Turkey In Europe
()
About this ebook
Related to Turkey In Europe
Related ebooks
The Lives of the Popes Vol. I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBetween Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHazard in Circassia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vlachica: Mountaintops Above a Stormy Sea of Contending Empires Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChronicles Of The Crusades: Contemporary narratives of the Crusade of Richard Couer De Lion and of the Crusade of Saint Louis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNomadic Pathways in Social Evolution Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHistory of the Wars: Books III & IV - The Vandalic War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Darius I to Philip II: The Story of the Greek Poleis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking the British empire, 1660–1800 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers: From the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5History of Phoenicia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBulgaria Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSerbia: A Sketch Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWith Alexander in India and Central Asia: moving east and back to west Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Balkan Peninsula Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSalonica Terminus: Travels into the Balkan Nightmare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Circassian Miracle: the Nation Neither Tsars, nor Commissars, nor Russia Could Stop Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAttila the Hun Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Caravan Moves On: Three Weeks among Turkish Nomads Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdyghe Khabze: Book I Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Straits from Troy to Constantinople: The Ancient History of the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara & Bosporos Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwelve Studies on the Making of a Nation The Beginnings of Israel's History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Battles of Antiochus the Great: The Failure of Combined Arms at Magnesia That Handed the World to Rome Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIranians and Greeks in South Russia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHernando Cortez: Makers of History Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
History & Theory For You
The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Five Minds for the Future Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Human Condition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wretched of the Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ideas Have Consequences Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prince: Second Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Origins Of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Essential Chomsky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bloodbath Nation Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Theory of Justice: Original Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Antisemitism: Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary Guide: The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene | The Mindset Warrior Summary Guide Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5End of History and the Last Man Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-18 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Turkey In Europe
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Turkey In Europe - William Milligan Sloane
Turkey In Europe: Three Essays
© 2020 Full Well Ventures
Three articles originally published in Political Science Quarterly,
in the issues of June 1908, December 1911, and September 1912
About the Author
William Milligan Sloane (1850-1928) was an American educator and historian. He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, in 1868, and afterward was employed as instructor in classics at the Newell School in Pittsburgh until 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he studied at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, receiving a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, with a dissertation entitled The Poet Labid: His Life, Times, and Fragmentary Writings,
which was published in 1877.
Sloane was a professor of Latin (1877-1883) and subsequently History (1883-1896) at Princeton University, when it was still known as the College of New Jersey. He resigned in 1896 to become Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University. Sloane served on the International Olympic Committee from 1894 to 1924. The founder and chairman of the United States Olympic Committee (known at the time as the American Olympic Committee), he escorted the first American Olympic team to 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens. Professor Sloane was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1911 president of the American Historical Association. His other honors were Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and of the Order of the Polar Star.
Chapter 1
Turkey in Europe: I
July 1908
THE EASTERNMOST of the three great peninsulas which project southward from continental Europe into the Mediterranean is at the present moment a historical laboratory. Almost every form of political and social experiment is there in progress. There are but few conceivable mixtures of human elements which have not been flung into the retort. Races, religions, languages, institutions, traditions, aspirations; governments, laws, administrations, tendencies; social forms, usages, occupations and organizations — every conception of man in social, political, and commercial relations may be concretely observed somewhere or another in that curious portion of the earth. Our fathers called it Turkey in Europe, and a part of it is still so designated by geographers. The Schoolboy of two generations ago bounded it by Austria, Russia, the Black Sea, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic seas. Unfortunately at that time there was a widespread and firm conviction that portions of the earth shown on the map by colored border lines were inhabited by peoples corresponding to the given designations: England by the English, France by the French, and so on.
Turkey, of course, whether in Europe or in Asia, was to the common mind inhabited by Turks. This conception, being utterly, radically false even then, has, like similar deceptions, persisted into our own day and still works immense harm. To those who constitute the overwhelming majority of western nations, Byzantium and the migrations of peoples in eastern Europe are matters either of the vaguest knowledge or, more commonly, of total ignorance. They are not aware that Turkey in Europe, entire, and Turkey in Asia, in part, are populated by peoples who, whatever they may be, are not Turks at all, having no slightest relation with their masters in blood, religion, institutions or aspirations. The human creature who boasts himself the plain man — the man on the street, who babbles about anything and everything and forms the self-styled public opinion with which intelligence is in perpetual warfare — this person of the majority says: Why of course the Turks should have Turkey; certainly; what business is it of others to meddle with a man in his own home?
Home, indeed! The beneficent occupation of a land makes it a homeland. The discovery and settlement of a misused territory makes it a home. We could even think of a home which had neither been conquered nor discovered, nor within historic times settled and occupied beneficently or otherwise, but which was merely a handful of people who had always been there. On the other hand, the commercial and political adventurer has no home where he dwells; the administrator of a trading factory has no home therein; the herdsman and nomad has no home in the wilds over which he roams. Even the great colonizers of the present world speak lovingly of England as home, though often they have made a wilderness to blossom a land to yield up its wealth, have founded a nation and established permanent, beneficent settlements. The idea of home is most complex, and in none of its many ingredients could it be tangential to the relation in which the Turks have stood to Turkey. They were not even conquerors, for the edifice they overthrew was already crumbling. When they occupied the Byzantine Empire they merely pitched their tents in successive camping places, wandering westward until, a little more than two centuries ago, they reached the walls of Vienna, where they met the first virile foe they had seen and were turned back. With certain oscillations they have been wandering backward ever since, slowly and steadily withdrawing under a rather gentle compulsion. They have withdrawn because others have exploited the lands which they occupied but never reduced to possession, from which they skimmed the surface opulence, while furnishing no sustenance to the processes which produced it. If the population of what is still called Turkey in Europe be, as is likely, about six millions, less than a third are Turks; and in those vast regions once under Turkish sway, the lands of Greece, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, there are virtually no Turks at all. They can live only as they find dumb, servile human cattle to herd, drive and slaughter. They are a stock which came from the upland steppes of Asia; they are careful now as always, when possible, to bury their dead across the Bosporus in the soil of Asia. From Asia they came, to Asia they return with little regret; and being a totally unhistoric people, it is doubtful whether centuries of European abode would in their future tradition be much more than a tale of Scheherazade.
Of primitive folk-stocks the Turk has retained nearly all the virtues, and they are many — so many as to make a normal Turkish gentleman a most agreeable and even lovable person. With his womankind uncontaminated by western notions; with his faith in Islam — a faith not native but acquired and inherited — undisturbed either by Arabic mysticism or occidental casuistry; with his pride of official rank and garb fully gratified or with scope for his unquestioned and oft-proven ability as a soldier, the Turk exhibits many fine qualities. It matters not that his salary as an official is never paid; there is the land of Baksheesh always open. It matters not that the shelter which we call his house is bare, rickety or in disrepair; is he not naturally a dweller in booths or tents? It matters not that his towns are filthy and unwholesome, that disease and death stalk abroad; his hour will strike only when fate ordains, as it would anyway. It matters not that there is plenty today and want tomorrow; such are the vicissitudes of life. If it rains, we are wet, that is all, but if the sun shines let us enjoy it; when battle is raging let us fight too, so Allah wills, and so on through the long range of human conditions and conduct. To apprehend a resignation that verges on apathy we must reverse almost every concept we have; in order to understand and do justice to the Turk, we need a fourth dimension. He is our antipodes. But he is domestic, hospitable within his possibilities,