n of
the institutions and power of the Othoman Empire. No nation ever
increased so rapidly from such small beginnings, and no government ever
constituted itself with greater sagacity than the Othoman; but no force
or prudence could have enabled this small tribe of nomads to rise with
such rapidity to power if it had not been that the Greek nation and its
emperors were paralysed by political and moral corruption. Justice was
dormant in the state, Christianity was torpid in the Church, orthodoxy
performed the duties of civil liberty, and the priest became the focus
of political opposition. By the middle of the fourteenth century the
Othoman Turks had raided Thrace, Macedonia, the islands of the Aegean,
plundered the large town of Greece, and advanced to the shores of the
Bosphorus.

At the end of the fourteenth century John VI. asked for efficient
military aid from Western Europe to avert the overthrow of the Greek
Empire by the Othoman power, but the Pope refused, unless John consented
to the union of the Greek and Latin Churches and the recognition of the
papal supremacy. In 1438 the Council of Ferrara was held, and was
transferred in the following year to Florence, when the Greek emperor
and all the bishops of the Eastern Church, except the bishop of Ephesus,
adopted the doctrines of the Roman Church, accepted the papal supremacy,
and the union of the two Churches was solemnly ratified in the cathedral
of Florence on July 6, 1439. But little came of the union. The Pope
forgot to sent a fleet to defend Constantinople; the Christian princes
would not fight the battles of the Greeks.

Then followed the conquest, in May 1453, of Constantinople, despite a
desperate resistance, by Mohammed II., who entered his new capital,
riding triumphantly past the body of the Emperor Constantine. Mohammed
proceeded at once to the church of St. Sophia, where, to convince the
Greeks that their Orthodox empire was extinct, the sultan ordered a
moolah to ascend the Bema and address a sermon to the Mussulmans
announcing that St. Sophia was now a mosque set apart for the prayers of
true believers. The fall of Constantinople is a dark chapter in the
annals of Christianity. The death of the unfortunate Constantine,
neglected by the Catholics and deserted by the Orthodox, alone gave
dignity to the final catastrophe.

_III.--Othoman and Venetian_

The conquest of Greece by Mohammed II. was felt to be a boon by the
greater part of the popu