2.

Now, first, I shall briefly mention the Turcomans, and dismiss them, because, when they have once illustrated the original state of their race, they have no place in this sketch. I have said, then, that the ancient Turco-Tartar empire, to which the Romans sent their embassy in the sixth century, extended to the Caspian and towards the Indus. It was in the beginning of the next century that the Romans, that is, the Greco-Romans of Constantinople, found them in the former of these neighbourhoods; and they made the same use of them in the defence of their territory, to which they had put the Goths before the overthrow of the Western Empire. It was a most eventful era at which they addressed themselves to these Turks of the Caspian. It was almost the very year of the Hegira, which marks the rise of the Mahometan imposture and rule. As yet, however, the Persians were in power, and formidable enemies to the Romans, and at this very time in possession of the Holy Cross, which Chosroes, their powerful king, had carried away from Jerusalem twelve years before. But the successful Emperor Heraclius was already in the full tide of those brilliant victories, which in the course of a few years recovered it; and, to recall him from their own soil, the Persians had allied themselves with the barbarous tribes of Europe, (the Russians, Sclavonians, Bulgarians, and others,) which, then as now, were pressing down close upon Constantinople from the north. This alliance suggested to Heraclius the counterstroke of allying himself with the Turkish freebooters, who in like manner, as stationed above the Caspian, were impending over Persia. Accordingly the horde of Chozars, as this Turkish tribe was called, at the Emperor's invitation, transported their tents from the plains of the Volga through the defiles of the Caucasus into Georgia. Heraclius showed them extraordinary attention; he put his own diadem on the head of the barbarian prince, and distributed gold, jewels, and silk to his officers; and, on the other hand, he obtained from them an immediate succour of 40,000 horse, and the promise of an irruption of their brethren into Persia from the far East, from the quarter of the Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of the passages by which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South. Such were the allies, with which Heraclius succeeded in utterly overthrowing and breaking up the Persian power; and thus, strange to say, the greatest of all the enemies of the Church among the nations of the earth, the Turk, began his career in Christian history by cooeperating with a Christian Emperor in the recovery of the Holy Cross, of which a pagan, the ally of Russia, had got possession. The religious aspect, however, of this first era of their history, seems to have passed away without improvement; what they gained was a temporal advantage, a settlement in Georgia and its neighbourhood, which they have held from that day to this.

This horde of Turks, the Chozars, was nomad and pagan; it consisted of mounted shepherds, surrounded with their flocks, living in tents and waggons. In the course of the following centuries, under the shadow of their more civilized brethren, other similar hordes were introduced, nomad and pagan still; they might indeed happen sometimes to pass down from the east of the Caspian as well as from the west, hastening to the south straight from Turkistan along the coast of the Aral;—either road would lead them down to the position which the Chozars were the first to occupy in Georgia and Armenia,—but still there would be but one step in their journey between their old native sheep-walk and horse-path and the fair region into which they came. It was a sudden Tartar descent, accompanied with no national change of habits, and promising no permanent stability. Nor would they have remained there, I suppose, as they did remain, were it not that they have been protected, as they were originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have made use of them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to this day, the successors of the Chozars, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, even as far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its maritime cities and ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand years ago, except that they have taken up the loose profession of Mahometanism, and have given up some of the extreme peculiarities of their Tartar state, such as their attachment to horse-flesh and mares' milk. These are the Turcomans.

3.

The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concerned, he tells us that[17] "they are tall and robust, with square flat faces, as well as the western; only they are more swarthy, and have a greater resemblance to the Tartars. Some of them have betaken themselves to husbandry. They are all Mohammedans; they are very turbulent, very brave, and good horsemen." And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that of firearms.

This account is drawn up from writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Precisely the same report of their habits is made by Dr. Chandler in his travels in Asia Minor in the middle of the last century; he fell in with them in his journey between Smyrna and Ephesus. "We were told here," he says, "that the road farther on was beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the Nomades Scythae: or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing their stations, and overspreading without control the vast neglected pastures of this desert empire.... We set out, and ... soon after came to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and herds and horses and poultry feeding round them."[18]

I may seem to be making unnecessary extracts, but I have two reasons for multiplying them; in order, first, to show the identity in character of the various tribes of the Tartar and the Turkish stock, and next, in order to impress upon your imagination what that character is; for it is not easy to admit into the mind the very idea of a people of this kind, dwelling too, and that for ages, in some of the most celebrated and beautiful regions of the world, such as Syria and Asia Minor. With this view I will read what Volney says of them, as he found them in Syria towards the close of the last century. "The Turkmans," he says,[19] "are of the number of those Tartar hordes, who, in the great revolutions of the Empire of the Caliphs, emigrated from the eastward of the Caspian Sea, and spread themselves over the vast plains of Armenia and Asia Minor. Their language is the same as that of the Turks, and their mode of life nearly resembles that of the Bedouin Arabs. Like them, they are shepherds, and consequently obliged to travel over immense tracts of land to procure subsistence for their numerous herds.... Their whole occupation consists in smoking and looking after their flocks. Perpetually on horseback, with their lances on their shoulders, their crooked sabres by their sides, and their pistols in their belts, they are expert horsemen and indefatigable soldiers.... A great number of these tribes pass in the summer into Armenia and Caramania, where they find grass in great abundance, and return to their former quarters in the winter. The Turkmans are reputed to be Moslem ... but they trouble themselves little about religion."

While I was collecting these passages, a notice of these tribes appeared in the columns of the Times newspaper, sent home by its Constantinople correspondent, apropos of the present concentration of troops in that capital in expectation of a Russian war. His Statement enables us to carry down our specimens of the Tartar type of the Turkish race to the present day "From the coast of the Black Sea," he writes home, "to the Taurus chain of mountains, a great part of the population is nomad, and besides the Turks or Osmanlis," that is, the Ottoman or Imperial Turks, "consists of two distinct races;—the Turcomans, who possessed themselves of the land before the advent of the Osmanlis, and who wander with their black tents up to the shores of the Bosphorus; and the Curds." With the Curds we are not here concerned. He proceeds: "The Turcomans, who are spread over the whole of Asia Minor, are a most warlike people. Clans, numbering many thousand, acknowledge the Sultan as the representative of the Caliphs and the Sovereign Lord of Islam, from whom all the Frank kings receive their crowns; but they are practically independent of him, and pay no taxes but to their own chiefs. In the neighbourhood of Caesarea, Kusan Oghlou, a Turcoman chief, numbers 20,000 armed horsemen, rules despotically over a large district, and has often successfully resisted the Sultan's arms. These people lead a nomad life, are always engaged in petty warfare, are well mounted, and armed with pistol, scimitar, spear, or gun, and would always be useful as irregular troops."

4.

And now I have said enough, and more than enough, of the original state of the Turkish race, as exhibited in the Chozars and Turcomans:—it is time to pursue the history of that more important portion of it with which we are properly engaged, which received some sort of education, and has proved itself capable of social and political union. I observed just now, that that education was very different in its mode and circumstances from that which has been the lot of the nations with which we are best acquainted. Other nations have been civilized in their own homes, and, by their social progress, have immortalized a country as well as a race. They have been educated by their conquests, or by subjugation, or by the intercourse with foreigners which commerce or colonization has opened; but in every case they have been true to their fatherland, and are children of the soil. The Greeks sent out their colonies to Asia Minor and Italy, and those colonies reacted upon the mother country. Magna Graecia and Ionia showed their mother country the way to her intellectual supremacy. The Romans spread gradually from one central city, and when their conquests reached as far as Greece, "the captive," in the poet's words, "captivated her wild conqueror, and introduced arts into unmannered Latium."[20] England was converted by the Roman See and conquered by the Normans, and was gradually civilized by the joint influences of religion and of chivalry. Religion indeed, though a depraved religion, has had something to do, as we shall see, with the civilization of the Turks; but the circumstances have been altogether different from those which we trace in the history of England, Rome, or Greece. The Turks present the spectacle of a race poured out, as it were, upon a foreign material, interpenetrating all its parts, yet preserving its individuality, and at length making its way through it, and reappearing, in substance the same as before, but charged with the qualities of the material through which it has been passed, and modified by them. They have been invaded by no conqueror, they have brought no captive arts or literature home, they have undergone no conversion in mass, they have been taught by no commerce, by no international relationship; but they have in the course of centuries slowly soaked or trickled, if I may use the words, through the Saracenic populations with which they came in contact, and after being nationally lost to the world, as far as history goes, for long periods and through different countries, eventually they have come to the face of day with that degree of civilization which they at present possess, and at length have usurped a place within the limits of the great European family. And this is why the path southwards to the east of the Aral was, in matter of fact, the path of civilization, and that by the Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia,—with many fortunes, under many masters, for many hundred years, before they came round to the region to which their Turcoman brethren attained so easily, but with so little eventual advantage. My meaning will be clearer, as I proceed.

5.

1. First of all, we may say that the very region into which they came, tended to their civilization. Of course the peculiarities of soil, climate, and country are not by themselves sufficient for a social change, else the Turcomans would have the best right to civilization; yet, when other influences are present too, climate and country are far from being unimportant. You may recollect that I have spoken more than once of the separation of a portion of the Huns from the main body, when they were emigrating from Tartary into Europe, in the time of the Goths.[21] These turned off sharp to the South immediately on descending the high table-land; and, crossing the Jaxartes, found themselves in a fertile and attractive country, between the Aral and their old country, where they settled. It is a peculiarity of Asia that its regions are either very hot or very cold. It has the highest mountains in the world, bleak table-lands, vast spaces of burning desert, tracts stretched out beneath the tropical sun. Siberia goes for a proverb for cold: India is a proverb for heat. It is not adequately supplied with rivers, and it has little of inland sea. In these respects it stands in singular contrast with Europe. If then the tribes which inhabit a cold country have, generally speaking, more energy than those which are relaxed by the heat, it follows that you will have in Asia two descriptions of people brought together in extreme, sometimes in sudden, contrariety with each other, the strong and the weak. Here then, as some philosophers have argued,[22] you have the secret of the despotisms and the vast empires of which Asia has been the seat; for it always possesses those who are naturally fitted to be tyrants, and those also whose nature it is to tremble and obey. But we may take another, perhaps a broader, view of the phenomenon. The sacred writer says: "Give me neither riches nor beggary:" and, as the extremes of abundance and of want are prejudicial to our moral well-being, so they seem to be prejudicial to our intellectual nature also. Mental cultivation is best carried on in temperate regions. In the north men are commonly too cold, in the south too hot, to think, read, write, and act. Science, literature, and art refuse to germinate in the frost, and are burnt up by the sun.

