[J.A.R. Marriott, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study of European Diplomacy. Oxford University: The Clarendon Press, 1919. Pp. 36-65]
CHAPTER III
THE ADVENT OF THE OTTOMANS
CONQUESTS IN EUROPE
'Modern history begins under the stress of the Ottoman Conquest.'- LORD ACTON.
'II n'y a point de nation turque, mais seulement des conquérants campés au milieu de populations hostiles; les Turcs ne forment point un État, mais une armée qui ne vaut que pour la conquête et tend à se dissoudre dès qu'elle est contrainte de s'arrêter.'-ALBERT SOREL.
The Ottomans in Asia. The origins of the Turkish tribe, subsequently known as the Osmanlis, Othmans or Ottomans, are shrouded in baffling; obscurity. The highly coloured pictures drawn by their own historians are, by common consent, entirely untrustworthy. But if little can be learnt authoritatively, perhaps it is because there is little to learn. It is still more probable that we have a good deal to unlearn. We are bidden, for example, to discard the commonly accepted tradition of a westward migration on an imposing scale; of a great struggle between the Ottoman and Seljukian Turks; of the dramatic overthrow of the Seljuk Empire; of the establishment of a powerful Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor and the advance of the conquerors upon South-Eastern Europe. This book is not, however, a history of the Ottomans, and the critical discussion of these and similar questions must not therefore be permitted to detain us. Let it suffice to say that the Ottomans emerge into the realm of authentic history in the thirteenth century. We first see them as one of innumerable bands of nomads, warriors, and herdsmen, flying from the highlands of Central Asia before the fierce onset of the Moguls. A picturesque but exceedingly doubtful legend tells how Ertogrul, chief of a tribe of some four hundred families, found himself in a position to perform a signal service to Alaeddin, Sultan of the Seljukian Turks. The Seljuks had established a powerful empire in Asia Minor in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but by the thirteenth their power was manifestly in decay. To the Seljuk Empire there was no immediate successor. The story of its overthrow by the Ottomans cannot be accepted. All that we know is that Ertogrul and his small band of followers established themselves, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, in the plain between Brusa and Nicaea, with a 'capital' at Yenishehr.
Osman (1288-1326). To Ertogrul there succeeded in 1288 his son Osman or Othman, from whom the tribe, destined to fame as the conquerors of Constantinople and inheritors of the Byzantine Empire, took their name.[1] Osman extended his modest heritage partly at the expense of other Turkish Emirs but mainly at the expense of the Greek Empire in Asia Minor, and, upon the extinction of the Seljuk Empire, he assumed the title of Sultan (circ. 1300). In 1301 he won his first notable victory over the Greeks at Baphaeon, in the neighbourhood of Nicomedia, and during the next few years he pushed on towards the Black Sea, and thus hemmed in the strong Greek cities of Nicomedia, Brusa, and Nicaea. On his death-bed (1326) he learnt that Brusa had fallen to his son Orkhan, and though the great prize of STicaea was denied to him, Osman died 'virtual lord of the Asiatic Greeks'.[2]
Orkhan (1326-1359). His Son and successor Orkhan not only rounded off Osman's work in Asia Minor, but obtained a firm foothold upon the European shores of the Hellespont. Nicomedia, the ancient capital of the Emperor Diocletian, fell to him in the first year of his reign, and was renamed Ismid. A few years later he crowned his victories over the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor by the capture of Nicaea, the second city of the Empire. By this time the Eastern Empire was, as MYe shall see later, tottering to its fall, not only in Asia Minor but in Europe. Towards the middle of the fourteenth century the pitiful remnant of it was distracted by civil war between the Palaeologi and John Cantacuzenos, who in 1341 had crowned himself Emperor at Demotika. Both parties appealed to Sultan Orkhan for help. Orkhan went to the assistance of Cantacuzenos in 1345, and was rewarded by the hand of Theodora, daughter of Cantacuzenos and granddaughter of the Bulgarian Tsar. This marriage may be regarded as the first step towards the establishment of an OttomanByzantine Empire in Europe. In 1349 Orkhan's assistance was again invoked by his father-in-law, to help in repelling the attacks of the Serbians, now at the zenith of their power, upon Macedonia. Orkhan's response was suspiciously prompt, and again a large body of Ottoman warriors feasted their eyes with a vision of the promised land.
Permanent settlement in Europe (1353). Hitherto the Ottoman horsemen, once their mission was accomplished, had duly withdrawn to their home on the Asiatic shore. But we are now on the eve of one of the cardinal events in world-history. That event was in one sense only the natural sequel to those which immediately preceded it; nevertheless it definitely stands out as marking the opening of a new chapter. In 1353 Cantacuzenos once more appealed for the help of the Ottoman Sultan against the Serbians: accordingly, Orkhan sent over his son Suleiman Pasha, by whose aid the Serbians were defeated at Demotika and the Greeks recaptured the Thracian capital Adrianople. In acknowledgement of these signal services Suleiman Pasha received the fortress of Tzympe, and there the Ottomans effected their first lodgment on European soil. Much to the chagrin of the rival emperors Gallipoli fell before the Ottoman assault in the following year (1354), and a few years later Demotika also was taken By this time the breach between Orkhan and his father-in-law was complete, and henceforward the Osmanli horsemen fought in Europe no longer as auxiliaries but as principals. Suleiman Pasha was killed by a fall from his horse in 1358, and a year later his father followed him to the grave. But the grip which they had got upon the European shore of the Dardanelles was never afterwards relaxed.
Condition of South-Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century. Before proceeding to describe the wonderful achievements of Ottoman arms during the next hundred years it seems desirable to get some clear idea of the political conditions which prevailed in South-Eastern Europe.
