acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

348 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
by a fighting race inferior to none in Asia Minor.
But Lesser Armenia, unhappily, was a little State
thrust between hostile greater ones. It was nearly
always at war. It had to fight Byzantines, Arabs,
Seljuks, Turks, and the Sultans of Egypt, and ever
sided with Crusaders. Since the times of the great
Armenian King Tigranes, the race has never exhibited
such warlike capacity as it did in the little kingdom
in the south founded by Armenian adventurers. Had
the race as a whole possessed any capacity for union,
here was the opportunity to have secured a great
and permanent Armenian kingdom from the Mediterranean
to the Black Sea, and eastward and westward
as far as the merits of the State deserved ; for at
Sivas, midway between the seas, an immigrant Armenian
population had already established itself
firmly. But the instinct for unity was absent, or, to
speak more strictly, was so overlaid and smothered by
jealousies and internal quarrels that racial unity and
progress became impossible even within the narrow
limits of Lesser Armenia. And so history records
that the last Armenian king died in Paris in 1393,
twenty years after his kingdom had fallen to the
Egyptians.
Yet as a race Armenians have many virtues. They
possess military qualities of a higher order altogether
than generally supposed. They are an industrious
people, with great aptitude and skill as artisans, an
average of intelligence sufficient for anything, and a
genius like few for money-making and business aflPairs.
Soon after the Osmanlis took Constantinople, they
found themselves everlastingly outwitted by the
Greeks whom they had conquered. It became the
custom, therefore, for each wealthy Osmanli to entrust
his affairs to an Armenian steward ; and then,
and since, the Armenian has generally proved himself
capable of holding his own and more against the
subtle and overreaching Greek. But for all their
abilities the quarrelsome disruptive nature of the
Armenian people has prevented all national advance ;