1.
And now, having dwelt upon the broad contrast which exists between
Christendom and Turkey, I proceed to give you some general idea of the
Ottoman Turks, who are at present in power, as I have already sketched
the history of the Seljukian. We left off with the Crusaders victorious
in the Holy Land, and the Seljukian Sultan, the cousin of Malek Shah,
driven back from his capital over against Constantinople, to an obscure
town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman,
who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso's celebrated Poem of
“Jerusalem Delivered,”—
That Solyman, than whom there was not any
Of all God's foes more rebel an offender;
Nay, nor a giant such, among the many
Whom earth once bore, and might again engender;
The Turkish Prince, who first the Greeks expelling,
Fixed at Nicæa his imperial dwelling.
And then he made his infidel advances
From Phrygian Sangar to Meander's river;
Lydia and Mysia, humbled in war's chances,
Bithynia, Pontus, hymned the Arch-deceiver;
But when to Asia passed the Christian lances,
To battle with the Turk and misbeliever,
He, in two fields, encountered two disasters,
And so he fled, and the vexed land changed masters.
Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest
seemed over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It
seemed as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as
the Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath
of the last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders
had broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of
July, 1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his
death-bed.
2.
Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the
name of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or
Turcoman, who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took
the prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political
improvement. His son, Othman's father, came into the service of the
last Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a
horde of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in
alliance with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism
of the desert, and, when he succeeded to his father's power, he
proclaimed a gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity.
Suddenly, like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain
heights which separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan
conquests, and he pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which
remained from that time the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for
Adrianople and Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series
of conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of
the first, if not the first power, not only of Asia, but of the world.
These conquests were achieved during the reigns of ten great
Sultans, the average length of whose reigns is as much as twenty-six
years, an unusual period for military sovereigns, and both an evidence
of the stability, and a means of the extension, of their power. Then
came the period of their decline, and we are led on through the space
of another 270 years, up to our own day, when they seem on the verge of
some great reverse or overthrow. In this second period they have had as
many as twenty-one Sultans, whose average reigns are only half the
length of those who preceded them, and afford as cogent an argument of
their national disorder and demoralization. Of these twenty-one, five
have been strangled, three have been deposed, and three have died of
excess; of the remaining ten, four only have attained the age of man,
and these come together in the course of the last century; two others
have died about the age of thirty, and three about the age of fifty.
The last, the thirty-first from Othman, is the present Sultan, who came
to the throne as a boy, and is described at that time by an English
traveller, as one of the most “sickly, pale, inanimate, and unmanly
youths he ever saw,”[57] and who has this very year just reached the
average length of the reign of his twenty predecessors.
The names of the Ottoman Sultans are more familiar to us and more
easy to recollect than other Oriental sovereigns, partly from their
greater euphony as Europeans read them, partly from their recurrence
again and again in the catalogue. There are four Mahomets, four
Mustaphas, four Amuraths or Murads, three Selims, three Achmets, three
Othmans, two Mahmoods, two Solimans, and two Bajazets.[58]
I have already described Othman, the founder of the line, as a
soldier of fortune in the Seljukian service; and, in spite of the
civilizing influences of the country, the people, and the religion, to
which he had attached himself, he had not as yet laid aside the habits
of his ancestors, but was half shepherd, half freebooter. Nor is it
likely that any of his countrymen would be anything else, as long as
they were still in war and in subordinate posts. Peace must precede the
enjoyment, and power the arts of government; and the very readiness
with which his followers left their nomad life, as soon as they had the
opportunity, shows that the means of civilization which they had
enjoyed, had not been thrown away on them. The soldiers of Zingis, when
laden with booty, and not till then, cried out to be led back, and
would fight no more; Tamerlane, at the end of fifty years, began to be
a magnificent king. In like manner, Othman observed the life of a
Turcoman, till he became a conqueror; but, as soon as he had crossed
Mount Olympus, and found himself in the Greek territory as a master, he
was both willing and able to accommodate himself to a pomp and luxury
to which a mere Turcoman was unequal. He bade adieu to his fastnesses
in the heights, and he began to fortify the towns and castles which he
had heretofore pillaged. Conquest and civilization went hand in hand;
his successor, Orchan, selected a capital, which he ornamented with a
mosque, a hospital, a mint, and a college; he introduced professors of
the sciences, and, what was as great a departure from Tartar habits, he
raised a force of infantry, among his captives (in anticipation of the
Janizaries, formed soon after), and he furnished himself with a train
of battering engines. More strange still, he gained the Greek Emperor's
daughter in marriage, a Christian princess; and lastly, he crossed over
into Europe under cover of friendship to the court of Constantinople,
and possessed himself of Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont. His
successors gained first Roumelia, that is, the country round
Constantinople, as far as the Balkan, with Adrianople for a capital;
then they successively swept over Moldavia, Servia, Bulgaria, Greece,
and the Morea. Then they gained a portion of Hungary; then they took
Constantinople, just 400 years ago this very year. Meanwhile they had
extended their empire into Syria, Egypt, and along the coast of Africa.
