its possession by the Greeks and their Cæsars he might have 'overlooked-they were the natural tenants of the land, and its 'first masters-but no Latin would he allow to intercept his claim. The Venetians must go back to their own land: otherwise he 'would be there himself. The embassies of the Republic were sent in vain; Have you authority to restore me my Salonik?"1 was his first and only question. The Venetians kept their ground for a few years; but at length Amurath appeared with overpowering numbers before its walls. The Italian defenders were few; the Greek inhabitants disaffected; an earthquake spread discouragement and alarm. Amurath, while his arrows swept the ramparts and his miners dug beneath them, was liberal in his promises of pardon and protection; but when the Venetians still held out, he gave the spoil and the people of Thessalonica to his army, and only reserved to himself the ground on which it stood, and the bare walls of its buildings. Thessalonica was stormed and depopulated; the last of the many terrible calamities which had fallen on that great city-one, like Thebes, of the unlucky cities of history; the first great siege in which the Ottomans, soon to become famous in this trying operation of war, assailed with success obstinately defended walls, and proved the fury and power of their storming columns.

2

The first great siege in which they had succeeded, but not the first which they had attempted. Amurath had, early in his reign, replied to the slippery and ill-judged policy of Manuel, and to his insincere excuses when it failed, by saying that he would bring an answer in person to the gates of Constantinople. He came, through ravaged fields and wasted villages, where his soldiers had torn up the very roots of the vines and fruittrees, and invested the land front of the city, from the sea to the head of the Golden Horn. The attack was the prelude and rehearsal of the great siege, thirty-one years later: the points assailed were the same; the siege-works and engines of the Ottomans were on a greater scale than any yet recorded in their history. They raised a continuous mound with fire-proof towers, facing, at a bow-shot's distance, and commanding with its missiles, the rampart of the city; they had all the ancient machinery of a siege; but they had not yet the new artillery of Mahomet the Conqueror. Amurath had promised Constantinople and its treasures to the conquering Moslems. Besides the soldiers of his host, there were collected round the Christian capital a rabble from all parts, lusting for plunder and blood,-armed ruffians to secure, and monied ruffians to purchase, the spoil,-such a crew as always collects in the East, when a rich and populous city is

1 Daru, xiii. No. 7.

2 Von Hammer, i. 336.

1

about to fall. But foremost in ferocity and the madness of savage expectation and fanatic passion,-crying, howling, whirling, raging like wild beasts,-was an unclean rout of five hundred dervishes, who claimed the convents as their share of the prey, and kept at its height the excitement of the army. Their leader was the great Scheikh, Mahomet of Bochara, the EmirSultan, the chief among the princes' of Moslem holiness, the brother-in-law of Bajazet; who had girded Amurath with Othman's sword, and who had once before, it was believed, helped the true heir of Othman by his prayers. At the river of Ulubad, when Amurath and his rival Mustafa stood with their armies on the opposite banks, and the fortune of the empire hung in doubt between them, the great Sheikh of Bochara had prayed three days continuously for Amurath: at the end of the three days, the loud voice of Michalogli stirred their old allegiance in the hearts of Mustafa's Akindjis, and the rest of the usurper's host melted away from him. Now, the great Scheikh rode into the Ottoman camp amid a crowd of dervishes, who prostrated themselves before him, and kissed his hands, his feet, and the bridle of his mule. He shut himself up in his tent, to ascertain the fortunate day and hour when Constantinople was to fall. When he came forth, he announced that on Monday, the 24th August, one hour after midday, he would lead the Ottomans into their destined capital. A dervish with a wooden sabre had preceded the early Ottomans in their attacks on the Bithynian cities; so now, at the appointed moment, the great Scheikh mounted his horse at the head of the army; a huge buckler was borne before him; and surrounded by the crowd of yelling and frantic dervishes, he drew his scymitar and shouted forth the signal for assault. But Constantinople resisted stoutly and successfully. Manuel, the emperor, lay dying in his palace; but his son, John Palæologus, was at the post of danger-thefated gate of S. Romanus. This time, the Cæsar did not stand there in vain. Women armed themselves with reaping-hooks for swords, and the ends of barrels for bucklers; monks and priests were mingled with the fighting men, and shouted the sacred names of the Gospel in answer to the war-cry of the dervishes. The fury of the assailants broke in vain against the ramparts; it raged till the setting of the sun; then, says the Greek historian of the siege, it suddenly passed into a panic terror; the Holy Virgin had appeared on the battlements, in awful majesty, to the very eyes of the great Scheikh himself; and the whole Turkish host burned their engines and broke up from Constantinople. The Turkish power had not yet regained

