The Turks From the Euphrates

3rdly, the two points following: 1st, that the locality where it received its commission, was the same as that where the preceding Saracen scourge was arrested and bound, viz. Baghdad by the Euphrates; 2ndly, that its people and power, then and there commissioned, continued thence forward in political life and action; so as, in due time, to effect the work assigned to the Euphratean horsemen in vision, of slaying the third part of men.

And to prove these two points, nothing more will be necessary than to trace, in brief narrative, the history of the Turkmen nation, from its first commissioning as a Moslem power against Christendom, to the time of the fall of Constantinople.

1. In my sketch of the state of the world, cotemporaneously, given in the last Chapter, as that which might have suggested itself to the mind of the second Basil at the commencement of the eleventh century, the name of Muhammud of Ghizni was mentioned as the only reigning potentate, whose power could reasonably have been deemed formidable to the Greek empire. It was also noted, as that which might allay apprehensions of danger from that quarter, that Muhammud seemed absorbed in his Indian conquests ; that he was then in his old age; and that his empire was likely, in all human probability, to fall to pieces at his death. We now proceed to observe, that, as it might then have seemed probable, so it happened. In the year 1028, three years after Basil's own death, Muhammud died: and, on his death, forthwith his vast empire began to fall to pieces.

Among his subjects had been numerous Turkmen tribes, descendants of those Turks of Mount Altai from whom, in the seventh century, the Avars had fled, and with whom the emperor Justin had negotiated: tribes whom it had been Muhammad's policy to move southward to Khorasan, a country between the Himalaya and the Caspian; thereby to separate them more entirely from their countrymen beyond the Oxus and Jaxartes.

It was these that were now to become a woe to Christendom. Soon after Muhammad's death (it was in the year A.D. 1038) they rose in assertion of their independence; chose Togrul Beg of the house of Seljuk as their chief; defeated and killed Muhammad's son Massoud; drove the Ghiznivite nobles eastward to the banks of the Indus; and stood forth before the world as the chief power in central Asia. Originally idolaters in religion, they had lately, both prince and people, embraced with fervor the religion of Islam: and, thus become co-religionists, they were called, in the year 1055 to his assistance by the Prophet's Vicar, the Caliph of Baghdad, on occasion of some threatening danger of domestic factions.

And then the following memorable consequence resulted. After the quelling of the factions, and the extinction of the weak dynasty of the Bowides, who had ruled since A. D. 933 in Persia, their chief, Togrul, was appointed by the Caliph his Lieutenant; (the inauguration being performed soon after with solemnity suited to the importance of the occasion;) and the Turk thereby legitimately constituted temporal lieutenant of the Prophet's Vicar, and head of the secular power of Islamism. Then, and thence, was the reviving and re-loosening of the long quiescent Moslem power against Roman Christendom.¹ And I must here pray the reader well to mark the place; as I shall in the next Section call on him to mark the time. For it was the very place noted in the prophecy, as that from whence the destroying angels, under the sixth Trumpet blast, were to be loosed and commissioned again, to destroy,Baghdad, by the Euphrates. This was one point that we were to prove in respect of the Turks. It only needs to pursue their history to see in it the fulfillment of the other.

2. Thus invested then, and with a freshness of fanatic fervor which spoke them animated by the same spirit from hell as their early Arab precursors, a holy war against Greek Christendom was speedily resolved on, in the very spirit of their commission. The chief Togrul himself dying, it fell to his nephew Alp Arslan, the successor to the office, title, and spirit of his uncle, and "with his name, next after that of the Caliph, similarly pronounced in the public prayers of the Moslems,"² to execute the project. Bearing in the very name of Alp Arslan, "The Valiant Lion"³, both his own character and that of his army, according to the prophetic symbol, "I saw in the vision the heads of the horses as the heads of lions," of which more in the next Section, "he passed the Euphrates," A.D. 1063, "at the head of the Turkish cavalry:" and the loss of the kingdom and frontier of Armenia, A.D. 1065, " was the news of a day." But mightier change seemed portended by the then glaring comet in the heavens.⁴ The emperor Diogenes Romanus, hastened to the defense of his Franks, Normans, Bulgarians, mingled with the to add strength to his army; and the invisible tutelage of the Virgin Mary was invoked too, as we have seen, to his succor. But succor came not to the Mariolatrist.

