court in the quality of tutors to their sons, was educating in the palace of Broussa the two young brothers of Amurath. The senior of these children, named also MustaphaSultan, was twelve years of age; the second, only eight. Elias, the Greek tutor, at the instigation of Paleologus, took off by night his two pupils from the palace of Broussa and led them to the court of the Caramans, always ready, as has been seen, to rise in arms against the house of Othman.

The Caramans saluted Mustapha with the title of Sultan, under pretext that he was the son of a Servian princess, spouse of Mahomet I., whereas Amurath was but the son of a beautiful odalisque. They gave Mustapha an army of Turks to conquer Broussa and the throne which the promptitude of Amurath had snatched from him unjustly.

The army of Caraman, profiting by the absence of Amurath, who had left Asia without troops, advanced to the gates of Broussa, and summoned the capital to recognize in the young pretender the true master of the empire. The inhabitants, in consternation, neither daring to proscribe the blood of Mahomet, nor too far to expose themselves to the resentments of Amurath, deputed their elders with homages and presents to Mustapha, but declared that they were not free to open the gates to a foreign army. Elias, irritated, but powerless, conducted his pupil and his army to the second imperial city of Bithynia, Isnik, and took it after a siege of thirty days. From Isnik, the young Emperor Mustapha came clandestinely to Constantinople, where he was received as sovereign by the Paleologuses; he concluded a treaty with them, like his father and his uncles.

XVIII.

During the absence of the young Emperor, Amurath II., repassing suddenly into Asia, availed himself at once of corruption and force to smother this unforeseen competition for the throne in the blood of a child of whom the crime was the crime of his governor. Elias, allured by Amurath with the hope of being made governor of Anatolia as the price of his perfidy towards his pupils, sold himself as readily to Amurath as he had sold himself to the Caramans. He prevented, by a thousand artifices and delays, the Caramans from taking with them the young Sultan for safety into their

dominions when they were themselves retiring before the army of Amurath.

Amurath, informed secretly by the traitor of the retreat of Mustapha, in the environs of Isnik, sent before him Mikhal-Oghli, with a troop of horse, to take possession of his two young brothers. Their faithful vizier, Tadjeddin, defended their asylum in single combat with Mikhal-Oghli, to give them time to leave the bath and take to flight. But during this heroic duel, wherein Mikhal-Oghli fell wounded mortally by the yataghan of Tadjeddin, Elias, binding Mustapha with cords, conducted him to the vanguard of the army of Amurath, at the gates of Isnik, and delivered him to Mezid-Beg, the head groom of the Emperor. The poor child was hanged on the branches of a fig-tree, in a garden by the gate of the city, so that the soldiers might defile, in passing, before the body. The second of the brothers, though of an age which forbade intelligence of the crime, was also made away with by the atrocious prudence of the ministers of Amurath.

Thus the principle of primogeniture, which the constitution lacked, was already supplied three times within three reigns by fratricide. In the imperfect legislations of the East, blood fills up the void of laws.

XIX.

Amurath II. stayed at Isnik only the time that was requisite to pay funeral honors to his brothers, and to send them to the tomb of their father in the green mosque of Broussa. He marched direct upon the principality of one of his most powerful vassals, the Prince of Castemouni, Isfendiar, who had fomented and sustained the rebellion of his brothers. Isfendiar, betrayed in the battle by his own son, Prince Kasim, and wounded by the hand of his own vizier, Yakschi-Beg, fled to Sinope, a maritime town of the Black Sea, which he made his capital.

Pursued to Sinope by the Ottoman army, Isfendiar could purchase pardon and peace from Amurath but by giving him in marriage his daughter, the celebrated princess of Sinope, whose beauty chanted by the poets and the historians of the times, inflamed the amorous imagination of the young Sultan. This passion of Amurath for beauty in his VOL. II.-2

wives, often agitated, from the recesses of his palace, the politics of the East.

XX.

His victories did not give him complete assurance of the throne, especially in Asia where his feudatories, so powerful and so restless, made submission but to meditate fresh rebellions. The numerous treacheries of Elias-Beg and of Kasim-Beg, by which he had profited, were brooding in his own council. The rivalries that existed between his five viziers might turn to ingratitude and vengeance against himself. He began by satisfying largely the ambition of the three sons of Timourtasch, his companions of boyhood and war, by giving to Oumour-Beg the principality of Kermian; to Ouroudj, the rank and title of beglerbeg or prince of princes (generalissimo); to the third, Ali-Beg, the principality of Saroukhan. These three viziers, thus rewarded and removed to a distance, reduced to two the number left in exercise of the imperial authority. Amurath was sure of the fidelity of the first, Ibrahim-Pasha, the friend of his father, the founder of his own fortune, the able colleague of the unfortunate Bayezid-Pasha in the two months posthumous government which, by disguising the death of Mahomet, had secured the throne to his eldest son.

