The Eastern Empire--The marriage of Orkhan and Theodora--Solyman
crosses the Hellespont--The death of Solyman--Amurath I conquers
Adrianople--A crusade against Amurath--Amurath conquers
Nish--Revolt of the Slavs--Western Europe at this period--Successes
of the Slavs--The battle of Kossova--Sultan Bajazet--Another
crusade against Turkey--Bajazet defeats the crusaders--The
ascendancy of Tamerlane--Bajazet is defeated by Tamerlane--Death of
Bajazet and Tamerlane--Civil war--Musa marches against
Servia--Mohammed I succeeds Musa--Amurath II--Pretender
Mustapha--Attack on Constantinople--Hunyadi Janos--Peace of
Szeggedin--The death of Ala-ed-din--Battle of Varna--Mohammed, son
of Amurath--Scanderbeg--Mohammed II--Conquest of Constantinople.
That Turkish rule has lasted as long as it has, has not died down like
the power of other Asiatic races who swept over Europe, held parts of it
for a while, and were then forced out again, is probably due to the fact
that earlier Ottoman Sultans took no step in advance before
consolidating their power behind them. They allowed time for each
conquered province, each subject race to blend into the general
nationality of their Empire by the assimilation of military and civil
institutions. Asia Minor became a solid Empire under Turkish rule, and
allowed the Sultan to look further afield for fresh conquests. He was
naturally drawn towards the West, where lay the heart of the Empire out
of which successive sons of Othman had carved their possessions. Again,
the troubled state of the Greek Empire, frequently rent by civil war,
offered the strong young Turk rulers an opportunity for interfering much
in the same way that Great Powers of to-day concern themselves with the
doings of less well-ordered states. The Eastern Empire was indeed in a
parlous state by the time Orkhan had brought his country from a chaos
of conquered provinces to a heterogeneous Empire, and invited
interference. The Emperor John V (Cantacuzene) realized the power of the
Turks, and sought to strengthen his position by an alliance with the
Sultan, so a marriage was arranged and celebrated with great pomp and
splendour between Orkhan, a widower of some sixty years, and the
Emperor's young daughter Theodora. This should have led to a good
understanding between the monarchs, but it did not, as the East was
pressing relentlessly on the enfeebled West, and temporary expedients
could not avert the coming catastrophe. All about Constantinople were
foreign settlements; Venetians and Genoese fought for mastery in the
narrow waters of the Bosphorus, and both united to wring concessions out
of the Eastern Empire. The rivalry of these two Republics gave Orkhan a
reason for interfering, and he decided to ally himself with the Genoese,
for he hated the Venetians, who had insulted him by declining to receive
his envoys to the Doges. But the Venetians were allied to Emperor John
Cantacuzene, in his struggles against another son-in-law, John
Palæologus.
Solyman, son of Orkhan, crossed the Hellespont by night with a handful
of followers and took Koiridocastron, or "Hog's Castle." No attempt was
made to regain this castle from the Turk, as the Emperor was fully
occupied with the armies of his rebel son-in-law, Palæologus, and with
the Genoese fleet. The Greek Emperor, finding himself in such sore
straits, without making any attempt to dislodge Solyman from the castle,
without even a remonstrance, implored Orkhan to send him assistance.
This Orkhan readily granted; he reinforced Solyman's small party with an
army of ten thousand men. This force defeated Palæologus and his
Slavonic army, but did not return to Asia; the Turk had landed in
Europe, and showed a determination to stay. Cantacuzene offered Solyman
ten thousand ducats to evacuate the "Hog's Castle," and the Sultan's son
agreed, but before the sum had been paid an earthquake visited Thrace
and threw down the walls of its strongholds. The Greeks saw in this a
sign of Heaven's ill-will, the Turks believed it to be a manifestation
of the will of Allah in their favour and a plain command to proceed with
the conquests in Europe. So while the Greeks were still trembling two of
Solyman's captains, Adjé Bey and Ghasi Fasil, occupied Gallipoli,
marched in over its defences shattered by the earthquake. Soon after
these events Solyman, when engaged in his favourite sport of falconry,
was thrown from his horse and killed. He was buried on the spot where he
had landed with his followers, and near him are buried his two captains,
to whose efforts the Turks owe their first firm foothold in Europe, when
Gallipoli, the key of the Dardanelles, the southern passage to
Constantinople, fell into their hands.
