government. Kotchi Bey, who wrote in the reign of Amurath IV. (1623), and who is termed by Von Hammer the Turkish Montesquieu, assigns in his work on the "Decline of the Ottoman Empire," which he traces up to the reign of the first Solyman, among the causes of that decline,-1st, the cessation in Solyman's time of the regular attendance of the Sultan at the meetings of the Divan; 2nd, the habit then introduced of appointing men to high stations who had not previously passed through a gradation of lower offices; 3rd, the venality and corruption first practised by Solyman's son-in-law and Grand Vizier, Roostem, who sold to people of the lowest character and capacity the very highest civil offices, though the appointment to all military ranks, high or low, was still untainted by bribery or other dishonest influence. The fourth censure passed by Kotchi Bey on Solyman is for his evil example in exceeding the limits of wise liberality by heaping wealth upon the same favourite Vizier, and allowing him not only to acquire enormous riches, but to make them, by an abuse of the Turkish mortmain law, inalienable in his family. This was done by transforming his estates into Vaks or Vakoufs; that is to say, by settling his property on some mosque or other religious foundation, which took from it a small quitrent, and held the rest in trust for the donor and his family. While admitting the justice of these charges of the Oriental historian, Von Hammer exposes the

* The classical reader will remember Xenophon's mode of securing his estate at Scillus, by dedicating it to Diana, to whose service a tenth of the produce was assigned, while Xenophon held the land and took the other ninetenths himself.

groundlessness of the censure which European writers have passed upon Solyman, when accusing him of having introduced the custom of shutting up the young princes of the House of Othman in the seraglio, instead of training them to lead armies and govern provinces. He points out that all the sons of Solyman, who grew up to manhood, administered pachalics under him, and that one of his last acts before his death was to appoint Amurath, his grandson, to the government of Magnesia.

In the same spirit in which Arrian sums up the character of Alexander the Great,* the German historian rightly warns us, when estimating that of Solyman the Great, not to fix our attention exclusively on the blamable actions of his life, but to remember also the bright and noble qualities which adorned him. As a man, he was warm-hearted and sincere, and honourably pure from the depraved sensuality which has disgraced too many of his nation. We must remember his princely courage, his military genius, his high and enterprising spirit, his strict observance of the laws of his religion without any taint of bigoted persecution, the order and economy which he combined with so much grandeur and munificence, his liberal encouragement of art and literature, his zeal for the diffusion of education, the conquests by which he extended his empire, and the wise and comprehensive legislation with which he provided for the good government of all his subjects; let him be thus taken for all in all, and we shall feel his incontestable right to the title of a great sovereign which now for three centuries he has maintained.

* Arrian, Vit. Al., lib vii. 28.

CHAPTER XI.

SELIM II. HIS DEGENERACY

PEACE WITH AUSTRIA - FIRST CONFLICT BETWEEN TURKS AND RUSSIANS-CONQUEST OF CYPRUS-BATTLE OF LEPANTO-OULOUDJ ALI'S ENERGYDEATH OF SELIM.

SOLYMAN the Great, the Magnificent, the Lawgiver, the Lord of his Age, was succeeded by a prince to whom his own national historians give the epithet of "Selim the Sot." The ignoble vices of this prince (to secure whose accession so much and such dear blood had been shed) had attracted the sorrowful notice and drawn down the indignant reprimand of the old Sultan in his latter years; but there was now no brother to compete for the throne with Selim, and on the 25th of September, 1566, the sabre of Othman was girt for the first time on a sovereign, who shrank from leading in person the armies of Islam, and wasted in low debauchery the hours, which his predecessors had consecrated to the duties of the state. The effects of this fatal degeneracy were not immediately visible. The perfect organisation, civil and military, in which Solyman had left the empire, cohered for a time after the strong hand, which had fashioned and knit it together for

* See Von Hammer, books 35, 36.

nearly half a century, was withdrawn. There was a numerous body of statesmen and generals who had been trained under the great Sultan: and thus somewhat of his spirit was preserved in the realm, until they had passed away, and another generation arisen, which knew not Solyman. Foremost of these was the Grand Vizier Mohammed Sokolli, who had victoriously concluded the campaign of Szigeth after Solyman's death ; and who, fortunately for Selim and his kingdom, acquired and maintained an ascendancy over the weak mind of the young Sultan, which was not indeed always strong enough to prevent the adoption of evil measures, or to curb the personal excesses of Selim's private life, but which checked the progress of anarchy, and maintained the air of grandeur in enterprise and of vigour in execution, by which the Sublime Porte had hitherto been distinguished.

An armistice was concluded with the Emperor Maximilian in 1568, on the terms that each party should retain possession of what it then occupied; and there was now for many years an unusual pause in the war between the houses of Hapsburg and Othman. The great foreign events of Selim's reign, are the attempts to conquer Astrakhan, and unite the Don and the Volga; the conquest of Cyprus; and the naval war of the battle of Lepanto. The first of these is peculiarly interesting, because the Turks were then for the first time brought into armed collision with the Russians.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, while the Ottoman Empire, then at the meridian of its glory, was the terror and admiration of the world; the Russian

was slowly and painfully struggling out of the degradation and ruin, with which it had been afflicted by two centuries and a half of Tartar conquest. The craft and courage of Ivan III. and Vasili Ivanovich had, between 1480 and 1533, emancipated Moscow from paying tribute to the Khans of Kipchakh; and, by annexing other Russian principalities to that of Muscovy, these princes had formed an united Russia, which extended from Kief to Kasan, and as far as Siberia and Norwegian Lapland. Even thus early the Grand Dukes, or, as they began to style themselves the Czars* of Muscovy, seem to have cherished ambitious projects of reigning at Constantinople. Ivan III. sought out and married Sophia, the last princess of the Greek Imperial family, from which the conquering Ottomans had wrested Byzantium. From that time forth, the two-headed eagle, which had been the imperial cognizance of the Emperors of Constantinople, has been assumed by the Russian sovereigns as their symbol of dominion. † During the minority of Ivan the Terrible (who succeeded in 1533) a period of anarchy ensued in Russia, but on that Prince assuming the government, the vigour of the

"This title is not a corruption of the word Cæsar, as many have supposed, but is an old Oriental word which the Russians acquired through the Slavonic translation of the Bible, and which they bestowed at first on the Greek emperors, and afterwards on the Tartar Khans. In Persia it signifies throne, supreme authority; and we find it in the termination of the names of the kings of Assyria and Babylon, such as Phalassar, Nabonassar," &c.-Kelly, "Hist. Russia," p. 125 n., citing Karamsin. Von Hammer, in his last note to his 31st book, says, "The title Czar, or Tzar, is an ancient title of Asiatic sovereigns. We find an instance of it in the title 'The Schar,' of the sovereign of Gurdistan; and in that of Tzarina (Zapîvn) of the Scythians."

"Until after the marriage of Ivan III. with Sophia, the cognisance of the grand princes of Moscow had always been a figure of St. George killing the dragon."-Kelly's Hist. Russia, p. 125 n.