1 Cf. Gordon and Tricupi, on the siege of Tripolitza by the Greeks in 1821,

its strength, for the great effort: an outburst of civil war, and the appearance of a new pretender at Nicæa, recalled Amurath from his premature enterprise; and he never after attempted to renew it.

And indeed till the very end of Amurath's long and fortunate reign, that power, though mounting year by year to its old supremacy, was not safe from trials which jeoparded its existence. The last and decisive one,-the issue of which might have overthrown the Ottomans more hopelessly than they were overthrown at Angora, but which did in fact give the empire of the East finally into their hands,—was their great conflict with Hungary. During the earlier part of Amurath's reign, a desultory but bloody strife had raged on the border, in Transylvania and the Bannat: success had alternated, but Sigismund was an unlucky leader, and the wounds which the Turks inflicted were the deepest. Hungary was beginning to feel their system of preliminary ravage, by which each country, as they drew near its limits, was prepared for the condition of a tributary province, till they were able to occupy and parcel it out among themselves, into sanjaks and timars, the military fiefs by which the empire was maintained and carried forward. The cry of terror, The wolves, the wolves!' continually gave notice to the Hungarian villages that the dreaded turbans had been descried in their neighbourhood; and Hungarian boys and maidens, swept from under the walls of Kronstadt and Hermanstadt, were driven in such troops through the passes of the Carpathians, that a slave was bartered against a pair of boots in the Ottoman camp. There were intervals of truce. The sessions and intrigues of the council of Basle were relieved, by the appearance of the envoys and magnificent presents of the Emperor of the Turks to the Emperor of the Romans: the embassy came to congratulate Sigismund on his election to the empire, and to offer a lasting peace; it was received by him with solemn pomp and honour in the cathedral, and the presents and the peace accepted. Yet Sigismund was at the same time corresponding with the Karamanian disturbers of the Ottoman power in Asia; and Amurath's pashas were soon leading the Christians of Servia and Wallachia, to join in a foray on their brethren of Transylvania. But towards the end of

The historian Aschik-pachasade thus relates his own experience :- Cette année (1438) le Sultan Mourad dévasta l'Hongrie. Le butin fut immense. Moimême, le pauvre, j'achetai pour 100 aspres un beau garçon, car moi, le pauvre, je fis partie de l'armée. Un jour, je me présentai chez le Sultan, et il me fit don de plusieurs prisonniers; alors je lui dis: Seigneur et Sultan, il faudrait avoir des chevaux et de l'argent pour emmener ces prisonniers. Sur le champ il me fit donner deux chevaux et 5,000 aspres. J'arrivai donc à Adrinople avec quatre chevaux et neuf prisonniers. Je vendis ceux-ci pour 300 et 200 aspres la tête.'-Von Hammer; (trad. de Hellert,) notes: ii. 492.