From the reign of Orkhan dates the first decisive influence of Turkey
over Eastern Europe. Orkhan and his brother, Ala-ed-din, forged the
weapons which were to bring the Eastern Empire to its fall and set up
another Empire in its place, an Empire which spread far afield over
Europe, and trod Western civilization under foot from the Black Sea to
the walls of Vienna. To-day that Empire's European possessions have
dwindled down to a small strip of land beyond the City's old walls and
the lines of Chatalja.
Another strong ruler followed Orkhan, Amurath I, his youngest son, in
1359. There were troubles in Asia to keep the new Sultan engaged, the
Prince of Carmania stirred up several Turkish Emirs to rise against the
House of Othman. This matter settled, Amurath bent his mind to further
conquests in Europe, and by 1361 he had captured the great city
Adrianople and made it his capital. Adrianople, the City of Hadrian,
scene of many historic events. Here Emperor Valens met the Goths as they
were streaming down the Valley of the Maritza, and tried to stem the
tide of barbarian invasion; but the Goths broke the trained legions of
Rome, who for years after could not be brought to face that foe again,
and Valens, the Emperor, was numbered among the slain. A few centuries
later Bulgarians and Greeks met here, and again an Emperor fell; whereas
the Goths contented themselves with slaying Valens in battle, the
conquering Bulgarians made a drinking-vessel of the skull of Nicephorus
I, vanquished at Adrianople.
To-day Bulgarians are investing a Turkish force in Adrianople, the first
European capital of the Sultans, where Amurath I lies buried. From here
Amurath prepared the way for the conquest of Constantinople; from here
he set out on those expeditions which brought one Christian nation after
another under the Turkish yoke. Here, too, the Turks first met their
present enemy, the Slav. Hitherto their opponents had been only the
enfeebled Greeks, and these had few, if any, friends in Europe. As
schismatics, the Pope was not concerned with their fate, but when
Amurath's campaigns extended westward, and threatened Catholic
countries, Pope Urban V became alarmed, and called upon Western Europe
for a new crusade. The King of Hungary, the Princes of Servia, Bosnia,
Wallachia, formed a league intended to drive the Osmanli out of Europe;
they collected their armed forces and marched towards the East, crossing
the Maritza about two days' march from Constantinople. There was no
force of equal strength available to Lalashahin, then in command of the
Ottoman forces in Europe, for the allied Princes disposed of some
twenty thousand men, and the Turkish army was scattered about in various
garrisons. The Christians, assured of victory, neglected all military
precautions, were caught unprepared during a night of revelry, "as wild
beasts in their lair. They were driven before us as flames before the
wind, till, plunging into the Maritza they perished in its waters," says
Seadeddin, the Oriental historian. This was the first encounter between
Turks and Slavs; there were many others, mostly with the same result,
and resulting in centuries of suffering for the vanquished. But the
times have changed; the Slav, no longer careless, undisciplined,
ill-prepared, has met the Turk again by the banks of the Maritza, and
before the West--prepared, purposeful, and strong--the East has failed
as it always has done, as it ever will do.
It was Amurath I who thus began to place the yoke on the Slav nations of
Eastern Europe; his troops captured Nissa (Nish), the strong city of the
Servians, and forced their Prince to sue for peace; it was granted on
the condition that he supplied a tribute of a thousand pounds of silver
and a thousand horse-soldiers every year. Sisvan, King of the
Bulgarians, had also taken part in the crusade of Western Christianity
against Amurath, and he was compelled to beg for mercy, which was shown
him at the price of his daughter's marriage to the conqueror.
