Clio is the most shamelessly unreliable of the Muses. She selects her
favorites with the autocratic partiality of the Russian Catherine,
decorates them with questionable honors, enriches them with other
people’s spoils, admires them to her heart’s content, and thrusts
them serenely to the front to receive the approbation of the world.
Occasionally she wearies of one or the other, and flings him lightly
down from the pedestal he has adorned so bravely. Occasionally,
having a fine feminine sense of humor, she is pleased to play with
our credulity, and, dressing up a man of straw, she assures us
smilingly that he is real flesh and blood, and worthy of our sincerest
admiration. And all this while, her best and noblest meet with stiffly
measured praise, and her strong sons are passed indifferently by. It
is at least amusing to think of the relative positions occupied by the
true mountaineer Scanderbeg, and the mythical mountaineer William Tell.
The one sleeps unremembered with scanty, hard-won fame; the other
carries such a weight of laurels that poets, wearied with singing his
praises, have been driven in despair to sing the praises of those who
praise him, as Coleridge piped to the Duchess of Devonshire,--
“Splendor’s fondly fostered child,”
because, in a moment of mild enthusiasm, she addressed some well-meant
but highly inefficient verses to the platform from which Tell did not
shoot the tyrant Gessler.
If the heroic struggle for a national life is at all times the most
engrossing picture the world’s history has to show us, where shall
we look for a more vivid illustration of the theme than in the long
and bitter contest between cross and crescent, between the steady,
relentless encroachment of the Turkoman power, and the vain and
dauntless courage which opposed it? The story of the early Ottomans
is one of wasteful and inexorable conquest, unrelieved by any touches
of humanity, or any impulses towards a higher civilization. To the
ferocious and impetuous pride of the barbarian they added an almost
inconceivable wariness and patience; they knew when to wait and
when to strike; they were never unduly elated by victory, and never
demoralized by defeat. That strange dream of their founder Othman which
won for him his Cilician wife, the mysterious vision of the full moon
resting in his bosom, and of the stately tree that sprang therefrom,
must have dimly hinted to the savage chief of the glory that was to
be. When in his sleep he placed Constantinople as a jewel upon his
swarthy finger, he felt the coming of shrouded things, and, believing
the prophecy would be fulfilled in his descendant, he saluted his bride
as the mother of a mighty race of kings. It was this firm conviction of
future greatness which made him seek for his son Orchan a fairer and
nobler wife than could be found in the black tents of his followers;
and, true to the instincts of his race, he despoiled an enemy to enrich
his own hearth. A Greek captain, in command of the castle of Belecoma,
was betrothed to the beautiful daughter of a neighboring Christian
chief. On their marriage night Othman surprised the wedding party as
they rode through the dark mountain passes. The short and desperate
conflict which ensued could have but one bitter ending. “The bridegroom
was slain, and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, was swept
off by the Turkoman robbers to their lair, to become the spouse of
their leader’s son.”[4]
[4] _The Early Ottomans_, by Dean Church.
Orchan was a mere boy when he received this ravished prize, the fair
booty of a barbarous strife. Fifty years later, when hair and beard
were white with age, he married again; and this time his bride was
the daughter of a Christian emperor, not stolen away from friends
and kindred, but given to him publicly with superb ceremonies, and a
ghastly mockery of rejoicing. In fifty years the Ottoman power had
grown into such fierce and sinister lustihood that Theodora, daughter
of the Emperor Cantacuzene, was assigned as a precious hostage and
seal of friendship between her father and his dreaded Turkish ally.
The church refused her blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and, amid
the pomp and majesty of imperial nuptials, there was lacking even
the outward form of Christian marriage. From that date the tide of
Turkish conquest spread with devastating rapidity. The impetuous
encroachments of Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances of
Amurath, became under Bajazet a struggle for life and death, not
with the enfeebled powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror who
had swept from the broad Tartar steppes to subdue and lay waste the
Eastern world. Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, eight
crowned heads had been laid low, when Timour, grimly ready for a
ninth victim, encountered the hitherto invincible sultan. They met,
and Bajazet, who had seen the flower of French and German chivalry
perish at his command, who had sat at his tent-door to witness the
day-long massacre of Christian prisoners, and who had shadowed the
very walls of Constantinople,--Bajazet was crushed like a worm by the
lame, white-haired old Tartar, and, eating out his heart with dull
fury, died in shameful captivity. But his race survived, vigorous,
elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with amazing swiftness under
Mahommed the Restorer and Amurath the Second, whose reign was one long
conflict with the Greek Emperor Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and,
hardest of all to subdue, with those warlike Sclavonic tribes who,
often defeated but never conquered, maintained with superb courage the
freedom of their mountain fastnesses. It was an unknown Servian soldier
who slew Amurath the First in the very moment of his triumph; it was
the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who repulsed Amurath the Second, and
hurled him back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at Adrianople.