Now it so happened that the region in which this party of Huns settled themselves was one of the fairest and most fruitful in Asia. It is bounded by deserts, it is in parts encroached on by deserts; but viewed in its length and breadth, in its produce and its position, it seems a country equal, or superior, to any which that vast continent, as at present known, can show. Its lower portion is the extensive territory of Khorasan, the ancient Bactriana; going northwards across the Oxus, we come into a spacious tract, stretching to the Aral and to the Jaxartes, and measuring a square of 600 miles. It was called in ancient times Sogdiana; in the history of the middle ages Transoxiana, or "beyond the Oxus;" by the Eastern writers Maver-ul-nere, or Mawer-al-nahar, which is said to have the same meaning; and it is now known by the name Bukharia. To these may be added a third province, at the bottom of the Aral, between the mouth of the Oxus and the Caspian, called Kharasm. These, then, were the regions in which the Huns in question took up their abode.

The two large countries I first mentioned are celebrated in all ages for those characteristics which render a spot desirable for human habitation. As to Sogdiana, or Maver-ul-nere, the region with which we are specially concerned, the Orientals, especially the Persians, of the medieval period do not know how to express in fit terms their admiration of its climate and soil. They do not scruple to call it the Paradise of Asia. "It may be considered," says a modern writer,[23] "as almost the only example of the finest temperate climate occurring in that continent, which presents generally an abrupt transition from burning tropical heat to the extreme cold of the north." According to an Arabian author, there are just three spots in the globe which surpass all the rest in beauty and fertility; one of them is near Damascus, another seems to be the valley of a river on the Persian Gulf, and the third is the plain of Sogdiana. Another writer says: "I have cast my eyes around Bokhara, and never have I seen a verdure more fresh or of wider extent. The green carpet mingles in the horizon with the azure of the sky."[24] Abulfeda in like manner calls it "the most delightful of all places God has created." Some recent writer, I think, speaks in disparagement of it.[25] And I can quite understand, that the deserts which must be passed to reach it from the south or the north may betray the weary traveller into an exaggerated praise, which is the expression both of his recruited spirits and of his gratitude. But all things are good only by comparison; and I do not see why an Asiatic, having experience of the sands which elsewhere overspread the face of his continent, should for that reason be ill qualified to pronounce that Sogdiana affords a contrast to them. Moreover, we have the experience of other lands, as Asia Minor, which have presented a very different aspect in different ages. A river overflows and turns a fruitful plain into a marsh; or it fails, and turns it into a sandy desert. Sogdiana is watered by a number of great rivers, which make their way across it from the high land on its east to the Aral or Caspian. Now we read in history of several instances of changes, accidental or artificial, in the direction or the supply of these great water-courses. I think I have read somewhere, but cannot recover my authority, of some emigration of the inhabitants of those countries, caused by a failure of the stream on which they depended. And we know for certain that the Oxus has been changed in its course, accidentally or artificially, more than once. Disputes have arisen before now between the Russian Government and the Tartars, on the subject of one of these diversions of the bed of a river.[26] One province of Khorasan, which once was very fertile, is in consequence now a desert It may be questioned, too, whether the sands of the adjacent deserts, which are subject to violent agitation from the action of the wind, may not have encroached upon Sogdiana. Nor should it be overlooked that this rich country has been subjected to the same calamities which have been the desolation of Asia Minor; for, as the Turcomans have devastated the latter, so, as I have already had occasion to mention, Zingis swept round the sea of Aral, and destroyed the fruits of a long civilization.

Even after the ravages of that conqueror, however, Timour and the Emperor Baber, who had a right to judge of the comparative excellence of the countries of the East, bear witness to the beauty of Sogdiana. Timour, who had fixed his imperial seat in Samarcand, boasted he had a garden 120 miles in extent. Baber expatiates on the grain and fruit and game of its northern parts; of the tulips, violets, and roses of another portion of it; of the streams and gardens of another. Its plains are said by travellers to abound in wood, its rivers in fish, its valleys in fruit-trees, in wheat and barley, and in cotton.[27] The quince, pomegranate, fig, apricot, and almond all flourish in it. Its melons are the finest in the world. Mulberries abound, and provide for a considerable manufacture of silk. No wine, says Baber, is equal to the wine of Bokhara. Its atmosphere is so clear and serene, that the stars are visible even to the verge of the horizon. A recent Russian traveller says he came to a country so smiling, well cultivated, and thickly peopled, with fields, canals, avenues of trees, villages, and gardens, that he thought himself in an enchanted country. He speaks in raptures of its melons, pomegranates, and grapes.[28] Its breed of horses is celebrated; so much so that a late British traveller[29] visited the country with the special object of substituting it for the Arab in our Indian armies. Its mountains abound in useful and precious produce. Coal is found there; gold is collected from its rivers; silver and iron are yielded by its hills; we hear too of its mines of turquoise, and of its cliffs of lapis lazuli,[30] and its mines of rubies, which to this day are the object of the traveller's curiosity.[31] I might extend my remarks to the country south of the Oxus and of its mountain range, the modern Affghanistan. Though Cabul is 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, it abounds in pomegranates, mulberries, apples, and fruit of every kind. Grapes are so plentiful, that for three months of the year they are given to the cattle.

6.

This region, favoured in soil and climate, is favoured also in position. Lying at the mouth of the two great roads of emigration from the far East, the valleys of the Jaxartes and the Oxus, it is the natural mart between High Asia and Europe, receiving the merchandize of East and North, and transporting it by its rivers, by the Caspian, the Kur, and the Phasis, to the Black Sea. Thus it received in former days the silk of China, the musk of Thibet, and the furs of Siberia, and shipped them for the cities of the Roman Empire. To Samarcand, its metropolis, we owe the art of transforming linen into paper, which the Sogdian merchants are said to have gained from China, and thence diffused by means of their own manufacturers over the western world. A people so circumstanced could not be without civilization; but that civilization was of a much earlier date. It must not be forgotten that the celebrated sage, Zoroaster, before the times of history, was a native, and, as some say, king of Bactriana. Cyrus had established a city in the same region, which he called after his name. Alexander conquered both Bactriana and Sogdiana, and planted Grecian cities there. There is a long line of Greco-Bactrian kings; and their coins and paterae have been brought to light within the last few years. Alexander's name is still famous in the country; not only does Marco Polo in the middle ages speak of his descendants as still found there, but even within the last fifteen years Sir Alexander Burns found a man professing that descent in the valley of the Oxus, and Lieutenant Wood another in the same neighbourhood.

Nor was Greek occupation the only source of the civilization of Sogdiana. Centuries rolled on, and at length the Saracens renewed, on their own peculiar basis, the mental cultivation which Sogdiana had received from Alexander. The cities of Bokhara and Samarcand have been famous for science and literature. Bokhara was long celebrated as the most eminent seat of Mahometan learning in central Asia; its colleges were, and are, numerous, accommodating from 60 to 600 students each. One of them gained the notice and the pecuniary aid of the Russian Empress Catharine.[32] Samarcand rivals Bokhara in fame; its university even in the last century was frequented by Mahometan youth from foreign countries. There were more than 300 colleges for students, and there was an observatory, celebrated in the middle ages, the ruins of which remain. Here lies the body of Timour, under a lofty dome, the sides of which are enriched with agate. "Since the time of the Holy Prophet," that is, Mahomet, says the Emperor Baber, "no country has produced so many Imaums and eminent divines as Mawar-al-nahar," that is, Sogdiana. It was celebrated for its populousness. At one time it boasted of being able to send out 300,000 foot, and as many horse, without missing them. Bridges and caravansaries abounded; the latter, in the single province attached to its capital, amounted to 2,000. In Bactriana, the very ruins of Balkh extend for a circuit of 20 miles, and Sir A. Burns wound through three miles of them continuously.

Such is the country, seated at present between the British and the Russian Empires, and such as regards its previous and later state, which the savage Huns, in their emigration from Tartary, had necessarily encountered; and it cannot surprise us that one of their many tribes had been persuaded to settle there, instead of seeking their fortunes farther west. The effect upon these settlers in course of time was marvellous. Though it was not of course the mere climate of Sogdiana that changed them, still we cannot undervalue the influence which is necessarily exerted on the mind by the idea of property, when once recognised and accepted, by the desire of possession and by the love of home, and by the sentiment of patriotism which arises in the mind, especially with the occupation of a rich and beautiful country. Moreover, they became the guests or masters of a people, who, however rude, at least had far higher claims to be called civilized than they themselves, and possessed among them the remains of a more civilized era. They found a race, too, not Tartar, more capable of civilization, more gifted with intellect, and more comely in person. Settling down among the inhabitants, and intermarrying with them, in the course of generations their Tartar characteristics were sensibly softened. For a thousand years this restless people remained there, as if chained to the soil. They still had the staple of barbarism in them, but so polished were they for children of a Tartar stock, that they are called in history the White Huns of Sogdiana. They took to commerce, they took to literature; and when, at the end of a few centuries, the Turks, as I have already described, spread abroad from the iron works and forges of Mount Altai to Kamtchatka, the Volga, and the Indus, and overran these White Huns in the course of their victories, they could find no parties more fitted than them to act as their diplomatists and correspondents in their negotiations with the Romans.

