Amurath II was succeeded, A.D. 1451, by his son Mohammed II., styled by Gibbon, “the Great Destroyer.” His passions were at once furious and inexorable. In the palace, as in the field, a torrent of blood was spilt on the slightest provocation. Constantinople has sealed his glory, and placed him among “the basest of men” whom the Eternal Spirit “sets up” to fufil his will.
“By these three, ” says John, “was the third of the men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the sulphur, which burst forth out of the
The conquest of Adrianople was followed in the ensuing spring, A.D. 1422, by the siege of Constantinople. The religious merit of subduing the City of the Caesars, attracted from Asia a crowd of volunteers, who aspired to the crown of martyrdom.
It would be well for the fame of fortunate destroyers of their species, if they would remember and be admonished by the remark of Ahab to Benhadad, king of Syria: “Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast to himself as he that putteth it off.” The sultan Bajazet belonged to the numerous class of military vain boasters, which is not, while we write, even now extinct. We have seen, that A.D. 1402, Constantinople and the Greek empire, were on the verge of destruction at his hand.
The sack of Aleppo and Damascus signalized the loosing of the Timour-Mogul power from its Euphratean boundary. In a peaceful conference with a doctor of Mohammedan law, he said: “You see me here a poor, lame, decrepit mortal.
The conquest and monarchy of the world was the first object of the ambition of Timour or Tamerlane.
On the dissolution of the Carizmian power by the Moguls, some of the Turkman chiefs engaged in the service of Aladdin, the sultan of Iconium; and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line. They had formerly pitched their tents near the southern banks of the Oxus. At the head of a Carizmian force, Soliman Shah was drowned in the passage of the Euphrates. His son Orthogrul became a soldier of
When the Mogul-power suppressed the Caliphate, which had been held by the race of Abbas above five hundred years, it spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt would have been lost had it been only defended by natives. But the Mamelucs were now established there; and they were equal in valor and superior in discipline to the Moguls. These were heading in the wrong direction. Their mission was towards Constantinople and the west.
The rise and progress of the Ottomans are founded on a previous knowledge of the great eruption of the Moguls and Tartars; whose rapid conquests may be compared with the primitive convulsions of nature which have agitated and altered the surface of the globe.
The second Euphratean angel power did not immediately follow the first. At the close of the eleventh century, and not more than forty years from the inauguration of Togrul, Constantinople and its empire were on the verge of ruin by the power of the Seljukian kingdom of Roum; and nothing less than a superhuman intervention seemed capable of averting it. To have permitted “the killing of the third of the men” “worshipping the daemonials and idols” at that epoch, would have falsified the vision.