Pride of race, love for his native land, shame at prolonged captivity,
and fury at heaped-up wrongs,--all these conflicting passions united
themselves in the breast of this implacable warrior, and urged
him relentlessly along his appointed path. He was the outcome of
that ruthless policy by which the Turks turned the children of the
cross into defenders of the crescent, a policy pursued with almost
undeviating success since Black Halil, a century and a half before, had
urged the training of Christian boys into a school of Moslem soldiers.
What gives to the history of Scanderbeg its peculiar significance, and
its peculiar ethical and artistic value is the fact that he avenged,
not only his own injuries, but the injuries of countless children
who, for over a hundred and fifty years, had been snatched from
their homes, families, and faith to swell the ranks of an infidel
foe. Wherever the tide of Ottoman battle raged most fiercely, there,
savage, dark, invincible, stood the Janissaries, men suckled on
Christian breasts and signed with Christian baptism, now flinging away
their lives for an alien cause and an alien creed, fighting with the
irresistible courage of fanaticism against their birthright and their
kindred. Never before or since, in the history of all the nations, has
a system of proselytizing been attended with such tremendous results.
The life-blood of Christendom was drained to supply fresh triumphs for
its enemies, and the rigorous discipline of a monastic training moulded
these innocent young captives into a soldiery whose every thought and
every action was subordinate to one overpowering influence, an austere,
unquestioning obedience to the cause of Islam.
With the example of this extraordinary success always before their
eyes, it is little wonder that the Turks regarded the children of the
vanquished as so many docile instruments to be fashioned by rigid
tutelage into faithful followers of the Prophet, and the first step
towards this desired goal lay in their early adoption of the Mohammedan
faith. No pang of pity, no sentiment of honor, interfered with this
relentless purpose. When John Castriota, the hereditary lord of Croia,
yielded up his four sons as hostages to Amurath the Second, he relied
on the abundant promises made him by that sovereign, who had, on the
whole, a fair reputation for keeping his royal word. The lads were
carried to Adrianople and reared in the sultan’s palace, where one
at least of the little prisoners attracted dangerous notice by his
vivacity and grace,--inheritances, it is said, from his beautiful
mother, Voisava. The fair-haired boy, then only eight years old, became
first the plaything of the seraglio, and afterwards the jealously
guarded favorite of Amurath himself. He was carefully taught, and was
forced to conform to the ceremonial rites of the Ottomans, and to make
an open profession of his new creed, receiving on this occasion the
name of Scanderbeg, a name destined to carry with it a just retribution
in the universal terror it excited. How much of Christian belief still
lingered in the child’s soul, or how much he gained afterwards from
the Albanian soldiers who had access to him, it is impossible to
say. Young as he was, he had learned, amid the unutterable treachery
and corruption of an Eastern court, to hide his emotions under an
impenetrable mask, so that even Amurath, cruel, wily, and suspicious,
found himself baffled by this Greek boy, whose handsome face betrayed
to none the impetuous anger that consumed him. At nineteen he had
command of five thousand horsemen, and enjoyed the title of pasha, a
barren honor for one soon to be robbed of his birthright. After the
close of the Hungarian war John Castriota died, and Amurath, ignoring
his plighted faith, seized Croia in the name of the captive princes,
ruthlessly extinguished its civil and religious liberties, turned the
churches into mosques, and treated the whole country as a defeated
and dependent province. Scanderbeg’s three brothers were conveniently
removed by poison; he himself, the object of a curious affection on the
sultan’s part, was watched with jealous and exacting eyes, and for a
while it seemed as though the free-born mountain chief would add one
more to the long list of Turkish proselytes and favorites, silenced
with doubtful titles, bought with dishonorable wealth.
But it was a time of waiting, a time ominous with delay. The heir of
Croia, mute, patient, and resolved, bided with steady self-control
the hour when he could strike a single blow for faith and freedom.
It came with the breaking out of fresh Hungarian troubles: with the
defiance sent by John Hunyadi and his forces drawn up on the banks
of the Moravia. While the Ottoman armies were engaged in this most
disastrous conflict, Scanderbeg threw off his long-endured disguise,
possessed himself by an unscrupulous device of his native city, and
put all who opposed him to the sword. From that day until his death,
forty years later, the record of his life is one perpetual heroic
struggle to preserve the hard-won liberty of Epeiros, a struggle
without intermission or relief, without rest for the victor or pity
for the vanquished. His scornful indifference to pressing dangers was
in itself the best of tonics to a people naturally brave, but taught
by bitter experience to fear the inexorable Turkish yoke. Scanderbeg
feared nothing; with him, indeed, fear was swallowed up in hatred.
