The Turk In Europe And His Stay There.

New York Times 100 years ago today, January 26, 1913:
More Than 600 Years of Misrule, Destruction, Robbery, and Murder.
NO CIVILIZING ADVANCE
He Came Out of the East to Plunder and Remained to Preserve the "Balance of Power."
    For the Osmanlis, or Turks as we call them, the Koran has been an excuse; never an inspiration. The inspiration is to be found in the ruins of Bagdad and Cordova and in the beautiful walls of the Alhambra and other remains of Moorish artistry; in the chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics that have come down to us from the Arabs; in the still living traditions of the schools of Tartary, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Northern Africa; in the great library at Cairo. The Koran guided the hand of the Saracenic weaver and potter, the pen of the poet and story teller, and tempered the blades of Damascus and Toledo.
    The excuse of the Koran is to be found in the chronicles of the Turks, who have torn down where others — Saracen, Jew, and Christian — had built up; who have lived by the talents and industry of others and inhabited the buildings constructed by their toil and genius; who have never written, a book, carved a statue, or painted a picture or done anything for the advancement of mankind in the arts or sciences; who have robbed and murdered without even the saving grace of an ideal.
    According, to the late Max Müller the Turk possesses all the, characteristics of a non-governing people and the misfortune of having been forced to exert them, in spite of himself, for the last five Centuries. This paradox seems to explain much.
    Who are the Turks? Why did they enter Europe? What have they done there?
    We first hear of them about six centuries after the Hegira as coming from Central Asia, driven from their lands by the Mongol invasion. They soon absorbed the Seljukian Turks, who a couple of centuries before — at about the time of the Norman conquest — had captured Bagdad and then Jerusalem, and had given to their chief or caliph the title of Commander of the Faithful. Then we hear of them founding an empire under Othman. (1299-1326) and taking from him the name of Ottoman. His son Orchan created the famous troops known as the Janizaries, and with them, having destroyed the roots of industry in Asia Minor, he crossed the Hellespont in 1365 — the first Turk to occupy European soil.
    The Turk has never been a hunter of game, manufacturer, or merchant. He was not in those days. He stayed in a place until he had exacted the last ration from the surviving inhabitants and then moved on. The grandson of Orchan captured Adrianople from the Greeks; his great-grandson, in 1396, defeated the soldiers of Hungary, massed to intercept his march westward, and ravaged Greece; he was checked finally by being attacked in his rear by another warrior from the East, the romantic Tamerlane, or Timur the Tartar.
    In the half century that followed, the Turks settled down over what to-day is being taken from them by Montenegrin, Serb, Bulgarian, and Greek, and turned the people of this territory into slaves. At the end of that half century Mohammed II., with more than 250,000 men laid siege to Constantinople and battered its walls with cannon — then used in large size for the first time. Then fell Constantine, the last of the Caesars, sword in hand, and with him the Byzantine Empire, which had lasted for more than a thousand years. The crescent was raised to the place whence the cross had been flung down on the dome of St. Sophia. This was in 1453.
    For a century the fate of all Europe rested in the balance. The Turk under Solyman the Magnificent carried his conquests throughout the Aegean, subdued all Northern Africa, taking it from his coreligionists, as far as Morocco, and beyond; devastated Hungary and parts of Austria, and in 1529 appeared under the walls of Vienna, 300,000 strong. There he was defeated by 60,000 Germans, conspicuously aided by a Polish Prince with a few thousand of his countrymen.
    From that time the Turkish Empire in Europe has been gradually contracting, while the Slavs and their Greek allies, who to-day are pushing the Turk backward into the chaos of Asia whence he sprung, have ever formed the bulwark between him and Christian Europe, between a degenerate and a progressive civilization.
    In the reign of Solyman the Turk passed through a transitory stage of partial civilization. He adopted something of the ways of the people whom he had conquered. Laws were established and certain relations for the first time were entered into with foreign States. In 1535 France had the honor of sending the first Christian Ambassador to Constantinople. His name was Jean de La Forêt, and he was a Knight of St. John of Jerusalem. Gradually a truce was made between Turkey and the people north of the Danube. Then the Turk turned his attention to the territory north of the Black Sea, and for more than three centuries has waged periodic conflict with the Russian.
    In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Turkey, which, meantime, had learned something of seacraft, with her ships manned by hordes of Christian slaves, tried to attack Western Europe from the Mediterranean, with and sometimes without the aid or her coreligionists in North Africa. The Venetians barred the paths of the Mediterranean just as the French, Teutons, and Slavs had barred the passes of the Bohemian and Moravian Alps and the Carpathians.
