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greatest part of his bashaws and Janizaries were the offspring of Christian parents; but the glories of the Turkish name were perpetuated by successive adoption; and, in the gradual change of individuals, the spirit of a legion, a regiment, or an oda is kept alive by imitation and discipline. In this holy warfare, the Moslems were exhorted to purify their minds with prayer, their bodies with seven ablutions; and to abstain from food till the close of the ensuing day. A crowd of dervishes visited the tents, to instil the desire of martyrdom, and the assurance of spending an immortal youth amidst the rivers and gardens of paradise and in the embraces of the black-eyed virgins. Yet Mahomet principally trusted to the efficacy of temporal and visible rewards. A double pay was promised to the victorious troops: "The city and the buildings," said Mahomet, “are mine; but I resign to your valour the captives and the spoil, the treasures of gold and beauty; be rich and be happy. Many are the provinces of my empire: the intrepid soldier who first ascends the walls of Constantinople shall be rewarded with the government of the fairest and most wealthy; and my gratitude shall accumulate his honours and fortunes above the measure of his own hopes." Such various and potent motives diffused among the Turks a general ardour, regardless of life and impatient for action; the camp re-echoed with the Moslem shouts of "God is God, there is but one God, and Mahomet is the [Sunday] apostle of God"; " and the sea and land, from Galata to the seven towers, were illuminated by the blaze of their nocturnal fires.

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Far different was the state of the Christians; who, with loud and impotent complaints, deplored the guilt, or the punishment, of their sins. The celestial image of the Virgin had been exposed in solemn procession; but their divine patroness was deaf to their entreaties: they accused the obstinacy of the emperor for refusing a timely surrender; anticipated the horrors of their fate; and sighed for the repose and security of Turkish servitude.

Johnson has confounded the Pleiads with the great bear or waggon, the zodiac with a northern constellation:

̓́Αρκτον θ ̓ ἣν καὶ ἅμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσι.

75 Phranza quarrels with these Moslem acclamations, not for the name of God, but for that of the Prophet: the pious zeal of Voltaire is excessive, and even ridiculous. [There was a great illumination in the Turkish camp on the night of the 24th May, when the Sultan first proclaimed his plan for a general assault (Barbaro, p. 46; it is mentioned also by the Slavonic chronicle). Gibbon refers to the illumination on May 27.]

The noblest of the Greeks, and the bravest of the allies, were summoned to the palace, to prepare them, on the evening of the twenty-eighth, for the duties and dangers of the general assault. The last speech of Palæologus was the funeral oration of the Roman Empire: 76 he promised, he conjured, and he vainly attempted to infuse the hope which was extinguished in his own mind. In this world all was comfortless and gloomy; and neither the gospel nor the church have proposed any conspicuous recompense to the heroes who fall in the service of their country. But the example of their prince and the confinement of a siege had armed these warriors with the courage of despair; and the pathetic scene is described by the feelings of the historian Phranza, who was himself present at this mournful assembly. They wept, they embraced; regardless of their families and fortunes, they devoted their lives; and each commander, departing to his station, maintained all night a vigilant and anxious watch on the rampart. The emperor, and some faithful companions, entered the dome of St. Sophia, which in a few hours was to be converted into a mosque; and devoutly received, with tears and prayers, the sacrament of the holy communion. He reposed some moments in the palace, which resounded with cries and lamentations; solicited the pardon of all whom he might have injured;" and mounted on horseback to visit the guards and explore the motions of the enemy. The distress and fall of the last Constantine are more glorious than the long prosperity of the Byzantine Cæsars.

al assault,

In the confusion of darkness an assailant may sometimes The genersucceed; but, in this great and general attack, the military May 29 judgment and astrological knowledge of Mahomet advised him to expect the morning,78 the memorable twenty-ninth of May,

76 I am afraid that this discourse was composed by Phranza himself; and it smells so grossly of the sermon and the convent that I almost doubt whether it was pronounced by Constantine. Leonardus assigns him another speech, in which he addresses himself more respectfully to the Latin auxiliaries. [The speeches in Phrantzes and Leonardo "are substantially identical, and do not vary more than would do two independent reports written some months after the delivery of a speech in our own time" (Pears, op. cit. p. 328).]

77 This abasement, which devotion has sometimes extorted from dying princes, is an improvement of the gospel doctrine of the forgiveness of injuries; it is more easy to forgive 490 times than once to ask pardon of an inferior.

78 [So the eye-witnesses, Phrantzes and Barbaro. But Critobulus and Ducas set the beginning of the final assault on the 28th, and make the fighting go on all night. Cp. Pears, p. 334.]

[Tuesday]

in the fourteen hundred and fifty-third year of the Christian æra. The preceding night had been strenuously employed: the troops, the cannon, and the fascines were advanced to the edge of the ditch, which, in many parts, presented a smooth and level passage to the breach; and his fourscore galleys almost touched, with the prows and their scaling-ladders, the less defensible walls of the harbour. Under pain of death, silence was enjoined; but the physical laws of motion and sound are not obedient to discipline or fear; each individual might suppress his voice and measure his footsteps; but the march and labour of thousands must inevitably produce a strange confusion of dissonant clamours, which reached the ears of the watchmen of the towers. At daybreak, without the customary signal of the morning-gun, the Turks assaulted the city by sea and land; and the similitude of a twined or twisted thread has been applied to the closeness and continuity of their line of attack.79 The foremost ranks consisted of the refuse of the host, a voluntary crowd, who fought without order or command; of the feebleness of age or childhood, of peasants and vagrants, and of all who had joined the camp in the blind hope of plunder and martyrdom. The common impulse drove them onwards to the wall; the most audacious to climb were instantly precipitated; and not a dart, not a bullet of the Christians was idly wasted on the accumulated throng. But their strength and ammunition were exhausted in this laborious defence; the ditch was filled with the bodies of the slain; they supported the footsteps of their companions; and of this devoted vanguard the death was more serviceable than the life. Under their respective bashaws and sanjaks, the troops of Anatolia and Romania were successively led to the charge: their progress was various and doubtful; but, after a conflict of two hours, the Greeks still maintained and improved their advantage; and the voice of the emperor was heard, encouraging his soldiers to achieve, by a last effort, the deliverance of their country. In that fatal moment, the Janizaries arose, fresh, vigorous, and invincible. The sultan himself on horseback, with an iron mace in his hand, was the spectator and judge of their valour; he was surrounded by ten thousand of his domestic troops, whom he reserved for the decisive occasion; and the