And thus at length they more than half encompassed the Mediterranean,
from the straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Venice, and reigned in
three quarters of the world.
3.
Now you may ask me, what were Christians doing in Europe all this
while? What was the Holy Father about at Rome, if he did not turn his
eyes, as heretofore, on the suffering state of his Asiatic provinces,
and oppose some rampart to the advance of the enemy upon
Constantinople? and how has he been the enduring enemy of the Turk, if
he acquiesced in the Turk's long course of victories? Alas! he often
looked towards the East, and often raised the alarm, and often, as I
have said, attempted by means of the powers of Christendom, what his
mission did not give him arms to do himself. But he was impeded and
embarrassed by so many and such various difficulties, that, if I
proposed to go through them, I should find myself engaged in a history
of Europe during those centuries. I will suggest some of them, though I
can do no more.
1. First of all, then, I observe generally, that the Pope, in
attempting to save Constantinople and its Empire, was attempting to
save a fanatical people, who had for ages set themselves against the
Holy See and the Latin world, and who had for centuries been under a
sentence of excommunication. They hated and feared the Catholics, as
much as they hated and feared the Turks, and they contemned them too,
for their comparative rudeness and ignorance of literature; and this
hatred and fear and contempt were grafted on a cowardly, crafty,
insincere, and fickle character of mind, for which they had been
notorious from time immemorial. It was impossible to save them without
their own cordial coöperation; it was impossible to save them in spite
of themselves.
These odious traits and dispositions had, in the course of the two
hundred years during which the Crusades lasted, borne abundant fruits
and exhibited themselves in results intolerable to the warlike
multitudes who had come to their assistance. For two hundred years
“each spring and summer had produced a new emigration of pilgrim
warriors for the defence of the Holy Land;"[59] and what had been the
effect upon the Greeks of such prodigality of succour? what
satisfaction, what gratitude had they shown for an undertaking on the
part of the West, which ought properly to have been their own, and
which the West commenced, because the East asked it? When the
celebrated Peter the Hermit was in Constantinople, he would have
addressed himself first of all to its imperial master; and not till the
Patriarch of the day showed the hopelessness of seeking help from a
vicious and imbecile court, did he cry out: “I will rouse the nations
of Europe in your cause.” The Emperors sought help themselves instead
of lending it. Again and again, in the course of the Holy Wars, did
they selfishly betake themselves to the European capitals; and they
made their gain of the successes of the Crusaders, as far as they had
opportunity, as the jackal follows the lion; but from the very first,
their pride was wounded, and their cowardice alarmed, at the sight of
their protectors in their city and provinces, and they took every means
to weaken and annoy the very men whom they had invited. In the great
council of Placentia, summoned by Urban the Second, before the Crusades
were yet begun, in the presence of 200 Latin Bishops, 4,000 inferior
clergy, and 30,000 laity, the ambassadors of the Greek Emperor had been
introduced, and they pleaded the distress of their sovereign and the
danger of their city, which the misbelievers already were
threatening.[60] They insisted on its being the policy of the Latin
princes to repel the barbarian in Asia rather than when he was in the
heart of Europe, and drew such a picture of their own miseries, that
the vast assembly burst into tears, and dismissed them with the
assurance of their most zealous coöperation.
Yet what, I say, was the reception which the cowardly suppliants had
given to their avengers and protectors? From the very first, they threw
difficulties in the way of their undertaking. When the heroic Godfrey
and his companions in arms arrived in the neighbourhood of
Constantinople, they found themselves all but betrayed into a dangerous
position, where they might either have been starved, or been easily
attacked. When at length they had crossed over into Asia, the Crusaders
found themselves without the means of sustenance. They had bargained
for a fair market in the Greek territories; but the Imperial Court
allowed the cities which they passed by to close their gates upon them,
to let down to them from the wall an insufficient supply of food, to
mix poisonous ingredients in their bread, to give them base coin, to
break down the bridges before them, and to fortify the passes, and to
mislead them by their guides, to give information of their movements to
the Turk, to pillage and murder the stragglers, and to hang up their
dead bodies on gibbets along the highway. The Greek clergy preached
against them as heretics and schismatics and dogs; the Patriarch and
the Bishops spoke of their extermination as a merit, and their priests
washed and purified the altars where the Latin priests had said mass.
Nay, the Emperors formed a secret alliance with Turks and Saracens
against them, and the price at which they obtained it, was the
permission of erecting a mosque in Constantinople.
