e the retinue of Timour.
Two of the most illustrious of them died in prison in Asia. As to the
rest, he exacted a heavy ransom from them; but, before he sent them
away, he gave them a grand entertainment, which displayed both the
barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic. He exhibited before them
his hunting and hawking equipage, amounting to seven thousand huntsmen
and as many falconers; and, when one of his chamberlains was accused
before him of drinking a poor woman's goat's milk, he literally
fulfilled the "castigat auditque" of the poet, by having the unhappy man
ripped open, in order to find in his inside the evidence of the charge.

Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nicopolis; nor is it
wonderful that it should damp the zeal of the Christians and weaken the
influence of the Pope, for a long time to come; anyhow, it had this
effect till the critical moment of the Turkish misfortunes was over, and
the race of Othman was recovering itself after the captivity and death
of its Sultan. "Whereas the Turks might have been expelled from Greece
on the loss of their Sultan," says Rainaldus, "Christians, torn to
pieces by their quarrels and by schism, lost a fit and sufficient
opportunity. Whence it followed, that the wound inflicted upon the beast
was not unto death, but he revived more ferocious for the devouring of
the faithful."

2. However, Christendom made a second attempt still, but when it was too
late. The grandson of Bajazet was then on the throne, one of the ablest
of the Sultans; and, though the allied Christian army had considerable
success against him at first, in vain was the bravery of Hunniades, and
the preaching of St. John Capistran: the Turk managed to negotiate with
its leaders, to put them in the wrong, to charge them with perjury, and
then to beat them in the fatal battle of Varna, in which the King of
Hungary and Poland and the Pope's Legate were killed, with 10,000 men.
In vain after this was any attempt to make head against the enemy; in
vain did Pope after Pope raise his warning voice and point to the
judgment which hung over Christendom; Constantinople fell.

6.

Thus things did but go on worse and worse for the interest of
Christendom. Even the taking of Constantinople was not the limit of the
Ottoman successes. Mahomet the Conqueror, as he is called, was but the
seventh of the great Sultans, who carried on the fortunes of the
barbarian empire. An eighth, a ninth followed.