HISTORY OF GREECE UNDER OTHOMAN AND VENETIAN DOMINATION. AD. 1453 — 1821

 

CHAPTER I.

 

The Political and Military Organization of the Othoman Empire, by which the Greeks were RETAINED IN SUBJECTION. A.D. 1453-1684.

 

The conquest of Greece by Mohammed II was felt to be a boon by the greater part of the population. The government of the Greek emperors of the family of Palaeologos, of their relations the despots in the Morea, and of the Frank princes and Venetian signors, had for two centuries rendered Greece the scene of incessant civil wars and odious oppression. The Mohammedan government put an end to the injustice of the petty tyrants, whose rapacity and feuds divided, impoverished, and depopulated the country. When Mohammed II annexed the Peloponnesus and Attica to the Othoman empire, he deliberately exterminated all remains of the existing aristocracy, both Frank nobles and Greek archonts, and introduced in their place a Turkish aristocracy, as far as such a class existed in his dominions. The ordinary system of the Othoman administration was immediately applied to the greater part of Greece, and it was poverty, and not valour, which exempted a few mountainous districts from its application.

Saganos Pasha was appointed by Mohammed II governor of the Morea and the duchy of Athens, but garrisons of the sultan’s regular troops were stationed in a few of the strongest fortresses, under officers independent of the pasha’s authority. The general defence of the country and the maintenance of order among the inhabitants was intrusted to Saganos, who was intrusted with complete control over the revenue necessary for that purpose. The arbitrary power of the pasha, and the license of the regular garrisons, were restrained by the timariot system. The feudal usages, which the earliest Othoman sultans had inherited with their first possessions in the Seljouk empire, were introduced by Mohammed II into Greece, as the natural manner of retaining the rural population under his domination. Large tracts of land in the richest plains having reverted to the government as belonging to the confiscated estates of the princes and nobles, a certain proportion of this property was divided into liferent fiefs, which were conferred on veteran warriors who had merited rewards by distinguished service. These fiefs were called timars, and consisted of a life-interest in lands, of which the Greek and Albanian cultivators sometimes remained in possession of the exclusive right of cultivation within determined limits, and under the obligation of paying a fixed revenue, and performing certain services for the Mussulman landlord. The timariot was bound to serve the sultan on horseback with a number of well-appointed followers, varying according to the value of his fief. These men had no occupation, and no thought but to perfect themselves in the use of their arms, and for a long period they formed the best light cavalry in Europe. The timars were granted as military rewards, and were not hereditary while the system continued to exist in its ancient purity. The veteran soldiers who held these fiefs in Greece were bound to the sultan by many ties. They looked forward to advance­ment to the larger estates called ziamets, or to gaining the rank of sandjak-beg, or commander of a timariot troop of horse. This class was consequently firmly attached to the central authority of the Othoman sultan, and constituted a check both on the ambitious projects and local despotism of powerful pashas, and on the rebellious disposition of the Christian population. The rich rewards granted by Mohammed II to his followers drew numerous bands of Turkoman and Seljouk volunteers to his armies from Asia Minor, who came to Europe, well mounted and armed, to seek their fortunes as warlike emigrants. His brilliant conquests enabled him to bestow rich lands on many of these volunteers, while their own valour gained for them abundant booty during his unceasing wars. Many of these adventurers were established in Greece after its conquest, and they were always ready to take the field against the Christians, both as a religious duty and as a means of acquiring slaves, whom, according to their qualifications, they might send to their own harems, to their farms, or to the slave-market. The timariots of the Othoman empire, like the feudal nobility of Europe, required a servile race to cultivate the land. Difference of religion in Turkey created the distinction of rank which pride of birth perpetuated in feudal Europe. But the system was in both cases equally artificial; and the permanent laws of man’s social existence operate unceasingly to destroy every distinctive privilege which separates one class of men as a caste from the rest of the community, in violation of the immutable principles of equity. Heaven tolerates temporary injustice committed by individual tyrants to the wildest excesses of iniquity; but history proves that Divine Providence has endowed society with an irrepressible power of expansion, which gradually effaces every permanent infraction of the principles of justice by human legislation. The laws of Lycurgus expired before the Spartan state, and the corps of janissaries possessed more vitality than the tribute of Christian children.

The Turkish feudal system was first introduced into Thessaly by Bayezid I, about the year 1397, when he sent Evrenos to invade the Peloponnesus. He invested so large a number of Seljouk Turks with landed estates, both in Macedonia and Thessaly, that from this period a powerful body of timariots was ever ready to assemble, at the sultan’s orders, to invade the southern part of Greece. Murad II extended the system to Epirus and Acarnania, when he subdued the possessions of Charles Tocco, the despot of Arta; and Mohammed II rendered all Greece subject to the burden of maintaining his feudal cavalry. The governmental division of Greece and the burdens to which it was subjected, varied so much at different times, that it is extremely difficult to ascertain the exact amount of the timariots settled in Greece at the time of Sultan Mohammed’s death. The number of fiefs was not less than about 300 ziamets and 1600 timars.

Along with the timariot system, Mohammed II imposed the tribute of Christian children on Greece, as it then existed in the other Christian provinces of his empire. A fifth of their male children was exacted from the sultan’s Christian subjects, as a part of that tribute which the Koran declared was the lawful price of toleration to those who refused to embrace Islam.

By these measures the last traces of the political institutions and legal administration, which the Greeks derived from the Roman Caesars, the Byzantine emperors, or the Frank princes, from the code of Justinian, the Basilika of Leo, or the assize of Jerusalem, were all swept away. Greece was partitioned among several pashas and governors, all of whom were under the orders of the beglerbeg of Roumelia, the sultan’s commander-in-chief in Europe. The islands and some maritime districts were at a later period placed under the control of the captain pasha. The Greeks, as a nation, disappear from history; but they had long laid aside the once glorious name of Hellenes and called themselves Romans. No instances of patriotic despair ennobled the records of their subjection. A dull uniformity marks their conduct and their thoughts. Byzantine ceremony and orthodox formality had already effaced the stronger traits of individual character, and extinguished genius. Othoman oppression now made an effort to extirpate the innate feelings of humanity. Parents gave their sons to be janissaries, and their daughters to be odalisques.

The history of the Othoman government during the period when its yoke bore heaviest on the Greeks, deserves to be carefully studied, if it were only to institute a comparison between the conduct of the Mussulmans, and the manner in which the most powerful contemporary Christian states treated their subjects. Unless this comparison be made, and the condition of the rayah in the sultan’s dominions be contrasted with that of the serf in the holy Roman empire of the Germans, and in the dominions of the kings of France and Spain, the absolute cruelty of the Othoman domination would be greatly overrated. The mass of the Christian population engaged in agricultural operations was allowed to enjoy a far larger portion of the fruits of their labour, under the sultan’s government, than under that of many Christian monarchs. This fact explains the facility with which the sultans of Constantinople held millions of Christian landed proprietors and small farmers in submissive bondage to a comparatively small number of Mohammedans in the European provinces of their empire. Indeed, the conquest of the Greeks was completed before the Othoman government had succeeded in subduing a considerable part of the Seljouk Turks in Asia Minor, and for several centuries the Mussulman population in Asia proved far more turbulent subjects to the sultans than the orthodox Christians in Europe. Mohammed II, and many of his successors, were not only abler men than the Greek emperors who preceded them on the throne of Byzantium, but they were really better sovereigns than most of the contemporary princes in the West. The Transylvanians and Hungarians long preferred the government of the house of Othman to that of the house of Hapsburg; the Greeks clung to their servitude under the infidel Turks, rather than seek a deliverance which would entail submission to the Catholic Venetians. It was therefore in no small degree by the apathy, if not by the positive good­will of the Christian population, that the supremacy of the Sublime Porte was firmly established from the mountains of Laconia to the plains of Podolia and the banks of the Don. So stable were the foundations of the Othoman power, even on its northern frontier, that for three centuries the Black Sea was literally a Turkish lake. The Russians first acquired a right to navigate freely over its waters in the year 1774.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Othomans became the most dangerous conquerors who have acted a part in European history since the fall of the western Roman empire. Their dominion, at the period of its greatest extension, stretched from Buda on the Danube to Bussora on the Euphrates. On the north, their frontiers were guarded against the Poles by the fortress of Kamenietz, and against the Russians by the walls of Azof; while to the south the rock of Aden secured their authority over the southern coast of Arabia, invested them with power in the Indian Ocean, and gave them the complete command of the Red Sea. To the east, the sultan ruled the shores of the Caspian, from the Kour to the Tenek; and his dominions stretched westward along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, where the farthest limits of the regency of Algiers, beyond Oran, meet the frontiers of the empire of Morocco. By rapid steps the Othomans completed the conquest of the Seljouk sultans in Asia Minor, of the Mamlouk sultans in Syria and Egypt, of the fierce corsairs of northern Africa, expelled the Venetians from Cyprus, Crete, and the Archipelago, and drove the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem from the Levant, to find a shelter at Malta. It was no vain boast of the Othoman sultan, that he was the master of many kingdoms, the ruler of three continents, and the lord of two seas.

For three centuries the position of the Greek race was one of hopeless degradation. Its connection with the old pagan Hellenes was repudiated by themselves, and forgotten by other nations. The modern Greeks continued to be prouder of having organized the ecclesiastical establishment of the orthodox hierarchy than of an imaginary connection with an extinct though cognate society, which had once occupied the highest rank in the political and intellectual world, and created the literature of Europe. The modern identification of the Christian Greeks with the pagan Hellenes is the growth of the new series of ideas disseminated by the French Revolution. At the time when ecclesiastical orthodoxy exerted its most powerful influence on the Greeks as a people, they were content to perpetuate their national existence in the city of Constantinople, in a state of moral debasement not very dissimilar from the position in which Juvenal describes their ancestors at Rome. The primates and the clergy acted as agents of Turkish tyranny with as much zeal as the artists and rhetoricians of old had pandered for the passions of their Roman masters. On the other hand, the slavery of the Greeks to the Othomans was not the result of any inferiority in numerical force, material wealth, and scientific knowledge. The truth is, that the successes of the Othoman Turks, like those of the Romans, must be in great part attributed to their superiority in personal courage, individual morality, systematic organization, and national dignity. The fact is dishonourable to Christian civilization. After the conquest of Constantinople, the Greeks sank, with wonderful rapidity, and without an effort, into the most abject slavery. For three centuries their political history is merged in the history of the Othoman empire. During this long period, the national position, for evil and for good, was determined by the aggregate of vice and virtue in the individuals who composed the nation. Historians rarely allow due weight to the direct influence of individual conduct in the mass of mankind on political history. At this period, however, the national history of the Greeks is comprised in their individual biography. Because they were destitute of virtue as individuals, they were contemptible as a nation.

