labored to cultivate and adorn as the perpetual inheritance of his
family. But his peaceful labors were often interrupted, and sometimes
blasted, by the absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the
Volga or the Ganges, his servants, and even his sons, forgot their
master and their duty. The public and private injuries were poorly
redressed by the tardy rigor of inquiry and punishment; and we must be
content to praise the “Institutions” of Timour, as the specious idea of
a perfect monarchy. Whatsoever might be the blessings of his
administration, they evaporated with his life. To reign, rather than to
govern, was the ambition of his children and grandchildren--the enemies
of each other and of the people. A fragment of the empire was upheld
with some glory by Sharokh, his youngest son; but after _his_ decease,
the scene was again involved in darkness and blood, and, before the end
of a century, Transoxiana and Persia were trampled by the Uzbecks from
the north, and the Turkomans of the black and white sheep. The race of
Timour would have been extinct, if a hero, his descendant in the fifth
degree, had not fled before the Uzbeck arms to the conquest of
Hindostan. His successors (the great Moguls) extended their sway from
the mountains of Cashmir to Cape Comorin, and from Candahar to the Gulf
of Bengal. Since the reign of Aurungzebe, their empire has been
dissolved, the treasures of Delhi have been rifled by a Persian robber,
and the richest of their kingdoms is now possessed by a company of
Christian merchants, of a remote island in the northern ocean.[23]
JEANNE D’ARC.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[A French heroine, otherwise known as La Pucelle and the Maid of
Orleans, date of birth uncertain, burned at the stake by English
influence as a sorceress at Rouen in 1431. Her enthusiasm and the
belief in the supernatural mission so inspired the French and
daunted the English as to turn the tide of war against the latter,
and was a main cause of ending that series of English invasions
which had imperiled the national existence of France.]
Jeanne d’Arc was the child of a laborer of Domrémy, a little village in
the neighborhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and
Champagne. Just without the cottage where she was born began the great
woods of the Vosges, where the children of Domrémy drank in poetry and
legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their flower garlands on
the sacred trees, and sang songs to the “good people,” who might not
drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne loved the forest;
its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her childish call. But at
home men saw nothing in her but “a good girl, simple and pleasant in her
ways,” spinning and sewing by her mother’s side while the other girls
went to the fields, attended to the poor and sick, fond of church, and
listening to the church-bell with a dreamy passion of delight which
never left her. The quiet life was soon broken by the storm of war as it
at last came home to Domrémy. As the outcasts and wounded passed by the
young peasant-girl gave them her bed and nursed them in their sickness.
Her whole nature summed itself up in one absorbing passion: she “had
pity,” to use the phrase forever on her lip, “on the fair realm of
France.”
As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid from the
Lorraine border should save the land; she saw visions; St. Michael
appeared to her in a flood of blinding light, and bade her go to the
help of the king and restore to him his realm. “Messire,” answered the
girl, “I am but a poor maiden; I know not how to ride to the wars, or to
lead men-at-arms.” The archangel returned to give her courage, and to
tell her of “the pity” that there was in heaven for the fair realm of
France. The girl wept, and longed that the angels who appeared to her
would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain that her
father, when he heard her purpose, swore to drown her ere she should go
to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain that the priest, the wise
people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and refused
to aid her. “I must go to the king,” persisted the peasant-girl, “even
if I wear my limbs to the very knees.... I had far rather rest and spin
by my mother’s side,” she pleaded, with a touching pathos, “for this is
no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it.”
“And who,” they asked, “is your Lord?” “He is God.” Words such as these
touched the rough captain at last; he took Jeanne by the hand and swore
to lead her to the king. When she reached Chinon she found hesitation
and doubt. The theologians proved from their books that they ought not
to believe her. “There is more in God’s book than in yours,” Jeanne
answered, simply. At last Charles received her in the midst of a throng
of nobles and soldiers. “Gentle Dauphin,” said the girl, “my name is
Jeanne the Maid. The heavenly King sends me to tell you that you shall
be anointed and crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be
lieutenant of the heavenly King who is the King of France.”
