The First Seven Sultans of the Ottoman Dynasty [pp. 42-64]

OF THE OTTOMAN DYNASTY.
share of booty, and made the very dlite of the army. They soon
made their name terrible, and their prowess decided many a
bloody day when the Cross went down before the Crescent. This
singular body of troops existed for almost 500 years, and Von
Honemer estimates that in that time at least half a million
Christian youth were incorporated into it, and wonderfully transformed into the most zealous fighters for Islam. Through the
whole of the 14th and more than half of the 15th centuries this
infernal policy was carried out, to recruit not only the Janizaries,
but the army and the population. Women and children taken
captive in war, and especially in the sack of cities, were incorporated into the harems, and became an undistinguishable portion of the population. Moslem war supported itself and exhausted the enemy with a vengeance.
Orkhon had now a more permanent. better organized, and
better paid army, consisting of horse, foot and Janizary guards,
than any monarch of Europe. He proceeded at once to make
use of it. Nice fell; and over the altar, where the first Christian
council was gathered, he carved with his sword, "God is God,
and Mohammed is the prophet of God."
Nicomedia, Cyzicus, and other places shared the same fate,
and he ravaged the country to the neighborhood of Chalcedon.
Andronicus gathered all his forces, and went out against him
with great magnificence and greater magniloquence, but his
army was dispersed like a flock of birds, and he was glad to recross the Bosphorus in safety. Now began that long series of
Turkish raids upon the European side of the Marmora and its
straits. The Greeks repelled them with unwonted vigor and
courage. The emperor finally attempted to form an alliance,
and gave Orkhon, at the age of sixty, his daughter in marriage.
It did not allay the victorious career of the enemy. In 1357,
Suleiman, Orkhon's eldest son and heir, made a permanent lodge ment on the European shore at Gallipoli, and thence spread
rapidly over that part of Thrace. Suleiman was killed by a fall
from his horse, and, soon after, the father died. Murad I., the
second son, who had been kept in the greatest seclusion, stepped
from virtual slavery to a throne. This third Sultan, though ab solutely ignorant of letters, was none the less a conqueror. He
added Karamania to his dominions, and some other fragments
of the Seljukian Empire, and by him and his successors the whole
1874.]
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