TURKEY.

(From the Modern Traveller.)

WHATEVER be the origin of the Turks as a nation, the foundation of the Ottoman empire dates no further back than the conquest of Prusa, the capital of Bithynia, by Othman, the son of Ertogrul, or Orthogrul, a Turcoman chieftain in the service of Aladin, a sultan of Iconium, who had established himself at Shughut, on the banks of the Sangirius. "Othman possessed," says Gibbon, "and perhaps surpassed the ordinary virtues of a soldier'; and the circumstances of time and place were propitious to his independence and success. The Seljukian dynasty was no more; and the distance and decline of the Mogul Khans soon enfranchised him from the control of a superior. He was situate on the verge of the Greek empire: the Koran sinctified his gazi, or holy war against the infidels, and their political errors unlocked the passes of Mount Olympus, and invited him to descend into the plains of Bithynia. It was on the 27th July, in the year 1299 of the Christian era, that Othman first invaded the territory of Nicomedia, and the singular accuracy of the date seems to disclose some foresight of the rapid and destructive growth of the monster.

The annals of the twenty-seven years of his reign would exhibit a repetition of the same inroads; and his hereditary troops were multiplied in each campaign by the accession of captives and volunteers. Instead of retreating to hills, he maintained the most useful and defensible posis; fortified the towns and castles which he had pillaged; and renounced the pastoral life for the baths and palaces of his infant capital. ut it was not till Othman was oppressed by age and infirmities, that he received the welcome news of the conquest of Prusa, which had been surrendered by famine or treachery to the arms of his son Orchan. The glory of Othman is chiefly founded on that of his descendants; but the Turks have transcribed or composed a royal testament of his counsels of justice and moderation. From the conquest of Prusa, we may date the true era of the Ottoman Empire. The lives and pos

sessions of the Christian subjects were redeemed by a tribute or ransom of 30,000 crowns of gold; and the city by the labours of Orchan, assumed the aspect of a Mahommedan capital. The office of Vizir was constituted for Aladin, the brother of Orchan."

Nice was taken by Orchan in 1330, and Nicomedia fell nine years after. The Moslem conqueror granted a safe-conduct to all who were desirous of departing with their families and effects; but the widows of the slain were given in marriage to the conquerors; and the sacrilegious plunder, the books, the vases, and the images, were sold or ransomed at Constantinople. The Emperor Andronicus the younger was vanquished and wounded by the son of Othman; he subdued the whole province or kingdom of Bithynia as far as the shores of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont; and the Christians confessed the justice and clemency of a reign which claimed the voluntary attachment of the Turks of Asia. Yet Orchan was content with the modest title of emir; and in the list of his compeers, the princes of Roun or Anatolia, his military forces were surpassed by the emirs of Ghermian and Caramania, each of whom could bring into the field an army of 40,000 men." On the death of Amir, the Turkish prince of Aidin, (Mysia), who had been the friend and ally of Cantacuzene, the Bithynian emir was applied to, to join his arms with those of the Greek emperor against the Latins. Orchan readily entered into this advantageous alliance, as a reward of which he obtained in marriage the daughter of Cantacuzene." "The Greek clergy," says the historian, "connived at the marriage of a Christian princess with a Without the sectary of Mahommed rites of the church Theodora was delivered to her barbarous lord; but it had been stipulated, that she should preserve her religion in the harem of Boursa; and her father celebrated her charity and devotion in this ambiguous situation. But the friendship of Orchan was subservient to his religion and interest; and in the Genoese war, he joined without a blush the enemies of Cantacuzene."

In this part of the Bithynin Emir, Bayazid, surnamed Ilderim, the Thunwe seem to have a counterpart to the derbolt, whose reign forms one of the artful and varying policy by which, in most splendid epochs in the Turkish our own days, the Vizir of loannina annals. Pursuing the plans and policy succeeded in rendering himself master of his father, he led his triumphant of Epirus and the greater part of Greece. armies from Boursa to Adrianople, Alternately the ally of the Latins and and from the Danube to the Euphrates. the Greeks, Orehan steadily pursued The Seljuktan Emirs of Asia Minor his own aggrandizement. In the civil had taken advantage of the distant wars of Romania, the Turkish cavalry, expeditions of Amurath, to unite their under the command of Soliman, his armis for the purpose of recovering eldest son, performed some service for their independence. Among these, the Emperor, but perpetrated more mis- the most powerful were the princes of chief. The Chersonesus was insensi- Caramania, who, by their influence bly filled with a Turkish colony, and over the minor chieftains, and by their Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont, coalitions with the Greek Emperors which had been partially destroyed by beyond the Hemus and the Danube, an earthquake, was rebuilt and peo- stirred up war alternately on that pled by the policy of Soli uan That frontier from which the Ottoman army prince having been killed by a fall was farthest removed. These revolts from his horse, the aged Orchan was and disturbances, by embarrassing the succeeded in his dominions by his son progress of the conqueror, protracted Murad, or Amurath 1. who subdued, the final overthrow of the Greek emwithout resistance, the whole of Thrace, pire. A victory obtained by Amurath from the Hellespont to Mount Hermus, over the Caramanians and their allies and made Adrianople the seat of a bey in the plain of Iconium, destroyed for lerbeylik, or vice-royalty, about 1365. the time this formidable confederacy; The Emperor John Palæologus, appears to have purchased his friendship or forbearance by the most abject submission; and Constantinople remained the capital-of a shadowy empire. The military bands called Yengi cheri, new soldiers, (corrupted into Janizaries,) were composed originally of European captives taken in the wars: they formed the first regular body of infan try ever maintained in constant exercise and pay by any European sovereign, and soon became the chief strength and pride of the Ottoman armies.

