HISTORY GONE WRONG? 397
How could a living corpse, rotting in all its parts, take so long to ex-
pire?
The Ottoman empire began in the late thirteenth century when the
Osmanlis, a Turkish clan or tribe, somehow penetrated into northwest
Anatolia, far from the plains and pastures of their ancestral home, very
close to the center of Byzantine (Greek) power. This warrior people
was swift to move and keen for loot—very dangerous. The Greeks
should have known it and seen them as potential, inevitable enemies.
Instead, these pseudo-Hellenes, too clever by half, thought they could
turn the Ottomans into tools and allies.
So when, in the mid-fourteenth century, the Byzantine empire was
riven by civil war, both sides began calling in Turks and Serbs (also in-
vaders) for aid. This pattern went back centuries: co-opt the barbarians
and get them to fight for rather than against you. Yet it's a high-risk
strategy to let the enemy into the house. He may like it too well. When
the Serbs got ambitious and decided to replace the Greek dynasty by
one of their own, the Greeks called once more on the Turks for help,
which they gave. But why stop there? Having beaten the Serbs, the
Turks planted themselves in Gallipoli in 1354, then overran Thrace,
and then in 1365 took Adrianople (the city of the Roman emperor
Hadrian) as their new capital, a day's march from Constantinople.
Now the Ottomans had one foot firmly established in Europe and one
in Asia Minor. The Byzantine "empire" was reduced to shrunken nod-
ules, Christian islets in a Muslim sea; and the Ottomans, like other
Asian invaders before them, began to imitate the pomp and ceremony
of the Greek court, though in their own way.
In 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and put an
end to the Roman empire, bells tolled and worshippers mourned in
courts and churches a thousand miles away. At that point, the Turks
held as much territory in Europe as in Asia, and were seen and feared
as the bearers of the Islamic sword against Christendom. The Turk
became a new bogeyman, his name synonymous with "brute" or "cruel
savage." Carnival targets, "têtes de Turc," wore turbans and large mus-
taches.* Schoolboys did arithmetic problems that sought the most ef-
ficient way to dispose of Turkish passengers on a sinking ship.
These hostile (fearful) perceptions and intermittent aggressions
marked off a restiess, moving frontier of conflict. The fall of the great
city, The City (which gives us the name Istanbul), constituted one of
- The expression has since been reduced to metaphor; a tête de Turc is now a butt of
mockery and jest.