The Greek Empire. The Empire of the East, known indifferently as the Greek or Byzantine Empire, had by this time reached the last stage of emasculate decay. The life of the Roman Empire had been prolonged for more than a thousand years by the epoch-making resolution of the Emperor Constantine. But it was now ebbing fast. For three hundred years after Constantine's removal of the capital to Byzantium (330 A.D.) the Empire continued to be essentially Roman. With the reign of Heraclius (61041) it became as definitely Greek. Under Leo III (the Isaurian, 716-41) Greek became the official language of the Empire, though its subjects still continued, until the advent of the Ottomans and beyond it, to style themselves Romaioi. Many hard things have been said of the Eastern Empire, but this at least should be remembered to its credit. For nearly a thousand years it held the gates of Europe against a series of assaults from the East, until in turn it was itself partly overwhelmed and partly absorbed by the Ottomans. Not that the Ottomans were the earliest of the Turkish tribes to threaten the Greek Empire. Towards the end of the eleventh century the Seljuks overran Asia Minor, drove the Emperor out of his Asiatic capital, Nicaea, and assumed the title of Sultans of Roum. The Emperors of the House of Comnenos pushed back the Seljuks from Nicaea to Iconium (Konia), but in the latter part of the twelfth century the Eastern Empire again showed symptoms of decrepitude, and at the opening of the thirteenth century it suffered an irreparable blow.
The Latin Empire at Constantinople (1204-61). The fourth crusade (12004) has generally been accounted one of the blackest crimes in modern history.[3] The immediate; result of it was to establish a Latin or Frankish Empire, under Baldwin, Count of Flanders, in Constantinople; more remotely it may be held responsible for the Ottoman conquest of South-Eastern Europe. It lasted little more than half a century (1204~61); but during those years the work of disintegration proceeded apace in the Balkan lands. The Slavonic kingdoms firmly established themselves in the northern parts. Boniface of Montferrat proclaimed himself King of Salonica. Greece proper was divided up into various Frankish principalities, while the Aegean islands passed, for the most part, under the flag of the maritime Republic of Venice. Meanwhile, the Greek Empire, dethroned at Constantinople, maintained itself, in somewhat precarious existence, at Nicaea. No less precarious was the hold of the Latin Empire upon Constantinople. The latter was purely a military adventure. It never struck any roots into the soil, and in 1261 Michael Palaeologus, Emperor of Nicaea, had little difficulty in reconquering Constantinople from the Latins. The restored Byzantine Empire survived for nearly two centuries, but its prestige had been fatally damaged, its vitality had been sapped, and it awaited certain dissolution at the hands of a more virile race. There can indeed be little doubt that only the advent of the Ottomans prevented Constantinople itself from falling into the hands of the Southern Slavs. The condition of the Byzantine Empire during this last period of its existence presents a curious analogy to that of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth. 'It is', writes a penetrating critic, 'the story of an uninterrupted succession of bitter internal quarrels, of attacks by former vassals upon the immediate frontiers of its shrunken territory, of subtle undermining by hostile colonies of foreigners whose one thought was commercial gain, and of intermittent, and in almost all cases selfishly inspired, efforts of Western Europe to put of the fatal day.'[4]
Territorially, the Greek Empire-had shrunk to the narrowest limits, little wider, in fact, than those to which the Ottoman Empire in Europe is reduced to-day. The Empire of Trebizond represented the remnant of its possessions in Asia, while in Europe, apart from Constantinople and Thrace, it held only the Macedonian coast with the city of Salonica and the Eastern Peloponnesus. Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia, Croatia, and Bosnia owned the sway of Lewis the Great; the Serbian Empire stretched from Belgrade to the Gulf of Corinth, from the Adriatic to the Aegean; Bulgaria held what we know as Bulgaria proper and Eastern Roumelia; Dalmatia, Corfu, Crete, and Euboea were in the hands of Venice; the Knights of St. John were in possession of Rhodes, while the Franks still held the kingdom of Cyprus, the principality of Achaia, the Duchies of Athens, Naxos, and Cephalonia, not to speak of many of the Aegean islands. Little, therefore, was left to the successors of the Caesars in Constantinople.
Illyrians and Thracians. When the Romans first made themselves masters of South-Eastern Europe they found three great races in possession: the Illyrians, the Thracians, and the Hellenes. The Illyrians, who had established the kingdom of Epirus in the fourth century B.C., were represented in the thirteenth century, as they are still, by the mountaineers of Albania. The Thracians, dominant during the Macedonian supremacy, mingled with Trajan's colonists in Dacia to form the people represented by the modern Roumanians. But neither of these aboriginal races would, perhaps, have preserved, through the ages, their identity but for the existence of the third race, the Greeks. It was the Greeks, who, by their superiority to their Roman conquerors in all the elements of civilization, prevented the absorption of the other races by the Romans, and so contributed to that survival of separate nationalities which, from that day to this,, has constituted one of the special peculiarities of Balkan politics. Of the Illyrians in Albania little need, in this place, be said, except that they have successfully resisted absorption by the Turks as they had previously resisted similar efforts on the part of Romans, Byzantines, and Slavs.
The Albanians have never contributed an important factor to the Balkan problem. Like the Slavs, but in even greater degree, 'they were devoid of cohesion and political sentiment, and have at no time been more than an aggregate of tribes, mostly occupied with internal quarrels,'[5] though, as we shall see, they have more than once produced a man of virile and commanding personality.
Moldavia and Wallachia. Far different has been the history of the Thracians in the Danubian principalities. That history is largely the outcome of geography. Their geographical situation, as was explained in the preceding chapter, though suggesting a highway to westward-bound invaders rendered them immune from conquest, and, as a fact, they have never actually submitted to a conqueror. Least of all to the Ottomans, who, as we shall see later, never made any serious or sustained attempt to absorb them into their Empire.
The modern Roumanians are commonly supposed to be descendants of the Roman colonists settled (circ. AD. 101) by the Emperor Trajan in the province of Dacia for the protection of the Roman Empire against the northern barbarians. This account of their origin was disputed, however, by Dr. Freeman, who held that they represented 'not specially Dacians or Roman colonists in Dacia, but the great Thracian race generally, of which the Dacians were only a part'.[6] The question is not one which can be permitted to detain us. It must suffice for our present purpose to say that just as the Hungarians represent a great Magyar wedge thrust in between the Northern and the Southern Slavs, so do the Roumanians represent a Latin wedge, distinct and aloof from all their immediate neighbours, though not devoid, especially in language, of many traces of Slav influences. Towards the close of the third century (circ. A.D. 271) the Emperor Aurelian was compelled by barbarian inroads to abandon his distant colony, and to withdraw the Roman legions, but the colonists themselves retired into the fastnesses of the Carpathians, only to emerge again many centuries later, when the barbarian flood had at last subsided.