Amorath is said to have been of mild temper and unostentatious deportment, a lover of learning and virtue. Hle perished by the hand of a foreign assassin, after gaining the victory of Cassova over the confederated Slavonian tribes*; and was succeeded in 1889 by the renowned Bajazet, or

I do not consider the term assassin can be strietly applied to the man who killed Amurath 1. The World in Minature" gives the following acconut of his death;-"The Sultan alighting from his horse, walked over the field of battle, and remarked with astonishment that almost all his foes, with whose bodies it was covered, were beardless youths," 'Prince,' said

but Bajazat, not content with their
equivocal submission, resolved to an-
nex by force their territories to his
empire. Openly renouncing the peace-
alle maxims of his predecessors, he
shipped of their hereditary posse:s-
ions his brother emirs of Glermian,
(or Kermian) and Karaman of Ardin
and Saruckhan. The northern regions
of Anatolia, from Angora to Amasia
and Fizeroum, had already been re-
duced to obedience; and after the
conquest of Iconium, the ancient king-
dom of the Seljukians might be con-
sidered as revived in the Ottoman
dynasty. "No sooner had he imposed
a regular form of servitude on the
Servians and Bulgarians, than he
passed the Danube to seck new ene-
mies and new subjects in the heart of
Moldavia. Whatever yet adhered to
the Greek empire in Thrace, Macedo-

one of his generals, none but hot headed boys
dare cope with Mesnimaus.' While ho was
speaking a wounded Triballian, extended on
the ground near them, raised himself, recogni-
zed the Sultan by the respect paid to him, gave
him a mortal blow, and was himself immedi-
ately ent to pieces.”

ria, and Thessaly, acknowledged a Turkish master. An obsequious bishop led him through the gates of Thermopyla into Greece; and we may observe," adds Gibbon, whose words we are citing, that the widow of a Spanish chief, who possessed the ancient seat of the oracle of Delphi, deserved his favour by the sacrifice of a beauteous daughter. The Turkish communication between Europe and Asia had been dangerous and doubtful till he stationed at Gallipoli a fleet of galleys to command the Hellespont, and intercept the Latin Succours of Constantinople. While the monarch indulged his passions in a boundless range of injustice and cruelty, he imposed on his soldiers the most rigid laws of modesty and abstinence; and the harvest was peaceably reaped and sold within the precincts of the camp."

ROYAL APPETITES.

CHARLES XII. was brave, noble generous, and disinterested,--a complete hero, in fact, and a regular fire-eater. Yet, in spite of these qualifications and the eulogiums of his biographer, it is pretty evidient to those who impartially consider the career of this potentate, that he was by no means of a sang mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any strawcrowned monarch in Bediam A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates this. I allude to his absurd freak at Frederickshall, when, in order to discover how long he could exist without now ishment, he abstained from all kinds of food for more than seventy hours! Now, would any man in his senses have done this? Would Louis XVIII., for instance, that wise and ever-to-be-lamented monarch? Had it been the reverse, indeed - bad Charles, instead of practising starvation, adopted the opposite expedient, and endeavoured to ascertain the greatest possible quantity of meat, fruit, bread. wine, vegetables, &c. &c. he could have disposed of in any given time-why then it might have

been something! But to fast for three days! If this be not madness !— Indeed, there is but one reason I could ever conceive for a person not eating ; and that is, when, like poor Count Ugolino and his family, he can get nothing to eat!

Charles, now, and Louis-what a contrast! The first despised the pleasures of the table, abjured wine, and would, I dare say, just as soon have been without "a distinguishing taste" as with it. Your Bourbon, on the contrary, a five-mealed man, quaffing right Falernian night and day; and wis-ly esteeming the gratification of his palate of such importance, as absolutely to send from Lille to Paris -a distance of I know not how many score leagues-at a crisis, too, of peculiar difficulty for a sin le páte! "Go," cried the illustrious exile to his messenger; "dispatch, mon enfant! Mount the tri-colour! Shout Vive le Diable! Any thing! But be sure to clutch the precious compound! Napoleon has driven me from my throne; but he cannot deprive me of my appetite!" Here was courage! I challenge the most enthusiastic admirer of Charles to produce a similar instance of indifference to danger!

There is another trait in the character of Louis which equally demands our admiration, and proves that the indomitable firmness may be sometimes associated with the most sensitive and -infantine sensibility. f conrse, it will be perceived that I allude to the peculiar tenderness by which that amiable prince was often betrayed, even into tears, upon occasions when ordinary minds would have manifested comparative non-chalance. I have been assured that Louis absolutely wept at Hartwell, merely because oysters were out of season! - a testaceous production, to which he was remarkably attached, (whence his cognomen of Des Huîtres, by corruption Dix-huit ;) so much so, indeed, as to be literally ready to cut them, whenever they were brought into his presence. It is said that this worthy descendant of the good Henri used to put a barrel of Colchester oysters daily hors de combat, merely to give him an appetite.