MAHOMET OR MOHAMMED II.
By EDWARD GIBBON.
[Surnamed the Great and the Victorious, born 1430, died 1481. His main title to fame is that he consummated the dreams of his predecessors, and after a siege of nearly two months, with a force of two hundred and fifty thousand men and a large fleet, carried the city of Constantinople by storm on May 29, 1453.]
The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our first attention to the person and character of the great destroyer. Mahomet II was the son of the second Amurath; and though his mother had been decorated with the titles of Christian and princess, she is more probably confounded with the numerous concubines who peopled from every climate the harem of the sultan. His first education and sentiments were those of a devout Mussulman; and as often as he conversed with an infidel, he purified his hands and face by the legal rites of ablution. Age and empire appear to have relaxed this narrow bigotry; his aspiring genius disdained to acknowledge a power above his own, and in his looser hours he presumed (it is said) to brand the Prophet of Mecca as a robber and impostor. Yet the sultan persevered in a decent reverence for the doctrine and discipline of the Koran. His private indiscretion must have been sacred from the vulgar ear, and we should suspect the credulity of strangers and sectaries, so prone to believe that a mind which is hardened against truth must be armed with superior contempt for absurdity and error. Under the tuition of the most skillful masters, Mahomet advanced with an early and rapid progress in the paths of knowledge; and, besides his native tongue, it is affirmed that he spoke or understood five languages—the Arabic, the Persian, the Chaldean or Hebrew, the Latin, and the Greek. The Persian might indeed contribute to his amusement, and the Arabic to his edification; and such studies are familiar to the Oriental youth. In the intercourse of the Greeks and Turks, a conqueror might wish to converse with the people over whom he was ambitious to reign; his own praises in Latin poetry or prose might find a passage to the royal ear; but what use or merit could recommend to the statesman or the scholar the uncouth dialect of his Hebrew slaves?
The history and geography of the world were familiar to his memory; the lives of the heroes of the East, perhaps of the West, excited his emulation; his skill in astrology is excused by the folly of the times, and supposes some rudiments of mathematical science; and a profane taste for the arts is betrayed in his liberal invitation and reward of the painters of Italy. But the influence of religion and learning was employed without effect on his savage and licentious nature. I will not transcribe, nor do I firmly believe, the stories of his fourteen pages, whose bellies were ripped open in search of a stolen melon, or of the beauteous slave whose head he severed from her body, to convince the Janizaries that their master was not the votary of love. His sobriety is attested by the silence of the Turkish annals, which accuse three, and three only, of the Ottoman line of the vice of drunkenness.
But it can not be denied that his passions were at once furious and inexorable; that in the palace, as in the field, a torrent of blood was spilled on the slightest provocation; and that the noblest of the captive youth were often dishonored by his unnatural lust. In the Albanian war he studied the lessons, and soon surpassed the example, of his father; and the conquest of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and two hundred cities—a vain and flattering account—is ascribed to his invincible sword. He was doubtless a soldier, and possibly a general. Constantinople has sealed his glory; but if we compare the means, the obstacles, and the achievements, Mahomet II must blush to sustain a parallel with Alexander or Timour. Under his command, the Ottoman forces were always more numerous than their enemies; yet their progress was bounded by the Euphrates and the Adriatic, and his arms were checked by Huniades and Scanderbeg, by the Rhodian knights and by the Persian king.
