rights or duties, ever gave hope, while the Ottomans were rising to greatness, that they would gradually open, from the tastes and tempers of their ancestral deserts, to the gentler manners, the wider thoughts, the nobler pursuits, the wiser and more equal laws, by which alone nations can be preserved from corruption and decay. There was no germ of improvement in their institutions; yet they succeeded in raising on those institutions a great monarchy, which with all its inherent seeds of ruin, has already stood the wear of four centuries. In the following pages we shall confine ourselves to that period of their history during which they were preparing for their future greatness, the period from their first appearance on the outskirts of the Greek empire, till they felt themselves ready to take the great step, for which they had so steadily been preparing, and claim the imperial city, round whose walls they had been closing for more than a century. Our chief guide, as he probably must be of most who study Ottoman history for some time to come, will be Von Hammer. His diffuse and ponderous, yet noble work, is the production of a scholar, a diplomatist, and a traveller, who for thirty years prepared himself for his task by an unwearied study, both of the people whose history he meant to write, and of the original monuments of that history. None but he has yet examined, systematically and critically, the Ottoman records. He ransacked the libraries of Europe from Naples to Oxford; he was able to command the use of the archives of those powers which had most connexion with the Porte, at Vienna and Venice; his agents searched for manuscripts in Cairo and Bagdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Of his absolute success, few probably in the West can be competent to judge; and few are likely to qualify themselves for testing his accuracy, by invading once more that strange mass of semi-barbarous literature, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, only existing in manuscript, and dispersed in distant libraries, from which he drew his materials. We must take on trust his reports of Turkish authorities. In the early part of the history, though they are not absolutely wanting, they furnish, even according to his estimate of them, but scanty and uncertain light: but it is all we have, to check the evidence, perhaps even less to be relied on, of the Greeks. But it is necessary, in accepting the testimony of Ottoman historians,' to remember the criticism of Seadeddin, one of the The earliest sources of Ottoman history to which Von Hammer could get access in the originals, and which he used, are as follows: : 1. The History of Aaschik-Paschazade. The writer was a witness of Amurath II.'s Hungarian war in 1438 (Von Hammer, i. 345, and infra, p. 294), and wrote under Bajazet II., the son of Mahomet the Conqueror, (1481-1512.) He drew materials from the Book of Sheikh Yachshi, the Imam of Sultan Orchan, (1325-1359,) (one of the seven who attended Othman's death-bed, Von Hammer, i. 86,) who relates 6 6 most famous of their number, on his predecessor, Idris, whose Eight Paradises' he eulogizes and copies, but of whom he remarks, that he is too concise in enumerating the virtues of 'the Ottomans, and does not set forth, with the copiousness and particularity which they deserve, the praises of the Sultans.' Yet the historian, whose almost only fault is said to be the niggardness of his eulogy, opens his work with claiming it as his merit, that all that is not to the credit of his race, he is most careful to pass over in silence, and that he will only admit posterity to the knowledge of the noble deeds of the house of Othman. It is a partial compensation that his standard of the blameworthy and the honourable is an eastern one; and he records without a remark, and of course without a shadow of censure, the murder of an aged uncle, who was pleading against an aggressive war with the Christians, by the first founder of the race. We have prefixed to this article the French translation of Von Hammer, to have the opportunity of giving the caution, that it is not to be trusted. It is to be regretted that this handsome and complete book, which contains at full length all Von Hammer's illustrative extracts and documents, and a useful atlas of maps and plans, should have been prepared, as far as the translator's work is concerned, with such inexcusable ignorance the earliest events of Ottoman history from the mouth of his father.' It was a forgotten book to the Ottomans in the 17th century. Von Hammer searched for it in vain at Constantinople; but found it, and made extracts from it, in the Vatican. 2. An old chronicle, by Ali Osman, reaching down to 1470. It had been brought to Europe by Veranzius, and used by Leunclavius. 3.View of the World,' by Neschri, a contemporary of Aashik-Paschazade under Bajazet II. Written in rough Turkish, simply and without art.' Also used by Leunclavius. 