was shining; and he seemed to hear in the murmur of the waves a call to follow where the radiant path across the waters pointed. Then, says the legend, his resolution was taken to bind the two continents together by the might of the Ottomans; and it was confirmed by the old warriors, whom his father had given him as counsellors in the government of his province. That same night two of them-Adsché-beg and Ghazi Fazil— rowed across the strait in a shallop, and brought back with them a Greek prisoner, who told them that the fort of Tzympe, a short distance from Gallipoli, was left without a garrison. Soleiman cut ox-hides into strips, and with them bound together trunks of trees into two rafts; thirty-nine of his bravest companions, and himself the fortieth-the legend keeps the favourite number, like the forty companions of Othman, and the forty robbers. of the Arabian tale--trusted themselves on the rafts, and on the following night were ferried across the Hellespont. Among them were the great Ottoman heroes of the time, with the renegade Greek chief of Brusa, Evrenos, the future conqueror of Greece and Macedonia, who was to grow grey as the most renowned among the captains of Amurath and Bajazet. The defenders of Tzympe were abroad in the fields, gathering in their harvest beneath the moonlight: a dung heap had been left, raised against the rampart, and over it the Ottomans mounted. They were followed next day by a large body in barks, and before three days were over 3,000 Turks had crossed to Tzympe, and held it fast. This crossing of the Hellespont is fixed by the Ottoman historians in the year 1356.

Cantacuzene was at the very moment asking the help of Orchan against the rival Greek Emperor. Orchan sent Soleiman himself; he beat back the Servian and Bulgarian allies of Palæologus, and then swept the valley of the Hebrus on his own account. But within a few months, a fearful catastrophe of nature threw open still wider to the Ottomans the gates of the Greek empire. While Cantacuzene and Orchan were negotiating about the restitution of Tzympe, an earthquake laid in ruins the cities of the Chersonese, and shattered their ramparts. It was winter; torrents of rain were followed by snow and piercing frosts; and in the midst of desolation and death from the fury and bitterness of the elements, the Ottoman robbers, like evening wolves,' came rushing in through the riven walls, to plunder, and now to occupy, the ruined cities. In this way they seized Gallipoli, while their chiefs were treating about the ransom of Tzympe.

It would have been surprising, if anything but force could have wrung back from the wily Ottoman a prize of which he knew so well the value. But his answer to the remonstrances

of his father-in-law and ally Cantacuzene, is characteristic of the grave and ironical perfidy, which soon became one of the distinguishing marks of his family and race. Cantacuzene, he said, had no right to demand back Gallipoli, and the neighbouring towns of the Chersonese, for it was not the force of arms which had given them to the Ottomans, but the earthquake.' Cantacuzene, according to some historians, was unable to pay the ransom which the Turk demanded. But it is plain that no ransom would have paid the price of that secure lodgement in Europe, which the opportunity of the moment had given him, and which was obviously the next step, whenever it could be taken, in the manifest policy of Orchan's house.

The operations of modern war have but lately reminded us of the importance of Gallipoli as a military position, where the safety of Constantinople is at stake. Its importance in the times of Orchan might have been less, if the maritime superiority of the Greeks, which at this period seems clear over the light Turkish barks, had been turned to account by resolute and able leaders. But in the hands that ruled Byzantium, it was useless. Fifty years before, the Catalan Grand Company had seized on Gallipoli, and from this commanding stronghold, joined to the land only by a narrow isthmus, and open to the sea, had sallied forth at will, to ravage the Greek provinces, to help or to overthrow an Emperor, and to insult the Imperial City at its gates. The system and the success of the Catalans, in this as in other instances, were obviously not lost on the Ottomans, who possessed their valour and their internal discipline, with far more of settled and formidable purpose. At Gallipoli, they held a post impregnable to the Greeks, which at once secured the ferry between Europe and Asia, and gave them the mastery of the approaches to the harbour of Constantinople. The same system of waiting and watching at the gates, which had given Brusa, Nicæa, and Nicomedia into their hands, was now applied on a larger scale to the reduction of the capital of the Empire.

In Gallipoli, Soleiman settled a colony of Asiatics,-Turks and Arabs, and divided the lands of the Chersonese among the warriors who had been, according to the Turkish legend, the companions of his nocturnal voyage across the Hellespont. Many of them left their names to the places where they resided, and the tombs of some of these heroes of Islam make Gallipoli a venerable spot. But it is still more sacred in the eyes of Ottomans, as possessing the tomb of Soleiman himself. He died, shortly after leading his people into Europe, not in the battle-field, nor from disease, but because his horse stumbled, while he was flying his hawks in a field near Bulair. le was buried where he fell, by a mosque which he had

built, within view of the sea. His grave marks the northern entrance of the Hellespont, as that of Protesilaus does the southern. For a hundred years,' says Von Hammer, he was the only Ottoman prince who lay buried in European earth; and his tomb continually invited the races of Asia to perform their pilgrimage to it with the sword of conquest. Of all the hero-tombs which have been hitherto mentioned in connexion with Ottoman history, there is none more renowned, or more visited, than that of the second Vizier of the empire, the 'fortunate Crosser of the Hellespont, who laid the foundation of the Ottoman power in Europe.' The atmosphere of legend still environed his memory in death. Ottoman story-tellers related to enthusiastic hearers, and Ottoman historians gravely repeat the tale, how when a mighty Christian armament landed near the holy tomb at Bulair, the hero Soleiman reappeared, leading a host of heavenly warriors, radiant with light and mounted on white horses, to the aid of his hard-pressed countrymen, and utterly destroyed the invaders. But the learned and impartial German, who has collected the Ottoman records, is at the pains to inform us, that the armament, the battle, and the victory, are irreconcilable with the more authentic facts of history.