For nearly a thousand years, reckoning to the Tartar invasion of 1241, Dacia was nothing but a highway for successive tides of barbarian invaders, Goths, Huns, Lombards, Avars, and Slavs. But, except the last, none of the invaders left any permanent impress upon the land. Still, the successive tides followed each other so quickly that the Daco-Romans themselves were completely submerged, and for a thousand years history loses sight of them.
But though submerged they were not dissipated. 'The possession of the regions on the Lower Danube', writes Traugott Tamm, 'passed from one nation to another, but none endangered the Roumanian nation as a national entity. " The water passes, the stones remain "; the hordes of the migration period, detached from their native soil, disappeared as mist before the sun. But the Roman element bent their heads while the storm passed over them, clinging to the old places until the advent of happier days, when they were able to stand up and stretch their limbs.'[7] The southern portion of what is now Roumania emerged, towards the close of the thirteenth century, as the principality of Wallachia (or Muntenia, i. e. mountain-land); the northern, a century later, came to be known as the Principality of Moldavia. Both principalities were founded by immigrant Rouman nobles from Transylvania, and, as a consequence, Roumania has always been distinguished from the other Balkan provinces by the survival of a powerful native aristocracy. In Serbia the nobles were exterminated; in Bosnia they saved their property by the surrender of their faith; in Roumania alone did they retain both.
Such was the position of the Danubian principalities when the Ottomans began their career of conquest in South-Eastern Europe. The principalities had never been in a position, like their neighbours to the south and west of them, to aspire to a dominant place in Balkan politics. Nor were they, like those neighbours, exposed to the first and full fury of the Ottoman attack. Still, under its famous Voivode Mircaea the Great, Wallachia took part against the Ottomans in the great Slavonic combinations, which were dissolved by the Turkish victories at Kossovo (1389) and Nicopolis (1396).
Early in the fifteenth century the Ottomans crossed the Danube, and in 1412 Wallachia was reduced to a state of vassaldom. But it was never wholly absorbed like Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace into the Ottoman Empire. Nor was Moldavia, which, for obvious geographical reasons) managed to maintain its independence for a hundred years longer than Wallachia. In 1475 Stephen the Great, Voivode of Moldavia, won a resounding victory over the Turkish army at Racova. In 1512, however, his son Bogdan, weakened by the attacks of Poland and Hungary, made a voluntary submission to the Ottomans. He agreed to pay tribute to the Sultan and to assist him in time of war, but Moldavia was to continue to elect its own prince, and no Turk was to be permitted to settle in the principality. These terms were confirmed, in 1536, by Suleiman the Magnificent, and formed the basis of the relations which subsisted between Constantinople and the two Danubian principalities down to the eighteenth century.
Bulgaria. South of the Danube and between that river and the Aegean lay the district known as Bulgaria. The Thraco-Illyrian race by which it was originally inhabited was conquered by the Slavs who, from the beginning of the sixth century onwards, inundated the peninsula. By the middle of the seventh century the Slav penetration of the Balkans was complete; from the Danube to the Maritza, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea the Slavs formed a solid mass, broken only by Albania and Southern Thrace; Greeks held the Aegean coast and most of the towns-Athens, Corinth, Patras, Larissa, and Salonica: but even in the interior of the Morea there was a considerable infusion of Slavs. Upon the heels of the Slavs came the Bulgars. The latter belong to a Turanian race, akin to the Avars, Huns, Magyars, and Finns. Coming like other Mongol races from Eastern Asia, they settled on the Volga, where the Greater or White Bulgaria continued to exist down to the sixteenth century. Thence they made various predatory inroads into the Balkan peninsula, in the latter part of the sixth and first half of the seventh century, and eventually in 679 subjugated the Slavs of Moesia and effected a definite and permanent settlement in the land between the Danube and the Balkan mountains. After their settlement, however, they were completely assimilated in language and in civilization to the conquered Slavs, and to-day they are commonly accounted a Slavonic people. Yet despite identity of speech, and despite a very large infusion of Slav blood, the Bulgar has developed a distinct national self-consciousness which has constantly come into conflict with that of the Southern Slavs.
The antagonism between these near neighbors has been accentuated in recent years by the establishment of an independent Bulgarian Exarchate. That exceedingly important step was taken in 1870, precisely one thousand years after the fateful decision by which the Bulgarian Church was placed under the Patriarch of Constantinople. Prince Boris of Bulgaria had been converted to Christianity in 866, but for the first few years it was uncertain whether the infant Bulgarian Church would adhere to Constantinople or to Rome. In 870, during the reign of the Emperor Basil I, the victory, pregnant with consequences for Bulgaria, was assured to Constantinople.
First Bulgarian Empire (893-972). It was under Simeon the Great (893-927), the son of Boris, that Bulgaria attained to the position of a great Power.; Simeon himself adopted the style of 'Tsar and Autocrat of; all Bulgars and Greeks', and the territorial expansion of his kingdom, the widest as yet achieved by Bulgaria, went far to sustain his titular pretensions. The Byzantine emperors could command the allegiance only of Constantinople, Adrianople, Salonica, and the territory immediately adjacent thereto, and were compelled to pay tribute to the Bulgarian Tsar. Simeon's empire stretched at one time from the Black Sea almost to the Adriatic, and included Serbia and all the inland parts of Macedonia, Epirus, and Albania.