The girl was in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the
vigor and activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn to
nightfall on horseback without meat or drink. As she mounted her
charger, clad in white armor from head to foot, with the great white
banner studded with _fleur-de-lis_ waving over her head, she seemed “a
thing wholly divine, whether to see or hear.” The ten thousand
men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough plunderers whose only
prayer was that of La Hire, “Sire Dieu, I pray you to do for La Hire
what La Hire would do for you were you captain-at-arms and he God,” left
off their oaths and foul living at her word and gathered round the
altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humor helped her to manage the
wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their camp-fires at the
old warrior who had been so puzzled by her prohibition of oaths that she
suffered him still to swear by his _bâton_. In the midst of her
enthusiasm her good sense never left her. The people crowded round her
as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bringing crosses
and chaplets to be blessed by her touch. “Touch them yourself,” she said
to an old Dame Margaret; “your touch will be just as good as mine.” But
her faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. “The Maid prays and
requires you,” she wrote to Bedford, “to work no more distraction in
France, but to come in her company to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the
Turk.”--“I bring you,” she told Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans to
meet her, “the best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of
Heaven.”
The besiegers looked on overawed as she entered Orleans, and, riding
round the walls, bade the people look fearlessly on the dreaded forts
which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to
engage the handful of besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of
forces at once made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken till only the
strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the
attack. “You have taken your counsel,” replied Jeanne, “and I take
mine.” Placing herself at the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the
gates to be thrown open, and led them against the fort. Few as they
were, the English fought desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen
wounded while endeavoring to scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard,
while Dunois sounded the retreat. “Wait a while!” the girl imperiously
pleaded, “eat and drink! So soon as my standard touches the wall you
shall enter the fort.” It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the
next day the siege was abandoned, and the force which had conducted it
withdrew in good order to the north.
In the midst of her triumph, Jeanne still remained the pure,
tender-hearted peasant-girl of the Vosges. Her first visit as she
entered Orleans was to the great church, and there, as she knelt at
mass, she wept in such a passion of devotion that “all the people wept
with her.” Her tears burst forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed
and of the corpses strewed over the battle-field. She grew frightened at
her first wound, and only threw off the touch of womanly fear when she
heard the signal for retreat.
Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed through the brutal
warriors of a mediæval camp. It was her care for her honor that had led
her to clothe herself in a soldier’s dress. She wept hot tears when told
of the foul taunts of the English, and called passionately on God to
witness her chastity. “Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale,” she cried to
the English warrior whose insults had been foulest, as he fell wounded
at her feet; “you called me harlot! I have great pity on your soul.” But
all thought of herself was lost in the thought of her mission. It was in
vain that the French generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was
resolute to complete her task, and, while the English remained
panic-stricken around Paris, the army followed her from Gien through
Troyes, growing in number as it advanced, till it reached the gates of
Rheims. With the coronation of Charles, the Maid felt her errand to be
over. “O gentle king, the pleasure of God is done!” she cried, as she
flung herself at the feet of Charles VII, and asked leave to go home.
“Would it were his pleasure,” she pleaded with the archbishop, as he
forced her to remain, “that I might go and keep sheep once more with my
sisters and my brothers; they would be so glad to see me again!”
The policy of the French court detained her while the cities of the
north of France opened their gates to the newly consecrated king.
Bedford, however, who had been left without money or men, had now
received re-enforcements, and Charles, after a repulse before the walls
of Paris, fell back behind the Loire, while the towns on the Oise
submitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In this later struggle Jeanne
fought with her usual bravery, but with the fatal consciousness that her
mission was at an end, and during the defense of Compiègne she fell into
the power of the Bastard of Vendôme, to be sold by her captor into the
hands of the Duke of Burgundy, and by the duke into the hands of the
English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and
after a year’s imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of
heresy before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its
head. Throughout the long process which followed every art was employed
to entangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the
peasant-girl foiled the efforts of her judges. “Do you believe,” they
asked, “that you are in a state of grace?” “If I am not,” she replied,
“God will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it.” Her capture,
they argued, showed that God had forsaken her. “Since it has pleased God
that I should be taken,” she answered, meekly, “it is for the best.”
“Will you submit,” they demanded, at last, “to the judgment of the
Church militant?” “I have come to the King of France,” Jeanne replied,
“by commission from God and from the Church triumphant above; to that
Church I submit.... I had far rather die,” she ended, passionately,
“than renounce what I have done by my Lord’s command.” They deprived
her of mass. “Our Lord can make me hear it without your aid,” she said,
weeping. “Do your voices,” asked the judges, “forbid you to submit to
the Church and the Pope?” “Ah, no! Our Lord first served.”
Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it is no wonder that, as the
long trial dragged on and question followed question, Jeanne’s firmness
wavered. On the charge of sorcery and diabolical possession she still
appealed firmly to God. “I hold to my Judge,” she said, as her earthly
judges gave sentence against her, “to the King of Heaven and Earth. God
has always been my lord in all that I have done. The devil has never had
power over me.” It was only with a view to be delivered from the
military prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she
consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared, in fact, among
the English soldiery those outrages to her honor, to guard against which
she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the
Church her dress was a crime, and she abandoned it; but a renewed insult
forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it
was treated as a relapse into heresy, which doomed her to death. A great
pile was raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands
now. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated “witch” from the
hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she
reached the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made
from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. “O Rouen, Rouen!”
she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty
scaffold, “I have great fear lest you suffer for my death.... Yes; my
voices were of God!” she suddenly cried, as the last moment came; “they
have never deceived me!” Soon the flames reached her, the girl’s head
sank on her breast, there was one cry of “Jesus!” “We are lost,” an
English soldier muttered, as the crowd broke up; “we have burned a
saint!”
MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II.
BY EDWARD GIBBON.
[Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. His
main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his
predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force
of two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried
the city of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.]
The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our first attention to
the person and character of the great destroyer. Mahomet II was the son
of the second Amurath; and though his mother had been decorated with the
titles of Christian and princess, she is more probably confounded with
the numerous concubines who peopled from every climate the harem of the
sultan. His first education and sentiments were those of a devout
Mussulman; and as often as he conversed with an infidel, he purified his
hands and face by the legal rites of ablution. Age and empire appear to
have relaxed this narrow bigotry; his aspiring genius disdained to
acknowledge a power above his own, and in his looser hours he presumed
(it is said) to brand the Prophet of Mecca as a robber and impostor. Yet
the sultan persevered in a decent reverence for the doctrine and
discipline of the Koran. His private indiscretion must have been sacred
from the vulgar ear, and we should suspect the credulity of strangers
and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind which is hardened against
truth must be armed with superior contempt for absurdity and error.
Under the tuition of the most skillful masters, Mahomet advanced with an
early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge; and, besides his
native tongue, it is affirmed that he spoke or understood five
languages--the Arabic, the Persian, the Chaldean or Hebrew, the Latin,
and the Greek. The Persian might indeed contribute to his amusement, and
the Arabic to his edification; and such studies are familiar to the
Oriental youth. In the intercourse of the Greeks and Turks, a conqueror
might wish to converse with the people over whom he was ambitious to
reign; his own praises in Latin poetry or prose might find a passage to
the royal ear; but what use or merit could recommend to the statesman or
the scholar the uncouth dialect of his Hebrew slaves?
The history and geography of the world were familiar to his memory; the
lives of the heroes of the East, perhaps of the West, excited his
emulation; his skill in astrology is excused by the folly of the times,
and supposes some rudiments of mathematical science; and a profane taste
for the arts is betrayed in his liberal invitation and reward of the
painters of Italy. But the influence of religion and learning was
employed without effect on his savage and licentious nature. I will not
transcribe, nor do I firmly believe, the stories of his fourteen pages,
whose bellies were ripped open in search of a stolen melon, or of the
beauteous slave whose head he severed from her body, to convince the
Janizaries that their master was not the votary of love. His sobriety is
attested by the silence of the Turkish annals, which accuse three, and
three only, of the Ottoman line of the vice of drunkenness.
But it can not be denied that his passions were at once furious and
inexorable; that in the palace, as in the field, a torrent of blood was
spilled on the slightest provocation; and that the noblest of the
captive youth were often dishonored by his unnatural lust. In the
Albanian war he studied the lessons, and soon surpassed the example, of
his father; and the conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two
hundred cities--a vain and flattering account--is ascribed to his
invincible sword. He was doubtless a soldier, and possibly a general.
Constantinople has sealed his glory; but if we compare the means, the
obstacles, and the achievements, Mahomet II must blush to sustain a
parallel with Alexander or Timour. Under his command, the Ottoman forces
were always more numerous than their enemies; yet their progress was
bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic, and his arms were checked by
Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the Rhodian knights and by the Persian king.
In the reign of Amurath he twice (A.D. 1451, February 9--A. D. 1481,
July 2) tasted of royalty, and twice descended from the throne; his
tender age was incapable of opposing his father’s restoration, but never
could he forgive the viziers who had recommended that salutary measure.
His nuptials were celebrated with the daughter of a Turkoman emir, and
after a festival of two months he departed from Adrianople with his
bride to reside in the government of Magnesia. Before the end of six
weeks he was recalled by a sudden message from the divan, which
announced the decease of Amurath and the mutinous spirit of the
Janizaries. His speed and vigor commanded their obedience; he passed the
Hellespont with a chosen guard, and at a distance of a mile from
Adrianople, the viziers and emirs, the imams and cadis, the soldiers and
the people, fell prostrate before the new sultan. They affected to weep,
they affected to rejoice. He ascended the throne at the age of
twenty-one years, and removed the cause of sedition by the death, the
inevitable death, of his infant brothers. The ambassadors of Europe and
Asia soon appeared to congratulate his accession and solicit his
friendship, and to all he spoke the language of moderation and peace.
