like most democracies, by an irresponsible tyrant. Neither race nor language nor colour makes any difference.[1] All True Believers are equal and any one of them may rise to any position: the world of the Arabian Nights, in which barbers become Great Wazirs and pastry-cooks marry Sultans' daughters really exists (or did exist until the invasion of Western manners quite in our own time) round the Bosphorus. All Islam are brothers. But, on the other hand, people who are not True Believers are utterly shut out from the world in which Moslems live. They remain another nation, may be tolerated, and may exist side by side with their own laws, but they are always as remote from the governing class as another species. And to be a subject-nation governed by a foreign race is a position with which no civilized people can be finally satisfied. So there have been endless revolts among the Rayahs, and after a revolt the Turk has no mercy. That is why, in spite of the tolerance of Moslem law, the history of the Ottoman Empire in Europe has been one long, monotonous story of the shedding of Christian blood. The Rayahs have always been in revolt, and the Turks have always been massacring. It began when they slew steadily through the whole day as soon as they had entered Constantinople in 1453; it is going on to-day all over Macedonia. And there has been no change in between.
But even when they do not revolt the Rayahs have no certainty that the Turk will keep his own law. Selim I (1512–1520) in a fit of religious enthusiasm suddenly ordered all churches to be turned into mosques and all Rayahs to become True Believers under pain of death (1520). With infinite difficulty the Patriarch Jeremias I persuaded him to obey the command of his own Prophet. Murad III (1574–1595) and Mohammed III (1595–1603) both nearly carried out the same plan. In Crete in 1670, fifteen thousand Christian children were taken from their
- ↑ The Ottoman Turks are now an almost entirely artificial race, as far removed from the original Turanians who came into Asia Minor in the 13th century as modern Turkish with its elaborately artificial forms and gigantic loans from Persian and Arabic (it has swallowed the grammars of both these languages besides its own) is from the rude dialect they brought with them from Central Asia. Any one can turn Turk by accepting Islam.