But the first Bulgarian Empire was short-lived. The Serbs reasserted their independence in 931; domestic feuds led to the partition of Bulgaria itself into Eastern and Western Bulgaria in 963; ecclesiastical schism, due to the spread of the curious Bogomil heresy, accentuated civil strife; while the Emperor Nikephoros Phokas (963-9) renounced in 966 the tribute paid to the Bulgarian Tsar, and, shortsightedly invoking the assistance of the Russians, inflicted a crushing defeat upon Bulgaria. It was, indeed, easier to introduce the Russians into the Balkans than to get rid of them. But the latter feat was at length accomplished by the Emperor John Tzimisces-a brilliant Armenian adventurer-and Eastern Bulgaria was merged, for the time, into the Byzantine Empire (972).
Western Bulgaria, with its capital at Okhrida, and including at one time Thessaly, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Herzegovina, and parts of Serbia and Bulgaria proper, survived for another thirty years. But it in turn fell before the long-sustained attack of the Emperor Basil II (976-1025), known to fame as Bulgaroktonos, 'slayer of the Bulgarians.' A succession of victories culminated in 1016 in the capture of Okhrida, and the Western Bulgaria, like the Eastern, ceased to exist. Once more the authority of the Byzantine emperor was reasserted throughout the Peninsula.
The Second Bulgarian Empire, (1187-1257). For more than a century and a half the history of Bulgaria is a blank. Its revival dates from a successful revolt headed in 1186 by John Asen-a Vlach shepherd-against the tyranny of the Emperor Isaac Angelus. The capital of this second or Vlacho-Bulgarian Empire was at Tirnovo where, in 1187, John Asen was crowned. It included, at one time, besides Bulgaria proper, most of Serbia, with parts of Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus, but the murder of John Asen II in 1257 brought the Vlach dynasty and the Vlacho-Bulgarian Empire to an end. Most of its provinces had already been lost to it, and the remnant was held in vassaldom to Serbia. For the Serbs had by this time become the dominant power in the peninsula, and it was, as we have seen, to combat the insistent menace of this people that Cantacuzenos, in the middle of the fourteenth century, invoked the aid of the Ottomans. The place of the Southern Slavs in the Balkan polity of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be our next concern.
Serbia and the Southern Slavs. Of the coming of the Slavs into the Balkan Peninsula something has been already said. By the middle of the, seventh century the peninsula had become predominantly Slavonic and the lines of the chief Slav States had already been roughly defined. Of Bulgaria no more need be said. The other three were inhabited by Serbs, Croatians. and Slovenes respectively. The last occupied what we know as Carniola and Southern Carinthia; the Croats held Croatia with parts of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia; the Serbs held the remaining portions of the three last-named provinces together with Montenegro and practically everything which was assigned to Serbia by the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), i.e. Serbia proper, old Serbia, and the northern part of Macedonia. The Southern Slavs have always been more devoted to independence than to discipline, more conspicuous for valour than for organizing capacity. From the first they were, in a political sense, loosely knit, lacking in coherence or in the power of continuous combination. They were bound to the soil, not by serfdom, but by the affectionate ties of cultivating proprietors. Such governmental machinery as they devised was local rather than central; they organized themselves in agricultural village-communities, and showed a marked aversion, in strong contrast with the Greeks, to city life. Originally they had neither kings, nor priests, nor even slaves, but settled down in free communities of peasant owners and organized their social and economic life on 'a system of family communism'.[8] Freedom-loving and brave, they had the defects of their qualities. Their lack of discipline, subordination, and political coherence, not less than the physical characteristics of their country, made it difficult to weld them into a powerful State, while their jealous devotion to the soil disposed them to local feuds of a peculiarly ferocious character.
Torn by internal dissensions the Serbs have always lacked, except towards the north, natural and definable frontiers. Still more unfortunate has been their lack of coast-line. They have never reached the Aegean, and only for a short period were they established on the Adriatic. The Greeks headed them off from the former; the Venetians and Hungarians, after the fall of Rome, generally kept a jealous hold upon the latter.
The Serbs embraced Christianity towards the end of the ninth century, but in ecclesiastical as in political affairs the Southern Slavs found it difficult to agree; for while the Serbs adhered to Constantinople the Croats acknowledged the authority of Rome. Temporal allegiance tended to follow the same direction. From the ninth century to the twelfth the Serbs were for the most part under the suzerainty of the Bulgarian or the Byzantine Empires; the Croats were subject to Hungary or Venice.
The Serbian Empire. The great period in the mediaeval history of Serbia extends from the middle of the twelfth to the close of the fourteenth century. Under the Nemanya dynasty (1168-1371) Serbia managed to compose, in some degree, her internal quarrels, and so gave herself, for the first time, a chance of attaining to a dominant position in Balkan politics. Stephen Nemanya, the first of the new line, succeeded in uniting most of the Serbian countries-Serbia proper, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, and though forced to make submission to the Emperor Manuel I Comnenus, he renewed his career of conquest on the latter's death, 1180, and when, in 1196, he resolved to abdicate, he handed over to his second son, Stephen Urosh (1196-1223), a kingdom tolerably homogeneous, and, in extent, indubitably imposing.
Stephen Urosh (1196-1223). The new ruler was, on his accession, confronted by difficulties which have recurred with ominous regularity in every period of Serbian history. These difficulties arose from three main causes: dynastic disunion; the jealousy of Bulgaria; and the unremitting hostility of the Magyars of Hungary. The chagrin of an elder brother, passed over in the succession, was mollified by the tact of a younger brother, a monk, the famous St. Sava. The same tactful intermediation secured for the Serbian Church internal autonomy and independence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Against the jealousy of Bulgaria St. Sava was less successful, for the Bulgarians, seizing the opportunity of Serbian disunion, made themselves masters of a large part of Eastern Serbia, including the important towns of Belgrade, Nish, and Prizren. The hostility of Andrew II of Hungary had, for the time being, little definite result, but its existence supplies one of those constant factors which give something of unity and consistency to the confused annals of the Southern Slavs. If at any time there has been in any special manifestation of national self-consciousness on the part of the Southern Slavs, Buda-Pesth has immediately responded by a marked exhibition of its unceasing vigilance and its ineradicable jealousy. Nor is it possible to deny that the antagonism between the two peoples is due to a direct conflict of interest. The Magyars have always striven to obstruct the progress of the Southern Slavs towards the Adriatic; the Serbians still block the access of the Magyars to the Aegean. Notwithstanding these initial difficulties the reign of Stephen Urosh was exceptionally prosperous. He himself was the first of Serbia's kings to receive the consecration of a solemn coronation, and so skillful was his diplomacy in playing off Rome against Constantinople, and Nicaea against both, that he secured the recognition of Serbian independence, both civil and ecclesiastical, not only from the Pope but from the Latin and Greek emperors.[9]
We must pass over with scant notice the century which elapsed between the death of Stephen Urosh (1223) and the accession of the most renowned of all Serbian rulers, Stephen Dushan (1331). Serbian annals have little else to record during this period but a monotonous tale of domestic quarrels and military expeditions, conducted with varying success, against immediate neighbours. A crushing defeat inflicted upon a combination of Greeks and Bulgars by Stephen VII[10] (1321-31) is perhaps worthy of record, since it prepared the way for the brilliant success achieved by his son. It should be noted also that by this time the Serbians had already come into contact with the Turks.
