XXXII.

Scarcely had Soliman II. ratified the truce and dismissed the ambassadors, than he reappointed Ibrahim seraskier or generalissimo of the army of Persia, and sent him to Koniah, the capital of Caramania, to muster there the army, and to prepare for the campaign. Iskender-Tschelebi, an able administrator of the finances of the Empire, accompanied Ibrahim to Koniah as kyaya or lieutenant of the seraskier. His riches and his luxury equalled his influence with the troops. He had the genius of military strategy. Twelve hundred cavalry, the contingent of his domains in Asia, marched in his train; six hundred slaves, magnificently dresed and having the head adorned with embroidered bonnets, served his tents. Ibrahim hardly equalled the sumptuosities of Iskender, and dreaded to be outshone by his kyaya in the eyes of the troops and the heart of the Sultan. Guardian of the treasury of the army in quality of defterdar or minister of finance, Iskender-Tschelebi, although honest, gave, by his magnificence, room for suspicion. A base intrigue of Ibrahim gave body to these surmises. One night, during the march of the chariots that carried the treasure, a cry of thieves! thieves! raised by some soldiers in the confidence of Ibrahim, arose around the wagons and stopped the march of the army. Ibrahim ran up; he ordered the arrest of thirty of the guard escorting the treasure. These men, interrogated and prompted by the enemies of Iskender, declared in presence of the implements of torture that they were accomplices of Iskender in pillaging the wagons of the gold for him.

The grand vizier did not venture further for fear of chafing the authority of the Sultan, who had himself appointed the kyaya. The calumny, authenticated by the declaration of the guards of the treasury, sufficed to ruin gradually the rival of Ibrahim. Iskender, who foresaw his ruin in the lurking enmity of the grand vizier, sought to ruin him in turn, by advising him to go directly to the heart of Persia, at Tauris, where he must fall into some snare set by Tahmasp for his greed of glory. Ibrahim followed this counsel, and marched with an hundred and fifty thousand men upon that city. He entered it without battle, and addressed to the Sultan a triumphal recital of his conquests. Soliman, with an army of reserve, advanced himself upon Tauris.

He entered it a clement victor, the 27th September. The two armies united, encouraged by the inaction of Tahmasp and by the defection of his allies, directed themselves rashly upon Hamadan by impracticable routes, strewing their footsteps with horses and with camels dead of hunger. Ibrahim, attributing to Iskender, head of the staff of the army, these disasters, had him degraded from his functions of defterdar by Soliman. Bagdad at last opened its gates to the Sultan. It was the end of the glory of this expedition, in which Soliman wished to rival Alexander, the conqueror of Babylon. Bagdad, in his idea, was to be at the east of his vast empire what Belgrade was at the west.

The immemorial sanctity of this city of the khalifs added in the mind of the Ottomans, to its strength, its magnificence, its situation. Tradition had made it a city almost fabulous. It was the "House of Salvation," consecrated by the spiritual throne of the successors of the Prophet, armed apostles of the "law without shadow." Almanser, the second Abassid Khalif, had founded it near the ruins of Babylon on the eastern banks of the Tigris not far from the Euphrates. The fertility of its territory, scorched by the sun, but watered by two rivers, had given it the name of Eden or the garden, whence is derived Bagdad. Rice, dates, lemons, figs, oranges, citrons, melons, pomegranates, sugar-cane, raisins, apples, apricots, peaches, color the country with tints. of gold. The caravans of India, of Arabia, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, meet there to barter their natural productions for the precious stones, the elephants, the horses, the cloths of silk, of wool and of cotton of Hindostan. One hundred and fifty towers flank its walls, which enclose twelve leagues of palaces and bazars. Its quays, a natural ditch on the side of the Tigris, are constantly embarking travellers, pilgrims and merchandise for the Persian Gulf. The river envelopes it on two of its sides and fans it with the coolness and salubrity of the waters. The tombs of the saints of Islam are the mile-stones along the routes; their glistening cupolas shine afar to the view of the caravans, like the diamonds of a spiritual crown. The monumental tomb of Zobeïde, wife of Haroun-al-Raschid, attests there the magnificence of love and of grief. Arabian academies attract thither the sages, the students, the poets of the East. The pyramids of human bones, ill effaced by the sand, recall the conquest and the desolation of Timour. Soliman forgot

himself for four months in this capital, which reminded him at every step that he was master of the palace of the masters of the world. He visited the ruins of Babylon; he invoked, according to the superstitious rites of the orientals, the genii buried beneath the mounds of brick and rubbish It is there, according to the Persian traditions, that these genii render oracles of fortune and of ambition to the conquerors who consult them. It is there, also, that the simple camel-herds of the desert learn the charms which have the power of transporting to heaven the women whom they love. They then inhabit for a moment the morning star; they play upon a lyre whose strings are tresses of the moonbeams, and they lend to the sounds of this lyre the dances of the stars."