The power and resources of the Othoman empire, at the time when the Sultans of Constantinople were most dreaded by the Western Christians, were principally derived from the profound policy with which the Turkish government rendered its Christian subjects the instruments of its designs. It gave to its subjects a modicum of protection for life and property, and an amount of religious toleration which induced the orthodox to perpetuate their numbers, to continue their labours for amassing wealth, and to prefer the domination of the sultan to that of any Christian potentate. In return, it exacted a tithe of the lives as well as of the fortunes of its subjects. Christian children were taken to fill up the chasms which polygamy and war were constantly producing in Mussulman society, and Christian industry filled the sultan’s treasury with the wealth which long secured success to the boldest projects of Othoman ambition. No accidental concourse of events could have given permanence to a dominion which maintained its authority with the same stem tyranny over the Seljouk Turk, the Turkoman, the Kurd, the Arab, and the Moorish Mussulman, as it did over the Greek, the Albanian, the Servian, the Bulgarian, the Vallachian, and the Armenian Christian. An empire whose greatness has endured for several centuries, must have been supported by some profound political combinations, if not by some wise and just institutions. Accidental accumulations of conquest, joined, together by military force alone, like the empires of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timor, have never attained such stability.

The Othomans exhibit the last example of a barbarous tribe intruding itself among civilized nations and forming a new nation in countries already densely peopled. It is true, that the great Turkish race, of which they were an offset, has always been one of the most numerous on the earth, and the Seljouk Turks had for three centuries formed a considerable part of the population of Asia Minor. But hitherto the Turks had exercised very little influence either in retarding or accelerating the progress of European civilization.

At the commencement of the fourteenth century the Othomans were a nameless tribe, whose leader Othman transferred his own name to his scanty band of followers. His father Ertogrul entered the Seljouk empire with a tribe numbering only 400 tents. Othman founded an empire, and in a short time the tribe of Ertogrul expanded into a great nation. The history of the Othomans offers some striking points of resemblance with that of the Romans. The legends of Romulus, of Numa the legislator, of Tarquin the Proud, and of the destruction of Rome by the Gauls, find a parallel in the foundation of an empire by Othman, in the legislation of Orkhan, in the character of Bayezid the Thunderer, and in the temporary extinction of the Othoman government by Timor the Great. The marvels of Othoman history have a grandeur in the simple truth that requires no aid from legendary ornament. Our aversion to the enduring results of Othoman institutions and conquests has sought gratification by depreciating the power of those institutions, and treating the mighty victories of the sultans as accidental and prosaic events. Our fathers feared and hated the Othomans too much to judge them fairly, and our prejudices still offer some obstacles to our contemplating with equanimity the marked superiority which they displayed in politics and war over Christian nations for more than two centuries. The Hellenic race in ancient times divided the inhabitants of the globe into Greeks and barbarians. The Othomans separated the inhabitants of their empire into Mussulmans and infidels. The division marks both intellectual and political progress.

The peculiar institutions which characterize the Othoman empire were first introduced by Orkhan. About the year 1329, Christian orphans, whose parents had been slain, were collected together, and schools for educating young slaves in the serai were formed. This was the commencement of a systematic education of Christian children, and of the corps of janissaries. Murad I gave both measures that degree of systematic regularity, by which the tribute of Christian children afforded a permanent supply of recruits to the sultan’s army and to the official administration. Hence Murad, rather than his father Orkhan, has been generally called the founder of the janissaries. The political institutions of the empire were extended and consolidated by Mohammed II. After the conquest of the empires of Constantinople and Trebizond, he published his Kanun-namé, or legislative organization of the Othoman empire. In the reign of Suleiman I, called by the Mussulmans the Legislator and by the Christians the Magnificent, the Othoman power attained its meridian splendour. The death of the Grand-Vizier, Achmet Kueprili, in the year 1676, during the reign of Mohammed IV, marks the epoch of its decline. Yet the decay of its strength was not without glory. In the year 1715 it inflicted a mortal wound on Venice, its ancient rival, by reconquering the Morea; and at the peace of Belgrade, in 1739, it frustrated the combined attacks of its most powerful enemies, by baffling the projects of Russia, and obtaining terms which were dishonourable to Austria.

A slight sketch of the Othoman government at the end of the reign of Mohammed II will be sufficient to place the relation of the Greeks to the dominant race and to the central administration in a clear light. This relation underwent very little change as long as the original institutions of the empire remained unaltered. During this period the records of the Greeks are of very little historical value; indeed, they are so destitute of authenticity on public affairs, that they can only be trusted when they can be confronted with the annals of their masters. It is by the influence which the Othoman government exercised on European politics that Greece finds a niche in the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is by the influence the Greek Church exercised on Muscovite civilization that the national importance was preserved.

The power of systematic organization, as distinct from the pedantry of uniform centralization, was never more conspicuous than in the energy of the Othoman administration. The institutions of Orkhan infused vigour into the Othoman tribe by forming a central administration, and organizing a regular army in immediate dependence on the person of the sultan. The administration of the Othoman power became in this way a part of the sultan’s household, and the Sublime Porte, which formed the emblem of the political existence of the empire, was called into active operation, without any direct dependence on Turkish nationality. The conquering race was never allowed a share of political power in the sultan’s government, however great the privileges might be which they were allowed to assume in comparison with the conquered Christians.

The strength of the Othoman empire during the most flourishing period of the sultan’s power reposed on the household troops he composed from the children of his Christian subjects. A tribute of male children was collected from Christians in the conquered provinces; and it was paid by the Greeks with as much regularity, and apparently with as little repining, as any of the fiscal burdens imposed on them. These tribute-children form the distinctive feature of the Othoman administration, as compared with the preceding Turkish empire of the Seljouks of Roum or of Iconium. They were carefully educated as Mussulmans, and their connection with their master the sultan, as household slaves, was always regarded in the East as more close, and even more honourable to the individual, than the connection of a subject to his sovereign, where the tie was not strengthened by a relationship of family, or at least of tribe. We find the same social relation between the slave and the master existing among the Jews at the earliest period of their national history. No stranger could partake of the passover, but the servant that was bought for money could eat thereof. The foreigner and the hired servant were nevertheless excluded from the family festival. The tribute-children, who were fed in the sultan’s house and were members of his household, supplied the Othoman emperors with an official administration and a regular army, composed of household slaves, as ready to attack the Seljouk and Arab sovereigns, though they were Mohammedans, as they were to assail the Greeks and the Servians, who were Christians.

We must not, however, conclude that the sovereignty of the sultan, even when aided by this powerful instrument, was entirely without restraint. The ministers of the Mohammedan religion, as interpreters of the civil and ecclesiastical law, had a corporate existence of an older date than the foundation of the Othoman power. This corporation, called the Ulema, possessed political rights, recognized throughout every class of Mohammedan society, independent of the sultan’s will, and the power of the sultan was long restrained by the laws and customs of which the Ulema was the representative and the champion. But in the long struggle between a despotic central authority and class privileges, supported only by local interests and prejudices, the victory at last remained with the sultan, and the Ulema no longer exerts any very important restraint on the political action of the Othoman government. Corruption, which is the inseparable attendant of despotic power, gradually rendered the principal interpreters of the dogmas of Islam the submissive instruments of the sultan’s will, and the power of the Ulema over public opinion was thus undermined.

The institutions of the Othoman empire range themselves in three classes: 1. Those which were derived from the text of the Koran, and which were common to all Mohammedan countries from the times of the Arabian caliphs; 2. Those civil and military arrangements connected with property and local jurisdiction which prevailed among the Seljouk Turks in Asia Minor; and 3. The peculiar institutions of the Othoman empire which grew up out of the legislation of Orkhan and successive sultans.

The evils inflicted on society by the absolute power over the lives and property of all Mohammedans, except the members of the Ulema, with which the laws of Mahomet invest the sultan, form the staple of the history of Islam. And when the arbitrary nature of the administration of justice inherent in the constitution of the Ulema becomes a concomitant of the despotic power of the sovereign, it is not surprising that, in Mohammedan countries, there has always been as little security for the property of individuals as there has been protection for political liberty. The authority which the Ulema possesses of extracting rules of jurisprudence for the decision of particular cases from the religious precepts of the Koran, opens an unlimited field for judicial oppression. The acknowledged imperfection of the administration of justice prevents the law from being regarded with due respect; and hence arises that ready submission to a despotic executive which characterizes all Mohammedan countries, for the power of the sovereign is considered the only effective check on the corruption of the Ulema. The sentiments of justice in the hearts of the people are also weakened by the laws of marriage, by the social relations which arise from the prevalence of polygamy, and by the immunity from all control enjoyed by the harem. The heads of families become invested with an arbitrary and despotic power at variance with the innate feelings of equity, and the moral responsibility which is the firmest basis of virtue in society is destroyed. The primary institutions which prevail wherever Mahomet has been acknowledged as the prophet of God, are, despotic power in the sovereign, an arbitrary administration of civil law, and an immoral organization of society. This is so striking, that every student of Turkish history feels himself puzzled in his attempts to solve the problem of ascertaining what were the good impulses of the human heart, or the sagacious policy of a wise government, by which these demoralizing influences were counteracted, and the Othoman empire raised to the high pitch of power and grandeur that it attained.

The second class of institutions which exerted a prominent influence on the Othoman government, consisted of the civil and military usages and customs of the Seljouk population of Asia Minor. The feudal institutions of the Seljouk empire continued to exist long after the complete subjection of its provinces to the Othoman sultan; and the wars of the national or feudal militia of Asia Minor with the central administration and the regular army at Constantinople, form an important feature in the history of the Othoman empire. The large irregular military force which marched under the sultan’s banner, along with the regular army of janissaries and sipahis, even in the European wars, consisted principally of Seljouk feudatories enrolled in Asia Minor. The administration of the sultan’s dominions has always presented strange anomalies in its numerous provinces, among the Moham­medan as well as among the Christian population. As in the Roman and the British empires, various races of men, and the followers of different creeds, lived intermingled in great numbers, and were allowed to retain those peculiar laws and usages that were closely interwoven with the thread of their social existence. This freedom from the administrative pedantry of centralization has saved the Othoman empire from the crime of becoming the exterminator of the races it has subdued. The sultans only interfered with the laws and customs of each conquered people in so far as was necessary to insure their submission to the Sublime Porte and render their resources available to increase the wealth and power of the Othoman empire.