Stephen Dushan (1331-55). The reign of Stephen VIII, 'Dushan,'[11] demands more detailed consideration, for it marks the meridian of Serbian history. Cut off at the early age of forty-six, perhaps by poison, he yet lived long enough to establish his fame both as lawgiver and conqueror. His code of laws published in 1349, not less than his encouragement of literature and his protection of the Church, has given to Dushan a place in the history of his own land analogous to that of King Alfred in our own. It is, however, as a mighty conqueror that his memory lives most vividly in Balkan history.
Conquests of Stephen Dushan. His first military success was achieved against the Emperor Andronicus III. He invaded Thessaly, defeated the forces of the emperor, and by a treaty dictated in 1340 Serbia was recognized as the dominant power in the peninsula Bulgaria, the sister of whose king Dushan married, formally recognized his supremacy, and in 1345 Stephen was crowned at Uskub, which he made his capital, Tsar of the Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks. So formidable was Dushan's position in South-Eastern Europe that in 1353 the Pope, Innocent VI, deemed it prudent in the interests of Western Christendom to incite Lewis, King of Hungary, to an attack upon the Serbian Tsar. The Magyars, as we have seen, were never backward in such enterprises; but, in this case, their intervention recoiled upon their own heads. The city of Belgrade, and the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina rewarded the victorious arms of Dushan. The extent of his empire was now enormous. It extended from the Save and Danube in the north almost to the Aegean in the south; from the Adriatic in the west almost to the Lower Maritza in the east. It thus comprised Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Southern Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, and a great part of Greece.[12]
The South Slavonic lands of Croatia, Slavonia, and Northern Dalmatia were still outside the Serbian Empire, nor did it even include Salonica, still less the imperial city itself. Not that Constantinople was beyond the range of Dushan's ambition. The distracted condition of the Eastern Empire seemed indeed to invite an attack upon it. In the domestic dissensions which so grievously weakened the Byzantine emperors in their incipient duel with the Ottomans, Dushan espoused the side of the Empress Anna against Cantacuzenos, and with marked success. In 1351 Dushan organized a great crusade against the decadent Empire of Constantinople with the hope of re-establishing the imperial city as a barrier against the advancing power of the Ottomans.
Cantacuzenos, as we have seen, had not hesitated, again and again, to invoke the aid of Sultan Orkhan against the redoubtable Dushan. In 1353 the Serbians were defeated by the Ottomans at Demotika and Adrianople, and Thrace and parts of Macedonia were thus recovered for the Byzantine Empire. Dushan was great enough both as statesman and strategist to see that, if South-Eastern Europe was to be saved from the Asian menace, Constantinople itself must be held by a national Power, more virile than that of the decadent Byzantines. Under the circumstances that Power could be none other than Serbia. Advancing in 1355 to the accomplishment of this great enterprise, Stephen Dushan was suddenly and prematurely cut off. That poison should have been suspected was inevitable, and the suspicion may be justified.
The death of the Tsar Dushan may fitly close our prolonged parenthesis.
The object of that parenthesis has been to enable the reader to grasp the main features of the general political situation in the Balkans at the moment when a new Power intervened in European affairs. The close of it tempts to speculation. Is it idle to conjecture what might have happened had the Ottomans declined the invitation of Cantacuzenos and elected to remain an Asiatic Power ? What, under those circumstances, would have been the fate of South-Eastern Europe ? The Greek Empire, undeniably damaged in prestige by the Latin episode, had itself fallen into a state of decrepitude which forbad any possible hope of redemption. Could a suitable successor have been found among the other Balkan 'States'? The autochthonous Illyrians, now settled in Albania, might perhaps have kept a hold on their mountain fastnesses, but they could never have hoped to do more. The Daco-Roumans, representing the other indigenous race, were geographically too remote from any one of the three keys of the Balkans-Belgrade, Salonica, and Constantinople -to assume at this stage a leading róle. The Greeks were politically successful only so long as they remained within sight and smell of the sea. The subjection of a hinterland has always seemed to be beyond their powers. By a process of exclusion we reach the Bulgarians and the Serbs, and judging from the experience of the recent past the future seemed to belong to one or other of these peoples, or still more certainly, if they could compose the differences which divided them, to both. Twice had the former attained to clear pre-eminence, if not to domination. But the empires of Simeon and Asen were matched if not surpassed by that of Stephen Dushan. And to Serbia came the 'psychological' chance. Her supremacy in Balkan politics coincided with one of the great moments in human history. Tremendous issues hung in the balance when Stephen Dushan was suddenly smitten with mortal illness, as he was advancing on Constantinople; when, from the Danube almost to the Aegean, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, Serbian suzerainty was virtually unchallenged; when the Ottomans were effecting their first lodgment on European soil.
The history of the Southern Slavs had already revealed congenital weaknesses; it would be idle to pretend that more recent experience has proved that during the dark days of adversity and oblivion they have been entirely overcome. But whatever the explanation the fact remains that, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Balkan Slavs had a chance such as comes to few peoples; and they missed it. As a result the history of South-Eastern Europe belongs for the next five hundred years not to the Slavs, nor to the Greeks, but to their Ottoman masters.
