian civilization disposes of
an endless power of rejuvenation and self -renewal,
whilst all the peoples of Islam infallibly reach a
point at last at which the word of the Koran is ful-
filled. "Change is innovation, innovation is the
path to hell. " Even the most intellectually gifted
of all the Mohammedan nations, which founded the
glorious State of the Ommiads and created the
wonderful edifices of Granada and Cordova,
suddenly stood still at a certain point in its path
as if bewitched ; and this congelation of Islam gave
the Spanish Christians the power and the right to
conquer the Ommiads, although at the time of
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? 28 Turkey and the Great Nations
the Cid they were even more inferior to the Moors
than the Rayahs are to-day to the Osmans.
The Turks, for their part, have already long gone
past the zenith of the culture attainable by their
capacities ; in the case of the Greeks, however, and
even of the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Rumanians,
only a biassed mind can dispute that they are no
longer to-day what they were a century ago ; their
strength, after a long, death-like slumber, is again
unmistakably, if slowly, resurrecting. The in-
crease among the Franks at the Bosphorus is also
becoming a peril to the Osman Empire. Under
the protection of their Ambassadors they form
States within the State; besides how could it be
possible to subject Europeans to Turkish juris-
diction? Their privileged position shatters re-
spect for the authorities, even as their practically
almost complete freedom from taxation damages
the State revenue; and compared with the seven-
teen Embassies which attack the " Sick Man " with
advice, threats, intrigues of every kind, the Sul-
tan appears to his own subjects almost like an
irresponsible person whom Europe has put
under observation.
With their strength, likewise grew the Rayahs'
self-consciousness, which often seems wearisome
to us Germans, and still oftener absurd, because
national pride is generally wont to be the more
bragging and boastful in inverse ratio to a nation's
might and deeds. But we must not on that
account misunderstand either the necessity of
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? Turkey and the Great Nations 29
this persistent national agitation, or its connection
with the decisive forces of the century. Was it not
altogether natural that the reawakening impulse
towards culture should again hold the mother
language in honour, the basis of all culture-- that
Bulgaria found her Karadzic, Greece her Rhigas
and the long series of her national apostles; that
the Serbs learnt to value their fine old national
poetry, and that the great actions of their fathers,
real and imaginary, were again eulogized every-
where? You may believe as much as you please of
Fallmerayer's brilliant hypotheses, which, in point
of fact, only partially survive a strict scientific
investigation, but the Neo-Greeks have absorbed
the Slav and Skypetarian elements, which their
nationality embraces, and filled them with Greek
culture; a strong national self -consciousness has
grown up in them as the result of hard struggles
and the memories of an ancient past ; they possess
living traditions, a civilized tongue, and a consider-
able literature; in short, they are a small nation
still extremely immature, but of indestructibly
developed individuality. A paltry cunning it is,
worthy of the demagogic judges of the late-
lamented Bundestag, that would try to explain this
persistent change in the popular life simply as
arising from the machinations of Russian agents !
There certainly was, and is, no lack of such agents,
although Liberal pessimists have garbled astound-
ing stories even on that point. Why, how long
is it since Bakunin was considered by the whole
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? 30 Turkey and the Great Nations
Liberal world to be a Russian spy; and who will
nowadays defend that idiotic supposition? The
Russians' despotic methods of government and
energetic patriotism brought it about that in
former years almost every educated Russian
communicated of his own free will or by command
to the Government, the observations he had
gathered together during his travels in Europe;
that old custom has assuredly not become quite
obsolete to-day. That Pan-Slavist fanatics carry
on their intrigues among all the South- Slav popu-
lations is beyond doubt; and if we consider the
strange personality of Mr. Wesselitzky Bogidar-
ovic, who first appeared as a Russian secret agent,
and then as a Bosnian leader of rebels, the question
forces itself even upon childlike temperaments,
whether the connections of such people do not
extend to very high circles in Petersburg. Only
do not let any one imagine that a long-lasting
national agitation could be kept going by these
means. If the Russians in Petersburg and Mos-
cow build a few Bulgarian schools for their kins-
men and Orthodox Believers, where is the wrong
in it? And would those schools flourish and have
influence if self-consciousness and a tendency to
education had not long been awakened in the
Bulgarian nation?
Perhaps there was yet another way whereby the
domination of the ruling people could have been
maintained amid the growing strength of the Ra-
yahs. The Empire might perhaps have kept alive,
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:02 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/loc. ark:/13960/t14m9qp6g Public Domain in the United States / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us
? Turkey and the Great Nations 31
if it further developed, according to the altered
circumstances, the well-tried, shrewd system of
separating the nations and churches, extended the
privileges of individual peoples and creeds, and
carefully protected the Christians from the inter-
ference of Mohammedan officials by a well-assured
provincial independence. This way was full of
danger; it might easily have led to the formation
of semi-sovereign tributary states. In order to
adopt it the Porte must needs have possessed
an unusual measure of self-knowledge and self-
denial. Meanwhile it was the only possible one,
and it was therefore always recommended by
Russia, the best judge of Turkish conditions; be-
cause the old truth, that the might of empires is
maintained by the same methods as created them,
is even more true of unchangeable theocracies
than of other states. But as the Porte cherished
a well-grounded suspicion of Russian advice,
it at last, after long inactivity, chose the method
which was directly opposed to the views of Peters-
burg. Owing to the rising influence of the Western
Powers there began, with Mahmud II, the aston-
ishing attempt to alter Turkey according to the
pattern of the unified Western States. Sultan
Mahmud created an army on the European model,
Rashid Pasha the mechanism of a uniformly
centralized government, the Hatti-Shereef of
Gulhane and Abdul -Mejid's Hat-Humayum
promised equality of justice to all subjects of the
Great Lord, Fuad Pasha and Ali Pasha introduced
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:02 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/loc. ark:/13960/t14m9qp6g Public Domain in the United States / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-us
? 32 Turkey and the Great Nations
the Neo-Napoleonic phrase into the blessed Turk-
ish Empire and announced that the time for
grandes agglomerations nationales had also arrived
for the East, that a unified Ottoman nation must
be created. Lastly, the enlightened Neo-Turk-
dom has likewise drunk to-day of the Constitu-
tional poison -- which acts upon such peoples like
brandy on the Redskins -- and demands a national
Parliamentary Council side by side with the
Sultan.
There is, unfortunately, merely a trifle lacking
for such a national council: viz. , a nation. The
Greeks and Slavs are not Turks; they can not
and will not be Turks; and the Turks can never
seriously allow them to be so. These so-called
reform-politics, which have now been trying for
several decades to abolish the racial hatreds and
religious fanaticisms of the Eastern world by a few
crumbs fallen from the table of Parisian constitu-
tion-makers, are nothing but a gigantic falsehood ;
and the patronage bestowed now by France, now
by England, on Turkish enlightenment, simply
shows that these Western Powers, in their self-com-
placent ignorance, have become quite incapa-
ble of understanding a foreign population. In
order to foresee the fate of the Neo-Turkish
reforms only a little honesty is needed, certainly
not any seer's gift ; for the same problem which is
to-day arising on the Bosphorus occupied the
astute minds of the whole world once before for
many years, when well-meaning diplomats hoped
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-08-05 01:02 GMT / http://hdl.