But the Slavs, Servians, Bulgarians, and Bosniaks were not disposed to
give in calmly to the methods of colonization adopted by Turkey. Most of
Thrace was added to the European possessions, and all Roumelia, and
there seemed to be no limit to the Osmanli's greed of territory. The
natives of conquered districts were removed to other parts of Turkey,
and Turks and Arabs sent to colonize in their stead. All this urged the
princes of the neighbouring Slav races to another mighty effort against
the Asiatic invader. Servia, remembering her past greatness, was chief
of the movement, which was joined by an Albanian people, the Skipetars,
Wallachians and Magyars from Hungary, Poles from the northern Slav
kingdom, all combined with the southern Slavs in this enterprise. But
the old crusading enthusiasm was dead, and Western Europe, which had
sent heroes such as Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard Coeur de Lion,
Frederick Barbarossa, looked on with apathy at the encroachments of the
Turk and the spread of Islam. Richard II, weak and worthless, was King
of England, the imbecile Charles VI reigned over France, and the
Germanic Empire was torn by civil wars, raging between robber knights
and the free towns of the Hansa, under the dissolute Emperor Wenzel. The
chivalry of Spain was still fully occupied with its own crusade against
the Moors, and finally there were divisions in the Papacy itself between
Clement VII and Urban VI. So no help could come to the Slav Crusaders
from the West. Still the league against Amurath was powerful, and he
realized that its subjection would tax all his energy and resources. He
made all necessary arrangements for the good government of Asia during
his absence in the field, then crossed the Hellespont to meet the enemy.
In the meantime the Bulgarians and Serbs had become over-confident,
owing to a successful battle in Bosnia; an Ottoman army moving through
that country was attacked by the Allies with great vigour, and fifteen
out of twenty thousand Turks killed. Inactivity on the part of the
Christians marked the next few months, while Amurath was pouring troops
into Bulgaria, and completing the conquest of that important member of
the league. Ali Pasha, Amurath's general, marched with an army of thirty
thousand men against Sisvan, over the passes of the Nadir Derbend, and
forced Shumla to surrender; Tirnova and Pravadi fell, and the Bulgarian
King fled to Nicopolis. Here Ali Pasha besieged him, and Sisvan begged
for peace. The terms of peace eventually agreed to by the conquering
Turk put an end to Bulgaria's existence as a political entity; it became
a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Lazar, King of the Servians, the head of the Powers leagued against
Amurath, was alarmed at the rapid strides made by the Osmanli forces,
and prepared for a resolute struggle. Amurath accepted the formal
challenge sent him by the Servian King, and marched westward towards the
frontiers of Servia and Bosnia; on the plain of Kossova he met the
Allies. After a night spent in a council of war in both camps, the
antagonists met on the plain of Kossova, the "Amselfeld," as the Germans
call it. To northward of the small stream Shinitza, which traverses the
plain, the chivalry of Servia, Bosnia, and Albania, their auxiliaries
from Poland, Hungary, and Wallachia, were drawn up in battle array on
27th August, 1389.
But the crusaders were unable to stand before the fierce onslaught of
the Osmanli, despite their reckless bravery. Slav chivalry went under in
a sea of blood, though Milosh Kabilovitch had inflicted a fatal wound on
the conqueror. The battle of the "Amselfeld" settled the fate of the
southern Slavs for many centuries.
Amurath II had died from the wound inflicted by Milosh Kabilovitch, and
his son Bajazet reigned in his stead. He pursued the war against Servia
energetically, and made that country a vassal state of the Ottomans.
King Stephen Lazarevitch, successor to King Lazar, gave the Sultan his
sister to wife, and agreed to pay as tribute a certain portion of the
produce of the silver mines in his dominions. Thus Bajazet broke down
Servia's resistance, and then turned against the other states which had
taken part in the latest crusade. Myrtché, Prince of Wallachia,
submitted, and his country became a vassal state of Turkey; Sigismund,
King of Hungary, invaded Bulgaria, but after some slight successes, was
defeated by a superior Turkish army in 1372, and forced to retreat.
While returning to his country from this campaign King Sigismund saw
fair Elizabeth Morsiney, and loved her. Their son, the great Hunyadi
Janos, avenged King Sigismund in his victorious campaigns against the
Turks.
Once again Western chivalry attempted to check the rising tide of Islam.