Such was the influence of Sogdiana on the Huns; is it wonderful that it exerted some influence on the Turks, when they in turn got possession of it? History justifies the anticipation; as the Huns of the second or third centuries settled around the Aral, so the Turks in the course of the sixth or seventh centuries overran them, and descended down to the modern Affghanistan and the Indus; and as the fair region and its inhabitants, which they crossed and occupied, had begun at the former era the civilization of the first race of Tartars, so did it at the latter era begin the education of the second.

7.

2. But a more direct and effective instrument of social education was accorded to the Turks on their occupation of Sogdiana. You may recollect I spoke of their first empire as lasting for only 200 years,[33] about 90 of which measures the period of that occupation. Their power then came to an end; what was the consequence of their fall? were they driven out of Sogdiana again? were they massacred? did they take refuge in the mountains or deserts? were they reduced to slavery? Thus we are introduced to a famous passage of history: the case was as follows:—At the very date at which Heraclius called the Turcomans into Georgia, at the very date when their Eastern brethren crossed the northern border of Sogdiana, an event of most momentous import had occurred in the South. A new religion had arisen in Arabia. The impostor Mahomet, announcing himself the Prophet of God, was writing the pages of that book, and moulding the faith of that people, which was to subdue half the known world. The Turks passed the Jaxartes southward in A.D. 626; just four years before Mahomet had assumed the royal dignity, and just six years after, on his death, his followers began the conquest of the Persian Empire. In the course of 20 years they effected it; Sogdiana was at its very extremity, or its borderland; there the last king of Persia took refuge from the south, while the Turks were pouring into it from the north. There was little to choose for the unfortunate prince between the Turk and the Saracen; the Turks were his hereditary foe; they had been the giants and monsters of the popular poetry; but he threw himself into their arms. They engaged in his service, betrayed him, murdered him, and measured themselves with the Saracens in his stead. Thus the military strength of the north and south of Asia, the Saracenic and the Turkish, came into memorable conflict in the regions of which I have said so much. The struggle was a fierce one, and lasted many years; the Turks striving to force their way down to the ocean, the Saracens to drive them back into their Scythian deserts. They first fought this issue in Bactriana or Khorasan; the Turks got the worst of the fight, and then it was thrown back upon Sogdiana itself, and there it ended again in favour of the Saracens. At the end of 90 years from the time of the first Turkish descent on this fair region, they relinquished it to their Mahometan opponents. The conquerors found it rich, populous, and powerful; its cities, Carisme, Bokhara, and Samarcand, were surrounded beyond their fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains were well cultivated, and its commerce extended from China to Europe. Its riches were proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort a tribute of two million gold pieces from the inhabitants; we read, moreover, of the crown jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of the buskin of another, which she dropt in her flight from Bokhara, as being worth two thousand pieces of gold.[34] Such had been the prosperity of the barbarian invaders, such was its end; but not their end, for adversity did them service, as well as prosperity, as we shall see.

It is usual for historians to say, that the triumph of the South threw the Turks back again upon their northern solitudes; and this might easily be the case with some of the many hordes, which were ever passing the boundary and flocking down; but it is no just account of the historical fact, viewed as a whole. Not often indeed do the Oriental nations present us with an example of versatility of character; the Turks, for instance, of this day are substantially what they were four centuries ago. We cannot conceive, were Turkey overrun by the Russians at the present moment, that the fanatical tribes, which are pouring into Constantinople from Asia Minor, would submit to the foreign yoke, take service under their conquerors, become soldiers, custom-officers, police, men of business, attaches, statesmen, working their way up from the ranks and from the masses into influence and power; but, whether from skill in the Saracens, or from far-reaching sagacity in the Turks (and it is difficult to assign it to either cause), so it was, that a process of this nature followed close upon the Mahometan conquest of Sogdiana. It is to be traced in detail to a variety of accidents. Many of the Turks probably were made slaves, and the service to which they were subjected was no matter of choice. Numbers had got attached to the soil; and inheriting the blood of Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal inhabitants for three generations, had simply unlearned the wildness of the Tartar shepherd. Others fell victims to the religion of their conquerors, which ultimately, as we know, exercised a most remarkable influence upon them. Not all at once, but as tribe descended after tribe, and generation followed generation, they succumbed to the creed of Mahomet; and they embraced it with the ardour and enthusiasm which Franks and Saxons so gloriously and meritoriously manifested in their conversion to Christianity.

8.

3. Here again was a very powerful instrument in modification of their national character. Let me illustrate it in one particular. If there is one peculiarity above another, proper to the savage and to the Tartar, it is that of excitability and impetuosity on ordinary occasions; the Turks, on the other hand, are nationally remarkable for gravity and almost apathy of demeanour. Now there are evidently elements in the Mahometan creed, which would tend to change them from the one temperament to the other. Its sternness, its coldness, its doctrine of fatalism; even the truths which it borrowed from Revelation, when separated from the truths it rejected, its monotheism untempered by mediation, its severe view of the divine attributes, of the law, and of a sure retribution to come, wrought both a gloom and also an improvement in the barbarian, not very unlike the effect which some forms of Protestantism produce among ourselves. But whatever was the mode of operation, certainly it is to their religion that this peculiarity of the Turks is ascribed by competent judges. Lieutenant Wood in his journal gives us a lively account of a peculiarity of theirs, which he unhesitatingly attributes to Islamism. "Nowhere," he says, "is the difference between European and Mahomedan society more strongly marked than in the lower walks of life.... A Kasid, or messenger, for example, will come into a public department, deliver his letters in full durbar, and demean himself throughout the interview with so much composure and self-possession, that an European can hardly believe that his grade in society is so low. After he has delivered his letters, he takes his seat among the crowd, and answers, calmly and without hesitation, all the questions which may be addressed to him, or communicates the verbal instructions with which he has been entrusted by his employer, and which are often of more importance than the letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing through a village, these little men will place their hands upon their breasts, and give the usual greeting. Frequently have I seen the children of chiefs approach their father's durbar, and stopping short at the threshold of the door, utter the shout of 'Salam Ali-Kum,' so as to draw all eyes upon them; but nothing daunted, they marched boldly into the room, and sliding down upon their knees, folded their arms and took their seat upon the musnad with all the gravity of grown-up persons."

As Islamism has changed the demeanour of the Turks, so doubtless it has in other ways materially innovated on their Tartar nature. It has given an aim to their military efforts, a political principle, and a social bond. It has laid them under a sense of responsibility, has moulded them into consistency, and taught them a course of policy and perseverance in it. But to treat this part of the subject adequately to its importance would require, Gentlemen, a research and a fulness of discussion unsuitable to the historical sketch which I have undertaken. I have said enough for my purpose upon this topic; and indeed on the general question of the modification of national character to which the Turks were at this period subjected.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Univ. Hist. Modern, vol. iii. p. 346.

[16] I am here assuming that the Magyars are not of the Turkish stock; vid. Gibbon and Pritchard.

[17] Vol. v. p. 248.

[18] P. 127, ed. 1817.

[19] Travels in Syria, vol. i. p. 369, ed. 1787.

[20] Hor. Epist. ii 1, 155.

[21] Supr. p. 26.

[22] Montesquieu.

[23] Murray.

[24] Caldecott's Baber.

[25] Vid. Quarterly Review, vol. lii. p. 396-7.

[26] Univ. Hist. mod. vol. v. p. 262, etc.

[27] Ibid. vol. iv. p. 353.

[28] Meyendorff.

[29] Moorcroft.

[30] Vid. Elphinstone.

[31] Wood's Oxus.

[32] Elphinstone's Cabul.

[33] Supr. p. 59.

[34] Gibbon.



LECTURE IV.

The Turk and the Saracen.

1.

Mere occupation of a rich country is not enough for civilization, as I have granted already. The Turks came into the pleasant plains and valleys of Sogdiana; the Turcomans into the well-wooded mountains and sunny slopes of Asia Minor. The Turcomans were brought out of their dreary deserts, yet they retained their old habits, and they remain barbarians to this day. But why? it must be borne in mind, they neither subjugated the inhabitants of their new country on the one hand, nor were subjugated by them on the other. They never had direct or intimate relations with it; they were brought into it by the Roman Government at Constantinople as its auxiliaries, but they never naturalized themselves there. They were like gipseys in England, except that they were mounted freebooters instead of pilferers and fortune-tellers. It was far otherwise with their brethren in Sogdiana; they were there first as conquerors, then as conquered. First they held it in possession as their prize for 90 or 100 years; they came into the usufruct and enjoyment of it. Next, their political ascendancy over it involved, as in the case of the White Huns, some sort of moral surrender of themselves to it. What was the first consequence of this? that, like the White Huns, they intermarried with the races they found there. We know the custom of the Tartars and Turks; under such circumstances they would avail themselves of their national practice of polygamy to its full extent of licence. In the course of twenty years a new generation would arise of a mixed race; and these in turn would marry into the native population, and at the end of ninety or a hundred years we should find the great-grandsons or the great-great-grandsons of the wild marauders who first crossed the Jaxartes, so different from their ancestors in features both of mind and body, that they hardly would be recognized as deserving the Tartar name. At the end of that period their power came to an end, the Saracens became masters of them and of their country, but the process of emigration southward from the Scythian desert, which had never intermitted during the years of their domination, continued still, though that domination was no more.

