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But to call them Osmanlis is to anticipate the next stage in their history. They are named after Osman, their first leader's son, and he after the third successor of the Prophet it was a good Moslem name, and he took it when he was converted to Islam and organised his pagan tent-dwellers into a settled Mohammedan State in the north-western hills of Anatolia, on the borders of Christendom.
Whenever the power of the Turks in the Hedjaz declines, which it will when the resources of Egypt are no longer directed to that point by so able and so undisturbed a possessor of Egypt as Mohammed Ali, the Arabs will avenge themselves for the submission, light as it is, which they now reluctantly yield to their conquerors; and the reign of the Osmanlis in the Hedjaz will probably terminate in many a scene of bloodshed.
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.
The influence of the Osmanlis in their empire to-day resides in three things: first, in their possession of Constantinople; second, in the sultan's caliphate and his guardianship of the holy cities of Islam; third, in certain qualities of Osmanli character, notably 'will to power' and courage in the field.
Venice could not feel quite indifferent to the prospect of the main part of that empire, which, while in Greek hands, had been her most serious commercial competitor, passing into the stronger hands of the Osmanlis. Once in Constantinople, the latter, long a land power only, would be bound to concern themselves with the sea also.
For thither in my early boyhood to the court of the Sultan of the Osmanlis was my father summoned, and him I never beheld again. It was from my aged grandfather that I learned my first lessons in astrology about the twelve houses, the ruling star of each day, the coming and the going of the planets, their conjunctions and oppositions, and the influences they exercise on men's lives.
Battle was not long in being joined. In the event, it would cost Russia about sixty years of strenuous effort to reduce the Byzantine power of the Osmanlis to a condition little better than that in which Osman had found the Byzantine power of the Greeks four centuries before. During the first two-thirds of this period the contest was waged not unequally.
The free and equal Osmanlis were all to take their cue from men of the Byzantine sort which the European provinces, and especially the city of Constantinople, breed. After the revolution, nothing in Turkey struck one so much as the apparition on the top of things everywhere of a type of Osmanli who has the characteristic qualities of the Levantine Greek.
The Osmanlis, had they possessed themselves of it, might well have let the latter be for a long time to come. Instead, they had to battle, with the help now of one section of the Balkan peoples, now of another, till forced to make an end of all their feuds and treacheries by annexations after the victories of Kosovo in 1389 and Nikopolis in 1396. Nor was this all.
Only educated Osmanlis can detect those errors: just now they are the very people we want to deceive." "I can pass for anything else here without being found out," I answered. "I can pass for a Persian when there are no Persians about, or for a Panjabí Mussulman, if necessary." "That is an idea. You might be an Indian Hadji. I will think of it." "What in the world do you intend to do?"
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