again became fields of battle, but with foreign foes. From these countries, formerly overflowed by them, the Turks were repelled. The Crusaders from the west, and the Fatimites on the south, won back the countries which the Turks had conquered, and the original region of their conquests, on the banks and borders of the Euphrates, became the disputed seat of their dominion, and was partly reft from them by the Franks. And even when the Crusades had spent their fury, and Europe had exhausted its strength, a new conqueror of Asia, Zinghis Khan, the emperor of the Moguls, repressed anew the power of the Turks, and, as if taking upon himself the task for which they were already prepared, threatened the Roman empire with destruction.

"The rise and progress of the Ottomans, the present sovereigns of Constantinople, are connected with the most important scenes in modern history; but they are founded on a previous knowledge of the great eruptions of the Moguls and Tartars; whose rapid progress may be compared with the primitive convulsions of nature, which have agitated and altered the surface of the globe. *-The Moguls subdued almost all Asia, and a large portion of Europe.+-They spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been defended only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamelukes had breathed in their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air; equal in valour, superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field; and brought back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates. But it overflowed, with resistless violence, the kingdoms of Armenia and Anatolia, of which the former was possessed by the Christians, the latter by the Turks. The sultans of Iconium opposed some resistance to the Mogul arms, till Azzadin sought a refuge among the Greeks at Constantinople, and his feeble successors, the last of the Seljukian dynasty, were finally extirpated by the Khans of Persia. Fifteen hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars were inscribed on the military roll.§-The life and reign of

*Gibbon's Hist. vol. xi. p. 401, c. 64. Ibid. p. 419.

+Ibid. p. 413.

§ Ib.

the great dukes of Russia, the kings of Georgia and Arme. nia, the sultans of Iconium, and the emirs of Persia, were decided by the frown or smile of the Great Khan. In this shipwreck of nations, some surprise may be excited by the escape of the Roman empire, whose relics, at the time of the Mogul invasion, were dismembered by the Greeks and Latins. Less potent than Alexander, they were pressed like the Macedonian, both in Europe and Asia, by the shepherds of Scythia; and, had the Tartars undertaken the siege, Constantinople must have yielded to the fate of Pekin, Samarcand, and Bagdad."*

The Turks, for a long period, were thus restrained and bound. Though they came like a whirlwind, so soon as their time of preparation began, yet their triumphs were checked, their power was broken; the first of their dynasties was dissolved,-they seemed to be fitted for slaughter rather than prepared to slay ; but yet apostate Christendom was not without its woe. The frenzy of a combined superstition and fanaticism wrought its own punishment, although that punishment failed to cure the mental and moral malady. Europeans, indeed, passed through the countries of Lesser Asia and Syria, which the Turks had previously overflowed: but desperate was the strife, and dreadful the slaughter; and their pathway was sprinkled, if we may use the profane phraseology of the world, with the best blood of Christendom. Eu

rope, for the space of two hundred years, from the

close of the eleventh to that of the thirteenth century, sent forth its swarms of armed crusaders; and innumerable calamities followed in their train, no less disastrous eventually to the Catholics than to the Turks.

The Crusaders, from the farthest west, with incredible loss of treasure and of blood, forced back the Turks to the regions where their conquests began: and the Moguls, from the farthest east, took up the task of repressing them. But though the extremes of the then

* Gibbon's Hist. vol. xi. pp. 125–423.

known world met to eradicate the Turkish power; though the lion-hearted Richard of England, and also the great Mogul, traversed at different periods the same plains for the execution of the same purpose; nay, though Mahometans disowned the representatives and successors of the commander of the faithful, and Saracens and Fatimites contended with the Turks; yet not all the multitudes and millions of the teeming west, led on by thousands and thousands of the boldest knights in Europe, and by priests, and princes, and kings; nor the "fifteen hundred thousand" who formed the muster-roll of warriors of Zinghis and Kolagou Khan, could do any more than bind the Turkish sultanies for a season, who, in despite of all their power, when such restraining causes ceased, were again free to sweep like a whirlwind, and to work the woe of idolatrous Christendom, after the grass or the sand of Palestine covered the myriads which Europe had sent thither, and "the Mogul emperors were lost in the oblivion of the desert."*

Of the LOOSING of the four sultanies, Gibbon speaks as freely as of the first investiture of the Turkish Sultan in his high office over the Moslem world.