As time went on, they did not stop even here. A number of Latin
merchants had settled at Constantinople, as our own merchants now are
planted all over the cities of the Continent. The Greek populace rose
against them; and the Emperor did not scruple to send his own troops to
aid the rioters. The Latins were slaughtered in their own homes and in
the streets; their clergy were burned in the churches, their sick in
the hospitals, and their whole quarter reduced to ashes; nay, 4,000 of
the survivors were sold into perpetual slavery to the Turks. They cut
off the head of the Cardinal Legate, and tied it to the tail of a dog,
and then chanted a Te Deum. What could be said to such a people?
What could be made of them? The Turks might be a more powerful and
energetic, but could not be a more virulent, a more unscrupulous foe.
It did not seem to matter much to the Latin whether Turk or Greek was
lord of Constantinople; and the Greek justified the indifference of the
Latin by declaring that he would rather have the Turban in
Constantinople than the Tiara.
2. It is the nature of crime to perpetuate itself, and the
atrocities of the Greeks brought about a retaliation from the Latins.
Twenty years after the events I have been relating, the Crusading hosts
turned their arms against the Greeks, and besieged and gained
possession of Constantinople; and, though their excesses seem to have
been inferior to those which provoked them, it is not to be supposed
that a city could be taken by a rude and angry multitude, without the
occurrence of innumerable outrages. It was pillaged and disfigured; and
the Pope had to publish an indignant protest against the work of his
own adherents and followers. He might well be alarmed and distressed,
not only for the crime itself, but for its bearing on the general
course of the Crusades; for, if it was difficult under any
circumstances to keep the Greeks in a right course, it was doubly
difficult, when they had been injured, even though they were the
original offenders.
4.
3. But there were other causes, still less satisfactory than those I
have mentioned, tending to nullify all the Pope's efforts to make head
against the barbarian power. I have said that the period of the Ottoman
growth was about 270 years; and this period, viz., the fourteenth and
fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, was the most
disastrous and melancholy in the internal history of the Church of any
that can be named. It was that miserable period, which directly
prepared the way for Protestantism. The resistance to the Pope's
authority, on the part of the states of Europe generally, is pretty
nearly coincident with the rise of the Ottomans. Heresy followed; in
the middle of the fourteenth century, the teaching of Wickliffe gained
ground in England; Huss and others followed on the Continent; and they
were succeeded by Luther. That energy of Popes, those intercessions of
holy men, which hitherto had found matter in the affairs of the East,
now found a more urgent incentive in the troubles which were taking
place at home.
4. The increase of national prosperity and strength, to which the
alienation of kings and states from the Holy See must be ascribed, in
various ways indisposed them to the continuance of the war against the
misbelievers. Rulers and people, who were increasing in wealth, did not
like to spend their substance on objects both distant and spiritual.
Wealth is a present good, and has a tendency to fix the mind on the
visible and tangible, to the prejudice of both faith and secular
policy. The rich and happy will not go to war, if they can help it; and
trade, of course, does not care for the religious tenets of those who
offer to enter into relations with it, whether of interchange or of
purchase. Nor was this all; when nations began to know their own
strength, they had a tendency to be jealous of each other, as well as
to be indifferent to the interests of religion; and the two most
valiant nations of Europe, France and England, gave up the Holy Wars,
only to go to war one with another. As in the twelfth century, we read
of Coeur de Lion in Palestine, and in the thirteenth, of St. Louis in
Egypt, so in the fourteenth do we read the sad tale of Poitiers and
Cressy, and in the fifteenth of Agincourt. People are apt to ask what
good came of the prowess shown at Ascalon or Damietta; forgetting that
they should rather ask themselves what good came of the conquests of
our Edwards and Henries, of which they are so proud. If Richard's
prowess ended in his imprisonment in Germany, and St. Louis died in
Africa, yet there is another history which ends as ingloriously in the
Maid of Orleans, and the expulsion of tyrants from a soil they had
usurped. In vain did the Popes attempt to turn the restless
destructiveness of the European commonwealth into a safer channel. In
vain did the Legates of the Holy See interpose between Edward of
England and the French king; in their very presence was a French town
delivered over by the English conqueror to a three days' pillage.[61]
In vain did one Pope take a vow of never-dying hostility to the Turks;
in vain did another, close upon his end, repair to the fleet, that “he
might, like Moses, raise his hands to God during the battle;"[62]
Christian was to war with Christian, not with infidel.