Ottoman Conquests in Europe. To the story of the Ottomans we must, therefore, after a long but necessary diversion, return. It was against the Serbs, not against the Greeks, that the Ottoman arms in Europe were first directed-a point on which a recent historian has laid considerable emphasis. The result was to involve the Ottoman invaders 'in a tangle of Balkan affairs from which they only extricated themselves after forty years of incessant fighting'.[13] Nevertheless it was upon the Thracian Chersonese that the invaders first fastened. Cantacuzenos was not slow to perceive the blunder he had made. An appeal to Orkhan to quit his hold was met by a courteous but firm refusal. Whereupon the wretched emperor so far humiliated himself as to beg for the assistance of the Bulgars and Serbs. On their refusal his position in Constantinople became desperate. His subjects recalled John Palaeologus, and Cantacuzenos abdicated his uneasy throne and withdrew into a monastery (1354).
Murad I (1359-89). Four years later Sultan Orkhan, his son-in-law, died. The reign of his son, Murad I, was one of the most splendid in the annals of the Ottomans. It opened auspiciously with a long and successful campaign in Thrace (1360-1) which finally assured the foothold of his people on the soil of Europe. One after another the important strategic points in Thrace fell into their hands, until at last, by the capture of Adrianople and Philippopolis, they confined the Greek Empire to Constantinople. The Emperor, John V, bowed to the inevitable, recognized the Ottoman conquest of Thrace as definitive, and agreed to become the vassal of the Sultan (1363).
By this time the Christian States were awakening to the gravity of the situation, and in 1363 Lewis the Great of Hungary led a crusading expedition of Hungarians, Serbians, Bosnians, and Wallachians against the successful infidel. Very little, however, was achieved by the enterprise, which came to a disastrous, if not a disgraceful, end in a crushing defeat on the banks of the Maritza.
Conquest of the Balkan Peninsula. In 1366 Sultan Murad took a step of high significance; he 4 established his capital at Adrianople, and, turning his back 'upon the imperial city, devoted himself for the remainder of 2 his life and reign-twenty-three years-to the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula. Sisman of Bulgaria was, in 1379, reduced to vassaldom; the Serbs were decisively defeated at Taenarus, and the Nemanya dynasty came to an end. With the extinction of the dynasty to which Dushan had given distinction Serbia's brief day was over. Little hope now remained to the Byzantine emperor. Frantic appeals were once more addressed to the Christian princes; the emperor himself undertook a special pilgrimage to Rome, but no help was forthcoming from a distracted and divided Christendom, and in 1373 John V definitely accepted the suzerainty of the Ottoman conqueror; undertook to render him military service; and entrusted to his custody his son Manuel as a hostage for the punctual performance of his promises.
Meanwhile Murad made rapid progress in the subjugation of the peninsula: Eastern Macedonia, up to the Vardar river, was conquered in 1372; the rest of Macedonia was occupied in 1380; the Ottomans established themselves in Prilep and Monastir, and, a few years later, in Okhrida. Murad then turned to complete the subjection of Bulgaria and Serbia Sofia was taken in 1385, and a year later Nish also fell.
Battle of Kossovo, June 15, 1389. One last and desperate effort was now made by the Slavs to avert their impending doom. A great combination was formed between the Southern Slavs of Serbia and Bosnia, the Bulgars, the Vlachs, and the Albanians. On June 15, 1389, one of the most fateful battles in the history of the Near East was fought on the historic plain of Kossovo. The arms of the Ottoman were completely victorious, and the Slav confederacy was annihilated. The assassination of the Sultan Murad by a pretending Serbian traitor, Milosh Obilic, adds a touch of tragedy to sufficiently impressive history. But the tragedy did not affect the issue of the day. Murad's son, Bajazet, rallied his troops and pressed the victory home. Lazar, the last Serbian Tsar, was captured and executed, and his daughter, Despina, became the wife of the victorious Sultan. The memory of the battle of Kossovo Polye-the Field of Blackbirds-has been preserved in the ballad literature of a freedom-loving peasantry. Not until 1912 did the memory cease to rankle; not until then was the defeat avenged, and the bitterness it had engendered even partially assuaged.
For five hundred years after Kossovo the Serbs never really rallied. Many of them took refuge in the mountains of Montenegro, and there maintained throughout the ages a brave fight for freedom; many more migrated to Bosnia, and even to Hungary. But as an independent State Serbia was blotted out.
Conquest of Bulgaria. Four years after the overthrow of the Southern Slavs at 4 Kossovo Bulgarian independence suffered a similar fate. 'The Turks had already taken Nikopolis in 1388, and in 1393 they destroyed the Bulgarian capital, Tirnovo. The Bulgarian Patriarch was sent into exile; the Bulgarian Church was, for just five hundred years, reduced to dependence on the Greek Patriarchate at Byzantium; the Bulgarian dynasty was extinguished, and the Bulgarian State was absorbed into the Empire of the Ottomans.
Battle of Nikopolis (1396). From the conquest of Bulgaria Bajazet turned to Hungary. He had already, in 1390, carried out a series of successful raids into that country; he now aspired to more permanent conquest. Sigismund, who had succeeded to the throne of Hungary in 1387, was fully conscious of the impending peril. He made a strong appeal to the other Christian princes of Europe, and in 1394 Pope Boniface IX proclaimed a crusade. One hundred thousand Paladins, the flower of the chivalry of France and Germany, nobles not a few from England, Scotland, Flanders, and Lombardy, and a large body of the Knights of St. John responded to the papal call, and enlisted under the banner of Sigismund. In the battle of Nikopolis (1396) the forces of Christendom were overthrown by the Ottomans. The larger part of Sigismund's followers were slain or driven into the Danube to be drowned; no fewer than four French Princes of the Blood and twenty sons of the highest nobility in France were among Bajazet's prisoners; of the Knights of Rhodes only the Grand Master survived, while Sigismund himself escaped with difficulty down the river, and thence by sea returned to Hungary. After the battle a force of Turks invaded Hungary, destroyed the fortresses, and carried off sixteen thousand Styrians into captivity. The triumph of the Ottomans was complete.
