o be made upon Rhodes and upon
Otranto on the Italian main, whilst he proceeded to Hungary in search of
a more worthy opponent (Hunniades.) Repulsed and wounded at Belgrade,
the sultan fell upon Trebizond with a numerous fleet, brought that city
to sue for terms, and then proceeded with a fleet of four hundred sail
to make a landing upon the island of Negropont, which he carried by
assault. A second attempt upon Rhodes, executed, it is stated, at the
head of a hundred thousand men, by one of his ablest lieutenants, was a
failure, with loss to the assailants. Mohammed was preparing to go to
that point himself with an immense army assembled on the shores of
Ionia, which Vertot estimates at three hundred thousand men; but death
closed his career, and the project was not carried into effect.

About the same period England began to be formidable to her neighbors on
land as well as on the sea; the Dutch also, reclaiming their country
from the inroads of the sea, were laying the foundations of a power more
extraordinary even than that of Venice.

Edward III. landed in France and besieged Calais with eight hundred
ships and forty thousand men.

Henry V. made two descents in 1414 and 1417: he had, it is stated,
fifteen hundred vessels and only thirty thousand men, of whom six
thousand were cavalry.

All the events we have described as taking place, up to this period, and
including the capture of Constantinople, were before the invention of
gunpowder; for if Henry V. had cannon at Agincourt, as is claimed by
some writers, they were certainly not used in naval warfare. From that
time all the combinations of naval armaments were entirely changed; and
this revolution took place--if I may use that expression--at the time
when the invention of the mariner's compass and the discovery of America
and of the Cape of Good Hope were about to turn the maritime commerce of
the world into new channels and to establish an entirely new system of
colonial dependencies.

I shall not mention in detail the expeditions of the Spaniards to
America, or those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English to India by
doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Notwithstanding their great influence
upon the commerce of the world,--notwithstanding the genius of Gama,
Albuquerque, and Cortez,--these expeditions, undertaken by small bodies
of two or three thousand men against tribes who knew nothing of
fire-arms, are of no interest in a military point of view.

The Spani