In the fatal field near Manzikert (A.D. 1071 ) his army was defeated, himself taken prisoner, and the fate of the Asiatic provinces sealed irretrievably. The victorious career of Alp Arslan himself against Greek Christendom was indeed cut short by assassination. But it was followed up under Malek Shah, the greater son of a great father: him of whose empire we read that it extended, in its final amplitude, from the Chinese frontier, west and south, as far as the neighborhood of Constantinople, the holy city of Jerusalem, (now just taken from the Fatimites,) and the spicy groves of Arabia Felix. I say the victorious career of the Turks against Greek Christendom was continued under him. For it was under the shadow of his scepter, as the Asiatics express it, that Suleiman, one of the many Seljukian subordinate princes, achieved in 1074 the conquest of Asia Minor; and, with Nice as his capital, founded what was then the dependent principality of Asia Minor, or Roum.

This was indeed, remarks the historian, " the most deplorable loss that the church and the empire had sustained since the first conquests of the Caliphs." Nor did the severity of the scourge end at Malek's death.

For though three out of the four kingdoms into which his dominions then split, I mean those of Persia, Kerman, and Syria, had nothing to do with the fated desolation of the Greek empire, the destiny of the fourth, Roum, now become an independent kingdom, was different. It seems that Suleiman had been originally urged to the war against the Christian infidels by the voice of the Caliph, as well as of the supreme Sultan: and as he deserved from them the title of Gazi, or Holy Champion, by the vigor and success with which he conducted it, so by the manner also in which he continued to make it subservient to the propagation of the Islamic faith. Throughout the whole extent of the new kingdom, from the Euphrates to Constantinople mosques were built, the laws of the Koran established, the mission of Muhammad preached, Turkish manners and language made to prevail in the cities, and Turkmen camps scattered over the mountains and plains.

On the hard condition of tribute and servitude, the Greek Christians might enjoy the exercise of their religion. But their most holy churches were profaned, their priests insulted, thousands of the children circumcised, and of their brethren multitudes induced to apostatize. Alexius trembled on the imperial throne of Constantinople, and in plaintive letters implored the succors of western Europe, for unless some great intervention should occur to prevent it, it threatened to extinguish his empire, and kill the third part of men. And such an intervention did in fact arise. The Crusades began, and continued for two centuries; not indeed so as to avert the destruction, but to delay it. And what I wish, at the present point of our enquiry, to call the reader's attention to, is this; that throughout those two centuries, a period memorable in the historic page, as comprehending within it the rise, progress, and end of the Crusades from western Europe, the Turkish Sultany of Roum, in spite of the hostility thus aroused against it, still all through preserved its Vitality. The host of the first Crusaders indeed, (A.D. 1097) having taken Nice, and once and again defeated the Turkmen hordes, forced them to move back the capital of their now contracted territory into the interior, to Iconium.

But in 1147 the leaders of the second Crusade, Conrad and King Louis VII, had in melancholy strains to relate to their countrymen that the power and spirit of the Anatolian Sultan remained unquenched; and how the bones of their Christian hosts lay bleaching among the Pamphylian hills, a monument of the continued sharpness of the Turkish arrows. Yet again in the third Crusade, A. D. 1189, the Emperor Frederic 1st, traversing the same route to the Holy Land, found every step of his fainting march besieged by the still innumerable hordes of the Turkmen: till, in desperation, he stormed Iconium, and forced the Sultan to sue for peace. It was not until the next century that a power of a different character, and from a different quarter, viz. that of the Moguls under one of the generals of Zenghis, sweeping across Anatolia, broke the kingdom of Iconium: and then in manner, and with results, such as not to extinguish the Turkmen power in Asia Minor, but only the Seljukian dynasty that had ruled over it.