It was the policy of the sultan to maintain constantly an isolated position, overlooking equally all the various nations in his empire, whether they were Mohammedan or Christian. This policy produced, in some respects, as direct an opposition between the Seljouk population of Asia Minor and the Othoman officials of the central administration, as it did between the dominant Mohammedans and the subject Christians in Europe. The sultan employed his household slaves as the agents of the executive government. The imperial officials, both civil and military, were consequently a distinct and separate race of men from the great body of the Mohammedan population of the empire, and this distinction was more galling to the proud Seljouk feudatory in Asia than to the Othoman landlord who had recently obtained the grant of an estate in Europe. The ties which connected the imperial officials with the Mussulman population were few and weak, while the bonds which united them to the sultan’s person and government, as children of his household and slaves of his Sublime Porte, were closely interwoven with all their feelings and hopes. No sentiments of patriotism united the Seljouk Turk and the Syrian Arab to the Othoman government; while, on the other hand, no kindred sympathies, and no sense of national responsibility, restrained the rigour of the despotism exercised by its officials. Religious bigotry, and the community of interest arising out of a long career of conquest, inspired all the Mohammedan subjects of the sultan with one object, whenever war was proclaimed against a Christian state. The Seljouk feudatories and the Bedouin sheiks were then as eager for plunder and the capture of slaves as the janissaries. Even during the time of peace, the Seljouks on the Asiatic coast were compelled to stifle their aversion to the Othoman administration by the necessity of watching every movement of the Christian population. But the persevering opposition of the Seljouk population in the interior of Asia Minor to the government of the sultan fills many pages of Turkish history for two centuries after the conquest of Constantinople; and this opposition must be constantly borne in mind by those who desire to understand the anomalies in the administration of the Othoman empire and in the social position of its Turkish inhabitants. Many relics of the former anomalies in the Othoman empire were visible at the beginning of the present century, which have now disappeared. The late Sultan Mahmoud II swept away the last traces of the Seljouk feudal system, by exterminating the deré-beys, the ruins of whose castles still greet the traveller in many of the most sequestered and picturesque valleys in the Asiatic provinces. Much of the local vigour of the Mohammedan population was then extinguished; and how far the force of the empire has been increased by centralizing its energies in the administrative establishments at Constantinople, is a problem which still waits for its solution.

The third class of Othoman institutions gave the empire its true historical character and distinctive political constitution. They had their origin in the legislation of Orkhan, and they grew under the fostering care of his successors, who persevered in following the direction he had marked out to them, until the work was completed by Mohammed II the conqueror of the Greek race. Orkhan made the household of the sovereign the basis of the government of the Othoman dominions, as it had been of the imperial administration in the Roman empire. He assigned to the organization of the army and the civil and financial administration an existence perfectly independent of the people. The great political merit of Orkhan’s institutions was, that they admitted of extension and development as the bounds of the empire were enlarged and the exigencies of the administration increased. Accordingly, we find Murad I so far extending his father’s regulations for recruiting the regular army from the tribute of Christian children, as to have obtained from some Turkish historians the honour of being called the founder of the corps of janissaries. At length when Mohammed II had completed his conquests, he turned his attention to the civil government of his vast empire. In all his plans for the administration of his new conquests, he made the institutions which Orkhan had bequeathed to the Othoman government the model of his legislation, and his Kanun-namé, consequently, is a collection of administrative ordinances, not an attempt to frame a code of civil laws. True to the spirit of Orkhan’s theory of government, he constituted the sultan’s palace the centre of political power, and its gate the spot to which his subjects must look for protection and justice. To the world at large the Sublime Porte was the seat of the sultan’s government, and only the sultan's slaves could enter within its precincts to learn the sovereign’s will in his own presence.

Mohammed II was one of those great men whose personal conduct, from their superiority of talent and firmness of purpose, modifies the course of public events, when it is granted to them, as it was to him, to exercise their influence during a long and successful reign. Though he ascended the throne at the age of twenty-one, his character was already formed by the education he had received. An enemy who knew him personally, and had the most powerful reasons to hate him, acknowledges that, with all the fire and energy of youth, he possessed the sagacity and the prudence of old age. The palace of the sultan, where the young princes of the race of Othman received their education amidst tribute-children selected on account of their superior talents and amiable dispositions, was for several generations an excellent public school. No reigning family ever educated so many great princes as the house of Othman. When the intellect was strong and the disposition naturally good, the character was developed at an early age by the varied intercourse of the tribute-children and their instructors. In this society the young sultan Mohammed, whom nature had endowed with rare mental and physical advantages, learned the art of commanding himself, as well as others, by his desire to secure the esteem and attachment of the youths who were the companions of his amusements, and who were destined to become the generals of his armies and the ministers of his cabinet. Mohammed II made it the duty of the sultan to preside in person over the whole government. For many years he was the real prime-minister, for he retained in his own hands the supreme direction of all public business after the execution of the grand-vizier Khalil. The succeeding grand­viziers only acted as commanders-in-chief of the army and principal secretaries of state for the general administration, not as vicegerents of the sultan’s power. From the time of Murad I to the taking of Constantinople, the usages and customs of the Othoman tribe still exercised some influence over the public administration, and the office of grand-vizier had been hereditary in the family of Djenderelli. Khalil was the fourth of this family who filled the office, and with him the political influence of the Othoman tribe expired. The project of Khalil had been to create an acknowledged power in the hands of the grand-vizier, as protector of the peaceable subjects of the empire, independent of the military power and the military classes. His avarice, as much as his ambition, induced him to use his hereditary authority to control the operations of the army. His conduct awakened the suspicion of Mohammed II, who detected his intrigues with the Greeks; and forty days after the conquest of Constantinople, Khalil was beheaded at Adrianople. Several of the grand-viziers of Mohammed II were men of great ability. Like the sultan, they had been educated in the schools of the imperial palace. The ablest of all was Mahmoud Pasha, whose father was a Greek and his mother an Albanian. He was a man worthy to rank with Mohammed II and with Scanderbeg.

The successors of Mohammed II pursued the line of policy he had traced out, and followed the maxims of state laid down in the Kanun-namé with energy and perseverance for several generations. They were men both able and willing to perform the onerous duties imposed on them. For two centuries and a half,from Othman to Suleiman the Legislator, the only sultan who was not a man of pre-eminent military talent was Bayezid II; yet he was nevertheless a prudent and accomplished prince. All these sovereigns directed in person the government of their empire, and the council, composed of the great officers of state and of viziers of the bench, was held in their presence.

The administrative fabric of the government was divided by Mohammed II into four branches: 1. The Executive, the chief instruments of which were the pashas; 2. The Judicial, embracing the Ulema, under the control of the kadiaskers, but subsequently presided over by the grand mufti; 3. The Financial, under the superintendence of the defterdars; and, 4. The Civil department, under the direction of the nishandjis or imperial secretaries. The grand-vizier, who was the chief of the pashas, exercised a supreme control over the whole government; while the pashas, each in his own province, commanded the military forces, maintained the police, watched over the public security, and enforced the regular payment of all taxes and imposts. The kadiaskers, or grand judges of Asia and Europe, were, in the time of Mohammed II, the administrative chiefs of the judicial and religious establishments on the different sides of the Bosphorus. They named the cadis or inferior judges. But in the reign of Suleiman the Great, the grand mufti was vested with many of the functions previously exercised by the kadiaskers, who were rendered subordinate to this great interpreter of the law. A supreme defterdar acted as minister of finance, and directed that important branch of state business which, in all long-established and extensive empires, ultimately becomes the pivot of the whole administration. The sultan’s private secretary was the chief nishandji, who performed the duty of principal secretary of state. His office was to affix the toghra (toura) or imperial cipher to all public acts, and to revise every document as it passed through the imperial cabinet.

Such was the general scheme of the administration as it was arranged by Mohammed II; and though it was reformed and improved by Suleiman the Legislator, it remained in force until the commencement of the present century. But when the indolence and incapacity of the sultans left the irresponsible direction of public affairs in the hands of their grand-viziers, those ministers exercised the despotic power of their masters in the most arbitrary manner.

The administration of justice and that of finance are the two most important branches of government in civilized society, because they come hourly into contact with the feelings and actions of every subject. The organization of both these departments has always been singularly defective in the Othoman empire. The manner in which justice was dispensed to the subjects of the sultan—whether Mussulman or Christian, whether in the tribunal of the cadi or the court of the bishop, was so radically vicious as to render all decisions liable to the suspicion and generally to the imputation of venality. The consequence was that corruption pervaded the whole frame of society; there was an universal feeling of insecurity, and a conviction that candour and publicity were both attended with individual danger. The want of morality and self-reliance, which is made the reproach of the subjects of the Othoman empire, and from which hardly a portion of the dominant race was exempt, can easily be traced to this defect in their social position. In all historical investigations we ought constantly to bear in mind the observation of Hume, that all the vast apparatus of government has for its ultimate object the distribution of justice. The executive power, and the assemblies which form a portion of the legislative, ought both, in a well-constituted state, to be subordinate to the law. The fashionable phrase of modern constitutions, that every citizen is equal before the law, is a mockery of truth and common sense in all states where there is one set of laws or regulations for the government and its officials, and another for the mass of people as subjected to that government. Until neither rank, nor official position, nor administrative privileges can be pleaded as a ground of exceptional treatment by the agents of the executive in matters of justice, there can be no true civil liberty. The law must be placed above sovereigns and parliaments as well as above ministers and generals.