The suppliant Greek Emperor in one of his begging missions, as they
may be called, came to England: it was in the reign of Henry the
Fourth, but Henry could do nothing for him. He had usurped the English
Crown, and could not afford to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, with so
precarious a position at home. However, he was under some kind of
promise to take the Cross, which is signified in the popular story,
that he had expected to die at Jerusalem, whereas he died in his palace
at Westminster instead, in the Jerusalem chamber. It is said, too, that
he was actually meditating a Crusade, and had ordered galleys to be
prepared, when he came to his end.[63] His son, Henry the Fifth,
crossed the Channel to conquer France, just at the very, the only time,
when the Ottoman reverses gave a fair hope of the success of
Christendom. When premature death overtook him, and he had but two
hours to live,[64] he ordered his confessor to recite the Seven
Penitential Psalms; and, when the verse was read about building the
walls of Jerusalem, the word caught his ear; he stopped the reader, and
observed that he had proposed to conquer Jerusalem, and to have rebuilt
it, had God granted him life. Indeed, he had already sent a knight to
take a survey of the towns and country of Syria, which is still extant.
Alas, that good intentions should only become strong in moments of
sickness or of death!
A like necessary or unnecessary attention, as the case might be, to
national concerns and private interests, prevailed all over Europe. In
the same century[65] Charles the Seventh of France forbade the
preaching of a Crusade in his dominions, lest it should lay him open to
the attacks of the English. Alfonso of Portugal promised to join in a
Holy War, and retracted. Alfonso of Arragon and Sicily took the Cross,
and used the men and money raised for its objects in a war against the
Genoese. The Bohemians would not fight, unless they were paid; and the
Germans affected or felt a fear that the Pope would apply the sums they
contributed for some other purpose.
5. Alas! more must be said; it seldom happens that the people go
wrong, without the rulers being somewhere in fault, nor is the portion
of history to which I am referring an exception. It must be confessed
that, at the very time the Turks were making progress, the Christian
world was in a more melancholy state than it had ever been either
before or since. The sins of nations were accumulating that heavy
judgment which fell upon them in the Ottoman conquests and the
Reformation. There were great scandals among Bishops and Priests, as
well as heresy and insubordination. As to the Pontiffs who filled the
Holy See during that period, I will say no more than this, that it did
not please the good Providence of God to raise up for His Church such
heroic men as St. Leo, of the fifth, and St. Gregory, of the eleventh
century. For a time the Popes removed from Italy to France; then, when
they returned to Rome, there was a schism in the Papacy for nearly
forty years, during which time the populations of Europe were perplexed
to find the real successor of St. Peter, or even took the pretended
Pope for the true one.
5.
Such was the condition of Christendom, thus destitute of resources,
thus weakened by internal quarrels, thus bribed and retained (so to
speak) by the temptations of the world, at the very time when the
Ottomans were pressing on its outposts. One moment occurred, and just
one, in their history, when they might have been resisted with success.
You will recollect that the Seljukians were broken, not simply by the
Crusaders, but also, though not so early, by the terrible Zingis. What
Zingis was to the Seljukians, such, and more than such, was Timour to
the Ottomans. It was in their full career of victory, and when
everything seemed in their power, when they had gained the whole
province of Roumelia, which is round about Constantinople, that a
terrible reverse befell them. The Sultan then on the throne was
Bajazet, surnamed Ilderim, or the Lightning, from the rapidity of his
movements. He had extended his empire, or his sensible influence, from
the Carpathians to the Euphrates; he had destroyed the remains of rival
dynasties in Asia Minor, had carried his arms down to the Morea, and
utterly routed an allied Christian army in Hungary. Elated with these
successes, he put no bounds to his pride and ambition. He vaunted that
he would subdue, not Hungary only, but Germany and Italy besides; and
that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St.
Peter's, at Rome. The Apostle heard the blasphemy; and this mighty
conqueror was not suffered to leave this world for his eternal
habitation without Divine infliction in evidence that He who made him,
could unmake him at His will. The Disposer of all things sent against
him the fierce Timour, of whom I have already said so much. One would
have thought the two conquerors could not possibly have come into
collision—Timour, the Lord of Persia, Khorasan, Sogdiana, and
Hindostan, and Bajazet, the Sultan of Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece.
They were both Mahomedans; they might have turned their backs on each
other, if they were jealous of each other, and might have divided the
world between them. Bajazet might have gone forward towards Germany and
Italy, and Timour might have stretched his conquests into China.
But ambition is a spirit of envy as well as of covetousness; neither
of them could brook a rival greatness. Timour was on the Ganges, and
Bajazet was besieging Constantinople, when they interchanged the words
of hatred and defiance. Timour called Bajazet a pismire, whom he would
crush with his elephants; and Bajazet retaliated with a worse insult on
Timour, by promising that he would capture his retinue of wives. The
foes met at Angora in Asia Minor; Bajazet was defeated and captured in
the battle, and Timour secured him in an iron-barred apartment or cage,
which, according to Tartar custom, was on wheels, and he carried him
about, as some wild beast, on his march through Asia. Can imagination
invent a more intolerable punishment upon pride? is it not wonderful
that the victim of it was able to live as many as nine months under
such a visitation?