Sigismund, King of Hungary, felt the danger of that power pressing on
his frontiers, and succeeded in moving the sympathies of other members
of the Catholic Church. So when Pope Boniface IX, in 1394, proclaimed a
crusade against the Osmanli, many of the martial youth of France and
Burgundy, set free by the end of the one hundred years' war with
England, joined in this new crusade. Count de la Manche, three cousins
of the King of France, James of Bourbon, Henri and Philippe de Bar,
acted as commanders under Count de Nevers; besides these were other
Frankish nobles, Philippe of Artois, Comte d'Eu, and Constable of
France, Lord de Courcy, Guy de la Tremouille, Jean de Vienne, Admiral of
France, St. Pol. Montmorel, and Reginald de Roze, marched from France,
and on their way through Germany were joined by Frederic, Count of
Hohenzollern, Grand Commander of the Teutonic Order, and Grand Master
Philibert de Naillac, who came from Rhodes with a strong body of Knights
of St. John of Jerusalem. There came also Bavarian knights, under the
Elector Palatine, and the Count of Mumpelsgarde; Styria sent its
contingent under Count de Cilly. In all, some ten to twelve thousand of
the flower of Western chivalry came down the Danube, full of high pride,
and boasting that "if the sky should fall, they would uphold it on the
point of their spears." Myrtché, Prince of Wallachia, though vassal and
tributary to the Sultan, had been induced to tempt the fortunes of war
once more, and joined the hosts of the Crusaders.
Bajazet was away in Asia, but his general, Yoglan Bey, defended
Nicopolis stoutly against the Crusaders, who closely invested it, and so
gained time for his master. Swiftly and silently came Bajazet, with his
well-trained, well-disciplined army, and the Christian knights at table
on the 24th September, 1396, were suddenly informed that a large Turkish
army was bearing down upon them. The Franks flew to arms and charged
recklessly into battle; their impetuosity and want of discipline proved
their undoing, and by evening Bajazet had vanquished this last crusade
against the rising fortunes of Islam. King Sigismund escaped; most of
the prisoners taken by the Turks were massacred, and those who were
spared lived weary months in captivity at Broussa until ransomed in
1397.
Thus was the West defeated in its attempt at rescuing Eastern
Christians, and Bajazet's victorious armies moved on to new conquests;
they overran and devastated Styria and southern Hungary, marched through
the pass of Thermopylæ, where there was no Leonidas and his devoted band
to bid them halt, and under their conquering Sultan, Locris, Phocis, and
Boeotia fell to the sword of Othman, till finally the whole Peloponese
was a Turkish province.
Constantinople, the only remaining portion of the Greek Emperor, had
escaped so far, but now its fate seemed about to be sealed when another
man, as great, perhaps, as Bajazet himself, came out of Asia--Tamerlane
and his Mongolian hordes.
Timour the Tartar, Timourlenk, Tamerlane, as he is variously called, was
born near Samarkand in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, and
spent the first half of his life in struggling for ascendancy over the
petty chiefs of rival tribes until, at the age of thirty-five, he had
fought his way to undisputed pre-eminence, and was proclaimed Khan of
Zagatai by the warriors of his race.
He made Samarkand his capital, and as he proposed to conquer the whole
habitable earth from there, this ambition was sure to bring him into
conflict with the Osmanli on the western confines of his territory.
Tamerlane had been insulted by the Sultan of Egypt, so he marched from
Sivas, which he had taken from the Turks in Bajazet's absence, towards
Syria, which experienced for two years the terror and cruelty of his
arms. An interchange of letters and embassies between Bajazet and
Tamerlane, on the subject of the latter's occasional incursions into
Turkish territory, served only to aggravate the tension between the two
monarchs, till hostilities became the only way out of an impossible
situation. Tamerlane's forces outnumbered the hundred and twenty
thousand men with which Bajazet marched against the Tartar at Sivas, but
Bajazet was impatient of the warnings of his best general, who had
observed a bad spirit in the army amongst the soldiers of Tartar race
whom Tamerlane had corrupted, and decided to bring matters to a definite
conclusion. He did, but to his own undoing, for Tamerlane
out-manoeuvred him at Angora, where the opposing forces met on July
20th, 1402. The Mongol army is said to have numbered eight hundred
thousand, and Bajazet could not have had more than one hundred thousand
to put into the field, for many had died by the way. Moreover,
Tamerlane's army was in high spirits, and well found in every way,
whereas Bajazet's troops were discontented, and large numbers of Tartars
deserted from him to swell the ranks of the Mongol army, and only the
Ottoman centre, where stood the Janissaries and the Servians, made any
effective resistance to the fierce charges of the Tartar cavalry. At
nightfall, when all was lost, Bajazet attempted to escape from the
field, but his horse stumbled and fell with him, and so delivered him
into the hands of his enemy. After an ineffectual attempt to escape,
Bajazet, who had hitherto been kindly treated, was placed in fetters
every night, and he died of a broken heart only eight months after the
battle of Angora. Prince Musa was allowed to take the body of his
father, Bajazet, to Broussa for burial, by Tamerlane who did not survive
his fallen rival long. Tamerlane died two years later, at Otrar, while
on the march to China, at the age of seventy-one, thirty-six years of
which he had reigned and conquered, and shed more blood, caused more
misery, than any other human before or since.
