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قراءة كتاب The Captain of the Janizaries A story of the times of Scanderberg and the fall of Constantinople

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The Captain of the Janizaries
A story of the times of Scanderberg and the fall of Constantinople

The Captain of the Janizaries A story of the times of Scanderberg and the fall of Constantinople

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES

A STORY OF THE TIMES OF SCANDERBEG
AND
THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

By JAMES M. LUDLOW, D.D. Litt.D

ELEVENTH EDITION

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NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1886, by Dodd, Mead & Co.


Copyright, 1890, by James M. Ludlow.

Electrotyped by Dodd, Mead & Co.

PREFACE.


The story of the Captain of the Janizaries originated, not in the author's desire to write a book, but in the fascinating interest of the times and characters he has attempted to depict. It seems strange that the world should have so generally forgotten George Castriot, or Scanderbeg, as the Turks named him, whose career was as romantic as it was significant in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Gibbon assigns to him but a few brief pages, just enough to make us wonder that he did not write more of the man who, he confessed, "with unequal arms resisted twenty-three years the powers of the Ottoman Empire." Creasy, in his history of the Turks, devotes less than a page to the exploits of one who "possessed strength and activity such as rarely fall to the lot of man," "humbled the pride of Amurath and baffled the skill and power of his successor Mahomet." History, as we make it in events, is an ever-widening river, but, as remembered, it is like a stream bursting eastward from the Lebanons, growing less as it flows until it is drained away in the desert.

Though our story is in the form of romance, it is more than "founded upon fact." The details are drawn from historical records, such as the chronicles of the monk Barletius—a contemporary, though perhaps a prejudiced admirer, of Scanderbeg—the later Byzantine annals, the customs of the Albanian people, and scenes observed while travelling in the East.

The author takes the occasion of the publication of a new edition to gratefully acknowledge many letters from scholars, as well as notices from the press, which have expressed appreciation of this attempt to revive popular interest in lands and peoples that are to reappear in the drama of the Ottoman expulsion from Europe, upon which the curtain is now rising.

THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES.


CHAPTER I.

From the centre of the old town of Brousa, in Asia Minor—old even at the time of our story, about the middle of the fifteenth century—rises an immense plateau of rock, crowned with the fortress whose battlements and towers cut their clear outlines high against the sky. An officer of noble rank in the Ottoman service stood leaning upon the parapet, apparently regaling himself with the marvellous panorama of natural beauty and historic interest which lay before him. The vast plain, undulating down to the distant sea of Marmora, was mottled with fields of grain, gardens enclosed in hedges of cactus, orchards in which the light green of the fig-trees blended with the duskier hues of the olive, and dense forests of oak plumed with the light yellow blooms of the chestnut. Here and there writhed the heavy vapors of the hot sulphurous streams springing out of the base of the Phrygian Olympus, which reared its snow-clad peak seven thousand feet above. The lower stones of the fortress of Brousa were the mementoes of twenty centuries which had drifted by them since they were laid by the old Phrygian kings. The flags of many empires had floated from those walls, not the least significant of which was that of the Ottoman, who, a hundred years before, had consecrated Brousa as his capital by burying in yonder mausoleum the body of Othman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty of the Sultans.

But the Turkish officer was thinking of neither the beauty of the scene nor the historic impressiveness of the place. His face, shaded by the folds of his enormous turban, wore deeper shadows which were flung upon it from within. He was talking to himself.

"The Padishah[1] has a nobler capital now than this,—across the sea there in Christian Europe. But by whose hands was it conquered? By Christian hands! by Janizaries! renegades! Ay, this hand!"—he stripped his arm bare to the shoulder and looked upon its gnarled muscles as he hissed the words through his teeth—"this hand has cut a wider swathe through the enemies of the Ottoman than any other man's; a swathe down which the Padishah can walk without tripping his feet. And this was a Christian's hand once! Well may I believe the story my old nurse so often told me,—that, when the priest was dropping the water of baptism upon my baby brow, this hand seized the sacred vessel, and it fell shattered upon the pavement. Ah, well have I fulfilled that omen!"

The man walked to and fro on the platform with quick and jarring step, as if to shake off the grip of unwelcome thoughts. There was a majesty in his mien which did not need the play of his partially suppressed fury to fascinate the attention of any who might have beheld him at the moment. He was tall of stature, immensely broad at the shoulders, deep lunged, comparatively light and trim in the loins, as the close drawn sash beneath the embroidered jacket revealed: arms long; hands large. He looked as if he might wrestle with a bear without a weapon. His features were not less notable than his form. His forehead was high and square, with such fulness at the corners as to leave two cross valleys in the middle. Deep-set eyes gleamed from beneath broad and heavy brows. The lips were firm, as if they had grown rigid from the habit of concealing, rather than expressing, thought, except in the briefest words of authority,—Cæsar-lips to summarize a campaign in a sentence. The chin was heavy, and would have unduly protruded were it not that there were needed bulk and strength to stand as the base of such prominent upper features. Altogether his face would have been pronounced hard and forbidding, had it not been relieved as remarkably by that strange radiance with which strong intelligence and greatness of soul sometimes transfigure the coarsest features.

These peculiarities of the man were observed and commented upon by two officers who were sitting in the embrasure of the parapet at the farther end of the battlement. The elder of the two, who had grown gray in the service, addressed his comrade, a young man, though wearing the insignia of rank equal to that of the other.

"Yes, Bashaw,[2] he is not only the right hand of the Padishah, but the army has not seen an abler soldier since the Ottoman entered Europe. You know his history?"

"Only as every one knows it, for in recent years he has written it with his cimeter flashing through battle dust as the lightning through clouds," replied the young officer.

The veteran warmed with enthusiasm as he narrated, "I well remember him as a lad when he was brought from the Arnaout's

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