im at His will. The
Disposer of all things sent against him the fierce Timour, of whom I
have already said so much. One would have thought the two conquerors
could not possibly have come into collision--Timour, the Lord of Persia,
Khorasan, Sogdiana, and Hindostan, and Bajazet, the Sultan of Syria,
Asia Minor, and Greece. They were both Mahomedans; they might have
turned their backs on each other, if they were jealous of each other,
and might have divided the world between them. Bajazet might have gone
forward towards Germany and Italy, and Timour might have stretched his
conquests into China.

But ambition is a spirit of envy as well as of covetousness; neither of
them could brook a rival greatness. Timour was on the Ganges, and
Bajazet was besieging Constantinople, when they interchanged the words
of hatred and defiance. Timour called Bajazet a pismire, whom he would
crush with his elephants; and Bajazet retaliated with a worse insult on
Timour, by promising that he would capture his retinue of wives. The
foes met at Angora in Asia Minor; Bajazet was defeated and captured in
the battle, and Timour secured him in an iron-barred apartment or cage,
which, according to Tartar custom, was on wheels, and he carried him
about, as some wild beast, on his march through Asia. Can imagination
invent a more intolerable punishment upon pride? is it not wonderful
that the victim of it was able to live as many as nine months under such
a visitation?

This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shortly before young
Harry of Monmouth, the idol of English poetry and loyalty, crossed the
sea to kill the French at Agincourt; and an opportunity was offered to
Christendom to destroy an enemy, who never before or since has been in
such extremity of peril. For fourteen years a state of interregnum, or
civil war, lasted in the Ottoman empire; and the capture of
Constantinople, which was imminent at the time of Bajazet's downfall,
was anyhow delayed for full fifty years. Had a crusade been attempted
with the matured experience and subdued enthusiasm, which the trials of
three hundred years had given to the European nations, the Ottomans,
according to all human probability, would have perished, as the
Seljukians before them. But, in the inscrutable decree of Heaven, no
such attempt was made; one attempt indeed was made too soon, and a
second attempt was made too late, but none at the time.

1. The first of these two was set on foot w