These instances by no means represent the full influence exercised by the New World on the most powerful mind of modern times, and through him on ages which have realised his ideas without adding anything to their transcendent scope and penetration. There can be little doubt that Bacon’s whole scheme for the reconstitution of knowledge on a broader basis and firmer foundation, in accordance with the truth of things and without regard to the routine of scholastic tradition, and with such fulness that, in his own words, the “crystalline globe” of the understanding should faithfully reflect all that the “material globe,” or external world, offers to his apprehension, was suggested to him by the facts briefly sketched in the foregoing pages. Truth, he wrote, was not the daughter of Authority, but of Time. America was certainly “the greatest birth of time”; Bacon applied these words to the philosophic system of which he was the founder. The discovery of America gave the human intellect what is known to mechanics as a “dead lift.” It dispelled a secular illusion; it destroyed the old blind reverence for antiquity, which Spenser might well have depicted as a sightless monster, stifling mankind in its serpentine embraces. Truth, to borrow from Milton an allegory worthy of Bacon, had been hewn, like the body of Osiris, into a thousand pieces. Philosophy, like Isis, the disconsolate spouse, wandered over the earth in quest of them: and the time would come when they should be “gathered limb to limb, and moulded into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.” What “grounds of hope,” to use Bacon’s phrase, for that glorious reunion—or rather, what certain auguries of its ultimate attainment—he gathered from the New Cosmography, his writings abundantly testify. His own vast survey of knowledge, attained or that ought to be attained, he modestly described as a coasting voyage or periegesis of the “New Intellectual World.” He loved to compare his own conjectures and anticipations of the boundless results which he knew his method destined to achieve in the hands of posterity with the faint indications which had inspired Colombo to attempt that “mirabilis navigatio,” that daring six weeks’ voyage westward across the Atlantic. Feebly, indeed, and through the darkness of night, he says, blew the breeze of hope from the shores of the New Continent of knowledge and power towards him, as from his lonely elevation he eagerly watched for those cheering signals which he knew would sooner or later greet the patient eye of expectant philosophy, though he himself might not be destined to behold them. Those signals, he wrote, must one day come, unless his own faith in the future should prove vain, and men were content to remain intellectual abjects. Humanity had waited long ages for the accomplishment of Seneca’s prophecy—a prophecy which was in every mouth at the Discovery, and of which Bacon, like all his contemporaries, hailed the Discovery as the destined fulfilment;
Venient annis saecula seri
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus
Tiphysque novos detegat orbes
Nec sit terris ultima Thule
Possibly he had pondered over a less-known passage in the prose writings of the same author, who predicts that the time shall come when knowledge shall be vastly increased, and men shall look back with amazement at the ignorance of the Greeks and Romans. There was confirmation for such hopes in Holy Scripture. The anticipation of the Chaldean seer that in the latest times “many should run to and fro, and knowledge be increased” he interpreted as foreshadowing the opening of five-sixths of the globe, hitherto closed, to man’s travel, study, and reinvigorated powers of reasoning. Into the future of history in the narrow sense of the word, Bacon ventured only by one memorable forecast, since abundantly verified, and more abundantly by momentous events of quite recent occurrence. He prophesied that the great inheritances of the East and the West, both at the time ready to slip from the feeble grasp of Spain, must alike fall to those who commanded the ocean—to that Anglo-Saxon race of which he will remain to all time one of the most illustrious representatives.
CHAPTER III. THE OTTOMAN CONQUEST, by J.B. Bury
IN the middle of the fourteenth century two powers which had recently sprung into unexpected prominence were closing in upon Constantinople from the west and from the east. But in the race for the stronghold on the Bosphorus the competitor which might have seemed to have the best chances of winning, suddenly fell out. With the death of Stephen Dusan (1356) the ill-consolidated empire of Servia collapsed: his successors were ciphers; whereas Orchan, the Sultan of the Ottomans, handed down a well-disciplined State, built on strong foundations, to a line of eminent princes. Under him the Ottoman Turks won (1358) their first foothold on European soil by the occupation of the fortress of Gallipoli,—somewhat less than a century before Mohammad II captured Constantinople. It was not long before Orchan’s son Murad I had crept round and conquered the eastern half of the Balkan peninsula, cutting off Constantinople from Christian Europe. For the first time, since the days of Darius and Xerxes, Thrace passed under the sway of an Asiatic power,—often as the hosts of Sassanid kings and Saracen caliphs had lined the shores of the dividing straits. If the conquest had resembled in character the old Persian conquest, if the inhabitants had been required only to pay tribute to a distant ruler and receive his garrisons in their cities, the lot of these lands would have been light. But they were taken into full possession by their new lords; and oriental nomads of an alien and intolerant religion were planted as the dominant race amid the Christian population. The circumstance that the Ottomans were nomads (they were a clan of the Turkish tribe of Oghuz) gives their empire its significance in the history of mankind. In the perpetual struggle between the herdsmen and the tillers of the soil which has been waged from remote ages on the continents of Europe and Asia, the advance of the Ottomans was a decisive victory for the children of the steppes. This feature of their conquest is of no less fundamental importance than its aspect as a victory for Islam.
How the Ottomans were caught in the tide of the Mongol invasion and their power almost ruined; how they recovered under the prudent guidance of Mohammad I; how the wave of conquest once more rolled on under Murad II, until a seal was set upon their European empire by the capture of Constantinople,—all this has been told by Gibbon. The story is here taken up in 1453.
For a moment it was not clear whether the new lord of Constantinople would be content with a suzerainty over the neighbouring lands which had once been provinces of the Roman empire, or would reduce them to the condition of provinces of the Ottoman realm. The princes of the Peloponnese, the despot of Servia, the lords of some of the island States of the Aegean, forthwith offered their submission. Mohammad soon showed that he would not acquiesce in a system of vassal states paying him tribute as overlord, but aimed at compassing the complete and immediate subjection of the Balkan peninsula. A typical oriental conqueror, he was driven on by the true instinct that it would be fatal to stand still or abandon aggression; he believed that it was the destiny of his people to spread the religion of the Prophet over the whole earth, and the task of his life was to further the accomplishment of this end. His next successors worked with varying vigour in the same direction, and the Ottomans throve so long as they conquered. But it was constant success in war that quickened and strengthened the frame of their State; and the hour in which limits were set to territorial advance marks the beginning of a rapid decline. The nature of their institutions, as we shall see, demanded war.
Mohammad first turned his arms against Servia. This step was determined by Servia’s geographical position, lying on the road to Hungary. For Mohammad saw