Turkish literature—Turkish proverbs—The literature of other Tartars—Legend of Turkish descent—The origin of the Turks—The Turks and Giougen—The Turks with the Eastern Empire—Arab subjection of the Turks—The Turks and Western civilization—The Turkish Navy—The Sultan’s Army—The lines of Chatalja—The refugees—View from the Mosque of Mihrama—The Mosque of Mohammed the Conqueror—The care of the sick and wounded.

THE history of the Turks has formed the subject of much scientific research, hampered considerably by a want of material, by a lack of information on the subject, handed down from earlier days. The Turks themselves have no liking for literature, have no bent in that direction, and all they have ever produced in that line are a series of stories relating the doings and sayings of Nasreddin Hodja, whose r?le is much like that of Till Eulenspiegel in Germany. These stories of Nasreddin Effendi are humorous in their way, but are to a great extent too indecent for the fastidious Western mind. The humour, too, is of the obvious order, from which the West is gradually, painfully emerging. I will give only one sample of Nasreddin’s wit. This worthy was awakened one night by a noise in his garden. He went to the open window, looked out, and saw something large and white moving about below. Nasreddin took down his bow, his quiver full of arrows, and sent one in the direction of the white object, then returned to bed and to sleep. The next morning he went out into his garden to ascertain the cause of the nocturnal disturbance, and discovered his shirt, hung out to dry, transfixed by the arrow. “How fortunate{142} it is that I was not inside that shirt last night,” quoth Nasreddin.

Proverbs give some idea of the working of a people’s soul, but in this respect too the Turk is not very prolific, certainly not original. Herewith a few samples:
Ei abdal! Ei dervish! Aktché ilé biter beriche.
Freely translated: Oh, monk! Oh, dervish! money will take you anywhere!

The sentiment has nothing to recommend it, and is certainly better expressed by La Fontaine:
Quelles affaires ne fait point
Ce malheureux métal, l’argent ma?tre du monde.

Or again:
Abdel Sekkédé, hadji Mekkédé.
(The monk to the convent, the pilgrim to Mecca.)

Also to be found in other languages:
Chasseur dans les bois, voyageur sur la route,
Les hommes, commes les mots n’out de prix qu’à leur place.
(Pariset.)

Or the simpler German:
Schuster bleib’ bei deiner Leiste.

There are no epics in the Turkish language, yet their wanderings should have called forth some such ebullition had they ever had some slight tendency to rise out of their primordial inarticulateness. They have little songs which the Anatolian peasants sing when the day’s work is done, which sound through the latticed windows of the women’s secluded chambers. But these songs are generally of love or homely matter, and do not tend to inspire the listener with ambition to emulate the deeds of his fathers for the honour and glory of his race and country. Other races emerging from barbarism to this day sing of their national heroes. What traveller along the lower reaches of the Danube has not listened to those bands of wandering Tsigani?

Then again, the Highlands of Scotland ring still with the recital of some great clan leader’s doughty deeds. True, they are mostly tales of strife and bloodshed, but they hold the germs of history and record it in the manner{143} most likely to lead others to higher aims. Of all this the Turk knows nothing. No epic tells of those days when his wild forebears left the congeries of nomad tribes which haunted the hunting-grounds north of the Hwang-Ho, of Tibet, and the rolling plains beyond the Hindu-Kush. Mongol and Manchu, Tartar and Magyar, forming groups of nomad tribes, akin and possibly speaking the same primitive language, which, when history became articulate, only differed in vocabulary, hardly at all in structure, as it does so widely from Aryan and Chinese. Of these races Manchu and Tartar have risen to greatness; Manchu till recently reigned over China from Peking, while one Osmanli, descendant of a wandering Tartar tribe, sits in the seat of former Roman Emperors of the East. The Finns, belonging to the same race, have in the course of centuries developed a literature of a high order, and are among the most enlightened of the children of the Tsar of all the Russias; Hungary’s history lives in glowing epics and passionate song; and both these scions of the same stock are valuable factors in the ?sthetic life of Europe. But the Manchus have fled from Peking after centuries of dark incompetence, and the Sultan, whose palace stands on the European banks of the Bosphorus, has during his short reign seen the provinces won by the sword of Othman torn from him by younger nations, whose soul has been nourished by stirring recital of their former greatness, whose heroes live in song and epic, which by these puts heart into the warrior and leads him on to victory.

Now those young nations are without the gates of Constantinople; they have reduced the Turkish Empire in Europe to a narrow strip of land between the Bosphorus and a line of defences, stretching from the Sea of Marmora to the Black Sea, the lines of Chatalja.

The Turks themselves claim descent from Japheth, the{144} son of Noah, as do the Armenians, by the way, and there is no reason to dispute with them about their traditional ancestor, who, by all accounts, was a most respectable person, and will serve as well as any other for genealogical mystification. Undoubtedly the Turks and their origin began to attract attention comparatively early in the history of Europe, and an English historian (Knolles) of the seventeenth century writes of them as follows: “The glorious empire of the Turks, the present terrour of the world, hath amongst other things nothing in it more wonderful or strange than the poor beginning of itself, so small and obscure as that it is not well knowne unto themselves, or agreed upon even among the best writers of their histories; from whence this barbarous nation that now so triumpheth over the best part of the world, first crept out and took their beginning. Some (after the manner of most nations) derive them from the Trojans, led thereunto by the affinity of the word Turci and Teucri; supposing (but with what probability I know not) the word Turci, or Turks, to have been made of the corruption of the word Teucri, the common name of the Trojans.”

