the meeting
of the two monarchs was formal and embarrassed: and Sobieski, disgusted
at the meanness and arrogance of the prince who owed to him the
preservation of his capital and throne, hastily cut short the
conference, by deputing to his chancellor Zaluski the task of showing to
Leopold the troops who had saved his empire; and departed on the 17th
with his noble colleague in arms, the Duke of Lorraine, to follow up
their triumphs by attacking the Turks in Hungary.

The battle of Vienna effectually broke the spell of the Ottoman military
ascendancy, which for near three centuries had held Europe in awe;--and
though the energies of the empire, and the efficacy of its institutions,
had long been gradually decaying, it was this great blow which first
revealed the secret of its impaired strength. The treaty of Zurawno with
Poland in 1676, had raised the Ottoman dominions to the highest point of
territorial extent which they ever attained. From the time of the
reunion of the empire, after the confusion following the defeat of
Bayezid I. by Timour, every reign had seen its boundaries enlarged by
successive acquisitions; and if we except the voluntary abandonment, in
1636, of the remote and unprofitable province of Yemen, the horsetails
had never receded from any territory on which they had been planted in
token of permanent occupation. Besides the vast territories which were
under the immediate rule of pashas sent from the Porte, and which the
land and capitation taxes (_ssalyaneh_ and _kharatch_,) the khan of the
Krim Tartars, the otaman of the Cossacks, the vassal princes of
Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, the hereditary chiefs of the
Circassian and Koordish tribes, and the rulers of the Barbary regencies,
were all "under the shadow of the imperial horsetails," and paid tribute
and allegiance to the sultan, who might boast, with no less justice than
did the monarchs of the Seljookian Turks of old, that a crowd of princes
arose from the dust of his footsteps. During the reign of Mohammed IV.,
the last relics of Venetian rule in the Levant had been extirpated by
the conquest of Candia; the frontiers in Hungary and Transylvania had
been strengthened by the acquisition of the important fortresses of
Grosswardein and Neuhausel, with the territory attached to them; while
Poland had been deprived of the province through which she had access to
the undefended points of the Ottoman frontier, and the Cossacks, from
restless