At length for this also the fatal hour arrived. A Turkish army of more than 200,000 warriors and a powerful fleet surrounded the doomed city. This was the twelfth and final Mussulman siege it had to suffer, namely, seven from the Arabs and five from the Turks. It was stormed after a desperate resistance by the inadequate number of its defenders, and delivered for three days to the pillage and brutality of its conquerors. The luckless year 1453 thus had to witness the last Romano-Greek Emperor, Constantine IX., falling sword in hand in his fruitless resistance to the Turks, the ardent Mohammed II. occupying his ancient throne as Sultan, the first Christian capital converted into a new centre of Mussulman conquests, and its finest churches turned into mosques. What had remained a constant but vain object of Moslem ambition for eight centuries, was now accomplished by Turkish pertinacity and valour, and the youthful victor of Constantinople had earned for himself to all posterity the proud title of El-Fatih, the Conqueror. This constituted the crowning victory both of Ottomanism and Mohammedanism.

From the height of this vantage-ground it is easy to foresee that, when once will have come to pass what already appears so decidedly within the range of possibilities, viz., the expulsion of the Turks from Constantinople, and the restoration of the still remaining church-mosques, about twenty in number, to their original destination for Christian worship, then also the anti-Christian system of Islamism will have made a long stride in the process of its inevitable dissolution.

Fortunately the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks had been delayed till it no longer involved the fall of Christendom itself. In the interval between the Arab failure and the Ottoman success in their Mussulman assaults of the Imperial stronghold on the Bosporus, a number of more or less powerful Christian capitals had dotted the European west. One of the most eastern of them was Vienna, and not even this could be taken by the Turks, notwithstanding their utmost efforts during the culminating period of their power. It is a matter of history comparatively recent and well known, with what brutality, cruelty,

and treachery, the Turks pushed their conquests in the lands of the Mediterranean, as the terror of Christendom by sea and land; how persistently they invaded and devastated the countries on the left bank of the Danube; how recklessly they employed sword, fire, impaling, and torture; how their whole system of keeping down the distant peoples whom they had subjugated, was one of unsparing oppression and heartless terrorism; how many tens of thousands of virgins and women they captured in Christian lands, sometimes fastening them together, in large gangs, by their hair, to be afterwards distributed in the harems of voluptuous Mussulmans; and how they crowned their anti-Christian measures by the institution of the Janissaries, whereby annually thousands of the most promising Christian boys were forcibly taken from their homes and brought up as Mohammedans, to form a standing army for the further conquest of Christian lands and the keeping in subjection of those already conquered.

It is equally patent how steadily the Ottomans kept the great Moslem idea in view of a victorious march through the heart of Europe for the entire overthrow of Christian dominion, and how repeatedly they attempted to achieve from the east what the Arabs in Spain had failed to accomplish from the west. They considered as Dar el harb, or 'domain of war,' not only this or that Christian country, but every Christian land within their reach. No wonder, then, that at the time when the Turkish hosts overran Malta and Hungary, their ultimate aim was so well understood all over Europe, that even in its remotest west the Church of insular England was anxiously reminded by its Archbishop, under Queen Elizabeth,¹ that the Isle of Malta was `invaded with a great army and navy of Turks, Infidels and sworn enemies of the Christian religion, and that if' they should prevail against that Isle, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom;' and as regards Hungary, that 'if the Infidels should prevail wholly against that most goodly and strong kingdom, all the rest of Christendom would lie open to the incursion of the said savage and most cruel enemies the Turks, to the most dreadful danger of whole Christendom.' So deep was the interest in the