summer in tents, with their cattle upon the mountains.' Our old historian relates with more than his usual prolixity the poetic love-adventure of the son of Ortoghrul with Malhatun, the beautiful daughter of the pious and learned Sheik Edebali. Von Hammer adds to his more clear and lively narrative of this romantic incident, a dream of Osman, evidently the fiction of a later age, which, however it may cast a suspicion upon the historic veracity. of the Turkish writers, gives no unfavourable impression of their poetical invention. At midnight he saw himself and the Sheikh, his host, stretched out at length. From the breast of Edebali arose the moon; as she waxed, she inclined towards Osman; at her full she sunk and concealed herself in his bosom. Then from his loins sprung up a tree, which grew in beauty and strength ever greater and greater; and spread its boughs and its branches ever wider and wider, over earth and sea, stretching its shadow to the utmost horizon of the three parts of the world. Under it stood mountains, like Caucasus and Atlas, Taurus and Hæmus, as the four pillars of the boundless leafy pavilion. Like the four rivers from the roots of this tree of paradise streamed forth the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile and the Danube. Barks covered the rivers, fleets the seas, corn the fields, and woods the mountains. From the latter sprang fountains in fertilizing abundance, and murmured through the rose and cypress thickets of these Eden-like lawns and groves. From the valleys towered up cities with domes and cupolas, with pyramids and obelisks, with minarets and turrets (pracht und thurmsäulen). On the summits of these glittered the crescent; from their galleries the Muezzin's call to prayer sounded through the concert of a thousand nightingales and a thousand parrots, who sung and chattered in the cooling shade, the countless leaves of which were formed like swords. Then arose a prevailing wind, and drove all the points against the cities, and particularly against the imperial capital of Constantine, which, at the conflux of two seas and two continents, like a diamond set between two sapphires and two emeralds, forms the most precious centre-stone of the ring of universal empire.' A darker and more true prognostic of the character of Turkish greatness was exhibited by its famous ancestor. The first foundation of the Ottoman kingdom was cemented by kindred blood. Already had the inclination of the tribe to place itself rather under the rule of the prudent and experienced Dindar, the brother of their chieftain Ortoghrul, than that of his impetuous and enterprising son, awakened the jealousy of the ambitious Osman. The endeavour of the elder to arrest, by the more timid counsels of age, the daring schemes of the younger warrior, wrought his anger to the height. Osman's fiery spirit would not brook the icy prudence of the greyheaded man; in wrath he opposed the arrows of his words with the arrow arrow of the bow; the uncle fell, shot dead by the nephew-a bloody lesson for all who should oppose the fixed determination of their lord. On the way from the castle of Köprihissar, by the side of the road, his tomb was raised. This uncle's-murder marks with terror the commencement of the Ottoman dominion, as the brother's murder that of Rome, only the former rests on better historical evidence. Edris, justly esteemed the most valuable historian of the Turks, who, at the beginning of his work, openly declares that, passing over in silence all that is reprehensible, he will only hand down to posterity the glorious deeds of the royal race of Osman, relates among the latter the murder of Dindar, with all the circumstances detailed above. If then such murderous slaughter of their kindred be reckoned by the panegyrists of the Osmanlies among their praiseworthy acts, what are we to think of those which cannot be praised, and of which their history is therefore silent? In the long galleries of domestic assassinations, the customary fore-court of all the subsequent reigns of the Ottoman princes, the uncle's-murder of Osman appears as the bloody threshold.' Such is the language of our author, perhaps somewhat too literally rendered. It is an appalling consideration that this sanguinary usage was one of the great conservative principles of the Ottoman monarchy. If we look to the histories of all other Mahometan or Asiatic empires, we find them overthrown or rent asunder, either during the life, or at the death of the reigning sovereign, by the insurrections or the conflicts of the sons by many mothers. This is the inalienable inheritance of polygamy in the harem. In the Ottoman succession alone we find the uncontested sceptre, for many generations, descending in an uninterrupted line-An Amurath an Amurath succeeds.' A deep religious reverence sanctified the race of Osman, as formerly the older caliphs of the holy line of the Prophet; and as long as that race was confined to a single stem, the throne stood in stern and solitary security. Even the prætorian turbulence of the janizaries shrunk in awe from an act of insurrection, which might interrupt for ever the sacred line of descent, and make it necessary to summon a new dynasty to the throne: the head of the vizier appeased their wrath-they dared not lift their rebellious voices, or their sacrilegious hands, against the power or the person of the sultan. No sooner however had timidity, or humanity, broken through this established policy of Turkish succession-no sooner was the old law of fratricide abrogated-than we begin to read of the sultan himself insulted by his ungovernable soldiery, compelled to abdicate, and, of course, suffering the inevitable fate of a deposed Asiatic sovereign. This tremendous truth, however revolting to humanity, cannot be called in question. This sanguinary regulation mainly contributed to the stability of the empire. The The second, and still more important secret of its greatness, was the establishment of a standing army, totally disconnected by birth, by possessions, by any common tie of citizenship, by blood, by feeling, or by interest, with the rest of the body politic. The janizary was an insulated being, who knew neither kin nor relationship but with his fellow soldiers. In the strong hands of the first warlike sultans this force was a solid and compact phalanx, ready to throw itself at once upon any quarter of the empire, requiring no summons but the drum, no military preparation but their kettle and their arms; always available for defence, and still more so for conquest. The janizaries were a stern band of mutes, who performed their master's bidding, to whatever deed of blood or devastation they might be sent forth. They were like the evil genii, under the magic authority of a powerful enchanter, with no sense of humanity-equally inaccessible to fear, mercy, and remorse;-a different order of beings, with nothing but the insatiable cupidity, the fierce and sanguinary passions, and a stern combining principle of mutual