Change of habits and promising no permanent stability

It was a sudden Tartar descent, accompanied with no national change of habits, and promising no permanent stability. Nor would they have remained, I suppose, as they did remain, were it not that they have been protected, as they were originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have made use of them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to this day, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, even as far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its maritime cities and ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand years ago, except that they have taken up the loose profession of Mahometanism, and have given up some of the extreme peculiarities of their Tartar state, such as their attachment to horseflesh and mares’ milk. These are the Turcomans.

The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concerned, he tells us that “they are tall and robust, with square flat faces, as well as the western; only they are more swarthy and have a greater resemblance to the Tartars. Some of them have betaken themselves to husbandry.

Profess Mahomedanism

They are all Mohammedans; they are very’ turbulent, very brave, and good horsemen”. And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that of fire-arms.

This account is drawn up from writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Precisely the same report of their habits is made by Dr. Chandler in his travels in Asia Minor in the middle of the last century; he fell in with them in his journey between Smyrna and Ephesus Jugoslavia. “We were told here”, he says, “ that the road farther on was beset with Turcomans, a people supposed to be descended from the Nomades Scythse or Shepherd Scythians; busied, as of old, in breeding and nurturing cattle, and leading, as then, an unsettled life; not forming villages and towns with stable habitations, but flitting from place to place, as the season and their convenience directs; choosing their stations and overspreading without control the vast neglected pastures of this desert empire. …

We set out, and . . . soon after came to a wild country covered with thickets, and with the black booths of the Turcomans, spreading on every side, innumerable, with flocks and herds and horses and poultry feeding round them”.