VII. — The Mohammedan world, under the direction of the TURKS, retains and carries out the anti-Christian Policy started by the Arabs, as long as its power of doing so lasts.

Whilst, during this welcome respite, Christianity was deepening its roots and spreading its branches in Europe, Islam was slowly and surely preparing in Asia tougher and rougher instruments, than even the Arabs, for making another supreme effort to carry out its old plan of altogether supplanting Christian supremacy by its own. The loose morality and unscrupulous violence which had distinguished the Mohammedan system from its birth, soon, like an evil seed, produced its corrupt and poisonous fruit in ever-widening circles of the Mussulman world. During the Abasside dynasty, when Bagdad was the seat of the Califate, so degenerate, untrustworthy, disunited, and factious had Arab society become, that the Califs found themselves compelled to look to the hardier and more reliable race of the recently Mohammedanised Tartar tribes from the deserts and highlands of Central Asia, as the fittest recruiting ground for an army on which they could rely.

These Tartars and Turkomans — all born horsemen and inured to the hardships and simplicity of nomadism from time immemorial — enlisted with alacrity under the Calif's banner, as offering so much more favourable a prospect to their daring and greed. Finding the gates of Central Asia so widely open to the riches and luxuries of the south and the west, these nomad hordes issued forth in ever-increasing numbers, pushed on, at times, by the teeming population of the remotest east. They — either as mercenaries of the Calif over whom they gradually gained a commanding influence, or, independently of him, as isolated bands of freebooters — helped to extend Mussulman domination at the expense of Christendom, and infused a new element of strength into the disunited and decaying world of Islam.

One of these Tartar tribes, the Seldjuks, established themselves in different parts of Western Asia, sometimes in direct opposition to the Calif's authority; and soon turning its victorious arms westward, conquered vast portions of Asia

Minor, which, till then, had remained in the hand of the Christians. Another such horde of Mohammedanised Tartars were the Turks,1 a number of whom, under their leader Ertogrul, joined their Seldjuk brethren in the province of Angora. They speedily developed such military prowess and strength, in the conflict with the Greek empire, that under their next leader, Othman, they could supplant their Seldjuk confederates, and, joined by fresh bands of countrymen from the east, overrun and subjugate all that the Christians still held of Asia Minor.

These Turks, or Ottomans, as they generally call themselves, after their distinguished chief, Othman, extended their power, in course of time, over the greater part of the Mohammedan world, became the heirs of the Califate, and vigorously took up the Mussulman policy of universal domination, which the Arabs were no longer able to carry out. We have seen that this policy implied, as its highest and most difficult aim, the subjugation of Christendom, and particularly the conquest of Constantinople, its strongest remaining citadel eastward. To this object the Ottoman Turks, on becoming the leading nation of Islam, directed their most persevering and gigantic efforts: this forms the open secret of their devastating wars and their ambitious policy of conquests.

Othman terminated his victorious career with the seizure of Broussa, A.D. 1326, which at once became the Turkish capital, almost within sight of Constantinople. From Broussa as his starting-point, Othman's first successor attacked the Romano-Greek Empire in Europe, making himself master of Gallipoli and Rodosto; and his second successor extended his European conquest beyond Adrianople, which he raised to the rank of second capital; and his third successor devastated Albania and Bosnia and incorporated the Christian kingdoms of Servia and Bulgaria with his own dominion, which now bordered on the Danube as far as Belgrade. Later Sultans enlarged and consolidated their conquests on the Balkan Peninsula and elsewhere, till nothing remained to the Greek Emperor but his capital Constantinople.