In the reign of Amurath he twice (A.D. 1451, February 9—A. D. 1481, July 2) tasted of royalty, and twice descended from the throne; his tender age was incapable of opposing his father’s restoration, but never could he forgive the viziers who had recommended that salutary measure. His nuptials were celebrated with the daughter of a Turkoman emir, and after a festival of two months he departed from Adrianople with his bride to reside in the government of Magnesia. Before the end of six weeks he was recalled by a sudden message from the divan, which announced the decease of Amurath and the mutinous spirit of the Janizaries. His speed and vigor commanded their obedience; he passed the Hellespont with a chosen guard, and at a distance of a mile from Adrianople, the viziers and emirs, the imams and cadis, the soldiers and the people, fell prostrate before the new sultan. They affected to weep, they affected to rejoice. He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-one years, and removed the cause of sedition by the death, the inevitable death, of his infant brothers. The ambassadors of Europe and Asia soon appeared to congratulate his accession and solicit his friendship, and to all he spoke the language of moderation and peace. The confidence of the Greek emperor was revived by the solemn oaths and fair assurances with which he sealed the ratification of the treaty; and a rich domain on the banks of the Strymon was assigned for the annual payment of three hundred thousand aspers, the pension of an Ottoman prince, who was detained at his request in the Byzantine court. Yet the neighbors of Mahomet might tremble at the severity with which a youthful monarch reformed the pomp of his father’s household; the expenses of luxury were applied to those of ambition, and a useless train of seven thousand falconers was either dismissed from his service or enlisted in his troops. In the first summer of his reign he visited with an army the Asiatic provinces; but after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the submission, of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design.
The Mahometan, and more especially the Turkish casuists, have pronounced that no promise can bind the faithful against the interest and duty of their religion, and that the sultan may abrogate his own treaties and those of his predecessors. The justice and magnanimity of Amurath had scorned this immoral privilege; but his son, though the proudest of men, could stoop from ambition to the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit. Peace was on his lips, while war was in his heart; he incessantly sighed for the possession of Constantinople; and the Greeks, by their own indiscretion, afforded the first pretense of the fatal rupture.
From the first hour of the memorable 29th of May, when the beleaguered city was carried by storm, disorder and rapine prevailed in Constantinople till the eighth hour of the same day, when the sultan himself passed in triumph through the gate of St. Romanus. He was attended by his viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of whom (says a Byzantine historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as Apollo, and equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals. The conqueror gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the strange though splendid appearance of the domes and palaces, so dissimilar from the style of Oriental architecture. In the hippodrome, or atmeidan, his eye was attracted by the twisted column of the three serpents; and as a trial of his strength he shattered with his iron mace or battle-axe the under jaw of one of these monsters, which in the eyes of the Turks were the idols or talismans of the city. At the principal door of St. Sophia he alighted from his horse and entered the dome; and such was his jealous regard for that monument of his glory, that on observing a zealous Mussulman in the act of breaking the marble pavement, he admonished him with his cimeter, that, if the spoil and captives were granted to the soldiers, the public and private buildings had been reserved for the prince. By his command the metropolis of the Eastern Church was transformed into a mosque, the rich and portable instruments of superstition had been removed; the crosses were thrown down, and the walls, which were covered with images and mosaics, were washed and purified and restored to a state of naked simplicity. On the same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the muezzin or crier ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan, or public invitation, in the name of God and his prophet. The imam preached, and Mahomet II performed the namaz of prayer and thanksgiving on the great altar where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Cæsars. From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: “The spider hath wove his web in the imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab.”
LORENZO DE’ MEDICI.
By JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
[Surnamed the “Magnificent,” born 1448, died 1492. The Medici family had in the latter part of the fourteenth century become one of the most influential and powerful in the Florentine Republic. It had amassed vast wealth in the pursuits of commerce, and spent it with the munificence of the most public-spirited princes. Cosmo de’ Medici about the year 1420 became the leading man of the state, and practically exercised control over the republic, though without definite authority, as ruler. The splendor of the family culminated in his grandson Lorenzo, who for a quarter of a century held the powers of the state in the palm of his hand, and made the city of Florence the most brilliant center of literature, learning, art, and refined luxury in Europe. Though he curtailed the liberties of the people, the city reached under him the highest degree of opulence and power it had ever attained. Eminent as statesman, poet, and scholar, the enthusiastic patron of authors and artists, munificent in his endowment of schools and libraries, he was the most favorable example of the Italian tyrants of the middle ages; and his life was the source of a stream of influences which helped to revolutionize his own age and that which succeeded it.]