The effort of Christendom was unfortunately premature. Could they have waited another six years, and then have struck hard when Bajazet was himself a prisoner in the hands of Tamerlane, the whole future course of European history might have been profoundly affected. When the chance did come in the first years of the fifteenth century, Christian Europe was too hopelessly distracted by the Great Schism and other quarrels to take advantage of it.
Conquest of Greece. After his victory at Nikopolis Bajazet turned southwards. Hitherto Greece proper had been spared; but between 1397 and 1399 Bajazet conquered Thessaly, Phocis, Doris, Locris, part of Epirus, and Southern Albania Thus the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula was all but complete. Athens and Salonica remained in Christian hands,[14] but the emperor himself retained nothing but the extreme south of the Morea and Constantinople.
Could even this remnant be saved ? At the end of the fourteenth century it seemed more than doubtful; at the beginning of the fifteenth it appeared at least to be possible; for the whole situation was temporarily transformed by the bursting over Western Asia of a storm which for some years had been gathering in the East.
Tamerlane. Born in Bokhara in 1336, Timour 'the Tartar' had in the latter half of the fourteenth century made himself master of a vast-stretching territory between the Indus and Asia Minor. From Samarkand to Khorassan, from Khorassan to the Caspian; northwards from the Volga to the Don and the Dnieper; southwards to Persia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Georgia-all acknowledged him as lord. In 1398 he invaded India, and was proclaimed Emperor of Hindustan; then, westwards again, he made himself master of Bagdad, Aleppo, and Syria. Finally, in 1402, he challenged the Ottoman Sultan in Anatolia. With the Ottoman Empire in Asia this book is not primarily concerned; but it is essential to remember that, coincidently with their ceaseless activity in Europe, the Ottomans had gradually built up, partly at the expense of the Greek emperors, partly at that of the Seljukian Turks, partly at that of smaller Turkish emirs, an imposing empire in Asia Minor.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century the whole of their hardly-won empire was threatened by the advent of the mighty conqueror Tamerlane. In 1402 Tamerlane inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Ottomans at Angora, and took the Sultan Bajazet prisoner. Later on he captured Brusa and Smyrna, and overran the greater part of Asia Minor. Rut then, instead of advancing into Europe, he again turned eastwards, and in 1405 he died. The cloud dispersed almost as quickly as it had gathered.
Sultan Bajazet died in captivity in 1403. The battle of Angora is memorable for the fact that it resulted not only in a crushing military defeat but in the capture of an Ottoman Sultan. Never had this happened before; never has it happened since. But apart from this, the defeat of Bajazet at Angora had curiously little significance. The remnant of the Byzantine Empire did, indeed, get a temporary respite; the imperial city was saved to it for half a century; and there ensued among the Ottomans a decade of confusion, civil war, and interregnum.
Yet during this period of confusion no attempt was made either by the Greek emperor or by the Slav peoples in the peninsula, or by interested competitors such as the Venetians or Genoese, or by Sigismund of Hungary, or by the Pope as representing Christendom, to repair the damage wrought in the last half century by the infidel. What is the explanation of this astounding neglect of a unique opportunity ? Christendom had, it is true, plenty on its hands. The Great Schism rendered nugatory any action on the part of a Pope. Sigismund, too, was preoccupied. But the essential reasons must be sought elsewhere. It is clear, in the first place, that the Greek Empire was sunk beyond hope of redemption; secondly, that the Balkan 'peoples' were unready to take its place; and finally, that the Ottoman Emperors, Orkhan, Murad, and Bajazet, had builded better than they knew. It is, indeed, a remarkable testimony to their statesmanship that the infant empire should have passed through the crisis after Angora practically unscathed. The ten years' anarchy was ended in 1413 by the recognition of Mohammed I (1413-21) as sole Sultan, but his brief reign did little to repair the havoc. That task he bequeathed to his son.
Murad II (1421-51). For thirty years Murad II devoted his great energy and l ability to its accomplishment. His first effort was directed ( against Constantinople; but the great prize was snatched from his grasp, as all men then believed, by the miraculous apparition of the Virgin on the walls of the beleaguered city, or possibly by an urgent call from Asia Minor. To Asia Minor, at any rate, he went, and having effectually restored his authority there, he returned to Europe in 1424. The attack upon Constantinople was not resumed, but in 1430 Salonica was for the first time -taken by the Ottomans, and Murad's victorious army advanced into Albania.
John Corvinus Hunyadi. But the main work of Murad lay elsewhere. In 1440 he was confronted by a great confederacy in the north. The Turkish victory at Nikopolis owed not a little to the help of Serbia, who, as a reward, was reinvested with Belgrade. In 1427, however, the lordship of the Serbians passed to George Brankovic, whereupon Murad immediately declared war, and Brankovic was compelled to surrender Nish to the Turks and Belgrade to the Magyars. But he built, lower down the Danube, the great fortress of Semendria, which remained, until the nineteenth century, the Serbian capital. Shortly afterwards the Ottomans were threatened by the rise of a great leader among the Magyars. Of all the foes whom the Turks encountered in their conquest of the Balkans, the most brilliant, perhaps, was John Corvinus Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, and celebrated by Commines as 'le chevalier blanc des Valaques'. Under his banner Magyars, Czechs, Vlachs, and Serbians united in an attempt to stem the Ottoman tide. The first encounter between Hunyadi and the Turks was in 1442 at Hermannstadt in Transylvania, when he inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Ottoman general. An attempt to avenge this defeat ended in an even more decisive victory for the arms of Hunyadi. In the summer of 1443 Hunyadi again led an imposing host against the Ottomans. Crossing the Danube near Semendria, he marched up the valley of the Morava, and on November 3 defeated the Turks at Nish He then took Sofia, forced the passage of the Balkans, and having won another great victory in the valley of the Maritza, found himself within striking distance of Constantinople.