He understood perfectly the nature of the warfare in which he was
engaged; he knew that, with adroitness and vigilance, every dark pass
and every rocky crag became his friend and ally. He knew, too, the
slender resources of the country, and never committed the mistake of
taking more men into the field than he could manage and support. When
Amurath sent an army of forty thousand soldiers to punish Croia, and
bring back the rebel chief “alive or dead” to Adrianople, Scanderbeg
limited his own forces to seven thousand foot and eight thousand horse,
when he might, had he chosen, have trebled that number. With this
compact body of picked and hardy warriors he lay in wait for the enemy,
entrapped them by a feigned retreat into a narrow defile, and, hemming
them in on either side, filled up the valley with their slain. Over
twenty thousand Turks perished in that dreadful snare, many of them
being trampled down by their helpless and panic-stricken countrymen.
It was Scanderbeg’s first decisive victory, and a grim warning to
Amurath of the possibilities that awaited him in the future. It gave to
Croia a breathing spell, and to its victorious army the rich spoils
of an Ottoman camp, so that those who had gone forth meagrely on foot
returned well armed and bravely mounted to their rock-built citadel.
Had this sudden and bewildering success been followed up by a vigorous
aggressive warfare on the part of Servia, Hungary, and Poland, then
all in arms against their common foe; had the allied powers listened
to the mountain chiefs, or to the burning remonstrances of Cardinal
Julian, the pope’s legate, the Turks might have been driven forcibly
back from Europe, and long centuries of suffering and dishonor spared
to Christendom. But the lord of Servia, George Brankovich, yearned for
his children whom Amurath held as hostages; Ladislaw, king of Hungary
and Poland, was weary of the perpetual strife; even Hunyadi’s fiery
voice was silenced; and a treaty of peace was signed with an enemy who
might then, and then only, have been crushed. This treaty, shameful in
itself, was still more shamefully broken in the following year, when
the Christian hosts again took the field, only to be utterly routed
in the terrible battle of St. Martin’s Eve. Never was disaster more
complete: Ladislaw’s severed head, borne on a pike over the Ottoman
ranks, struck terror and despair into the hearts of his followers;
Hunyadi, after a vain, furious effort to redeem this ghastly symbol of
defeat, fled from a field red with his countrymen’s blood; the papal
legate and two Hungarian bishops perished in the thickest of the fray.
It was the beginning of the end, and four years later the cause of
Christendom received its deathblow at Kossova, when Hunyadi, beaten
finally back from Servia, was taught by the bitterness of defeat that
his name no longer sounded ominously, as of old, in the ears of his
Moslem foe. Only Scanderbeg remained unsubdued amid his mountain peaks,
and Amurath, flushed with conquest, now turned his whole attention to
the final punishment of this audacious rebel.
The scale on which the invasion of Croia was planned shows in itself
how deep-seated was the sultan’s anger, and how relentless his purpose.
One hundred and sixty thousand men were assembled in Adrianople, the
ablest generals were united in command, and Mohammed, his savage son
and successor, accompanied the expedition, filled with fierce hopes
of vengeance. Resistance seemed almost vain, but Scanderbeg, in no way
disturbed by the coming storm, prepared with characteristic coolness to
meet it at every point. He ordered all who dwelt in the open country
or in unprotected villages to destroy their harvests and to quit their
homes, so that the enemy might find no resources in the scorched and
deserted fields. The women and children, the aged and infirm, were sent
either to the sea-coast or out of the kingdom, many of them as far away
as Venice. The fortifications of Croia were repaired; the garrison
was strengthened and put under command of a brave and able governor,
and Scanderbeg himself, with only ten thousand men, took the field,
ready to waylay and harass Amurath at every step of his difficult and
dangerous march. The first severe fighting was done before the walls
of Setigrade, a strongly guarded town which made a gallant resistance,
repulsing the Turks again and again, and only yielding when a traitor,
bought by the sultan’s gold, poisoned the fountains which supplied the
city with water. From this point the invading army marched on to Croia,
covered the surrounding plains, planted their cannon--then an imposing
novelty in warfare--before its massive gates, and summoned the garrison
to surrender. A defiant refusal was returned; the Ottomans stormed
the walls, and were repulsed with such fury that over eight thousand
Janissaries perished in the combat, while Scanderbeg, poised like an
eagle on the cliffs, waited until the battle was at its height, and
then sweeping down on the unconscious foe, forced their trenches, fired
the camp, and drove all before him with terrible havoc and slaughter.
