nfidels, who held their possessions against the united armies of the
western knights.

It was left to the Infidels to put an end to the long existence of the
Roman Empire, and to dedicate St. Sophia, where Christ and the saints
had been worshipped for almost one thousand years, to Allah and
his prophet. At the very time when people were wrangling about
religious dogmas in Constance, when the reconciliation between the
Greek and the Catholic churches had failed, and the defection of forty
million people from the rule of the Pope was threatening, the Moslems
advanced victoriously to Steiermark and Salzburg. The noblest prince
of Europe at that time, the Roman King, fled from his capital before
them; and St. Stephen in Vienna came near being turned into a mosque,
like St. Sophia in Byzantium.

At that time the countries from the African desert to the Caspian Sea,
and from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, obeyed the orders of the
Padisha. Venice and the German Emperors were registered among the
tributaries of the Porte. From it three quarters of the coastlands of
the Mediterranean took their orders. The Nile, the Euphrates, and
almost the Danube had become Turkish rivers, as the archipelago and
the Black Sea were Turkish inland waters. And after barely two hundred
years this same mighty empire reveals to us a picture of dissolution
which promises an early end.

In the two old capitals of the world, Rome and Constantinople, the
same means have been employed to the same ends, the unity of the dogma
to obtain unrestricted power. The vicar of St. Peter and the heir of
the calif have fallen thereby into identical impotency.

Since Greece has declared her independence, and the principalities of
Moldavia, Wallachia, and Servia are offering only a formal recognition
to the Porte, the Turks are as if banished from these, their own
provinces. Egypt is a hostile power rather than a subject country;
Syria with her wealth, Adana (the province of Cilicia), and Crete,
conquered at the cost of fifty-five attacks and the lives of seventy
thousand Mussulmans, have been lost without one sword-thrust, the
booty of a rebellious pasha. The control in Tripolis, hardly
recovered, is in danger of being lost again. The other African states
of the Mediterranean have today no real connection with the Porte;
and France in her hesitation whether she should keep the most
beautiful of them as her own is looking to the cabinet of St. James
rather tha