On the throne of Samarcand, 63 he displayed, in a
short repose, his magnificence and power; listened to the complaints of
the people; distributed a just measure of rewards and punishments;
employed his riches in the architecture of palaces and temples; and gave
audience to the ambassadors of Egypt, Arabia, India, Tartary, Russia, and
Spain, the last of whom presented a suit of tapestry which eclipsed the
pencil of the Oriental artists. The marriage of six of the emperor’s
grandsons was esteemed an act of religion as well as of paternal
tenderness; and the pomp of the ancient caliphs was revived in their
nuptials. They were celebrated in the gardens of Canighul, decorated with
innumerable tents and pavilions, which displayed the luxury of a great
city and the spoils of a victorious camp. Whole forests were cut down to
supply fuel for the kitchens; the plain was spread with pyramids of meat,
and vases of every liquor, to which thousands of guests were courteously
invited: the orders of the state, and the nations of the earth, were
marshalled at the royal banquet; nor were the ambassadors of Europe (says
the haughty Persian) excluded from the feast; since even the casses,
the smallest of fish, find their place in the ocean. 64
The public joy was testified by illuminations and masquerades; the trades
of Samarcand passed in review; and every trade was emulous to execute some
quaint device, some marvellous pageant, with the materials of their
peculiar art. After the marriage contracts had been ratified by the
cadhis, the bride-grooms and their brides retired to the nuptial chambers:
nine times, according to the Asiatic fashion, they were dressed and
undressed; and at each change of apparel, pearls and rubies were showered
on their heads, and contemptuously abandoned to their attendants. A
general indulgence was proclaimed: every law was relaxed, every pleasure
was allowed; the people was free, the sovereign was idle; and the
historian of Timour may remark, that, after devoting fifty years to the
attainment of empire, the only happy period of his life were the two
months in which he ceased to exercise his power. But he was soon awakened
to the cares of government and war. The standard was unfurled for the
invasion of China: the emirs made their report of two hundred thousand,
the select and veteran soldiers of Iran and Touran: their baggage and
provisions were transported by five hundred great wagons, and an immense
train of horses and camels; and the troops might prepare for a long
absence, since more than six months were employed in the tranquil journey
of a caravan from Samarcand to Pekin. Neither age, nor the severity of the
winter, could retard the impatience of Timour; he mounted on horseback,
passed the Sihoon on the ice, marched seventy-six parasangs, three hundred
miles, from his capital, and pitched his last camp in the neighborhood of
Otrar, where he was expected by the angel of death. Fatigue, and the
indiscreet use of iced water, accelerated the progress of his fever; and
the conqueror of Asia expired in the seventieth year of his age,
thirty-five years after he had ascended the throne of Zagatai. His designs
were lost; his armies were disbanded; China was saved; and fourteen years
after his decease, the most powerful of his children sent an embassy of
friendship and commerce to the court of Pekin. 65
The fame of Timour has pervaded the East and West: his posterity is still
invested with the Imperial title; and the admiration of his
subjects, who revered him almost as a deity, may be justified in some
degree by the praise or confession of his bitterest enemies. 66
Although he was lame of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not
unworthy of his rank; and his vigorous health, so essential to himself and
to the world, was corroborated by temperance and exercise. In his familiar
discourse he was grave and modest, and if he was ignorant of the Arabic
language, he spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish
idioms. It was his delight to converse with the learned on topics of
history and science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game
of chess, which he improved or corrupted with new refinements. 67
In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
Mussulman; 68 but his sound understanding may tempt us to
believe, that a superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies, for
saints and astrologers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. In
the government of a vast empire, he stood alone and absolute, without a
rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to seduce his affections, or a
minister to mislead his judgment. It was his firmest maxim, that whatever
might be the consequence, the word of the prince should never be disputed
or recalled; but his foes have maliciously observed, that the commands of
anger and destruction were more strictly executed than those of
beneficence and favor. His sons and grandsons, of whom Timour left
six-and-thirty at his decease, were his first and most submissive
subjects; and whenever they deviated from their duty, they were corrected,
according to the laws of Zingis, with the bastinade, and afterwards
restored to honor and command. Perhaps his heart was not devoid of the
social virtues; perhaps he was not incapable of loving his friends and
pardoning his enemies; but the rules of morality are founded on the public
interest; and it may be sufficient to applaud the wisdom of a
monarch, for the liberality by which he is not impoverished, and for the
justice by which he is strengthened and enriched. To maintain the harmony
of authority and obedience, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to
reward the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his dominions, to
secure the traveller and merchant, to restrain the depredations of the
soldier, to cherish the labors of the husbandman, to encourage industry
and learning, and, by an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the
revenue, without increasing the taxes, are indeed the duties of a prince;
but, in the discharge of these duties, he finds an ample and immediate
recompense. Timour might boast, that, at his accession to the throne, Asia
was the prey of anarchy and rapine, whilst under his prosperous monarchy a
child, fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the East to
the West. Such was his confidence of merit, that from this reformation he
derived an excuse for his victories, and a title to universal dominion.
