XXIX.

Khalil-Pasha, grand vizier, was, at the death of Amurath II., son and grandson of a vizier by right of practice and capacity, but not by right of inheritance. Amurath, however, established the hereditariness of certain high dignitaries, such as that of general of the akindjis, guides of the Sultan, the grand equerry and grand cup-bearer in the families already illustrious of Mikhal-Oghli, of Samsama and of Elvan-Beg.

The Turkish tongue, philosophy, history, poetry, the arts, the industries, with the exception of architecture, of which the triple-staired minaret of Adrianople is at once the play and the masterpiece, made little progress under the agitated and interrupted reign of Amurath II. A single eminent poet, Amadeddin, author of the Turkish Divan, survives through his misfortunes rather than his book or his works. Amadeddin would have the Koran to be a simple revelation of the unity and the universality of God to the human reason, through the voice of a sage or a prophet more inspired or more rational than the rest of the Arabs. He confounded in his rationalistic commentary of the Koran God and his works, and pretended that entire nature could say without blasphemy: "I am God, I emanate from God, and am absorbed into God, as a drop of water is into the ocean." This doctrine scandalized the imans and the believers. They accused him of degrading God and Mahomet, in making the latter a philosopher instead of a privileged confidant. Religions must have exceptional miracles, instead of the perpetual miracles of nature and of reason-those two real high-priests of the Divinity. The oulemas and doctors of the law, cited, judged, and flayed him alive at Broussa, without extorting from the martyr a disavowal of his faith.

BOOK TWELFTH.

I.

THE intelligence of the death of Amurath II. found his son, Mahomet II., at Magnesia, weary of his retirement, humiliated by his inactivity, impatient for the throne. "Let those who love me follow me," cried he as he leapt on horseback, without giving his court time to prepare for the departure. By means of the fleetest horses kept always saddled from distance to distance on the route from Asia to Europe, he crossed the mountains that border on the north the plain of Magnesia, and galloped night and day towards Moudania, a port of the Propontis overagainst Gallipoli.

This Prince, who had already twice essayed the sceptre, was still in the precocious flower of his youth; he was only twenty years. His portrait, taken somewhat later by the most finished Venetian painters, and among others by Bellini, whom he had called to his court, depicts him in all the energy of a sanguine constitution wherein imperious will boiled in the veins with the blood. His stature was short and massive, the legs bowed from the habit of the saddle and the divan, the shoulders broad, the nape muscular like that of the bull and the lion, the neck short, the beard dark and heavy, the lip severe, though with a dimple of humor at the angles of the mouth, the cheeks prominent, plump and purpled with impetuous blood, the ball of the eyes round, vivid, with a glance denoting promptitude to anger, the eyebrows naturally or artificially arched to a remarkable elevation above the eyes, a sign of superiority of race, the forehead fair, broad and smooth, like that of one who has never struggled either with himself or others. His caftan red, edged with gold and trimmed with ermine: his silver-hilted pon

iard, incrusted with rubies; his turban surmounted with a yellow aigrette which rises like a flower springing from the brow, attest the refined taste of dress and of majesty in a man who means not only to command, but wishes also to dazzle. On the whole his physiognomy instils more terror than attraction. It speaks a man who is not cruel by temperament, but whom the impetuosity of his first impulses might sweep from softness to crime.

II.

Mahomet II., without taking a moment's repose on the way, trembling lest the throne should escape him a third time, crossed the Hellespont in a skiff, and arrived in two days from his exile of Magnesia in his fortress of Gallipoli. Once his foot in Europe, he stopped for two days to give time to the magistrates and the populations of Thrace and of Adrianople to prepare for him the reception of a sovereign.

The letters of his father's viziers, which he found at Gallipoli, assured him of his advent without obstacle to the empire. He then relaxed his pace, awaited the corteges sent from Adrianople to meet him, and received every where upon the route the respects and the obeisances due the majesty of a Sultan. The people had forgotten his faults and remembered but his youth. Fair hopes were had of a prince brought up by a father alternately severe and indulgent, corrected by two necessary lessons, matured by some years of retreat, married recently to a Turcoman princess of a rank and beauty calculated to fix his inconstancies, and who had learned, in losing twice the throne, the art of now keeping it on recovery.