Bajazet's misguided efforts against Tamerlane brought the Ottoman
Empire, which had been gaining strength so steadily, to the verge of
ruin, and calamity after calamity fell upon the House of Othman after
the disaster of Angora. Civil war broke out as each son of Bajazet
strove for the throne; Solyman fought against his brother Musa, and
though at first successful, spoilt the results by debauchery and the
cruelty with which he treated his troops, so they deserted to Musa, and
Solyman was killed while endeavouring to escape to Constantinople. Musa
followed in his father's footsteps, and seems to have inherited his
energy and ferocity. He thought fit to consider that the Servian Prince,
vassal of the Ottoman Empire, had assisted Solyman against him, so he
carried war in Servia, war with all the barbarity a Turkish Sultan and
Turkish troops were capable of, and then turned towards Constantinople,
for the Emperor Manuel Palæologus had been the ally of Solyman. Musa
laid siege to the City, and Manuel called to Mohammed, the youngest and
ablest son of Bajazet, for assistance, and so we find Ottoman troops
defending the Castle of Cæsar against their own brothers.
The war between the two brothers raged with varying success till the
troops of Musa, whose conduct towards them was little better than that
of Solyman, ranged themselves against him at the decisive moment when
the two brothers confronted each other on the field of battle. Musa was
wounded in a fray with Hassan, the Aga of his Janissaries, and seeing
things going against him, fled, and was found dead in a swamp near the
field of battle. The only other son of Bajazet, Issa, had disappeared
during the war between Solyman and Mohammed in Asia, so the latter
succeeded to the throne of Turkey, and was girt with the sword of
Othman.
In Mohammed I, who reigned from 1413-1421, the House of Othman put forth
one of the best sovereigns of that race. He did not win such distinction
in the field as did some of his predecessors and successors; his
conquests were over the affections of men, for he was just and merciful.
His people called him Pehlevan, Champion, for he was brave, and of great
personal strength and activity; others called him Tshelebi, which
suggests that he had all those attributes that make a gentleman; true to
his friends, a terror to his enemies the rebellious Turcomans, his
country's historian calls him, "The Noah who preserved the Ark of the
Empire, when menaced by the deluge of Tartar invasion."
Those were troubled times, but they seem peaceful compared to the days
of Mohammed I's predecessors, and by the time death overtook Mohammed I
in the eighth year of his reign, rebellions had been suppressed, order
restored, and honourable peace settled for a while in Ottoman dominions.
But it was broken soon after Amurath II, son of Mohammed I, had been
girt with the sword of Othman at Broussa; a claimant to the throne,
alleged son of Bajazet, had long been held captive by the Emperor of
Byzant, who now thought fit to set up this pretender Mustapha against
young Amurath. But the new Sultan, though only eighteen years of age,
showed promise of the military and political abilities of the great sons
of Othman from whom he was descended, and when he and Mustapha met in
battle the latter was out-manoeuvred and forced to flee to Gallipoli,
where he sought refuge in the strong fortress. Aided by Genoese, Amurath
II broke down the defences of Gallipoli, captured Mustapha, and had him
put to death. Then Amurath II turned towards Constantinople to punish
the Emperor for his unprovoked hostility to him. Constantinople was
invested, and Amurath's troops surged in successive waves against the
Walls of Theodosius. The fight was fiercest near the Gate of St.
