Hamlet-Turk
TODAY we know, all too well, the pensive militarist, and oven the neurotic militarist. But a mediaeval Turkish warrior sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought was remarkable. Several early Ottoman rulers inflamed their minds with the exploits of Alexander the Great, but Mahomet II, the Conqueror to whom Constantinople fell, had a very different type of mind to inflame. From boyhood he was a reader; he knew Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Chaldean. His designs to conquer the world mingled curiously with a desire for some deeper self-knowledge. He had all the savage ways of his savage race; but he was Hamlet-at heart. Millions of murders made a hero, but there was Providence in the fall of a sparrow.
The Conqueror was always a solitary, sceptical and melan- choly. Though he waged war with the fanatical cruelty of the Moslem towards the Christian, he was suspect to his untutored soldiers as an infidel. His spells of morbid, brooding melancholy were quite un-Asiatic. He was the eldest son of the plump, voluptuous Murad II by a European slave-girl, which gave force to the fantastic rumour that he received the Sacrament in secret. Whatever refinements lay behind the parrot-beak and the thick, cherry lips were not those of the Christian culture at which he struck so dire a blow. He lived and died a Tartar of the Tartars, a musing misanthropical, Turk, but still a Turk. He had been reared in a world of treachery and sauve qui peut; and in his boyhood his father twice abdicated in his favour, only to reassume power. The thwarted youth grew up arrogant, mistrustful and faithless.
Over-ripe, rather rotten, the " New Rome " on the Marmora Was a fruit ready to fall. The Mecca of scholars and depository of a moribund culture had sunk to the degradation of an open slave-mart in its centre, and the reigning house, the Palaeologi, were shipping away the very pavements under their feet for gold. Of the Byzantine empire only the Peloponnese and a few fields outside the capital remained, and the ninety-fifth Caesar paid tribute to the Sultan of Adrianople. Islam, triumphant in North Africa, was ever mindful of the Prophet's words, " They, shall conquer Constantinople; happy the victorious Prince and his soldiers I " The young Sultan's complex mind was bent on a single aim— Alexander's. His ambition stretched to Naples, even to the greater Rome of the West. On his father's death he procured a certain Ali to drown his 4by brother Ahmed, Murad's legitimate son, in his bath; then he put. Ali to death. Yet he could scarcely resist a beggar in the street. His methods anticipated Hitler's. The doomed city he .encircled with fortresses and ships. Still protesting his peace- ful aims, he found means of propitiating neutral rulers. He laid waste the fields for a considerable distance round the capital, and butchered the -Emperor's envoys sent to protest against his actions. He then encamped with an enormous force before the ancient walls of Theodosius, which yet proved so strong that it was forty days before the end came. Not till the eleventh hour, when the forlorn- little garrison of Christian heroes was almost exhausted, did.' the Sultan's melancholy seize him. Strange portents in the sky shook his nerve, and to reassure himself he went disguised among his motley followers and listened to their talk in several languages. Those who spread gloom and disaffection were beheaded.
In the morning sunshine of May 30th he made his triumphant entry through the gate they call Top Kapott, conqueror where twenty Turk and Saracen besiegers had failed. Before. the door of Holy Sophia he dismounted and sprinkled earth upon his head, a characteristic memento nwri. He paused spell- bound as he entered the glorious temple where his janissaries had murdered, raped and. looted; and it was some minutes before he recovered and, going on to the high altar, prostrated himself in prayer to Allah. On his way back he struck furiously with his sword at a soldier who was hacking at the marble floor, reviling him for a vandal. On just such an impulse, years later, he had his own son bowstrung for violating a woman.
As he rode through the ageless Hippodrome and came to the historic Serpent Column of Delphi, he struck off one of its triple heads, a supreme gesture of defiance to the West and its observances.. From there he passed to the palace of the Caesars, which his followers had already ransacked, and as he gazed upon the desolate scene he was heard to murmur Firdusi's words : " Now it is the spider who draws the curtain over the royal doorway, and the sad-voiced owl is sentinel on Afrisiab's lofty tower."
" More cruel than Nero," Tetaldi wrote, adding, less perceptively: " he delighted in bloodshed." He habitually impaled those who surrendered to him in war, and it was he who ordained the custom, which endured for centuries, whereby the Sultan killed off his brothers on accession. He eschewed drunkenness; but his lusts respected neither childhood, sex nor rank. There is nothing out of character in the famous legend of his Christian odalisque Irene, who lies in a Moslem tomb hard by his own turbeh. She would not abjure her faith, and Mahomet, maddened by the reproaches of the mullahs, had her brought before him. Unveiling her in the presence of them all, he said, " This woman I love as 'my life, but my life I give to Islam," and sent her to execution.
The glory of the Ottomans was not among the greatest generals. He never came to grips with Hunyadi of Hungary or his renegade janissary Scanderberg. The gorgeous paste- board empire of Trebizond collapsed before his hordes, and he completed the conquest of -seven weakened kingdoms: Caramania, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Moldavia, Kastemouni and Morea. His strategy is a little difficult to evaluate, as he always commanded the bigger battalions; but good laws and sound financial administration attested the range of his capacities. He knew, like Chatham and Churchill, how to choose the right man in war. Scholars, artists and Christian sages, he loved and flattered. He had the Ptolemaic writings translated into Arabic, and knew philosophy and mathematics," as well as history. The bearded, mournful, semitic features which Gentile Bellini has depicted are alert with intelligence. But from the stern gaze the dream, the curiosity, the ardour have departed. Absolute power has corrupted absolutely, and Hyde has ousted Jekyll. Mahomet waged war with nervous fury for twelve years on end; then his faithful janissaries themselves rose and demanded some rest, Hurt and baffled, he knew opposition at last. When only fifty-one he died, prematurely old, worn with inward friction. The mournful cypresses that wave before, the tallest Mosque in Stamboul are as fitting a memorial, perhaps, as the Conqueror's martial catafalque inside.
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