    At the battle of Lepanto, Oct. 7, 1571, 200 Venetian galleys aided by some Spanish, French, and Austrian ships, in which nearly every noble house in Christendom had a representative, practically wiped out for this time the Turkish navy; and from the wrecks of the Turkish ships, amid the 20,000 corpses that littered them, were rescued more than 8,000 Christian slaves. In that strange battle — the first and the last in which Christian Powers really united to keep back the Turk — the English sailor, Sir Richard Grenville, fought side by side with the Spanish poet, Cervantes. After Lepanto, Venice was left by Western Europe to keep back the Turk alone. Of this task, Molmenti, the historian of Venice, has written:
    The ever memorable sacrifice of Venice who felt within herself, her ships, her treasure, her noblest blood, was watched with indifference by the great powers, who lent her slight and inefficient aid; and, while the banner of San Marco was borne through hecatombs of slaughter in Eastern waters, the flags of other nations, profiting by the great distress of their great rival, invaded other seas and enlarged the borders of their commerce. The Turks, who never a moment wavered in their resolve to storm Candia, made a supreme effort against the walls of the city in 1667; the rain of shot carried death into the citadel and strewed the streets with the slain. And yet Candia held out. In the space of five months we hear of thirty-two assaults, seventeen sorties. 618 mines exploded, 3,600 Venetian troops and 20,000 Turks laid low.
    At length the Cretan city, a heap of ruins, surrendered; but from those ruins and from the mouths of the gallant defenders who were dragged away into slavery there arose appeals for vengeance, which Venice heard while all Western Europe remained deaf — just as they did two centuries later to the cries of the tortured from Armenia and Macedonia.
    Western Europe found it cheaper to buy off the Turk than sacrifice lives. Tribute has been paid ever since, whether it has consisted of money or pledges, to maintain the existence of the Turk in Europe.
    A map engraved in 1650 shows Turkey possessing the whole of the Balkan peninsula, a large part of what is now Austria-Hungary, the Crimea, and the greater part of the northern shores of the Black Sea, together with vast territory in Asia Minor, with which we are not at the moment concerned. The greatest aid to the Turk in maintaining his supremacy in the Balkans was the spirit of religious controversy which obtained there among the Albanians, Rumanians, Hungarians, Greeks, and Slavs, the traditions of which have been forgotten only to-day in making war upon their common foe.
    North and northwest of the peninsula, however, Christianity became a bond of more fruitful union. By the Treaty of Karlovicz in 1699, the Sultan lost Transylvania and the country between the Danube and the Theiss, and handed over the Morea to the Venetians, Podolia and the Ukraine to Poland, and Azov to Russia. Then began a century of exchanges, Turkey recovering Azov and Morea, losing and recovering part of Servia and Walachia, so that at the close of the eighteenth century the Turks had withdrawn on the northeast to the line of the Dneister, and on the northwest to the Danube, although the Sultan still ruled over Moldavia, Walachia, Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and the whole peninsula to the south, including, of course, Greece and the Archipelago.
    With the, opening of the nineteenth century the contraction of Turkey became rapid and steady. Again and again the completeness of this contraction threatened to wipe Turkey off the map of Europe, but as many times was the ultimate averted by the powers, who still continued to pay to the Sultan the tribute of preserving his existence.
    In 1817 Servia obtained her semi-freedom, and in 1829 Greece, after a long and memorable struggle, formed a separate kingdom — under the protection of those very powers which were also saving the Turk from total annihilation in Europe. Moldavia and Walachia became Danubian principalities under Turkish suzerainty in 1858, and twenty years later shook themselves free from Turkey and united under the title of the Kingdom of Rumania. At this same date, and as one of the results of the contemporaneous Russo-Turkish war and the Treaty of Berlin, Russia acquired Bessarabia and Rumania, Dobruja.
    The independence of the principality of Montenegro was acknowledged, for the Turk in truth had never entirely subdued the dwellers of the Black Mountain. Servia also gained her independence, and in 1882 was declared a kingdom. Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia became autonomous provinces, under the Sultan's suzerainty, but in 1885 were united, and technically known down to four years ago as Northern and Southern Bulgaria — "an autonomous tributary principality, with a national Christian government and a native militia."
    Events of the last four years in the Balkans can be traced to the failure of the Turk to carry out Article XXIII. of the Berlin Treaty of 1878, which provided for the establishment of an autonomous province, under a Christian governor in Macedonia, the consequent violation of other clauses in the Treaty by Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, and Montenegro, and the internal dissensions among the Turks themselves through the attempt of The Young Turk Party and its political instrument, the Committee of Union and Progress, to establish a constitutional government.
    While Turkey was in the throes of political transition the principalities of both Bulgaria and Montenegro became kingdoms, the former establishing her complete independence of Turkey, and Austria-Hungary formally annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. The forcing of a Constitution upon Abd-ul-Hamid, the suppression of the reactionists who tried to return him to his ancient absolute power, his final dethronement, and the complete victory of the Parliamentary Party were events which were viewed with the utmost satisfaction by the great powers and by the civilized world in general. Under a popular government it was believed that the Turk would soon be in a position to take his place among civilized nations.
