which hurts
the hand of the gardener as he hoes.

Neither life nor property was any longer safe from them. The Sultan
himself, when he sat upon the throne, was in the most dangerous place
of all, and the Viziers--the chief officials of the realm--trembled
every day for their lives. The turbulence of the Janissaries was a
perpetually recurring disease running through all the arteries of the
realm, and covering the once mighty empire with poisonous ulcers.

These seditious outbreaks occurred even during the deliberations of
the Divan, and fear on such occasions was a more urgent counsellor
than conviction to the palace magnates who sat in the cupolaed
chamber.

The threats of the Janissaries had compelled Mahmoud to take up arms
against Ali Pasha; and now, when Ali had kindled the flames of war all
over the empire, and the Sultan bade the Janissaries hasten against
the enemy and subdue him, they replied that they would not fight
unless the Sultan led them in person.

Instead of that, they waged war within the very walls of Stambul, for
whenever the news of a defeat reached the capital, the Janissaries
would fall upon the defenceless Greeks and massacre them by thousands.

From distant Asia, from the most savage parts of the empire, Begtash's
priests appeared and proclaimed in the mosques death and destruction
on the heads of all the Greeks. It was they who, with torches in their
hands, headed the rush of the fanatical Janissaries against Buyukdere,
Pera, and Galata, the quarters of the city where the Greeks resided,
and every day they thundered with their bludgeons at the gates of the
Seraglio, demanding ever more and more sentences of death against the
Greek captives who were shut up in the Seven Towers. The Sultan's
officials, trembling with fear, wrote out the sentences demanded of
them, and the victims fell in hundreds; and when the Russian
ambassador, Stroganov, protested against this butchery, the
Janissaries attacked his palace and riddled all the doors and windows
with bullets, which was the subsequent pretext for the long war which
shook the empire to its base, though the Janissaries never lived to
feel it.

Mahmoud watched from the summit of the imperial palace the devastation
of Stambul and the devastation of his empire, and he saw no help
anywhere. He saw nothing but the melancholy examples of his ancestors
and the disappearance of his dominions; and as he stroked the head of
his first-born, Abdul Meji