defeated with great loss, and taken prisoner. The Turkish historians assert that Bayezid was confined by the conqueror in an iron cage, but Timúr's own companion and historian asserts that the conqueror treated his captive with great lenity; all that can be determined with certainty is that the sultan died in the enemy's camp. Timúr himself fell a victim to disease, while preparing to invade China (A.D. 1405); his empire was dismembered after his death, but Baber, one of his descendants, established an empire at Delhi, in northern India (A.D. 1526), which, sadly shorn of its ancient glories, subsisted almost to our own times under the name of the empire of the Great Moguls. After a long fratricidal war, Mohammed I., the youngest of Bayezíd's sons, succeeded to his father's dominions. The greater part of his reign was spent in restoring the Ottoman power in western Asia, and thus the Byzantines obtained a respite, by which they knew not how to profit. Morad, or Amurath II., raised the glory of the Ottomans to a height greater than it had yet attained. He deprived the Greeks of all their cities and castles on the Euxine Sea, and along the coasts of Thrace, Macedon, and Thessaly; he even stormed the fortifications that had been constructed across the Corinthian isthmus, and carried his victorious arms into the midst of the Peloponnesus. The Grecian emperors acknowledged him as their superior lord, and he, in turn, accorded them protection. Two Christian heroes arrested the progress of the sultan, John Hunniades, and George Castriot, better known by the name of Scanderbeg. Hunniades was a celebrated Hungarian general; he drove the Turks from Servia, whose possession they eagerly coveted, and long impeded their progress westward. Scanderbeg was an Albanian prince, possessing a small district in the Epirote mountains, of which Croia was the capital. At the head of a small but faithful band of followers he long resisted the mighty armies of the Ottomans, and compelled Amurath himself to raise the siege of Croia. At length Mohammed II. ascended the Ottoman throne (A.D. 1451), and from the moment of his accession directed all his efforts to the capture of Constantinople. At the head of an army of three hundred thousand men, supported by a fleet of three hundred sail, he laid siege to this celebrated metropolis, and encouraged his men by spreading reports of prophecies and prodigies that portended the triumph of Islamism. Constantine, the last of the Greek emperors, met the storm with becoming resolution; supported by the Genoese, and a scanty band of volunteers from western Europe, he maintained the city for fifty-three days, though the fanaticism of his enemies was raised to the highest pitch by their confident reliance on the favour of heaven, while prophecies of impending woe and desolation proportionally depressed the inhabitants of Constantinople. At length, on the 29th of May, A.D. 1453, the Turks stormed the walls, the last Constantine fell as he boldly disputed every inch of ground, multitudes of his subjects were massacred in the first burst of Turkish fury, the rest were dragged into slavery, and when Mohammed made his triumphal entry he found the city a vast solitude. A shade of melancholy mingled with the pride of victory; he vented his feelings in a quotation from the Persian poet Sadî,— The spider spreads the hangings of the palace of Cæsar, The conquest of Constantinople was followed by that of Servia, Bosnia, Albania, Greece, including the Peloponnesus, several islands of the Archipelago, and the Greek empire of Trebizond. All Christendom was filled with alarm; Pope Pius II. convened a council at Mantua, for the purpose of organising a general association to resist the progress of the Turks (A.D. 1459). A crusade was preached by his order, and he was about to undertake the command of the expedition in person, when death cut short his projects at Ancona (A.D. 1464). The Christian league was dissolved by his death, the Turks were permitted to establish their empire in Europe, and this received a great increase both of security and strength by the voluntary tender of allegiance which the khans of the Crimea made to Mohammed II. (A.D. 1478). After the first burst of fanaticism was over, Mohammed granted protection to his Christian subjects, and by his wise measures Constantinople was restored to its former prosperity. 189 CHAPTER VI. THE REFORMATION, AND COMMENCEMENT OF THE STATES-SYSTEM IN EUROPE. SECTION I. Progress of Maritime Discovery. THE rapid progress made in maritime discovery at the close of the Middle Ages cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of the state of navigation among the ancients, and we gladly avail ourselves of some valuable articles on the subject in the Saturday Magazine, to give an outline of the amount of maritime science and information which existed before the use of the mariner's compass was introduced into Europe. The scene of the earliest known navigation was the Mediterranean Sea, which naturally seemed to the ancients to be situated in the middle of the earth; as is implied by its name. As navigation advanced only at a creeping pace, and as but a small amount of fresh experience was laid up by one generation for the benefit of the next, it took very many ages to explore the Mediterranean, Tyrrhene, Hadriatic, and Ægean seas. The people of Tyre and Sidon, the Phoenicians, 'whose merchants were princes' (Isaiah xxiii. 