The four following observations will serve to appreciate his claim to the
public gratitude; and perhaps we shall conclude, that the Mogul emperor
was rather the scourge than the benefactor of mankind. 1. If some
partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of
Timour, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their
rapine, cruelty, and discord, the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict
their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the
reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities was
often marked by his abominable trophies, by columns, or pyramids, of human
heads. Astracan, Carizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus,
Boursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others, were sacked, or burnt, or utterly
destroyed, in his presence, and by his troops: and perhaps his conscience
would have been startled, if a priest or philosopher had dared to number
the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the establishment of
peace and order. 69 2. His most destructive wars were
rather inroads than conquests. He invaded Turkestan, Kipzak, Russia,
Hindostan, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and Georgia, without a hope or a
desire of preserving those distant provinces. From thence he departed
laden with spoil; but he left behind him neither troops to awe the
contumacious, nor magistrates to protect the obedient, natives. When he
had broken the fabric of their ancient government, he abandoned them to
the evils which his invasion had aggravated or caused; nor were these
evils compensated by any present or possible benefits. 3. The
kingdoms of Transoxiana and Persia were the proper field which he labored
to cultivate and adorn, as the perpetual inheritance of his family. But
his peaceful labors were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by the
absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the Volga or the Ganges,
his servants, and even his sons, forgot their master and their duty. The
public and private injuries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor of
inquiry and punishment; and we must be content to praise the Institutions
of Timour, as the specious idea of a perfect monarchy. 4.
Whatsoever might be the blessings of his administration, they evaporated
with his life. To reign, rather than to govern, was the ambition of his
children and grandchildren; 70 the enemies of each
other and of the people. A fragment of the empire was upheld with some
glory by Sharokh, his youngest son; but after his decease, the
scene was again involved in darkness and blood; and before the end of a
century, Transoxiana and Persia were trampled by the Uzbeks from the
north, and the Turkmans of the black and white sheep. The race of Timour
would have been extinct, if a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree,
had not fled before the Uzbek arms to the conquest of Hindostan. His
successors (the great Moguls 71) extended their sway
from the mountains of Cashmir to Cape Comorin, and from Candahar to the
Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of Aurungzebe, their empire had been
dissolved; their treasures of Delhi have been rifled by a Persian robber;
and the richest of their kingdoms is now possessed by a company of
Christian merchants, of a remote island in the Northern Ocean.
Far different was the fate of the Ottoman monarchy. The massy trunk was
bent to the ground, but no sooner did the hurricane pass away, than it
again rose with fresh vigor and more lively vegetation. When Timour, in
every sense, had evacuated Anatolia, he left the cities without a palace,
a treasure, or a king. The open country was overspread with hordes of
shepherds and robbers of Tartar or Turkman origin; the recent conquests of
Bajazet were restored to the emirs, one of whom, in base revenge,
demolished his sepulchre; and his five sons were eager, by civil discord,
to consume the remnant of their patrimony. I shall enumerate their names
in the order of their age and actions. 72 1. It is
doubtful, whether I relate the story of the true Mustapha, or of an
impostor who personated that lost prince. He fought by his father’s side
in the battle of Angora: but when the captive sultan was permitted to
inquire for his children, Mousa alone could be found; and the Turkish
historians, the slaves of the triumphant faction, are persuaded that his
brother was confounded among the slain. If Mustapha escaped from that
disastrous field, he was concealed twelve years from his friends and
enemies; till he emerged in Thessaly, and was hailed by a numerous party,
as the son and successor of Bajazet. His first defeat would have been his
last, had not the true, or false, Mustapha been saved by the Greeks, and
restored, after the decease of his brother Mahomet, to liberty and empire.