Not, I say, the Turkmen power. For so it had been ordered by an overruling Providence, that, just before this destroying Mogul irruption, a fresh band of Turkmen from Charisme and the Oxus, under Ortugrul and his son Othman, fleeing from the Moguls, had in A. D. 1240 engaged themselves in the service, and become subjects of the kingdom, of Aladdin the then Sultan of Iconium.⁵ And when the Seljukian dynasty bad been extinguished, as before stated, one of these, reuniting some of the broken fragments, furnished a new head to the Turkmen of Anatolia. Gradually, but continuously, this process of reunion went on under the Othmans: the decline of the Moguls, and death of Cazan of the house of Zenghis, having, as Gibbon says, "given free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire. And at length, in the course of the 14th century, every fragment having been united by them, and the whole of Anatolia (including both Iconium and Nice, the more ancient and the later capital) embraced in their dominion, even as in the earlier and balmy days of Suleiman's greatness, with the same manners, language, and laws remaining to it as before, as well as the same religion, and with an armorial memento too, as I believe, of the Seljukian ensign, in the crescent that gilded and surmounted its banners,⁶ it might truly be said, as Gibbon remarks with his usual accuracy, that the ancient kingdom of the Seljukians had again revived under the Ottoman princes.

We ruling dynasty was indeed different; and a brief interval of anarchy had passed before the revival: but not so (let the reader well mark the point) as to affect the unity and continuity of the Turkmen Anatolian kingdom. Just as the Visigoth power in Spain was continued under Pelayo and his successors, or as the Frank kingdom, after the dissolution of the Carlovingian and anarchy consequent, was yet kept up in the new line of Hugh Capet, just as, (to take a biblical example,) Judah, when revived under Nehemiah or the Maccabean princes, after the longer or shorter periods of interregnum consequent on the invasions of Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus, was still regarded in scripture prophecy and promise as the same Judah, so is the identity of the Ottoman with the old Seljukian empire demonstrable, on this reorganization of the Turkmen power.⁷ And as under the one dynasty it began the fulfillment of the prophecy of the sixth apocalyptic Trumpet, so under the other, as I must now briefly notice, it completed it.

Although indeed, as to the rest, what need it to tell the well-known history? Of the Sultans Othman and Orchan, Amurath and Bajazet,⁸ who knows not; and of the passage of their victorious armies across the Hellespont? Who knows not how, from the Danube to the Adriatic, the European provinces of the empire were then, one after another, rent from it by the ruthless foe, until its vitality Was almost confined to the city of Constantine: just as vegetable life sometimes dies down to the root: or, where the limbs are dead, the animal life may still beat at the heart? Then at length, says the historian⁹ for the first time for above 1000 years from its foundation, Constantinople was surrounded both on the Asiatic and European side by "the arms of the same hostile monarchy." The four tempest angels seemed to have occupied each its corner of the heavens, whence to destroy and the Turkmen Sultan, Muhammad the 2nd, furnished the earthly agency for the consummation of the catastrophe.

On the particulars of this catastrophe it is not my present purpose to dwell. There are various most interesting points of detail, which will call for notice in the next Section. Suffice it in the present to have shown, as I proposed, the national continuity of these Turkmen, from the time of their first commissioning, and the loosing of the Moslem power under them against Roman Christendom, down to that of their destroying the Greek empire. And in conclusion, let me only remark, how by their official titles and appellatives the Turkmen Sultans seemed almost to proclaim before the world, their identity on those points with the prefigured agents of the second woe. Slayer as he was, in apocalyptic phrase, of the third of the men of Christendom, the Sultan called himself Hunkiar, the slayer of men.

Reviver that he was, agreeably with the apocalyptic prophecy, of the long dormant spirit of the preceding woe, i. e. of the spirit of the old Moslem Caliphate, he had soon the caliphate, or spiritual headship of the Moslem world, yielded up to him,¹⁰ (as, long before, its temporal headship,) and added it also to his titles. Finally, having in 1530 united Baghdad to his dominions, just as if to direct the attention of an enquirer to that city by the Euphrates, as the local source whence, as here foretold, his primary commission issued, he inserted it prominently into the list of his proud titles of empire. "I Sultan of Sultans," was his style of writing, "Governor of the earth . . . . . . Lord of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem ….. and more particularly of the capital of the Caliphs, BAGHDAD"