When the earth had grown dry, and grass was flourishing, the Khan
moved in person, with fifty thousand of the Crimean and Astrachan
hordes, to help Doroshenko and the insurgents. The Khan himself,
and his relatives, the petty sultans, and all the more important
murzas and beys, wore kaftans as gifts from the Padishah, and went
against the Commonwealth, not as they went usually, for booty and
captives, but for a holy war with “fate,” and the “destruction” of
Lehistan (Poland) and Christianity.
Another and still greater storm was gathering at Adrianople, and
against this deluge only the rock of Kamenyets was standing erect;
for the rest of the Commonwealth lay like an open steppe, or like
a sick man, powerless not only to defend himself, but even to rise
to his feet. The previous Swedish, Prussian, Moscow, Cossack,
and Hungarian wars, though victorious finally, had exhausted the
Commonwealth. The army confederations and the insurrections of
Lyubomirski of infamous memory had exhausted it, and now it was
weakened to the last degree by court quarrels, the incapacity of
the king, the feuds of magistrates, the blindness of a frivolous
nobility, and the danger of civil war. In vain did the great
Sobieski forewarn them of ruin,--no one would believe in war. They
neglected means of defence; the treasury had no money, the hetman
no troops. To a power against which alliances of all the Christian
nations were hardly able to stand, the hetman could oppose barely a
few thousand men.
Meanwhile in the Orient, where everything was done at the will
of the Padishah, and nations were as a sword in the hand of
one man, it was different altogether. From the moment that the
great standard of the Prophet was unfurled, and the horse-tail
standard planted on the gate of the seraglio and the tower of the
seraskierat, and the ulema began to proclaim a holy war, half Asia
and all Northern Africa had moved. The Padishah himself had taken
his place in spring on the plain of Kuchunkaury, and was assembling
forces greater than any seen for a long time on earth. A hundred
thousand spahis and janissaries, the pick of the Turkish army,
were stationed near his sacred person; and then troops began to
gather from all the remotest countries and possessions. Those who
inhabited Europe came earliest. The legions of the mounted beys of
Bosnia came with colors like the dawn, and fury like lightning; the
wild warriors of Albania came, fighting on foot with daggers; bands
of Mohammedanized Serbs came; people came who lived on the banks
of the Danube, and farther to the south beyond the Balkans, as far
as the mountains of Greece. Each pasha led a whole army, which
alone would have sufficed to overrun the defenceless Commonwealth.
Moldavians and Wallachians came; the Dobrudja and Belgrod Tartars
came in force; some thousands of Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis
came, led by the terrible Azya, son of Tugai Bey, and these last
were to be guides through the unfortunate country, which was well
known to them.
After these the general militia from Asia began to flow in. The
pashas of Sivas, Brussa, Aleppo, Damascus, and Bagdad, besides
regular troops, led armed throngs, beginning with men from the
cedar-covered mountains of Asia Minor, and ending with the swarthy
dwellers on the Euphrates and the Tigris. Arabians too rose at
the summons of the Caliph; their burnooses covered as with snow
the plains of Kuchunkaury; among them were also nomads from the
sandy deserts, and inhabitants of cities from Medina to Mecca. The
tributary power of Egypt did not remain at its domestic hearths.
Those who dwelt in populous Cairo, those who in the evening gazed
on the flaming twilight of the pyramids, who wandered through
Theban ruins, who dwelt in those murky regions whence the sacred
Nile issues forth, men whom the sun had burned to the color of
soot,--all these planted their arms on the field of Adrianople,
praying now to give victory to Islam, and destruction to that land
which alone had shielded for ages the rest of the world against the
adherents of the Prophet.
