When the earth had grown dry, and grass was flourishing, the Khan moved in person, with fifty thousand of the Crimean and Astrachan hordes, to help Doroshenko and the insurgents. The Khan himself, and his relatives, the petty sultans, and all the more important murzas and beys, wore kaftans as gifts from the Padishah, and went against the Commonwealth, not as they went usually, for booty and captives, but for a holy war with “fate,” and the “destruction” of Lehistan (Poland) and Christianity.
Another and still greater storm was gathering at Adrianople, and against this deluge only the rock of Kamenyets was standing erect; for the rest of the Commonwealth lay like an open steppe, or like a sick man, powerless not only to defend himself, but even to rise to his feet. The previous Swedish, Prussian, Moscow, Cossack, and Hungarian wars, though victorious finally, had exhausted the Commonwealth. The army confederations and the insurrections of Lyubomirski of infamous memory had exhausted it, and now it was weakened to the last degree by court quarrels, the incapacity of the king, the feuds of magistrates, the blindness of a frivolous nobility, and the danger of civil war. In vain did the great Sobieski forewarn them of ruin,—no one would believe in war. They neglected means of defence; the treasury had no money, the hetman no troops. To a power against which alliances of all the Christian nations were hardly able to stand, the hetman could oppose barely a few thousand men.
Meanwhile in the Orient, where everything was done at the will of the Padishah, and nations were as a sword in the hand of one man, it was different altogether. From the moment that the great standard of the Prophet was unfurled, and the horse-tail standard planted on the gate of the seraglio and the tower of the seraskierat, and the ulema began to proclaim a holy war, half Asia and all Northern Africa had moved. The Padishah himself had taken his place in spring on the plain of Kuchunkaury, and was assembling forces greater than any seen for a long time on earth. A hundred thousand spahis and janissaries, the pick of the Turkish army, were stationed near his sacred person; and then troops began to gather from all the remotest countries and possessions. Those who inhabited Europe came earliest. The legions of the mounted beys of Bosnia came with colors like the dawn, and fury like lightning; the wild warriors of Albania came, fighting on foot with daggers; bands of Mohammedanized Serbs came; people came who lived on the banks of the Danube, and farther to the south beyond the Balkans, as far as the mountains of Greece. Each pasha led a whole army, which alone would have sufficed to overrun the defenceless Commonwealth. Moldavians and Wallachians came; the Dobrudja and Belgrod Tartars came in force; some thousands of Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis came, led by the terrible Azya, son of Tugai Bey, and these last were to be guides through the unfortunate country, which was well known to them.
After these the general militia from Asia began to flow in. The pashas of Sivas, Brussa, Aleppo, Damascus, and Bagdad, besides regular troops, led armed throngs, beginning with men from the cedar-covered mountains of Asia Minor, and ending with the swarthy dwellers on the Euphrates and the Tigris. Arabians too rose at the summons of the Caliph; their burnooses covered as with snow the plains of Kuchunkaury; among them were also nomads from the sandy deserts, and inhabitants of cities from Medina to Mecca. The tributary power of Egypt did not remain at its domestic hearths. Those who dwelt in populous Cairo, those who in the evening gazed on the flaming twilight of the pyramids, who wandered through Theban ruins, who dwelt in those murky regions whence the sacred Nile issues forth, men whom the sun had burned to the color of soot,—all these planted their arms on the field of Adrianople, praying now to give victory to Islam, and destruction to that land which alone had shielded for ages the rest of the world against the adherents of the Prophet.
There were legions of armed men; hundreds of thousands of horses were neighing on the field; hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, of sheep and of camels, fed near the herds of horses. It might be thought that at God’s command an angel had turned people out of Asia, as once he had turned Adam out of paradise, and commanded them to go to countries in which the sun was paler and the plains were covered in winter with snow. They went then with their herds, an innumerable swarm of white, dark, and black warriors. How many languages were heard there, how many different costumes glittered in the sun of spring! Nations wondered at nations; the customs of some were foreign to others, their arms unknown, their methods of warfare different, and faith alone joined those travelling generations; only when the muezzins called to prayer did those many-tongued hosts turn their faces to the East, calling on Allah with one voice.
There were more servants at the court of the Sultan than troops in the Commonwealth. After the army and the armed bands of volunteers marched throngs of shopkeepers, selling goods of all kinds; their wagons, together with those of the troops, flowed on like a river.
Two pashas of three tails, at the head of two armies, had no other work but to furnish food for those myriads; and there was abundance of everything. The sandjak of Sangrytan watched over the whole supply of powder. With the army went two hundred cannon, and of these ten were “stormers,” so large that no Christian king had the like. The Beglerbeys of Asia were on the right wing, the Europeans on the left. The tents occupied so wide an expanse that in presence of them Adrianople seemed no very great city. The Sultan’s tents, gleaming in purple silk, satin, and gold embroidery, formed, as it were, a city apart. Around them swarmed armed guards, black eunuchs from Abyssinia, in yellow and blue kaftans; gigantic porters from the tribes of Kurdistan, intended for bearing burdens; young boys of the Uzbeks, with faces of uncommon beauty, shaded by silk fringes; and many other servants, varied in color as flowers of the steppe. Some of these were equerries, some served at the tables, some bore lamps, and some served the most important officials.
On the broad square around the Sultan’s court, which in luxury and wealth reminded the faithful of paradise, stood courts less splendid, but equal to those of kings,—those of the vizir, the ulema, the pasha of Anatolia, and of Kara Mustafa, the young kaimakan, on whom the eyes of the Sultan and all were turned as upon the coming “sun of war.”
Before the tents of the Padishah were to be seen the sacred guard of infantry, with turbans so lofty that the men wearing them seemed giants, They were armed with javelins fixed on long staffs, and short crooked swords. Their linen dwellings touched the dwellings of the Sultan. Farther on were the camps of the formidable janissaries armed with muskets and lances, forming the kernel of the Turkish power. Neither the German emperor nor the French king could boast of infantry equal in number and military accuracy. In wars with the Commonwealth the nations of the Sultan, more enervated in general, could not measure strength with cavalry in equal numbers, and only through an immense numerical preponderance did they crush and conquer. But the janissaries dared to meet even regular squadrons of cavalry. They roused terror in the whole Christian world, and even in Tsargrad itself. Frequently the Sultan trembled before such pretorians, and the chief aga of those “lambs” was one of the most important dignitaries in the Divan.
After the janissaries came the spahis; after them the regular troops of the pashas, and farther on the common throng. All this camp had been for a number of months near Constantinople, waiting till its power should be completed by legions coming from the remotest parts of the Turkish dominions until the sun of spring should lighten the march to Lehistan by sucking out dampness from the earth.