This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shortly before
young Harry of Monmouth, the idol of English poetry and loyalty,
crossed the sea to kill the French at Agincourt; and an opportunity was
offered to Christendom to destroy an enemy, who never before or since
has been in such extremity of peril. For fourteen years a state of
interregnum, or civil war, lasted in the Ottoman empire; and the
capture of Constantinople, which was imminent at the time of Bajazet's
downfall, was anyhow delayed for full fifty years. Had a crusade been
attempted with the matured experience and subdued enthusiasm, which the
trials of three hundred years had given to the European nations, the
Ottomans, according to all human probability, would have perished, as
the Seljukians before them. But, in the inscrutable decree of Heaven,
no such attempt was made; one attempt indeed was made too soon, and a
second attempt was made too late, but none at the time.
1. The first of these two was set on foot when Bajazet was in the
full tide of his victories; and he was able, not only to defeat it,
but, by defeating, to damp the hopes, and by anticipation, to stifle
the efforts, which might have been used against him with better effect
in the day of his reverses. In the year 1394, eight years before
Bajazet's misfortunes, Pope Boniface the Ninth proclaimed a Crusade,
with ample indulgences for those who engaged in it, to the countries
which were especially open to the Ottoman attack. In his Bull, he
bewails the sins of Christendom, which had brought upon them that
scourge which was the occasion of his invitation. He speaks of the
massacres, the tortures, and slavery which had been inflicted on
multitudes of the faithful. “The mind is horrified,” he says, “at the
very mention of these miseries; but it crowns our anguish to reflect,
that the whole of Christendom, which, if in concord, might put an end
to these and even greater evils, is either in open war, country with
country, or, if in apparent peace, is secretly wasted by mutual
jealousies and animosities.”[66]
The Pontiff's voice, aided by the imminent peril of Hungary and its
neighbouring kingdoms, was successful. Not only from Germany, but even
from France, the bravest knights, each a fortress in himself, or a
man-of-war on land (as he may be called), came forward in answer to his
call, and boasted that, even were the sky to fall, they would uphold
its canopy upon the points of their lances. They formed the flower of
the army of 100,000 men, who rallied round the King of Hungary in the
great battle of Nicopolis. The Turk was victorious; the greater part of
the Christian army were slain or driven into the Danube; and a part of
the French chivalry of the highest rank were made prisoners. Among
these were the son of the Duke of Burgundy; the Sire de Coucy, who had
great possessions in France and England; the Marshal of France
(Boucicault), who afterwards fell on the field of Agincourt; and four
French princes of the blood. 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 he 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;
but, before he sent them away, he gave them a grand entertainment,
which displayed both the barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic.
He exhibited 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 in his inside the
evidence of the charge.
Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nicopolis; 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; anyhow, 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
opportunity. 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.”
2. However, Christendom made a second attempt still, but when it was
too late. The grandson of Bajazet 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
negotiate with its leaders, to put them in the wrong, to charge them
with perjury, and 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.
6.
Thus things did but go on worse and worse for the interest of
Christendom. Even the taking of Constantinople was not the limit of the
Ottoman successes. Mahomet the Conqueror, as he is called, was but the
seventh of the great Sultans, who carried on the fortunes of the
barbarian empire. An eighth, a ninth followed. The ninth, Selim,
returned from his Eastern conquests with the last of the Caliphs in his
company, and made him resign to himself the prerogatives of Pontiff and
Lawgiver, which the Caliph inherited from Mahomet. Then came a tenth,
the greatest perhaps of all, Soliman the Magnificent, the contemporary
of the Emperor Charles, Francis the First of France, and Henry the
Eighth of England. And an eleventh might have been expected, and a
twelfth, and the power of the enemy would have become greater and
greater, and would have afflicted the Church more and more heavily; and
what was to be the end of these things? What was to be the end? why,
not a Christian only, but any philosopher of this world would have
known what was to be the end, in spite of existing appearances. All
earthly power has an end; it rises to fall, it grows to die; and the
depth of its humiliation issues out of the pride of its lifting up.
This is what even a philosopher would say; he would not know whether
Soliman, the tenth conqueror, was also to be the last; but if not the
tenth, he would be bold to say it would be the twelfth, who would close
their victories, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth. But what a
philosopher could not say, what a Christian knows and enjoys, is this,
that one earthly power there is which is something more than earthly,
and which, while it dies in the individual, for he is human, is
immortal in its succession, for it is divine.
