CHAPTER XXIII
THE TURKS IN EUROPE
I have now tried to tell you the story--up to the year 1500 and the beginning of that century which was to see the new birth of learning and the reformation in the Church--of the way in which most of the countries of Europe settled down nearly into the shape in which we see them now, or see them in maps made before the Great War. There remains one corner of the picture, the south-eastern corner, which we still have to look at; and there we find that a people entirely strange to Europe entered into possession during the fifteenth century. That people were the Ottoman Turks who had succeeded to the rule of the Mahommedan world, which they had wrested from their own kinsmen the Seljuk Turks.
The story of this branch of the Turkish nation is the common story of a people coming West by reason of pressure of other tribes from the East. Mongols, from the borders of China, seem to have been the oppressors, from the East, of the Ottomans.
Before the middle of the thirteenth century they were settled near Angora, in what was then called the Kingdom of Rum. It was in the possession of the Seljuk Turks. But the Seljuk kingdom was breaking up. The Greeks of the Eastern Empire were attacking it heavily. The Ottomans, perhaps a hardier people than the Seljuks, because they had more lately been leading the nomadic, wandering life, supported their {219} kinsmen and hosts, and it ended in the Ottomans becoming the leaders of the Turks in Asia Minor. The Greeks were only a little more united and efficient than the Seljuks, and before the middle of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had the whole of Asia Minor in their hands.
Their fighting force was much increased by the formation of a standing army, called the Janissaries. They numbered some 12,000 at this time, though this number was more than quadrupled in later centuries. The force was chiefly composed of Christian captives. But these troops had such large privileges allowed them that there was no difficulty in filling their ranks.
[Sidenote: Mayors of the Palace]
And then happened that which we have seen occurring again and again in course of the story. Just as the Vandals were invited into Africa, just as the Moslems were invited into Spain, and just as both these guests stayed a great deal longer and made themselves much more at home than their hosts had expected, so now the Ottomans were invited into Europe to assist the Mayor of the Palace, as he was called, in Constantinople, who had seized the Government. This title of Mayor of the Palace, for the chief officer or prime minister, was taken from the Frankish court. The power of these Mayors of the Palace became, as we have seen, very great among the Franks, and the office often passed from father to son. The first of the Capets had been Mayor of the Palace to the last Carolingian.
The Ottomans accepted the invitation. They crossed into Europe. They established the usurper on the throne. They drove his enemies right up into the Balkans. And, for the time being, they returned to their own land. But they had learnt that this corner of Europe was a desirable territory and that it was undefended by any effective force. Bulgarians, {220} Serbians, Bosnians, and Albanians held the lands, or nearly those same lands, that you will see marked under their names on any map of Europe made before the Great War. By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had overrun all these countries and had organised them under Turkish rule. They had taken Adrianople, the city of second importance in the Eastern Empire. They had spread terror westerly in Europe by a great victory won over a Christian army of twice the number of the Ottoman force at Kossovo. and again by a victory, in which many crusading knights were killed, at Nicopolis. At the very end of the century they were besieging Constantinople itself: but for a while the capital of the Empire was delivered from their hands. Partly by the stubborn courage of the besieged forces in the city, partly by bribery, and partly by a new danger appearing on the eastern border of their own kingdom in Asia, they were induced to raise the siege.
The new danger came, as ever, from the east. It was really Timur, or Tamerlane, with his Tartar hordes, who saved Constantinople, the capital city of Eastern Christendom, for another half-century from the Turks.
[Sidenote: Turks take Constantinople]
The Tartars came in irresistible numbers. They swept over nearly all Asia Minor and down into Egypt where the Caliph, the religious head of Mohammedanism, ruled. And then, as always before, they went back again. The ravaged countries were left to recover as best they could, and the Ottomans resumed their campaign in Europe.
