Ottomans

"The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate, But in this world, a spell of health is the best state. What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war; Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates."

"The green of my garden, my sweet sugar, my treasure, my love who cares for nothing in this world. My master of Egypt, my Joseph, my everything, the queen of my heart's realm. My Stanbul, my Karaman, my land of the Roman Caesars, My Badakhshan, my Kipcak, my Baghdad, and Khorasan. O my love of black hair with bow-like eyebrows, with languorous perfidious eyes. If I die you are my killer, O merciless, infidel woman."

"By 1516, Ottoman forces had seized Damascus, and in the following year they entered Egypt, shattering the Mamluk forces by the use of Turkish cannon. Having thus closed the spice route from the Indies, they moved up the Nile and pushed through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, countering the Portuguese incursions there. If this perturbed Iberian sailors, it was nothing to the fright which the Turkish armies were giving the princes and peoples of eastern and southern Europe. Already the Turks held Bulgaria and Serbia, and were the predominant influence in Wallachia and all around the Black Sea; but, following the southern drive against Egypt and Arabia, the pressure against Europe was resumed under Suleiman (1520–1566). Hungary, the great eastern bastion of Christendom in these years, could no longer hold off the superior Turkish armies and was overrun following the battle of Mohacs in 1526—the same year, coincidentally, as Babur gained the victory at Panipat by which the Mughal Empire was established. Would all of Europe soon go the way of northern India? By 1529, with the Turks besieging Vienna, this must have appeared a distinct possibility to some. In actual fact, the line then stabilized in northern Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire was preserved; but thereafter the Turks presented a constant danger and exerted a military pressure which could never be fully ignored. Even as late as 1683, they were again besieging Vienna."

"The Ottoman Empire was, of course, much more than a military machine. A conquering elite (like the Manchus in China), the Ottomans had established a unity of official faith, culture, and language over an area greater than the Roman Empire, and over vast numbers of subject peoples. For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and technologically ahead of Europe. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics, cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry—in mills, gun-casting, lighthouses, horsebreeding—the Muslims had enjoyed a lead. The Ottoman system of recruiting future janissaries from Christian youth in the Balkans had produced a dedicated, uniform corps of troops. Tolerance of other races had brought many a talented Greek, Jew, and Gentile into the sultan’s service—a Hungarian was Mehmet’s chief gun-caster in the Siege of Constantinople. Under a successful leader like Suleiman I, a strong bureaucracy supervised fourteen million subjects—this at a time when Spain had five million and England a mere two and a half million inhabitants. Constantinople in its heyday was bigger than any European city, possessing over 500,000 inhabitants in 1600."

"The Ottoman padishahs (emperors), also known as sultans, were initially a dynasty of and golden extraordinarily dynamic conquerors. The succession demanded a large number of heirs, cages who were produced by a numerous harem of potential mothers of future sultans. However, once a padishah had succeeded, this multitude of princes was a constant threat to his throne, a problem new sultans increasingly solved by murdering all their brothers. Troublesome harem girls or princesses who interfered too much in politics were killed also. In the East, it was forbidden to shed royal blood and thus from Mongolia to the Bosphorus, princes were killed by being suffocated, crushed in carpets by horses or elephants, or strangled with a bowstring. The girls were sown up in sacks and dropped into the Bosphorus. When Suleiman the Magnificent was informed by his favourite wife, the blonde Slavic Roxelana, that his own son Mustafa had been plotting against him, he summoned the prince and watched as he was asphyxiated before him. A similar fate befell one of Roxelana’s sons, Bayezid, after he betrayed the sultan and briefly took up with the Persian shah; Bayezid’s four sons were despatched in the same way."

"Ah, my brave Arabs! If I could only gather them in from all their desert ways, and arm them properly... But I fear it cannot be. They are drifting in by tens and scores, where I need hundreds and thousands."

