rich the Tartar tribes of Armenia and Caramania. "Here," says one of these victims of the conquest, was seen a soldier robed in sacerdotal costume; another carried dogs in a leash, coupled by the gilt cincture of a pontiff; a third drank his wine from a chalice; a fourth used as a plate the sacred patens; innumerable wagons were seen conveying through the provinces furniture, clothes, women, girls, children, to the conquered capital. Droves of men, chained two by two, were mingled with herds of camels, of oxen, and of horses, which the victors were driving slowly towards the mountains."

Thus ended, after a thousand years of splendor, the last capital of the Roman Empire, become the capital of a people of whom the Romans knew not even the name. The Empire was so exhausted before the annihilation of the city of Constantine, that the fall of Constantinople was scarcely noticed in Europe, and the Turks sacked one of the mother cities of the Christian world without affecting the Christian world with either horror or pity. The Romans had wearied the admiration, the degenerate Greeks the contempt of the Universe. A single man protested against the fortune of the Ottomans, and this man was a chieftain of mountaineers unknown to the world-Scander-Beg.

Let us return to Epirus.

BOOK THIRTEENTH.

I.

THE entry of Mahomet II. into Adrianople after the conquest of Constantinople, recalls the triumphs of the Cæsars at Rome. A crowd of senators, of grand officers of the palace of Constantine, of wives and daughters of the first families of the Byzantine Empire, followed on foot in the dust the horse of the conqueror. Among the number, but in mourning, and her eyes streaming with tears for the loss of her husband and her sons, was seen the princess, wife of the grand duke Notaras, executed with his children for having conspired after pardon. This widow died of grief and shame a few days after the triumph she had decorated. Mahomet, who had noticed her, as has been seen, at Constantinople, for her virtue and her talents, did not impute to her the faults of her husband; and as if to protest against his own cruelty in having subjected her to the harsh law of the conqueror, he had her buried with the Christian pomp of her religion, and he erected her a mausoleum.

Vengeance followed close upon triumph. The grand vizier, Khalil, fourth vizier of the family of Tschendereli, the cause of the two boyish dethronements of Mahomet, the object of a secret resentment in his soul, suspected also of intelligence with the Christians before and during the siege of Constantinople, had at last fulfilled, perhaps reluctantly, the promise which he made his master of giving him the capital of the Christians. The subordinate viziers, and the troops, to rid themselves of the blame of slowness and the failures of the first assaults, had often accused him of having an understanding with Constantine, to save the city and to conclude a peace, of which the Greeks would pay him secretly the price. There is no visible ground for these mur

murs and charges in the conduct of Khalil. Constantinople had fallen, in large part owing to his preparations. Envy alone or ingratitude could have accused him. It is probably to the greatness of the service that he owed this reward. Scarce had he led the Sultan back victorious to Constantinople, than Mahomet had him called before him, reproached him with his pretended connivance with Constantine and Notaras, of whom he had, said he to him, received presents to thwart the ardor of the Ottomans in the conquest of this remnant of an empire. Another day the Sultan, passing on horseback before the yard of a peasant where a chained fox was vainly endeavoring to get free: "Poor fool," said, with a bitter pleasantry, Mahomet to the fox in the presence of the grand vizier, "why hast thou not applied to Khalil to purchase thy liberty, thou wouldst not be there."

Khalil, sufficiently apprised by these indications of the danger that impended over his head, affected lassitude of business, and prepared for a pilgrimage to Mecca, to sanctify, said he, his old age, but in reality, to let envy deaden and the storm pass over. But he waited too late to accomplish this design. Mahomet II., who wished to owe but to himself, in the eyes of the Ottomans, the conquest of the first city of the East, pressed by the enemies of Khalil in the divan and by his own resentments, had the grand vizier thrown, as he came out from the council, into the prison of Adrianople. After forty days of anguish and of vain supplication of the Sultan, the headsmen entered his dungeon, left him scarce time to make a last prayer, and cut off his head. This great man, too faithful to Amurath II., and too faithful to his son, after him, paid the penalty of his too great services with the resignation of a sage. "Throw my head," said he to the chiaoux, "at the feet of the Sultan; I have now nothing else of any grandeur to give him."