It was a remarkable question addressed by the savage Tartars of
Zingis to the missionaries whom the Pope sent them in the thirteenth
century: “Who was the Pope?” they asked; “was he not an old man, five
hundred years of age?”[67] It was their one instinctive notion of the
religion of the West; and the Turks in their own history have often had
cause to lament over its truth. Togrul Beg first looked towards the
West, in the year 1048; twenty years later, between the years 1068 and
1074,[68] his successor, Malek Shah, attracted the attention of the
great St. Gregory the Seventh. Time went on; they were thrown back by
the impetuosity of the Crusaders; they returned to the attack. Fresh
and fresh multitudes poured down from Turkistan; the furious deluge of
the Tartars under Zingis spread itself and disappeared; the Turks sunk
in it, but emerged; the race seemed indestructible; then Othman began a
new career of victory, as if there had never been an old one, and
founded an empire, more stable, more coherent than any Turkish rule
before it. Then followed Sultan after Sultan, each greater than his
predecessor, while the line of Popes had indeed many bright names to
show, Pontiffs of learning, and of piety, and of genius, and of zeal
and energy; but still where was the destined champion of Christendom,
the holy, the inflexible, the lion-hearted, the successor of St.
Gregory, who in a luxurious and a self-willed age, among his other high
duties and achievements, had the mission, by his prayers and by his
efforts, of stopping the enemy in his full career, and of rescuing
Catholicism from the pollution of the blasphemer? The five hundred
years were not yet completed.
But the five hundred years at length were run out; the long-expected
champion was at hand. He appeared at the very time when the Ottoman
crescent had passed its zenith and was beginning to descend the sky.
The Turkish successes began in the middle of the eleventh century; they
ended in the middle of the sixteenth; in the middle of the sixteenth
century, just five hundred years after St. Gregory and Malek Shah,
Selim the Sot came to the throne of Othman, and St. Pius the Fifth to
the throne of the Apostle; Pius became Pope in 1566, and Selim became
Sultan in that very same year.
O what a strange contrast, Gentlemen, did Rome and Constantinople
present at that era! Neither was what it had been, but they had changed
in opposite directions. Both had been the seat of Imperial Power; Rome,
where heresy never throve, had exchanged its Emperors for the
succession of St. Peter and St. Paul; Constantinople had passed from
secular supremacy into schism, and thence into a blasphemous apostasy.
The unhappy city, which with its subject provinces had been
successively the seat of Arianism, of Nestorianism, of Photianism, now
had become the metropolis of the false Prophet; and, while in the West
the great edifice of the Vatican Basilica was rising anew in its
wonderful proportions and its costly materials, the Temple of St.
Sophia in the East was degraded into a Mosque! O the strange contrast
in the state of the inhabitants of each place! Here in the city of
Constantine a God-denying misbelief was accompanied by an impure,
man-degrading rule of life, by the slavery of woman, and the corruption
of youth. But there, in the city which Apostles had consecrated with
their blood, the great and true reformation of the age was in full
progress. There the determinations in doctrine and discipline of the
great Council of Trent had lately been promulgated. There for twenty
years past had laboured our own dear saint, St. Philip, till he earned
the title of Apostle of Rome, and yet had still nearly thirty years of
life and work in him. There, too, the romantic royal-minded saint,
Ignatius Loyola, had but lately died. And there, when the Holy See fell
vacant, and a Pope had to be appointed in the great need of the Church,
a saint was present in the conclave to find in it a brother saint, and
to recommend him for the Chair of St. Peter, to the suffrages of the
Fathers and Princes of the Church.
7.
St Carlo Borromeo,[69] the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was the
nephew of the Pope who was just dead, and though he was only
twenty-five years of age at the time, nevertheless, by the various
influences arising out of the position which he held, and from the
weight attached to his personal character, he might be considered to
sway the votes of the College of Cardinals, and to determine the
election of a new Pontiff. It is remarkable that Cardinal Alessandrino,
as St. Pius was then called, (from Alexandria, in North Italy, near
which he was born,) was not the first object of his choice. His eyes
were first turned on Cardinal Morone, who was in many respects the most
illustrious of the Sacred College, and had served the Church on various
occasions with great devotion, and with distinguished success. From his
youth he had been reared up in public affairs, he had held many public
offices, he had great influence with the German Emperor, he had been
Apostolical Legate at the Council of Trent. He had great virtue,
judgment, experience, and sagacity. Such, then, was the choice of St.
Carlo, and the votes were taken; but it seemed otherwise to the Holy
Ghost. He wanted four to make up the sufficient number of votes. St.
Carlo had to begin again; and again, strange to say, the Cardinal
Alessandrino still was not his choice. He chose Cardinal Sirleto, a man
most opposite in character and history to Morone. He was not nobly
born, he was no man of the world, he had ever been urgent with the late
Pope not to make him Cardinal. He was a first-rate scholar in Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin; versed in the Scriptures, ready as a theologian.
Moreover, he was of a character most unblemished, of most innocent
life, and of manners most popular and winning. St. Pius as well as St.
Carlo advocated the cause of Cardinal Sirleto, and the votes were given
a second time; a second time they came short. It was like holy Samuel
choosing Eliab instead of David. Then matters were in confusion; one
name and another were mentioned, and no progress was made.