8), were among the first whom the spirit of commerce and the desire of gain had made dissatisfied with what had hitherto seemed the natural limits of marine excursion. The great antiquity of the Phoenicians, however, is perhaps the reason why our knowledge of them is obtained from incidental and isolated accounts; but on the naval spirit and industry of Carthage, a colony planted by the former power, in the ninth century before Christ, the light of history, owing to their connection with the Romans, is more abundantly shed. With the Carthaginians, perhaps, had originated the idea of quitting the Mediterranean by the straits of Gades (now Gibraltar), of sailing southward, circumnavigating the coast of Africa, and then returning northward by the Red Sea, towards the Levant, or eastern side of the Mediterranean. This notion seems to have been cherished for ages, as the prime, the crowning enterprise, long thought of and debated; but which only a solitary few, at long intervals of time, determined to try to effect. Knowing only a portion of the globe, and conceiving that portion to be upon an extended plane, those who held a voyage from Crete to Egypt to be a signal proof of naval courage, and who had never reached Sicily or Africa but by a wayward tempest, or by shipwreck, and who were then objects of wonder at having escaped the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis and the Syrtes, those wave-bound prisons of mariners, might justly have feared for themselves, in being committed to unknown waters, and in tracking shores which the reports of others who had never seen these regions, no less than their own fears, had represented as the abode of every horror. In short, distance from the land seems to have alarmed all the ancients; who, upon every occasion, when quitting sight of the shore, fancied they saw, as Homer tells us : A length of ocean and unbounded sky, The general truth of these observations is corroborated by the story of the Pamphylian, who was taken prisoner and carried to Egypt. He was kept as a slave for a very long time at a town near one of the mouths of the Nile, where Damietta now stands. Being frequently employed to assist in maritime business, he conceived the idea of committing himself to the mercy of the waves in a sailing boat, in order that he might once again behold his native country. Having provided himself to the best of his means and ability, he set sail, resolving rather to perish in the bosom of the old ocean than to remain longer in captivity. He traversed the vast expanse of waters which lies between Egypt and Asia Minor, and arrived safely at Pamphylia. From this bold and unusual adventure he lost his original name, and received the appellation of Mononautes, or the lone sailor, which for a long time after, we may presume, served his family as a patent of nobility. We have the foregoing account from Eustathius, the commentator of Homer. The first great natural assistance given to ancient navigation was the discovery of the trade-winds which prevail in the Indian Ocean. These winds, from the dependence which may be placed upon them, and from their consequent value to commerce, are called trade-winds, and extend about thirty degrees on each side of the Equator. These winds, however, maintain their regularity only in the open ocean. Where land breaks the continuity of the liquid surface great changes are produced; but the most remarkable effects exist in the Indian Ocean. The third degree of south latitude is a boundary between distinct winds; from that boundary northward to the continent of Hindostan a north-east wind blows from October to April, and a south-west from April to October; seasons. while, from the same boundary to the tenth degree of south latitude, a north-west wind blows from October to April, and a southeast from April to October. These winds are called monsoons. The term monsoon, or, according to the Persian, monsum, implies seasons; and is so used in the Malayan, moossin, and other dialects of the East. The breaking up of the monsoons, or periodical changes in the direction of these winds, divides the Indian year into two The monsoons on the eastern side of the globe originate with the trade-winds, of which they are a species, produced by the diversity of continent and islands, seas and gulfs, in this part of the world. These periodical currents of winds, if noticed by the Arabians, were not made to serve their maritime trade, until the keener enterprise of the West, in the person of Hippalus (about A.D. 50), first ventured to steer off from the Arabian and Persian shores, and to be impelled eastward in the direction of the wind. A voyage which had consumed years now took up but as many months, by a conformity, on the part of the mariner, with this invariable law of nature. The means of profit and information were now less monopolised, and the West became better acquainted with the inhabitants and produce of the East. The navigation to the Indies was continued, when the Romans became masters of Egypt, by sailing down the Arabian Gulf, and from thence to the mouth of the river Indus, along the southern coasts of Arabia and Persia. But, under the Emperor Claudius, this route was so far changed that after emerging from the Arabian Gulf they cut across the Indian Ocean directly to the mouth of the Indus, by noticing, and taking advantage of, the time when the south-west trade-wind blew. The trade was carried on with India thus: the goods that were intended for the Indian markets were embarked at Alexandria, and carried up the Nile, a distance of about three hundred miles, to Coptus. From the latter place the merchandise was carried on camels' backs to Berenice, a distance of two hundred and sixty miles. Berenice is on the shore of the Red Sea, and there the goods were warehoused until the proper season for sailing, when they steered for the opposite coast of Arabia, and took on board frankincense and other Arabian commodities, giving arms, knives, vessels, &c., in return. They now proceeded on their voyage to India; whence, having disposed of their articles of merchandise, and got gold, spices, drugs, &c., in return, they pursued their voyage back to Alexandria, where they usually arrived about December or January. The Indian commodities were conveyed from Berenice to Alexandria in the way before described; and a fleet sailed annually from the latter place to Rome, conveying the treasures of the East. When the Constantinopolitan empire was formed, by the divi |