A degenerate mind seemed to argue his spurious birth; and if, on the
throne of Adrianople, he was adored as the Ottoman sultan, his flight, his
fetters, and an ignominious gibbet, delivered the impostor to popular
contempt. A similar character and claim was asserted by several rival
pretenders: thirty persons are said to have suffered under the name of
Mustapha; and these frequent executions may perhaps insinuate, that the
Turkish court was not perfectly secure of the death of the lawful prince.
2. After his father’s captivity, Isa 73 reigned for some time
in the neighborhood of Angora, Sinope, and the Black Sea; and his
ambassadors were dismissed from the presence of Timour with fair promises
and honorable gifts. But their master was soon deprived of his province
and life, by a jealous brother, the sovereign of Amasia; and the final
event suggested a pious allusion, that the law of Moses and Jesus, of Isa
and Mousa, had been abrogated by the greater Mahomet. 3. Soliman
is not numbered in the list of the Turkish emperors: yet he checked the
victorious progress of the Moguls; and after their departure, united for a
while the thrones of Adrianople and Boursa. In war he was brave, active,
and fortunate; his courage was softened by clemency; but it was likewise
inflamed by presumption, and corrupted by intemperance and idleness. He
relaxed the nerves of discipline, in a government where either the subject
or the sovereign must continually tremble: his vices alienated the chiefs
of the army and the law; and his daily drunkenness, so contemptible in a
prince and a man, was doubly odious in a disciple of the prophet. In the
slumber of intoxication he was surprised by his brother Mousa; and as he
fled from Adrianople towards the Byzantine capital, Soliman was overtaken
and slain in a bath, 731 after a reign of seven years and ten
months. 4. The investiture of Mousa degraded him as the slave of
the Moguls: his tributary kingdom of Anatolia was confined within a narrow
limit, nor could his broken militia and empty treasury contend with the
hardy and veteran bands of the sovereign of Romania. Mousa fled in
disguise from the palace of Boursa; traversed the Propontis in an open
boat; wandered over the Walachian and Servian hills; and after some vain
attempts, ascended the throne of Adrianople, so recently stained with the
blood of Soliman. In a reign of three years and a half, his troops were
victorious against the Christians of Hungary and the Morea; but Mousa was
ruined by his timorous disposition and unseasonable clemency. After
resigning the sovereignty of Anatolia, he fell a victim to the perfidy of
his ministers, and the superior ascendant of his brother Mahomet. 5.The
final victory of Mahomet was the just recompense of his prudence and
moderation. Before his father’s captivity, the royal youth had been
intrusted with the government of Amasia, thirty days’ journey from
Constantinople, and the Turkish frontier against the Christians of
Trebizond and Georgia. The castle, in Asiatic warfare, was esteemed
impregnable; and the city of Amasia, 74 which is equally
divided by the River Iris, rises on either side in the form of an
amphitheatre, and represents on a smaller scale the image of Bagdad. In
his rapid career, Timour appears to have overlooked this obscure and
contumacious angle of Anatolia; and Mahomet, without provoking the
conqueror, maintained his silent independence, and chased from the
province the last stragglers of the Tartar host. 741 He relieved
himself from the dangerous neighborhood of Isa; but in the contests of
their more powerful brethren his firm neutrality was respected; till,
after the triumph of Mousa, he stood forth the heir and avenger of the
unfortunate Soliman. Mahomet obtained Anatolia by treaty, and Romania by
arms; and the soldier who presented him with the head of Mousa was
rewarded as the benefactor of his king and country. The eight years of his
sole and peaceful reign were usefully employed in banishing the vices of
civil discord, and restoring on a firmer basis the fabric of the Ottoman
monarchy. His last care was the choice of two viziers, Bajazet and
Ibrahim, 75 who might guide the youth of his son Amurath;
and such was their union and prudence, that they concealed above forty
days the emperor’s death, till the arrival of his successor in the palace
of Boursa. A new war was kindled in Europe by the prince, or impostor,
Mustapha; the first vizier lost his army and his head; but the more
fortunate Ibrahim, whose name and family are still revered, extinguished
the last pretender to the throne of Bajazet, and closed the scene of
domestic hostility.