No such principles of government ever entered into the minds of the Othoman Turks. The Mohammedan jurisprudence declares distinctly that there is a different civil law for the believer in Islam and for the infidel. It pronounces that the Koran confers privileges on the true believer from which all others are excluded. The Mohammedan law, therefore, was founded on principles of partial, not of universal application, and it has maintained a perpetual struggle with the natural abhorrence of injustice which God has implanted in the human heart. Even the Mussulman population of the Othoman empire was not insensible to the instability of their legal position as a dominant race, where the mass of the population was of a different religion. They always felt that their power in Europe was based on maxims of law and policy which rendered its duration uncertain. The Mohammedans in Europe always contemplated the probability of their being one day expelled from countries where they appeared as foreign colonists and temporary sojourners, and looked forward to a period when they should be compelled to retreat into those Asiatic lands where the majority of the inhabitants followed the faith of Mahomet. Hence resulted the nervous anxiety displayed by the Mussulmans to convert the Christian population of the sultan’s dominions. The true believers considered that this was the only manner by which it was possible to confer on the followers of a different religion an equality of civil rights, and they felt that this equality could alone give stability to their government. Several of the ablest statesmen in the Othoman empire declared, that until the Mohammedan religion was embraced by all the sultan’s subjects, the government could neither be secure nor equitable. They fully acknowledged the danger of treating the Christians under their dominion with systematic injustice, and they endeavoured to palliate the evil they could not eradicate. The necessity of protecting the Christians against oppression was recognized by Mohammed II, and the patriarch of Constantinople was appointed the agent for the Greek nation at the Sublime Porte for this purpose. But the first legislative enactments for the declared object of protecting the Christian subjects of the sultan against official and Mussulman oppression, by investing them with a guarantee in their own personal rights, were dated in the year 1691. These imperial ordinances were promulgated by the grand-vizier Mustapha Kueprili, called the Virtuous, and were termed the Nizam-djedid, or New System. Governors of provinces, pashas and other officials, were commanded to treat the Christians with equity. They were strictly prohibited from exacting any addition to the haratch or capitation-tax, or to any of the imposts as fixed by the laws of the empire, under the pretext of local necessities. The intention of the Othoman government had always been to leave the collection and administration of the funds destined for local purposes in the hands of the inhabitants of the locality. This attempt of Mustapha the Virtuous to sanction the right of Christians to demand protection against Mussulman injustice, under Mohammedan laws, produced very little practical effect in ameliorating the lot of the Greeks. The Othoman administration was about this period invaded by a degree of corruption, which left all the sultan’s subjects, both Mussulman and Christian, exposed to the grossest injustice. It required many social changes in the East before any progress could be made in the task of levelling the barriers which separated the dominant religion from the faith of the subject people. The difference was too great to be effaced by legislative enactments alone.

The imperfection of the financial administration in the Othoman government assisted the vices of the judicial system in accelerating the decline of the empire. In all countries, the manner in which the permanent revenues of the state are levied, exerts an important effect on the national prosperity. A small amount of taxation may be so collected as to check the accumulation of national wealth, and hinder the people from adopting fixed habits of industry, while a large amount may be imposed in such a way as to form a very slight check on the progress of a nation. The taxes in the Othoman empire were not so injurious from their amount, as from the way in which they were imposed and collected. The Mohammedans were exempt from many burdens which fell heavy on the Jews and Christians; and as often happens with financial privileges, these exceptions proved ultimately of very little advantage to the class they appeared to favour.

The great financial distinction between the followers of Islam, or the true believers, and the rayahs or infidel subjects of the sultan, was the payment of the haratch or capitation­tax. This tax was levied on the whole male unbelieving population, with the exception of children under ten years of age, old men, and priests of the different sects of Christians and Jews. The maimed, the blind, and the paralytic were also exempted by Moslem charity. This payment was imposed by the Koran on all who refused to embrace the Mohammedan faith, as the alternative by which they might purchase peace. The Othomans found it established in the Seljouk empire, and, as they were bound by their religious precepts, they extended it to every country they conquered. In the reign of Suleiman the Legislator, this tax yielded a revenue of seventeen millions of piastres, while the whole revenue of the empire only amounted to twenty-seven millions, or about £6,000,000 sterling

A duty levied alike on imports and exports amounted to two and a half per cent, when the goods were the property of a Mohammedan, but to five per cent, when they belonged to a Christian or Jewish subject of the Porte. This moderate duty enabled the commerce of the Othoman empire to flourish greatly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Though the commercial duties levied on the infidels were double the amount of those paid by the Mohammedans, they were in reality so moderate, that the difference was easily compensated by closer commercial relations with foreign merchants in distant countries, and by greater activity and economy. The Christians, consequently, preserved the greater share of the trade of Turkey in their hands. And as both Christians and Jews were excluded from war and politics, they turned their whole attention to trade. The different members of the same family dispersed themselves in various cities of the empire, in order that they might collect cargoes for exportation with the greatest facility, and personally superintend their distribution at the ports of consumption in the most economical manner. In an age when guarantees for personal honesty were not easily ob­tained beyond the circle of family ties, and extensive credit required to be replaced by personal attendance, the Greeks made their family connections a substitute for the privileges of corporations and guilds in the commercial cities of western Europe. Another circumstance favoured the trade of the non-Mussulman population of the Othoman empire. Venality and rapacity have always been prominent characteristics of the Othoman financial system. The Christian population of the East had been disciplined to every species of financial extortion for many ages by the Greek emperors. In fiscal measures the Othomans were the pupils of the Byzantine system, and the officials of the Porte soon perceived that the privilege of paying smaller duties placed the interests of the Mussulman trader in opposition to the interests of the imperial fisc. The custom-house officers were taught to favour that trade which brought the largest returns to the imperial treasury, and to throw obstacles in the way of commercial dealings which bore the character of individual privileges injurious to the sultan’s revenue. The import and export duties formed one of the principal branches of the sultan’s revenue, and we have already observed that the nature of the Othoman government prevented the existence of much sympathy between the great bulk of the Mohammedan landlords or cultivators of the soil and the agents of the sultan’s administration. The policy of throwing obstacles in the way of the commercial operations of the Turks gradually gained strength, until the Mussulman land­lord was content, in order to save time and avoid collision with the government officials, to sell his produce to rayah merchants, who in this way gained possession of the greater part of the trade of the empire. At a later period, the privileges conceded by commercial treaties to the subjects of foreign nations introduced a change in the commercial position of the Christian subjects of the Porte, which was extremely injurious both to the wealth and moral character of the Greek traders. From this period the history of Othoman commerce becomes a record of privileges granted to foreigners, and of fraudulent schemes adopted by the rayahs to share in these privileges, or to elude their effect. The government strove to indemnify itself for these frauds by unjust exactions, and the native traders employed corruption and bribery as the most effectual protection against the abuses of tyrannical authority. The letter of the law and the legitimate duties served only as the text for an iniquitous commentary of extortions and evasions.

The land-tax, however, was the impost which bore heaviest on the industry of the whole agricultural population, without distinction of religion or race. This tax consisted of a fixed proportion of the annual produce, generally varying from a tenth to a third of the whole crop. Almost all the countries which fell under the domination of the Mohammedans were in a declining state at the time of their conquest. This was as much the case with Syria, Egypt, Persia, and Northern Africa in the seventh century, as it was with the Greek empires of Constantinople and Trebizond, and the principalities of Athens and the Morea, in the fifteenth. In such a state of society, communications are becoming daily more confined, and it is consequently more easy for the cultivator to pay a determinate proportion of his crop than to make a fixed payment in money. Thus, the worst possible system of taxation was established in the dominions of the Mohammedan conquerors as a boon to their subjects, and was received with satisfaction. All the land in the Othoman empire was subjected to this tax, whether it was held by Mohammedans or infidels. The evil effect of this system of taxation in repressing industry arises in great measure from the methods adopted to guard against fraud on the part of the cultivator of the soil. He is not allowed to commence the labours of the harvest until the tax-gatherer is on the spot to watch his proceedings; and he is compelled to leave the produce of his land exposed in the open air until the proportion which falls to the share of the government is measured out and separated from the heap. Where the soil is cultivated by a race of a different religion from the landlord, it becomes the interest of the landlord to combine with the tax-collector, or to become himself a farmer of the revenue, and then every act of tyranny is perpetrated with impunity. Throughout the whole Othoman empire all agricultural industry is paralyzed for at least two months annually; the cultivators of the soil being compelled to waste the greater portion of their time in idleness, watching the grain on the threshing-floors, seeing it trodden out by cattle, or else winnowing it in the summer breezes; for immemorial usage has prescribed these rude operations as the surest guarantees for protecting the government against frauds on the part of the peasant. This barbarous routine of labour is supposed to be an inevitable necessity of state, and consequently all improvements in agriculture are rendered impracticable. The evils inherent in the system of exacting the land-tax in the shape of a determinate proportion of the annual crop, have produced a stationary condition of the agricultural population wherever it has prevailed. It arrested the progress of Europe during the middle ages, and at the present day it forms the great barrier to improvement in the Othoman empire and the Greek kingdom.

Another evil arising from this mode of levying the tax on the soil is, that it induces the government to weaken the rights of property, and thus, in the hope of increasing the annual revenue of the state, capital is excluded from seeking a permanent investment in land. Even under the Roman empire, a similar policy caused some degree of insecurity to the landed proprietor, whose arable land was not sufficiently protected by the law, if it remained uncultivated. For, by the Roman jurisprudence, the occupier who tilled the land belonging to another person, if he maintained his occupation for a year, acquired a right of occupancy, leaving the real proprietor only the power of regaining possession of his land by an action at law, which he had to carry on against the possessor in order to establish his right of property. It is evident that this transference of possession to the squatter who could obtain the undisturbed occupancy for a single year, was an element of insecurity in all landed property. The laws of Great Britain are based on very different principles from those of Rome. The rights of property are always considered too sacred to be tampered with for fiscal purposes; mere possession confers no right to land. The Othoman legislation has adopted the policy of the Roman law, and it considers the loss which might accrue to the state from the land remaining uncultivated as a greater evil than the injury inflicted on society by unsettling the rights of property. The Othoman law allowed any person to cultivate arable land which was left uncultivated by its proprietor beyond the usual term, even though the proprietor might desire, for his own profit, to retain it for pasture. The possession of arable land could only be retained by keeping it in constant cultivation, according to customary routine. Capital, under such circumstances, could not be invested in land with security or profit. A barrier was raised against agricultural improvements, and the population engaged in cultivating the soil was condemned to remain in a stationary condition.