4. The Eight Paradises' of Idris of Bitlis, who died 1523, and who, at the instance of Bajazet II., wrote in Persian the first Ottoman history with attention to elegance of style. Seaddedin regrets in him his extreme luxuriance of diction. What that must have been, may be imagined, from the soberer critic's language, who describes the work as 'veiled in musk;' as a resplendent beauty among all the brides of the library,' whose 'musk-perfumed hair, that is, the interlacing lines of its letters, is like the locks of the Houris,' and 'whose face is painted with vermilion, that is, it is plentifully interspersed with the texts of the Koran written in red ink.' Von Hammer procured it with difficulty. 5. History of Lutfi-Pascha, down to 1553. He had been Grand Vizier. 6. History of Djemali, down to 1550. Brought to Vienna in 1551, and translated by Leunclavius. The first trustworthy foundation of Ottoman history in Europe.' 7. The Crown of Histories' of Seaddedin, the first official historiographer of the Ottoman sultans, under Amurath III. (1574-95.) Seaddedin was tutor to the princes, judge of the army, and at last Mufti. Translated, but carelessly, by Bratutti. 8. History of Aali, to 1597, uncritical, but painstaking and impartial, and not written in an official spirit.' Thus the earliest Turkish historian cited by Von Hammer wrote after the Conquest. With these materials in his hands, instead of in those of Cantemir, we feel our footing more secure; but, after all, Gibbon's remark about Cantemir involuntarily recurs, that 'he gives a miserable idea of his Turkish guides.' or negligence. The continual and stupid mistakes which recur in this neat and flowery French version of Von Hammer's ungainly but vigorous German, negative, to our mind, the assertion in the title-page, that it was translated 'under the direction of the author.' We cannot doubt that Von Hammer understood French. We are certain that the French which is put in his mouth by his translator, working, as he says, under his direction,' makes him perpetually say the exact opposite of what he says himself, in German.' The traveller in Asia Minor comes from time to time upon encampments of Turkomans, such as have for the last 1,000 years roamed with their horses and their flocks over the provinces of the East. These wandering shepherds still adhere to the life which their fathers led, in the steppes and highlands of Central Asia. They pitch their black tents in the plains and near the cities during the winter; as the summer draws on, they retire to the coolness and fresh springs of the mountain pastures. They can live contented with this vagrant liberty; but they are ever ready to mount and ride, at a moment's warning, to any call to pillage and war. Such a tribe, dangerous or harmless, or merely troublesome, according to the character of its chiefs, was roaming, towards the middle of the 13th century, in the north-western corner of Asia Minor, by the banks of the Sangarius and among the oak forests of the Bithynian Olympus; one, and an inconsiderable one, among the many tribes of the same race, who had fixed their tents, and some of them their thrones, in that fair but wasted land. This encampment of shepherds and freebooters was the germ of the Ottoman Empire. It was but the fragment of a small Turkoman horde, which towards the beginning of the century,-among the many migrations and changes caused among the wandering races of Asia by the devastations of Genghis Khan,-had left its seats in Khorasan, which lay in the track of the Mongol invasions, to seek safer and remoter pasture grounds by the sources of the Euphrates. They seem to have wandered down the course of the river, to the neighbourhood of Aleppo, till, on the death of Genghis Khan, they again turned their faces eastward, towards their old abodes; but as the tribe was crossing the Euphrates, the horse of their leader, Suleiman Schah, stumbled from the steep bank, and his rider was drowned in the stream, at a spot which still keeps the name of the Turk's Grave.' This broke пр the camp. Suleiman left four sons. Two of them continued their course eastward, and with the majority of the tribe, their posterity have been lost among the nomad hordes into which 1 In our references to Von Hammer, we cite, unless the contrary is expressed, from the second German edition. (Pesth, 1834.) they melted. The other two, Ertoghrul and his brother Dundar, with but 400 families, turned once more to the west, to become the founders of the mighty and terrible house of Othman. At that time, the nominal masters of Asia Minor were the Turkoman Sultans of the family of Seljouk, who ruled at Iconium. Their protection was sought by their humbler kinsmen under Ertoghrul. The story goes, that in the journeyings of Ertoghrul and his tribe, they came upon a battle-field, where a fight was going on between two unequally matched armies. Ertoghrul could not resist the temptation to join