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There is nothing characteristic in manufacture or commerce, except an aversion to such pursuits. In fact, all occupations, except agriculture and military service are distasteful to the true Osmanli. He is not much of a merchant. He may keep a stall in a bazaar, but his operations are rarely undertaken on a scale which merits the name of commerce or finance.
The fathers point out Stambul to their sons, they point it out as the booty that will give them sustenance; tender women lay their hands upon the sword to use it against the Osmanli, and will fight like heroes. Yet the days of the Sons of the Prophet will not yet come to an end; they will resist the enemy, and stand fast like a Salamander in the midst of the burning embers.
In the second place the Osmanli 'Turks', however fallen away from the virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either 'the will to power' or their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to rule as soldiers.
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.
Almost all the military glories of Suleiman known to contemporary Europe as 'the Magnificent' and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli sultans made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire.
The Morea and central Greece passed out of the empire, the first provinces so to pass since the Osmanli loss of Hungary. Yet it was in the middle of that fatal struggle that Mahmud settled for ever with the Janissaries, and during all its course he was settling one after another with the Dere Beys!
For the Osmanli is a warrior, and his nation is a warrior tribe; his belief is too simple for civilization, his courage too blind and devoted for the military operations of our times, his heart too easily roused by the bloodthirsty instincts of the fanatic, and too ready to bear the misfortunes of life with the grave indifference of the fatalist.
When an Osmanli is desirous of seeing me ride the bicycle, he goes honestly and straightforwardly to work at coaxing and worrying; except in very rare instances they have seemed incapable of resorting to deceit or sharp practice to gain their object. Not so childlike and honest, however, are our new acquaintances, the Persians.
I could not remotely guess to whom I owed this dismal fate, and was too petulant to speculate upon it. But the meddler, friend or foe, who had bereft me of my chance to die whilst I was fit and ready, came in for a Turkish cursing the curse that calls down in all the Osmanli variants the same pangs in duplicate upon the banned one.
But in front lay a rich but weak Christian state, the centre of the civilization to which the popular element in the Osmanli society belonged.
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