e was no force capable of resisting him. Just then, he died,
Otranto was lost, and the enterprise was not renewed. His people
were a nation of soldiers, not a nation of sailors. For operations
beyond sea they relied on the seamen of the AEgean, generally
Christians, as they had required the help of Genoese ships to ferry
them over the Hellespont.

Under Bajazet, the successor, there was some rest for Europe.
His brother, who was a dangerous competitor, as the crown went to
the one who survived, fled for safety to the Christians, and was
detained as a hostage, beyond the possibility of ransom, by the
Knights of St. John, and then by the Pope. The Sultan paid,
that he might be kept quiet.

For years the Turks were busy in the East. Selim conquered Syria
and part of Persia. He conquered Arabia, and was acknowledged by
the Sheriff of Mecca caliph and protector of the holy shrine. He
conquered Egypt and assumed the prerogative of the Imaum, which
had been a shadow at Cairo, but became, at Constantinople, the
supreme authority in Islam. Gathering up the concentrated
resources of the Levant, Solyman the Magnificent turned, at last,
against the enemy who guarded the gates of civilised Europe.
Having taken Belgrade, he undertook, in 1526, the crowning
campaign of Turkish history. At the battle of Mohacs Hungary
lost her independence. The Turks found a Transylvanian magnate
who was willing to receive the crown from them; and the broad
valley of the Danube continued to be their battlefield until the
days of Sobieski and Eugene. But the legitimate heir of King
Ladislas, who fell at Mohacs, was Ferdinand, only brother of
Charles V; and Hungary, with the vast region then belonging to
the Bohemian crown, passing to the same hands as the ancient
inheritance of the Habsburgs, constituted the great Austrian
monarchy which extended from the Adriatic to the far Sarmatian
plain, and Solyman's victory brought him face to face with the
first Power able to arrest his progress. The Turks were repulsed
at Vienna in 1529, at Malta in 1564. This was their limit in
Western Europe; and after Lepanto, in 1571, their only expansion
was at the expense of Poland and Muscovy. They still wielded
almost boundless resources; the entire seaboard from Cattaro all
round by the Euxine to the Atlantic was Mahomedan, and all but
one-fourth of the Mediterranean was a Turkish lake. It was long
before they knew that it was not their destiny to be