79 Besides the 10,000 guards, and the sailors and the marines, Ducas numbers in this general assault 250,000 Turks, both horse and foot.

tide of battle was directed and impelled by his voice and eye. His numerous ministers of justice were posted behind the line, to urge, to restrain, and to punish; and, if danger was in the front, shame and inevitable death were in the rear of the fugitives. The cries of fear and of pain were drowned in the martial music of drums, trumpets, and attaballs; and experience has proved that the mechanical operation of sounds, by quickening the circulation of the blood and spirits, will act on the human machine more forcibly than the eloquence of reason and honour. From the lines, the galleys, and the bridge, the Ottoman artillery thundered on all sides; and the camp and city, the Greeks and the Turks, were involved in a cloud of smoke, which could only be dispelled by the final deliverance or destruction of the Roman empire. The signal combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections; the skilful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary though pernicious science. But, in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion; nor shall I strive, at the distance of three centuries and a thousand miles, to delineate a scene of which there could be no spectators, and of which the actors themselves were incapable of forming any just or adequate idea.

The immediate loss of Constantinople may be ascribed to the bullet, or arrow, which pierced the gauntlet of John Justiniani.80 The sight of his blood, and the exquisite pain, appalled the courage of the chief, whose arms and counsel were the firmest rampart of the city. As he withdrew from his station in quest of a surgeon, his flight was perceived and stopped by the indefatigable emperor. "Your wound," exclaimed Palæologus, "is slight; the danger is pressing; your presence is necessary; and whither will you retire?" "I will retire," said the trembling Genoese, "by the same road which God has opened to the Turks;" and at these words he hastily

80 [At 3 o'clock in the morning a breach in the outer wall near the gate of "St. Romanus" had been made by a cannon, and the Turks pressed into the space between the outer and inner walls. They were repelled at last, mainly through the efforts of the Venetians (according to Barbaro); but it was soon necessary to bring up the reserves which (under Theodore Palæologus and Demetrius Cantacuzenus) were posted at the Church of the Holy Apostles. It was at this moment, when these reserve troops were driving back the Turks, that Giustiniani was wounded (in the leg, Phrantzes; in the hand, Chalcondyles and Ducas; under the armpit, Zorzo Dolfin and Leonardus; in the arm, Pusculus; in the chest, Critobulus).]

passed through one of the breaches of the inner wall. By this pusillanimous act, he stained the honours of a military life ; and the few days which he survived in Galata, or the isle of Chios, was embittered by his own and the public reproach.81 His example was imitated by the greatest part of the Latin auxiliaries, and the defence began to slacken when the attack was pressed with redoubled vigour. The number of the Ottomans was fifty, perhaps an hundred, times superior to that of the Christians; the double walls were reduced by the cannon to an heap of ruins; in a circuit of several miles, some places must be found more easy of access or more feebly guarded; and, if the besiegers could penetrate in a single point, the whole city was irrecoverably lost. The first who deserved the [Hasan of sultan's reward was Hassan, the Janizary, of gigantic stature and strength. With his scymetar in one hand and his buckler in the other, he ascended the outward fortification; of the thirty Janizaries, who were emulous of his valour, eighteen perished in the bold adventure. Hassan and his twelve companions had reached the summit: the giant was precipitated from the rampart; he rose on one knee, and was again oppressed by a shower of darts and stones. But his success had proved that the achievement was possible: the walls and towers were instantly covered with a swarm of Turks; and the Greeks, now driven from the vantage-ground, were overwhelmed by increasing multitudes.82 Amidst these multitudes, the emperor, who

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81 In the severe censure of the flight of Justiniani, Phranza expresses his own feelings and those of the public. For some private reasons, he is treated with more lenity and respect by Ducas; but the words of Leonardus Chiensis express his strong and recent indignation, gloriæ salutis suique oblitus. In the whole series of their Eastern policy, his countrymen, the Genoese, were always suspected, and often guilty. ["The dialogue between Constantine and Giustiniani given in the pages of Gibbon is evidently a rhetorical invention. None of the historians were present, and who of those present could report any conversation with accuracy at such a moment?" Finlay, History of Greece, iii. p. 520 note. Barbaro, who is throughout severe on the Genoese, is markedly hostile to Giustiniani. The facts that the wound actually proved mortal, and that Giustiniani's valour and distinguished services are extolled by all the Greek writers, are a sufficient answer to the accusations of cowardice and failure in duty.]

82 [In this account of the last conflict Gibbon has omitted a highly important fact which hastened the capture of the city. This fact is not mentioned by Phrantzes; it rests on the authority of Ducas (p. 280-5) and is confirmed by a short statement of Critobulus (i. 60 ad fin.). North of the Porta Charisii, south of the Porta Caligaria, in a transverse wall which connects the inner and outer Theodosian walls, there is a small postern (found by M. Paspates) which is called the Kerkoporta by Ducas (wrongly ?). It was always kept shut, but had been opened by Giustiniani's orders for the purpose of a possible sortie. Some

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