Another vice of the financial administration of the Othoman empire tended to annihilate the wealth of its subjects. This was the depreciation of the metallic currency; and it was so great, that it appears alone sufficient to explain the decline which has taken place in the resources and population of the sultan’s dominions during the last two centuries. It happened repeatedly, that when the amount of specie in the imperial treasury was found inadequate to meet the demands on the government, the sultan’s ministers supplied the deficiency by adulterating the coinage. Perhaps no administrative measures in the Othoman empire have produced more poverty, or have more rapidly undermined the resources of the people and the strength of the government, than this mode of defrauding the sultan’s subjects of their property. The Byzantine emperors preserved their coinage unaltered in its standard for seven centuries; and there can be no doubt that this wise conduct contributed greatly to the stability of society and to the duration of that empire. On the other hand, the Greek emperors of the house of Palaeologos appear to have been constantly tampering with the coinage. But no government ever carried the depreciation of its coinage to such a degree as the Othoman. The asper was long the unit of Turkish monetary enumeration. Originally it was a silver coin, representing the miliaresion of the Byzantine empire, and ten were equal in value to a gold sequin or byzant. At the accession of Selim I, after an interval of only thirty-one years, the size of the asper, and the relative value of silver to gold, were so much diminished that fifty-four of the new aspers were equal to a Venetian sequin, which passed current for fifteen of the old aspers. The aspers of the time of Mohammed II may, however, be supposed to have lost a considerable portion of their original weight by attrition. In the reign of Suleiman the Legislator, the sequin passed current for sixty aspers; but about the middle of the sixteenth century that sultan issued a coinage so debased by alloy as to raise the value of the sequin to ninety aspers. From that period the deterioration of the Othoman coinage proceeded with accelerated speed in each successive reign. In the commercial treaty with England, concluded in the year 1675, the value of the dollar was fixed at eighty aspers, but when the treaty of Carlovitz was signed in the year 1699, German and Venetian dollars were already valued at one hundred and twenty aspers. At the accession of the present sultan, the value of the Venetian sequin was about six thousand aspers. The asper, however, has long been a mere nominal monetary division.

The Greeks found the line of separation which the Koran draws between the infidels and the true believers much more galling than the other Christian subjects of the sultan. They could not forget that they had been a dominant race when they were conquered by the Mohammedans; and even their pride could not conceal the fact that they were numerically superior to the Othomans in all the European provinces of the empire. The memory of lost power and former wealth was kept alive by some knowledge of Hellenic literature, and an unbounded confidence in their own merits as members of the only orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy. These feelings have always rendered the Greeks as unquiet subjects as their inordinate selfishness has rendered them oppressive masters. The moral and political condition of the Greek race, during two thousand years, proves that neither classical knowledge nor ecclesiastical orthodoxy can supply the want of those qualities necessary to infuse morality into a corrupted society. Their system of education was evidently much inferior to that adopted by their Turkish masters for the education of the Christian children collected by the tribute and compelled to embrace Mohammedanism. These apostates displayed a degree of activity, intelligence, honesty, and self-respect rarely found among their brethren whose education remained under the superintendence of Greek pedants and orthodox priests. Accordingly we find that many Greeks of high talent and moral character were so sensible of the superiority of the Mohammedans, that even when they escaped being drafted into the sultan’s household as tribute-children, they voluntarily embraced the faith of Mahomet. The moral superiority of Othoman society must be allowed to have had as much weight in causing these conversions, which were numerous in the fifteenth century, as the personal ambition of individuals.

The number of the Christian subjects of the sultan in Europe filled the minds of several sultans with alarm, and the desire of increasing the number of the true believers became a measure of policy as well as of religion. The Koran, however, forbids the forced conversion of adults who believe in the revelations of Moses or of Jesus. The divan sought in vain for plans of conversion that promised any success in overcoming the national and religious attach­ments of the Christians, whose persevering opposition to Mohammedanism could not be concealed. At last the extermination of the whole orthodox population was suggested as the only means of eradicating the canker which was devouring the heart of the empire. In the breast of a bigoted tyrant the suggestions of political necessity were allowed to silence every sentiment of humanity and sound policy. The very bases of the Othoman power —the tribute of Christian children, and the revenues paid by the parents of these children— were in danger of being destroyed. But, fortunately for the Christians, Selim I commenced his project of putting an end to all religious differences in his dominions by exterminating heresy among the Mohammedans. About forty thousand Shiis or sectaries of Ali were massacred by his orders in the year 1514. This monstrous act of barbarity was surpassed in Christian Europe, more than half a century later, by the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve(2and August 1572). A despot who could murder heretics in cold blood was not likely to have any compunction in exterminating those whom he regarded as infidels. To complete his project for establishing unity of faith in his empire, Selim at last ordered his grand-vizier to exterminate the whole Christian population of his dominions, and to destroy all Christian churches. Orthodox and Catholics, Greeks and Armenians, were alike condemned to death. With great difficulty the grand-vizier, Piri Pasha, and the mufti Djemali, succeeded in persuading Selim to abandon his diabolical project. The Christians in the East were fortunate in escaping the treatment which the Catholics of the West had inflicted on the Albigenses. Time had improved the general condition of society. A Mohammedan high-priest in the sixteenth century was more deeply sensible of the feelings of humanity and true charity than the head of the Latin Church in the thirteenth.

Nevertheless, the project of exterminating the Christians was revived at subsequent periods. Sultan Ibrahim was anxious to carry it into effect in the year 1646. The chief of the hierarchy again refused to sanction the cruelty. He declared that the laws of Mahomet forbid the issue of such a fetva, for the Koran prohibits the murder of men who have laid down their arms and consented to pay tribute to the true believers. Although the grand mufti might have found it impossible to convince the sultan of the injustice of his proposed measure, he was able to demonstrate its impolicy. By referring to the registers of the haratch, he showed Ibrahim that a very large part of the revenues of the empire were paid by the Christian population. In the capital alone their number amounted to two hundred thousand, and throughout the whole empire they were the most docile tax-payers.

The progress of civilization among the Turks, and the abhorrence of injustice which is innate in the human heart, gradually induced some of the most eminent Othoman statesmen to adopt measures for improving the position of the sultan’s Christian subjects. We cannot doubt that they contributed by their influence to accelerate the abolition of the tribute of Christian children, even though we can trace its cessation directly to other political causes. In the year 1691, the grand-vizier, Mustapha Kueprili, issued the regulations, already mentioned under the name of the Nizam-djedid, for securing to the Christians legal protection against official oppression. Since that period the Othoman government has made several attempts to reconcile the legislation of the Koran with an equitable administration of justice to its subjects; but, until very recently, these attempts proved ineffectual to protect the Christians against the Mohammedans. The possibility of ultimately rendering Christians and Mohammedans equal in the eye of the law, under an Othoman sultan, admits of doubt, and the project is not viewed with much favour either by Christians or Mohammedans. It is quite as violently repudiated by the Greeks as by the Turks. As far as regards Arabs and Armenians, the possibility is readily admitted; but both the Othomans and the Greeks aspire at being a dominant race. As the Othoman government has grown more moderate in its despotism, the Greek subjects of the sultan have risen in their demands. They now assume that their orthodoxy is irreconcilable with Othoman domination, and they believe that it is the duty of all Christian powers to labour for their deliverance from a yoke to which they submitted with unexampled docility for four centuries. The rivalry of the Greeks and Othomans produces a hatred which is much more deeply rooted than the mere aversion caused by the religious differences of the other Christians and Mohammedans in the empire. The victory, in the struggle between the Greeks and Othomans, can only be gained by political wisdom and military power. The religious differences of the other races may be separated from their political interests by a wise and equitable dispensation of justice to all the subjects of the sultan, without distinction of rank, of race, or of faith, and by the adoption of a system of free communal administration equalizing financial burdens.

It must not be supposed that the institutions of the Othoman empire have respected the principles of justice in regulating the rights of the Mohammedans any more than in governing the Christians. The legality of murder, when that crime has appeared necessary to secure the public tranquillity and remove the chances of civil wars, has been established as an organic law. Mohammed II, after citing in his Kanun-namé the opinion of the Ulema that the Koran authorizes the murder of his brothers by the reigning sultan, adds this injunction, “Let my children and grandchildren be dealt with accordingly”. In a government where inhumanity and immorality were so publicly proclaimed to be grounds of legislation, it was natural that political expediency should become the only practical rule of conduct. But in order to act energetically on maxims so abhorrent to human feelings, it was also necessary for the government to create its own instruments. This could only be effected by educating a body of officials, and forming an army, whose members were completely separated from the rest of the sultan’s subjects. It was absolutely requisite for the sultan to possess ministers and troops who were slaves of his Sublime Porte —men without family or nation— men who had as few ties to connect them with the dominant Mohammedan as with the subject Christian population of the empire. This desideratum was supplied by the institution of the tribute-children. These little Christians were reared to form the first regular troops of the Othoman sultans, and soon grew into a standing army.

This foundation of the Othoman army was laid by Orkhan, whether from his own impulse, or at the suggestion of his brother Aladdin, who acted as his prime-minister, or in consequence of the advice of Kara Khalil, his most intimate counsellor, is uncertain, and not of much historical importance. The organization of the tribute-children was improved and the numbers of the regular troops were increased by Murad I; but even in the victorious reign of Mohammed II the Othoman regular army was small when compared with the armies which the continental sovereigns of Europe consider it necessary to maintain at the present day, even during periods of profound peace. The whole military force of this sultan probably never exceeded seventy or eighty thousand fighting­men, and of these the regular infantry or janissaries amounted only to twelve thousand, and the regular cavalry to about ten thousand. The great numerical difference between the forces of the Othoman sultans at this period, and of the European sovereigns at present, must be in some degree attributed to the financial moderation of the Othoman government during the early period of the empire. It was this financial moderation, coming as a relief after the rapacity of the Greek emperors, which made the Greeks hug their chains; and it forms a strong contrast to the excessive financial burdens and constant interference with individual liberty which characterizes the system of administration in modern centralized states. The Othoman government required its troops principally in warfare. Even during the worst periods of Turkish tyranny, the Porte showed no disposition to intermeddle with every act of the local administration, which was often intrusted to its Christian subjects. The military forces of the empire consisted of different troops, which owed their existence to a variety of circumstances, and whose origin dates from very different times. It was the admirable organization of these troops, the great military talents of the generals who commanded them, and the indefatigable superintendence of every administrative detail by the sultans themselves, not the number of the troops, which so long rendered the Othoman armies superior to the military forces of contemporary Christian sovereigns. For a considerable time after the sultan possessed the only regular army of any importance in Europe.

The Greek race had been easily held in subjection by small bodies of men even before their conquest by the Othomans. The Crusaders, who conquered the Byzantine empire, and the Franks, the Venetians, and the Genoese, who ruled in Greece, in Asia Minor, and in the islands of the Archipelago, were far inferior in numbers to the subject Greeks. The Othomans were originally less numerous, but the sultans connected the interests of all the Turks with the extension of the empire, by conferring on them many of the privileges of a dominant race. The first and greatest was common to all Mohammedans. They were reputed to be born soldiers (askery), while non­Mohammedans were called merely burghers (beledy), and were incapable of entering the army.