In these conflicts, the wisest Turks, and indeed the body of the nation,
were strongly attached to the unity of the empire; and Romania and
Anatolia, so often torn asunder by private ambition, were animated by a
strong and invincible tendency of cohesion. Their efforts might have
instructed the Christian powers; and had they occupied, with a confederate
fleet, the Straits of Gallipoli, the Ottomans, at least in Europe, must
have been speedily annihilated. But the schism of the West, and the
factions and wars of France and England, diverted the Latins from this
generous enterprise: they enjoyed the present respite, without a thought
of futurity; and were often tempted by a momentary interest to serve the
common enemy of their religion. A colony of Genoese, 76
which had been planted at Phocæa 77 on the Ionian coast,
was enriched by the lucrative monopoly of alum; 78 and their
tranquillity, under the Turkish empire, was secured by the annual payment
of tribute. In the last civil war of the Ottomans, the Genoese governor,
Adorno, a bold and ambitious youth, embraced the party of Amurath; and
undertook, with seven stout galleys, to transport him from Asia to Europe.
The sultan and five hundred guards embarked on board the admiral’s ship;
which was manned by eight hundred of the bravest Franks. His life and
liberty were in their hands; nor can we, without reluctance, applaud the
fidelity of Adorno, who, in the midst of the passage, knelt before him,
and gratefully accepted a discharge of his arrears of tribute. They landed
in sight of Mustapha and Gallipoli; two thousand Italians, armed with
lances and battle-axes, attended Amurath to the conquest of Adrianople;
and this venal service was soon repaid by the ruin of the commerce and
colony of Phocæa.
If Timour had generously marched at the request, and to the relief, of the
Greek emperor, he might be entitled to the praise and gratitude of the
Christians. 79 But a Mussulman, who carried into Georgia the
sword of persecution, and respected the holy warfare of Bajazet, was not
disposed to pity or succor the idolaters of Europe. The Tartar
followed the impulse of ambition; and the deliverance of Constantinople
was the accidental consequence. When Manuel abdicated the government, it
was his prayer, rather than his hope, that the ruin of the church and
state might be delayed beyond his unhappy days; and after his return from
a western pilgrimage, he expected every hour the news of the sad
catastrophe. On a sudden, he was astonished and rejoiced by the
intelligence of the retreat, the overthrow, and the captivity of the
Ottoman. Manuel 80 immediately sailed from Modon in the Morea;
ascended the throne of Constantinople, and dismissed his blind competitor
to an easy exile in the Isle of Lesbos. The ambassadors of the son of
Bajazet were soon introduced to his presence; but their pride was fallen,
their tone was modest: they were awed by the just apprehension, lest the
Greeks should open to the Moguls the gates of Europe. Soliman saluted the
emperor by the name of father; solicited at his hands the government or
gift of Romania; and promised to deserve his favor by inviolable
friendship, and the restitution of Thessalonica, with the most important
places along the Strymon, the Propontis, and the Black Sea. The alliance
of Soliman exposed the emperor to the enmity and revenge of Mousa: the
Turks appeared in arms before the gates of Constantinople; but they were
repulsed by sea and land; and unless the city was guarded by some foreign
mercenaries, the Greeks must have wondered at their own triumph. But,
instead of prolonging the division of the Ottoman powers, the policy or
passion of Manuel was tempted to assist the most formidable of the sons of
Bajazet. He concluded a treaty with Mahomet, whose progress was checked by
the insuperable barrier of Gallipoli: the sultan and his troops were
transported over the Bosphorus; he was hospitably entertained in the
capital; and his successful sally was the first step to the conquest of
Romania. The ruin was suspended by the prudence and moderation of the
conqueror: he faithfully discharged his own obligations and those of
Soliman, respected the laws of gratitude and peace; and left the emperor
guardian of his two younger sons, in the vain hope of saving them from the
jealous cruelty of their brother Amurath. But the execution of his last
testament would have offended the national honor and religion; and the
divan unanimously pronounced, that the royal youths should never be
abandoned to the custody and education of a Christian dog. On this
refusal, the Byzantine councils were divided; but the age and caution of
Manuel yielded to the presumption of his son John; and they unsheathed a
dangerous weapon of revenge, by dismissing the true or false Mustapha, who
had long been detained as a captive and hostage, and for whose maintenance
they received an annual pension of three hundred thousand aspers. 81
At the door of his prison, Mustapha subscribed to every proposal; and the
keys of Gallipoli, or rather of Europe, were stipulated as the price of
his deliverance. But no sooner was he seated on the throne of Romania,
than he dismissed the Greek ambassadors with a smile of contempt,
declaring, in a pious tone, that, at the day of judgment, he would rather
answer for the violation of an oath, than for the surrender of a Mussulman
city into the hands of the infidels. The emperor was at once the enemy of
the two rivals; from whom he had sustained, and to whom he had offered, an
