an of the country--for Anatolia was already Turkish two
centuries before the Osmanlis appeared on the scene. 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. A tribe had become a march, and the final stage
was from march to empire.

From this point onwards Ottoman history singularly resembles the history
of the Osmanlis' present allies. The March of Brandenburg, the March of
Austria, and the March of Osman--they were each founded as the outer
bulwarks of a civilisation, and all erected themselves into centres of
military ascendancy over their fellow-countrymen and co-religionists to
the rear as well as the strangers opposite their front. The Osmanlis may
have been more savage in their methods than the marchmen of
Germany--though hardly, perhaps, than the Teutonic Knights who prepared
the soil of Prussia for the Hohenzollerns. The Teutonic Knights
exterminated their victims; the Osmanlis drained theirs of their blood
by taking a tribute of their male children, educating them as Moslems,
and training them as recruits for an Ottoman standing army. Their first
expansion was forwards into Christian Europe; their capital shifted from
a village in the hills to the city of Brusa on the Asiatic shore of
Marmora, from Brusa across the Dardanelles to Adrianople, from
Adrianople to the imperial city on the Bosphorus; and, with the capture
of Constantinople, the Osmanli Sultans usurped the pretensions of East
Rome, as the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns the emblems of Charlemagne and
Caesar Augustus.

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. But the heritage of "Rum" is not the
final factor in the Ottoman Empire as it exists to-day; for after the
successors of Osman had founded their military monarchy with blood and
iron on the ruins of one-third of Europe, they turned eastwards, with a
genuinely Oriental gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the
apparently mechanical impetus of all Asia