g considered, especially by the females, as conducive to
health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants;
and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest
of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and
accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it
was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave
that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes,
and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or
negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings or in the
immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended
their lives in the streets by day and by night.

The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their
neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve
themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the
houses and laid before the doors, where the early morn found them in
heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no
longer possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four were
generally laid together; husband and wife, father and mother, with two
or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier;
and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing
the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals;
so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment.

FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE

TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI

A.D. 1354

JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL[53]

During the early years of the fourteenth century a new
Mahometan realm was established on the ruins of the
Seljukian and Byzantine power in Asia Minor. Osman,[54] or
Othman, the founder of this realm, which is regarded as the
original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia Minor,
and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured
Prusa (now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nicaea--then
second only to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine
empire--and six years later he defeated the Turkish Prince
of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed his territory,
including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus, to
the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of
North-western Asia Minor.

During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent
passages of the H