Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

The empire of the Ottomans is the
most extraordinary instance in history
of an empire raised by the sword,
governed by the perpetual effusion of
blood, despising all civilisation, cor-
rupted by the grossest excesses of
private life, disordered in every func-
tion of government, constantly ex-
posed to the greatest military powers
of Europe, yet advancing from con-
quest to conquest for three centuries
without a check, (from 1299 to 1566,)
and retaining its vast possessions un-
impaired for three centuries more.

The first approach of the Turks to
Europe was at the close of the thir-
teenth century, when Othman, the
son of a Turcoman chieftain in the
service of Aladin, Sultan of Iconium,
on the memorable 27th of July 1299,
made a descent on the rich territory
of Nicomedia. The Asiatic domin-
ions of the Greek Emperors were lost
in a struggle of two centuries, when
Mohammed the Second assaulted
Constantinople, on the 29th of May
1453. The body of the last emperor
was found buried under a heap of
slain, and Constantinople became the
capital of a new faith, a new people,
and a new sovereignty. His imme-
diate successors wasted the blood, but
exercised the valour of their troops,
in expeditions to Armenia, the Cau-
casus, and Persia. But the nobler
prize lay to the west. All solid sove-
reignty belongs to the hardy frames
and the regular opulence of Europe.
Soliman the First, named the Magni-
ficent, and if a conqueror can deserve
the name, deserving it by the vastness
of his designs and the splendour of his
successes, threw himself upon Hun-
gary. Combining the unusual tac-
tique of an army and fleet, in itself an
evidence of the superiority of his ge-
nius to that of his time, he at once
overran the dominions of the Hunga-
rian king, and assaulted Rhodes, held
by the famous Knights of St John of
Jerusalem, and regarded as the bul-
wark of Christendom. By the reluc-
tant aid of the Venetians, Rhodes was
stormed, after a desperate siege. So-
liman marched to the conquest of
Austria at the head of 200,000 men—
an army which no European potentate,
in the rudeness and distractions of the
age, could hope to oppose. On its
way, it trampled down the army of
Hungary, which had the madness to
meet it ; and marching over the bodies
of 20,000 men, with their monarch,
on the field, converted the kingdom
into a Turkish province, and invested
Vienna. The strength of the ram-
parts and the approach of winter
alone saved the Austrian capital from.
following the fate of the Hungarian.
But while all Christendom trembled
at the sight of the horse-tails, Soliman
died—living and dying, the greatest
conqueror since Charlemagne.

But with him the empire had reach-
ed its fated height. Thenceforth it
was to descend. The seraglio has
been the ruin of Turkey. The se-
cresy of its bloody transactions—its
habitual separation of the sovereign
from the people—its desperate disso-
luteness—and the sullen ignorance,
brute vengeance, and helpless effe-
minacy, which must be nurtured with-
in such walls, extinguished all the
rude virtues of the barbarian. Soli-
man, a hero and a legislator, always
exposing his life in the field, or holding
in his own hand the helm of his vast
empire, reigned almost half a century.
The reigns of his successors have
been proverbial for their brevity. The
janizaries became the true disposers of
the throne. From the time of Musta-
pha the First—whom they strangled
for his effeminacy, and Achmet, whom
they placed on the throne and then
strangled for his usurpation—the jani-
zaries were the recognised makers
and executioners of the sultans.

The first decisive recoil of the Ot-
toman power was in 1683, when So-
bieski, at the head of the Polish army,
forced the Vizier Kara Mustafa to raise
the siege of Vienna, on the 12th of Sep-
tember. But a power more formidable
than even Austria now began to
threaten the Porte on the feeblest part
of its frontier. Peter the Great, break-
ing the treaty of Carlowitz, invaded
Moldavia in 1711. But, though forced
to make an ignominious convention
for his escape, the Russian never for-
got the hope of conquest, and has
since never abandoned the opportu-
nity.

The nineteenth century commenced
in an aggravation of those horrors which
had become characteristic of the Turk-
ish throne. Selim the Sultan dethroned
and strangled ; Mustapha the Usurper
dethroned and stangled ; Bairactar, the
famous Vizier, in the attempt to avenge
the death of Selim, blown up by his
own hand, and thousands of his ad-
herents slaughtered by the janizaries ;
the accession of Mahmoud, the late
Sultan, signalized by the total massacre
of the janizaries in Constantinople, and
the extinction of their order through-
out the empire ;— all less resembling
the transactions of an established go-
vernment, than the last desperate con-
vulsions of a suicidal empire. Yet
some extraordinary influence seems,
for the last century, to have saved her
from hourly ruin. Her time has clearly
not come yet ; and political prophecy
has been once more put to shame.
Turkey, mutilated of the two horns of
her crescent, Greece and Egypt, still re-
tains the solid centre of her possessions ;
and when all human probability looked
for her immediate dissolution, by the
advance of Russia on one side and
Egypt on the other, she has found a
sudden protection in the tardily awa-
kened vigilance of England, Austria,
and France.

But the day of Turkish independence
is at an end. She may live by the
protection of the great states, but with-
out it she cannot live. She is now a
throne under tutelage ; and remarkable
as have been the instances of European
recovery from national misfortune,
there is nothing in the doctrines of Is-
lamism, or the habits of the Asiatic,
to administer that energy by which
alone nations can stand on their feet
again, after having been once flung on
the ground. The grave of her despo-
tism has been dug, but neither Russian
nor Egyptian must be suffered to lay
the body of the last of the Sultans
there.