But the second, Aouz-Pasha, more ambitious than became a vizier, had taken over the army an ascendant which he thought of imposing on the young Sultan, or in turning seditiously to his own account by getting the throne to be offered him through a barrack popularity fomented dexterously among the Janissaries. Aouz-Pasha distrusted the umbrage of the Sultan, as the Sultan distrusted the artifices of his vizier. The vigilant Ibrahim watched and warned his master. Amurath, who had hitherto temporized through prudence, felt that the hour was come either to strike or be stricken.

One day as the divan assembled to deliberate on some commotion among the Janissaries, Amurath, as if by an accidental and familiar gesture, placed his hand upon the breast of Aouz-Pasha, and heard the ring of a cuirass beneath the robe of the vizier. Perceiving this hidden armor brought to the councils of his master, the Sultan, convinced of either an insulting precaution, or a culpable design,

ordered the headsmen to deprive the vizier of his eyes. This punishment, executed, without provoking a revolt, upon the favorite of the army, culpable at least for his imprudence, and the honorable exile of the three sons of Timourtasch, too powerful in Asia for courtiers, confirmed, by the silence and the terror of the army, the authority of the Sultan. All was hoped from a prince who knew the art of recompensing; all was feared from a master who dared to punish; all was yielded to a Sultan who showed himself resolved to reign.

Thenceforth the faithful Ibrahim, whom he familiarly called Lala (father), was the sole vizier, head and arm of the Sultan.

XXI.

The festivities of the marriage to the princess of Sinope marked the return of Amurath to Adrianople. The young widow of Khalil-Pasha was sent to bring the bride to the capital. Her triumphal entry into Adrianople rivalled the nuptial pomps of Constantinople and of Samarcand. Three young sisters of the Sultan were married on the same day, one to Kasim-Beg, brother of the bride and son of Isfendiar; the second to Karadja-Tchelebi, governor-general of all the Turkish provinces of Asia; the third to the son of the grand vizier Ibrahim-Pasha.

The sovereign princes of Servia and Wallachia attended the nuptials at Adrianople less as allies than as vassals. The Sultan, who now desired nothing but peace, sent them in his name to make rich presents to the King of Hungary, Sigismund, in token of deference and reconciliation. The King of Hungary responded by European presents, Flemish cloths, Frisian horses, Malines lace, golden-pommelled saddles, Utrecht velvets, and golden florins of Hungary.

Amurath was intoxicated with love of the princess of Sinope.

XXII.

Of all his princely neighbors and all his princely vassals who had agitated the commencement of his reign, there remained for him to pacify or to subdue but old Djouneyd. Age had small effect upon the restlessness and perfidy which formed the tissue of the long career of this personage. After

having made and unmade three sultans, he now mused on ruining a fourth, always ungrateful for the pardon which he received, or always uncontent with the price of his treacheries.

The day following the night on which he had deserted the camp of Mustapha on the Rhyndacus, Djouneyd arrived with sixty horsemen of his retinue at Tyra, a delightful town of his ancient dominions in the shady valley of the Strymon. There, after having reposed his horses and strengthened his escort, by a host of his old vassals proud of joining his standard to humble Smyrna, their rival in opulence and commerce, Djouneyd crossed in a day the plain of BurghazOwa, through which winds the Caïster, and fell upon Smyrna, left without master or garrison during the struggle between the two sultans.

Smyrna, Phocea, the borders of the gulf, the cities and villages of Ionia, from the Black Cape along to Ephesus, seeing the reappearance of a prince by whom they had been long governed, and who represented himself as acknowledged and restored by Amurath, had supplied him, in a few days, with treasures and soldiers to reconstitute his power. In vain the Prince of Aïden, uneasy and jealous at such a neighbor, had marched against him with his army; Djouneyd, anticipating him with six thousand combatants in the gorges of Ephesus and Tyra, debouched boldly into the basin of Burghaz-Owa, and resting his left upon a lake and his right upon the marshes of the Caïster, awaited the Prince of Aïden.

The two armies, after stopping to survey each other for a moment without being able to come to an engagement on account of the marshes that separated them, committed the fate of the battle to a duel to death between the two chiefs on the only strip of solid ground between the two camps.

Djouneyd, despite the weight of eighty years, which the ardor of his ambition prevented him from feeling at the moment of reconquering or of for ever losing his old dominions, launched his steed against the horse of the young Pasha of Aïden with the impetuosity of despair. After a fierce struggle between the two knights, in which skill and vigor had for a long time kept death suspended above their heads, Djouneyd, lifting his club to strike without minding lest he might be stricken, felled with the blow the Pasha of Aïden motionless at his horse's feet.