"Hard was the penalty of broken faith,

By Ladislaus paid on Varna's plain;

For many a knight there met unhonored death,
When, like a god of vengeance, rose again

Old Amurath from his far home, and cried,

Again he abdicated and withdrew to Magnesia, but by civil troubles was obliged, sorely against his will, again to resume the power. Soon after he captured Patras and Corinth, and forced Constantine, the Prince of the Morea, who afterwards became the last Emperor of Constantinople, to pay tribute. He fought unsuccessfully with the Albanians, who had revolted under their leader Scanderbeg, but inflicted a crushing defeat on the Hungarian Huniadi at the second battle of Kossova. Dying three years later, he was succeeded by Sultan Mohammed II.

Master of all Asia Minor save the Empire of Trebizond, and of nearly all the wide region in Europe south of the Danube, the chief aspiration of the youthful Sultan was the capture of Constantinople. This he accomplished.

The subsequent history of the imperial Ottoman Dynasty and of the Ottomans is inseparably interwoven with the history of this city. No other city not sacred has so large a hold upon their imagination. Often affectionately they call it Oummoudunia, the Mother of the World, and Der el Saadet, the City of Felicity; sometimes Islambol, the City of Islam, or its Abundance and Extent. The latter appears on the coins of Sultan Abd-ul Hamid I. By the Arabs it is sometimes called El Farruch, the Earth-Divider. Ever since 1453 it has been the Ottoman capital, not only the political centre, as residence of the sovereign and of his court, but the focus, the heart of Ottoman theology, jurisprudence, and literature. It has been more to their empire than Paris is to France.

The grandeur and growth of that Empire did not indeed terminate or .culminate in the acquisition of that famous city for which during nearly two centuries seven sultans, both as successors and as complements of one another, had been preparing the way. Montesquieu considers as a main cause of the greatness of the Roman State the fact that

its early kings were all "grands person-
nages. But what he subsequently says is

truer of the first seven sultans than of the
seven semi-legendary Kings of Rome: "One
finds nowhere in history an unbroken suc-
cession of such statesmen and such
erals."

gen

Moreover, each appeared in just the circumstances and the order for which he was best qualified by his talents, natural characteristics, and disposition. None was so fitted for the period of patient, half-silent reconstitution as Sultan Mohammed I; none for the period of primitive foundation and to impart the primitive impulse as Sultan Osman I; none for the conquest of the city as Sultan Mohammed II the Conqueror. A succinct sketch like this can neither set forth nor do justice to this truth, nor can it adequately represent those sovereigns in their high rôle of organizers, administrators, and patrons of learning. Yet it aids in answering the question, how from a patriarchal chief of a few hundred families, surrounded by envious friends and mightier enemies, was developed that colossal power which shook the world. Most often in the course of dynasties the second or third generation has diminished or enfeebled the political structure which the founder has

built up. But here it would be difficult to say which of the first seven sultans was the greater, inasmuch as all were great. So the Ottoman Empire, as it enthroned itself in the capital of Justinian and the Constantines, though bearing the name of its first sultan, was the creation and development, not merely of one conquering hero, but of a dynastic line which Jouannin asserts to have been "more prolific in great men than any other dynasty which has reigned on the face of the globe."

IV

HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY THE PRESENT SULTAN

HE sovereign of Constantinople and of that widespread empire to which it is capital and centre, may well awaken curiosity and interest on the score of his exalted rank, and because of that lordly dynastic line of which he is heir and representative. But a still sincerer respect and homage are due the present Sultan, because of the intellectual and moral qualities which characterize him as a ruler and a man. In his veins flows the blood of twenty successive sultans, his ancestors, and he is the twenty-first in direct descent from Sultan Osman I, the illustrious founder of his house. He is the thirty-fourth sabre-girded sultan, and the twenty-eighth who has reigned at Constantinople. No other European monarch can trace his ancestry in so direct and unbroken succession through so many years to the earliest sovereign of his race, inheritance being always transmitted in the male line, and at no time deviating farther than to a brother, uncle, or nephew.

The Oriental pomp of his titles reads like a passage from the "Arabian Nights," -Sultan of Sultans, King of Kings, Bestower of Crowns upon the Princes of the World,

Shadow of God upon Earth, Emperor and Sovereign Lord of the White Sea and the Black Sea, of Roumelia and Anatolia, of Karamania, of the Country of Roum, Diarbekir, Kurdistan, Azerbidjan, Cham, Aleppo, Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem the Holy, of all the Countries of Arabia and Yemen, and moreover of an Infinity of other Provinces gloriously acquired, Son of Sultan Abd-ul Medjid Khan, Son of Sultan Mahmoud Khan II, the Shah Sultan Abd-ul Hamid Khan II.

He was born on the sixteenth day of the month of Shaban, in the year of the Hegira 1258 (September 22, 1842). His early life, like that of every Ottoman Prince, was passed in the seclusion of the seraglio, save that in 1867 he accompanied his uncle Sultan Abd-ul Aziz on a journey to western Europe. This was the first occasion in Ottoman history that a sultan has visited a foreign land as a peaceful guest. The mental condition of his elder brother, Sultan Mourad V, rendering abdication a state necessity, Sultan Abd-ul Hamid II, as next in age, reluctantly ascended the throne, being girded with the sabre in the Mosque of Eyoub on Shaban 12, 1293 (August 31, 1876).

The duties incumbent on him were twofold: he was to be caliph, or spiritual head, of the unnumbered millions of the Mussulman faith, and Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, whose far-reaching dominions, with their heterogeneous peoples, stretch through three continents. The political condition at his advent rendered these responsibilities still more weighty. The Empire was confronted with an imminent, inevitable, and inevitably disastrous war. The treasury was empty, national credit bankrupt, the army disorganized and dispersed, the country impoverished, discouraged, and distracted by factions whose aims were all