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g considered, especially by the females, as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest of the populace undertook the office for the sake of gain; and accompanied by only a few priests, and often without a single taper, it was borne to the very nearest church, and lowered into the first grave that was not already too full to receive it. Among the middling classes, and especially among the poor, the misery was still greater. Poverty or negligence induced most of these to remain in their dwellings or in the immediate neighborhood; and thus they fell by thousands; and many ended their lives in the streets by day and by night. The stench of putrefying corpses was often the first indication to their neighbors that more deaths had occurred. The survivors, to preserve themselves from infection, generally had the bodies taken out of the houses and laid before the doors, where the early morn found them in heaps, exposed to the affrighted gaze of the passing stranger. It was no longer possible to have a bier for every corpse--three or four were generally laid together; husband and wife, father and mother, with two or three children, were frequently borne to the grave on the same bier; and it often happened that two priests would accompany a coffin, bearing the cross before it, and be joined on the way by several other funerals; so that instead of one, there were five or six bodies for interment. FIRST TURKISH DOMINION IN EUROPE TURKS SEIZE GALLIPOLI A.D. 1354 JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL[53] During the early years of the fourteenth century a new Mahometan realm was established on the ruins of the Seljukian and Byzantine power in Asia Minor. Osman,[54] or Othman, the founder of this realm, which is regarded as the original Ottoman empire, subdued a great part of Asia Minor, and in the year of his death 1326, his son Orkhan captured Prusa (now Brusa) and Nicomedia. In 1330 he took Nicaea--then second only to Constantinople in the Greek or Byzantine empire--and six years later he defeated the Turkish Prince of Karasi, the ancient Mysia, and annexed his territory, including the capital, Berghama, the ancient Pergamus, to the Ottoman dominions, thus securing nearly the whole of North-western Asia Minor. During the reign of Orkhan the Ottomans made frequent passages of the H
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