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extricated themselves after forty years of incessant fighting in almost every part of the peninsula except the
domain of the Greek emperor. This warfare, which in no way advanced the proper aims of the lords of Brusa
and Nicaea, not only profited the Greek emperor by relieving him of concern about his land frontier but also
used up strength which might have made head against the Tartars. Constantinople then, as now, was detached
from the Balkans. 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
The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria--Serbia--Greece--Rumania--Turkey 121
Kosovo in 1389 and Nikopolis in 1396.
Nor was this all. They became involved also with certain peoples of the main continent of Europe, whose
interests or sympathies had been affected by those long and sanguinary Balkan wars. There was already bad
blood and to spare between the Osmanlis on the one hand, and Hungarians, Poles, and Italian Venetians on the
other, long before any second opportunity to attack Constantinople occurred: and the Osmanlis were in for
that age-long struggle to secure a 'scientific frontier' beyond the Danube, whence the Adriatic on the one flank
and the Euxine on the other could be commanded, which was to make Ottoman history down to the eighteenth
century and spell ruin in the end.
It is a vulgar error to suppose that the Osmanlis set out for Europe, in the spirit of Arab apostles, to force their
creed and dominion on all the world. Both in Asia and Europe, from first to last, their expeditions and
conquests have been inspired palpably by motives similar to those active among the Christian powers,
namely, desire for political security and the command of commercial areas. Such wars as the Ottoman sultans,
once they were established at Constantinople, did wage again and again with knightly orders or with Italian
republics would have been undertaken, and fought with the same persistence, by any Greek emperor who felt
himself strong enough. Even the Asiatic campaigns, which Selim I and some of his successors, down to the
end of the seventeenth century, would undertake, were planned and carried out from similar motives. Their
object was to secure the eastern basin of the Mediterranean by the establishment of some strong frontier
against Iran, out of which had come more than once forces threatening the destruction of Ottoman power. It
does not, of course, in any respect disprove their purpose that, in the event, this object was never attained, and
that an unsatisfactory Turco-Persian border still illustrates at this day the failures of Selim I and Mohammed
IV.
By the opening of the fifteenth century, when, all unlooked for, a most terrible Tartar storm was about to
break upon western Asia, the Osmanli realm had grown considerably, not only in Europe by conquest, but
also in Asia by the peaceful effect of marriages and heritages. Indeed it now comprised scarcely less of the
Anatolian peninsula than the last Seljuks had held, that is to say, the whole of the north as far as the Halys
river beyond Angora, the central plateau to beyond Konia, and all the western coast-lands. The only emirs not
tributary were those of Karamania, Cappadocia, and Pontus, that is of the southern and eastern fringes; and
one detached fragment of Greek power survived in the last-named country, the kingdom of Trebizond. As for
Europe, it had become the main scene of Osmanli operations, and now contained the administrative capital,
Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental primacy. Sultan Murad, who some years after his succession in
1359 had definitely transferred the centre of political gravity to Thrace, was nevertheless carried to the
Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria, Serbia, and districts of both Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral
parts of an empire which had come to number at least as many Christian as Moslem subjects, and to depend as
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