XXXVIII.

But winter, which already covered Mount Hemus with snow, saved the capital of the empire. Amurath II., intrenched in a defile which bears the name of the Gates of Trajan, because this Emperor had shut the gorge with a gate against the Barbarians, intrenched also in the defile of Soulouderbend-so called from the waters that defend it by artificial inundation, awaited Huniad upon these sole breaches of the continuous wall of the Balkans. Amurath, in sight of the Hungarian cavalry ready to escalade the defile, threw open upon the rapid steep of the Hemus the sluices wherein he had accumulated water frozen only on the surface. These waters, in rolling down in thin sheets over the paths which were to be ascended by the cavalry of Huniad, covered them during the night with a flake of solid ice, of which the inclination doubled the danger to the horses. Huniad and his army retired before this frost. The gates of Trajan, obstructed by Amurath with rocks rolled from the peaks of the Balkan, forced him to seek another passage. The less inaccessible defile of Isladi at last opened them Mount Hemus, after an assault wherein rocks, snows, blocks of ice, combated in vain for the Ottomans. Huniad, as the Hannibal of the Germans, had vowed to vanquish even nature to reach his enemies in the heart of the empire. A last battle waged by him in the plain of Yalowaz, at the foot of the Balkan, made him master of the delicious valley of Philippopolis and presently of the fertile basins of Adrianople.

XXXIX.

Whether it was the dissensions, which dissolve all confederacies after victories rather than after reverses, that hindered the Hungarian hero from pursuing his idea to the annihilation of the Turks in their capital without defence, or that the sudden return of Amurath, recalled from Asia, where he was also at war, by the dangers of Adrianople, intimidated the Hungarians, or rather that the young King of Poland and of Hungary, Ladislas, swayed by his council, wherein Huniad had enemies, was unwilling to give so much glory to a single man, Huniad came to a stop upon the southern peak of the Balkans, and leaving his army to for tify itself at Sophia and at Nissa, repassed himself precipi

tately the Danube with Ladislas. The king and the general came to triumph in their capital. He meditated for the ensuing spring another campaign.

XL.

He

The weariness of so many wars, and the wisdom of the grand vizier Khalil, counselled Amurath II. to repair his forces in a long peace. The reverses of his generals in his absence were misfortunes and not personal humiliations to himself. The pacification of Asia, the conquest of Salonica and of Epirus, doubled the strength of the empire in the east. He resolved to make in the west, upon the Danube, all the sacrifices compatible with the security of the Ottomans in Europe. The happiness of his people was in his eyes the first of glories. He himself had, as has been seen, a passion for leisure and for love, the natural genius of peace. despatched then fresh envoys to offer terms of arrangement to the different Christian princes, whose union formed the strength of Huniad, and to the King of Hungary himself. To Drakul, Prince of Wallachia, he restored his dominions; to the Despot of Servia, his kingdom and his two sons prisoners at Tokat, with their blind uncle; to Ladislas and the assembly of the Hungarians, mutual inviolability of their frontiers. Ladislas, encouraged by the recent wars of Huniad, hesitated; but the confederates, from whom he was expecting in spring contingents promised for the new campaign, being disinterested by Amurath, left the Hungarians to themselves. This retirement of the confederates forced Ladislas and the diet to peace.

Assemblies have not the constancy and love of glory of heroes. Huniad surrendered to the will of his country. The peace of Szegedin was signed between the Hungarians and the Turks, the 12th July, 1444. The two sovereigns ratified it, one by an oath on the Gospel, the other by an oath upon the Koran, thus taking, each, their God as witness and avenger of the sworn faith. A ransom of sixty thousand ducats, paid by Amurath to Ladislas, restored to the sister of the Sultan the husband whom she wept. Amurath thought of repose, a contemplative life and love-those chief

ambitions of his life.

XLI.

The death of his eldest son, Alaeddin, whom he cherished as the fruit of his first loves with the princess of Sinope, and for whom he destined the throne after having confirmed it, threw him into that melancholy peculiar to the happy of this world, whose felicity is saddened by the reflection of its own fragility. His other son, who afterward became Mahomet II., was still in infancy. This prince did not give signs in his boyish years of the impetuous virility which afterward signalized his reign. He derived from his mother, Helen, princess of Servia, second wife of Amurath, the feminine beauty, the timorous grace, and the deference, somewhat servile, to the will of his father and his teachers, which, in the women of the Sclavonic race, reveals the habits of their antique slavery. Amurath did not think himself destined to a long life. He feared that the throne might take his son unprepared in the discipline of arms and of government. He desired to exercise him in these arts while there was yet time, and to set him to govern under his eyes that he might repair the faults he committed, and come to his aid if fortune should doom him to adversities. To give up the government to a youth confided to able and faithful ministers whom he himself had formed, to remove to a distance from the capital, and to occupy himself, still living, with the meditation of things eternal, to witness from a distance a posthumous reign, to counsel it in case of error, to sustain it in case of danger, and to reign, so to say, twice, while putting off still young the governmental burden that irked his languor, such was the idea of Amurath, an idea of foresight for his son, of solicitude for the empire, of voluptuous philosophy for himself. Diocletian had the same lassitude in similar circumstances. Charles the Fifth accomplished it in Spain. Tiberius simulated it at Rome. Amurath II. renewed it in Turkey. The more worthy men are of reigning, the more they are tempted to abdicate a position which by its nothingness deceives no less the great in soul, than its exterior deceives the multitude who are possessed and scorned by the lords of empire.

