themselves into centres of military ascendancy over their fellow-countrymen and co-religionists to the rear as well as the strangers opposite their front. The Osmanlis may have been more savage in their methods than the marchmen of Germany—though hardly, perhaps, than the Teutonic Knights who prepared the soil of Prussia for the Hohenzollerns. The Teutonic Knights exterminated their victims; the Osmanlis drained theirs of their blood by taking a tribute of their male children, educating them as Moslems, and training them as recruits for an Ottoman standing army. Their first expansion was forwards into Christian Europe; their capital shifted from a village in the hills to the city of Brusa on the Asiatic shore of Marmora, from Brusa across the Dardanelles to Adrianople, from Adrianople to the imperial city on the Bosphorus; and, with the capture of Constantinople, the Osmanli Sultans usurped the pretensions of East Rome, as the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns the emblems of Charlemagne and Caesar Augustus.

Byzantium has become a very potent element in the Osmanlis' character, more potent than the habits of the march or the instinct of the steppes. It has dictated their system of administration, dominated their outlook on life, penetrated their blood. But the heritage of "Rűm" is not the final factor in the Ottoman Empire as it exists to-day; for after the successors of Osman had founded their military monarchy with blood and iron on the ruins of one-third of Europe, they turned eastwards, with a genuinely Oriental gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the apparently mechanical impetus of all Asiatic conquerors, from Sargon of Akkad and Cyrus the Persian to Jenghis Khan and Timur. The stoutest opponent of the Osmanlis in Asia was the Anatolian Sultanate of Karaman—Moslem, Turkish, and the legitimate heir of those Seljuk Turkish Sultans who had given Osman's father his first footing in the land. Osmanli and Karamanli fought on equal terms, but when Karaman was overthrown there was no power left in Asia that could stop the Osmanlis' advance. The Egyptians and Persians had no more chance against Ottoman discipline and artillery than the last Darius had against the Macedonians. A campaign or two brought Sultan Selim the First from the Taurus to Cairo; a few more campaigns at intervals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Ottoman armies could be spared from Europe, drove the Persians successively out of Armenia and Mosul and Bagdad. And thus, by accident, as it were, in the pursuit of more coveted things, the Osmanlis acquired "Turkey-in-Asia," which is all that remains to them now and all that concerns us here.

"Turkey-in-Asia" is a transitory phenomenon, a sort of chrysalis which enshrouded the countries of Western Asia because they were exhausted and needed torpor as a preliminary to recuperation. Many calamities had fallen upon them during the five centuries before the chrysalis formed. The break-up of the Arab Caliphate of Bagdad had led to an interminable, meaningless conflict among a host of petty Moslem States; the wearing struggle between Islam and Christendom had been intensified by the Crusades; and waves of nomadic invaders, each more destructive and more irresistible than the last, had swept over Moslem Asia out of the steppes and deserts of the north-east. The most terrible were the Mongols, who sacked Bagdad in 1258, and gave the coup de grâce to the civilisation of Mesopotamia. And then, when the native productiveness of the Near East was ruined, the transit trade between Europe and the Indies, which had belonged to it from the earliest times and had been the second source of its prosperity, was taken from it by the western seafarers who discovered the ocean routes. The pall of Ottoman dominion only descended when life was extinct.

The Osmanlis, whose nomadic forefathers had fled before the face of the Mongols out of Central Asia, took the heritage which had slipped from the Mongols' grasp, and gathered all threads of authority in Western Asia into their hands. The most valuable spoil of their Asiatic conquests was the Caliphate. Hulaku, the sacker of Bagdad, had put the Caliph Mustasim to death, and the remnant of the Abbasids had kept up a shadowy succession at Cairo, under the protection of the Sultan of Egypt. Selim the Osmanli, when he entered Cairo as a conqueror in 1517, caused the contemporary Abbasid to cede his title, for what it was worth, to him and his successors. It was a doubtful title, scorned by all Shias and regarded coldly by many Sunni rulers who were unwilling to recognise a spiritual superior in their most formidable temporal rival. But such as it was, it strengthened the Osmanli's hold on his dominions. Caliph of Islam, victorious guardian of the Moslem marches, and heir by conquest of imperial Rűm, the Osmanli Sultan held his Asiatic provinces with ease; but the best security for his tenure was the misery to which they were reduced. Commerce and cultivation ebbed, population dwindled, and nomads still drifted in upon what once had been settled lands. The Ottoman Government, desiring a barrier against Persia, encouraged the Kurds to spread themselves over Armenia; it welcomed less the Shammar and Anazeh Arabs, who broke over the Euphrates about the year 1700 and turned the last fields of Northern Mesopotamia to desolation; but it was too impotent or indifferent to turn them out. Western Asia lay fallow under the Ottoman cannon-wheels. There have been fallow periods before in the slow rhythm of its life—under the Persians, for instance, who overran all lands and peoples of the East in the sixth century B.C., overshadowed the Greeks for a moment, as the Osmanlis overshadowed Europe, halted, too massive for offence but seemingly unassailable, and then collapsed pitifully before the probing spears of Alexander.

The Osmanlis are passing at this moment as the Achaemenids passed then. They lost the last of Europe in the Balkan War, and with it their prestige as increasers of Islam; the growth of national consciousness among their subjects, not least among the Turks themselves, has loosened the foundations of their military empire, as of the other military empires with which they are allied. They forfeited the Caliphate when they proclaimed the Holy War against the Allied Powers—inciting Moslems to join one Christian coalition against another, not in defence of their religion, but for Ottoman political aggrandisement. They lost it morally when this incitement was left unheeded by the Moslem world; they lost it in deed when the Sherif of Mekka asserted his rights as the legitimate guardian of the Holy Cities, drove out the Ottoman garrison from Mekka, and allied himself with the other independent princes of Arabia. All the props of Ottoman dominion in Asia have fallen away, but nothing dooms it so surely as the breath of life that is stirring over the dormant lands and peoples once more. The cutting of the Suez Canal has led the highways of commerce back to the Nearer East; the democracy and nationalism of Europe have been extending their influence over Asiatic races. On whatever terms the War is concluded, one far-reaching result is certain already: there will be a political and economic revival in Western Asia, and the direction of this will not be in Ottoman hands.

We are thus witnessing the foundation of a new era as momentous, if not as dramatic, as Alexander's passage of the Dardanelles. The Ottoman vesture has waxed old, and something can be discerned of the new forms that are emerging from beneath it; their outstanding features are worth our attention.

II

The new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate factor to be reckoned with. It is very new—newer than the Young Turks, and sharply opposed to the original Young Turkish programme—but it has established its ascendancy. It decided Turkey's entry into the War, and is the key to the current policy of the Ottoman Government.