These Janissaries formed a disciplined body of regular infantry. In the seventeenth century the Turks clung to the sabre, the musket, and even bows and arrows, as their arms, neglecting the pike, "the queen of infantry weapons," as Montecuculi calls it, just as afterwards they neglected the bayonet. But in the use of their arms every man of the Janissaries was a trained expert. The Turkish horsemen were famed for their rapidity of action, being generally more lightly armed and better mounted than the Germans or Poles. The Spahis, or royal horseguards, were the flower of the cavalry. The feudal levy from lands held by military tenure, swelled the numbers of their armies, and every province wrested from the Christians provided more fiefs to support fresh families of soldiers. Thus the children and lands of the conquered furnished the means for new conquests. Light troops, who were expected to live by plunder, spread far and wide before an advancing Ottoman host, eating up the country, destroying the inhabitants, and diverting the attention of the enemy. The Ottoman artillery was numerous, and the siege pieces of great calibre. Auxiliaries, such as the Tartars of the Crimea, the troops of Moldavian, Wallachian, Transylvanian, and even Hungarian princes, made a formidable addition to their forces. These armies lay, a terror to the inhabitants, a constant anxiety to the rulers, upon the frontiers of Germany and of Poland;—a black storm of war, ever ready to break in destructive energy upon them.
Whatever schism divided Turks and Persians, towards Europe at least, from the Caspian to Morocco, Islam presented an unbroken front, contrasting powerfully with the bitter divisions of Christendom. Massinger, in the "Renegade," puts into the mouth of a Moslem what many a Christian must have thought of with shame and terror:—
"Look on our flourishing empire, if the splendour,
The majesty, and glory of it dim not
Your feeble sight; and then turn back and see
The narrow bounds of yours, yet that poor remnant,
Rent in as many factions and opinions
As you have petty kingdoms."[1]
United Islam, which had preceded her western rival Spain in greatness, seemed also destined to long outlive that power's decay.
When Spain, in the sixteenth century, had been at the zenith of her power under Charles V., the Turks, under their great Emperor Solyman, had been not unworthy rivals to her. Even then Solyman had penetrated to the walls of Vienna, in 1529, and probably the lateness of the season, October, and the absence of his heavy artillery, stuck deep in the soil of Hungarian roads, saved the capital of the Austrian dominions more effectually than the valour of the garrison or the relieving forces of Charles could have done. Then the tide of Turkish power touched its farthest limit, but the fear of its return was not destroyed till after the lapse of one hundred and fifty years. Till after the siege of 1683, it is said that a crescent disgraced the spire of St. Stephen's, the cathedral of Vienna—a sign to avert the fire of Turkish gunners.