Treaty of Szegeddin. Sultan Murad, beaten to his knees, begged for peace, which was solemnly concluded at Szegeddin (July 12, 1444). There was to be a truce for ten years; Serbia and Herzegovina were to be restored to George Brankovic in complete independence, and Wallachia was to pass under the suzerainty of Hungary. Ladislas, King of Hungary, swore upon the Gospels, the Sultan swore upon the Koran, that the terms should be faithfully observed.
Hardly was the ink dry upon the treaty when Ladislas, on yielding to the combined and perfidious persuasion of the Papal Legate, Cardinal John Cesarini, and the Greek Emperor, determined to break it. Hunyadi, bribed by a promise of the throne of Bulgaria, reluctantly consented, and on September 1 the Hungarian army marched into Wallachia, and in less than two months found themselves in front of Varna. The surrender of Varna, however, put a term to the triumph of the Hungarians.
Battle of Varna, Nov. 10, 1444. Secure in the oath of a Christian, Sultan Murad had gone into retirement after the Treaty of Szegeddin, and had sent his army into Asia Minor. The news of the Hungarian advance recalled both the Sultan and his army. Transported from Asia by a heavily bribed Genoese fleet, the Turks reached Varna, and there on November 10, 1444, inflicted a crushing and merited defeat upon their foes. The King of Hungary, the Papal Legate, and two bishops paid for their perfidy with their lives upon the field of battle.
Hunyadi, however, escaped, and four years later he again led a great army across the Danube. The Turks met him on the historic field of Kossovo (October 17, 1448), and there, after three days battle, aided by the defection of George Brankovic, they won, for the second time, a decisive victory.
Thus was the infant empire of the Ottomans saved at last from one of the greatest dangers that ever threatened it. In the same year the Emperor John VIII died, and the rival claimants appealed to Sultan Murad, who designated Constantine as his successor. In 1451 Murad himself died, and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed II.
Mohammed II, 'the Conqueror' (1451-81). Mohammed, a young prince of one and twenty, lost no time: in plunging into the task with the accomplishment of which his name will always be associated Having hastily renewed all his father's engagements with Hungary, Serbia, Wallachia, the republics of Ragusa, Venice, and Genoa, he promptly declared war upon the Greek emperor and advanced to the siege of the imperial city. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople was carried by assault, and the last Greek emperor died fighting in the breach.
Fall of Constantinople: the Byzantine Ottoman Empire. The last Greek emperor died, but his empire survived. It has been recently argued that modern critics have attached to the conquest of Constantinople an importance of which contemporaries were ignorant. The contention is partly true. Contemporaries, However, are not the best judges of the historical perspective of the events they witness. To the people of that day the capture of Constantinople was merely the inevitable climax of a long series of Ottoman victories on European soil. The Sultan was already sovereign of the Greek Empire; the emperor was his vassal; the taking of the imperial city was merely a question of time.
Nevertheless, the fall of Constantinople is in the true historical sense 'epoch marking'. Of its significance in an economic and commercial sense, and its relation to the geographical Renaissance, mention has been already made. Hardly less direct was its relation to the Humanistic Renaissance. Learning fled from the shores of the Bosphorus to the banks of the Arno. From Florence and Bologna and other Italian cities the light of the new learning spread to Paris and to Oxford. The Oxford lectures of John Colet, the Novum Instrumentum of Desiderius Erasmus, perhaps even Luther's historic protest at Wittenberg, may be ascribed, in no fanciful sense, to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. But most important of all its consequences, from our present standpoint, was the foundation of a new empire. That empire was not exclusively Turkish; still less was it purely Byzantine. It was a fusion and combination of the two. The Ottomans were in truth not merely the conquerors of the Balkans but the heirs of the Graeco-Roman Empire of the East.
For further reference: H. A. Gibbons, The Foundations of the Ottoman Empire (with an elaborate bibliography for the period prior to 1403); E. A. Freeman, The Ottoman Power in Europe (London, 1877); S. Lane Poole, Turkey (1250-1880), (London, 1888); D. S. Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (London, 190a); Sir W. Muir, The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline, and Fall (London, 1891); A. Wirth, Geschichte der Turken; H. F. Tozer, The Church and the Eastern Empire (1888); L. von Ranke, History of Servia (Eng. trans. 1858); Lavisse et Rambaud, :Histoire Générale, vol. iii (with excellent bibliography for this period); Sir W. M. Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890); W. Miller, The Balkans (1896), The Latins in the Levant: a History of Frankish Greece (1908); Vte A. de la Jonquiere, Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman, 2 vols. (new ed. 1914); E. Creasy, History of the Ottoman Turks; J. von Hammer, Gesch. des Osmanischen Reichs, 10 vols.; E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; J. H. Newman, The Ottoman Turks; F. W. Zinkeisen, Gesch. des Osmanischen Reichs in Europa, 7 v016. (vol. i); Sir E. Pears, Destruction of the Greek Empire (1903); C. Oman, Byzantine Empire; W. H. Hutton, Constantinople.
1. Only to Europeans are the Ottomans known as 'Turks'-a name, among themselves, of contempt, see H. A. Gibbons, Ottoman Empire, p. 29; Hogarth, Balkans, p. 319, &c.
2. Hogarth, op. cit., p. 325.
3. See e.g. Sir Richard Jebb, Modern Greece, p. 30; Sir Edwin Pears, Conquest of Constantinople ; the famous chapters in Gibbon's Decline and Fall ; and Milman's Latin Christianity.
4. A. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 36.
5. Eliot, op. cit., p. 44.
6. A. Freeman, Ottoman Power in Europe, p. 51.
7. Quoted by D. Mitrany, The Balkans, p. 256.
8. Eliot, op. cit., p. 25.
9. The Latin Empire was established at Constantinople in 1204, see supra.
10. It should be noted that the numeration of kings and the chronology of their reigns are alike uncertain.
11. Dushan=the strangler, and according to one, but not the only, version Stephen VIII strangled his father.
12. See supra, chap. ii.
13. Hogarth, The Balkans, p. 327.
14. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 231, seems to have established bis point that Salonica was not taken until 1430, and that Athens survived the capture of Constantinople; but it is not certain.