Turkey In Europe E-Book

William Milligan Sloane

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A series of three articles, "Turkey In Europe," originally published in Political Science Quarterly, by American historian William Milligan Sloane (1850-1928), talks about the Balkans, an area of southeastern Europe which historically has been more under the influence of Moslem Turkey than other parts of Europe. 

Leseprobe

Turkey In Europe: Three Essays

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Three articles originally published in “Political Science Quarterly,” in the issues of June 1908, December 1911, and September 1912

About the Author

William Milligan Sloane (1850-1928) was an American educator and historian. He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, in 1868, and afterward was employed as instructor in classics at the Newell School in Pittsburgh until 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he studied at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, receiving a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, with a dissertation entitled “The Poet Labid: His Life, Times, and Fragmentary Writings,” which was published in 1877.

Sloane was a professor of Latin (1877-1883) and subsequently History (1883-1896) at Princeton University, when it was still known as the College of New Jersey. He resigned in 1896 to become Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University. Sloane served on the International Olympic Committee from 1894 to 1924. The founder and chairman of the United States Olympic Committee (known at the time as the American Olympic Committee), he escorted the first American Olympic team to 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens. Professor Sloane was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1911 president of the American Historical Association. His other honors were Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and of the Order of the Polar Star.

Chapter 1

Turkey in Europe: I

July 1908

THE EASTERNMOST of the three great peninsulas which project southward from continental Europe into the Mediterranean is at the present moment a historical laboratory. Almost every form of political and social experiment is there in progress. There are but few conceivable mixtures of human elements which have not been flung into the retort. Races, religions, languages, institutions, traditions, aspirations; governments, laws, administrations, tendencies; social forms, usages, occupations and organizations — every conception of man in social, political, and commercial relations may be concretely observed somewhere or another in that curious portion of the earth. Our fathers called it Turkey in Europe, and a part of it is still so designated by geographers. The Schoolboy of two generations ago bounded it by Austria, Russia, the Black Sea, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic seas. Unfortunately at that time there was a widespread and firm conviction that portions of the earth shown on the map by colored border lines were inhabited by peoples corresponding to the given designations: England by the English, France by the French, and so on.

Turkey, of course, whether in Europe or in Asia, was to the common mind inhabited by Turks. This conception, being utterly, radically false even then, has, like similar deceptions, persisted into our own day and still works immense harm. To those who constitute the overwhelming majority of western nations, Byzantium and the migrations of peoples in eastern Europe are matters either of the vaguest knowledge or, more commonly, of total ignorance. They are not aware that Turkey in Europe, entire, and Turkey in Asia, in part, are populated by peoples who, whatever they may be, are not Turks at all, having no slightest relation with their masters in blood, religion, institutions or aspirations. The human creature who boasts himself the plain man — the man on the street, who babbles about anything and everything and forms the self-styled public opinion with which intelligence is in perpetual warfare — this person of the majority says: Why of course the Turks should have Turkey; certainly; what business is it of others to meddle with a man in his own home?

Home, indeed! The beneficent occupation of a land makes it a homeland. The discovery and settlement of a misused territory makes it a home. We could even think of a home which had neither been conquered nor discovered, nor within historic times settled and occupied beneficently or otherwise, but which was merely a handful of people who had always been there. On the other hand, the commercial and political adventurer has no home where he dwells; the administrator of a trading factory has no home therein; the herdsman and nomad has no home in the wilds over which he roams. Even the great colonizers of the present world speak lovingly of England as home, though often they have made a wilderness to blossom a land to yield up its wealth, have founded a nation and established permanent, beneficent settlements. The idea of home is most complex, and in none of its many ingredients could it be tangential to the relation in which the Turks have stood to Turkey. They were not even conquerors, for the edifice they overthrew was already crumbling. When they occupied the Byzantine Empire they merely pitched their tents in successive camping places, wandering westward until, a little more than two centuries ago, they reached the walls of Vienna, where they met the first virile foe they had seen and were turned back. With certain oscillations they have been wandering backward ever since, slowly and steadily withdrawing under a rather gentle compulsion. They have withdrawn because others have exploited the lands which they occupied but never reduced to possession, from which they skimmed the surface opulence, while furnishing no sustenance to the processes which produced it. If the population of what is still called Turkey in Europe be, as is likely, about six millions, less than a third are Turks; and in those vast regions once under Turkish sway, the lands of Greece, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, there are virtually no Turks at all. They can live only as they find dumb, servile human cattle to herd, drive and slaughter. They are a stock which came from the upland steppes of Asia; they are careful now as always, when possible, to bury their dead across the Bosporus in the soil of Asia. From Asia they came, to Asia they return with little regret; and being a totally unhistoric people, it is doubtful whether centuries of European abode would in their future tradition be much more than a tale of Scheherazade.

