Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)

The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.

At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumed with musk, two crowns were placed on his head; two scimitars were girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.

Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.

The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.

At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”

There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”

Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.

Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under some grievous and unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.

In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.

The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplest yet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”

“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.

Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.

The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.

The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.

We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.

They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.

Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace and scimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thus the greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.

The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.

In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem was conquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.

When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.

It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.

But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.

Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”

This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.

The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.

Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.

As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is not without defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”

Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in the possession of the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.

Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.

After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, and a mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the World’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”

Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan, i. e. the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.

The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them converts to the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.

Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.

A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of many hundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.

The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.

To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.

Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed out and gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.

Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.

Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributed among the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.

His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.

These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.

The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.

In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.

Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” who came to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.

The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.

After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.

Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under the hands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.

Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.

As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.

It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.

After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.

With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.

Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.

Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.

Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.

Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas, or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.

It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.

But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid together on an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.

The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.

THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.

Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years of martyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”

As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.

Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insulting letters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against the scimitars and battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”

Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”

On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”

All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”

Bajazet was both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.

Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field of battle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.

Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.

The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.

Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.

Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.

Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.

As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselves and leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.

Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.

Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat at Antioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.

Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

CHAPTER V.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

With the death of Tamerlane all his further designs were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved; and fourteen years after his decease, the most powerful of his children sent an embassy of friendship and commerce to the court of Pekin. But far different was the fate of the Ottoman monarchy. The massive trunk was bent to the ground, but no sooner had the hurricane passed than it again rose with fresh vigor and more luxuriant foliage.

The province of Anatolia was desolated; the cities without walls or palaces, without treasures or rulers: while the open country was overspread with hordes of shepherds of Tartar or Turcoman origin. The five living sons of Bajazet were soon fighting for the spoils of their father’s empire: finally the favorite son Mohammed I., stood forth as the sole heir of the empire. He obtained Anatolia by treaty and Roumania by force of arms and the eight years of his peaceful reign were spent in banishing the vices of civil discord and placing on a firmer basis the fabric of the Ottoman monarchy. The wisest Turks were devoted to the unifying of the empire and from Anatolia to Roumania one spirit seemed to animate them all. The Christian powers of Europe might have emulated their example, but the bitter schism between the Greek and the Latin divisions of the church, the factions and the wars of France and England, blinded them to the danger that was threatening in the East.

Had a confederate fleet occupied the straits of the Dardanelles and a strong fort been built on the west side at Gallipoli, the Ottoman power must speedily have been annihilated; but as it was the dissensions and the indifference of the other powers of Europe first yielded up the Greek Empire to the Turks as they have since sustained it—an alien power—race and religion in one of the fairest regions of the earth.

In sheerest folly did Manuel the Emperor of Constantinople enter into an alliance with Mohammed I., whereas his policy should have been to prolong the division of the Ottoman powers. The Sultan and his troops were transported over the Bosphorus, and were hospitably entertained in the capital. Not long after he unsheathed a sword of revenge in delivering the true or the false Mustapha, real or pretended son of Bajazet I., on his promise of delivering up the keys of Gallipoli, or rather of Europe, so soon as he was placed on the throne of Roumania. But no sooner was he established than he dismissed the Greek ambassadors with a smile of contempt, saying in a pious tone that at the day of judgment he would rather answer for the violation of an oath than for having delivered up a Mussulman city into the hands of an infidel.

The Emperor was thus at once the hated of the two rivals for the Ottoman throne; and the victory of Amurath over Mustapha was followed by the siege of Constantinople, the following spring (A. D. 1422, June 10, Aug. 24). The strength of the walls successfully resisted an army of two hundred thousand Turks for some two months, when the army was drawn off to quell some domestic revolt, and the fall of the city was delayed for thirty years under the disgraceful conditions of the payment of tribute to Turkey.

Meantime the Ottomans were with cruel severity, organizing a terrible power for further conquest. The captured provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Servia, became the perpetual recruiting ground for the Turkish army. After the royal fifth of the captives was diminished by conquest, an inhuman tax of the fifth child or of every fifth year was rigorously levied on the Christian families. At the age of twelve or fourteen, the most robust youths were torn away from their parents to be trained for the army or for civil service. They might pass through four successive schools according to their development or promise and then found themselves without friendships, outside their own number, without parents, without homes, dependent on the will of the despot on the throne, whose hand, on the slightest displeasure could break in pieces “these statues of glass.”

