permanent situation, he altered his forbearance to a system of the most
rigid and barbarous persecution; which diabolical plan he has
particularly recommended to his misguided followers, in that part of his
Alcoran, entitled The Chapter of the Sword; and as proofs of the blind
zeal his followers have adopted from his infernal tenets, the many
bloody battles of the Turks with the whole of the professors of Christ's
gospel, and their cruel massacres of them at various periods,
sufficiently evince.

Constantine was, in the year 1453, besieged in Constantinople, by
Mahomet the Second, with an army of 300,000 men, when, after a bloody
siege of about six week, on the 29th of May, 1453, it fell into the
hands of the infidels, after being an imperial christian city for some
centuries; and the Turks have, to this day, retained possession of it,
as well as of the adjoining suburb of Pera.

On entering Constantinople, the Turks exercised on the wretched
christians the most unremitting barbarity, destroying them by every
method the most hellish cruelty could invent, or the most unfeeling
heart could practise: some they roasted alive on spits, others they
flayed alive, and in that horrid manner left to expire with hunger; many
were sawed asunder, and others torn to pieces by horses.--For full three
days and nights the Turks were striving to exceed each other in the
exercise of their shocking carnage, and savage barbarity; murdering,
without distinction of age or sex, all they met, and brutishly violating
the chastity of women, of every distinction and age.

During the year 1529, Solyman the First retook Buda from the christians,
and showed the most horrible persecution of the inhabitants; some had
their eyes torn out, others their hands, ears, and noses cut off, and
the children their privities, the virgins were deflowered, the matrons
had their breasts cut off, and such as were pregnant had their wombs
ripped open, and their unborn babes thrown into the flames. Not content
with this, he repeated these horrid examples all the way on his march to
Vienna, which he ineffectually besieged, during which, this diabolical
barbarian, having made a body of christians prisoners, he sent three of
them into the city to relate the great strength of his army, and the
rest he ordered to be torn limb from limb by wild horses in sight of
their christian brethren, who could only lament by their cries and tears
their dreadful fate.

In many places