Scarce had the victorious Sultan got together three thousand Janissaries before the walls of Gallipoli, than he presented himself at the gates, covered only by the cloud of arrows which those three thousand pages launched upon the ramparts. The mere presence of Amurath put to flight through all the gates that opened on the plain of Thrace the terrified remnants of the bands of Mustapha. This Sultan had scarce time to arrive before them at Adrianople, and pack up hastily his treasures, to set them upon mules, and fly again towards Mount Hemus, hoping to find a refuge and an avenger in the Prince of Servia.

Amurath, more prompt in the pursuit than Mustapha, clogged by his treasures, was in flight, traversed Adrianople without stopping, had his troopers mounted on the fresh horses left behind by Mustapha, and got up with him at Yénidjé, a village of the mountains at a day's journey from the capital. The suite of Mustapha dispersed at the unexpected approach of the Turkish cavalry, and abandoned their master to his fate. Mustapha had only time to hide himself in a gorge of Mount Togan, which covers with its forests the bed of the torrent of Toudja, and to squat among the roots of an oak on the edge of the water. The mute gesture of one of his slaves revealed his hiding-place to Amurath, who dragged him with his own hands out of his recess, as if a sultan should be put in chains only by another sultan.

Amurath led back to Adrianople the apocryphal emperor loaded with irons and maledictions by this same peasantry who had risen in a body a few days before, to set an adventurer, dear to their imagination, upon two thrones. Amurath, to convince the incredulous populations of Mount Hemus of his death, had a gibbet erected on the ramparts of Adrianople, and suspended thereon his rival, leaving the body in chains to dangle at the will of the winds until the eagles and ravens of Mount Hemus had devoured the Sultan of Adrianople and left his bones bare to bleach in the sun.

XIV.

Without losing time for vengeance, Amurath II., after having consolidated his reign at Adrianople, led his army, still glowing with ardor and intoxicated by his victories, to the walls of Constantinople, to demand of the old and perfidious Manuel reparation for the treacheries to his sworn

faith in the assistance given by the Greeks to Mustapha. The fickle people of Constantinople, who had forced the old Emperor to deliver Mustapha in order to annoy Amurath, besieged with crowds and clamors the palace of the Blackernes to exact now from the court more servile concessions to the vanquisher of Mustapha. The terror which had seized the city was turned to frenzy against the ministers and negotiators of Manuel, who, cried the people, were too slow to satisfy the just anger of the Sultan. Theologos, first interpreter of the court of Manuel, having been sent by his master to Amurath to mitigate his exigencies, and not having yet succeeded in concluding a peace of which the conditions were too humiliating for the Emperor, was accused by public rumor of protracting the negotiations for the sake of his personal ambition. The people with loud cries demanded his head; the archers of the Greek island of Candia, who formed the guard of the palace, weary of defending the accused, ended with joining themselves in the demand for his execution from the Emperor. The feeble old Emperor threw Theologos to the populace to divert its rage from his own family. The Candiotes dragged the innocent minister beneath the palace windows, tore out his eyes, lacerated him with wounds, and threw him, blind and bleeding, into a cistern, where he expired a short time after.

His house, forced, pillaged, fired by the populace of Constantinople, contained the vases of gold and the rich presents which he was charged by the Emperor to bear in secret to Amurath to obtain more favorable conditions. Those innocent treasures appeared to the people an accusing witness of the frauds and embezzlements of Theologos. Calumny survives even punishment.

Meanwhile, Amurath, who knew and loved Theologos, often sent by Manuel to the court of his father Mahomet I., was indignant at this immolation of an innocent man. He suspected another minister of Manuel, Pyllis the Ephesian, a rival of Theologos, to have fomented the sedition. Pyllis the Ephesian was at that moment in the Sultan's tent to negotiate. Amurath had him put in irons, interrogated him by torture to wrest from him the avowal of his intrigues, and had him set upon a pyre already kindled to expiate his crimes in the flames. Pyllis escaped death only by apostasy; he abjured Christianity and took refuge in the faith of Mahomet.

XV.

During the blockade of Constantinople, which had now no outlet but by its sea, Amurath II., dispersing his troops in the country still dependent upon the Greek Empire, made a desert of the orchards, the gardens, the villages, and the pleasure houses, with which the luxury of a double empire had covered and decorated the environs of the first capital of the universe. To stifle more effectually the breath of the city of the Paleologuses, Amurath constructed an exterior rampart, which extended from the Cyclopean Palace, of which the walls overhung the Sea of Marmora, along to the lofty palace of the Blackernes which commanded the port of the Golden Horn from the height of the imperial hill. This rampart, surmounted with wooden towers filled with earth, faced the antique ramparts and the marble towers which hemmed round the capital of Constantine with a semicircle of constructions, wherein Greek art, bas-reliefs, cornices, capitals, triumphal arches, had made the fortifications of a vast city equal to the walls of a temple.

