36 NOTES ON A SOJOURN IN THE LEVANT. 
religion and extended their empire, just as the Teutonic tribes did 
the Roman empire. But the greatest feat of all accomplished by 
the Turks was that they got their Sultan named Khaleef, or 
Successor of Mohammed. The present Sultan of the Turks 
wields great influence no doubt as Sultan, but he exercises an 
incomparably wider and stronger power through his being Khaleef. 
The manner of the Turkish irruption and conquests was as 
follows. About the beginning of the fourteenth century from 
some cause or another the Turks of Turkestan began to leave 
their country in tribes to seek for new homes in other countries. 
Some of these tribes went to the north of the Caspian Sea, and 
some of them effected a settlement in Europe. The Tartar races 
were given to making irruptions out of their own country to 
settle in that of some other nation, whom they would turn out and 
dispossess. 
On these occasions the Turks seem to have gone their way in 
tribes, leisurely and deliberately, roaming through foreign 
countries, sometimes being pushed on by the inhabitants of one 
of these victimised countries until they came to a country which, 
for their own reasons, they conquered, subdued, and settled. 
Other tribes took a course south of the Caspian—included 
in these were the Ottoman and the Seljuk tribes—who gradually 
forced their way into Asia Minor, which seems to have been 
settled by the Seljuk tribe. The Ottomans went further—they 
crossed the Bosphorus, and eventually, in 1453, took Constanti- 
nople. Part of the Ottoman tribe turned southward as they came 
to Asia Minor, and they over-ran and conquered Syria in the 
early part of the sixteenth century. The Arab government of that 
country, therefore, lasted about nine hundred years. 
The Turkish empire is a military empire only. The Turks 
appear to have little or no genius for colonising a country after 
conquering it. The countries of the Turkish empire are governed 
by Pashas, civil and military, and their subordinates ; the whole 
of the empire being divided into provinces called pashaliks. The 
great majority of the Arabs in the Turkish empire profess the 
Mohammedan religion. 
