Bajazet spared twentyfive of his noblest prisoners

Bajazet spared twenty-five of his noblest prisoners, whom their wealth and station made it politic to except; then, summoning the rest before his throne, he offered them the famous choice of the Koran or the sword. As they came up one by one, they one by one professed their faith in Christ, and were beheaded in the Sultan’s presence. His royal and noble captives be carried about with him in his march through Europe and Asia, as he himself was soon to grace the retinue of Timour.

Two of the most illustrious of them died in prison in Asia. As to the .rest, he exacted a heavy ransom from them; and, before he sent them away, he gave them a grand entertainment, which displayed both the barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic. He displayed before them his hunting and hawking equipage, amounting to seven thousand huntsmen and as many falconers; and, when one of his chamberlains was accused before him of drinking a poor woman’s goat’s milk, he literally fulfilled the “ castigat auditque” of the poet, by having the unhappy man ripped open, in order to find the evidence of the charge.

Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nico- polis; nor is it wonderful that it should damp the zeal of the Christians and weaken the influence of the Pope, for a long time to come; any how, it had this effect till the critical moment of the Turkish misfortunes was over, and the race of Othman was recovering itself after the captivity and death of its Sultan. “Whereas the Turks might have been expelled from Greece on the loss of their Sultan”, says Rainaldus, “ Christians, torn to pieces by their quarrels and by schism, lost a fit and sufficient op-portunity. Whence it followed, that the wound inflicted upon the beast was not unto death, but he revived more ferocious for the devouring of the faithful”.

Bravery of Hunniades

However, Christendom made a second attempt still, hut when it was too late. The grandson of Baja- zet was then on the throne, one of the ablest of the Sultans; and, though the allied Christian army had considerable success against him at first, in vain was the bravery of Hunniades, and the preaching of St. John Capistran: the Turk managed to negociate with them, to put them in the wrong, to charge them with perjury, then to beat them in the fatal battle of Varna, in which the King of Hungary and Poland and the Pope’s Legate were killed, with 10,000 men. In vain after this was any attempt to make head against the enemy; in vain did Pope after Pope raise his warning voice and point to the judgment which hung over Christendom; Constantinople fell.