the inhabitants, launch some in boats, some by swimming towards their galleys which take them off, and hear afar from the gulf the long continuous cry of the massacred city.

"The pillage and the carnage," relates the Greek Anagnosta, an eye-witness of this disastrous night, "transcended the hopes of the Turks and the terror of the Greeks. No family escaped the swords, the chains, the flames, the outrages of the Asiatics fierce for their prey. At the close of the day, each soldier drove like a herd before him, through the streets of Salonica, troops of women, of young girls, of children, of caloyers and anchorites, of monks of all the monasteries. Priests were chained with virgins, children with old men, mothers with their sons, in derision of age, of profession, of sex, which added a barbarous irony to nudity and death itself."

Twenty thousand slaves, besides the thousands of dead that lay scattered through the houses, in the temples and the streets, came forth from the gates of Salonica to go bewail their liberty, their honor and their chastity in the camp of the victors.

Amurath II., more voluptuous than cruel, regretting the word that he had pledged to the army, moved to a distance from the city during this shameful day in order not to hear the cry of this people sacrificed to his vengeance. He had his tent struck on the green and flowery banks of the Gallicus, a stream that winds down from the mountains through the orchards of Salonica. Horror and remorse pursued him into this retreat. He could not withstand the spectacle of this agony of an innocent people. He sent orders to stop the sack of the city; forbade that a single captive should be put to death; restored their liberty to all those who by the laws of war fell to the lot of the Sultan. He reserved also for his part of the conquest all the monuments and public edifices of Salonica which the fury of the assault had spared. He even restored to the inhabitants, who ransomed themselves in large numbers, their houses and the property which they enjoyed before the war against the Venetians. In fine, to repeople this magnificent capital left half empty, he poured into it the populations of some neighboring Greek towns who had submitted without resistance to his army. Not one among those populations had to save his life by changing his religion. Islamism made itself room sword in hand in Europe and Asia, but it left their place to the other religions.

The Koran and policy ordained zeal, but without authorizing persecution.

XXVIII.

Thus changed for long to come the ownership of Salonica, that key of the sea, of Thessaly and of Greece, that rival of Smyrna and of Constantinople, that colony of Macedon, to which Thessalonica, sister of Alexander the Great, had given name. The Romans, after Alexander, foresaw the importance of a maritime capital seat at the bottom of the last gulf of the Mediterranean, a harbor for their vessels, and a depot for their land armies between Byzantium and Athens, between the East and the West. The Emperors, jealous of attaching their memory to its monuments, had embellished it with triumphal arches and Corinthian colonnades, which bore upon their platforms the master works of Attic sculpture. Constantine, on embracing the religion of the Christians, had mutilated, but not entirely destroyed, these works of antique art. The traveller admires to-day the marble ruins of three religions overturned and prostrated in the dust by one another.

The Emperor Theodosius, by a vengeance worthy of barbarians, to punish an excitement of the people of Salonica in favor of a circus rider, had the inhabitants invited to the scene of their sedition, under pretext of public games, and caused the massacre of twelve thousand spectators of both sexes and all ages by his soldiers. The Normans, too, profaned, ensanguined and fired it in their conquests, by pillage, by ravishment, by butcheries, which equalled the atrocities of Theodosius. In fine, Amurath II. and the Venetians now quite demolished in disputing it.

The strength, the commodiousness, and the delights of its situation still retained or soon attracted to it a population of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants-Greeks, Epirotes, Jews, Ottomans, exercising there in peace, under the tolerance of the sultans, their worship, their usages, their commerce, their agriculture. Salonica is still erect in our day, stretching forth its two arms around its ports, as if to embrace the sea to which it is indebted for its wealth; resting on a range of hillocks backed by the sombre mountains of Thessaly, surrounded with cypresses, which seem to weep above so many generations of tombs, and surmounted

by its citadel of seven dismantled towers-a sign of ruin rather than of strength when the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Macedonians and the Turks have by turns hurled each other from off the ramparts, to lose or conquer this enslaved queen of the fairest gulf of the Mediterranean.

Salonica became, after the conquest of Amurath II., the rival of Broussa and of Adrianople, and the grand halt for the Turks towards their final conquest of Greece, of the Peloponnesus and the coveted shores of the Adriatic.

XXIX.

Already these provinces, detached from the empire of Byzantium by the partition which the Emperor Manuel had made of them among his seven sons, and by the conquests which the Ragusans, the Venetians, the Genoese, had distributed amongst them in large fiefs, were incapable of compact resistance to the vanquishers of Salonica. The large islands of Negropont and of Candia were held by the Venetians; the charming isles of Chio and of Lesbos, by the Genoese; Athens, Thebes, Acarnania, Epirus, Etolia, by the sons of a Sicilian adventurer, who disputed in arms with each other their inheritances, and called in by turns the Turks to arbitrate in their dissensions.

