l human occupation save the trade of war and the pursuit of military
dominion, offered a strong contrast to the distracted condition of the
holy Roman empire, where an intellectual and industrious people,
distracted by half a century of religious controversy and groaning under
one of the most elaborately perverse of all the political systems ever
invented by man, seemed to offer itself an easy prey to any conqueror.
The Turkish power was in the fulness of its aggressive strength, and
seemed far more formidable than it would have done had there been clearer
perceptions of what constitutes the strength and the wealth of nations.
Could the simple truth have been thoroughly, comprehended that a realm
founded upon such principles was the grossest of absurdities, the Eastern
might have seemed less terrible than the Western danger.

But a great campaign, at no considerable distance from the walls of
Vienna, had occupied the attention of Germany during the autumn. Mahomet
had taken the field in person with a hundred thousand men, and the
emperor's brother, Maximilian, in conjunction with the Prince of
Transylvania, at the head of a force of equal magnitude, had gone forth
to give him battle. Between the Theiss and the Danube, at Keveste, not
far from the city of Erlau, on the 26th October, the terrible encounter
on which the fate of Christendom seemed to hang at last took place, and
Europe held its breath in awful suspense until its fate should be
decided. When the result at last became known, a horrible blending of the
comic and the tragic, such as has rarely been presented in history,
startled the world. Seventy thousand human beings--Moslems and
Christians--were lying dead or wounded on the banks of a nameless little
stream which flows into the Theisa, and the commanders-in-chief of both
armies were running away as fast as horses could carry them. Each army
believed itself hopelessly defeated, and abandoning tents, baggage,
artillery, ammunition, the remnants of each, betook themselves to
panic-stricken flight. Generalissimo Maximilian never looked behind him
as he fled, until he had taken refuge in Kaschan, and had thence made his
way, deeply mortified and despondent, to Vienna. The Prince of
Transylvania retreated into the depths of his own principality. Mahomet,
with his principal officers, shut himself up in Buda, after which he
returned to Constantinople and abandoned himself for a time to a
voluptuous ease, inconsistent