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 58 DESTEUCTION OE THE GEEEK EMPIEE who followed during a century, had been for the most part wandering shepherds, and the nomadic instinct still con- tinued, and still continues, in the race, notwithstanding that there has been a considerable admixture of other races. The tent of their leader was larger than that of his followers, and its entrance came, in the course of time, to be known as The Lofty Gate, or The Sublime Porte. The shepherd warriors, who were destined to destroy the empire of the New Rome, had few of the desires, habits, or aspirations of civilisation. Commerce, except in its simplest form of barter, was and has always been almost unknown to them. Among the Turks of a later period the disinclination to change the traditional habits of the race is to some extent due to the indifference or contempt felt for trading com- munities by a race of conquerors ; though, perhaps, inca- pacity to hold their own as traders against the peoples they subdued has had a larger share in producing their aversion to commerce. The furniture of their huts is even yet only such as would have been found in their felt tents. They have no desire to possess the ordinary utensils which Europeans of every race consider either as the necessaries of life or as adding largely to its comfort. They have never taken kindly to agriculture. Surrounded by fertile land, the Turk will till only enough to supply him with the barest necessaries of life, and the traveller in the interior of Asia Minor is to-day, as he has been for centuries, astonished to see that Turkish peasants who, as the owners of large tracts of fertile land, capable of producing almost any fruits or vegetables, and of supporting even a large number of cattle, may be accounted wealthy, are yet content to live upon fare and amid surroundings at which the ordinary European peasant, and even the Turks' own neighbours of different races, would express their dissatisfaction. 1 1 That this aversion to agriculture, and contentment amid poverty, of the Turkish peasant are not merely the result of Mahometanism, is evidenced by the fact that the Pomaks — that is, the Bulgarians who have accepted Islam — and the Mahometans of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have emigrated into Asia Minor since the Busso-Turkish War of 1878, are noticed everywhere to be