n
armies as far north as the Danube.

But though the provinces of the corrupt and effete Byzantine Empire
were falling into the hands of the Turks, the Slavs were still
unsubdued. Lazar the Serb threw down the gauntlet to Murad. On the
memorable field of Kossovo, in 1389, the opposing forces met--Murad
supported by his Asiatic and European vassals and allies, and Lazar
with his formidable army of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Poles,
Magyars, and Vlachs. Few battles in the world have produced such a
deep and lasting impression as this battle of Kossovo, in which the
Christian nations after long and stubborn resistance were vanquished
by the Moslems. The Servians still sing ballads which cast a halo of
pathetic romance round their great disaster. And after more than
five centuries the Montenegrins continue to wear black on their caps
in mourning for that fatal day.

In the next two centuries the Ottoman Empire moved on toward the
zenith of its glory. Mohammed II conquered Constantinople in 1453.
And in 1529 Suleyman the Magnificent was at the gates of Vienna.
Suleyman's reign forms the climax of Turkish history. The Turks had
become a central European power occupying Hungary and menacing
Austria. Suleyman's dominions extended from Mecca to Buda-Pesth and
from Bagdad to Algiers. He commanded the Mediterranean, the
Euxine, and the Red Sea, and his navies threatened the coasts of
India and Spain.

But the conquests of the Turks were purely military. They did
nothing for their subjects, whom they treated with contempt, and
they wanted nothing from them but tribute and plunder. As the Turks
were always numerically inferior to the aggregate number of the
peoples under their sway, their one standing policy was to keep them
divided--divide et impera. To fan racial and religious differences
among their subjects was to perpetuate the rule of the masters. The
whole task of government, as the Turks conceived it, was to collect
tribute from the conquered and keep them in subjection by playing
off their differences against one another.

But a deterioration of Turkish rulers set in soon after the time of
Suleyman with a corresponding decline in the character and
efficiency of the army. And the growth of Russia and the reassertion
of Hungary, Poland, and Austria were fatal to the maintenance of an
alien and detested empire founded on military domination alone. By
the end of the seventeenth century the Turks had been driven out of
Au