"The plans of all of the powers have always been entirely selfish as far as Turkey was concerned. For years Russia has coveted Constantinople, to say nothing of the rest of Turkey along the Black Sea and south of the Caucasus, and Britain has endeavored to keep us just strong enough to prevent Russia from realizing these ambitions. Finally came the Kaiser with his scheme of a chain of German-controlled states from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf. Russia would wipe us off the map, England would keep us weak, and Germany would make us strong. All selfish motives on the face of them, no doubt, but- can you wonder which alternative is the least repugnant to us Turks, especially to us Young Turks, who have done our best to avoid being enmeshed in the nets of British and Russian diplomacy and intrigue which held helpless our predecessors? I think I will not need to say more to answer your question as to why it was Germany obtained the Bagdad railway concession, why the Hedjaz line was built by Germans, and why the Germans are recasting our military establishment."

"Real Turkish unification is my dearest wish, and any international political arrangement which will leave me a free hand to work for that, I will subscribe to. Turkey contains a great many Christians as well as Mohammedans. The latter I would regenerate from within, not from without. The West has little that we need save battleships and shrapnels, and if it would leave us alone we would not need even these."

"We are taking care of our troops today, hence their loyalty. Formerly a rifle was given to a man and he had to shift for himself."

"All who seek to enrich those who do not work should be destroyed."

"How could a person forget about the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Montenegrans."

"The transformation of the Islamic world into one of revolution, as His Majesty has desired, had been in preparation for some time and had now been put into action."

"The threat could be eliminated by removing the Armenians from the places where they lived and sending them to other places."

"If the Russians retreat, they are done."

"You are greatly mistaken. We have this country absolutely under our control. I have no desire to shift the blame onto our underlings and I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility myself for everything that has taken place."

"How can we furnish bread to the Armenians when we can't get enough for our own people? I know that they are suffering and that it is quite likely that they cannot get bread at all this coming winter. But we have the utmost difficulty in getting flour and clothing right here in Constantinople."

"We can then use Platonic means to quiet Armenians and Greeks, but in time of war we cannot investigate and negotiate. We must act promptly and with determination. I also think that the Armenians are making a mistake in depending upon the Russians. The Russians really would rather see them killed than alive. They are as great a danger to the Russians as they are to us. If they should form an independent government in Turkey, the Armenians in Russia would attempt to form an independent government there."

"The Armenians had a fair warning of what would happen to them in case they joined our enemies. Three months ago I sent for the Armenian Patriarch and I told him that if the Armenians attempted to start a revolution or to assist the Russians, I would be unable to prevent mischief from happening to them. My warning produced no effect and the Armenians started a revolution and helped the Russians. You know what happened at Van. They obtained control of the city, used bombs against government buildings, and killed a large number of Moslems. We knew that they were planning uprisings in other places. You must understand that we are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and that we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back. We have got to prevent this no matter what means we have to resort to. It is absolutely true that I am not opposed to the Armenians as a people. I have the greatest admiration for their intelligence and industry, and I should like nothing better than to see them become a real part of our nation. But if they ally themselves with our enemies, as they did in the Van district, they will have to be destroyed. I have taken pains to see that no injustice is done; only recently I gave orders to have three Armenians who had been deported returned to their homes, when I found that they were innocent. Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them. I know what such encouragement means to a people who are inclined to revolution. When our Union and Progress Party attacked Abdul Hamid, we received all our moral encouragement from the outside world. This encouragement was of great help to us and had much to do with our success. It might similarly now help the Armenians and their revolutionary programme. I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens. We now have this country in our absolute control and we can easily revenge ourselves on any revolutionists."

"I shall not return to Constantinople until I have conquered Egypt!"

"In the program of the Turkish government, nothing is said of a Turkification of the Arabs. I have never intended anything like that nor even thought of it. Our sole purpose is to strengthen the feeling of fraternity between the Ottoman-Turkish and the Ottoman-Arab elements and to make the latter understand that the national interests of the Arabs are identical to those of the Turks and that any harm to one of them necessarily means harm to the other. The Ottoman-Turkish and the Ottoman-Arab elements have to rally to the caliphate without afterthoughts if they want to survive."

"With us it is not a question of Bolshevism or democracy, but of life or death. A decision in favor of a Soviet could not be opposed by the Young Turks."