injury; and the victory of Amurath was followed, in the ensuing spring, by
the siege of Constantinople. 82
The religious merit of subduing the city of the Cæsars attracted from Asia
a crowd of volunteers, who aspired to the crown of martyrdom: their
military ardor was inflamed by the promise of rich spoils and beautiful
females; and the sultan’s ambition was consecrated by the presence and
prediction of Seid Bechar, a descendant of the prophet, 83
who arrived in the camp, on a mule, with a venerable train of five hundred
disciples. But he might blush, if a fanatic could blush, at the failure of
his assurances. The strength of the walls resisted an army of two hundred
thousand Turks; their assaults were repelled by the sallies of the Greeks
and their foreign mercenaries; the old resources of defence were opposed
to the new engines of attack; and the enthusiasm of the dervis, who was
snatched to heaven in visionary converse with Mahomet, was answered by the
credulity of the Christians, who beheld the Virgin Mary, in a
violet garment, walking on the rampart and animating their courage. 84
After a siege of two months, Amurath was recalled to Boursa by a domestic
revolt, which had been kindled by Greek treachery, and was soon
extinguished by the death of a guiltless brother. While he led his
Janizaries to new conquests in Europe and Asia, the Byzantine empire was
indulged in a servile and precarious respite of thirty years. Manuel sank
into the grave; and John Palæologus was permitted to reign, for an annual
tribute of three hundred thousand aspers, and the dereliction of almost
all that he held beyond the suburbs of Constantinople.
In the establishment and restoration of the Turkish empire, the first
merit must doubtless be assigned to the personal qualities of the sultans;
since, in human life, the most important scenes will depend on the
character of a single actor. By some shades of wisdom and virtue, they may
be discriminated from each other; but, except in a single instance, a
period of nine reigns, and two hundred and sixty-five years, is occupied,
from the elevation of Othman to the death of Soliman, by a rare series of
warlike and active princes, who impressed their subjects with obedience
and their enemies with terror. Instead of the slothful luxury of the
seraglio, the heirs of royalty were educated in the council and the field:
from early youth they were intrusted by their fathers with the command of
provinces and armies; and this manly institution, which was often
productive of civil war, must have essentially contributed to the
discipline and vigor of the monarchy. The Ottomans cannot style
themselves, like the Arabian caliphs, the descendants or successors of the
apostle of God; and the kindred which they claim with the Tartar khans of
the house of Zingis appears to be founded in flattery rather than in
truth. 85 Their origin is obscure; but their sacred and
indefeasible right, which no time can erase, and no violence can infringe,
was soon and unalterably implanted in the minds of their subjects. A weak
or vicious sultan may be deposed and strangled; but his inheritance
devolves to an infant or an idiot: nor has the most daring rebel presumed
to ascend the throne of his lawful sovereign. 86
While the transient dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a
crafty vizier in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the
Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries,
and is now incorporated with the vital principle of the Turkish nation.
To the spirit and constitution of that nation, a strong and singular
influence may, however, be ascribed. The primitive subjects of Othman were
the four hundred families of wandering Turkmans, who had followed his
ancestors from the Oxus to the Sangar; and the plains of Anatolia are
still covered with the white and black tents of their rustic brethren. But
this original drop was dissolved in the mass of voluntary and vanquished
subjects, who, under the name of Turks, are united by the common ties of
religion, language, and manners. In the cities, from Erzeroum to Belgrade,
that national appellation is common to all the Moslems, the first and most
honorable inhabitants; but they have abandoned, at least in Romania, the
villages, and the cultivation of the land, to the Christian peasants. In
the vigorous age of the Ottoman government, the Turks were themselves
excluded from all civil and military honors; and a servile class, an
artificial people, was raised by the discipline of education to obey, to
conquer, and to command. 87 From the time of Orchan and the first
Amurath, the sultans were persuaded that a government of the sword must be
renewed in each generation with new soldiers; and that such soldiers must
be sought, not in effeminate Asia, but among the hardy and warlike natives
of Europe. The provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and
Servia, became the perpetual seminary of the Turkish army; and when the
royal fifth of the captives was diminished by conquest, an inhuman tax of
the fifth child, or of every fifth year, was rigorously levied on the
Christian families. At the age of twelve or fourteen years, the most
robust youths were torn from their parents; their names were enrolled in a
book; and from that moment they were clothed, taught, and maintained, for
the public service. According to the promise of their appearance, they
were selected for the royal schools of Boursa, Pera, and Adrianople,
intrusted to the care of the bashaws, or dispersed in the houses of the
