as the Ottoman Empire,
established in the north-west corner of Asia Minor. Like all previous
Turkish immigrations, they came not in any overwhelming horde, with
sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but as a small compact body
with a genius for military organisation, and the gift, which they retain
to this day, of stalwart fighting. The policy to which they owed their
growth was absorption, and the people whom they first began to absorb
were Greeks and other Christians, and it was to a Christian girl,
Nilufer, that Osman married his son Orkhan. They took Christian youths
from the families of Greek dwellers, forced them to apostatise, gave
them military training, and married them to Turkish girls. It was out of
this blend of Greek and Turkish blood, as Mr. D.G. Hogarth points out,
that they derived their national being and their national strength. This
system of recruiting they steadily pursued not only among the Christian
peoples with whom they came in contact, but among the settlements of
Turks who had preceded them in this process of pushing westwards, and
formed out of them the professional soldiery known as Janissaries. They
did not fight for themselves alone, but as mercenaries lent their arms
to other peoples, Moslem and Christian alike, who would hire their
services. This was a policy that paid well, for, after having delivered
some settlement from the depredations of an inconvenient neighbour, and
with their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned on those who had
hired their arms, took their toll of youths, and finally incorporated
them in their growing empire. Like an insatiable sponge, they mopped up
the sprinklings of disconnected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia
Minor, and swelled and prospered. But as yet the extermination of these
was not part of their programme: they absorbed the strength and manhood
of their annexations into their own soldiery, and came back for more.
They did not levy those taxes paid in the persons of soldiers for their
armies from their co-religionists, since Islam may not fight against
Islam, but by means of peaceful penetration (a policy long since
abandoned) they united scattered settlements of Turks to themselves by
marriages and the bond of a common tongue and religion.

Their expansion into Europe began in the middle of the fourteenth
century, when, as mercenaries, they fought against the Serbs, and fifty
years later they had a firm hold over Bulgaria as well. Gre