Orchan survived his son Soleiman scarcely a year: he died in the year 1359. With Orchan and Soleiman, the lawgiver. and the champion, seems to end the age of the heroes in the Ottoman annals: with the conquests of Amurath, these annals enter into the domain of European history.

Then it was known why Orchan had held back so long. When his son Amurath took up his father's work, it was seen at once, in terrible clearness, what a change had come over the Ottoman invaders. In that significant and eventful pause in their advance, the rude freebooters, who prowled in conscious and patient helplessness round the impregnable ramparts of Nice and Brusa, content if, after ten years of untired watching at their gates, they might surprise or weary out their prey, had become transformed into self-reliant and ready soldiers, able for all the works of victorious warfare, for swift, and continued, and enduring conquest. With Amurath begins, rapid and sudden, the irresistible outburst of Turkish power. Their roving bands, indeed, had long known well the routes in neighbouring Europe; they were familiar with the towns and cities of Thrace and Macedonia, under whose walls they had often swept in insulting security. They had watered their horses in the Strymon and the Axius, in the Morava and the Danube; but they had come and gone. But when, in the first year of Amurath, their squadrons issued from the fastness of the Chersonese, along the

narrow isthmus of Bulair, and through the towns which Soleiman had already occupied at its outlets and approaches, they entered to remain; they were come this time to divide and take possession. All the harassing forays of their predecessors are forgotten, compared with this great and determined advance, which in less than thirty years, for the second time in history, established an Asiatic power in Europe; and which made the Greek emperor a vassal to a Mahometan chieftain, for all that was left to him of his renowned empire, the city and outskirts of Constantinople.

The intrigues of the rival Turks of Karaman detained Amurath for a moment in Asia; but the rebels of Galatia were soon put down, and the important castle and city of Angora, reputed by Ottoman writers one of the strongest in the line of Turkish fortresses from Buda to Van, was secured, to guard the eastern limits of the Ottomans. Then he at once crossed into Thrace, where his brother's grave seemed the call to conquest and its pledge. There was no delay in seizing the towns that remained untaken, in the vicinity and on the approaches of the Chersonese. From them he marched boldly into the heart of what had been the Greek empire. Amurath threw himself on the great military road which joins Constantinople to the Upper Danube, and so to the countries of the west: the towns upon its line were successively and swiftly occupied; while another body, under the veteran renegade Evrenos, and another of Orchan's old captains, pushed up the valley of the Hebrus. Didymotichon, the modern Demotica, the future prison of Charles XII., was taken; and Amurath, pleased with its position, and with the capture of a favourite residence of some of the Byzantine emperors, thought it worthy of being selected for the site of his first European palace. But a grander capital than Demotica was within his grasp. The Ottoman powers by the Hebrus, and the great north road, were converging on Adrianople. Hadji Ilbeki, the conqueror of Demotica, had ridden that year up to the walls of that great city, and boldly maintained the possibility of its capture. The thought of the greatness of the prize seeins to have made even Amurath hesitate; but the council of war was held, and it was resolved to venture. The Greek governor of Adrianople risked and lost a battle outside the gates of the city, the first and last which the Greeks dared with Amurath. The Greeks fled, and Adrianople surrendered. In Amurath's first campaign in Europe, before he had been two years on the throne, the rival capital to Constantinople, lying opposite its very gates, and barring the approaches from western Christendom, came without resistance into his hands.

From this time, till Amurath's last field, no check stopped him in his steady progress. Along the great north-western road, the flame leapt from point to point, along its stations and towns, from Adrianople to Philippopolis, from Philippopolis over the passes of Hamus to Sofia, from Sofia to Naissus, on the edge of the Servian kingdom, and within a few marches of Belgrade. Westward, along the old Egnatian way, Evrenos pushed onwards, and prepared the way to Greece: he halted only after he had crossed the Axius, at the Macedonian town of Vardar; the castles and strongholds, which had not yielded to him on his first passage, were one by one mastered afterwards, and a line of posts in the mountain passes and on the coast secured; Serres, and the fruitful valley of the Upper Strymon, on one side, and the great city of Thessalonica on the other, at last, after several years, completed the Turkish conquests over the southern shore of Thrace. Nor were the Turkish invaders come this time merely to conquer. At the furthest points of their progress, they at once began to build and to endow, as the permanent occupants of the soil, not only for themselves, but for their posterity. At Vardar, Evrenos was the founder of richly endowed caravanserais and public kitchens for the poor; at Philippopolis, Lalashahin left his memorial, in a noble bridge of stone two bow-shots in length, and wide enough for the passage of two carriages abreast; and gave a large number of slaves, for whose sustenance he provided, to keep it in repair. The towns on each side of the great Adrianople road were captured; and thus the circle of Turkish occupation round Constantinople was completed and drawn closer, and the Emperors were isolated, at least by land, from their ancient realm. In due time, Hadji Ilbeki pushed up the valley of the Tundscha, which comes down from the Balkan to join the Hebrus at Adrianople. The towns on the pleasant southern slopes of the mountains, Iamboli and Aidos, and Sizeboli on the sea, were taken. Then the great dividing range was crossed. The Ottomans threaded from the south the defiles, which led to the plains of Bulgaria and the banks of the Danube. Then first, names are heard of, which have been heard so often, and with so much interest, since; then first we hear of the mountainnest of Schumla, which has so often sheltered the Ottoman armies; and at the end of Amurath's reign, we hear of the Ottomans round the towns of the Lower Danube, from Nicopolis and Rustschuk to Hirsova, and of the first siege, recorded by_history, of Silistria.

It was not with Greeks that the Ottomans disputed for the

P. 30.

1 Yenidjé Vardar, near the old Pella. See a sketch of it, in Lear's Albania,