The city of Janina, seated like that of Cashmere on the margin of its lake, in a fertile and inaccessible basin of Albania, had offered and ceded itself voluntarily to Amurath II., to escape these lacerations of its provinces and those vicissitudes of domination, too feeble to be of any defense to it. Amurath, conformably to his treaty with the people of this opulent city, sent there the sons of some of the chief families of Adrianople to conduct the government in his name, and to compel the ambitious neighbors of Janina to respect an Ottoman possession. The beauty of the young Christian women of Epirus seduced the eyes of the young officers of Amurath. They demanded the maidens in marriage from their families. The difference of religion having been objected by the Epirotes, the young warriors posted themselves of a Sunday at the church gate, and took off by concerted violence eighteen of the most beautiful Albanian damsels from the arms of their mothers. No blood was spilt in this rape; and the parents consented to leave their daugh

ters in the arms of their ravishers. Hence the multiplication in Albania of families half Turkish, half Christian, who, in confounding the two races, confounded also often the two religions.

XXX.

A pestilence and an earthquake suspended for several months of the year 1430 the definite irruption of Amurath II. into Greece. The plague took off three brothers of Amurath who lived sequestered in the palace of Adrianople, and his able vizier, Ibrahim Tschendereli, son, grandson and father of viziers of the same name equally happy in their faithful administration of the empire. Amurath wept for his vizier as he would have wept for a father. The taste of pleasure, of meditation, and the voluptuous pleasures of the harem, which obtained mastery of him whenever he was not spurred by necessity, made him give up to his new vizier, Khalil-Tschendereli the policy almost hereditary of the divan. It is thus we see Louis XIV. in France, and even the Kings and parliaments in England, transmit the premiership from sire to son in the family of the Louvois, the Colberts, the Pitts, wherein the spirit of the government was become a domestic tradition, so to speak.

XXXI.

But the agitations of the Danube in Europe and of Caramania in Asia, left no long leisure to Amurath II. nor to his minister. The Despot of Transylvania, Brankovich, menaced his frontiers; then, menaced himself by the Venetians and the Germans, he implored the peace and alliance of Amurath. His daughter Mara, still a child, was sent by Brankovich to the Sultan, betrothed to the Sultan, and brought up with great care in the seraglio to the age of nubility. Her precocious beauty, which was soon to agitate the empire, made Amurath impatient for the hour of proclaiming her his second spouse.

Sigismund, King of Hungary, having provoked anew the Ottomans on the Danube, Amurath II. sent across the river his general Ali, son of Evrenos, formed to war under his father, as his vizier Khalil had been formed to politics by Ibrahim-Tschendereli. Ali-Evrenos inundated Transylva

nia in debouching like a torrent from the Iron Gates with fifty thousand Ottomans. Sixty thousand prisoners brought back by him into slavery, and innumerable herds of cattle, were the indemnity of this campaign, which Amurath had not commenced. A young German student, among the number of the captives, was destined to undergo twenty years of slavery in the tents and the palaces of the sultans, and bring back to his country the most intimate history of the manners and the events of that court.

XXXII.

The father-in-law of the Sultan, father of young Mara, who had again armed against Amurath II. during the Hungarian expedition, besieged and captured in Semendria by Evrenos, was condemned to lose his eyes and to languish till his death in the prison of Tokat in the depths of Cilicia. Two sons of Timourtasch, hereditary chiefs, like Evrenos, of the armies of the Sultan, ravaged anew the plains of Hungary, and brought back with them to Nicopolis such multitudes of slaves, that one of the most beautiful Hungarian maidens, put up for sale in the market of Nicopolis, was bought for a pair of sandals from the soldier who owned

her.

The Sultan, far from priding himself on these melancholy spoils, negotiated, in the midst of his triumphs, to acquire pacific alliances on the other side of the Danube. The Poles, sometimes allies, sometimes rivals of the Hungarians, appeared to him the nation fittest to counterbalance by a Turkish alliance the growing power of the Hungarians, whose affinities were rather with the Germans. He sent the ambassadors with costly presents to the King of Poland, Ladislas.

The Poles, one of those tribes emigrating in the night of pre-historic times from the table-lands of Tartary into the steppes almost as wild of Sarmatia, bare with the Russians, the Servians, the Transylvanians, the Sclaves, the Croats, the generic name of Sclaves, a name importing the Criers of War. This name described their genius; an equestrian people, lovers of unrestrained liberty, incapable of repose or stability, alike ready to cede its independence to a master through factious spirit, and to recover it from the oppressor by heroism, changing their government by mere fickleness of passion-republic, hereditary monarchy, elective