, that he might seize his person,
but the sagacious warrior was too wily to be thus entrapped.

The Turks were now in the full tide of victory. They had conquered
Constantinople, fortified both sides of the Bosporus and the Hellespont,
overrun Greece and planted themselves firmly and impregnably on the
shores of Europe. Mahomet II. was sultan, succeeding his father Amurath.
He raised an army of two hundred thousand men, who were all inspired
with that intense fanatic ferocity with which the Moslem then regarded
the Christian. Marching resistlessly through Bulgaria and Servia, he
contemplated the immediate conquest of Hungary, the bulwark of Europe.
He advanced to the banks of the Danube and laid siege to Belgrade, a
very important and strongly fortified town at the point where the Save
enters the great central river of eastern Europe.

Such an army, flushed with victory and inspired with all the energies of
fanaticism, appalled the European powers. Ladislaus was but a boy,
studious and scholarly in his tastes, having developed but little
physical energy and no executive vigor. He was very handsome, very
refined in his tastes and courteous in his address, and he cultivated
with great care the golden ringlets which clustered around his
shoulders. At the time of this fearful invasion Ladislaus was on a visit
to Buda, one of the capitals of Hungary, on the Danube, but about three
hundred miles above Belgrade. The young monarch, with his favorite,
Cilli, fled ingloriously to Vienna, leaving Hunniades to breast as he
could the Turkish hosts. But Hunniades was, fortunately, equal to the
emergence.

A Franciscan monk, John Capistrun, endowed with the eloquence of Peter
the Hermit, traversed Germany, displaying the cross and rousing
Christians to defend Europe from the infidels. He soon collected a
motley mass of forty thousand men, rustics, priests, students, soldiers,
unarmed, undisciplined, a rabble rout, who followed him to the
rendezvous where Hunniades had succeeded in collecting a large force of
the bold barons and steel-clad warriors of Hungary. The experienced
chief gladly received this heterogeneous mass, and soon armed them,
brought them into the ranks and subjected them to the severe discipline
of military drill.

At the head of this band, which was inspired with zeal equal to that of
the Turk, the brave Hunniades, in a fleet of boats, descended the
Danube. The river in front of Belgrade was covered with the flot