Thus with satanic craftiness and cruelty were the stolen children of Christian races trained to become the destroyers of a Christian empire, which, for more than a thousand years had stayed the flood of barbarism from sweeping over all Europe.

Freeman, the historian, declares that we may take Mohammed II., as the ideal of his race, the embodiment in their fullest form of Ottoman greatness and Ottoman wickedness. A general and a statesman of the highest order, he was also a man of intellectual cultivation in other ways, a master of many languages and a patron of the art and the literature of his time. At the same time the three abiding Ottoman vices, cruelty, lust and faithlessness, stand forth in terrible preëminence. His first act was the murder of his infant brother and he made the murder of brothers the standing law of his empire. He made the Ottoman power what it has been ever since. He defined its northern and western boundaries. “The Ottoman Empire as our age has to deal with it, is before all things the work of Mohammed the Conqueror.”

His reign was from 1451 to 1481. Coming to the throne at the early age of twenty-one, he had read Plutarch assiduously and studied the careers of Alexander, Cæsar and other great conquerors; causing also the biographies of illustrious men to be translated into Turkish, to give to himself and to his people the emulation of glory.

On returning to Adrianople, this thirst of glory and of conquest devoured him as it had devoured his ancient models. He coveted Constantinople with a consuming avidity that often woke him with a bound from his sleep. The phantom of Constantinople beset by day and night the young conqueror. He tried to conceal his impatience for fear of exciting before the hour the emotions of the Christian West. He could not restrain it. He sent for his grand vizier, Khalil, at night. Alarmed, the vizier embraced as in a last farewell his wife and daughter, made his death prayer and appeared before the Sultan. He prostrated himself as if to redeem his life by a ransom and presented to Mohammed II. the golden cup. “Do not fear, my lala, (familiar term as father), do not fear, it is not thy gold nor thy life I want: what I want that thou shouldest give me is Constantinople.” Then showing him his eyes, fatigued with sleeplessness, and his couch disordered, he added, “I cannot sleep unless you promise me what I dream of night and day.”

“You must have it, my master,” responded Khalil. “Who could refuse you that which belonged to you by the grandeur of your views, and by the omnipotence of your arms. I have divined this long time your desires beneath your silence; I have all prepared to satisfy on an appointed day, your religion, your patriotism, your glory. Constantinople or my head is at your feet.”

The next day the Sultan set out with Khalil for Gallipoli and then proceeded to the village situated on the European shore of the Bosphorus at the point which formerly gave passage to the Persians of Darius. There he ordered Khalil to construct forthwith a fortress in front of the Asiatic fortress constructed twenty years before by his ancestor, Bajazet-Ilderim.

This promontory on the Bosphorus, at a point where the channel is not wider than a river and only a few miles distant from Constantinople, was admirably chosen to extend the limits of the conquest, to wall in the city, and to smother it by terror even before being swept by the fury of their fiery onslaught.

With fantastic superstition the Sultan or his architect gave the different compartments the form of the letters, which in Arabic compose both his name and the name of the false prophet, as if to stamp with the very walls of a fortress on the soil of Europe, the seal of Islamism, and the empire on the last promontory that still sheltered the capital of the Christians.

The Greek Emperor alarmed at this menace almost under the very walls of his capital sent Ambassadors who timidly demanded explanations from the Sultan.

“Of what do you complain?” replied he, “I form no project against your city. To provide for the security of my dominions is not to infringe the treaties. Have you forgotten the extremity to which my father was reduced when your Emperor, leagued against him with the Hungarians, sought to hinder him from passing into Europe? His galleys at that time barred the passage and Mourad was obliged to claim the aid of the Genoese. * * * * My father at the battle of Varna vowed to construct a fortress on the European shore. This vow I fulfil. Have you the right or power to control in this manner what are mine; that of Asia because it is inhabited by Ottomans; that of Europe, because you are unable to defend it.

“Go tell your master that the reigning Sultan is not like his predecessors: that their wishes did not go so far as does to-day my power. I permit you to retire for this time: but I will have the skin flayed off the bodies of those who henceforth should have the insolence of calling me to an account for what I do in my own empire.”

A thousand masons and a host of laborers were soon at work on this fortress.