Here it is necessary to have a clear idea of the nature of that association of the Turkish tribes from the Volga to the Eastern Sea, to which I have given the name of Empire:—it was not so much of a political as of a national character; it was the power, not of a system, but of a race. They were not one well-organized state, but a number of independent tribes, acting generally together, acknowledging one leader or not, according to circumstances, combining and cooeperating from the identity of object which acted on them, and often jealous of each other and quarrelling with each other on account of that very identity. Each tribe made its way down to the south as it could; one blocked up the way of the other for a time; there were stoppages and collisions, but there was a continual movement and progress. Down they came one after another, like wolves after their prey; and as the tribes which came first became partially civilized, and as a mixed generation arose, these would naturally be desirous of keeping back their less polished uncles or cousins, if they could; and would do so successfully for awhile: but cupidity is stronger than conservatism; and so, in spite of delay and difficulty, down they would keep coming, and down they did come, even after and in spite of the overthrow of their Empire; crowding down as to a new world, to get what they could, as adventurers, ready to turn to the right or the left, prepared to struggle on anyhow, willing to be forced forward into countries farther still, careless what might turn up, so that they did but get down. And this was the process which went on (whatever were their fortunes when they actually got down, prosperous or adverse) for 400, nay, I will say for 700 years. The storehouse of the north was never exhausted; it sustained the never-ending run upon its resources.

2.

I was just now referring to a change in the Turks, which I have mentioned before, and which had as important a bearing as any other of their changes upon their subsequent fortunes. It was a change in their physiognomy and shape, so striking as to recommend them to their masters for the purposes of war or of display. Instead of bearing any longer the hideous exterior which in the Huns frightened the Romans and Goths, they were remarkable, even as early as the ninth century, when they had been among the natives of Sogdiana only two hundred years, for the beauty of their persons. An important political event was the result: hence the introduction of the Turks into the heart of the Saracenic empire. By this time the Caliphs had removed from Damascus to Bagdad; Persia was the imperial province, and into Persia they were introduced for the reason I have mentioned, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as captives taken in war, sometimes as mercenaries for the Saracenic armies: at length they were enrolled as guards to the Caliph, and even appointed to offices in the palace, to the command of the forces, and to governorships in the provinces. The son of the celebrated Harun al Raschid had as many as 50,000 of these troops in Bagdad itself. And thus slowly and silently they made their way to the south, not with the pomp and pretence of conquest, but by means of that ordinary intercommunion which connected one portion of the empire of the Caliphs with another. In this manner they were introduced even into Egypt.

This was their history for a hundred and fifty years, and what do we suppose would be the result of this importation of barbarians into the heart of a flourishing empire? Would they be absorbed as slaves or settlers in the mass of the population, or would they, like mercenaries elsewhere, be fatal to the power that introduced them? The answer is not difficult, considering that their very introduction argued a want of energy and resource in the rulers whom they served. To employ them was a confession of weakness; the Saracenic power indeed was not very aged, but the Turkish was much younger, and more vigorous;—then too must be considered the difference of national character between the Turks and the Saracens. A writer of the beginning of the present century,[35] compares the Turks to the Romans; such parallels are generally fanciful and fallacious; but, if we must accept it in the present instance, we may complete the picture by likening the Saracens and Persians to the Greeks, and we know what was the result of the collision between Greece and Rome. The Persians were poets, the Saracens were philosophers. The mathematics, astronomy, and botany were especial subjects of the studies of the latter. Their observatories were celebrated, and they may be considered to have originated the science of chemistry. The Turks, on the other hand, though they are said to have a literature, and though certain of their princes have been patrons of letters, have never distinguished themselves in exercises of pure intellect; but they have had an energy of character, a pertinacity, a perseverance, and a political talent, in a word, they then had the qualities of mind necessary for ruling, in far greater measure, than the people they were serving. The Saracens, like the Greeks, carried their arms over the surface of the earth with an unrivalled brilliancy and an unchequered success; but their dominion, like that of Greece, did not last for more than 200 or 300 years. Rome grew slowly through many centuries, and its influence lasts to this day; the Turkish race battled with difficulties and reverses, and made its way on amid tumult and complication, for a good 1,000 years from first to last, till at length it found itself in possession of Constantinople, and a terror to the whole of Europe. It has ended its career upon the throne of Constantine; it began it as the slave and hireling of the rulers of a great empire, of Persia and Sogdiana.

3.

As to Sogdiana, we have already reviewed one season of power and then in turn of reverse which there befell the Turks; and next a more remarkable outbreak and its reaction mark their presence in Persia. I have spoken of the formidable force, consisting of Turks, which formed the guard of the Caliphs immediately after the time of Harun al Raschid:—suddenly they rebelled against their master, burst into his apartment at the hour of supper, murdered him, and cut his body into seven pieces. They got possession of the symbols of imperial power, the garment and the staff of Mahomet, and proceeded to make and unmake Caliphs at their pleasure. In the course of four years they had elevated, deposed, and murdered as many as three. At their wanton caprice, they made these successors of the false prophet the sport of their insults and their blows. They dragged them by the feet, stripped them, and exposed them to the burning sun, beat them with iron clubs, and left them for days without food. At length, however, the people of Bagdad were roused in defence of the Caliphate, and the Turks for a time were brought under; but they remained in the country, or rather, by the short-sighted policy of the moment, were dispersed throughout it, and thus became in the sequel ready-made elements of revolution for the purposes of other traitors of their own race, who, at a later period, as we shall presently see, descended on Persia from Turkistan.

Indeed, events were opening the way slowly, but surely, to their ascendancy. Throughout the whole of the tenth century, which followed, they seem to disappear from history; but a silent revolution was all along in progress, leading them forward to their great destiny. The empire of the Caliphate was already dying in its extremities, and Sogdiana was one of the first countries to be detached from his power. The Turks were still there, and, as in Persia, filled the ranks of the army and the offices of the government; but the political changes which took place were not at first to their visible advantage. What first occurred was the revolt of the Caliph's viceroy, who made himself a great kingdom or empire out of the provinces around, extending it from the Jaxartes, which was the northern boundary of Sogdiana, almost to the Indian ocean, and from the confines of Georgia to the mountains of Affghanistan. The dynasty thus established lasted for four generations and for the space of ninety years. Then the successor happened to be a boy; and one of his servants, the governor of Khorasan, an able and experienced man, was forced by circumstances to rebellion against him. He was successful, and the whole power of this great kingdom fell into his hands; now he was a Tartar or Turk; and thus at length the Turks suddenly appear in history, the acknowledged masters of a southern dominion.

4.

This is the origin of the celebrated Turkish dynasty of the Gaznevides, so called after Gazneh, or Ghizni, or Ghuznee, the principal city, and it lasted for two hundred years. We are not particularly concerned in it, because it has no direct relations with Europe; but it falls into our subject, as having been instrumental to the advance of the Turks towards the West. Its most distinguished monarch was Mahmood, and he conquered Hindostan, which became eventually the seat of the empire. In Mahmood the Gaznevide we have a prince of true Oriental splendour. For him the title of Sultan or Soldan was invented, which henceforth became the special badge of the Turkish monarchs; as Khan is the title of the sovereign of the Tartars, and Caliph of the sovereign of the Saracens. I have already described generally the extent of his dominions: he inherited Sogdiana, Carisme, Khorasan, and Cabul; but, being a zealous Mussulman, he obtained the title of Gazi, or champion, by his reduction of Hindostan, and his destruction of its idol temples. There was no need, however, of religious enthusiasm to stimulate him to the war: the riches, which he amassed in the course of it, were a recompense amply sufficient. His Indian expeditions in all amounted to twelve, and they abound in battles and sieges of a truly Oriental cast. "Never," says a celebrated historian,[36] "was the Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the height of the mountains, the breadth of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy," or their elephants of war. One of the sovereigns of the country brought against him as many as 2,500 elephants; the borderers on the Indus resisted him with 4,000 war-boats. He was successful in every direction; he levelled to the ground many hundreds of pagodas, and carried off their treasures. In one of his campaigns[37] he took prisoner the prince of Lahore, round whose neck alone were sixteen strings of jewels, valued at L320,000 of our money. At Mutra he found five great idols of pure gold, with eyes of rubies; and a hundred idols of silver, which, when melted down, loaded a hundred camels with bullion.

These stories, which sound like the fables in the Arabian Nights, are but a specimen of the wonderful fruits of the victories of this Mahmood. His richest prize was the great temple of Sunnat, or Somnaut, on the promontory of Guzerat, between the Indus and Bombay. It was a place as diabolically wicked as it was wealthy, and we may safely regard Mahmood as the instrument of divine vengeance upon it. But here I am only concerned with its wealth, for which grave writers are the vouchers. When this temple was taken, Mahmood entered a great square hall, having its lofty roof supported with 56 pillars, curiously turned and set with precious stones. In the centre stood the idol, made of stone, and five feet high. The conqueror began to demolish it. He raised his mace, and struck off the idol's nose. The Brahmins interposed, and are said to have offered the fabulous sum, as Mill considers it, of ten millions sterling for its ransom. His officers urged him to accept it, and the Sultan himself was moved; but recovering himself, he observed that it was somewhat more honourable to destroy idols than to traffic in them, and proceeded to repeat his blows at the trunk of the figure. He broke it open; it was found to be hollow, and at once explained the prodigality of the offer of the Brahmins. Inside was found an incalculable treasure of diamonds, rubies, and pearls. Mahmood took away the lofty doors of sandal-wood, which belonged to this temple, as a trophy for posterity. Till a few years ago, they were the decoration of his tomb near Gazneh, which is built of white marble with a cupola, and where Moollas are still maintained to read prayers over his grave.[38] There too once hung the ponderous mace, which few but himself could wield; but the mace has disappeared, and the sandal gates, if genuine, were carried off about twelve years since by the British Governor-General of India, and restored to their old place, as an acceptable present to the impure idolaters of Guzerat.[39]

It is not wonderful that this great conqueror should have been overcome by the special infirmity, to which such immense plunder would dispose him; he has left behind him a reputation for avarice. He desired to be a patron of literature, and on one occasion he promised a court poet a golden coin for every verse of an heroic poem he was writing. Stimulated by the promise, "the divine poet," to use the words of the Persian historian, "wrote the unparalleled poem called the Shah Namna, consisting of 60,000 couplets." This was more than had been bargained for by the Sultan, who, repenting of his engagement, wished to compromise the matter for 60,000 rupees, about a sixteenth part of the sum he had promised. The indignant author would accept no remuneration at all, but wrote a satire upon Mahmood instead; but he was merciful in his revenge, for he reached no more than the seven-thousandth couplet.