    Much was written about the emancipation of the Turkish women, about the revival of education, about the things that the free Turks would soon accomplish in the fields of industry and commerce. A committee of the British Parliament was invited, to visit the seat of the new government. It left Stamboul filled with glowing descriptions of new Turkey, and these descriptions were soon spread Broadcast through periodicals and newspapers.
    But what had been seen and written about was only on the surface — a surface constructed by the Greek and Jewish elements in the Turkish body politic. Beneath the Turk remained the same, always the same. He had merely permitted the surface of seeming advancement and progress to cover him for the time as a hostage to the powers to leave him alone. The atrocities in Armenia and Macedonia continued. The keeping of Article XXIII. of the Berlin Treaty became more remote than ever.
    A word about these atrocities, which will bring into lurid relief the parasitic character of the Turk: In Armenia the industrious natives loaned money to the Turks to embark in various pursuits. When no more could be borrowed on the security offered word was passed to the Kurdish tribes that "the harvest was ripe," and the Kurds came and wiped out the creditors. What remained was the spoil of the debtors and the soldiers who were sent to drive back the Kurds. This procedure was repeated with varying amplifications through a long period of years. Never was the Sultan loath to heed the cry of Christendom to punish the Kurds. Nor did he hesitate incidentally to punish an official now and then whose hand had been too obvious in the game.
    For years Macedonia has been the cockpit of the Balkans. Around it the Montenegrins, Serbs, and Greeks never, even under the most despotic rule from Constantinople, quite lost their traditions of self-government. Here are a great number of nationalities — Bulgarians, Greeks, Jews, Rumanians, and Turks — which foster racial antagonism, constantly stimulated among the non-Turks by the almost open war between the Exarch of Bulgaria and the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church. Before the Macedonians became the slaves of the Turks they were the serfs of the Greeks. In their land the evil work of the Turk has found its fullest expression as a destroyer of life and property, as a scourge of mind and body. Of late years the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee working under Bulgarian auspices has done much to unite this heterogeneous mass of human beings — this wrack left behind by successive waves of migration and conquest.
    But after one has learned the answers to the various questions as to the Turk's mission in Europe, there are still others: Why in the name of progressive civilization has he been permitted to remain there? Why have his fables of reform been so often accepted as truth?
    The answer is to be found in one term, as ancient as European diplomacy: "The balance of power."
    The maintenance of the integrity of Turkey in Europe has long been acknowledged officially by the Powers to be a vital necessity — not because any particular nation desires to befriend the Turks for themselves, nor from any philanthropic motives whatever, but solely because the downfall of the Turkish Empire would mean a disruption of the relative strength of the mutual bond on which reposes the peace of Europe. England and France did not join against Russia in the Crimea out of sympathy for the Turk, nor was the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 brought to a close by the Powers through similar philanthropic motives, but merely because a conquest of Turkey by Russia would destroy the delicate equilibrium of Western Europe. Could anything be more offensive to Russia than to have her Black Sea fleet shut out from the Mediterranean, as it is by the Treaty of Berlin, in which the sacredness of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles is guaranteed to Turkey by the Powers?
    Aside from the Russian force tending to destroy this equilibrium there is another, the Austro-Hungarian. But while Russia would gain access to the Eastern Mediterranean by the destruction of the Turkish Empire, Austria-Hungary would leave Turkey as a rampart against Russia on the east and force her way through the heterogeneous mass of Macedonia to the coast of the Aegean or the Strait of Otranto. Austria would like the territory north of Greece as a Slavonic appendage to her German and Magyar nationalities. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Austro-Hungarian scheme finds more sympathy in the chancelleries of Western Europe than does the Russian, which seems now nearing a condition of realization through the signal victories of the arms of the Balkan League.
    But, suppose, in the light of the almost inevitable removal of the Turk from the map of Europe, that Russia and Austria-Hungary should combine their interests? Neither the Triple Alliance nor the Triple Entente could support the strain. Moreover, there is no assurance that the Balkan League, when once more at peace, would be able to govern the various races and creeds to which it would fall heir any better than the Turk. More than fifty years ago Lord Palmerston foresaw the present day. Assuming that the extinction of the Turk in Europe was a "fait accompli," he wrote of the readjusting forces:
    There are no sufficient elements for a Christian State in European Turkey capable of performing its functions as a component part of the European system. The Greeks are a small minority, and could not be the governing race. The Slavonians, who are the majority, do not possess the conditions necessary for becoming the bone and sinew of a new State. A reconstruction of Turkey means neither more nor leas than its subjection to Russia, direct or indirect, immediate or for a time delayed,
    A peaceful readjustment of the unique conditions produced to-day in Turkey depend — to develop one point in Lord Palmerston's prophecy — on whether the victorious nations of the league will be more grateful to Russia, which has constantly, although covertly, encouraged their enterprises, or to Western Europe, which has just as constantly, but more openly, held on them a restraining hand.