dependence and discipline. As long as the master retained the spell, they moved in blind obedience, alike against foreign or domestic enemies, overawing the brooding spirit of insurrection, and extending, in every quarter, the bounds of conquest. The spell once broken, the slave became the master; he would still indeed, from the congenial love of fame, and plunder, and bloodshed, perform the bidding of his lord against the foreign foe; but within the empire he no longer owned any authority beyond his own fierce and intractable will. The standing army-formerly the strength of the throne-the silent executioner of the sovereign's ordinances-became an armed republic within the bosom of the realm-even within the precincts of the palace -raising or striking off the heads of viziers or nuftis-elevating and dethroning even the sacred Sultan himself. It is remarkable that the institution of this formidable power is almost coeval with the foundation of the Ottoman greatness. Its extinction by the present sultan, an inevitable, though atrocious policy, seems as if nearly the same date were assigned to their common existence. Will more years elapse between the extermination of the janizaries, and the final dissolution of the Turkish empire, than between their first establishment and its foundation in the Othman ? person of According to M. von Hammer, Gibbon and the European writers, in general, assign too late a date for the first incorporation of the janizaries. The cruel, the infernal policy, by which the children of Christian parents were seized, and forcibly converted into the chosen body-guard, as it were, of Mahometanism, is by them ascribed to the reign of Amurath, the grandson of Othman ; Othman ; but it belongs, according to our author, to that of his pre- converts (every fifth captive was selected for this purpose) were constantly recruited by renegades, and, in the language of our author, the vital principle of the military strength of the Turks struck its roots into the blood-manured soil of a triple apostacy, from country, from kindred, and from faith.' The picturesque story of the consecration of these new troops by the famous Dervise Hadschi Begtasch, their appellation as Yenitscheri, (new troops,) and the form of their turban, shaped like the sleeve of their holy patron, as related with so much spirit by Gibbon, is likewise transferred, on the almost unanimous authority of the Turkish historians, to the reign of Orchan. The first permanent establishment of the Ottomans on the European continent is an event of the utmost importance in their annals. 6 Ignorant of their own history,' says Gibbon*, the modern Turks confound their first and their final passage of the Hellespont, and describe the son of Orchan as a nocturnal robber, who, with eighty companions, explores, by stratagem, an unknown * We could have wished that our author had given a more clear and distinct reply to the question suggested by Gibbon, I am ignorant whether the Turks have any writers older than Mahomet II.' In a note, vol. i. p. 630, M. von Hammer shows that they had not only sheiks, religious writers, and learned lawyers, but poets and authors on medicine. But the inquiry of Gibbon obviously refers to historians. The oldest of their historical works, of which Von Hammer makes use, is the 'Tarichi Aaschik Paschasade,’—i. e. The History of the Great Grandson of Aaschik Pasha,—who was a dervise and celebrated ascetic poet, in the reign of Murad (Amurath) I. Ahmed, the author of the work, lived during the reign of Bajazet II., but, says he, derived much information from the book of Scheik Jachshi, the son of Elias, who was. Imaun to Sultan Orchan, (the second Ottoman king,) and who related, from the lips of his father, the oldest circumstances of the Ottoman history. This book, having searched for it in vain for five-and-twenty years, our author found at length in the Vatican. All the other Turkish histories on his list, as indeed this, were written after the reign of Mahomet II. It does not appear whether any of the rest cite earlier authorities of equal value with that claimed by the 'Tarichi Aaschik Paschasade.' and and hostile shore. Soliman, at the head of ten thousand horse, was transported in the vessels, and entertained as the friend of the Greek emperor.' Our author excuses the silence with which the Turkish historians pass over the earlier intercourse of the Ottomans with the European continent, of which he enumerates sixteen different occasions, as if they disdained those peaceful excursions by which they gained no conquest, and established no permanent footing in the Byzantine territory. As yet the Prose of History had not asserted its right over the Poetry of Tradition.' This defence, wę fear, would not have been accepted as satisfactory by the historian of the Decline and Fall.' In fact, the Turkish account of this expedition of Soliman is a purely poetic legend. It was among the ruins of Cyzicus, which his imagination transformed into the pillared remains of an enchanted palace of the queen of Saba, by the light of the moon, that visionary temples and palaces rose out of the waters and mingled with the clouds. Voices from the deep murmuring billows seemed to summon him to some great enterprize, and the moon, which appeared to unite both continents with a chain of silver light, reminded him of the vision of his grandsire Osman. These poetic fables have a kind of family connexion, and probably a common origin. Soliman threw himself that very night, with a few companions, into a boat; only forty Turks assisted at the surprise of a castle named Tzympe, (now called Dschemenlek ;) but the first conquest of the Turks in Europe was soon secured by three thousand men. Even sober history admits the awful convulsions, the shuddering, as it were, of the European continent, when the Mahometan laid the foundation of his dominion upon her wasted soil. The Turk, indeed, in the terrible earthquake, which, by a singular coincidence, threw down the walls of the cities and fortresses of Thrace, and dispersed their trembling inhabitants into other towns, might read an invitation, or a command from Allah, to occupy the deserted walls, and change the crumbling churches of Christ into mosques for the worship of the Prophet. Cantacuzene himself relates, that the money for the restitution of Tzympe, and for the service rendered by his brother-in-law Soliman, at the head of ten thousand Turks, whom he had invited to his succour, was in the act of payment, when it was interrupted by this dire and portentous disaster. The occasion, both parties no doubt agreed, was providentially offered-the trembling and fugitive Greek read the judgment of offended heaven-the Turk the vindication of his treacherous infraction of the solemn treaty. At all events, it was too tempting an opportunity to be foregone. The Turks remained masters of the Thracian cities-the crescent shone from the walls of Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont; and thus the Asiatic |