Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue
The righteous and all such as honor Truth.”
—Samson Agonistes.
The Turks, from their first appearance upon European soil, have been a danger to the peace and civilization of Christendom. When their fierce hordes crossed the Bosporus, bearing aloft the standard of the crescent, it was a boast among them that the sign was but a temporary emblem of their power, and that when she had waxed to the fulness of her orb—donec Lunæ totus impleatur orbis, as was insolently said to an ambassador of the West—her silvery sheen would change to the golden glory of the sun, and blaze from an eastern sky over prostrate and Mohammedan Europe.
With one foot upon Constantinople and the other on Rome,[78] the colossus of Islam would have projected an awful shadow over the Christian world. Efforts tremendous and long sustained were made to lift itself up; but this it could never do, and it has fallen and is broken, but in its fall covers fair provinces and crushes a multitude of unfortunate Christians. If the Turks have ceased to be a stirring menace to the nations, we must ascribe the curbing of their power to divine Providence, which brought forward at critical times a number of men mighty by the sword or
through the word—Huniades, Matthias Corvinus, Ladislas of Hungary, St. John Capistran, Cardinal Julian Cesarini, Scanderbeg, St. Pius V., Don John of Austria, Mark Anthony Colonna, Sobieski, and others—who fought their advance towards the Adriatic and along the Danube. As this great Ottoman inundation rose higher and higher, until it seemed as though the work of the church for a thousand years would be swept away in fewer days, God spoke: “I set my bounds around it, and made it bars and doors; and I said: Hitherto thou shalt come, and shalt go no further: and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves.” (Job xxxviii.)
In the fifteenth century several independent princelings, called despots by the Greeks, were in possession of the rich and populous district of Albania, which stretches along the coast of the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas, and corresponds geographically to the Epirus of the ancients. One of the noblest of these chiefs was John Castriot, who came of an ancient family in Lower Macedonia. His wife, Woïzava, presented him with nine children, and among them that George, born in 1404, who was destined to become the defender of his persecuted race, the Christian Gideon, as he was hailed by Pope Paul II., and
the hero of his native country against the Turks. Several omens are reported to have accompanied his birth and signified his future greatness. Without denying that these may have been something more than mere accidents or freaks of the imagination, we only certify that as the child grew up he developed a strength of character and an aptitude for arms which his after-successes amply justified and the inherent nobility of his parents had prepared.
“Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis;
… nec imbellem feroces