DEAN CHURCH ON THE EARLY OTTOMANS.* THE first charm of
Dean Church's writing, at least for his present critic, is this,—that he leaves an impression of saying so much less than he could say, of knowing subjects thoroughly to which he only alludes in passing, of habitually refraining from pouring out the wealth which, nevertheless, is in his possession. This strikes us even in his criticism, as, for instance, in his criticism in this volume, the first of a collection of his less important writings, on Montaigne. His few pages contain much more than an estimate of Montaigne's writings and of his place in literature. That is admirable, though occa- sionally a little fierce in its condemnation ; but beside and beyond it is an estimate of Montaigne himself, of his whole personality, so complete and so acute, that the reader feels that the Dean, without again opening a book or reading a manuscript, could give us a finished biography of the first French eauseur. The magnificent passage (pp. 69-72) in which he describes Montaigne's leading idea, his doubt whether truth was ever attainable in a world so full of complexities, is one of the finest exhibitions of critical insight to be found in literature ; but it is followed by this, which to our minds suggests an even greater power, the power which, though displayed in far other forms and through a more enticing method, has been the secret of strength to all the greatest dramatists :— "But the evil influences of those unhappy times acted on a character which was in some respects too well adapted to feel their power. Montaigne felt the attractions of truth, but none of its obligations. Lofty and clear in his idea of it, curious in his inquiries, fastidious in his tests, and not easily put off with its counterfeits, he hated responsibility, and would not submit to the trouble of having a purpose. Uncertainty, so far from disturbing him, was a real pleasure ; he revelled in it. He is whimsically pathetic in his description of the torment he felt in having to make up his mind, or to commit himself ; anything that fixed and tied him down, anything that required the effort and tension of his mind, he revolted from with fear and disgust. The idea of duty, with its attendant necessities of decision and of labour, was his bugbear and scarecrow. To hunt after truth as his pastime and sport was quite according to his taste ; to hunt after it as his duty was as completely the opposite. He was the sworn enemy of all constraint, whether it were a constraint that confined the range and variations of his judgment, or a constraint that imposed on him the obligation of attention and method. To such a mind, which thoroughly enjoyed the liberty of taking one view of a subject to-day, with the reserved right and avowed anticipation of taking another to-morrow ; which found the most delightful exer- cise of its natural subtlety in hovering about contrarieties and exaggerating difficulties, and carefully avoided bringing them to .a point and issue ; which shrunk with the loathing of an escaped galley-slave from all enforced trouble and work, in great things and small, the case of his property and the politics of the day, in his books, his business, his ménage, his writing ; which steadily 'declined and put away the thought that he was bound in this world to anything, but to indulge the bent of his genius, and study himself, his repose, and his diseases,—this keen scrutiny of the perplexities and realities of life was no wholesome employment. Montaigne's practical lesson is, that man was not made for truth, and does not want it ; that he may go through life very well without truth, and without the pains of looking for it ; that if he
is fool enough to be anxious and in earnest about it, he will but bring himself into endless difficulties, merely at the end to lose his labour ; but that he will find it a pleasant and healthful exercise to turn his inquiries after it into an amusing toy, to be taken up and laid down as a change from his other pleasures."
• Miscellaneous Essay& By the Rey. U. W. Church. Dean of St. Pours. Vol. I. London : Macmillan. That is Montaigne, not a view of Montaigne's writing ; yet it is given us only en passant, as a largesse out of abundance for which many thanks are not required, and with a single view to make the criticism of Montaigne's work bite a little deeper into the reader's mind.