There is a melancholy grandeur about the last days of this victorious Sultan, which seems to show that even then the character of his race was changed from the fierce impatience of Hun and Tartar to the grave, pensive, and majestic demeanour of the Turk. Tartar he was in his countenance, as he was painfully conscious, but his mind had a refinement, to which the Tartar was a stranger. Broken down by an agonizing complaint, he perceived his life was failing, and his glory coming to an end. Two days before his death, he commanded all the untold riches of his treasury, his sacks of gold and silver, his caskets of precious stones, to be brought out and placed before him. Having feasted his eyes upon them, he burst into tears; he knew they would not long be his, but he had not the heart to give any part of then away. The next day he caused to be drawn up before his travelling throne, for he observed still the Tartar custom, his army of 100,000 foot and 55,000 horse, his chariots, his camels, and his 1,300 elephants of war; and again he wept, and, overcome with grief, retired to his palace. Next day he died, after a prosperous reign of more than thirty years.

But, to return to the general history. It will be recollected that Mahmood's dominions stretched very far to the west, as some say, even round the Caspian to Georgia; and it is not wonderful that, while he was adding India to them, he found a difficulty in defending his frontier towards Persia. Meantime, as before, his own countrymen kept streaming down upon him without intermission from the north, and he thought he could not do better than employ these dangerous visitors in garrison duty against his western enemies. They took service under him, but did not fulfil his expectations. Indeed, what followed may be anticipated from the history which I have been giving of the Caliphs: it was an instance of workmen emancipating themselves from their employer. The fierce barbarians who were defending the province of Khorasan so well for another, naturally felt that they could take as good care of it for themselves; and when Mahmood was approaching the end of his life, he became sensible of the error he had committed in introducing them. He asked one of their chiefs what force he could lend him: "If you sent one of the arrows into our camp," was the answer, "50,000 of us will mount to do thy bidding." "But what if I want more?" inquired Mahmood; "send this arrow into the camp of Balik, and you will have another 50,000." The Sultan asked again: "But what if I require your whole forces?" "Send round my bow," answered the Turk, "and the summons will be obeyed by 200,000 horse."[40] The foreboding, which disclosures such as this inspired, was fulfilled the year before his death. The Turks came into collision with his lieutenants, and defeated one of them in a bloody action; and though he took full reprisals, and for a while cleared the country of them, yet in the reign of his son they succeeded in wresting from his dynasty one-half of his empire, and Hindostan, the acquisition of Mahmood, became henceforth its principal possession.

5.

We have now arrived at what may literally be called the turning-point of Turkish history. We have seen them gradually descend from the north, and in a certain degree become acclimated in the countries where they settled. They first appear across the Jaxartes in the beginning of the seventh century; they have now come to the beginning of the eleventh. Four centuries or thereabout have they been out of their deserts, gaining experience and educating themselves in such measure as was necessary for playing their part in the civilized world. First they came down into Sogdiana and Khorasan, and the country below it, as conquerors; they continued in it as subjects and slaves. They offered their services to the race which had subdued them; they made their way by means of their new masters down to the west and the south; they laid the foundations for their future supremacy in Persia, and gradually rose upwards through the social fabric to which they had been admitted, till they found themselves at length at the head of it. The sovereign power which they had acquired in the line of the Gaznevides, drifted off to Hindostan; but still fresh tribes of their race poured down from the north, and filled up the gap; and while one dynasty of Turks was established in the peninsula, a second dynasty arose in the former seat of their power.

Now I call the era at which I have arrived the turning-point of their fortunes, because, when they had descended down to Khorasan and the countries below it, they might have turned to the East or to the West, as they chose. They were at liberty to turn their forces eastward against their kindred in Hindostan, whom they had driven out of Ghizni and Affghanistan, or to face towards the west, and make their way thither through the Saracens of Persia and its neighbouring countries. It was an era which determined the history of the world. I recollect once hearing a celebrated professor of geology attempt to draw out the consequences which would have occurred, had there not been an outlet for the Thames, which exists in fact, at a certain point of its course. He said that, had the range of hills been unbroken, it would have streamed off to the north-east, and have run into the sea at the Wash in Lincolnshire. An utter change in the political events which came after, another history of England, and nothing short of it, would have been the result. An illustration such as this will at least serve to express what I would say of the point at which we now stand in the history of the Turks. Mahmood turned to the east; and had the barbarian tribes which successively descended done the same, they might have conquered the Gaznevide dynasty, they might have settled themselves, like Timour, at Delhi, and their descendants might have been found there by the British in their conquests during the last century; but they would have been unknown to Europe, they would have been strange to Constantinople, they would have had little interest for the Church. They had rebelled against Mahmood, they had driven his family to the East; but they did not pursue him thither; he had strength enough to keep them off the rich territory he had appropriated; he was the obstacle which turned the stream westward; in consequence, they looked towards Persia, where their brethren had been so long settled, and they directed their course for good and all towards Europe.

But this era was a turning-point in their history in another and more serious respect. In Sogdiana and Khorasan, they had become converts to the Mahometan faith. You will not suppose I am going to praise a religious imposture, but no Catholic need deny that it is, considered in itself, a great improvement upon Paganism. Paganism has no rule of right and wrong, no supreme and immutable judge, no intelligible revelation, no fixed dogma whatever; on the other hand, the being of one God, the fact of His revelation, His faithfulness to His promises, the eternity of the moral law, the certainty of future retribution, were borrowed by Mahomet from the Church, and are steadfastly held by his followers. The false prophet taught much which is materially true and objectively important, whatever be its subjective and formal value and influence in the individuals who profess it. He stands in his creed between the religion of God and the religion of devils, between Christianity and idolatry, between the West and the extreme East. And so stood the Turks, on adopting his faith, at the date I am speaking of; they stood between Christ in the West, and Satan in the East, and they had to make their choice; and, alas! they were led by the circumstances of the time to oppose themselves, not to Paganism, but to Christianity. A happier lot indeed had befallen poor Sultan Mahmood than befell his kindred who followed in his wake. Mahmood, a Mahomedan, went eastward and found a superstition worse than his own, and fought against it, and smote it; and the sandal doors which he tore away from the idol temple and hung up at his tomb at Gazneh, almost seemed to plead for him through centuries as the soldier and the instrument of Heaven. The tribes which followed him, Moslem also, faced westward, and found, not error but truth, and fought against it as zealously, and in doing so, were simply tools of the Evil One, and preachers of a lie, and enemies, not witnesses of God. The one destroyed idol temples, the other Christian shrines. The one has been saved the woe of persecuting the Bride of the Lamb; the other is of all races the veriest brood of the serpent which the Church has encountered since she was set up. For 800 years did the sandal gates remain at Mahmood's tomb, as a trophy over idolatry; and for 800 years have Seljuk and Othman been our foe, singled out as such, and denounced by successive Vicars of Christ.

6.

The year 1048 of our era is fixed by chronologists as the date of the rise of the Turkish power, as far as Christendom is interested in its history.[41] Sixty-three years before this date, a Turk of high rank, of the name of Seljuk, had quarrelled with his native prince in Turkistan, crossed the Jaxartes with his followers, and planted himself in the territory of Sogdiana. His father had been a chief officer in the prince's court, and was the first of his family to embrace Islamism; but Seljuk, in spite of his creed, did not obtain permission to advance into Sogdiana from the Saracenic government, which at that time was in possession of the country. After several successful encounters, however, he gained admission into the city of Bokhara, and there he settled. As time went on, he fully recompensed the tardy hospitality which the Saracens had shown him; for his feud with his own countrymen, whom he had left, took the shape of a religious enmity, and he fought against them as pagans and infidels, with a zeal, which was both an earnest of the devotion of his people to the faith of Mahomet, and a training for the exercise of it. He died, it is said, in battle against the pagans, and at the wonderful age of 107. Of his five sons, whom he left behind him, one, Michael, was cut off prematurely in battle against the infidels also, and has obtained the name of Shadid or the Martyr; for in a religion where the soldier is the missionary, the soldier is the martyr also. The other sons became rich and powerful; they had numerous flocks and fertile pastures in Sogdiana, till at length they attracted the notice of the Sultan Mahmood, who, having dispossessed the Saracens of the country where Seljuk had placed himself, looked about for mercenary troops to keep his possession of it. It was one of Seljuk's family, who at a later date alarmed Mahmood by telling him he could bring 200,000 horsemen from the Scythian wilderness, if he sent round his bow to summon them; it was Seljuk's horde and retainers that ultimately forced back Mahmood's son into the south and the east, and got possession of Sogdiana and Khorasan. Having secured this acquisition, they next advanced into Persia, and this was the event, which is considered to fix the date of their entrance into ecclesiastical history. It was the date of their first steadily looking westward; it determined their destiny; they began to be enemies of the Cross in the year 1048, under the leading of Michael the Martyr's son, Togrul Beg.

