The Ottoman and Persian Empires 59

only secondary thought for the social or economic good of the
provincials. Provided that these demands were met, there was little
deliberate interference with the racial or religious status of the
population, except such as might arise locally from the presence of
garrisons and officials of the ruling race and creed. The Christians
in the Ottoman Empire continued to fare much as they had fared
under preceding Muslim rulers, and their lot was distinctly better
than that of the Jews in medieval and twentieth-century Central
and Eastern Europe. The Turks showed greater toleration to the
Christians in the Asiatic provinces, where they were a small and
submissive minority, than in the Balkans, where they constituted a
rebellious majority constantly intriguing with the neighbouring
enemy Powers, Austria and Russia.1 Catholic missions were ad-
mitted, not only to the Levant, but to Baghdad and Basra as early
as the seventeenth century, though they were always exposed to
the caprice of changing local authority. In the depopulated Pales-
tine of the eighteenth century the pilgrim-dues were the most
important item of revenue. The yearly pilgrimage of some 4,000
persons c. 1750 had risen to 10-12,000 when the French traveller
Volney visited Palestine in 1784, and the tax collected for their
visit to the Jordan alone amounted to three times the tax-assess-
ment of the town of Gaza, then the most populous town in Pales-

tine.

2

The Turks were a racial minority in their great empire, and made
no attempt at the general colonization of the conquered provinces.
The empire was conceived on no narrow Turkish-national basis,
but was a comprehensive empire like the Abbasid or the Roman.
Whatever a man's race or birthplace, he was eligible for govern-
ment-service and could attain the highest office, provided that he
conformed to the general cultural pattern of the empire: the reli-
gion and social customs of Sunni Islam; a military background of
training and experience; and the Turkish language, which under
the Ottomans (while absorbing a multitude of forms of expression
and loan-words from Arabic and Persian) had yet triumphantly
asserted itself as the language of the ruling-class against those .two
languages of an older and higher civilization. While the bulk of
1 The Armenian atrocities of the last fifty years had their origin in the rise of
an insistent Armenian nationalism encouraged by Turkey's traditional enemy,
Russia. Cf. the contemporary comments of D. G. Hogarth, A Wandering
Scholar in the Levant (1896), 146 ff.
2 De Haas, op. citv 357 f., with references,