At length and at last, and not till all others were thought of who
could enter into the minds of the electors, the Cardinal Alessandrino
himself began to attract attention. He seems not to have been known to
the Fathers of the conclave in general; a Dominican Friar, of humble
rank, ever taken up in the duties of his rule and his special
employments, living in his cell, knowing little or nothing of
mankind—such a one St. Carlo, the son of a prince and the nephew of a
Pope, had no means of knowing; and the intimacy, consequent on their
coöperation in behalf of Cardinal Sirleto, was the first real
introduction which the one Saint had to the other. It was just at this
moment that our own St. Philip was in his small room at St. Girolamo,
with Marcello Ferro, one of his spiritual children, when, lifting up
his eyes to heaven, and going almost into an ecstasy, he said: “The
Pope will be elected on Monday.” On one of the following days, as they
were walking together, Marcello asked him who was to be Pope. Philip
answered, “Come, I will tell you; the Pope will be one whom you have
never thought of, and whom no one has spoken of as likely; and that is
Cardinal Alessandrino; and he will be elected on Monday evening without
fail.” The event accomplished the prediction; the statesman and the man
of the world, the accomplished and exemplary and amiable scholar, were
put aside to make way for the Saint. He took the name of Pius.
I am far from denying that St. Pius was stern and severe, as far as
a heart burning within and melting with the fulness of divine love
could be so; and this was the reason that the conclave was so slow in
electing him. Yet such energy and vigour as his was necessary for his
times. He was emphatically a soldier of Christ in a time of
insurrection and rebellion, when, in a spiritual sense, martial law was
proclaimed. St. Philip, a private priest, might follow his bent, in
casting his net for souls, as he expressed himself, and enticing them
to the truth; but the Vicar of Christ had to right and to steer the
vessel, when it was in rough waters, and among breakers. A Protestant
historian on this point does justice to him. “When Pope,” he says, “he
lived in all the austerity of his monastic life, fasted with the utmost
rigour and punctuality, would wear no finer garments than before ...
arose at an extremely early hour in the morning, and took no siesta. If we doubted the depth of his religious earnestness, we may find a
proof of it in his declaration, that the Papacy was unfavourable to his
advance in piety; that it did not contribute to his salvation and to
his attainment of Paradise; and that, but for prayer, the burden had
been too heavy for him. The happiness of a fervent devotion, which
often moved him to tears, was granted him to the end of his life. The
people were excited to enthusiasm, when they saw him walking in
procession, barefooted and bareheaded, with the expression of
unaffected piety in his countenance, and with his long snow-white beard
falling on his breast. They thought there had never been so pious a
Pope; they told each other how his very look had converted heretics.
Pius was kind, too, and affable; his intercourse with his old servants
was of the most confidential kind. At a former period, before he was
Pope, the Count della Trinità had threatened to have him thrown into a
well, and he had replied, that it must be as God pleased. How beautiful
was his greeting to this same Count, who was now sent as ambassador to
his court! 'See,' said he, when he recognized him, 'how God preserves
the innocent.' This was the only way in which he made him feel that he
recollected his enmity. He had ever been most charitable and bounteous;
he kept a list of the poor of Rome, whom he regularly assisted
according to their station and their wants.” The writer, after
proceeding to condemn what he considers his severity, ends thus: “It is
certain that his deportment and mode of thinking exercised an
incalculable influence on his contemporaries, and on the general
development of the Church of which he was the head. After so many
circumstances had concurred to excite and foster a religious spirit,
after so many resolutions and measures had been taken to exalt it to
universal dominion, a Pope like this was needed, not only to proclaim
it to the world, but also to reduce it to practice; his zeal and his
example combined produced the most powerful effect.”[70]
8.
It is not to be supposed that a Saint on whom lay the “solicitude of
all the churches,” should neglect the tradition, which his predecessors
of so many centuries had bequeathed to him, of zeal and hostility
against the Turkish power. He was only six years on the Pontifical
throne; and the achievement of which I am going to speak was among his
last; he died the following year. At this time the Ottoman armies were
continuing their course of victory; they had just taken Cyprus, with
the active coöperation of the Greek population of the island, and were
massacring the Latin nobility and clergy, and mutilating and flaying
alive the Venetian governor. Yet the Saint found it impossible to move
Christendom to its own defence. How, indeed, was that to be done, when
half Christendom had become Protestant, and secretly perhaps felt as
the Greeks felt, that the Turk was its friend and ally? In such a
quarrel England, France, and Germany were out of the question. At
length, however, with great effort, he succeeded in forming a holy
league between himself, King Philip of Spain, and the Venetians. Don
John, of Austria, King Philip's half brother, was appointed
commander-in-chief of the forces, and Colonna admiral. The treaty was
signed on the 24th of May; but such was the cowardice and jealousy of
the parties concerned, that the autumn had arrived, and nothing of
importance was accomplished. With difficulty were the armies united;
with difficulty were the dissensions of the commanders brought to a
settlement. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were scouring the Gulf of Venice,
blockading the ports, and terrifying the city itself.
