[48] Vid. a beautiful passage in Cardinal Wiseman's late lecture at Liverpool.
[54] Alison on Population, vol. i. p. 309, etc.
And now, having dwelt upon the broad contrast which exists between Christendom and Turkey, I proceed to give you some general idea of the Ottoman Turks, who are at present in power, as I have already sketched the history of the Seljukian. We left off with the Crusaders victorious in the Holy Land, and the Seljukian Sultan, the cousin of Malek Shah, driven back from his capital over against Constantinople, to an obscure town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman, who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso's celebrated Poem of "Jerusalem Delivered,"--
That Solyman, than whom there was not any Of all God's foes more rebel an offender; Nay, nor a giant such, among the many Whom earth once bore, and might again engender; The Turkish Prince, who first the Greeks expelling, Fixed at Nicæa his imperial dwelling.
And then he made his infidel advances From Phrygian Sangar to Meander's river; Lydia and Mysia, humbled in war's chances, Bithynia, Pontus, hymned the Arch-deceiver; But when to Asia passed the Christian lances, To battle with the Turk and misbeliever, He, in two fields, encountered two disasters, And so he fled, and the vexed land changed masters.
Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest seemed over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It seemed as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as the Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath of the last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders had broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of July, 1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his death-bed.
Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the name of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or Turcoman, who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took the prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political improvement. His son, Othman's father, came into the service of the last Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a horde of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in alliance with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism of the desert, and, when he succeeded to his father's power, he proclaimed a gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity. Suddenly, like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain heights which separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan conquests, and he pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which remained from that time the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for Adrianople and Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series of conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of the first, if not the first power, not only of Asia, but of the world.