There were legions of armed men; hundreds of thousands of horses
were neighing on the field; hundreds of thousands of buffaloes,
of sheep and of camels, fed near the herds of horses. It might be
thought that at God’s command an angel had turned people out of
Asia, as once he had turned Adam out of paradise, and commanded
them to go to countries in which the sun was paler and the plains
were covered in winter with snow. They went then with their herds,
an innumerable swarm of white, dark, and black warriors. How many
languages were heard there, how many different costumes glittered
in the sun of spring! Nations wondered at nations; the customs of
some were foreign to others, their arms unknown, their methods
of warfare different, and faith alone joined those travelling
generations; only when the muezzins called to prayer did those
many-tongued hosts turn their faces to the East, calling on Allah
with one voice.
There were more servants at the court of the Sultan than troops in
the Commonwealth. After the army and the armed bands of volunteers
marched throngs of shopkeepers, selling goods of all kinds; their
wagons, together with those of the troops, flowed on like a river.
Two pashas of three tails, at the head of two armies, had no other
work but to furnish food for those myriads; and there was abundance
of everything. The sandjak of Sangrytan watched over the whole
supply of powder. With the army went two hundred cannon, and of
these ten were “stormers,” so large that no Christian king had the
like. The Beglerbeys of Asia were on the right wing, the Europeans
on the left. The tents occupied so wide an expanse that in presence
of them Adrianople seemed no very great city. The Sultan’s tents,
gleaming in purple silk, satin, and gold embroidery, formed, as it
were, a city apart. Around them swarmed armed guards, black eunuchs
from Abyssinia, in yellow and blue kaftans; gigantic porters from
the tribes of Kurdistan, intended for bearing burdens; young boys
of the Uzbeks, with faces of uncommon beauty, shaded by silk
fringes; and many other servants, varied in color as flowers of the
steppe. Some of these were equerries, some served at the tables,
some bore lamps, and some served the most important officials.
On the broad square around the Sultan’s court, which in luxury
and wealth reminded the faithful of paradise, stood courts less
splendid, but equal to those of kings,--those of the vizir, the
ulema, the pasha of Anatolia, and of Kara Mustafa, the young
kaimakan, on whom the eyes of the Sultan and all were turned as
upon the coming “sun of war.”
Before the tents of the Padishah were to be seen the sacred guard
of infantry, with turbans so lofty that the men wearing them seemed
giants, They were armed with javelins fixed on long staffs, and
short crooked swords. Their linen dwellings touched the dwellings
of the Sultan. Farther on were the camps of the formidable
janissaries armed with muskets and lances, forming the kernel of
the Turkish power. Neither the German emperor nor the French king
could boast of infantry equal in number and military accuracy.
In wars with the Commonwealth the nations of the Sultan, more
enervated in general, could not measure strength with cavalry in
equal numbers, and only through an immense numerical preponderance
did they crush and conquer. But the janissaries dared to meet even
regular squadrons of cavalry. They roused terror in the whole
Christian world, and even in Tsargrad itself. Frequently the Sultan
trembled before such pretorians, and the chief aga of those “lambs”
was one of the most important dignitaries in the Divan.
After the janissaries came the spahis; after them the regular
troops of the pashas, and farther on the common throng. All this
camp had been for a number of months near Constantinople, waiting
till its power should be completed by legions coming from the
remotest parts of the Turkish dominions until the sun of spring
should lighten the march to Lehistan by sucking out dampness from
the earth.
The sun, as if subject to the will of the Sultan, had shone
brightly. From the beginning of April until May barely a few warm
rains had moistened the meadows of Kuchunkaury; for the rest, the
blue tent of God hung without a cloud over the tent of the Sultan.
The gleams of day played on the white linen, on the turbans, on the
many-colored caps, on the points of the helmets and banners and
javelins, on the camp and the tents and the people and the herds,
drowning all in a sea of bright light. In the evening on a clear
sky shone the moon, unhidden by fog, and guarded quietly those
thousands who under its emblem were marching to win more and more
new lands; then it rose higher in the heaven, and grew pale before
the light of the fires. But when the fires were gleaming in the
whole immeasurable expanse, when the Arab infantry from Damascus
and Aleppo, called “massala djilari,” lighted green, red, yellow,
and blue lamps at the tents of the Sultan and the vizir, it might
seem that a tract of heaven had fallen to the earth, and that those
were stars glittering and twinkling on the plain.