III.

The viziers, the pashas, the generals, the oulemas, the army and the people, awaited him a league in advance of Adrianople. All who were mounted, on perceiving the Sultan, descended from their horses and prostrated themselves in the dust. As soon as Mahomet II. had received these homages, the cortege, the people and the army advanced slowly towards the gate of the city, halting from distance to distance to give vent to boisterous sobbings. Upon each of these outbursts, signs of grief and homage to the memory of

Amurath II., Mahomet dismounted, and, passing the back of his hand over his eyes, wept, or affected to weep, with the people for his father. At the gate of the city, the grief and sobbing ceased; cries of joy filled the air, and the Sultan, conducted to his palace by the crowd, found there but solitude, uncertainty and terror, between the reign which ends and the reign that is commencing. The ministers of the father, ignorant if they were destined for favor or for resentment in the eyes of the son, abstained from following the monarch into the interior of the seraglio.

Mahomet II. left them trembling the whole night. The following day, which usage designates for the public inauguration to the supreme rank, he mounted the throne in presence of all the dignitaries of the empire, the Janissaries, the oulemas, and the people, crowded in the apartments and the courts of the seraglio. The aged Ibrahim, formerly grand vizier, and the chief of the eunuchs, served alone at this inauguration, the one emboldened by his years and his retirement from public life, the other by necessity of his office as head chamberlain of the palace.

"Where is Khalil?" said with an affected astonishment the Sultan to Ibrahim, his father. "Go tell him to take by my throne the rank that belongs to him, and from which I have not dismissed him; let him continue to govern under the son as he has governed under the father. As to my second vizier, Ishak-Pasha, I charge him to conduct the body and the funeral of my father to the tomb of our ancestors in the green mosque at Broussa.”

The grand vizier Khalil was expecting his disgrace and even death for having allured, some years previous, Mahomet from Adrianople under a false pretext, and restored the father to the throne of the same son who was now crowned. Such services to Amurath II. and to the empire, might appear unpardonable injuries to the son. The magnanimity of Mahomet II. astonished without assuring him completely; favors in those courts being often but vengeances postponed. But Khalil flattered himself with soon effacing the remembrance of the offence by the magnitude of his services. resumed the functions of vizir-azem, and the empire did not change hands.

He

IV.

But the harem of Amurath II. had changed its master. This Prince left in dying several children, male and female, born of odalisques of servile condition, who inspired no umbrage in Mahomet II., son of a Princess of Sinope. This Princess had died, during the first abdication of Amurath, at Magnesia. The second wife of Amurath, Helen of Servia, daughter of the royal house of this nation, had no son who might dispute the throne with his step-brother. But the young Princess of Transylvania, Mara, third wife and adored to his death by the late Sultan, had by Amurath a son, still at the breast, whom the death of the father left exposed in its cradle to the umbrageous prudence of Mahomet. This son, born like himself of a Princess, of the Mussulman faith, might appear one day to the Ottomans a more legitimate heir to the throne than the son of a Christian Princess. Although the age of the infant placed the danger in a remote future, Mahomet II., forestalling it by the precipitance of crime, did not leave himself a day for hesitation or for pity. He merely wished to hide the hand that should perpetrate the crime, so that an empire, in doubt as to the circumstances of the murder, might ascribe it to the zeal of an officious servitor, and acquit himself of all complicity on seeing him punish his accomplice.

He chose for this murder Ali, son of Evrenos-Beg, that general defeated by both Huniad and Scander-Beg, who had ransomed his shameful reverses in war by still more shameful services in the seraglio. He ordered him to drown in its bath the infant of the Sultana Mara; and in order that the cries and the resistance of the young mother, who was suckling her son at her own breast, might be prevented by the promptitude and silence of the deed, he gave a long audience to the mourning widow of his father, while his agent was assassinating her son.

The despair and lamentations of the Sultana on reentering the harem and finding her child a corpse, gave publicity to the crime. Adrianople trembled with horror; a reign commencing by an odious fratricide appeared to be marked with blood. A murmur of indignation arose along the seraglio. Mahomet II., to stifle it, took the expedient of turning it against the secret executioner of his own crime. He feigned ignorance, regret, horror, and had Evrenos be