with the Crusaders at Dorylaeum.
"With horrible howlings," says Mr. Turner, "and loud clangour of drums
and trumpets, the Turks rushed on;" and you may recollect, the savage
who would have murdered the Bishop of Bamberg, began with a shriek.
However, as you will see directly, such an onset was as ignorant as it
was savage, for it was made with a haughty and wilful blindness to the
importance of firearms under their circumstances. The Turks, in the
hey-day of their victories and under their most sagacious leaders, had
scorned and ignored the use of the then newly invented instruments of
war. In truth, they had shared the prejudice against firearms which had
been in the first instance felt by the semi-barbarous chivalry of
Europe. The knight-errant, as Ariosto draws and reflects him, disdained
so dishonourable a means of beating a foe. He looked upon the use of
gunpowder, as Mr. Thornton reminds us, as "cruel, cowardly, and
murderous;" because it gave an unfair and disgraceful advantage to the
feeble or the unwarlike. Such was the sentiment of the Ottomans even in
the reign of their great Soliman. Shortly before the battle of Lepanto,
a Dalmatian horseman rode express to Constantinople, and reported to the
Divan, that 2,500 Turks had been surprised and routed by 500
musqueteers. Great was the indignation of the assembly against the
unfortunate troops, of whom the messenger was one. But he was successful
in his defence of himself and his companions. "Do you not hear," he
said, "that we were overcome by guns? We were routed by fire, not by the
enemy. It would have been otherwise, had it been a contest of courage.
They took fire to their aid; fire is one of the elements; what is man
that he should resist their shock?" They did not dream of the apophthegm
that knowledge is power; and that we become strong by subduing nature to
our will.

Accordingly, their tactics by sea was a sort of land engagement on deck,
as it was with our ancestors, and with the ancients. First, they charged
the adverse vessel, with a view of taking it; if that would not do, they
boarded it. They fought hand to hand, and each captain might pretty much
exercise his own judgment which ship to attack, as Homer's heroes chose
their combatants on the field of Troy. However, the Christian galeasses
at Lepanto,--for to these we must at length return,--were vessels of
larger dimensions than the Ottomans had ever built; they were fortified,
like castles, with h