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.  Greece 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 barred Russia’s development into the Mediterranean, should lead to such a war as we are now passing through.  That policy, for the present, has utterly defeated its own ends, for the key is in the pockets of Prussia.  But all through that century, though the Powers maintained Turkey there, they helped to liberate, or saw liberate themselves, the various Christian kingdoms in Europe over which at the beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey exercised a military despotism.  They weakened her in so far as they could, but they one and all refused to let her die, and above all refused to give her that stab in the heart which would have been implied in her expulsion from Constantinople.