Some Greek peasants, at work in their harvest fields, having been slain, Constantine, the Emperor, sent messengers to expostulate, and then to add: “If unmerited reverses menace the capital of the empire, the Omnipotent will be the refuge of the Emperor. The inhabitants will defend themselves by all the means which destiny leaves them, so long as God shall not have inspired the Sultan with thoughts of justice and peace.”

Mohammed II. replied to this adjuration of his justice, but by the first cannon shot discharged from the fortress, already armed, at a Venetian vessel wishing to try if the Bosphorus were still free.

While Mohammed thus threatened the capital of the East the Emperor implored with fervent prayers the assistance of earth and heaven. The invisible powers seemed deaf to his supplications; the Powers of Europe were stupid, jealous or deaf. Christendom beheld with indifference the fall of Constantinople. Some states were too weak and others too remote. By some the danger was considered imaginary, by others as inevitable. The western princes were involved in endless quarrels; and the Roman Pontiff was exasperated by the falsehood or obstinacy of the Greeks. Thus they were left to the tender mercies of the Turks.

The Sultan and Khalil had already returned to Adrianople to prepare the two hundred thousand men, the machines, the arms and the munitions stored in secret for the assault. From Germany and Italy were brought all the arts and the latest secrets of scientific warfare. A cannon founder, Urban, a Hungarian, deserted from Constantinople on pretext of poor pay and sought the service of the Sultan.

Mohammed thought nothing dear in exchange for Constantinople: and lavished gold and honors on the refugee. “Can you found me a piece sufficiently like a thunderbolt that a ball launched from it may shake the walls of Constantinople?”

“I can found you one,” replied the Hungarian, “that would overthrow the walls of Babylon.”

A foundry was established at Adrianople, the metal was prepared, and at the end of three months Urban produced a piece of brass ordnance of stupendous and almost incredible magnitude. The stone bullet was of twelve palms circumference and weighed twelve hundred pounds. Before its trial the population were warned of the coming event. The explosion was felt or heard in the circuit of an hundred furlongs, the ball was driven above a mile and buried itself a fathom in the ground. It required a force of a hundred oxen and seven hundred men to move it, and nearly two months were consumed in dragging it one hundred and fifty miles to Constantinople.

In the spring of 1453 two hundred thousand men from Asia, and two hundred thousand from Europe assembled rapidly in the vast plains that extend from Gallipoli to Constantinople under the eye of the Sultan, Khalil and his generals. The land and the sea supplied them in abundance for all the wants of the army; while a fleet of one hundred and sixty vessels of war, many of them but small ones, cruised about in full view of the tents upon the sea of Marmora.

Constantine, the Emperor, must have been mad to hope to defend a city some thirteen miles in extent, when a careful enumeration showed only four thousand nine hundred and seventy Romans: to which were added some five or six thousand strangers under the command of John Justiniani, a noble Genoese.

No capital had been more favored by nature than Constantinople for defence against the investment and the assault of an entire people. Geography had made it a citadel, a thousand years of power in its emperors and of art in its engineers had completed the work of nature. Nature had made a peninsula, policy an island, the hills a fortress. The Greek Empire as if it had foreseen that one day it would fall, seemed to have meant to confine all its monuments, all its masterpieces, all its riches in an Acropolis at the extreme point of the continent of Europe where it fled the barbarians to encounter the Conquerors.

While fear was falling upon the hearts of Byzantines presentiments of glory cheered the hearts of the soldiers of Mohammed through the sole prophecy of the Koran. “Know you the city,” says the Koran, “of which two sides look upon the sea and one side upon the land? It will fall, not beneath the force of the enginery of war, but before the omnipotence of these words: ‘There is no other God but God, and God alone is great.’”

Nevertheless the strength of the continuous wall outside of Thrace, flanked with towers and bristling with battlements, the great thickness and the height of the walls, the site and depth of the trenches, the cincture of the waves, the impregnable renown of the city, the history of the numerous and fruitless sieges which Constantinople had withstood did not leave Mohammed and his generals at ease as to the result. Twenty-nine times since its foundation had this mistress of the seas and of the continents seen an enemy under its walls. Constantinople had triumphed in twenty-one. Then any day the West might relieve the city through the two seas. Mohammed was looking ceaselessly towards the sea dreading to see approach through the Dardanelles a cloud of Christian sail bringing the courage and skill of Europe to the battlefield of Christendom. Oh that the wasted warriors of Jerusalem might spring to life again and save Europe from the curse of Islam. But there was no voice, neither any that regarded. Constantinople was left alone in her death agonies.