a

Amurath's life, the raids and inroads on the Hungarian border gradually swelled into a serious and formidable war, which for once threatened the Turkish power with the combined and determined hostility of Christendom. John Hunyady, who is said to have owed his existence to a furtive amour of King Sigismund with a fair Hungarian lady, when he was seeking refuge from Bajazet's horsemen,'-a chief who in the irregular warfare of his country had no equal, except his contemporary Scanderbeg, fiery, audacious, crafty, and pitiless as the Ottomans whom he fought, and as open as they to corrupt and selfish influences, had made his name, in two or three years, a word of fear to those, before whom Europe trembled. The terrible and bloody Yanko,' as the Turks called him, had slain one of Amurath's veteran chiefs, and captured a second; his soldiers had slaughtered his captives before him while he sat at meat, and he had sent to Buda à chariot, heaped with the choicest spoils, and surmounted with the heads of the fallen pashas. The warlike chiefs of Servia and Wallachia, who had so often fought for Amurath, went over to the winning Christian side; and a legate from Rome appeared in Hungary to fan the rising enthusiasm, and urge on the fierce valour of Hunyady. The rival councils of Basle and Florence, exhausted but not reconciled, had just ended their weary and fruitless sessions; and the crafty Venetian patrician, who sat in S. Peter's chair at Rome, seized the moment to turn men's thoughts from the thorny questions of internal reformation to a war with the Turks. Giuliano Cesarini, the cardinal who had so ably led the pertinacious and disrespectful fathers of Basle in their struggle with the Pope, and had already shown his zeal, if not his aptitude, in the conduct of a religious war against the Bohemian heretics, was despatched to employ his eloquence, his subtlety, and his turbulence, in rousing the wild nations of the Danube and the Vistula, in the name of the Holy Father. He succeeded. A little while before, Amurath could interfere in the internal affairs of Poland, and prescribe the conditions on which he was willing to support young Ladislaus on its throne. Now Ladislaus, king at once of Poland and Hungary, was the head of a confederacy, which included all the neighbouring Christian nations, Hungary, Poland, Servia, Wallachia, together with the Pope, the great maritime powers, Genoa, Venice, and Philip of Burgundy, and lastly, the Cæsar of Constantinople. A fleet of Italian and Flemish galleys, with the Pope's nephew, the Cardinal of Venice, as their admiral-such a post might not be wholly unsuitable to one who, though a churchman, was a Venetian nobleman-assembled at the Helles

1 Engel, in Von Hammer, i. 188. It is not the common account.

pont. John Hunyady, followed by the king and Cardinal Julian, burst like a tempest across the Danube. He beat the Turks out of Servia. He swept them before him, along that famous northwestern road, the old pathway of armies on their march to decide the fate of nations, but which, for many years, had only seen them moving with unbroken uniformity against the west, and never in the reverse direction. Amurath stood under the walls of Nissa, only to be utterly overthrown. The Turks were pushed back to the mountain ramparts of the Balkan; half the great road to Constantinople, with its stations, was in the hands of the Christian army, and winter found them preparing to scale, amid snow and storm, the guarded defiles of the Balkan. Hunyady first tried the pass of Trajan's Gate, through which the direct road is carried; but he found it barricaded with rocks and paved with ice he tried the next one to the east, the pass of Isladi, and on Christmas-eve, amid rolling rocks and descending avalanches, fought his way to the southern crests of Hamus, and opened the road through Trajan's Gate to the army of Ladislaus. Once more the Turks were routed beyond the Balkan; and Hunyady, after slaughtering a hundred and seventy of his prisoners, led back a brother-in-law of Amurath, and the Beglerbeg, or military chief of Roumelia, to grace his triumph at Buda.

For the first time in their history, a sultan of the Ottomans sued for peace. It was not the time for peace: for Albania was rising against him under Scanderbeg; the Christian fleet was in the Hellespont; the Karamanian Turks were in league with the Christian powers, which had driven him across the Balkan; and while he was losing Europe, he was threatened in Asia. It was not the time for peace: but Ladislaus waited long for promised succours to renew the war, and they did not come; George Brankovich, lord of Servia, wanted to get his children out of the hands of Amurath, and to bargain with him for the future remission of all tribute and vassalage; it is alleged, that 50,000 Turkish ducats won the influence of the great Hunyady to the side of peace.1 In spite of the earnest efforts of Cardinal Julian, peace was granted. The spring of 1444 was wasted, and in the summer, a truce of ten years, by which Amurath surrendered the tributes of Servia and Wallachia, but retained possession of Bulgaria, was solemnly agreed to. Copies of the treaty were made in both languages. Amurath swore to it on the Koran, and the Turks demanded that King Ladislaus should swear on the Sacred Host. This was refused; but he gave his oath to observe it on the Gospels.

! Contin.de Fleury, an. 1444. No. 2.