and his prophet; the imam preached; and Mahomet the Second performed the namaz of prayer and thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars.76 From St. Sophia he proceeded to the august, but desolate, mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry: "The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace; and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab." 77

Yet his mind was not satisfied, nor did the victory seem complete, till he was informed of the fate of Constantine; whether he had escaped, or been made prisoner, or had fallen in the battle. Two Janizaries claimed the honor and reward of his death the body, under a heap of slain, was discovered by the golden eagles embroidered on his shoes: the Greeks acknowledged, with tears, the head of their late emperor; and, after exposing the bloody trophy,78 Mahomet bestowed on his rival the honors of a decent funeral. After his decease,

Lucas Notaras, great duke,79 and first minister of the empire, was the most important prisoner. When offered his person and his treasures at the foot of the throne, "And why," said the indignant sultan, "did you not employ these treasures in the defence of your prince and country?" They were yours," answered the slave; "God had reserved them for

66

78 We are obliged to Cantemir (p. 102) for the Turkish account of the conversion of St. Sophia, so bitterly deplored by Phranza and Ducas. It is amusing enough to observe, in what opposite lights the same object appears to a Mussulman and a Christian eye.

"This distich, which Cantemir gives in the original, derives new beauties from the application. It was thus that Scipio repeated, in the sack of Carthage, the famous prophecy of Homer. The same generous feeling carried the mind of the conqueror to the past or the

future.

78 I cannot believe with Ducas (see Spondanus, A. D. 1453, No. 13) that Mahomet sent round Persia, Arabia, &c., the head of the Greek emperor: he would surely content himself with a a trophy less in

human.

79 Phranza was the personal enemy of the great duke; nor could time, or death, or his own retreat to a monastery, extort a feeling of sympathy or forgiveness. Ducas is inclined to praise and pity the martyr; Chalcondyles is neuter, but we are indebted to him for the hint of the Greek conspiracy.

your hands."
"If he reserved them for me," replied the
despot, "how have you presumed to withhold them so loug
by a fruitless and fatal resistance? The great duke alleged
the obstinacy of the strangers, and some secret encourage-
ment from the Turkish vizier; and from this perilous inter-
view he was at length dismissed with the assurance of pardon
and protection. Mahomet condescended to visit his wife, a
venerable princess oppressed with sickness and grief; and his
consolation for her misfortunes was in the most tender strain

of humanity and filial reverence. A similar clemency was
extended to the principal officers of state, of whom several
were ransomed at his expense; and during some days he
declared himself the friend and father of the vanquished
people. But the scene was soon changed; and before his
departure, the hippodrome streamed with the blood of his
noblest captives. His perfidious cruelty is execrated by the
Christians they adorn with the colors of heroic martyrdom
the execution of the great duke and his two sons; and his
death is ascribed to the generous refusal of delivering his
children to the tyrant's lust.* Yet a Byzantine historian has
dropped an unguarded word of conspiracy, deliverance, and
Italian succor: such treason may be glorious; but the rebel
who bravely ventures, has justly forfeited his life; nor should
we blame a conqueror for destroying the enemies whom he
can no longer trust. On the eighteenth of June the victorious
sultan returned to Adrianople; and smiled at the base and
hollow embassies of the Christian princes, who viewed their
approaching ruin in the fall of the Eastern empire.

Constantinople had been left naked and desolate, without a prince or a people. But she could not be despoiled of the incomparable situation which marks her for the metropolis of a great empire; and the genius of the place will ever triumph over the accidents of time and fortune. Boursa and Adrianople, the ancient seats of the Ottomans, sunk into provincial towns; s; and Mahomet the Second established his own r residence, and that of his successors, on the same commanding spot which had been chosen by Constantine.80 The fortifica

།

So For the restitution of Constantinople and the Turkish foundations, see Cantemir, (p. 102-109,) Ducas, (c. 42,) with They not,

• Von Hammer relates this undoubtingly, and apparently on good anthority, p. 559. — M.

tions of Galata, which might afford a shelter to the Latins. were prudently destroyed; but the damage of the Turkish cannon was soon repaired; and before the month of August, great quantities of lime had been burnt for the restoration of the walls of the capital. As the entire property of the soil and buildings, whether public or private, or profane or sacred, was now transferred to the conqueror, he first separated a space of eight furlongs from the point of the triangle for the establishment of his seraglio or palace. It is here, in the bosom of luxury, that the Grand Signor (as he has been emphatically named by the Italians) appears to reign over Europe and Asia; but his person on the shores of the Bosphorus may not always be secure from the insults of a hostile navy. In the new character of a mosque, the cathedral of St. Sophia was endowed with an ample revenue, crowned with lofty minarets, and surrounded with groves and fountains, for the devotion and refreshment of the Moslems. The same model was imitated in the jami, or royal mosques; and the first of these was built, by Mahomet himself, on the ruins of the church of the holy apostles, and the tombs of the Greek emperors. On the third day after the conquest, the grave Abu Ayub, or Job, who had fallen in the first siege of the Arabs, was revealed in a vision; and it is before the sepulchre of the martyr that the new sultans are girded with the sword of empire.8 Constantinople no longer appertains to the Roman historian; nor shall I enumerate the civil and religious edifices that were profaned or erected by its Turkish masters: the population was speedily renewed; and before the end of September, five thousand families of Anatolia and Romania had obeyed the royal mandate, which enjoined them, under pain of death, to occupy their new habitations in the capital. The throne of Mahomet was guarded by the numbers and fidelity of his Moslem subjects: but his rational policy aspired to collect the remnant of the Greeks; and they returned in crowds, as soon

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of

Tournefort, and the rest of our modern travellers. From a gigantic picture of the greatness, population, &c., of Constantinople and the Ottoman empire, (Abrégé de l'Histoire Ottomane, tom. p. 16-21,) we may learn, that in the year 1586 the Moslems were less numerous in the capital than the Christians, or even the Jews.