The rumor, spread by Amurath in Asia and Europe, that the wealth of the Greeks would be abandoned to the soldiers, had swollen his camp with cattle traders, with slave merchants, with Jewish usurers, with Christian traffickers, who were awaiting this prey, by far the richest of the three worlds. Swarms of mendicant dervishes, run from Diarbekir, from the Taurus, from Caramania, "were already partitioning in idea," say the Genoese and Venetian historians of the camp of Amurath," the rich monasteries, and the consecrated virgins who peopled the numberless convents of that monkish city.

The old Sheik Bokhari, to whom Bajazet-Ilderim had married one of his daughters, joined Amurath with an escort of five hundred disciples on horseback. An oracle of the Ottomans for three reigns back, the Sheik Bokhari, to whose wisdom in counsel was attributed the gift of prophecy, entered the camp in the midst of the army prostrated at the feet of his mule. He shut himself up in an humble tent, and spent the night in invoking Allah. His disciples, during this meditation of the master, apostrophized from aloft the towers the guards of Constantinople, showed them with a gesture the immense expanse of the tents of Amurath, and defied them to call to their assistance their Christ, so often disowned in his sanctity by their vices and their mendacity.

XVI.

The following day the Sheik Bokhari, mounted on a warhorse and attended by his five hundred companions, advanced sabre in hand up to the walls of Constantinople, at the point opposite the gardens of the palace of the Blackernes. It was the 26th June, 1422. Like a herald of the wars of chivalry, the old man, brandishing his sabre against the city, shouted three times the war-cry, Allah and Mahomet.

It was the signal for the assault. Two hundred thousand men on each side, all equally erect on the ramparts and on the towers, obscured the air with the clouds of arrows, of stones, of smoke, and of fire. This unmoving struggle, which extended its lines of combatants from the Wooden Palace, now the Seven Towers, bathed by the Sea of Marmora, along to the river Lycus, an humble stream which strays through the meadows of a valley in the basin enclosed by the Golden Horn, embraced the entire space over which Byzantium is not intrenched by its three seas.

Byzantium regained some remnants of Roman courage in this extremity. Her palaces, her temples, her gods, her wealth, her women, her children, her liberty, her life, the whole empire was trembling, praying and fighting behind this rampart, which in breaching was to open a passage for a deluge of Ottomans. The old Emperor, Manuel, aged nearly eighty years, seemed to have lived to that age only to witness from his bed of death the last day of his people. He yielded his last breath while the battle was raging. John Paleologus, his son, was fighting during his father's agony at the gate Saint-Romain, the grand triumphal outlet of Constantinople into the country.

The whole people, down to the women, the old men, the children, the priests, the monks, the nuns, were become an army on that supreme day; some seeking safety, others death, all martyrdom. The two religions fought like the two peoples. The shouts of Allah and of Christos clashed above the din of conflict. Each army expected a miraculous triumph. The nature of the arms was the only real miracle; the Turks, who had as yet neither artillery, nor miners, nor Greek fire in their army, and with whom the horse and sabre were the sole implements of warfare, could not possibly assail ramparts that were fortified by seven centuries, unless with scaling-ladders crushed by rocks which were rolled

down upon them from the battlements. The soldiers of Paleologus, who fell by the Turkish arrows, were replaced instantly upon the breach, from a population of two millions. The abyss of dust, of fire and steel, which separated the two ramparts, was filled only with the slain. Not a stone of the solid walls and massive towers of Constantinople gave way before the Ottoman machines composed of wood and earth. The day declined without relaxing the fervor of the battle, but also, without advancing by a single step the victory. Each party seemed alike to invoke the advent of night in order to impute its failure to the intervention of darkness.

The superstition of the two peoples helped at last to separate the combatants. A mysterious virgin, robed in a gold embroidered pink dress, and her face radiant with the dying splendors of the day, appeared of a sudden upon the walls, athwart the dust, to both Greeks and Turks. At this natural or preconcerted spectacle of a woman of celestial beauty protecting the city of miracles, the Greeks consoled, and the Ottomans in consternation, ceased the struggle. An immense clamor of gratitude to the Panagia (the miraculous virgin of the Byzantines) arose through the air and threw a panic among the credulous dervishes of Bokhari. Amurath II., as superstitious as his people, ordered the army to burn its useless towers, abandoned his wooden circumvallation, and returned to his camp. This fruitless assault of twelve hours between two armies who could not come to close quarters cost little blood to the two nations. Only some hundreds of bodies were picked up from the trenches. But the assault of two hundred thousand Ottomans, thus victoriously repulsed by an effeminate city, restored the confidence to the Greeks which it took away from the Ottomans, and prolonged by a reign the duration of the empire.

XVII.

A new manœuvre of the Greeks, and this time legitimate, since it was meant to create a diversion to their ruin, recalled at the same moment Amurath II. into Asia. The court of Byzantium had anew succeeded in shaking Asia beneath his throne.

One of those Greek renegades of the stamp of Djouneyd, whom the Ottoman sovereigns often brought to their