It is the inconvenience of any mere sketch of historical transactions, that a multiplicity of objects successively passes over the field of view, not less independent in themselves, though not less connected in the succession of events, than the pictures of a magic lantern. I am aware of the weariness and the perplexity which are in consequence inflicted on the attention and the memory of the hearer; but what can I do but ask your indulgence, Gentlemen, for a circumstance which is inherent in any undertaking like the present? I have in the course of an hour to deal with a series of exploits and fortunes, which begin in the wilds of Turkistan, and conclude upon the Bosphorus; in which, as I may say, time is no measure of events, one while from the obscurity in which they lie, at another from their multitude and consequent confusion. For four centuries the Turks are little or hardly heard of; then suddenly in the course of as many tens of years, and under three Sultans, they make the whole world resound with their deeds; and, while they have pushed to the East through Hindostan, in the West they have hurried down to the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, have taken Jerusalem, and threatened Constantinople. In their long period of silence they had been sowing the seeds of future conquests; in their short period of action they were gathering the fruit of past labours and sufferings. The Saracenic empire stood apparently as before; but, as soon as a Turk showed himself at the head of a military force within its territory, he found himself surrounded by the armies of his kindred which had been so long in its pay; he was joined by the tribes of Turcomans, to whom the Romans in a former age had shown the passes of the Caucasus; and he could rely on the reserve of innumerable swarms, ever issuing out of his native desert, and following in his track. Such was the state of Western Asia in the middle of the eleventh century.

7.

I have said there were three great Sultans of the race of Seljuk, by whom the conquest of the West of Asia was begun and completed; their names are Togrul Beg, Alp Arslan, and Malek Shah. I have not to write their histories, but I may say a few words of their characters and their actions.

1. The first, Togrul, was the son and grandson of Mahometan Martyrs, and he inherited that fanaticism, which made the old Seljuk and the young Michael surrender their lives in their missionary warfare against the enemies of their faith. Each day he repeated the five prayers prescribed for the disciples of Islam; each week he gave two days to fasting; in every city which he made his own, he built a mosque before he built his palace. He introduced vast numbers of his wild countrymen into his provinces, and suffered their nomadic habits, on the condition of their becoming proselytes to his creed. He was the man suited to his time; mere material power was not adequate to the overthrow of the Saracenic sovereignty: rebellion after rebellion had been successful against the Caliph; and at the very time I speak of he was in subjection to a family of the old Persian race. But then he was spiritual head of the Empire as well as temporal; and, though he lay in his palace wallowing in brutal sensuality, he was still a sort of mock-Pope, even after his armies and his territories had been wrested from his hands; but it was the reward of Togrul's zeal to gain from him this spiritual prerogative, retaining which the Caliph could never have fallen altogether. He gave to Togrul the title of Rocnoddin, or "the firm pillar of religion;" and, what was more to the purpose, he made him his vicegerent over the whole Moslem world. Armed with this religious authority, which was temporal in its operation, he went to war against the various insurgents who troubled the Caliph's repose, and substituted himself for them, a more powerful and insidious enemy than any or all. But even Mahomet, the Caliph's predecessor, would not have denied that Togrul was worthy of his hire; he turned towards Armenia and Asia Minor, and began that terrible war against the Cross, which was to last 500 years. The prodigious number of 130,000 Christians, in battle or otherwise, is said to be the sacrifice he offered up to the false prophet. On his victorious return, he was again recognized by his grateful master as his representative. He made his public entry into the imperial city on horseback. At the palace gate he showed the outward deference to the Caliph's authority which was his policy. He dismounted, his nobles laid aside their arms, and thus they walked respectfully into the recesses of the palace. According to the Saracenic ceremonial, the Caliph received them behind his black veil, the black garment of his family was cast over his shoulders, and the staff of Mahomet was in his hand. Togrul kissed the ground, and waited modestly, till he was led to the throne, and was there allowed to seat himself, and to hear the commission publicly declaring him invested with the authority of the Vicar of the Arch-deceiver. He was then successively clothed in seven robes of honour, and presented with seven slaves, the natives of the seven climates of the Saracenic Empire. His veil was perfumed with musk; two crowns were set upon his head; two scimitars were girded on his side, in token of his double reign over East and West. He twice kissed the Caliph's hand; and his titles were proclaimed by the voice of heralds and the applause of the Moslem.

Such was Togrul Beg, and such was his reward. After these exploits, he marched against his brother (for these Turkish tribes were always quarrelling over their prey), deposed him, strangled him and put to death a number of his adherents, married the Caliph's daughter, and then died without children. His power passed to his nephew Alp Arslan.

2. Alp Arslan, the second Sultan of the line of Seljuk, is said to signify in Turkish "the courageous lion:" and the Caliph gave its possessor the Arabic appellation of Azzaddin, or "Protector of Religion." It was the distinctive work of his short reign to pass from humbling the Caliph to attacking the Greek Emperor. Togrul had already invaded the Greek provinces of Asia Minor, from Cilicia to Armenia, along a line of 600 miles, and here it was that he had achieved his tremendous massacres of Christians. Alp Arslan renewed the war; he penetrated to Caesarea in Cappadocia, attracted by the gold and pearls which encrusted the shrine of the great St. Basil. He then turned his arms against Armenia and Georgia, and conquered the hardy mountaineers of the Caucasus, who at present give such trouble to the Russians. After this he encountered, defeated, and captured the Greek Emperor. He began the battle with all the solemnity and pageantry of a hero of romance. Casting away his bow and arrows, he called for an iron mace and scimitar; he perfumed his body with musk, as if for his burial, and dressed himself in white, that he might be slain in his winding-sheet. After his victory, the captive Emperor of New Rome was brought before him in a peasant's dress; he made him kiss the ground beneath his feet, and put his foot upon his neck. Then, raising him up, he struck or patted him three times with his hand, and gave him his life and, on a large ransom, his liberty. At this time the Sultan was only forty-four years of age, and seemed to have a career of glory still before him. Twelve hundred nobles stood before his throne; two hundred thousand soldiers marched under his banner. As if dissatisfied with the South, he turned his arms against his own paternal wildernesses, with which his family, as I have related, had a feud. New tribes of Turks seem to have poured down, and were wresting Sogdiana from the race of Seljuk, as the Seljukians had wrested it from the Gaznevides. Alp had not advanced far into the country, when he met his death from the hand of a captive. A Carismian chief had withstood his progress, and, being taken, was condemned to a lingering execution. On hearing the sentence, he rushed forward upon Alp Arslan; and the Sultan, disdaining to let his generals interfere, bent his bow, but, missing his aim, received the dagger of his prisoner in his breast. His death, which followed, brings before us that grave dignity of the Turkish character, of which we have already had an example in Mahmood. Finding his end approaching, he has left on record a sort of dying confession:—"In my youth," he said, "I was advised by a sage to humble myself before God, to distrust my own strength, and never to despise the most contemptible foe. I have neglected these lessons, and my neglect has been deservedly punished. Yesterday, as from an eminence, I beheld the numbers, the discipline, and the spirit of my armies; the earth seemed to tremble under my feet, and I said in my heart, Surely thou art the king of the world, the greatest and most invincible of warriors. These armies are no longer mine; and, in the confidence of my personal strength, I now fall by the hand of an assassin." On his tomb was engraven an inscription, conceived in a similar spirit. "O ye, who have seen the glory of Alp Arslan exalted to the heavens, repair to Maru, and you will behold it buried in the dust."[42] Alp Arslan was adorned with great natural qualities both of intellect and of soul. He was brave and liberal: just, patient, and sincere: constant in his prayers, diligent in his alms, and, it is added, witty in his conversation;—but his gifts availed him not.

3. It often happens in the history of states and races, in which there is found first a rise and then a decline, that the greatest glories take place just then when the reverse is beginning or begun. Thus, for instance, in the history of the Ottoman Turks, to which I have not yet come, Soliman the Magnificent is at once the last and greatest of a series of great Sultans. So was it as regards this house of Seljuk. Malek Shah, the son of Alp Arslan, the third sovereign, in whom its glories ended, is represented to us in history in colours so bright and perfect, that it is difficult to believe we are not reading the account of some mythical personage. He came to the throne at the early age of seventeen; he was well-shaped, handsome, polished both in manners and in mind; wise and courageous, pious and sincere. He engaged himself even more in the consolidation of his empire than in its extension. He reformed abuses; he reduced the taxes; he repaired the high roads, bridges, and canals; he built an imperial mosque at Bagdad; he founded and nobly endowed a college. He patronised learning and poetry, and he reformed the calendar. He provided marts for commerce; he upheld the pure administration of justice, and protected the helpless and the innocent. He established wells and cisterns in great numbers along the road of pilgrimage to Mecca; he fed the pilgrims, and distributed immense sums among the poor.

He was in every respect a great prince; he extended his conquests across Sogdiana to the very borders of China. He subdued by his lieutenants Syria and the Holy Land, and took Jerusalem. He is said to have travelled round his vast dominions twelve times. So potent was he, that he actually gave away kingdoms, and had for feudatories great princes. He gave to his cousin his territories in Asia Minor, and planted him over against Constantinople, as an earnest of future conquests; and he may be said to have finally allotted to the Turcomans the fair regions of Western Asia, over which they roam to this day.

All human greatness has its term; the more brilliant was this great Sultan's rise, the more sudden was his extinction; and the earlier he came to his power, the earlier did he lose it He had reigned twenty years, and was but thirty-seven years old, when he was lifted up with pride and came to his end. He disgraced and abandoned to an assassin his faithful vizir, at the age of ninety-three, who for thirty years had been the servant and benefactor of the house of Seljuk. After obtaining from the Caliph the peculiar and almost incommunicable title of "the commander of the faithful," unsatisfied still, he wished to fix his own throne in Bagdad, and to deprive his impotent superior of his few remaining honours. He demanded the hand of the daughter of the Greek Emperor, a Christian, in marriage. A few days, and he was no more; he had gone out hunting, and returned indisposed; a vein was opened, and the blood would not flow. A burning fever took him off, only eighteen days after the murder of his vizir, and less than ten before the day when the Caliph was to have been removed from Bagdad.