The military force was divided into many bodies, organized at various periods by different governments, and on opposite systems. But from the period of the restoration of the power of the Othoman sultans by Mohammed I, after the dominion of Timor’s successors in Asia Minor was overthrown, the troops of the Othoman empire may be classed under the heads of regulars, or those permanently receiving pay from the sultan, and irregulars, or those who were bound only to temporary service in time of war. The latter class, as has been already observed, existed long before the foundation of the Othoman government. It was composed of the proprietors of landed estates, who had owed military service for their possessions, either to the Seljouk sultans of Roum (or Iconium), or to the emirs who established themselves as sultans when that empire declined, and who were ultimately conquered by the house of Othman. This feudatory system formed the earliest military organization of Othman’s own possessions, and its sphere was extended by his successors, who continued to grant new fiefs in all the subsequent conquests of the Othoman armies. On the other hand, the aristocracy, which this system created, was circumscribed in its authority, and deprived of the power of controlling the sultan through its territorial influence, by the superior military organization of the slaves of the Porte. The tribute-children received, from their education and organization, an existence so completely separated from the old feudal militia, that they formed a complete counterpoise to the Seljouk nobility both in the cabinet and the camp. Thus, we find Sultan Mohammed II in command of an army consisting in part of Seljouk nobles and Mohammedan gentlemen, like the armies of contemporary Christian monarchs in western Europe, and in part of a regular force of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, not unlike the invincible troops of ancient Rome, or the modern armies of civilized nations. In this way the sultans were able to take the field with a corps of janissaries, whose exploits have rivalled the deeds of the Roman legions, and with a host of irregular cavalry of matchless excellence, equal to that of the Parthians.

The janissaries formed the best portion of the regular infantry. They were the first-fruits of the institution of the tribute-children. At the conquest of Constantinople their number only amounted to twelve thousand, but in the reign of Suleiman the Legislator it had already attained forty thousand. The first blow which weakened the strength of this redoubtable corps was struck by its own members. When the janissaries rebelled, at the accession of Selim II in 1566, they changed the original constitution of their corps by forcing the sultan to concede to them the right of enrolling their children as recruits to fill up vacancies. At an early period they had not been allowed to marry, but this privilege had been afterwards conceded as a favour to those who distinguished themselves by their services, or who were stationed for a length of time in garrison. After their original organization underwent the change consequent on the introduction of hereditary succession, the numbers of the corps rapidly increased. At the accession of Mohammed III in 1598, upwards of one hundred thousand janissaries were found inscribed on the rolls. Until the reign of Murad III, A.D. 1574-95, the majority of the corps had consisted of tribute-children, supplied by the Christian provinces of the empire. The original constitution of these troops excluded all Mohammedan citizens from the body. Its mem­bers were required to be slaves, reared as an offering to the Prophet, and their education taught them to regard their dedication to the propagation of the Mohammedan religion as their highest privilege, while their strict discipline rendered them the best soldiers in the world for more than two centuries. If we estimate the value of their education by the strength of its influence on their minds throughout their lives, we are compelled to concede to it the highest praise. Few men have ever fulfilled the duties they were taught to perform in a more effectual manner. The Jesuits in South America were not more successful missionaries of Christianity than the janissaries were of Mohammedanism in Christian Europe. Fortunately it is the nature of despotism to accelerate the corruption even of those institutions which increase its power, and the janissaries suffered the fate of every body whose privileges are at variance with the principles of justice and those great laws of human progress which impel the mass of mankind towards improvement. After the year 1578, the number of janissaries’ children entitled to enter the corps became so great that the tribute-children were regarded by the veterans with jealousy. On the other hand, the insubordination which the corps often displayed, even under such warlike sultans as Selim I and Suleiman the Great, alarmed their more feeble successors, and caused them to adopt the policy of weakening the military strength of a body that threatened to rule the empire. The tribute-children were no longer placed in its ranks, nor was the tribute itself exacted with the former strictness, for the Christian population began to be regarded as more useful to the state as tax-payers than as breeders of soldiers. The Turkish population in Europe had now increased sufficiently to supply the Porte with all the recruits required for the army. When the position of the janissary became hereditary, the corps was soon transformed into a military corporation, which admitted into its ranks only the children of janissaries or born Mussulmans. The pay and privileges of the members of this militia were so great that it became the habit of the sultan, the officers of the court, and the ministers of the empire, to reward those whom they favoured by introducing them into some of the odas or battalions of the janissaries. At last, during the reign of Mohammed IV. (a.d. 1649-1687), the tribute of Christian children ceased to be exacted. Indeed, for some time before the formal abolition of the tribute, a comparatively small number of children had been torn from their families, and these had been employed as household servants of the sultan and of powerful pashas. Nearly about the same time, the depreciation of the Turkish money reduced the pay of the janissaries to such a pittance that it was insufficient to maintain a family in the capital, and married janissaries were allowed to eke out their means of subsistence by keeping shops and following trades. Their places in the corps, therefore, generally devolved on men bred to their father’s occupation, and the celebrated army of tribute-children sank into a militia of city traders, possessing only sufficient military organization to render them formidable to their own government and to the peaceful inhabitants of the empire.

The regular cavalry was also originally composed of tribute-children. In the time of Mohammed II it was divided into three distinct bodies, and consisted of ten thousand men. The sipahis acquired the same pre-eminence among the cavalry which the janissaries held among the infantry, and their seditious conduct rendered them much sooner troublesome to the government. The organization and discipline of the regular cavalry, indeed, was modified at an early period by the continual grants of fiefs which were conceded to its members. From this circumstance, and from its frequent seditions, the corps underwent many modifications, and ceased to be recruited from the tribute-children at an earlier period than the janissaries. The spirit of Seljouk feudalism and of nomadic life always exercised a powerful influence among the cavalry of the Othoman armies; but it is not necessary to enter into any details on this subject, as it produced no very marked effect on the relations between the sultan’s government and his Christian subjects.

During the most flourishing period of the Othoman empire the tribute of Christian children supported the whole fabric of the sultan’s power, and formed the distinguishing feature of the political and military administration of the Sublime Porte. This singular tribute was first exacted from the Greek race as a tithe on the increase of the male population set apart for the glory and edification of Mohammedanism —just as the Anglican ecclesiastical establishment exacts the tithe-pig from the Catholics of Ireland for the benefit of the State Church of the British empire. There is nothing more startling in the long history of the debasement of the Greek nation, which it has been my melancholy task to record, than the apathy with which the Greeks submitted to this inhuman imposition. It seems to us wonderful to find a people, which even at the lowest ebb of their political fortunes preserved no inconsiderable degree of literary culture, displaying an utter indifference to the feelings of humanity, yet clinging to local interests and selfish prejudices, both civil and religious, with desperate energy. While their heads were hot with bigotry, their hearts were cold to the sentiments of philanthropy, and almost without a struggle they sank into the lowest depths of degradation to which a civilized race has ever fallen. The Turkish race never made much progress in colonizing Europe, even though the provinces of the Greek empire were almost depopulated at the time of the conquest. Had the Greeks, therefore, resisted the payment with any degree of national vigour, they might have saved their national honour from a stain which will remain as indelible as the glories of ancient Greece are enduring. Some sentiments of humanity and an ordinary degree of courage would have sufficed to prevent the Othoman Turks from acquiring the military renown that surrounds the power of the sultans with a halo of glory. Extermination ought to have been preferable to the dishonour of breeding recruits to extend the sway of Mohammedanism. And the value of Greek orthodoxy in directing the moral feeling of Christians must in some degree be estimated by the fact that for two centuries the Greek population, though completely under the guidance of the orthodox clergy, continued to pay this tribute without much repining. Mohammed II secured the services of the higher clergy by restoring an orthodox patriarch at Constantinople, and employed the hierarchy of the Greek church as an instrument of Othoman police.

The history of this tax is worthy of attention. The Mohammedan law authorizes, or rather commands, every Mussulman to educate all unbelieving children who may have legally fallen under his power as true believers, but it strictly prohibits the forced conversion of any who have attained the age of puberty. The Koran also gives one-fifth of the booty taken in war to the sovereign. The Seljouk sultans had generally either sold their share of the spoil, commuted it for a payment in money, or else filled their palaces with concubines and pages, in virtue of this privilege. The project of converting this claim into a means of strengthening the executive power was due to Orkhan, and its organization as the source of recruiting the regular army to Murad I, as we have already mentioned. Several sovereigns had previously formed armies of purchased slaves, in order to secure the command over a military force more obedient and susceptible of stricter discipline than the native militia of their dominions. In the sixth century, Tiberius II, Emperor of the East, when he wished to restore the discipline of the Roman armies, formed a corps of fifteen thousand heathen slaves, whom he purchased and drilled to serve as the nucleus of a standing army unconnected with the feelings of the people, and untainted with the license of the native soldiers. But this attempt to introduce slavery as an element of military power in Christian society failed. The system was adopted with more success by the caliphs of Bagdad and the sultans of Cairo. The Turkish guards of the Abassids, and the Circassian slaves of the Mamlouk kings, were the best troops among the Mohammedans for several ages. It is true, they soon proved more dangerous to their sovereigns than the national militia: nevertheless it was reserved for the Othoman sultans to found an empire on the strength of a subject-population and the votaries of a hostile religion. The plan required a constant supply of recruits of the early age which admitted of com­pulsory conversion to Islam.

