mpire, and they at once offered protection
and immunities to the patriarch and his prelates. The conquest
of the entire peninsula, with the islands, occupied a generation,
and it was good policy meanwhile to do nothing that would diminish
the advantage or awaken alarm of persecution. Their system required
the increase rather than the conversion of Christian subjects,
for the tribute of gold as well as the tribute of blood. The
Janissaries were selected among the sons of Christian parents,
who became renegades, and who, having neither home nor family,
no life but in camp, no employment but arms, became not only the
best professional soldiers in the world, but a force constantly
active to undo the work of pacific statesmen and to find fresh
occasion for war. There were occasional outbreaks of blind ferocity,
and at all times there was the incapacity of an uncivilised race to
understand the character and the interest of alien subjects more
cultivated than themselves. But there was not at first the sense
of unmitigated tyranny that arose later; and there was not so
great a contrast with life as it was under Italian despots as to
make Christians under the Sultan passionately long for deliverance.

From the perjury of Varna, in 1444, when the Christians broke the
treaty just concluded at Szegedin, it was understood that they
could never be trusted to keep engagements entered into with
people of another religion. It seemed a weak-minded exaggeration
of hypocrisy to abstain from preying on men so furiously divided,
so full of hatred, so incapable of combining in defence of their
altars and their homes, so eager in soliciting aid and intervention
from the infidel in their own disputes. The several principalities
of the circumference, Servia, Bosnia, Wallachia, the Morea, and the
islands, varying in nationality and in religion, were attacked
separately, and made no joint defence. In Epirus, Scanderberg,
once a renegade, then in communion with Rome, drawing his supplies
from the opposite coast of Apulia, which his sentinels on Cape
Linguetta could see at sunrise, maintained himself for many years
victoriously, knowing that his country would perish with him.
John Hunyadi had defended Christendom on the Hungarian frontier
so well that the monarchy of his son stemmed the tide of invasion
for seventy years. While the Turkish outposts kept watch on the
Danube, Mahomet seized Otranto, and all the way upwards to the Alps
ther