The Turkish vanguards soon swept away the towns and villages as far as the gates of the city and Mohammed and his army halted at the distance of five miles. Thence ordering the final disposition of his vast army he marched in battle array, planted the imperial standard before the gate of St. Romanus and on the 6th of April, 1453, formed the memorable siege of Constantinople.

The colossal cannon of Adrianople and some others of very great size were trained upon this single gate, while eighteen other batteries were placed in a continuous line along the main wall. On the morning of the 7th at break of day the fire opened from all these volcanoes and the first great siege conducted with the help of heavy artillery had begun.

The tactics of the Hungarian officer were first to batter over a large area the ramparts of the gate of St. Romanus and then to shatter the center with the fire of the great guns. The charge of the great cannon of Urban was five hundred pounds of powder—the ball like a mass of rock hurled from a crater on fire made the very ground tremble beneath the walls. The entire facings of the towers and the bastions crumbled into the moat.

Thus during ten days, while keeping his soldiers behind the eminences of the ground only as necessary to work the batteries, did Mohammed watch the breaches being made by the cannon of Urban in the walls, towers and gates of Constantinople. But two hours and tons of oil were scarce sufficient to cool the bronze gun, and only seven or eight shot could be discharged a day: but each of these rent the walls like an earthquake. On the tenth day the great gun burst with terrific force, hurling the dismembered bodies of its inventor and the gunners far over the walls into the doomed city.

Explaining the Inflammatory Placards.

Sapping and mining were now resorted to, and movable towers that could be pushed against the walls were provided, having grappling irons and drawbridges to let down upon the battlements, across which the fierce Janizaries could rush in hand to hand encounter with the defenders on or behind the ramparts.

The hope and heart of Constantine were cheered at last by the sight of an approaching squadron of fourteen sail—among them five stout and lofty ships guided by skillful pilots and manned by the veterans of Italy and Greece long practiced in the arts and perils of the sea. The Emperor however fearing to open the harbor of the Golden Horn to the fleet of Mohammed, kept his own ships safely anchored behind the chains that protected the harbor and left these ships to fight out the battle alone.

The ramparts, the camp, the coasts of Asia and Europe were lined with multitudes of spectators as these ships with joyful shouts sailed down upon the hostile fleet of three hundred vessels. Most of these however were huge boats crowded with troops but without artillery. Those who have in their eye the situation of city, harbor and shore, can easily conceive the scene and admire the grandeur of the spectacle.

On came the ships in proud defiance. Their artillery swept the waters. Bullets, rocks and Greek fire were showered from these floating fortresses upon the huge flat galleys of the Turks. The weight of the Venetian vessels crushed them like seashells beneath their planks. Wielding their helms and sails as skillfully as the Turks did their horses, they spread death, disorder and flight among the hostile fleet and strewed the two beaches of Asia and Europe with their wrecks that burned as they drifted to the shore.

In vain Mohammed spurred his horse breast deep into the sea and drew his scimitar against the Venetian vessels which were fighting but a few yards from him in the mouth of the Bosphorus. For a moment his cries and his presence encouraged his galleys but they were shattered anew. The Greeks struck down the iron chains that protected the harbor of the Golden Horn and the Christian ships entered it under full sail amid the shouts of soldiers and populace thronging the walls of the city.

Twelve thousand Turks perished in this sea fight. The introduction of these supplies revived the hopes of the Greeks. The city could easily be saved by the sea. A rational and moderate armament of the maritime states might have saved the relics of the Roman name and maintained a Christian fortress in the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Yet this was the sole and feeble attempt to save Constantinople.

Mohammed, now convinced that a complete investment by sea and land was the condition of conquest, resolved to conquer nature herself. By means of the thousands of wood cutters and miners who followed his army, he caused to be levelled and planked in a few weeks a road for his galleys and ships over the hills and across the valleys into the Golden Horn. Over these “ways” which were well greased with ox-fat, a part of his fleet were drawn by cables and launched into the waters and anchored in the same bay with the Greek fleet and under the shelter of the Ottoman artillery. Then a hundred thousand men were employed in making from one bank to the other a bridge or causeway of sufficient breadth to permit one hundred men to march abreast to storm the bastions of the fort.

Seven weeks of bombardment on the land side had at last opened four immense breaches upon the ruins of four towers. Only the moat of great width and thirty feet deep protected the assault of four hundred thousand men from the ten thousand combatants of Constantine that were extended along the walls for more than three miles.

