spread 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. 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 were 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 † reigned for some time in the neigh bourhood of Angora, Sinope, and the Black Sea; and his ambassadors were dismissed from the presence of Timour with fair promises and honourable gifts. But their master was soon deprived of his province and life, by a jealous

accordance with the view taken of their general character in a preceding note. See p. 139-140.-ED.] The civil wars,

from the death of Bajazet to that of Mustapha, are related, according to the Turks, by Demetrius Cantemir (p. 58-82). Of the Greeks, Chalcocondylas (1. 4 and 5), Phranza (l. 1, c. 30-32), and Ducas 27); the last is the most copious and best informed.

+ Arabshah, tom. ii. c. 26, whose testimony on this occasion is weighty and valuable. The existence of Isa (unknown to the Turks is likewise confirmed by Sherefeddin (1. 5, c. 57).

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, 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 Wallachian 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

* [Mahomet is called by the Byzantine writers Kurtzelebi, a corrup tion of Kyrishdji Tchelebi (the Noble Wrestler), a name given to him on account of his skill in wrestling. Finlay, ii. 608.-ED.]

VOL. VII.

Ο

castle, in Asiatic warfare, was esteemed impregnable; and the city of Amasia, 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. He relieved himself from the dangerous neighbourhood 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 vizirs, Bajazet and Ibrahim,t 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 vizir 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

* Arabshah, loc. citat. Abulfeda, Geograph. tab. xvii. p. 302. Busbequius, epist. 1, p. 96, 97, in Itinere C. P. et Amasiano.

The virtues of Ibrahim are praised by a contemporary Greek. (Ducas, c. 25.) His descendants are the sole nobles in Turkey: they content themselves with the administration of his pious foundations

the schism of the West, and the factions and wars of France and England, diverted the Latins from this gene rous 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, which had been planted at Phocæa,† on the Ionian coast, was enriched by the lucrative monopoly of alum; and their tranquillity under the Turkish empire

are excused from public offices, and receive two annual visits from the aultan. (Cantemir, p. 76.) * See Pachymer (1. 5, c. 29), Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 2, c. 1), Sherefeddin (l. 5, c. 57), and Ducas (c. 25). The last of these, a curious and careful observer, is entitled, from his birth and station, to particular credit in all that concerns Ionia and the islands. Among the nations that resorted to New Phocæa, he mentions the English ('Iyyλñvo); an early evidence of Mediterranean trade. For the spirit of navigation,

and freedom of ancient Phocæa, or rather of the Phocæans, consult the first book of Herodotus, and the Geographical Index of his last and learned French traslator, M. Larcher (tom. vii. p. 299). [Consult also Clinton (F. H. i. 119. 228. 234). The most flourishing period of the Phocæans was from 575 to 532 B.c. when they held the empire of the sea. Their colonies are the best evidence of their commercial activity, and among them we find the important ports of Heraclea in Pontus and Marseilles.-ED.] Phocæa is not

enumerated by Pliny (Hist. Nat. 35. 52) among the places productive of alum: he reckons Egypt as the first, and for the second the isle of Melos, whose alum mines are described by Tournefort (tom. i. lettre 4), a traveller and a naturalist. After the loss of Phocæa, the Genoese, in 1459, found that useful mineral in the isle of Ischia. (Ismael Bouillaud, ad Ducam, c. 25.) [The alumen of Pliny and the ancients was what we now call vitriol. The art of preparing our present alum was not discovered till the twelfth century, and according to some, at Edessa. The commercial transactions of the Genoese in the East brought it under their notice, and they made it for themselves, first at Phocæa, near the mouth of the Hermus, now Focchia Vecchia (Chishull's Travels, p. 32), or Fokia (Malte Brun and Balbi, p. 647), then in the vicinity of Pera, and in 1459 on the island of Enaria or Ischia. John di Castriot, who had been acquainted with the process during his residence at Constantinople, after the fall of that city, took refuge at Rome, and urged Pius II. to establish alum-works at Tolfa, near Civita Vecchia. These produced so large a revenue, that Julius III., Paul III. and IV. and Gregory XII. placed their alum on a level with their doctrine, and guarded both alike by bulls and excommunications. In 1608, the pale verdure of vegetation about Whitby and Guisborough in Yorkshire, betrayed the presence of the rock to Sir Thomas Chaloner, the tutor of Prince Henry, eldest son of James I. He allured Italian workmen, and in defiance of the most virulent papal fulminations, succeeded in making alum to such an extent, that the

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. But a Mussulman, who carried into Georgia the sword of persecution, and respected the holy warfare of Bajazet, was not disposed to pity or succour 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†

produce of that district soon amounted to six thousand tons in the year. Beckmann, History of Inventions, (Bohn) i. 180. Gough's Camden, iii. 81.-ED.] *The writer who has the most abused this fabulous generosity, is our ingenious Sir William Temple (his works, vol. iii. p. 349, 350, octavo edition), that lover of exotic virtue. After the conquest of Russia, &c. and the passage of the Danube, his Tartar hero relieves, visits, admires, and refuses the city of Constantine. His flattering pencil deviates in every line from the truth of history; yet his pleasing fictions are more excusable than the gross errors of Cantemir. For the reigns of Manuel. and John, of Mahomet I. and Amurath II. see the Othman history of Cantemir (p. 70-95), and the three Greeks, Chalcocondylas, Phranza, und Ducas, who is still superior to his rivals.