8.

Such is human greatness at the best, even were it ever so innocent; but as to this poor Sultan, there is another aspect even of his glorious deeds. If I have seemed here or elsewhere in these Lectures to speak of him or his with interest or admiration, only take me, Gentlemen, as giving the external view of the Turkish history, and that as introductory to the determination of its true significance. Historians and poets may celebrate the exploits of Malek; but what were they in the sight of Him who has said that whoso shall strike against His corner-stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, shall be ground to powder? Looking at this Sultan's deeds as mere exhibitions of human power, they were brilliant and marvellous; but there was another judgment of them formed in the West, and other feelings than admiration roused by them in the faith and the chivalry of Christendom. Especially was there one, the divinely appointed shepherd of the poor of Christ, the anxious steward of His Church, who from his high and ancient watch tower, in the fulness of apostolic charity, surveyed narrowly what was going on at thousands of miles from him, and with prophetic eye looked into the future age; and scarcely had that enemy, who was in the event so heavily to smite the Christian world, shown himself, when he gave warning of the danger, and prepared himself with measures for averting it. Scarcely had the Turk touched the shores of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, when the Pope detected and denounced him before all Europe. The heroic Pontiff, St. Gregory the Seventh, was then upon the throne of the Apostle; and though he was engaged in one of the severest conflicts which Pope has ever sustained, not only against the secular power, but against bad bishops and priests, yet at a time when his very life was not his own, and present responsibilities so urged him, that one would fancy he had time for no other thought, Gregory was able to turn his mind to the consideration of a contingent danger in the almost fabulous East. In a letter written during the reign of Malek Shah, he suggested the idea of a crusade against the misbeliever, which later popes carried out. He assures the Emperor of Germany, whom he was addressing, that he had 50,000 troops ready for the holy war, whom he would fain have led in person. This was in the year 1074.

In truth, the most melancholy accounts were brought to Europe of the state of things in the Holy Land. A rude Turcoman ruled in Jerusalem; his people insulted there the clergy of every profession; they dragged the patriarch by the hair along the pavement, and cast him into a dungeon, in hopes of a ransom; and disturbed from time to time the Latin Mass and office in the Church of the Resurrection. As to the pilgrims, Asia Minor, the country through which they had to travel in an age when the sea was not yet safe to the voyager, was a scene of foreign incursion and internal distraction. They arrived at Jerusalem exhausted by their sufferings, and sometimes terminated them by death, before they were permitted to kiss the Holy Sepulchre.

9.

Outrages such as these were of frequent occurrence, and one was very like another. In concluding, however, this Lecture, I think it worth while to set before you, Gentlemen, the circumstances of one of them in detail, that you may be able to form some ideas of the state both of Asia Minor and of a Christian pilgrimage, under the dominion of the Turks. You may recollect, then, that Alp Arslan, the second Seljukian Sultan, invaded Asia Minor, and made prisoner the Greek Emperor. This Sultan came to the throne in 1062, and appears to have begun his warlike operations immediately. The next year, or the next but one, a body of pilgrims, to the number of 7,000, were pursuing their peaceful way to Jerusalem, by a route which at that time lay entirely through countries professing Christianity.[43] The pious company was headed by the Archbishop of Mentz, the Bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Ratisbon, and, among others, by a party of Norman soldiers and clerks, belonging to the household of William Duke of Normandy, who made himself, very soon afterwards, our William the Conqueror. Among these clerks was the celebrated Benedictine Monk Ingulphus, William's secretary, afterwards Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, being at that time a little more than thirty years of age. They passed through Germany and Hungary to Constantinople, and thence by the southern coast of Asia Minor or Anatolia, to Syria and Palestine. When they got on the confines of Asia Minor towards Cilicia, they fell in with the savage Turcomans, who were attracted by the treasure, which these noble persons and wealthy churchmen had brought with them for pious purposes and imprudently displayed. Ingulphus's words are few, but so graphic that I require an apology for using them. He says then, they were "exenterated" or "cleaned out of the immense sums of money they carried with them, together with the loss of many lives."

A contemporary historian gives us fuller particulars of the adventure, and he too appears to have been a party to the expedition.[44] It seems the prelates celebrated the rites of the Church with great magnificence, as they went along, and travelled with a pomp which became great dignitaries. The Turcomans in consequence set on them, overwhelmed them, stripped them to the skin, and left the Bishop of Utrecht disabled and half dead upon the field. The poor sufferers effected their retreat to a village, where they fortified an enclosure and took possession of a building which stood within it. Here they defended themselves courageously for as many as three days, though they are said to have had nothing to eat. At the end of that time they expressed a wish to surrender themselves to the enemy, and admitted eighteen of the barbarian leaders into their place of strength, with a view of negotiating the terms. The Bishop of Bamberg, who is said to have had a striking presence, acted for the Christians, and bargained for nothing more than their lives. The savage Turcoman, who was the speaker on the other side, attracted by his appearance, unrolled his turban, and threw it round the Bishop's neck, crying out: "You and all of you are mine." The Bishop made answer by an interpreter: "What will you do to me?" The savage shrieked out some unintelligible words, which, being explained to the Bishop, ran thus: "I will suck that blood which is so ruddy in your throat, and then I will hang you up like a dog at your gate." "Upon which," says the historian, "the Bishop, who had the modesty of a gentleman, and was of a grave disposition, not bearing the insult, dashed his fist into the Turcoman's face with such vigour as to fell him to the ground, crying out that the profane wretch should rather be the sufferer, for laying his unclean hands upon a priest."

This was the signal for an exploit so bold, that it seemed, if I may so express myself, like a particular inspiration. The Christians, unarmed as they were, started up, and though, as I have observed, they may be said to have scarcely tasted food for three days, rushed upon the eighteen Turcomans, bound their arms behind their backs, and showing them in this condition to their own troops who surrounded the house, protested that they would instantly put them all to death, unless they themselves were let go. It is difficult to see how this complication would have ended, in which neither side were in a condition either to recede or to advance, had not a third party interfered with a considerable force in the person of the military governor, himself a Pagan,[45] of a neighbouring city; and though, as our historian says, the Christians found it difficult to understand how Satan could cast out Satan, so it was, that they found themselves at liberty and their enemies marched off to punishment, on the payment of a sum of money to their deliverers. I need not pursue the history of these pilgrims further than to say, that, of 7,000 who set out, only 2,000 returned to Europe.

* * * * *

Much less am I led to enter into the history of the Crusades which followed. How the Holy See, twenty years after St. Gregory, effected that which St. Gregory attempted without result; how, along the very way which the pilgrims I have described journeyed, 100,000 men at length appeared cased in complete armour and on horseback; how they drove the Turk from Nicaea over against Constantinople, where he had fixed his imperial city, to the farther borders of Asia Minor; how, after defeating him in a pitched battle at Dorylaeum, they went on and took Antioch, and then at length, after a long pilgrimage of three years, made conquest of Jerusalem itself, I need not here relate. To one point only is it to our present purpose to direct attention. It is commonly said that the Crusades failed in their object; that they were nothing else but a lavish expenditure of men and treasure; and that the possession of the Holy Places by the Turks to this day is a proof of it. Now I will not enter here into a very intricate controversy; this only will I say, that, if the tribes of the desert, under the leadership of the house of Seljuk, turned their faces to the West in the middle of the eleventh century; if in forty years they had advanced from Khorasan to Jerusalem and the neighbourhood of Constantinople; and if in consequence they were threatening Europe and Christianity; and if, for that reason, it was a great object to drive them back or break them to pieces; if it were a worthy object of the Crusades to rescue Europe from this peril and to reassure the anxious minds of Christian multitudes;—then were the Crusades no failure in their issue, for this object was fully accomplished. The Seljukian Turks were hurled back upon the East, and then broken up, by the hosts of the Crusaders.[46] The lieutenant of Malek Shah, who had been established as Sultan of Roum (as Asia Minor was called by the Turks), was driven to an obscure town, where his dynasty lasted, indeed, but gradually dwindled away. A similar fate attended the house of Seljuk in other parts of the Empire, and internal quarrels increased and perpetuated its weakness. Sudden as was its rise, as sudden was its fall; till the terrible Zingis, descending on the Turkish dynasties, like an avalanche, cooeperated effectually with the Crusaders and finished their work; and if Jerusalem was not protected from other enemies, at least Constantinople was saved, and Europe was placed in security, for three hundred years.[47]

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Thornton.

[36] Gibbon.

[37] Vid. Dow's Hindostan.

[38] Caldecott's Baber. Vid. also Elphinstone, vol. ii. p. 366.

[39] "Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnauth in triumph from Affghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan Mahmood looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee. The insult of 800 years is at last avenged," etc., etc.—Proclamation of the Governor-General to all the princes, chiefs, and people of India.

[40] Gibbon. Universal Hist.

[41] Baronius, Pagi.

[42] Gibbon.

[43] Baronius, Gibbon.

[44] Vid. Cave's Hist. Litterar. in nom. Lambertus.

[45] Gibbon makes this the Fatimite governor of some town in Galilee, laying the scene in Palestine. The name Capernaum is doubtfully mentioned in the history, but the occurrence is said to have taken place on the borders of Lycia. Anyhow, there were Turcomans in Palestine. Part of the account in the text is taken from Marianus Scotus.

[46] I should observe that the Turks were driven out of Jerusalem by the Fatimites of Egypt, two years before the Crusaders appeared.