The tribute of Greek children being once established, officers of the sultan visited the districts on which it was imposed, every fourth year, for the purpose of collecting that proportion of the fifth of the male children who had attained the requisite age. All the little Greeks of the village, between the ages of six and nine, were mustered by the protogeros, or head man of the place, in presence of the priest, and the healthiest, strongest, and most intelligent of the number were tom from their parents, to be educated as the slaves of the Porte. It is not for history to attempt a description of the agony of fathers, nor to count the broken hearts of mothers caused by this unparalleled tax, but it offers a pathetic subject of tragedy to a modern Euripides. The children were carried to Constantinople, where they were placed in four great colleges, to receive the training and instruction necessary to fit them for the part they were afterwards to perform in life. Those who were found least fitted for the public service were placed in the families of Othoman landed proprietors in Bithynia; those of inferior capacity were employed as slaves in the serai, as gardeners and guards of the outer courts of the palaces. But the greater number were trained and disciplined as soldiers, and drafted into the corps of janissaries and sipahis of the regular cavalry; while those who displayed the most ability, who promised to become men of the pen as well as of the sword, were selected to receive a better education, and destined for the highest offices in the administration. Never was a more perfect instrument of despotism created by the hand of man. Affection and interest alike bound the tribute­children to the personal service of the sultan; no ties of affection, and no prejudices of rank or of race, connected them with the feudal landed interest, nor with the oppressed sub­jects of the empire. They were as ready to strike down the proudest descendant of the Seljouk emirs, or the Arab who boasted of his descent from the Prophet, as they were to go forth against the Christian enemies of the sultan and extend the domain of Mohammedanism. The Turks formed a dominant race in the Othoman empire, but the tribute-children were a dominant class even among the Turks. Mankind has never witnessed a similar instance of such wise combinations applied to such bad ends, and depraved by such systematic iniquity. It is, however, manifestly a law of Providence, that immorality and injustice have a direct effect in developing the principles of decay in political communities. And history is continually recording facts which demonstrate how the infinite wisdom of God connects the decay and death of communities with moral causes. Time can alone determine whether it is possible so far to eradicate the seeds of immorality and injustice from political institutions, as to secure a permanent duration to any earthly community. But it is evident that it can only be attainable by an unceasing vigilance in the path of reform, individual as well as national; no principle of conservatism can produce this desirable condition of society. The temporal fortune of individuals often escapes the consequences of iniquity, for the physical decay of man is not directly connected with moral deterioration; vice, therefore, appears to enjoy impunity in many cases, unaffected both by the sense of moral responsibility, and by the fear of the judgment to come. But the deviations of governments from moral laws inevitably bring retributive justice on the State.

The history of the Othoman empire affords a striking illustration of this truth. In no case did injustice so directly confer strength and dominion, and in none did it ever more evidently produce decline and ruin.

The irregular troops of the Othoman empire were composed chiefly of feudal cavalry. This militia existed in the Seljouk empire before the ancestors of Othman entered Asia Minor. Its constitution placed it more under the control of the central authority, and caused it to be less influenced by class prejudices and the interests of an armed nobility, than the feudal chivalry of the West. Until the time of Suleiman the Legislator, the timars or cavalry fiefs were granted only for life; and it was rare for the son to obtain his father’s grant of land, which was usually conferred on some veteran as a reward for long service in the field, or for distinguished valour and capacity. This militia was divided into three classes, according to the extent of the fiefs. First in rank were the Sandjak-begs, who were bound to bring into the field more than twenty well-armed followers on horseback. But many of this class possessed such extensive fiefs that they mustered several thousand horsemen. The second class was the Ziams, who were bound to take the field with from four to nineteen mounted followers, and who may be compared to the holders of knights’fees in feudal Europe. The third class was called Timariots, and might be bound to take the field alone, or with as many as three followers. It is not necessary to notice the anomalies which were admitted into the system. The right of hereditary succession was respected in many districts where the great Seljouk nobles and Turkoman chiefs had voluntarily submitted to the Othoman government; and several of these great chieftains, at the commencement of the present century, could still boast of a princely authority, which dated from an older period than the dynasty of Othman. But in the case of the ordinary timariots, ziams, and sandjak-begs, the classes remained always too disconnected, and the right of hereditary succession never received the universal acknowledgment necessary to admit of the formation of a territorial aristocracy.

As long as the mass of Mussulman society in the Othoman empire was pervaded by a military spirit, and new conquests annually brought an increase of wealth, in the shape of captive slaves and grants of fiefs, the timariots and begs rushed eagerly to war with well-appointed followers, in order to secure a large share of the spoil. The harems were often filled with Russian, Polish, and Austrian ladies, and a great part of Hungary was parcelled out in fiefs. But when the conquests of the sultans were arrested, and many successive campaigns were required to defend the territory already conquered, it often happened that the holders of the smaller fiefs found their resources completely exhausted. Some were compelled to eke out their contingents with grooms and pipe­bearers, mounted on baggage-mules; and others abandoned the army, sacrificed their fiefs, and became cultivators of the soil to gain a livelihood. Before the time of Suleiman, a timariot who joined the army with a single follower, brought into the field a companion well-armed and mounted, who stood by his side in danger, and shared his booty in success; but before a century had elapsed, many of the ziams joined the army with contingents, in which grooms, pipe-bearers, domestic servants, and cooks were mustered to complete their masters’ following. Such militia was inefficient in the time of war, and it continued to be a means of wasting the resources of the country in time of peace; for these men being privileged to bear arms, would neither attend to agricultural pursuits, nor to any of the duties of landed proprietors. The personal nature of the tenure by which they held their estates prevented their devoting any portion of their annual revenues to improvements promising a distant return. Hence we find the land occupied by Othoman proprietors becoming less productive, in each successive generation, the buildings on it becoming more dilapidated; and from age to age a visible decline in the numbers of the Mohammedan population of the empire begins to be observed. At the present day the traveller in Asia Minor is often struck by finding a long-deserted mosque in the vicinity of a cemetery, adorned with numerous marble tombs, surrounded by a tract of country where there is now no human habitation; and fallen bridges and ruined caravanserais indicate the existence of a degree of activity and prosperity in past times which has long ceased in the Othoman empire. A just and inexorable law of society appears to have doomed the Turkish race to extinction in Europe and Asia Minor, unless it resign its privileges as a dominant people, and place itself on an equality with the other races who inhabit the sultan’s dominions.

The feudal institutions of the Othoman empire, as they departed much less from the natural order of society than those of Western Europe, had a longer duration when transplanted into the Greek provinces. Those of the Latin empire of Romania disappeared in the third generation, but those of the Othoman empire survived almost to our own times. The latest traces of the system were swept away by the Sultan Mahmoud II, when he destroyed the Deré-beys, who were the last surviving element of Seljouk society. He has often been accused of an erroneous policy in not endeavouring to reinvigorate and restore the institutions of his Mohammedan subjects in Asia Minor. Those, however, who are familiar with the changes which time has made in the state of property in the East, know well that it would have been no less futile than to attempt restoring the feudal system in France or Germany. The military organization of the Mohammedan landed proprietors had passed away as irrevocably as that of our Christian knights and barons.

Besides the feudal militia, the armies of the sultan received a considerable addition of irregular troops from the numerous bodies of soldiers maintained by the pashas in their respective governments. Some remarkable instances of the immense numbers of armed followers maintained in the households of great officers of the empire during the reign of Suleiman the Legislator deserve notice as illustrations of the state of society at the acme of the Othoman power. The defterdar Iskender Tchelebi, who was put to death in the year 1535, had upwards of six thousand slaves, consisting chiefly of captives torn from their parents at an early age, many of whom were of Greek origin. These slaves were educated in his household in a manner not very dissimilar to that adopted in the serai of the sultan for the tribute-children. The greater part was in due time formed into bodies of troops, and served in the Othoman armies; many received a learned education, and were trained to enter the political and financial departments of the administration. The superiority of their education is proved by the fact, that when they passed into the sultan’s household after their master’s execution, several rose to the highest offices of the State, and no less than seven of these purchased slaves of Iskender Tchelebi attained the rank of vizier. Mohammed Sokolli, the celebrated grand-vizier of Suleiman at the time of that great sultan’s death, was one of the number. The celebrated Barbarossa, who died in 1544, left two thousand household slaves; and the widow of Mohammed Sokolli possessed nine hundred slaves, all of Christian parentage, in the year 1582.

It would be difficult to enumerate all the anomalies that existed in the military forces of the Othoman empire. They varied in different provinces, and in the same province, from age to age. It is only necessary here to notice those deviations from the general system which influenced the Greek population. The Porte found it often advisable to adopt different arrangements in Europe, where the majority of its subjects were Christians, from those established in Asia Minor, where the Mohammedan population was all-powerful. One remarkable deviation from the law which reserved all military power as an exclusive privilege of the true believers is to be found in the employment of Christian troops by various sultans. It was commenced by Orkhan himself, when he laid the foundations of the Othoman power. Motives of policy induced him to make every effort to secure the support of the Greek mountaineers of Bithynia (whose military spirit is often vaunted by the Byzantine historians), in order to oppose them to the Seljouk emirs in his vicinity. Orkhan, consequently, formed a corps of Greeks, consisting of one thousand cavalry and one thousand infantry. When his son, Murad I, however, had increased and improved the corps of janissaries, these Christian troops were only employed in collecting the taxes and the tribute of Christian children. Still, even at later periods, after it was recognized as a law of the empire that Mohammedans alone should bear arms, the Christians continued to act both as pioneers and as auxiliaries. Ibrahim, the grand-vizier of Suleiman, employed them as gendarmes for the protection of the unarmed rayahs against the disorderly conduct of the Turkish irregulars; and Christians were generally admitted to form a portion of the contingents of Servia and Albania. Indeed, down to the commencement of the Greek revolution, a Christian gendarmerie was maintained by the Porte in the mountain districts of Macedonia, Epirus, and Greece; and at the present day, Albanian Christians are serving with the Othoman armies on the banks of the Danube. Besides the troops furnished by the immediate subjects of the sultan, large contingents of Christians from the tributary states have borne an important part in the Othoman wars from the earliest periods of their history. The defeat of Bayezid I by Timor at Angora is generally attributed by native historians to the flight of the Servian auxiliaries.

The military strength of the Othoman empire began to decline from the period when the sultans ceased to take the field at the head of their armies. The absolute power necessary to imprint energy on every movement of its complicated administration could not be safely intrusted to the grand-vizier, so that even the most effeminate of the sultans, who lived secluded in the harem, and associated almost exclusively with women and eunuchs, frequently controlled the acts of the divan, and rendered the arrangements of the government subservient to the intrigues of the palace. Another evil followed which soon produced incalculable demoralization in the public service. When the sultans ceased to hold constant communication with the military and civil Servants of the Porte, they lost the power of judging of their merits. Viziers were enabled to advance their personal adherents over the heads of the ablest administrators and bravest soldiers in the empire; and favourites reared in the palace could easily, by securing the favour of the sultan or the chief of the eunuchs, obtain the highest offices in the State, without possessing any of the qualifications required for the performance of its duties. The Othoman empire followed the usual steps of other despotisms in its progress from corruption to decline; and the selection of ignorant and unsuitable ministers, generals, and admirals was facilitated by the fatalism of the Mohammedans. The populace, who judged the grand-viziers and highest dignitaries of the empire rather by their individual temper and personal conduct than by the policy of their administration, often showed dissatisfaction at the measures of those grand-viziers who had enjoyed the highest reputation before entering on office. The apparent contradiction between the behaviour of the ablest men in different circumstances and positions, at last induced the people to infer that human intelligence alone was insufficient to guide a sovereign in selecting fit ministers. The religious element was always powerful in the Mohammedan population; and it became the feeling of the people that it was better to trust in God than in man. It was a sincere confidence in that divine protection which had raised the Othoman empire to its unexampled pitch of power and glory that gave currency to the popular saying,—'Where God gives an employment, He bestows the qualities it requires’.