81 The Turbé, or sepulchral monument of Abu Ayub, is described and engraved in the Tableau Générale de l'Empire Ottoman, (Paris, 1787, in large folio,) a work of less use, perhaps, tl an magnificence, (tom. i. p. 305, 306.)

as they were assured of their lives, their liberties, and the free exercise of their religion. In the election and investiture of a patriarch, the ceremonial of the Byzantine court was revived and imitated. With a mixture of satisfaction and horror, they beheld the sultan on his throne; who delivered into the hands of Gennadius the crosier or pastoral staff, the symbol of his ecclesiastical office; who conducted the patriarch to the gate of the seraglio, presented him with a horse richly caparisoned, and directed the viziers and bashaws to lead him to the palace which had been allotted for his residence.82 The churches of Constantinople were shared between the two religions: their limits were marked; and, till it was infringed by Selim, the grandson of Mahomet, the Greeks 83 enjoyed above sixty years the benefit of this equal partition. Encouraged by the ministers of the divan, who wished to elude the fanaticism of the sultan, the Christian advocates presumed to allege that this division had been an act, not of generosity, but of justice; not a concession, but a compact; and that if one half of the city had been taken by storm, the other moiety had surrendered on the faith of a sacred capitulation. The original grant had indeed been consumed by fire: but the loss was supplied by the testimony of three aged Janizaries who remembered the transaction; and their venal oaths are of more weight in the opinion of Cantemir, than the positive and unanimous consent of the history of the times.84

82 Phranza (1. iii. c. 19) relates the ceremony, which has possibly been adorned in the Greek reports to each other, and to the Latins. The fact is confirmed by Emanuel Malaxus, who wrote, in vulgar Greek, the History of the Patriarchs after the taking of Constantinople, inserted in the Turco-Græcia of Crusius, (1. v. p. 106-184.) But the most patient reader will not believe that Mahomet adopted the Catholic form, "Sancta Trinitas quæ mihi donavit imperium te in patriarcham novæ Romæ deligit."

83 From the Turco-Græcia of Crusius, &c. Spondanus (A. D. 1453, No. 21, 1458, No. 16) describes the slavery and domestic quarrels of the Greek church. The patriarch who succeeded Gennadius threw himself in despair into a well.

4 Cantemir (p. 101-105) insists on the unanimous consent of the Turkish historians, ancient as well as modern, and argues, that they would not have violated the truth to diminish their national glory, since it is esteemed more honorable to take a city by force than by composition. But, 1. I doubt this consent, since he quotes no particu lar historian, and the Turkish Annals of Leunclavius affirm, without exception, that Mahomet took Constantinople per vim, (p. 329.) 2. The same argument may be turned in favor of the Greeks of the

The remaining fragments of the Greek kingdom in Europe and Asia I shall abandon to the Turkish arms; but the final extinction of the two last dynasties 85 which have reigned in Constantinople should terminate the decline and fall of the Roman empire in the East. The despots of the Morea, Demetrius and Thomas,86 the two surviving brothers of the name of PALEOLOGUS, were astonished by the death of the emperor Constantine, and the ruin of the monarchy. Hopeless of defence, they prepared, with the noble Greeks who adhered to their fortune, to seek a refuge in Italy, beyond the reach of the Ottoman thunder. Their first apprehensions were dispelled by the victorious sultan, who contented himself with a tribute of twelve thousand ducats; and while his ambition explored the continent and the islands, in search of prey, he indulged the Morea in a respite of seven years. But this respite was a period of grief, discord, and misery. The hexamilion, the rampart of the Isthmus, so often raised and so often subverted, could not long be defended by three hundred Italian archers: the keys of Corinth were seized by the Turks they returned from their summer excursions with a train of captives and spoil; and the complaints of the injured Greeks were heard with indifference and disdain. The Albanians, a vagrant tribe of shepherds and robbers, filled the peninsula with rapine and murder: the two despots implored the dangerous and humiliating aid of a neighboring hashaw; and when he had quelled the revolt, his lessons inculcated the rule of their future conduct. Neither the ties of blood, nor the oaths which they repeatedly pledged in the communion and before the altar, nor the stronger pressure of necessity, could reconcile or suspend their domestic quarrels. They ravaged each other's patrimony with fire and sword: the alms and succors of the West were consumed in civil hostility; and their power was only exerted in savage and

times, who would not have forgotten this honorable and salutary treaty. Voltaire, as usual, prefers the Turks to the Christians.

85 For the genealogy and fall of the Comneni of Trebizond, see Ducange, (Fam. Byzant. p. 195;) for the last Palæologi, the same accurate antiquarian, (p. 244, 247, 248.) The Palæologi of Montferrat were not extinct till the next century; but they had forgotten their Greek origin and kindred.

86 In the worthless story of the disputes and misfortunes of the two prothers, Phranza (1. iii. c. 21-30) is too partial on the side of Thomas; Ducas (c. 44, 45) is too brief, and Chalcondyles (1. viii. ix. x.) tco diffuse and digressive.