[47] I am pleased to see that Mr. Sharon Turner takes the same view strongly.—England in Middle Ages, i. 9. Also Mr. Francis Newman; "The See of Rome," he says, "had not forgotten, if Europe had, how deadly and dangerous a war Charles Martel and the Franks had had to wage against the Moors from Spain. A new and redoubtable nation, the Seljuk Turks, had now appeared on the confines of Europe, as a fresh champion of the Mohammedan Creed; and it is not attributing too much foresight or too sagacious policy to the Court of Rome, to believe, that they wished to stop and put down the Turkish power before it should come too near. Be this as it may, such was the result. The might of the Seljukians was crippled on the plains of Palestine, and did not ultimately reach Europe.... A large portion of Christendom, which disowned the religious pretensions of Rome, was afterwards subdued by another Turkish tribe, the Ottomans or Osmanlis; but Romish Christendom remained untouched: Poland, Germany, and Hungary, saved her from the later Turks, even during the schism of the Reformation, as the Franks had saved her from the Moors. On the whole, it would seem that to the Romish Church we have been largely indebted for that union between European nations, without which Mohammedanism might perhaps not have been repelled. I state this as probable, not at all as certain."—Lectures at Manchester, 1846.



III.

THE CONQUESTS OF THE TURKS



LECTURE V.

The Turk and the Christian.

I Said in my last Lecture, that we are bound to judge of persons and events in history, not by their outward appearance, but by their inward significancy. In speaking of the Turks, we may for a moment yield to the romance which attends on their name and their actions, as we may admire the beauty of some beast of prey; but, as it would be idle and puerile to praise its shape or skin, and form no further judgment upon it, so in like manner it is unreal and unphilosophical to interest ourselves in the mere adventures and successes of the Turks, without going on to view them in their moral aspect also. No race casts so broad and dark a shadow on the page of ecclesiastical history, and leaves so painful an impression on the minds of the reader, as the Turkish. The fierce Goths and Vandals, and then again the Lombards, were converted to Catholicism. The Franks yielded to the voice of St. Remigius, and Clovis, their leader, became the eldest son of the Church. The Anglo-Saxons gave up their idols at the preaching of St. Augustine and his companions. The German tribes acknowledged Christ amid their forests, though they martyred St. Boniface and other English and Irish missionaries who came to them. The Magyars in Hungary were led to faith through loyalty to their temporal monarch, their royal missioner St. Stephen. The heathen Danes reappear as the chivalrous Normans, the haughty but true sons and vassals of St. Peter. The Saracens even, who gave birth to an imposture, withered away at the end of 300 or 400 years, and had not the power, though they had the will, to persevere in their enmity to the Cross. The Tartars had both the will and the power, but they were far off from Christendom, or they came down in ephemeral outbreaks, which were rather those of freebooters than of persecutors, or they directed their fury as often against the enemies of the Church as against her children. But the unhappy race, of whom I am speaking, from the first moment they appear in the history of Christendom, are its unmitigated, its obstinate, its consistent foes. They are inexhaustible in numbers, pouring down upon the South and West, and taking one and the same terrible mould of misbelief, as they successively descend. They have the populousness of the North, with the fire of the South; the resources of Tartars, with, the fanaticism of Saracens. And when their strength declines, and age steals upon them, there is no softening, no misgiving; they die and make no sign. In the words of the Wise Man, "Being born, they forthwith ceased to be; and have been able to show no mark of virtue, but are consumed in wickedness." God's judgments, God's mercies, are inscrutable; one nation is taken, another is left. It is a mystery; but the fact stands; since the year 1048 the Turks have been the great Antichrist among the races of men.

I say since this date, because then it was that Togrul Beg finally opened the gates of the North to those descents, which had taken place indeed at intervals before, but then became the habit of centuries. In vain was the power of his dynasty overthrown by the Crusaders; in vain do the Seljukians disappear from the annals of the world; in vain is Constantinople respited; in vain is Europe saved. Christendom in arms had not yet finished, it had but begun the work, in which it needed the grace to persevere. Down came the savage hordes, as at first, upon Sogdiana and Khorasan, so then upon Syria and its neighbouring countries. Sometimes they remain wild Turcomans, sometimes they fall into the civilization of the South; but there they are, in Egypt, in the Holy Land, in Armenia, in Anatolia, forming political bodies of long or short duration, breaking up here to form again there, in all cases trampling on Christianity, and beating out its sacred impression from the breasts of tens of thousands. Nor is this all; scarcely is the race of Seljuk quite extinct, or rather when it is on its very death-bed, after it had languished and shrunk and dwindled and flickered and kept on dying through a tedious two hundred years, when its sole remaining heir was just in one obscure court, from that very court we discern the birth of another empire, as dazzling in its rise, as energetic and impetuous in its deeds as that of Togrul, Alp, and Malek, and far more wide-spreading, far more powerful, far more lasting than the Seljukian. This is the empire of the great (if I must measure it by a human standard) and glorious race of Othman; this is the dynasty of the Ottomans or Osmanlis; once the admiration, the terror of nations, now, even in its downfall, an object of curiosity, interest, anxiety, and even respect; but, whether high or low, in all cases to the Christian the inveterate and hateful enemy of the Cross.

1.

There is a certain remarkable parallel and contrast between the fortunes of these two races, the Seljukian and the Ottoman. In the beginning of the twelfth century, the race of Seljuk all but took Constantinople, and overran the West, and did not; in the beginning of the fifteenth, the Ottoman Turks were all but taking the same city, and then were withheld from taking it, and at length did take it, and have it still. In each case a foe came upon them from the north, still more fierce and vigorous than they, and humbled them to the dust.

These two foes, which came upon the Seljukian Turks and the Ottoman Turks respectively, are names by this time familiar to us; they are Zingis and Timour. Zingis came down upon the Seljukians, and Timour came down upon the Ottomans. Timour pressed the Ottomans even more severely than Zingis pressed the Seljukians; yet the Seljukians did not recover the blow of Zingis; but the Ottomans survived the blow of Timour, and rose more formidable after it, and have long outlived the power which inflicted it.

Zingis and Timour were but the blind instruments of divine vengeance. They knew not what they did. The inward impulse of gigantic energy and brutal cupidity urged them forward; ambition, love of destruction, sensual appetite, frenzied them, and made them both more and less than men. They pushed eastward, westward, southward; they confronted promptly and joyfully every peril, every obstacle which lay in their course. They smote down all rival pride and greatness of man; and therefore, by the law (as I may call it) of their nature and destiny, not on politic reason or far-reaching plan, but because they came across him, they smote the Turk. These then were one class of his opponents; but there was another adversary, stationed against him, of a different order, one whose power was not material, but mental and spiritual; one whose enmity was not random, or casual, or temporary, but went on steadily from age to age, and lasts down to this day, except so far as the Turk's decrepitude has at length disarmed anxiety and opposition. I have spoken of him already; of course I mean the Vicar of Christ. I mean the zealous, the religious enmity to every anti-Christian power, of him who has outlasted Zingis and Timour, who has outlasted Seljuk, who is now outlasting Othman. He incited Christendom against the Seljukians, and the Seljukians, assailed also by Zingis, sunk beneath the double blow. He tried to rouse Christendom against the Ottomans also, but in vain; and therefore in vain did Timour discharge his overwhelming, crushing force against them. Overwhelmed and crushed they were, but they revived. The Seljukians fell, in consequence of the united zeal of the great Christian commonwealth moving in panoply against them; the Ottomans succeeded by reason of its deplorable divisions, and its decay of faith and heroism.

2.

Whether indeed in the long run, and after all his disappointments and reverses, the Pope was altogether unsuccessful in his warfare against the Ottomans, we shall see by-and-by; but certainly, if perseverance merited a favourable issue, at least he has had a right to expect it. War with the Turks was his uninterrupted cry for seven or eight centuries, from the eleventh to the eighteenth; it is a solitary and singular event in the history of the Church. Sylvester the Second was the originator of the scheme of a union of Christian nations against them. St. Gregory the Seventh collected 50,000 men to repel them. Urban the Second actually set in motion the long crusade. Honorius the Second instituted the order of Knight Templars to protect the pilgrims from their assaults. Eugenius the Third sent St. Bernard to preach the Holy War. Innocent the Third advocated it in the august Council of the Lateran. Nicholas the Fourth negotiated an alliance with the Tartars for its prosecution. Gregory the Tenth was in the Holy Land in the midst of it, with our Edward the First, when he was elected Pope. Urban the Fifth received and reconciled the Greek Emperor with a view to its renewal. Innocent the Sixth sent the Blessed Peter Thomas the Carmelite to preach in its behalf. Boniface the Ninth raised the magnificent army of French, Germans, and Hungarians, who fought the great battle of Nicopolis. Eugenius the Fourth formed the confederation of Hungarians and Poles who fought the battle of Varna. Nicholas the Fifth sent round St. John Capistran to urge the princes of Christendom against the enemy. Callixtus the Third sent the celebrated Hunniades to fight with them. Pius the Second addressed to their Sultan an apostolic letter of warning and denunciation. Sixtus the Fourth fitted out a fleet against them. Innocent the Eighth made them his mark from the beginning of his Pontificate to the end. St. Pius the Fifth added the "Auxilium Christianorum" to our Lady's Litany in thankfulness for his victory over them. Gregory the Thirteenth with the same purpose appointed the Festival of the Rosary. Clement the Ninth died of grief on account of their successes. The venerable Innocent the Eleventh appointed the Festival of the Holy Name of Mary, for their rout before Vienna. Clement the Eleventh extended the Feast of the Rosary to the whole Church for the great victory over them near Belgrade. These are but some of the many instances which might be given; but they are enough for the purpose of showing the perseverance of the Popes.