picuous than the relics of Hellas, still crown many high hills in
Greece, and their French tongue has added another strain, to the varied
nomenclature of the country.[1] Yet there also pandemonium prevailed.
Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched
the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the
French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the
west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the
encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east. To complete the
anarchy, the non-Romaic peoples in the interior of the Balkan peninsula
had taken the fall of Constantinople as a signal to throw off the Imperial
yoke. In the hinterland of the capital the Bulgars had reconstituted their
kingdom. The Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the
Thessalian plains. The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the
Adriatic had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out
migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring
princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of
continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only less
common than Slavonic. South-eastern Europe was again in the throes of
social dissolution, and the convulsions continued till they were stilled
impartially by the numbing hand of their ultimate author the Turk.

[Footnote 1: e.g. Klemoutsi, Glarentsa (Clarence) and Gastouni--villages
of the currant district in Peloponnesos--and Sant-Omeri, the mountain that
overlooks them.]

The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the way
of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions, which
showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth. This was the extreme
march on the north-western rim of the Anatolian plateau, overlooking the
Asiatic littoral of the Sea of Marmora. It had been founded by one of
those Turkish chiefs who migrated with their clans from beyond the Oxus;
and it was consolidated by Othman his son, who extended his kingdom to the
cities on the coast and invested his subjects with his own name. In 1355
the Narrows of Gallipoli passed into Ottoman hands, and opened a bridge to
unexpected conquests in Europe. Serbia and Bulgaria collapsed at the first
attack, and the hosts which marched to liberate them from Hungary and from
France only ministered to Ottoman prestige by their disastrous
discomfiture.