Ibrahim Pasha: Grand Vizir of Suleiman the Magnificent
9781465683861
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The life of Ibrahim Pasha, as full of strange events as the most highly‐colored romance, paradoxical, and to western students of society almost incomprehensible in its rapid changes, is very difficult to place soberly before Occidental readers; yet its very strangeness is typical of the Orient, and if we could understand this romantic life we might find we held a key to much in Turkish life and thought. But our only chance of understanding it is to banish from our minds western conceptions and accept as facts what seem like wild imaginings. Ibrahim Pasha was not of the Turkish race, a fact which accounts for some of the paradoxes of his career, but his life was passed in a Turkish environment, one of whose notable characteristics is that it has always at once included and modified so many alien elements. In any consideration of the Turkish people, the most important thing to hold in mind is that the Turks are neither Aryan nor Semitic, being unrelated to Persians, Arabs, Greeks, or Hebrews. When ethnologists dare not speak definitely of race distinctions, the layman cannot venture to place the Turk in the “Touranian” or other group, but he can accept the fact that the Turks came into Europe from Central Asia and are in some way related to the Tatars and Mongols in the East, and probably to the Magyars and Finns in the West. The Turks of Central Asia during the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries seem to have possessed qualities which characterize Turks of the period we are studying, and even mark the Turk of the present day. Monsieur Léon Cahun, in his monograph on the Turks and the Mongols, has made a careful study of these early Turks, a portion of which I will briefly summarize here. The dominating quality of the Turks of Central Asia was their love of war. According to a Persian verse: “They came and pillaged and burned and killed and charged and vanished.” The one virtue required of them was obedience, the only crime was treason. Activity to them meant war: one word expressed the idea contained in our two words to run and to kill with the sword. The ideal death was in war; as their proverb ran, “Man is born in the house but dies in the field.” In their earliest cults the worship of steel and the sword are prominent. Their second marked characteristic was their hierarchical spirit, and their strong feeling for discipline. Insubordination and conspiracy they always punished by death. Their ideal government is illustrated by the inscription on a funeral stone recently found in Mongolia. It was erected in 733 A. D. by a Turkish prince to his brother Kul Khan, the substance being as follows: “I and my brother Kul Khan Tikine together have agreed that the name and renown acquired by the Turkish people through our father and uncle shall not be blotted out. For the sake of the Turkish people I have not slept by night nor rested by day.... I have given garments to the naked, I have enriched the poor, I have made the few numerous, I have honored the virtuous.... By the aid of Heaven, as I have gained much, the Turkish people also have gained much.”