Anatolian peasantry. It was the first care of their masters to instruct
them in the Turkish language: their bodies were exercised by every labor
that could fortify their strength; they learned to wrestle, to leap, to
run, to shoot with the bow, and afterwards with the musket; till they were
drafted into the chambers and companies of the Janizaries, and severely
trained in the military or monastic discipline of the order. The youths
most conspicuous for birth, talents, and beauty, were admitted into the
inferior class of Agiamoglans, or the more liberal rank of Ichoglans,
of whom the former were attached to the palace, and the latter to the
person, of the prince. In four successive schools, under the rod of the
white eunuchs, the arts of horsemanship and of darting the javelin were
their daily exercise, while those of a more studious cast applied
themselves to the study of the Koran, and the knowledge of the Arabic and
Persian tongues. As they advanced in seniority and merit, they were
gradually dismissed to military, civil, and even ecclesiastical
employments: the longer their stay, the higher was their expectation;
till, at a mature period, they were admitted into the number of the forty
agas, who stood before the sultan, and were promoted by his choice to the
government of provinces and the first honors of the empire. 88
Such a mode of institution was admirably adapted to the form and spirit of
a despotic monarchy. The ministers and generals were, in the strictest
sense, the slaves of the emperor, to whose bounty they were indebted for
their instruction and support. When they left the seraglio, and suffered
their beards to grow as the symbol of enfranchisement, they found
themselves in an important office, without faction or friendship, without
parents and without heirs, dependent on the hand which had raised them
from the dust, and which, on the slightest displeasure, could break in
pieces these statues of glass, as they were aptly termed by the Turkish
proverb. 89 In the slow and painful steps of education,
their characters and talents were unfolded to a discerning eye: the man,
naked and alone, was reduced to the standard of his personal merit; and,
if the sovereign had wisdom to choose, he possessed a pure and boundless
liberty of choice. The Ottoman candidates were trained by the virtues of
abstinence to those of action; by the habits of submission to those of
command. A similar spirit was diffused among the troops; and their silence
and sobriety, their patience and modesty, have extorted the reluctant
praise of their Christian enemies. 90 Nor can the victory
appear doubtful, if we compare the discipline and exercise of the
Janizaries with the pride of birth, the independence of chivalry, the
ignorance of the new levies, the mutinous temper of the veterans, and the
vices of intemperance and disorder, which so long contaminated the armies
of Europe.
The only hope of salvation for the Greek empire, and the adjacent
kingdoms, would have been some more powerful weapon, some discovery in the
art of war, that would give them a decisive superiority over their Turkish
foes. Such a weapon was in their hands; such a discovery had been made in
the critical moment of their fate. The chemists of China or Europe had
found, by casual or elaborate experiments, that a mixture of saltpetre,
sulphur, and charcoal, produces, with a spark of fire, a tremendous
explosion. It was soon observed, that if the expansive force were
compressed in a strong tube, a ball of stone or iron might be expelled
with irresistible and destructive velocity. The precise æra of the
invention and application of gunpowder 91 is involved in
doubtful traditions and equivocal language; yet we may clearly discern,
that it was known before the middle of the fourteenth century; and that
before the end of the same, the use of artillery in battles and sieges, by
sea and land, was familiar to the states of Germany, Italy, Spain, France,
and England. 92 The priority of nations is of small account;
none could derive any exclusive benefit from their previous or superior
knowledge; and in the common improvement, they stood on the same level of
relative power and military science. Nor was it possible to circumscribe
the secret within the pale of the church; it was disclosed to the Turks by
the treachery of apostates and the selfish policy of rivals; and the
sultans had sense to adopt, and wealth to reward, the talents of a
Christian engineer. The Genoese, who transported Amurath into Europe, must
be accused as his preceptors; and it was probably by their hands that his
cannon was cast and directed at the siege of Constantinople. 93
The first attempt was indeed unsuccessful; but in the general warfare of
the age, the advantage was on their side, who were most commonly
the assailants: for a while the proportion of the attack and defence was
suspended; and this thundering artillery was pointed against the walls and
towers which had been erected only to resist the less potent engines of
antiquity. By the Venetians, the use of gunpowder was communicated without
reproach to the sultans of Egypt and Persia, their allies against the
Ottoman power; the secret was soon propagated to the extremities of Asia;
and the advantage of the European was confined to his easy victories over
the savages of the new world. If we contrast the rapid progress of this
mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason,
science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper,
will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.