of Timour by Ahmed-ben-Arabschah, describes the citadel as inaccessible to conquerors.

The neighboring city of Mardin and the whole province of Kurdistan submitted, after some vicissitudes, to the arms and policy of Idris. The fortress of "Oblivion," thus named from the horror of its dungeons, the cities of Nizibe and of Dara, which rise adjacent to the banks of the Tigris at the point where it passes into northern Mesopotamia, followed the fate of Diarbekir. Nizibe, formerly celebrated, was no more visible but by its ruins; Dara, surrounded with walls sixty feet high and ten feet thick, showed at a distance its sixty towers on the horizon. Mossoul, which the Tigris only separates from ancient Nineveh, which Noureddin had embellished with mosques and with palaces by the hand of the artists of Bagdad, and which has given by its feminine industry the name to the cloth called muslin, an aerial tissue designed for turbans, was at the same time wrested from the Persians and annexed to the Ottoman empire. Ancient Edessa, a city environed like an island by an arm of the Tigris, possessed successively by Alexander, by the Persians, by the Arabs, by the Crusaders, by the Kurds, passed from Ismael-Schah to Selim. The whole region between the Euphrates and the Orontes became an Ottoman province. Idris delivered to the chieftains of the different tribes the standard, the drum and the horsetails, insignia of the sovereignty of these new feudatories. The Ottoman empire owes to its policy still more than to its arms these provinces where it had received birth, of which it knew the language and the manners, and which it rather seduced than conquered to the yoke of the Turks. Idris was one of those neogtiators who are themselves alone worth an army. Selim, who appreciated his genius, designed him to pacify and organize Egypt after the conquest. But death removed Idris before his time; his name, his writings, and his pacific conquests have immortalized his services to the Ottomans.

BOOK EIGHTEENTH.

I.

SCARCELY had the spring of the year 1516 dissolved the snows of Mount Taurus-a barrier like the Alps between Turkey and Syria-than Selim I. put in motion his grand vizier Sinan-Pasha with a vanguard of forty thousand men on Cæsarea of Cappadocia. Sinan-Pasha was to march thence towards the Euphrates by the Iron Gates. The Iron Gates open Syria between two precipices of the Taurus cleft asunder by a convulsion of the earth.

The Sultan was disguising still, by an oblique march from the Iron Gates upon the Euphrates, his design of invading Syria and Egypt. Sinan-Pasha was supposed only to borrow the extreme border of Syria, to the end of conquering the Persian country between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and of going to protect Mecca and Medina against Ismael-Schah. The Mamelukes of Egypt and Syria were not deceived by these pretexts of encroachment upon their territory. They advanced with a numerous cavalry as far as the Iron Gates to dispute the passage with Sinan. Selim, informed by Sinan of this assemblage of the Mamelukes, which intercepted his route, convened the divan to deliberate on a declaration of war upon the masters of Egypt and of Syria.

The pretext of the impiety of the Mamelukes in pretending to oppose the pious crusade of the Ottomans to Mecca and Medina, authorized the declaration of war in the eyes of the faithful. Selim, according to the precept of the Koran, which says: " You must not punish your enemy before apprizing him by a manifesto," sent Karadja-Pasha and the grand judge of the army to the Sultan of Egypt to bid him "to reflect or to tremble."

This Sultan was at that time Kanssou-Ghauri, raised to

this military sovereignty by his courage and by the will of the Circassian Mamelukes. He replied to this message only by assembling fifty thousand men at Aleppo, second city of Syria, fronting the defiles of the Taurus, and which covers at once the route of Damascus and that of Beyrout.

II.

Selim I., starting from Constantinople immediately after Sinan, was already at Aïntab, at ten marches from Aleppo, with a hundred and twenty thousand men, the choice of the veterans of the empire. Kanssou-Ghauri sent him back his ambassadors, after having loaded them with irons and with verbal invectives, according to the usage of the Circassian warriors. He sent with them nevertheless an Egyptian ambassador to propose to the Turkish Sultan to remove all motives of war by undertaking to act as mediator between him and Schah-Ismael. Selim, to render the quarrel more irreconcilable, had the hair and the beard shaven off the envoy of the Mamelukes, and had him led to the frontiers of Syria, stript of his turban, coifed with a woman's bonneť, mounted on a lame and bare-boned ass, for the purpose of exciting the laughter of the people.