Romanus, where a number of dervishes, headed by a renowned saint, Seid
Bakhari, formed the vanguard of a forlorn hope in a desperate attack on
25th August, 1422. Among the inducements which urged these five hundred
dervishes to dash out their souls against the City walls was one
calculated to appeal to a Mohammedan saint, marking the ethical
difference between him and the Christian variant; the many nuns in the
convents of Constantinople were assigned to these pious souls as their
share of the spoil. No doubt it was hoped that the company of those
ladies would brighten up the monastic seclusion of the dervishes in
times of peace if ever they came as intervals in the popular
diversion--war. The garrison of Constantinople was making a stout
defence, and might conceivably have held out by itself, but supernatural
intervention was evidently called for, if only for the sake of the
ladies, and the bright apparition of a virgin, robed in violet of
dazzling lustre, further encouraged the besieged, while the besiegers,
hearing of this interference with their business, decided to raise the
siege, and try again some other day. Historians, who are always ready to
discount the value of supernatural apparitions which sparkle in the sky
just in the nick of time, maintain that Amurath II was drawn from the
siege of Constantinople by trouble in Asia. He had a brother, another
Mustapha, whom the Greek Emperor had bribed to raise rebellion in Asia
Minor. The extraordinary rapidity of Amurath's movements frustrated all
young Mustapha's plans; he fled, was caught by some of the Sultan's
officers, and hanged on the nearest tree, which act, no doubt, saved the
Sultan a good deal of trouble.
Amurath returned to Europe and resumed hostilities with the Greek
Emperor, not by besieging Constantinople again, but by annexing other
towns here and there. He took several towns on the Black Sea coast which
had held to Byzant till then, captured Thessalonica from the Venetians,
and made matters easier for the campaign he was obliged to undertake
against turbulent neighbours and insubordinate vassals on the Western
marches of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Hungary, still smarting under
the defeat of their King at Nicopolis, was roused to action by the great
Hunyadi; Bosniaks and Albanians feared for their independence, and
Wallachia longed to be free; Servia, too, was troublesome, under a fiery
leader Vuk Brankoviç, and after much vacillation, these enemies of the
Osmanli contrived to drop their jealousies for a while, and to combine
against the Eastern invader. The fortunes of war went against Amurath,
and his renowned opponent, Hunyadi Janos, beat his armies at Belgrade
and Hermanstadt, and again at Vasag. The Allies pushed on triumphantly
through Servia and Bulgaria of to-day, up to the Balkan range, where
they wrested two mountain-passes, strongly defended, from the fiercely
resisting Turks. Strange to say, Hunyadi did not advance on Adrianople,
but returned to Pesth after a final victory at the foot of Mount
Kunobitza. During most of this time Amurath had been away in Asia; he
now hurried back to retrieve the fallen fortunes of his Empire in
Europe, but finding that impossible, decided to consolidate what was
left to him, and entered into peace negotiations with his adversaries,
which ended in the Treaty of Szeggedin, in 1444; hereby George
Brankoviç, son of Vuk, became independent ruler of Servia, and Wallachia
was lost to Hungary.
Misfortune dogged Amurath; his eldest son Ala-ed-din died, he who had
assisted in command of the Ottoman forces in Asia, his father's right
hand, and left the Sultan inconsolable, borne down by the weight of
accumulating affliction. There was a second son, Mohammed, still young,
and to him Amurath entrusted the throne and its heavy burdens, while he
retired into dignified seclusion at Magnesia. But Mohammed was too young
for the enormous responsibilities of his post, and Amurath had to
revisit the scenes of his former activity from time to time. The
successes of the Christians, and the retirement to Asia of Amurath,
roused the Greek Emperor to fresh intrigues against his Asiatic
adversary; he and the Pope induced the King of Hungary to break the oath
made at the Peace of Szeggedin, Cardinal Julian salved that monarch's
conscience, and so King Ladislaus started off on another crusade against
the Turk. Amurath hurried back from Asia, crossed the Hellespont with
the aid of the Genoese, and met his adversaries near Varna in November,
1444. The battle raged with varying success all day, until King
Ladislaus, whose horse fell with him, was captured and slain on the
spot. His head impaled on a spear threw his troops into a panic; many
of them perished by the sword, among them Cardinal Julian, Stephan
Bathory, and many other nobles. This victory of the sword of Othman at
Varna settled the fate of those vassal Slavs who had risen against the
Sultan; Servia was thoroughly reconquered, Bosnia's royal family was
exterminated, and their country added to the Ottoman dominions.