Constantinople, again besieged in 1422, was again saved for a while by the appearance of a rival claimant to the Sultanship of Turkey. But the Turks pushed northwards into Hungary, where the Hungarians opposed them with a resolute resistance. Battles were fought with varying result, until, again on the fatal battlefield of Kossovo, the Moslem won another great {221} victory. The siege of Constantinople was recommenced with more vigour than ever. In 1453 the long-deferred end came. The city was taken by assault. The Christian Church of St. Sophia became the Moslem mosque.
There is little more to say, to complete the story of the Turks in this south-eastern corner of Europe. They did not rest content with their conquests, but were constantly pushing northward and westward. The Christian nations generally, but by no means always, united to oppose them. They fought their conquering way as far north as Poland, and for a while we find Poland in alliance with the Moslem power. Yet fighting broke out afresh, and a large portion of Poland was laid waste. Peace was again made between the two in the first year of the sixteenth century, and it was a peace that had some permanence, but it enlarged still further the bounds of the Turkish possessions.
In the midst of all this fighting by land in Europe, the Turks had found leisure to attend to naval matters and to the building and outfit of a large fleet. And with a fleet thus in constant readiness for action in the eastern waters of the Mediterranean Sea, there was one power, at least, with which it was certain to come into collision--the great naval power of Venice.
Ever since the fourth Crusade in which Constantinople had been taken, largely by the aid of the Venetian navy, Venice had held many of the islands in the Ægean Sea and had a hold on cities on the Levantine coast.
She was not the only Italian State, as we have seen, to be powerful at sea. There was Genoa, on the western side of the peninsula. We have also seen why the situation of Venice was the more favourable--because she looked eastward, and so was the gate by which the wealth of the East came into Western Europe. {223} It was largely by the help of the Genoese navy that the Greeks had retaken Constantinople, in 1261, from the Latins. Naval encounters between the fleets of these two rival Italian States were many during the next century and a half. Now one had the victory and now the other. But always the greater resources and wealth were on the side of Venice.
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[Illustration: GENOA]
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Nevertheless she was very hardly beset about the year 1380. Her main fleet had been beaten, the navy of Genoa held her blockaded by sea, and the enemy State of Padua prevented provisions coming to her by land. She was in imminent danger of starvation.
And then the Genoese fleet suffered just that disaster which the Athenian fleet had suffered in its blockade of Syracuse. The Venetians contrived to block the waterway which gave entrance and exit to the lagoon in which the blockading ships of the Genoese lay. They found themselves entrapped precisely as they had proposed to trap the Venetians, and finally had to surrender and hand over the greater part of their fleet. It was a disaster from which Genoa never recovered, and Venice was left mistress of the Mediterranean.
She was mistress, almost without dispute, until the Turkish navy was sufficiently strong to oppose her. The first war between them which went on for fifteen years from 1464, was indecisive, but it ended with Venice paying tribute to Turkey for her trading rights. Venice had no friends. She had been nearly starved out by Padua, lying just inland of her own territory; and lest this should happen to her again she had fought, and fought with success, to add to her mainland territory. Therefore she had not a neighbour with whom she was not on terms of enmity. All were jealous of her and all feared her.
Thus it happened that in the very last year of the fifteenth century, when war with Turkey broke out {224} again, we see the curious spectacle of the Pope himself, of the Emperor, and of the rulers of three other great states of Italy, Naples, Florence, and Milan, all, in some degree, favouring the Turkish and Moslem Sultan in his fight against the Italian and Christian ruler of Venice. Less than fifty years earlier, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the Pope had imposed and endeavoured to collect a tax of one-tenth of the value of all benefices--or of all paid offices in the Church--in order to raise a force to evict the Turks. But now he had come to regard the Moslem Turk as a less dangerous enemy than the Venetian Christian.
In that final year, moreover, the Turks gained their first really crippling naval victory over the Venetians at Sapienza; and for Venice it was the beginning of the end of her great power.
Thus at the opening of the sixteenth century we find the Turk established nearly as far in Europe as it was his destiny to plant himself. He had all that country of the Balkans which various races of the Slavs had held before him and which they again now hold, after him; and he had parts of what before, and also later again, were Austria. Therefore of those Balkans and of those Austrian provinces, he was in no more than temporary possession.
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