This wealth of unemployed resource especially strikes us when the Dean permits himself now and again the rare indulgence of writing history. Perhaps only a few of our readers are aware that he once wrote for the series called "Epochs of Modern History" a minute volume called The Beginnings of the Middle Ages. The little book is a marvel, a specimen of literary pemmican to which we know no rival. Nine readers out of ten would say as they read it, especially if they read as most men do, for the reading's sake, "That is condensed Gibbon wonderfully well cooked ;" but the tenth would perceive that while the Dean is traversing Gibbon's ground, and of necessity constantly agreeing with him, he is writing from a knowledge as original and often as thorough as Gibbon's own ; and that, consequently, while compressing his facts out of all reason—for truly human skill could not do the work in the space—he is never dull, never slurs any state- ment, never leaves any indefinite impression. He understands, and therefore his reader understands. Read, for example, in the Beginnings, the chapter on "The Consolidation of England," sixteen duodecimo pages ; gather up what impressions you have derived from it; and doubt if you can that its author could have written a History of Early England which Sir F. Palgrave would have admired, and in which Mr. Freeman would have censured nothing but the spelling. Or take the fascinating account of the early Ottomans in the volume before us. No history can be more easily made interesting than that of the Ottoman Empire, because it is so studded with great indivi- dualities, with Sultans, Viziers, and conquerors who, in their deeds, their characters, and their distinctive forms of crimin- ality, were among the most separate of mankind. But at the same time, there is no history which it is more difficult to make clear. The student of ordinary books never quite understands how Ottoman power grew, why a small Asiatic clan contrived to master the Roman Empire of the East, where its chiefs found the military power to defeat some of the strongest armies of Europe. Dean Church gives us easily, and as part of an essay, the explanation, or rather, for he does not say quite enough on the inherent force of the Tartar character, which is quite alone in Asia, the two main facts upon which the explanation depends. The dynasty, at first one of singular and almost unbroken strength, the Sultans being rather the picked men of their House than its regular heirs, pursued consciously for centuries a single object from which they never swerved, the supersession of the Eastern Cmsardom by the Snitanet, and one of them forged the most tremendous weapon of war that appeared in the Middle Ages, a. weapon absolutely original, a great army entirely European in origin, entirely Mahommedan in spirit and in faith. The little horde which Ertoghrul led to Broussa in the beginning of the thirteenth century, though fierce and warlike, were a hundred years later masters only of a little principality, when "Black Halil," counsellor of Sultan Orchan, the first who struck coins in his own name, thought of and carried out one of the most stupendous and most successful crimes recorded in the history of the world. An attempt to reorganise the army from Turks only had failed, owing to their indiscipline, when Black Halil, who was now "Judge of the Host," showed "to Orchan and his counsellors, that though grown-up Turko- mans could not be brought under discipline, children could be schooled to anything. The children of the conquered, he said, like all that belongs to them, are given to the conquerors, by the Prophet's law ; and that law, besides, declares, that every child, of whomsoever born, brings with him into the world the disposition to embrace Islam. A school of Christian children, cut off from home and country, and trained with rigid dis- cipline to the faith of the Prophet and the practice of arms, will grow up into an obedient and yet zealous and devoted soldiery. They will not much remember, in the pride of soldiership and the excitement of conquest, their old faith and friends ; but their Christian and subject kinsmen will often look with wistful and envious eyes, to the honours and privi- leges of the children who were, ravished from them. They will not wish to go back to Christendom and bondage ; but many Christians will be tempted to come and share their religion and fortunes. Islam will be served and strengthened by the best
blood of Christendom, and the numbers of its martyrs swelled by those who must have otherwise perished in their ignorance." His advice was taken, and from that day forth a fixed tribute of Christian children was exacted from all conquered pro- vinc,es, and was swelled by multitudes of kidnapped boys. Within half-a-century this force had grown to its strength, and thenceforward for four hundred years, till Mahmoud the Terrible, in 1826, swept it in six months of massacre out of existence, the Janissary Army was the weapon of the Ottoman Empire. Black Halil did his work thoroughly, and the im- press which he stamped upon his European boy-slaves never quitted the great force of which they were the first com- ponents :—