To sustain these outrageous insults, Selim debouched with sixty thousand men into the plains of Syria, between Aleppo and the foot of the Taurus. A vast pasturage named the prairie of Dabik was the field of battle of the two armies. Selim, who dreaded the cavalry of the Mamelukes, renewed against them the tactics to which he owed the victory of Tauris against the Persians. He established in his front a rampart of wagons and of camels to break the impetuosity of the charges of the Circassians, and he masked upon the two flanks an artillery by so much the more formidable that the Mamelukes had hitherto disdained the use of it in open field. The battle was, on the side of the Circassians, but a charge and a flight. Terrified by the number of the Ottomans, dismayed by the impassable obstacles opposed by Selim to their horses, cannonaded right and left by the fire of the guns which a curtain of Janissaries covered and uncovered by turns, they abandoned their Sultan and galloped off towards Aleppo. Kanssou-Ghauri, aged over eighty years, was the last to turn reins to save at least the honor of his race. Surrounded by a cloud of spahis, he was hurled from his

horse by a tschaousch who cut off his head, and took it to Selim attached to the pommel of his saddle by the white beard. The Sultan, indignant at this outrage to old age, to the throne, and to heroism, had the tschaousch put to death for his sole recompense. Having entered Aleppo on the traces of the fugitive Mamelukes, Selim found there a million of ducats in the treasury of the Egyptians, and heaps of barley and wheat for the provisioning of his army. The inhabitants of Aleppo, enslaved to a foreign race, received the Turks as liberators. The reign of the Circassians was but the yoke of a soldiery. Masters for masters, the Syrians preferred the newest.

Aleppo at that time reckoned within its walls two hundred thousand inhabitants, rich and industrious. Bounded on one side by the Orontes and the delightful valley of Antioch, on the other by the Euphrates, its territory and its commerce made it the rival of the opulent Damascus. Entire Syria could not hesitate to follow the fate of its capital. Selim stopped there but the time requisite for the establishment of a government. Abandoning the seaboard of maritime Syria to its own fate, he left Mount Lebanon on his right, and advancing through the fertile valley of Baalbeck, between Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, he encamped a few days after upon the table-lands which overlook the queen of Mesopotamia and of Syria, Damascus. The Arabs, the Druses, the Maronites, nations covering Lebanon and AntiLebanon with their warlike tribes, opened to him of themselves the gates of Damascus.

The aspect of this city made him almost forget at a first view the majesty and the marvels of Constantinople. Lying at the foot of the last mountain stages of Anti-Lebanon from which the eye surveys, as from a promontory, its walls of black and yellow marble, its cupolas, its minarets as numerous as the forest of masts in a port; watered by the winding branches of the azure-tinted Chrysorhoas which part off around its ports and go to fertilize its gardens, and which afterwards reunite to form lakes in its plains; shaded by a circular forest of fruit trees, which let fall their products upon pastures as rich as those of the Alpine valleys; capital of the desert, port of the caravans of Bagdad, of which you see from aloft the long files of camels ploughing slowly the plains, unlimited save by its sky of rose and azure; peopled by four hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom the palaces, the fac

tories, the shops, emit a buzz of life through the sultry airDamascus by its climate, by its soil, by its industry, its magnificence, its monuments, its population, its reminiscences, would have sufficed for the desires of a conqueror less insatiable than Selim. Its history consecrated it no less than its splendor in the eyes of the Turks. "Symbol of beauty on the face of the earth," say of it the Mussulman poets of Arabia, "plumage of the bird of paradise, necklace of the celestial doves, Irem of unnumbered columns; " honored by the Prophet himself, who had visited it during his journeys in Syria, with a verse of the Koran; in which he writes that "the angels of God have spread their wings upon this city; "abode of the Khalifs before Bagdad, adorned with a mosque superior to that of Cordova, of Jerusalem, and of Cairo, the roofs of which are supported by forty columns of porphyry, of serpentine, of rose marble, and of Egyptian granite; wherein six lamps swung on chains of gold illuminated the cupola, and which has a copy of the Koran from the hand of Ali himself, the favorite and secretary of the Prophet; pilgrimage of the whole East, tombs of the widows of Mahomet, elevated by Noureddin to the rank of the most lettered cities of Asia; neighbor to the holy cavern of Rouboua where the Mussulmans go to venerate the cradle of the prophet Jesus; presenting at every step, within its walls and without, monuments, vestiges, tombs of prophets, of saints, of sages, of poets, of Islamism,-the prestige of Damascus to the Turkish army exalted still the grandeur of the possession. Selim sojourned there at leisure to relish the conquest of it, and converse with its men of lore, of letters, or of sanctity, of which the names were venerated throughout Islamism. He forgot a moment there the cares of war, to compose some mystic poetry known by the title of the "Divan of the Persian poems of Selim."

III.

Selim I. resumed not till the following spring the route of Egypt. Egypt, distracted by factions striving for the throne, after the death of the old Sultan slain at Aleppo, was agitated without union under the Mamelukes. Sinan Pasha advanced by Gaza, the last city of maritime Syria before entering the desert of El-Arish, which separates Syria from Egypt. His artillery, as at Aleppo, dispelled the vanguard