XLII.

Amurath II. had, no doubt, less trouble in forming this

heroic resolution than in getting it accepted by the three ambitious and rival princesses, all still young, whom he had married, and who strove for the ascendant over his heart and his policy. If we may trust to contemporary historians, German, Ottoman or Greek, witnesses more or less initiated in the mysteries of the seraglio, these three princesses, equally beautiful, and worthy of enjoying exclusively the heart of their joint husband-the princess of Sinope, the princess Helen of Servia, and the young princess Mara, daughter of the Waywode of Transylvania agitated by their jealousies, their intrigues, and their hatreds, not only the court, but the ministry, the armies, the policy of Amurath.

A false idea is formed in Europe, on the faith of ill-informed writers, as to the lot of the princesses, Ottoman or Christian, espoused by the Emperors of Broussa, Adrianople or Constantinople. The notion is, that the seraglio, abandoned to polygamy, is but a park for odalisques doomed to serve disdainfully a master's passions. Neither religion, nor law, nor usage, nor history degrades in this manner the marriage or the condition of the wives, Mussulman or Christian, of the sultans, of the princes, of the powerful of the empire. There have been already seen, in the reigns of the first Amurath and of Bajazet-Ilderim, examples of marriages between the sultans and the princesses, daughters, sisters, nieces of the Emperors of Byzantium, or the Christian princesses of Servia, surrounded in the palace of Broussa with all the respect, all the honors, and all the liberties of worship accorded to the rank of empresses. They have been seen even to take with them their regular chaplain, and practise openly the Christian religion in the palace of their husband. We shall presently see even women who were not born princesses, reign, and even perpetuate during several reigns their dominion in the seraglio, with as much sway as Theodora over Justinian in the palace of Byzantium. This seraglio, which imagination represents as a prison, the abode of the sighs and the humiliations of the sultanas, although interdicted by Eastern manners to the eyes of men, contains not the less, in the shade of the vast enclosures of the harem, all the pomps, all the delights, and all the pleasures of Western palaces.

XLIII.

Marriage, in the law of Mahomet, although combined,

by a concession to the usages of Arabia, with the tolerance of a plurality of wives, is an act at once religious and civil, which imposes on the husband the greatest respect for the title and sacred rights of the wife. Polygamy is permitted but to Ottomans in circumstances to support and lodge separately, and equip suitably, several wives. The law alone. sanctions the marriage, the priest blesses it. The nuptials are celebrated during four days with a publicity and a festivity of which we have seen the splendor in the marriage of the sons of Timour and of Mahomet I.; the two families conduct with an imposing cortege the bride to the house of the husband. Repudiation, allowed at the request of the wife as well as of the husband, is subjected to conditions quite favorable to the rights, to the liberty, and to the dignity of the wife. The man who, having married a freewoman, should take a slave for second wife, would thereby forfeit his right to the first. The wives have all an equal right to perfect equality of treatment, of attention, on the part of the common husband. The husband cannot force the wife to receive in her house the children of another bed. He must assign to each of the consorts slaves or servants of her own. If the wife complains of infraction of the laws of the harem, the magistrate hears the case and renders justice to the complainant. Marriages between Mussulmans and Christians are legal, provided the children be brought up in the religion of the father. The least insult or a mere menace of repudiation from the husband to the wife dissolves the marriage and authorizes the latter to recover her independence. The rights of maternity are guaranteed to the wife; nothing can deprive her of the right of keeping her children of either sex in her house and her dependence. This filial tenderness in her regard is not only in the nature and the manners of the Orientals, but also in their laws. The duty of providing for all the wants of their mother is not only enjoined imperatively upon the sons and the daughters, but on the brother, the sister, the nephew, the niece, along to the extreme limits of consanguinity.

XLIV.

The sultans are not excepted from any of these religious laws of marriage. The omnipotence of the sovereigns and the Oriental luxury of their court, while augmenting in the