ece was their
next prey; they penetrated Bosnia and Macedonia, and in 1453 attacked
and took Constantinople under Mohammed the Conqueror. Still true to the
policy of incorporation they continued to mop up the remainder of the
Balkan Peninsula, and at the same time consolidated themselves further
in Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seventeenth century their
expansion reached its utmost geographical limits, but already the Empire
held within it the seeds of its own decay, and by a curious irony the
force that should still keep it together was derived not from its own
strength, but from the jealousies of the European Powers among
themselves, who would willingly have dismembered it, but feared the
quarrels that would surely result from the apportionment of its
territories. The Ottoman Empire from then onwards has owed its existence
to its enemies.

Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very loosely knit together, and
no bond, whether of blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the
assembly of Christian and Jewish and non-Moslem races of which it was so
largely composed. The Empire never grew (as, for instance, the British
Empire grew) by the emigration and settlement of the Osmanli stock in
the territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only took. From the
beginning right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it has
been a military despotism, imposing itself on unwilling and alien tribes
whom it drained of their blood, and then left in neglect until some
further levy was needed. None of its conquered peoples was ever given a
share in the government; they were left unorganised and, so to speak,
undigested elements under the Power which had forced them into
subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included in
that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control. Turkey
in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea of
Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and the
only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe the
existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange political
phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of Power. No one of
the Great Powers, from fear of the complications that would ensue, could
risk the expulsion of the Turkish Government from Constantinople, and
there all through the nineteenth century it has been maintained lest the
Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked the bolts that