TURKEY
583
TURKEY
In the reign of Miirad I, the successor of Orkhan, Adri- 1 anople was taken, which became the European capital of the Ottomans till they captured Constantino|>le. When the Turks entered Europe, the territorj' of the Greek empire was almost limited to a quadrangle extending from Constantinople to Adrianople, and from the Black Sea to the Archipelago, to a small part of the coast near Thessalonica, and the larger portion of the Pelo- ponnesus. The bulk of what subsequently became Eu- ropean Turkey consisted of the empire of Servia, ex- tending from the Danube to the Peloponnesus, and bounded on the west by Bosnia and the Adriatic Sea: and of the kingdom of Bidgaria. extending from the Danube to Adrianople. boiuiiled on the east by the Black Sea. The frontier between Bulgaria and Servia was constantly changing. When the Turks began to get a foothold, Widdin and Sophia were the nearest Bulgarian towns to the frontier. At this time the power of Servia began to go down after the death of Stephen Dushan. its greatest ruler, an<l ISidgaria began to split up into three separate kingdoms. Thus both were unable to resist the advancing Turks. In 1363 the Bulgarian city of Piiilippopolis was taken. About 1371 the chief of the three Bulgarian kingdoms, that of Tirnova, became tributary. For a while a Slavic confederation, tnider the Bosnian king Stephen, won some successes; but in the great battle of Kossova, in 1389. the confederate Bosnians, Servians, Bulgarians, and Wallachians were utterly defeated. Two or three years later, Servia and Wallachia became tributary, and the greater part of Bulgaria was conquered. INIurad's son, Bajazet I, was the first to exchange the humbler title of emir for that of sultan, and also the first who attacked Constantino- ])le. The progress of the Turks was arrested by the stunning defeat which they suffered in 1402 at Angora, at the hand of Timor, the famous Tamerlane; but they recovered their power under Bajazet's grandson, IMurad II (1421-51), who conquered Thessalonica, Corinth, Pa- tras, and a part of Albania, which was heroically de- fended by the great Scanderbeg. His son, Mohammed II (1451-81), conquered Constantinople, and thereby de- stroyed the Greek empire. He reduced, in 1459, Servia from a tributary principality to an Ottoman province; in 1463 Bosnia was annexed; in 1461, the Christian em- pire of Trebizond, in Asia; in 1466. Caramania; in 1479. the Peloponnesus, which at that time belonged to the Venetians. In 1480 Otranto, in Italy, was captured; and the design was openly avowed to conquer all of Western Europe and to exterminate Christianity. But Mohammed's death, in 1481, put an end to these schemes; Otranto was soon abandoned, and no further progress was ever made west of the Adriatic. The conquests of Jlohammed gave to the Turkish empire about the same extent it had before the late East- ern war. In the whole of the Balkan peninsula onh' the small mountain district of IMontenegro has kept its independence to our own times. Selim the Inflexi- ble (1612-19) warred against iNIohammedan enemies, and annexed Syria and Egypt to his dominions. From the last of a line of nominal caliphs Selim obtained a cession of his rights, and ever since the Ottoman sultans have been acknowledged as chiefs of their re- ligion by all Mussulmans of the Sunnite sect. During the reign of Sideiman II (1519-66) the empire attained the greatest extent it has ever had. The larger por- tion of Hinigary was annexed; a Turkish pasha ruled at Buda; and the princes of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia became vassals of the sultan. Rhodes was taken from the Knights of St. John, and a large tract of land in Asia from the Persians. With the death of Sideiman the decline of Turkish power began. The reign of Selim [[.the Drunkard (1566-74), was marked by the first great reverse of the Ottoman arms — the overthrow of the Turkish fleet by the fleets of Spain and Venice at the battle of Lepanto, in 1571. No last- ing conquests of importance were made from this time, except the islands of Cyprus and Crete. The frontier
on the north towards Hungary, and in later times to- wards Pussia, went steadily back. The succession of great rulers was stopped. The powers of the sultan became less, the power of the pashas greater. In 1622 a sultan was, for the first time, murdered. In the latter half of the 17th century the Turks began to lose their hold on Hungary. The battle of St.(iottliard, in 1664, was the first great overthrow of the Turks by land. At the end of the 17th century the Turks had been at war with all their Christian neighbors, and they had lost territory at all points excejit one. In a war against Po- land thej' had gained Podolia : they had lost, besides Hungary, the Peloponnesus, and Azof. All of these ter- ritories, inclusive of Podolia, were given up by the trea- ties in 1699 and 1700. The peace of Carlowitz, in 1699, marks a point in the decline of the Ottoman power, and the Turks were for the first time compelled to treat with the Christian powers of Europe on equal terms. The wars against Austria, which, with breaks from time to time, had gone on since the battle of Jloliacz, 1526, by which the Turks established their ride over Hun- gary, were ended by the peace of Sistova in 1791, The result was that Hungary was freed from the Turk, but that Servia and Bosnia were left in his clutches. The frontier established by that peace has remained almost unchangetl. The most dangerous of all the foreign en- emies of Turkey proved to be Kiissia. The wars be- tween Russia and tlie Turks began in the middle of the 17th century, and the two countries have ever since ap- peared as irreconcilable hereditary foes whose inter- minable conflict could only be endt'd'by the destruction of the one or the other. The wars between Russia and Turkey put on a very distinctive character when Peter the Great, in 1696, took Azof, the key of the Black Sea. From the time that Mohammed the Conqueror took the Genoese possessions in the Crimea, the Black Sea had been wholly under the (wwer of the Turks. When Azof fell into the hands of the Russians, it remained for a great time the point of contention between the two countries. A new stage in the history of these wars is marked by the famous treat}- of Kainarji of 1774, which ended the first war of Catherine II against the Turks. This treaty for the first time brought the Ottoman power into some measure of dependence. It gave Rus- sia a firm foothold on tlie Black Sea. and the impor- tant right to remonstrate in behalf of Wallachia and Moldavia, in case of any breach of their privileges by the Turks.