There was one evil in the Othoman administration which could only be restrained by the constant personal attention of the sultan. Venality was, from an early period, the prevalent vice in the civil and judicial administration of the empire. Yet, though the interest of the sovereign was directly opposed to this inherent vice of the administration, avarice induced many sultans to become participators in its fruits, and the court became as deeply tainted with the corruption as the government. The practice of the sovereign receiving a present whenever he conferred an office, gradually introduced the system of selling every office to the highest bidder. The venality of the Othoman officials was great even before the taking of Constantinople. The avarice of Khalil, the grand-vizier of Mohammed II, is notorious, and it cost him his life. Before one half of the reign of Mohammed II had elapsed, the patriarchs of Constantinople purchased their rank by paying a sum of money to the Porte. Khotshibeg, who wrote a work on the causes of the decline of the Othoman empire, dates its decay from the time of Suleiman the Legislator, and attributes it to the great increase of venality which then took place. Rustem, the grand-vizier of Suleiman, dropped the veil which had concealed the extent of this corruption in the general administration. He openly put up every office for sale at a fixed price, and declared publicly that money was the object most eagerly sought for by the Porte. To increase the public revenues of the State, he farmed the taxes to Jews and Greeks. By his venality and exactions Rustem accumu­lated a fortune of two hundred thousand gold ducats of annual revenue. In a state of society where riches were all powerful, his example was irresistible. The two other causes of decline indicated by Khotshibeg are, the habit adopted by Suleiman of absenting himself from the ordinary meetings of the divan, which were held four times every week, and of naming his personal favourites to the highest offices in the State, without their having acquired the experience requisite for the performance of their duty by a long and active career of service. The nomination of Ibrahim, the grand­falconer of Sultan Suleiman, to the office of grand-vizier, accelerated the decline of the administrative organization.

After the reign of Suleiman, justice grew every day more venal. Judicial offices were as openly sold as administrative; and, except when the army was engaged in active service, all promotion, even in the military service, was obtained by the payment of a bribe. The veteran janissaries languished, forgotten or neglected, in the frontier garrisons of Buda and Bagdad; while the sons of shopkeepers in the capital, and the followers of pashas, whose public duties had been confined to police service—to maintaining order in the markets, to guarding the persons of foreign ambassadors, or standing sentinel at the city gates—were allowed to purchase the highest military commands. This corruption soon became incurable, for it pervaded the whole body of the Othoman officials, who, as we have already observed, formed a class of men too completely separated from the mass of the population to be under the influence of its moral sympathies. The conviction of the members of the government that they were not amenable to public opinion, and owed no responsibility to the people, very naturally led to the exactions and oppressions which render Turkish history a continual record of revolts and rebellions. There was no hope of punishing the iniquities of a pasha, except by the arbitrary action of the sultan’s power. It was necessary to slay the accused, for to obtain his condemnation by any tribunal which could take cognizance of his crimes was almost hopeless. The suffering people had little hope of redress, if compelled to bring their complaints before the divan, for every member of that body felt that he was himself exposed to similar accusations. The condition of the sultan’s Christian subjects bore a strong resemblance, in this point, to that of the Roman provincials in the time of the republic, who had no great chance of redress when they sought for justice against the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of a proconsul, as their complaints required to be laid before a senate in which proconsuls possessed an overwhelming influence. Yet, we must not condemn the Othoman empire in the time of Suleiman without comparing the state of its administration with that of contemporary Christian governments. The sale of offices was then very general in Europe, and we find it adopted by the papal court, towards the end of the sixteenth century, as a regular method of recruiting the finances. The abuse was carried quite as far by the pope as by the sultan. It was the inherent defects in the judicial administration of the Mohammedans which rendered the venality of public employments more injurious to the State at Constantinople than at Rome. This abuse, however, had no inconsiderable effect in producing the degraded social condition of the papal dominions existing at the present day.

In the reign of Suleiman the Great, the wealth of the Othoman empire far exceeded that of any other European state. The annual income of the sultan was generally estimated at 12,000,000 ducats, while the revenues of Charles V, from all his wide-extended dominions, never exceeded 6,000,000; yet the Netherlands and the richest parts of Italy were included in the Spanish empire. At that period many parts of Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Thrace, which are now almost deserted, were cultivated by an active population. Venice drew large supplies of wheat from the Othoman dominions, and during the greater part of the two centuries which followed the conquest of Constantinople, both the Othoman and the Greek population of the empire increased considerably. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the incessant extortions of the pashas, who became partners with the farmers of taxes in their pashalics, encroached so far on the accumulated capital of the preceding period as to diminish the resources, and, ultimately, the numbers of the population.

As the power of the Othoman empire reposed on its military strength, the internal decay of the government produced little change on its position, with reference to the Christian states of Europe, until the number and discipline of its troops were sensibly diminished. It was long before this happened. In the moral conduct of the soldiers and in the public police of the army, a Turkish camp, until a late period, displayed a marked superiority over the military forces of contemporary Christian sovereigns. This superiority was one of the most efficient causes of the long career of victory of the Othoman armies. Before the sultan’s armies entered on a campaign, the regular troops, janissaries, sipahis, and artillerymen, received a part of their pay in advance, that they might purchase the necessaries required before taking the field. During the campaign they were paid with regularity, and the strictest discipline was maintained on the march, in order to insure the establishment of markets at every halt and the attendance of numerous suttlers in the camp. Of their superiority in military science we have also many testimonies.

We possess two remarkable testimonies in favour of the order and discipline which prevailed at the head-quarters of Othoman armies by Christian writers, well acquainted with the Turkish troops, and neither of them favourably disposed towards the Othoman government. There is an interval of two centuries between the periods at which they wrote, and both were eye-witnesses of the facts they describe. The first was the Greek Chalcocondylas, who lived in the middle of the fifteenth century; the other was the Englishman Rycaut, who resided in Turkey in the latter half of the seventeenth. Chalcocondylas, in describing the invasion of the Morea by Sultan Murad II, in the year 1445, praises the discipline of the Othoman army as incomparably superior to that of contemporary Christian powers. He mentions that it secured ample supplies in the camp-markets by paying regularly and liberally for provisions, and by this means relieved the commanders from the necessity of detaching large bodies of men to forage. The historian says that he had never heard of armies in which such order was preserved. Though the suttlers were accom­panied by immense trains of mules, laden with provisions and stores of every kind, there was no confusion. A spot was assigned for their tents, and the soldiers always found a well-stocked market in the vicinity of the camp. It is true these suttlers derived as large a part of their profits from the slave-trade and from the purchase of the soldiers’ booty, as from the sale of supplies to the troops. Accordingly, when the number of captives made in war decreased, and the slave-trade became less profitable in the Othoman camps, the difficulty of supplying the troops was considerably increased. Still, the viziers regarded it as the first of their military duties to see that their soldiers were well supplied, and that discipline was strictly enforced.

Sir Paul Rycaut, who resided in the Othoman empire for eighteen years, seven of which he passed at Constantinople as secretary of the English ambassador, and eleven at Smyrna as consul, describes the army of the grand-vizier, which he visited at Belgrade in the year 1665, in the following words: “In the Turkish camp no brawls, quarrels, or clamours are heard; no abuses are committed on the people by the march of the army; all is bought and paid for with money as by travellers that are guests at an inn. There are no complaints of mothers of the rape of their virgin daughters, no violences or robberies offered to the inhabitants; all which order tends to the success of their armies, and to the enlargement of their empire”.

While this system of military discipline was enforced as a means of increasing the efficiency of the regular army, the peaceful provinces of the empire were exposed to be plundered by pashas and their households when travelling to their governments, almost as if they were inhabited by a hostile population. Every great officer had a right to demand lodging and provisions at the charge of the districts through which he passed on the public service. This right became a source of incredible exactions, as the venality of the imperial officials increased with constant impunity. We may form some faint idea of the extent to which the oppression of the sultan’s officers was carried by calling to mind the extortions exercised under the authority of the royal prerogative of purveyance in feudal England, after it was recognized to be the country in which the best protection for individual property had been established. We find, even as late as the reign of James I, the English parliament declaring, that though the king’s prerogative of purveyance had been regulated by not less than thirty-six statutes, still the royal purveyors imprisoned men for refusing to surrender their property, lived at free quarters, and felled wood without the owner’s consent. The abuses which originated in the right of every petty officer in Turkey to claim lodging and provisions, at the expense of the town or village at which he might find it convenient to halt, became at last so great a burden to the agricultural population near some of the principal roads, that the villagers abandoned their dwellings, and emigrated to the most secluded valleys in the mountains.

But long after the immediate vicinity of most of the great highways had been depopulated by the exactions of pashas and tax-gatherers, discipline continued to be strictly enforced at the headquarters of the armies of the Othoman empire. As late as the year 1715, when the grand-vizier (Ali Kumurgi) conquered the Morea from the Venetians, the exactitude with which the Turkish cavalry paid for the fodder, which was brought to the camp from a distance and sold at a high price, excited the wonder of Monsieur Brue, the French interpreter of the embassy at Constantinople, who accompanied the expedition. But after that period even the discipline of the Othoman armies in the field declined with great rapidity.

From the preceding sketch of the military establishments of the Othoman empire, it is evident that the conquests of the sultans were the result of a wise organization, and of a system of education which formed a superior class of soldiers, much more than from any overwhelming superiority of numbers.

Such were the most prominent features of the government to which the Greeks were subjected for several centuries. Yet, with all the vices of the sultans’ administration, and though the lives and property of the rayahs were valued chiefly in proportion as they contributed to supply the sultan with recruits for his army and money for his treasury, it may be doubted whether any contemporary Christian government would have treated an alien and heretical race, which it had conquered, with less severity and injustice.