The head of Khalil was exposed in the morning at the gates of the seraglio. The one hundred and twenty thousand gold ducats which composed his immense fortune, passed into the treasury of Mahomet II. It was Khalil who opened that long series of immolated viziers which ensanguine the annals of the Empire. Men too great to be subjects, whom the people and the sovereign fling alternately to each other in expiation; the people, because they hate them; the prince, because he fears them.

II.

A Servian, Mahmoud-Pasha, son of a Greek woman, who had not a drop of Turkish blood in his veins, was appointed grand vizier in the place of Khalil. Mahmoud, carried off in infancy by the Turks of Selymbria, had been, like Scander-Beg, brought up among the pages. He had pleased Mahomet II. by his intelligence and his fidelity in the management of the imperial treasury.

The year following the capture of Constantinople was marked at Adrianople but by the changes of viziers and by the expedition of Tourakhan into Greece and Epirus, to complete the extinction of the Byzantine Empire by the subjection of the brothers or the relatives of the Paleologuses. The ambassadors of the Christian powers of Italy and of the Danube came successively to compliment Mahomet II. on his victory. A rapid expedition into Servia, conducted by the Sultan in person in the spring of the ensuing year (1455), gave him the opulent city of Novomonte, where mines of silver thenceforth flowed into his treasury.

After having delivered the army to his lieutenants, Mahomet, to prepare his subjects for the approaching change of capital, went with his court to Constantinople, where he inaugurated the new seraglio with the fêtes and revelries of the harem. All bent before him in Servia, in Greece, in Macedon, on the Euxine, in Asia, and in the Archipelago. The religious order of St. John of Jerusalem itself, sent him disguised under the name of presents the tributes they paid him for some of their islets. Such independence, even nominal, no longer suited Mahomet. He had just subverted an empire; he could not tolerate the rivalry of a monas. tery of warriors. After some fruitless negotiations to convert the presents into a tribute, Mahomet, offended at this insolence, assembled in all his ports the dispersed fleet of Constantinople, to besiege Rhodes, where the pride of the knights defied his arms. Hamza, the captain-pasha, armed and charged with troops and guns three hundred galleys or vessels of all sorts, to carry to Rhodes the law of his master. Hamza paraded vainly these three hundred sail before the islands and before Rhodes. He returned after two months' navigation without bringing to the Sultan other than words and an ambiguous treaty, wherein these islanders at the same time recognized and contested the sovereignty of the Turks.

"If thou hadst not been the friend of my father," said bluntly the Sultan to his admiral, "I would have thee flayed alive."

A fine young man, Greek by birth, a favorite of the seraglio of Mahomet, named Younis, received the title of captain-pasha. Younis, scouring the sea and the harbors of the Archipelago, confined himself to sending the Sultan a young Greek woman of great beauty, contrary to treaties, on board a vessel of Mitylene. Doria, a Genoese noble, who possessed the sovereignty of one of those islands, averted the ravages of Younis by sending his only daughter a present to Mahomet. The wrath and ambition of this Prince yielded only to those living spoils that bedecked his harem.

III.

He employed the other spoils of the Archipelago in the decoration of his new capital. He built eleven new mosques, beside the transformed churches, for the service of his people in the city. The most memorable of these is the Mosque of Mahomet II. Eight colleges or medresses, high schools of theology and of jurisprudence, of history, of poetry, surround this mosque. Innumerable cells for the gratuitous accommodation of the students and the professors are built above a range of lecture-rooms. An imaret or perpetual kitchen for the poor, where the students and the poor generally find twice a day their rations gratis; an asylum for the insane, a hospital for the sick, a caravansera or hotel for the traveller without shelter, a public library, a bathing cistern for man and animals, warm baths for the people, in fine, a cemetery shaded with cypresses for the eternal repose of the faithful, complete the group of edifices comprised within the precincts of the Mosque of the Conqueror. A civilization which conceived these monuments, the art which decorated them, the charity which consecrated them to religion, to intellect, to the miseries of the people, seem to rival the monuments and the institutions of the Vatican.

Contrasted with this, however, is a sanguinary law, founded, like all State crimes, on a pretended public safety, erecting fratricide into a dynastic right in the person of sultans mounting the throne. "The majority of lawyers," says the preamble of this law of blood of Mahomet II., "have declared that those of my sons or my grandsons who shall