The heart of Soliman, already smitten to enslavement by one of those women, the dream of padischahs as of shepherds, was credulous to these evocations and superstitions of love. This woman, whom he had left reluctantly in his harem at Constantinople, and whose charms had competed in him with the passion for glory, was the young Russian slave, Roxelana, of whom the history will presently occupy so large a place in his life.

XXXIIL

Letters of victory dated from Bagdad and addressed by Soliman to all the princes of the world, informed them of the triumph of the Sultan. Ibrahim wrested during this sojourn an involuntary crime from his master. Under false appearances of embezzlement and treason, Iskender, delivered to the grand vizier by the Sultan, was hanged ignominiously in the market-place of Bagdad. His brother, more irreproachable still than he, was decapitated the same day. Eight thousand slaves of Iskender-Tschelebi were confiscated and joined to the personal slaves of the Sultan; seven of these young slaves, formed in the school of the defterdar for the service of the empire, became afterwards grand viziers. This iniquitous and vindictive murder, contrived by Ibrahim, gave a hint for the vizier's own ruin to the Sultan, should he desire a future pretext to get rid of him. The French ambassador, Laforest, came in the name of France to Bagdad to congratulate the Sultan on his triumphs in Asia. France seemed to have the instinct of the Ottoman alliance,

her best guarantee against the fears of a universal monarchy, whether of Spain, or of Germany, or of Russia. The two nations, athwart their different religions, identified themselves in one policy. France and Turkey have been alarmed for their existence only at the moment when Napoleon forgot this vital policy of France, through an ambitious compliance to the covetousness of the Russian Empire. present war expiates and rectifies this false diplomacy of the vanquisher of Austerlitz.

The

A first treaty under the name of "capitulations," assured to France for her subjects, her co-religionists, her commerce, the same liberty, security, justice and privileges in Turkey as in their native land. The two nations interdicted each other, reciprocally, the right common in those times of making prisoners of war slaves. It was the last treaty negotiated and signed by the grand vizier Ibrahim. Fourteen years of power and almost of sovereignty had exhausted the favors of fortune. The murmurs of envy and the suspicions of his master worked secretly against him. It has been seen by his murder of Iskender at Bagdad, and by the insolent ostentation of his power to the ambassadors of Charles V., that those murmurs and those umbrages were not without pretext. His head, ardent and enfeebled by the very excess of his prosperities, had become dizzy with ambition and ingratitude. An influence more secret, but more affectionate and more assiduous, began to counterweigh his influence in the soul of Soliman. The love of the Sultan, hitherto concentrated in the harem, was about to find access into his policy.

BOOK TWENTIETH.

I.

THE Sultana Validé, mother of Soliman, had introduced into the harem of her son, a slave, Russian, Polish or Circassian, of marvellous beauty, named Roxelana. Some French historians give this slave another origin. They pretend that she was born in the South of France, that the pirates of Tunis had kidnapped her an infant, from the coasts of Provence, and sold her at Constantinople to the chief of the eunuchs of the Sultana Validé. No authentic document, no probability even, justifies this romantic origin of the Sultana, who governed afterwards through the heart of Soliman the court and empire. All the contemporary historians, Greek, Ottoman and Italian, agree in styling her the Russian Sultana, whether it was that she was born in fact of Muscovite parents, or rather that, abducted, as was common at this period, by parties of Cossacks from the Poles or the Circassians, and sold by them to the Greek merchants of the Black Sea, she had been trafficked under the name of Russian in the slave mart of Constantinople. Her Caucasian features and her character, at once simple, seductive and savage, like that of the races born subject to slavery, seemed to give her more resemblance to the daughters of Circassia than to the women of Europe. She seemed ignorant herself of what rank she was born; she had known no family or country other than harems and eunuchs. Her beauty, according to the portraits or the traditions of the seraglio, attests rather that mixture of the Asiatic and Tartar blood, wherein the dark eyes, the silken lashes, the creamy paleness of the tint, the languor of attitude habitual to the Persian beauties, contrast with the rounded outline of the face, with the shortness of the nose, the thickness of the lips and the warm