"Our sole aim was, by virtue of this war, to rid ourselves of the lot of them, however many international decisions there were. Each one represented a blow to our...independence...And, just as it was our dearly held goal to lift the Capitulations and the Mt. Lebanon concessions, we also desired to destroy the signed understanding concerning the reforms in Eastern Anatolia..."

"There is nothing in the world that could make me turn from the law. With a clear conscience, I am prepared to answer for each and every one of my political and administrative orders and actions, and to do so before the court of public opinion..."

"The Grand Architect Sinan son of Abdülmennan Ağa built this noteworthy bridge in the year at the command of Sultan Süleyman. It rises into the sky like a rainbow, spanning the water from one cliff to the other, a single arch like the in Baghdad. The flows beneath it in the middle of the city of . Each end of the bridge is a fortified castle, so it is impossible to pass from one side of the city to the other without crossing this bridge."

"Amongst the Turkes there is noe Gentility, nor Nobility, but are all as ignoble and inferiour members, to one maine body the great Turke, lineally descending of the house of Ottoman: whose magnificence, puissance, and power is such, that the most eloquent tongue cannot sufficiently declare: His thousands or Janisaries, Shouses, and others dayly attending him: which are the nerves and sinewes of the Warlike body of his whole Monarchy and imperiall estate: His hundreds (besides his Queene) of Concubines, hourely maintained by his meanes, and monethly renewed: His Armies, Bashawes, Emeeres, Vizier-bashawes, Sanzacks, Garrisons, and Forces here and there dispersed amongst his dominions, would be impossible for me briefly to relate. The inhumane policy of the Turkes, to avoid civill dissention is such, that the seede of Ottoman (all except one of them) are strangled to death: Wherefore, as Augustus Cæsar said of Herod in the like case, it is better to be the great Turkes dogge, then his Sonne. His Daughters or Sisters are not so used, but are given in marriage to any Bassa, whom so they affect; yet with this condition; the King saith to his Daughter, or Sister, I give thee this man to be thy slave; and if he offend thee in any case, or be disobedient to thy will, here I give thee a Dagger to cut off his head; which alwaies they weare by their sides for the same purpose."

"We take this opportunity to acquaint your Majesty. When the French Republic was engaged in a war with most of the powers of Europe . . . our Sublime Porte not only took no part against them, but regardful of the ancient amity existing with that nation, adopted a system of the strictest neutrality . . . they [French] all of a sudden have exhibited the unprovoked and treacherous proceedings . . . it is a standing law amongst all nations, not to encroach upon each other’s territories, whilst they are supposed to be at peace . . . a conduct so audacious, so unprovoked, and so deceitfully sudden on their part, is an undeniable trait of the most extreme insult and treachery . . . now it being certain, that in addition to the general ties of religion, the bonds of amity and good understanding have ever been firm and permanent with your Majesty . . . we therefore sincerely hope . . . that you will not refuse entering into concert with us, and giving our Sublime Porte every possible assistance . . . a strict connection is expected between them [French] and your Majesty, for whose service they are to send over a corps of troops by the way of Egypt . . . they [French] are a nation whose deceitful intrigues and perfidious pursuits know no bounds. They are intent on nothing, but on depriving people of their lives and properties, and on persecuting religion, wherever their arms can reach . . . it is sincerely hoped that you will not refuse every needful exertion towards assisting your brethren Mussulmen, according to the obligations of religion, and towards defending Hindostan itself, against the effect of French machinations. Should it be true, as we hear, that an intimate connection has taken place between your Court and that nation, we hope that by weighing present circumstances, as well as future inconvenience which would result from such a measure, your Majesty will beware against it, and in the event of your having harboured any idea of joining with them, or of moving against Great Britain, you will lay such resolution aside. We make it our special request that your Majesty will please to refrain from entering into any measures against the English, or lending any compliant ear to the French. Should there exist any subject of complaint with the former, please to communicate it, certain as you may be of the employment of every good office on our side, to compromise the same; we wish to see the connection above alluded to, exchanged in favour of Great Britain."