The Sultan was desirous of sparing the blood of his soldiers, now that the city lay at his mercy, of securing the Byzantine treasures as well and accordingly sent an envoy to appeal from the courage of the Emperor to the cowardice of the Greeks. The avarice of the Sultan might have been satisfied with the annual tribute of one hundred thousand ducats; but his ambition grasped the capital of the East. He guaranteed the Empire the absolute and independent sovereignty of the Peloponnesus, the property of all the inhabitants of Constantinople subject only to tribute if he would surrender.

The reply was grandly heroic and stoical, not to say Christian. It was sad, hopeless, yet grand and dignified. He said that he would give thanks to God if Mohammed really inclined, in according him a sure and honorable peace, to spare his nation the catastrophes that weighed upon it. * * * That he was ready to discuss with the Sultan the conditions of a treaty as from prince to prince or even the conditions of a tribute of war imposed by the strong upon the weak:—but that no human force and no personal advantage would ever make him consent to give up to the enemy of the Christian name an empire and a capital, which he had sworn to his God, to his people and to himself, not to deliver, but with his life.

These words, too noble, too elevated for the rest of Christian Europe were most irritating to the impatient Sultan who, guided by his favorite science of astrology, fixed on the twenty-ninth day of May as the fortunate and fatal hour.

Several days were given to preparations for the assault. The Sultan proclaimed it throughout the camps, and dervishes, fired their religious fanaticism by going through the ranks and haranguing the Moslems: “It was the last step of Islam in Europe to sweep off the last focus of idolatry on the two continents. Their bows and their scimitars were the weapons of Allah the true God. Those who vanquish in his name will possess the earth; those who fall will possess the houris and the fountains of Paradise.”

On the eve of the day of the assault an illumination of joy suddenly lighted up the camps of the Ottomans from the hills of the Bosphorus of Europe to the sea of Marmora. Every soldier had his torch of resinous pine, and thousands of fires burned all night long, and the three contiguous seas were reddened with an anticipated reflection of the conflagration of the doomed city.

Constantinople lighted up as it were by its own funeral pyre watched and wept and prayed during the night. Endless processions of priests, monks, nuns, and other women thronged the streets chanting with mournful voice, “Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy. Lord, rise in our defence.” The whole city ran to the altars; no one except Constantine and his few soldiers ran to arms: and he was everywhere posting his generals and giving orders for the morrow.

The morning dawned with the four hundred thousand men in order of battle. The disciplined and veteran troops were carefully arranged in several lines of battle, Mohammed himself at the center and in their front with his twenty thousand Janizaries waiting for the decisive moment to arrive.

Between the city and the camp were the two hundred thousand motley volunteers whom he would send first into the battle to tire the defenders and fill the trenches with their dead bodies.

Constantine went with the nobles of his court to the Church of St. Sophia seeking to draw from the religion of his fathers the courage and perhaps the fortune of saving its altars.

He attended a short service, as if it were his own funeral service. He received communion from the hands of the Patriarch; made with tears a public confession of his sins to which the sobbings of the people were the only audible response. After this he repaired to his palace, his household and his family, where says one of his auditors in his farewell, he pronounced the funeral oration of the Greek Empire. He then threw aside the robes of royalty, keeping on only his shoes embroidered with a golden eagle, and his purple mantle, mounted on horseback in the costume of a private soldier, and went forth for the last time to battle in the front ranks of the defenders of the faith.

Such men only four hundred years ago did Western Christian Europe willingly let die when she failed to stand beside him to beat back the Turkish hordes and warriors to their desert plains in Asia.

Mohammed II. then proclaimed to his army as if to excite every fiercest passion in the breast of his men, that the entire city was devoted to spoil, and the inhabitants to slavery or death. “The city and public buildings are mine; but I abandon to you the captives and the booty, the precious metals and beautiful women; be rich and happy. The provinces of my Empire are numerous, the intrepid soldier who first mounts the walls of Constantinople shall be governor of the most delightful and opulent of them all, and such will be my gratitude that he will obtain more wealth and honor than he can dream of.”

Mohammed thus fired all the cruel passions of the undisciplined hosts of his vanguard.