The confidence of the Greek emperor was revived by the solemn oaths and
fair assurances with which he sealed the ratification of the treaty; and
a rich domain on the banks of the Strymon was assigned for the annual
payment of three hundred thousand aspers, the pension of an Ottoman
prince, who was detained at his request in the Byzantine court. Yet the
neighbors of Mahomet might tremble at the severity with which a youthful
monarch reformed the pomp of his father’s household; the expenses of
luxury were applied to those of ambition, and a useless train of seven
thousand falconers was either dismissed from his service or enlisted in
his troops. In the first summer of his reign he visited with an army the
Asiatic provinces; but after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the
submission, of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the
smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design.
The Mahometan, and more especially the Turkish casuists, have pronounced
that no promise can bind the faithful against the interest and duty of
their religion, and that the sultan may abrogate his own treaties and
those of his predecessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had
scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the proudest of men,
could stoop from ambition to the basest arts of dissimulation and
deceit. Peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart; he
incessantly sighed for the possession of Constantinople; and the Greeks,
by their own indiscretion, afforded the first pretense of the fatal
rupture.
From the first hour of the memorable 29th of May, when the beleaguered
city was carried by storm, disorder and rapine prevailed in
Constantinople till the eighth hour of the same day, when the sultan
himself passed in triumph through the gate of St. Romanus. He was
attended by his viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of whom (says a
Byzantine historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and
equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals. The
conqueror gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the strange though
splendid appearance of the domes and palaces, so dissimilar from the
style of Oriental architecture. In the hippodrome, or _atmeidan_, his
eye was attracted by the twisted column of the three serpents; and as a
trial of his strength he shattered with his iron mace or battle-axe the
under jaw of one of these monsters, which in the eyes of the Turks were
the idols or talismans of the city. At the principal door of St. Sophia
he alighted from his horse and entered the dome; and such was his
jealous regard for that monument of his glory, that on observing a
zealous Mussulman in the act of breaking the marble pavement, he
admonished him with his cimeter, that, if the spoil and captives were
granted to the soldiers, the public and private buildings had been
reserved for the prince. By his command the metropolis of the Eastern
Church was transformed into a mosque, the rich and portable instruments
of superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down, and the
walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, were washed and
purified and restored to a state of naked simplicity. On the same day,
or on the ensuing Friday, the _muezzin_ or crier ascended the most lofty
turret, and proclaimed the _ezan_, or public invitation, in the name of
God and his prophet. The imam preached, and Mahomet II performed the
_namaz_ of prayer and thanksgiving on the great altar where the
Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the
Cæsars. From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion
of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few
hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection
on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he
repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: “The spider hath wove his
web in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the
towers of Afrasiab.”
LORENZO DE’ MEDICI.
BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
[Surnamed the “Magnificent,” born 1448, died 1492. The Medici
family had in the latter part of the fourteenth century become one
of the most influential and powerful in the Florentine Republic. It
had amassed vast wealth in the pursuits of commerce, and spent it
with the munificence of the most public-spirited princes. Cosmo de’
Medici about the year 1420 became the leading man of the state, and
practically exercised control over the republic, though without
definite authority, as ruler. The splendor of the family culminated
in his grandson Lorenzo, who for a quarter of a century held the
powers of the state in the palm of his hand, and made the city of
Florence the most brilliant center of literature, learning, art,
and refined luxury in Europe. Though he curtailed the liberties of
the people, the city reached under him the highest degree of
opulence and power it had ever attained. Eminent as statesman,
poet, and scholar, the enthusiastic patron of authors and artists,
munificent in his endowment of schools and libraries, he was the
most favorable example of the Italian tyrants of the middle ages;
and his life was the source of a stream of influences which helped
to revolutionize his own age and that which succeeded it.]
In one point Lorenzo was inferior to his grandfather. He had no
commercial talent. After suffering the banking business of the Medici to
fall into disorder, he became virtually bankrupt, while his personal
expenditure kept continually increasing. In order to retrieve his
fortunes it was necessary for him to gain complete disposal of the
public purse. This was the real object of the constitutional revolution
of 1480, whereby his privy council assumed the active functions of the
state. Had Lorenzo been as great in finance as in the management of men,
the way might have been smoothed for his son Piero in the disastrous
year of 1494.