By the time Mohammed could rally his scattered forces, the Epeirots
were off and away, with little scathe or damage to themselves; and this
exasperating method of attack was the weapon with which the mountain
chief finally wore out the courage and endurance of the invaders. Every
inch of ground was familiar to him, and a snare to his enemies. Did
Mohammed, burning with rage, scale the hills in pursuit, a handful of
men held him at bay; while Scanderbeg, appearing as if by magic on the
other side of the camp, chose this propitious moment for an attack. By
day or night he gave the enemy no truce, no respite, no quarter. Two
hours out of the twenty-four he slept, and all the rest he spent in
unceasing, unwearying, unpitying warfare; until the Turks, harassed by
a danger ever present but never visible, lost heart and trembled before
the breathless energy of their foe. They were beginning also to suffer
from a scarcity of provisions, and Scanderbeg took excellent care
that this trouble should not be too speedily relieved. The supplies,
brought at an immense cost from Desia, were intercepted and carried off
triumphantly to the hills, and the unhappy Ottomans, starved in camp
and slaughtered out of it, realized with ever-increasing dismay the
unenviable nature of their position.
It must be admitted, in justice to the Epeirots, that the success
of Scanderbeg’s manœuvres rested exclusively on their absolute and
unquestioned fidelity. Swift and sure information was brought him of
every movement on the enemy’s part, and vigilant eyes kept watch over
every rocky pass that gave access to his haunts. For once Amurath’s
gold was powerless to buy a single traitor, and the systematic perfidy
by which the Turks were accustomed to steal what they could not grasp
failed for once of its prey. After a fruitless effort to undermine
the rock on which Croia was founded, the sultan sought to corrupt
first the governor and then the garrison with dazzling offers of
advancement, but all the wealth in Adrianople could not purchase one
poor Christian soldier. Baffled and heart-sick with repeated failure,
Amurath at last offered to raise the siege and depart, on payment of a
small yearly sum, a mere nominal tribute to salve his wounded pride.
Even this trifling concession was sternly refused by Scanderbeg, who
would yield nothing to his hated foe. Then for the first time the
sultan understood the relentless nature of this man whom he had petted
as a child and wronged as a boy, whom he had held a helpless hostage
in his hands, and who now defied him with unutterable aversion and
scorn. Abandoning himself to grief, fury, and despair, he tore his
white beard, and recalled his countless triumphs in the past, only to
compare them with this shameful overthrow. He who had seen the allied
powers of Christendom suing at his feet, to be humbled in his old age
by an insignificant Illyrian chieftain! The blow broke his proud heart,
and on his death-bed he conjured his son to avenge his name and honor.
Gladly Mohammed undertook the task, but the present was no time for
its fulfillment. The siege of Croia was raised, the dejected Moslem
army straggled homewards, cruelly harassed at every step by their
unwearied foe, and Scanderbeg once more entered his native city amid
the acclamations of a brave people, born again to freedom, and wild to
welcome their deliverer.
It is pleasant to think that, before being called a third time into
the field, even this indomitable fighter found a little leisure in
which to marry a wife, and to cultivate the arts of peace. Domestic
tranquillity ran but a slender chance of palling on its possessor
in those stirring days; but Scanderbeg made the most of his limited
opportunities. He carried his bride in triumph to every corner of his
little kingdom, he labored hard to restore those habits of thrift and
industry which perpetual warfare roots out of every nation, and he
wisely refrained from overtaxing the narrow resources of his people.
When his purse was empty, he looked to his enemies and not to his
friends for its replenishment; and that stout old adage, “The Turk’s
dominions are Scanderbeg’s revenues,” is a sufficient witness to his
admirable financiering. He realized fully that the legacy of hate
bequeathed by Amurath to Mohammed would bear bitter fruits in the hands
of that fierce and able monarch, and so employed every interval of
peace in strengthening himself for the struggle that was to follow.
Twice again during his lifetime was Epeiros invaded by the Ottomans;
and Scanderbeg, driven from his lair, was hunted like a deer from hill
to hill, now lying in covert, now fiercely resisting, but unconquered
always. Wily offers of friendship from the sultan were received with a
not unnatural suspicion, and courteously declined; hired assassins were
detected, and delivered up to a prompt and pitiless justice. For forty
years this Albanian soldier defended his mountain eyrie from a power
vast enough to destroy two empires, and cruel enough to make the whole
Eastern world tremble. Constantinople fell, while Croia stood unharmed.
The last news brought to Scanderbeg, as he lay dying at Lyssa, was that
the Turks had invaded the Venetian dominions. The feeble warrior raised
himself in bed, and called for his sword and armor. “Tell them,” he
gasped, “that I will be with them to-morrow,” and fell back fainting on
his pillows. On the morrow he was dead.