Neither pen nor tongue can fly fast enough to describe the wild impetuosity of their attack as they precipitated themselves upon the reverse side of the moat, one hundred feet wide and six thousand paces long. The stone, the earth, the wood these carried were not sufficient to fill this mighty trench. The cannon and the sharpshooters behind the ramparts still existing, strewed thousands of Turks on the back of the exterior ditch. The smoke of the Greek artillery rolled back upon the combatants, so that the gunners and archers of Constantine could take aim only by the noise against the hosts of their invisible assailants. In vain the bullets and the grape shot filled the trenches with the Turks: these masses of men, pushed forward by their mere impetus, rushed headlong into the water and formed with the dead and dying a causeway of human bodies about the gateway of St. Romanus, which supplied a bridge for the battalions that pressed behind.

After this sacrifice of the “Scum of the Army,” thus put to death to secure victory, the three columns of the regular army, comprising two hundred and sixty thousand men, advanced in profound silence to the assault. The force of the fire of the nine thousand brave defenders was already exhausted by this desperate struggle of two hours. To protect them was this ditch now nearly filled up with earth and men and crumbling walls. The purple mantle of Constantine, as he appeared momentarily on the summits of the shattered walls, served as a target for the Tartars, and an inspiration to the Spartans and Italians inside. Strong yet in their broken walls, in their towers and in their artillery, in their despair they repulsed the mad rushes of these torrents of men as with wild cries, under cover of clouds of arrows and with glistening scimitars they charged again and again along the whole line on port and continent. For three terrible hours the carnage continued, and fifty thousand Ottomans rolled into the ditches or into the sea. The huge balls of Constantine tearing into these solid columns piled the ground with dead; stones, rocks, beams and Greek fire, crushed, burned, and mutilated those who tried to scale those wrecks of towers.

The three column heads halted, wavered and ebbed a moment towards the camp of Mohammed. A shout of victory rose from behind the ramparts, and a chanting of hymns from the heart of the city. Constantine hurried from gate to gate to encourage the hope of his soldiers, who were done nearly to death.

But their joy was vanishing. Mohammed wavered only a moment, then stirred by the cries of his Janizaries, who still stood motionless about his tent, yet burning with fury to avenge the rebuff of the army, he turned and launched them like a mighty thunderbolt to the deserted center of attack—the gate of St. Romanus.

The presence of the Sultan brandishing his battle-mace, the shame of forsaking their sovereign, the reproaches of the Janizaries rallied the shaken columns and the battle was on as fierce as ever. Mohammed promised a kingdom to the first man who should take and hold a rampart.

At this juncture his heroic Justiniani fled his standard, though the Emperor pleaded with him by the panic that would follow his flight; but there may be bounds to human courage when men fight for glory, and not for country or for faith, and he fled. It proved the rout of the besieged.

The Italians followed their general. The Janizaries, at fearful loss, swarmed over the walls. Constantine, flinging off his purple mantle and retaining but the arms and the uniform of a common soldier, that it might not be mutilated, fought to the last breath between the inner and the outer wall at the breach of the gate of St. Romanus, that the Turks might enter the imperial city only upon the dead body of its fallen Emperor. Thus did Constantine by his heroic death put to eternal contrast and eternal shame the dastardly degeneracy of his own nation and the miserable cowardice and selfishness of the Christian nations of western Europe.

The story is soon finished. As the troops rushed through and over the deserted walls, a hundred thousand panic stricken men and women fled to the church of St. Sophia. The sight of this unarmed and helpless multitude disarmed the fury of the soldiers, who, remembering the promises of the Sultan, began each to seize his captives and his. The Greeks held out their hands to be tied with cords or saddle girths; women and girls were tied by their girdles or their veils. Nuns were torn from the altars and from their convents with naked bosoms, outstretched hands and dishevelled hair. The cries of mothers, children and nuns were heartrending: even the Ottomans themselves were affected by it. Yet sixty thousand captives thus bound came forth from convent, hovel, or from palace, traversed for the last time the streets of their desolated city to be carried into captivity into all the cities and the tents of Asia.

The pillage lasted eight hours without exhausting the riches of an empire. The coined treasure was more than four million ducats, the uncoined gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, vases and ornaments of palaces and churches was incalculable. One hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts warmed the baths of the barbarians. But at the close of the day Mohammed entered at the head of his Janizaries to restore order. He proceeded at once to the Church of St. Sophia. The soldiers were still engaged in pillaging its treasures: and one of the barbarians even in his presence continued the work of destroying a precious marble of the sanctuary. Mohammed struck him a blow with his club saying: “I have abandoned you the slaves and the treasures, but the monuments belong to me.” The soldier was borne off dying from the church.