" These armed slaves were also the most remarkable and most lasting of military brotherhoods. The world has seen some singular instances of men bound to one another, for the sole purposes of war, by principles or obligations deeper and stronger than those which hold together for a time the fleeting assemblage of a common army—the soldier-citizens of Sparta, the Roman legions of the Empire, the monks of the Temple and the Hospital, the troopers of Cromwell's new model.' But all the conditions and all the feelings which concentrated and which inspired the valour of Spartan citizens and Roman legionaries, of the brethren of the military orders, and the troopers of Naseby and Dunbar, were combined in the institute of the Janissaries. The ties of home and family which had been burst for ever when the boy began his training, were never allowed to reunite, even in a strange land and a different faith, as long as the soldier could do his work. The hunger and thirst, the watchings and the labours, which annealed to their due temper the spirit and frame of the Spartan boy, were not greater than those which exercised the young postulant of the Janissaries, when he was sent to Anatolia or the schools of the capital, to learn his new language, to imbibe his new fanaticism, and to practise the arms which he was to handle till his death. The mind of the Spartan boy, when he grew to be a man, was not more thoroughly warped from all the influences and interests of civil and social life, to think of war as the only end for which it was worthy to live, and to long for it, as his holiday and refresh- ment after the austerities of peace, than that of the new recruit who entered one of those dormitories filled with the fiercest of the Moslem soldiery, all of whom had been once, like himself, baptized in infancy into the faith of Christ. Nor did the training, at once so crushing and so inflaming, so narrow and so intense, relax there. In these convent-like barracks' all was silence and subjection. The younger humbly served and waited on the elder. Within the walls, and among the brotherhood itself, the word of the superior was the only law, the instinct of the inferior submissive obedience; without the walls the lowest knew no master, except their sultan. They were men who recognised no old kindred; they were not allowed to seek a new one in marriage. Such is the picture which Venetian residents and Austrian nuncios have preserved of this won- derful association in its early days. The only comparisons by which they could convey an adequate idea of their order, their rigid discipline, their simple and sparing fare, their coarse garb, their silence, their grave self-command, the stillness which reigned in their barracks and in their immovable lines, their blind and abso- lute obedience, were drawn from the austerities and self-abnega- tion of monastic life. They were soldiers, but soldiers whose demeanour and appearance was that of monks. Nor was the com- parison far wrong. The animating principle of that fiery valour, which, in the early Ottoman wars, boasted—and enemies confirmed the boast—that the Janissaries had never fled in battle, was a religious one. The bond of their companionship was an affiliation to a religious order. The well-known formula of the consecration of their institute, when Orchan or Amurath led the New Soldiers to receive their name and their benediction from the Scheikh Hadji Bektash, need not be repeated here. The Janissaries called themselves the children and family of this great saint of Islam. They wore to the last the badge of their spiritual relationship; the strip of coarse cloth, which hung down behind from their white felt caps, represented the sleeve of the dervish's mantle, with which he covered the head of the first Janissary when he named and blessed him. Hadji Bektash was also the founder of an order of dervishes ; and between these two families—the brethren of prayer and the brethren of the sword—the strictest fellowship was kept up. The Janissaries were incorporated with the order of the Bektash dervishes. The Scheikh of the Bektashes was, in virtue of his religious office, the chief of the 99th Oda of the Janissaries; in their barracks eight of the Bektash dervishes prayed day and night for the welfare of the realm and a blessing on the scimitars of their brothers. When those famous soldiers were destroyed, the Bektash dervishes were proscribed with them."
That is a long extract, but the man who has read it receives from a Dean, and probably for the first time, an intelligible explanation of the terrible power of the Ottoman Army, other- wise an unaccountable anomaly in Asiatic history. The man who wrote it, and wrote it, be it observed, only to strengthen an essay, has the true historian's spirit, the spirit which will study a whole literature, or the tedious records of ages, if only he may make a historic fact clear to those who care to under- stand. This is not the gift for which Dean Church is usually admired, and it is because he possesses it, as we think, in such full measure, and because it is so often overlooked, that we have made it the main subject of the present paper.
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