Others have ingeniously endeavoured to identify the Turks with the lost “Ten Tribes”; these mysterious people have frequently been called upon to act as ancestors to modern nations. I remember well an English matron, mother of a promising family, who tried to foist this ancestry upon the people of Great Britain. However, she was advised to look at her domestic treasures, and the sight of her snub-nosed offspring seriously shook her strange belief.

Perhaps, though it seems no adequate reason, the constant infusion of fresh blood, the mixing by marriage with the women of conquered or conquerors, has prevented a national expression of sentiment based on historic facts, and the Turks, even before they emerged from distant{145} Asia, had absorbed several other races not akin to them, or had been absorbed by some temporarily more powerful nation. There is sufficient reason to suppose that the Iranians, the original inhabitants of Bokhara, were the foundation and predominant note in the tribes which after a while became defined as Turks. The Chinese seem to have been the first to become acquainted with the Turks, and that so long ago as 1300 B.C. Chinese records of 300 B.C. mention a warlike race called Hiung-nu. Vigorous, active, restless, always on horseback, these savages hovered round the frontiers of the Celestial Empire. They were, it seems, divided into tribes, which when not acting in concert on some greater raid, probably behaved much as Scottish clans did not so long ago, and quarrelled and fought amongst each other. So it appears that a clan called the Asena sought the protection of a stronger one, which Gibbon called the Giougen, or Jwen-jwen. The Asena settled for a while in the district where now stands Shan-tan, in which district a hill called Dürk? (helmet), from its shape, is said to have originated the name “Turk.”

In course of time, about a century, the Asena began to feel their strength and tried it on their hosts, the result a massacre of Giougen and their disappearance from the pages of history. Again no epic tells us the stirring story of those days, and what is known is due to the researches of men like Chavannes and E. H. Parker. But the Turks from this time came into the field of history and into the purview of the West; they had gained in strength and importance with astounding rapidity, and were making their presence felt on the nations to westward of their former haunts. They still clung to their habits of nomadic hunters, but, it seems, engaged in trade as well, carrying goods for others in their caravans, connecting East and West with links of doubtful trustiness.{146}

It was through this trading that they first came into contact with the Western world. Persia stood in the way of this young Turkey’s commercial development, and would insist on Turkish silks finding their outlet to the Persian Gulf rather than by the roads of the old Roman Empire of the East. Thus it came that Turkish envoys sought out Emperor Justin at Constantinople. The Emperor was somewhat chary of dealing with these strangers, but little more than half a century later Turkish warriors were assisting Heraclius against the Persians. As the Turks increased in number they felt the need of further expansion, so a section of them made its way north towards Lake Baikal and menaced China, but were subdued in 630. China then set about creating ill-feeling between the two sections of the Turkish people, the northern and the western tribes, and brought about a division which seems to have been final. In the meantime another force had arisen in Asia Minor which was destined to overrun that district, surge into Syria, conquer Egypt and the African countries washed by the Mediterranean Sea, and send its tide up against the barriers of the Pyrenees.

The Arabs had come from out of the desert and, fired by the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, had carried their green banner victorious over the ruins of former Empires. The Caliphate, the Arab Empire, grew as rapidly under the immediate successors of the Prophet as the Turkish State, if it could be so called, had done a century before. Persia went under before the furious onslaught of the Arabs in 639, and the conquerors overflowing into Transoxania had subjected the peoples living there by 714. The Arabs spread westward as well, and only forty-six years after the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, in the seventh century the Sea of Marmora was alive with the lateen sails of the swarthy marauders.{147} They dashed out their souls against the strong defences of Constantinople, the Walls of Theodosius, in successive attempts to capture the City of fabulous wealth, but were forced to retire defeated. However, the Turks, who nearly ten centuries later broke down those stout defences, became subject to the Caliphate.

This applies to the Western Turks only; they vanished as a political entity and gradually became converted to a creed well suited to bring out the qualities of a high-spirited, martial race of nomads. It sanctified their lust of blood and conquest, and gave fuller force to this people’s fighting spirit by imposing the strict discipline of Islam, “obedience,” but made no mention of that broad tolerance breathed by the Founder of Christianity to which the West owes so much of its civilization. It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes, if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam, would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has learnt nothing. This people, still nomad, has taken nothing from the West but a misunderstood, misapplied idea of representative Government which failed at its inception and has hastened the downfall of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It has absorbed nothing but a dim idea of a military organization which when applied to a civilized, cultured nation makes for military perfection, when attempted on nomads leads to such debacles as the plains of Thessaly, the mountainous districts of Macedonia, and the stricken fields of Thrace have recently witnessed.{148}

British naval officers have for years been acting as instructors to the Turkish Navy, which from a collection of obsolete iron tanks has to outward appearance assumed the semblance of a war fleet; left to themselves, what has that fleet done to help Turkey in her present straits? The Greek Navy is afloat and preventing transhipment of Turkish troops from Asia Minor—but the Sultan’............