Accustomed to Arabian and barbarian magnificence—Constantinople dazzled him as she sat in her grandeur the Queen of two continents on the shores of the Bosphorus:—

“Earth hath no fairer sight to show

Than this blue strait, whose waters flow,

Bordered with vineyards, summer bowers,

White palaces and ivied towers.”

Mohammed after having admired the grandeur of the edifice, the elevation of the dome—a second temple upheld in air by one hundred columns of porphyry, of rose-colored marble or serpentine, mounted the altar and offered a Mussulman prayer: then ordered that this church, the most magnificent and majestic which Christianity had yet constructed should become the first Mosque of the Conquerors of Constantinople. The cross was torn down, the pictures of the saints destroyed, and Muezzins mounting to the dome chanted for the first time to the desert streets of the Metropolis of Christianity in the East, the well-known call: “God is God; God is great; Come to prayer.”

As the architects in his presence began to remove the mosaics of colored glass which formed the pictures in the ceiling we are told that Mohammed cried out: “Stop, confine yourselves to covering over these mosaics with a coat of lime so that they may not scandalize the believers but do not tear from the ceilings these marvelous incrustations. Who knows but that they may be uncovered at some future day in another change of fortune and of destination of this temple.”

That hour of Destiny has not yet struck the hour of deliverance, and the lime still covers the walls and the Muezzins still call the faithful to prayer above the noise and din of the busy streets of a fallen city once the glory of a Christian Empire.

From St. Sophia Mohammed proceeded to the august but desolate palace of a hundred successors of the great Constantine but which in a few hours had been stripped of its pomp of royalty. A passing reflection on the vanity and vicissitudes of human greatness caused him to repeat an elegant distich of Persian poetry:—

“The spider has woven his net in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”

The fifth day after the conquest he consecrated by a formal act the liberty of conscience accorded by the Koran to the vanquished. He claimed for the Mussulmans only half the churches leaving the rest to the Christians. The patriarch Gennadius led in pomp to the palace clothed in his pontifical robes and in the midst of a cortége of priests, received from him the investiture of the patriarchate. “It is my wish,” said the Sultan, “to give the Christians and their pontiffs the same rights and the same protection that they enjoyed under your emperors.” He even attended in person the pomps and ceremonies of the Christians, as an impartial of the two religions which henceforth were to divide his people.

Before the death of Mohammed in 1459, by his many conquests of the neighboring states and peoples he had consolidated his empire: and it stood forth a fearless conqueror until in 1571 the battle of Lepanto marked the turning point in the history of the Ottoman power.

We here turn aside for a brief hour from the stream of historical narrative to consider some of the results of Ottoman misrule which has for more than four centuries controlled an empire in Eastern Europe almost as large as France, in one of the most delightful and beautifully varied regions on the continent and which yet holds its peoples in the relentless grip of the Dark Ages.

Weighed in the balances of the humanity, the culture, the Christianity and the civilization of the dawning century, Turkey is in every way found wanting and soon may appear the hand of fire to write on the black pages of her awful atrocities, “Thy days are numbered. Thy kingdom shall be destroyed and given to another.” How long shall the blood of her slain cry aloud in the ears of Christendom, yet in vain still cry aloud? The consciences of England and America must give answer to that cry of blood or be themselves weighed in the balances in the day of the Lord at hand.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BULGARIAN MASSACRE.

We must pass over in silence a period of four hundred years in the history of the Ottoman Empire to open its blood-stained pages in our own era at the narrative of the Bulgarian massacres. The centuries and the peoples have been under the rule of the barbarian; the story is one of continued persecution, outrage, and massacre. The Turk never changes. What he has always done he always will do. And as long as any Christian lands or people remain under his power and at his mercy, so long will there be discontents, disturbances, revolts and massacres. The only way to end these is to end the rule of the Turk. Reform—not to say regeneration, is an impossibility. He is an alien in race and religion. His spirit is fierce and fanatical: his rule that of the dark ages, the rule of a tyrant without conscience or remorse.

In the early part of this century the oppression of the Turk became unbearable, and throughout the empire the Greek Christians rose in rebellion.