Exemplary order and discipline reigned among those legions. The
pashas bent to the will of the Sultan, like a reed in a storm; the
army bent before them. Food was not wanting for men and herds.
Everything was furnished in superabundance, everything in season.
In exemplary order also were passed the hours of military exercise,
of refreshment, of devotion. When the muezzins called to prayer
from wooden towers, built in haste, the whole army turned to the
East, each man stretched before himself a skin or a mat, and the
entire army fell on its knees, like one man. At sight of that order
and those restraints the hearts rose in the throngs, and their
souls were filled with sure hope of victory.
The Sultan, coming to the camp at the end of April, did not move at
once on the march. He waited more than a month, so that the waters
might dry; during that time he trained the army to camp life,
exercised it, arranged it, received envoys, and dispensed justice
under a purple canopy. The kasseka, his chief wife, accompanied
him on this expedition, and with her too went a court resembling a
dream of paradise.
A gilded chariot bore the lady under a covering of purple silk;
after it came other wagons and white Syrian camels, also covered
with purple, bearing packs; houris and bayaderes sang songs to
her on the road. When, wearied with the road, she was closing the
silky lashes of her eyes, the sweet tones of soft instruments
were heard at once, and they lulled her to sleep. During the
heat of the day fans of peacock and ostrich feathers waved above
her; priceless perfumes of the East burned before her tents in
bowls from Hindostan. She was accompanied by all the treasures,
wonders, and wealth that the Orient and the power of the Sultan
could furnish,--houris, bayaderes, black eunuchs, pages beautiful
as angels, Syrian camels, horses from the desert of Arabia; in a
word, a whole retinue was glittering with brocade, cloth of silver
and gold; it was gleaming like a rainbow from diamonds, rubies,
emeralds, and sapphires. Nations fell prostrate before it, not
daring to look at that face, which the Padishah alone had the
right to see; and that retinue seemed to be either a supernatural
vision or a reality, transferred by Allah himself from the world of
visions and dream-illusions to the earth.
But the sun warmed the world more and more, and at last days of
heat came. On a certain evening, therefore, the banner was raised
on a lofty pole before the Sultan’s tent, and a cannon-shot
informed the army and the people of the march to Lehistan. The
great sacred drum sounded; all the others sounded; the shrill
voices of pipes were heard; the pious, half-naked dervishes began
to howl, and the river of people moved on in the night, to avoid
the heat of the sun during daylight. But the army itself was to
march only in a number of hours after the earliest signal. First
of all went the tabor, then those pashas who provided food for
the troops, then whole legions of handicraftsmen, who had to
pitch tents, then herds of pack animals, then herds destined for
slaughter. The march was to last six hours of that night and the
following nights, and to be made in such order that when soldiers
came to a halt they should always find food and a resting-place
ready.
When the time came at last for the army to move, the Sultan rode
out on an eminence, so as to embrace with his eyes his whole power,
and rejoice at the sight. With him were his vizir, the ulema,
the young kaimakan, Kara Mustafa, the “rising sun of war,” and a
company of the infantry guard. The night was calm and clear; the
moon shone brightly; and the Sultan might embrace with the eye all
his legions, were it not that no eye of man could take them all in
at once,--for on the march, though going closely together, they
occupied many miles.
Still he rejoiced in heart, and passing the beads of odorous
sandalwood through his fingers, raised his eyes to Heaven in thanks
to Allah, who had made him lord of so many armies and so many
nations. All at once, when the front of the tabor had pushed almost
out of sight, he interrupted his prayer, and turning to the young
kaimakan, Kara Mustafa, said,--
“I have forgotten who marches in the vanguard?”
“Light of paradise!” answered Kara Mustafa, “in the vanguard are
the Lithuanian Tartars and the Cheremis; and thy dog Azya, son of
Tugai Bey, is leading them.”