his territory: the one by
accessions from other wandering Turkish tribes, and the other by extending
it by force as he had a chance. Then the Sultan of Iconium died, and his
land and authority were divided among ten states, of which Etrogruhl's was
one. So now he was an independent ruler with none to call him to account.

In the mean time his son Othman had developed great ability as a warrior
and as a leader. He had met the armies of the Byzantine Emperor, and had
defeated them, and had captured fortresses and cities. And the Emperor
from the roof of his palace at Constantinople had seen across the
Bosphorus the smoke of his burning towns and villages. So when his father
died and Othman came into his inheritance, he found himself the ruler of a
powerful and inspiring state, and the Ottoman Empire had commenced its
extraordinary career of conquest.

His son and successor, Orkhan, inherited the same commanding qualities and
the kind of ability required to organize a new state.

By one terrible stroke of genius he created the most effective military
organization which has ever been known--one which, from that time down to
our own century, was the terror of Europe and of Asia.

He conceived the idea of exterminating Christianity by means of
Christians.

The plan was, every year to enroll 1,000 Christian boys taken from the
Christian families captured in war. Only the finest were selected. They
must be very young, so that they would have no ties to remember, no human
sympathies to enfeeble them.

These boys were placed under a rigid military training, with rich rewards
and indulgences for zeal and aptitude, and terrible disgrace and
punishment for the reverse.

They were familiarized with awful atrocities, their sensibilities
destroyed, and at the same time intelligence rendered acute by severe
intellectual training.

In this way was developed the strongest, the fiercest military corps, the
most terrible instrument for the use of despotic power, ever created by
subtle craft or employed by fanaticism.

They were called the Janizaries. And the very name struck a terror which
almost conquered in advance.

When Orkhan led his first 1,000 boys to a dervish priest to bless them,
he flung the sleeve of his robe over the head of one of them, and asked
that the great God of Mahomet would make "their arrows keen, and their
swords deadly."

Thereafter, the dervish cap which they wore had always a long sleeve-like
pendant