"Their hostility, (that of Halagou and his successors,) to the Moslems, inclined them to unite with the Greeks and Franks; and their generosity or contempt had offered the kingdom of Anatolia as the reward of an Armenian vassal. The fragments of the Seljukian monarchy were disputed by the emirs who had occupied the cities or the mountains; but they all confessed the supremacy of the Khans of Persia, and he often interposed his authority, and sometimes his arms, to check their depredations, and to preserve the peace and balance of the Turkish frontier. The death of Cazan, one of the greatest and most accomplished princes of the house of Zinghis, removed this SALUTARY CONTROL; and the decline of the Moguls gave FREE SCOPE to the rise and progress of the OTTOMAN EMPIRE."†

* Gibbon's Hist. vol. xi. p. 428. chap, 64. + Ibid. p. 431.

The dates as well as the facts are striking. It was not solely the decline of the Moguls that gave free scope to the Ottomans. In the year 1291, Acre was stormed and taken by the Mamelukes, and the Crusaders lost their last inch of ground in Palestine. "A mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the world's debate." The death of Cazan, which removed the salutary control that checked the depredations of the Turks, took place on the twenty-first of May 1301, and from that time "the decline of the Moguls gave free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman empire." And it was on the twenty-seventh of July, in the year 1301,* (erroneously stated by Gibbon 1299,) “ of the Christian era, that Othman first invaded the territory of Nicomedia; and the singular accuracy of the date seems to disclose some foresight of the rapid and destructive growth of the monster."+ The bands were broken, the crusaders and the Mogul Tartars alike disappeared; the Turks were loosed, the second woe was in action again; and the worshippers of idols and persecutors of saints needed not to seek an enemy in Asia or in Europe. And having seen how the Four sultanies were formed and were BOUND; their being LOOSED is the fact to which we have now to turn; and of that also there is no lack of proof, when our ready and laborious purveyor of evidence is at hand. The hewer of wood and drawer of water may smile or scowl at the edifice he labours to rear, but it is his task to labour still, till the last log be brought, or the

* Baron Von Hammer, whose name carries with it the highest authority in oriental literature and researches, has lately cor. rected this singular error of Gibbon's; and refers to the very authority of Pachymer, appealed to by Gibbon, in proof that 1301 is the true date. He refers also to other authorities, such as Nach Hdchi Chalfas Chronology. Geschichte des Osmanischen reiches, durch Von Hammer, vol. i. p. 68, et not. p. 577.

Gibbon's Hist. vol. xi. p. 433, c. 64.

last needful drop be drawn. A little more may soon suffice, and we have done, though not unthankfully, with Gibbon.

"The annals of the twenty-seven years of his (Othman's) reign would exhibit a repetition of the same inroads; and his hereditary troops were multiplied in each campaign by the accession of captives and volunteers." "In the establishment and restoration of the Turkish empire, the first merit must doubtless be assigned to the personal qualities of the sultans, since, in human life, the most important scenes will depend upon the character of a single actor. By some shades of wisdom and virtue, they may be discriminated from each other; but except in a single instance, a period of nine reigns, and two hundred and sixty-five years, is occupied from the elevation of Othman to the death of Soliman, by a race of warlike and active princes, who impressed their subjects with obedience and their enemies with terror.†

"The emperor Andronicus the younger, was vanquished and wounded by (Orchan) the son of Othman; he subdued the whole province or kingdom of Bythinia, as far as the shores of the Bosphorus and Hellespont. In the list of his compeers, the princes of Roum and Anatolia, his military forces were surpassed by the emirs of Ghermian and Caramania, each of whom could bring into the field an army of forty thousand men. Their dominions were situated in the heart of THE SELJUKIAN KINGDOM; but the holy warriors, though of inferior note, who formed new principalities on the Greek empire, are more conspicuous in the light of history." "The captivity or ruin of the seven churches of Asia was consummated; and the barbarous lords of Ionia and Lydia still trample on the monuments of classic and Christian antiquity."§

"The Turkish scimitar," (a great sword was given him,) was wielded with the same spirit by Amurath the First, the son of Orchan. By the pale and fainting light of the Byzantine annals, we can discern that he subdued, without resistance, the whole province of Romania or Thrace, from the Hellespont to Mount Hæamus and the verge of the capital ; and that Adrianople was chosen for the royal seat of his government and religion in Europe. Constantinople, whose decline is almost coeval with her foundation, had often, in the

* Gibbon's Hist.vol. xi. p. 433, c. 64. † Ibid. vol. xii. p. 57. c. 65. Ibid. vol. xi. p. 436, chap. 64. § Ibid. p. 437.