in the fray; and, as he was a lover of justice and equity, resolved, while yet at a distance, and not knowing who were the combatants, to assist the weaker side. He found, after his horsemen had decided the battle, that he had helped the Sultan of Iconium, the great Alaeddin, against an overpowering force of Mongols. But with his ready hand, and love of fair play, Ertoghrul's ambition and desire was only for the retirement and peace of an unmolested pastoral life. He asked for no reward from the Sultan, but to be allowed to feed his flocks in some safe and secluded district; and Alaeddin assigned him the Black Mountain near Angora. Such was the account which the servants of the house of Othman delivered to its chroniclers, as what they had heard from the elders of the tribe, respecting the first occasion of the close alliance between their chiefs and the Seljoukian Sultans. But the retired pasture grounds of the Black Mountain were in time exchanged for a more public scene of life, which tempted and favoured more aspiring desires, and more stirring adventure. In the decline of the Eastern Empire, its Asiatic border had gradually shrunk back before the Persians, the Arabs, and the Seljouks, from the Euphrates, to the south-eastern horizon of Constantinople, the Bithynian hills. The river Sangarius, with its chain of forts, and the passes of Olympus behind it, which covered the frontier, and fenced in the green and wooded plain which was spread round the walls of Nicomedia and Nicæa, had more than once been forced by the invaders, and Bithynia with its royal cities lost and regained, in the vicissitudes of border war. Bithynia was now a province of the Byzantine empire, the last that remained to it on the other side of the Bosphorus; and the outlying fringe of plain that extends beyond its mountain border, from the eastern slopes of Olympus to the banks of the Sangarius and the Thymbres, was a debateable ground, occupied and fought over both by Greeks and Seljouks. Here Alaeddin settled Ertoghrul and his horde, as an advanced camp, to guard the outskirts of his dominions, and annoy those of his Christian neighbours. He could not : have chosen a more efficient garrison. In the wasted and depopulated plain, and the extensive river banks, and in the cool summits and uplands of the neighbouring hills, the flocks of the tribe found ample and congenial range for their winter and summer wanderings; and its rapid and active horsemen were not more ready to defend their new pasture grounds, than they were to challenge the risks and excitement of border frays and plunder. They were skilfully and resolutely led and a great trial of strength and cunning with the Greek borderers and their hired Tartar allies, established Ertoghrul's name, and his claim to the confidence of Alaeddin. In the front of the battle rode a crowd of light-armed skirmishers, whose name, the Akindji, became in later times but too familiar to the Christians of Hungary and Germany, as the name of the irregular bands, who preceded the march of the Ottoman hosts, and whose furious onset was the signal of battle. Behind their cover came the main array, the 444 companions of Ertoghrul, (Turkish tradition, which delights in combinations of the number four, has preserved the exact number,) which helped Alaeddin when he was overpowered by the Mongols. For three days and three nights the battle lasted; it began in the defiles of Olympus, crossed the mountain, and descended into the plain of Brusa; but in the end Ertoghrul broke and trampled down his enemies, and chased them through the plain, to the edge of the sea. Alaeddin had waited anxiously for the news; and in memory of the victory, and of the fiery horsemen of the vanguard, he called the name of the district which he had given to Ertoghrul, Sultan Eni, the Sultan's Fore-front. Sultan Eni-which still keeps the name, as a Sandjak or fief of the Ottoman empire-was the first land which the founders of that empire could call their own-the first foothold, from which they advanced, step by step, to the conquest of half the Roman dominion. In the narrow canton of Sultan Eni are found the first local names of Ottoman history, made to the nation venerable by their association with the abodes, the fortunes, the graves of its patriarchs, heroes, martyrs. Here are found the scenes of their birth, their combats, their loves, their councils. Here is still seen the village where the Cilician wife of Othman, long wooed and hardly won, spent her maiden years, with her aged father, the venerable Scheikh Edebali. And here by the roadside, the ancient domed tomb among the cypresses on the hill, of the Turkoman leader, whose children have arrogated to themselves a place above all other earthly thrones, is visited by Mahometan pilgrims with pride and devotion, near the hamlet where he ruled.' 1 The village of Shughut, or Sogud, near the Sangarius. Leake's Asia Minor, p. 15; Von Hammer, i, 64. |