Europe was at last horrified by the massacre on the island of Chios, April 11, 1822, when the entire population of forty thousand Greeks was put to the sword. Bravely did the Greeks fight for their freedom. The Sultan called to his aid the Khedive of Egypt, and for three years did they ravage Crete and the Peloponnesus, committing every crime and fiendish outrage that even a Turk could think of from 1824 to 1827. At last Byron roused the spirit of England. The patience of Europe was worn out. England, France and Russia united to crush the power of the barbarian and to set free his victims, as the wild beast would not let go his prey till it was dragged out of his teeth.

In November, 1827, was fought the great battle of Navarino. The Turkish and Egyptian fleet was destroyed. Greece was saved.

The Russian protectorate over the Eastern Christians was confirmed and renewed: and also her right to free navigation in the Black Sea and the straits. Scarcely had this “fit of generous enthusiasm on behalf of the struggling Greeks” passed, than England under another minister began to regret the part she had taken. The glorious victory of Navarino was spoken of as an “untoward event.” Austria and France shared in her misgivings. She suddenly began to talk about the necessity of muzzling the Russian Bear, and upholding Turkey in behalf of British interests.

Ostensibly through fear of Russian aggression, but really from the preponderance of commercial interests, England has now for more than sixty years been the upholder and defender of the Turkish government. The sarcasm of Freeman, the historian, is cutting and pitiless as he reviews the policy of England up to the hour of the terrible outrages perpetrated against the Bulgarians, and her crime against humanity that followed the fall of Plevna.

Through fear of Russia, England induced the powers to sign a convention in 1841 by which it was agreed that no foreign fleets should enter the straits in time of peace.

The result of this convention was to shut up the fleet of Russia in the Black Sea, making of it to her, merely an inland lake.

By a successful stroke of policy Louis Napoleon III., President of the Republic of France, had himself elected Emperor in November, 1852. To signalize his accession he sought to pose as an ally of England. It was his policy to pick quarrels with the great military powers of Europe and then get some other nation to help him out. He began with Russia over the holy shrines in Jerusalem by seeking to have the privileges of the Latin Church enlarged. The Greek Church appealed to the Czar of Russia, the head of the Church, and then it was carried to the Porte.

In the spring of 1853, Prince Menchikoff was sent to Constantinople. Firstly, to negotiate on the question of the shrines, which question was settled with Russia’s acquiescence. Secondly, to extract from Porte a note confirming the treaties that had conferred on Russia the Protectorate of the Christians of the Ottoman Empire.

The second demand was made necessary by the renewed exactions under which some of these populations were then suffering: as it “happened,” says an English writer, that Omar Pacha, at the head of a Turkish force, was operating against the Christians of Montenegro. And something of the sort was always happening somewhere. For the Turkish policy towards the Christian has always been the same from the beginning of its power and will continue the same to the end.

When the English Ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, returned to Constantinople, in April, 1853, after an absence of eight months, he was directed “to warn the Porte that the accumulated grievances of foreign nations which the Porte is unable or unwilling to redress, the mal-administration of its own affairs * * * may lead to a general revolt among the Christian subjects of the Porte * * that perseverance in his (the Sultan’s) present conduct must end in alienating the sympathies of the British nation and make it impossible for Her Majesty’s government to overlook the exigencies of Christendom exposed to the natural consequence of his unwise policy and reckless mal-administration.”

The demand of Russia was refused and Prince Menchikoff left Constantinople May 21st, 1853.

A few days later the Sultan issues a firman in which he promises again that he will maintain all the rights and privileges of the Greek Christians, and appeals to his allies.

He was merely throwing dust in the air for the wind to blow away, though he thought he could fool Europe with his waste breath.

On the 13th of June the allied English and French fleets anchored in Besika Bay, the nearest point they could reach without the violation of the treaties.

The Czar Nicholas at once ordered his army to cross the Pruth and enter Moldavia, July 2d. Yet this occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia could not be considered an invasion of the Ottoman territory, nor a “Casus belli, per se,” for these provinces were autonomous and under Russian protection since the treaty of Bucharest, while according to the same treaty the Turks had no right to send troops into their territory.

Taking Armenian Prisoners to the Grand Zaptie Prison.

The unanimous judgment of Europe was expressed in what is known as the “Vienna Note” and in urging its acceptance upon the Porte they practically acknowledged the justice of the Czar’s demand and signed their own condemnation in the war that ensued.