Of primitive folk-stocks the Turk has retained nearly all the virtues, and they are many — so many as to make a normal Turkish gentleman a most agreeable and even lovable person. With his womankind uncontaminated by western notions; with his faith in Islam — a faith not native but acquired and inherited — undisturbed either by Arabic mysticism or occidental casuistry; with his pride of official rank and garb fully gratified or with scope for his unquestioned and oft-proven ability as a soldier, the Turk exhibits many fine qualities. It matters not that his salary as an official is never paid; there is the land of Baksheesh always open. It matters not that the shelter which we call his house is bare, rickety or in disrepair; is he not naturally a dweller in booths or tents? It matters not that his towns are filthy and unwholesome, that disease and death stalk abroad; his hour will strike only when fate ordains, as it would anyway. It matters not that there is plenty today and want tomorrow; such are the vicissitudes of life. If it rains, we are wet, that is all, but if the sun shines let us enjoy it; when battle is raging let us fight too, so Allah wills, and so on through the long range of human conditions and conduct. To apprehend a resignation that verges on apathy we must reverse almost every concept we have; in order to understand and do justice to the Turk, we need a fourth dimension. He is our antipodes. But he is domestic, hospitable within his possibilities, Companionable, interested in you and in such life as touches his interests; he has a dignity, a repose, a pleasant way which are delightful. Above all, strange as it may sound, he is the most tolerant of all human beings. There are in Turkey more faiths, sects, denominations and religions, more licenses in profession and behavior, than in any other territorial expanse of equal size. If only the adherents of these various cults pay, often and enough, and if only they do not in act, word or precept subvert existing rule and order, nothing else matters at all. Islam is the most democratic of all natural religions; there are no orders, no priestly intermediation, no governors, and no hierarchy of any sort. The naturally independent temper of the Turk is thus confirmed by his faith. There is the caliph, the padishah, the embodiment of theocratic power; and then there are all the rest, exalted or humbled, enriched or impoverished, preserved or destroyed, kept alive or killed, regulated in every relation of life by a power and conditions that affect all alike; birth, inheritance, fealty, no such mere accident counts in life at all. Tolerant and democratic — both in a contemptuous sort of way — the Turk is also in ordinary life a kindly, gentle soul. His women-folk are under no compulsion or discipline, he is generous to the very utmost; his slaves are scarcely aware of their bondage, so easy is the yoke. With divorce dependent upon his whim and accomplished by his own unfettered will, the rearrangement of domestic relations is so easy that social conditions are scarcely disturbed. A disordered mind makes its unhappy owner a public charge; beggars are humored, tolerated and supported by alms, especially the halt, the maimed and the blind; the dogs of Constantinople drive ladies from the sidewalks and make vehicles swerve by their sluggish inertia. Easy indifference and a liberal soul combine to make Turkish life a thing apart; a sort of genial inefficiency permeates it all. Yet beneath it is the volcano of indiscipline. Guile and the oiled feather first; then, if thwarted, fury and recklessness. Smooth promises with perpetual delay; then performance under compulsion with the Parthian arrows of atrocious bloodshed.

Some such characterization, however imperfect, is essential to any grasp of the first principles of Turkish rule. In the apogee of its extent and greatness, those who immigrated and seated themselves as the mighty were in a minority, as were the conquering Teutons in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. In the exercise of a fanaticism both physical and spiritual, they simply took what they found. The people on the soil were reduced to a dead level of peasant boorishness, the ruling class stripped land and people of all they dared to take without destroying the wellspring of supply. [Note: Just who and what these invading people or peoples were, just who and what the settled peoples were, it is not easy to determine.] The arbitrary childishness of Turkish behavior today is probably a fair sample of what it always has been. After years of contact with western ways they have, to be sure, acquired something of European shiftiness and duplicity, but it has served merely to strengthen their own naif rascality. My dragoman tells the customs inspector not to tumble the contents of my trunk; the police inspector discreetly turns his eye another way; the trunk is closed, and in a few moments the official comes trotting to receive his “gift,” which he divides with him of the blind eye. This is the whole system in miniature: the feint of honesty, the practice of roguery, a pretense of knowledge, the crassest ignorance in fact. The Ottoman Empire has army, navy, police, treasury, foreign office and all the paraphernalia of administration, internal and external. From beginning to end the whole machinery is an empty form, a mill that grinds no grist; and the palace clique or camarilla or kitchen cabinet, or a harem intrigue or the sultan’s wish determines the course of all affairs. The Parliament met once, was adjourned, and for the ensuing thirty years has never met again. It was not prorogued, it was merely adjourned; and so there is a constitution and a constitutional monarch — in name, as is all the rest. Warships float, but no one would risk the firing of a gun on board. When the United States grows restless in the demand for an indemnity due for the destruction of American property, a cruiser is ordered from some American shipyard; it arrives and anchors in the Golden Horn, where it ends its days in peace; the published price contents the Turks and seems, somehow, to cover the indemnity to us.