The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2 by Horace G. Hutchinson

I have now tried to tell you the story -- up to the year 1500 and the / beginning of that century which was to see the new birth of learning / and the reformation in the Church -- of the way in which most of the / countries of Europe settled down nearly into the shape in which we / see them now, or see them in maps made before the Great War. There / remains one corner of the picture, the south-eastern corner, which we / still have to look at; and there we find that a people entirely / strange to Europe entered into possession during the fifteenth / century. That people were the Ottoman Turks who had succeeded to the / rule of the Mahommedan world, which they had wrested from their own / kinsmen the Seljuk Turks.

The story of this branch of the Turkish nation is the common story of / a people coming West by reason of pressure of other tribes from the / East. Mongols, from the borders of China, seem to have been the / oppressors, from the East, of the Ottomans.