Once again Amurath retired to the pleasant seclusion he had sought at
Magnesia; some describe it as monastic in character, but that
description sounds unlikely; at least the monasticism of the Sultan and
that of Christian monks can have had little in common, the former
probably allowing pleasures which a Christian monk would be bound to
regard with pious horror. Alas, and I am sorry for Amurath, because he
had worked hard and deserved a good time, his son Mohammed proved unfit
to hold the victorious Turkish soldiery, so he was given a change at
Magnesia, while his father re-established order in the army. Amurath
reigned for another six years after these happenings--years which he
spent usefully, in gathering in odd outlying bits of territory into the
Ottoman fold. The Peleponese peninsula was made a vassal state, and
Hunyadi Janos severely beaten at Kossova.
The only trouble which Amurath was unable to settle was caused by the
Albanian, Scanderbeg, who defied the Sultan from his mountain
fastnesses, and reigned over his wild country and fierce subjects for
many years after Amurath, who had himself instructed Scanderbeg in the
art of war, had been laid to rest at Broussa.
His son Mohammed lost no time in ascending the throne, removing a slight
obstacle, or what might have become one, in the person of Amurath's
infant son by a Servian Princess. The babe was drowned in a bath at the
moment when his mother was offering her congratulations to the new
Sultan. Mohammed's subjects failed to see the humorous side of this act
of statecraft, and made trouble, so the Sultan put all the blame on the
officer who had carried out the order, and had him put to death for
treason. Mohammed had to confess to his own share in the deed when, many
years later, he included fratricide among the permissible expedients of
statesmanship.
Mohammed II lives in history as "The Conqueror," and he seems to have
had all the qualities as well as the good fortune which help mortals to
that high title; he had some other qualities which were, if not
necessary to success, at least picturesque, and in keeping with the
morals and ideals of the time he lived in, and of the peoples with whom
he had to deal. He was strong of purpose and far-sighted, ingenious and
of tireless energy, and these qualities brought him victory over his
enemies in the field and success in the guidance of his people's life
through the dark passages of diplomacy. These qualities shone out into
the foreground; in the background were cruelty, perfidy, and a
sensuality which revolted even the loose-living warriors of his day.
The West called to Mohammed II; there was yet one more city awaiting
conquest by a son of Othman ere the Eastern Empire should pass out of
history and the Turk should rule large European provinces from the seat
of Constantine. Another, Constantine XI, and last of that long line of
Byzantine Emperors, had come to the throne some three years before
Mohammed was girt with the sword of Othman. This Constantine was wise,
just, and merciful, and has gone down to history among the heroes of the
world. But all the noblest qualities united in the person of its Emperor
were unable to stem the tide rising up to the walls of Constantinople,
were inadequate when opposed to relentless force from without, and
supineness, sloth, cowardice, within the City walls. The fate of
Constantinople drew nearer, till in May, 1453, the hour had struck, and
Mohammed II rode as conqueror over heaps of slain, among whom was the
lost Emperor, through the breach in the wall made by his huge cannon and
the fiery assaults of the Janissaries, to the deserted palaces of
Imperial Byzant.
Thus fell Constantinople, the City of many sieges, into the hands of an
Asiatic nation which from here ruled wide tracts of Europe, raiding
right up to the gates of Vienna, the Kaiserstadt of the Holy Roman
Empire, "Deutscher Nation." For nearly five centuries an unbroken line
of sons of Othman have sat in the seat of Cæsar, have conquered from
here, and from here have watched the decay of their power in Europe. One
by one young races, reborn after years of slavery, rose and asserted
their rights, gained first autonomy, then independence, from a master
who seemed but a stranger and a sojourner in the lands of Roum. Now, as
I write, those young nations have closed in on every side, and Ottoman
possessions in Europe are hardly greater in extent than were those of
decadent Byzant when Mohammed II's artillery thundered outside the
walls, brought down those stout defences, and with them an old
civilization, in a mass of crumbling ruins.