But the holy Pope was securing the success of his cause by arms of
his own, which the Turks understood not. He had been appointing a
Triduo of supplication at Rome, and had taken part in the procession
himself. He had proclaimed a jubilee to the whole Christian world, for
the happy issue of the war. He had been interesting the Holy Virgin in
his cause. He presented to his admiral, after High Mass in his chapel,
a standard of red damask, embroidered with a crucifix, and with the
figures of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the legend, “In hoc signo
vinces.” Next, sending to Messina, where the allied fleet lay, he
assured the general-in-chief and the armament, that “if, relying on
divine, rather than on human help, they attacked the enemy, God would
not be wanting to His own cause. He augured a prosperous and happy
issue; not on any light or random hope, but on a divine guidance, and
by the anticipations of many holy men.” Moreover, he enjoined the
officers to look to the good conduct of their troops; to repress
swearing, gaming, riot, and plunder, and thereby to render them more
deserving of victory. Accordingly, a fast of three days was proclaimed
for the fleet, beginning with the Nativity of our Lady; all the men
went to confession and communion, and appropriated to themselves the
plentiful indulgences which the Pope attached to the expedition. Then
they moved across the foot of Italy to Corfu, with the intention of
presenting themselves at once to the enemy; being disappointed in their
expectations, they turned back to the Gulf of Corinth; and there at
length, on the 7th of October, they found the Turkish fleet, half way
between Lepanto and the Echinades on the North, and Patras, in the
Morea, on the South; and, though it was towards evening, strong in
faith and zeal, they at once commenced the engagement.
The night before the battle, and the day itself, aged as he was, and
broken with a cruel malady, the Saint had passed in the Vatican in
fasting and prayer. All through the Holy City the monasteries and the
colleges were in prayer too. As the evening advanced, the Pontifical
treasurer asked an audience of the Sovereign Pontiff on an important
matter. Pius was in his bedroom, and began to converse with him; when
suddenly he stopped the conversation, left him, threw open the window,
and gazed up into heaven. Then closing it again, he looked gravely at
his official, and said, “This is no time for business; go, return
thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the
Turkish, and is victorious.” As the treasurer went out, he saw him fall
on his knees before the altar in thankfulness and joy.
And a most memorable victory it was: upwards of 30,000 Turks are
said to have lost their lives in the engagement, and 3,500 were made
prisoners. Almost their whole fleet was taken. I quote from Protestant
authorities when I say that the Sultan, on the news of the calamity,
neither ate, nor drank, nor showed himself, nor saw any one for three
days; that it was the greatest blow which the Ottomans had had since
Timour's victory over Bajazet, a century and a half before; nay, that
it was the turning-point in the Turkish history;[71] and that, though
the Sultans have had isolated successes since, yet from that day they
undeniably and constantly declined, that they have lost their
prestige and their self-confidence, and that the victories gained
over them since are but the complements and the reverberations of the
overthrow at Lepanto.
Such was the catastrophe of this long and anxious drama; the hosts
of Turkistan and Tartary had poured down from their wildernesses
through ages, to be withstood, and foiled, and reversed by an old man.
It was a repetition, though under different circumstances, of the
history of Leo and the Hun. In the contrast between the combatants we
see the contrast of the histories of good and evil. The Enemy, as the
Turks in this battle, rushing forward with the terrible fury of wild
beasts; and the Church, ever combating with the energetic perseverance
and the heroic obstinacy of St. Pius.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] Formby's Visit to the East.
[58] The three remaining of the thirty are Orchan, Ibrahim, and
Abdoul Achmet.
[59] Gibbon.
[60] Gibbon.
[61] Hume's History.
[62] Ranke, vol. i
[63] Turner's History.
[64] Ibid.
[65] Gieseler's Text Book.
[66] Baronius.
[67] Bergeron.
[68] Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074.
[69] Bollandist. Mai. 5.
[70] Ranke's Hist. of the Popes.
[71] “The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of
Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe.”—Alison's Europe, vol. ix.
p. 95. “The powers of the Turks and of their European neighbours were
now nearly balanced; in the reign of Amurath the Third, who succeeded
Selim, the advantages became more evidently in favour of the
Christians; and since that time, though the Turks have sometimes
enjoyed a transitory success, the real stability of their affairs has
constantly declined.”—Bell's Geography, vol. ii, part 2. Vid. also
Ranke, vol. i., pp. 381-2. It is remarkable that it should be passed
over by Professor Creasy in his “Fifteen Decisive Battles.”