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. The ninth, Selim, returned from his Eastern conquests with the last of the Caliphs in his company, and made him resign to himself the prerogatives of Pontiff and Lawgiver, which the Caliph inherited from Mahomet. Then came a tenth, the greatest perhaps of all, Soliman the Magnificent, the contemporary of the Emperor Charles, Francis the First of France, and Henry the Eighth of England. And an eleventh might have been expected, and a twelfth, and the power of the enemy would have become greater and greater, and would have afflicted the Church more and more heavily; and what was to be the end of these things? What was to be the end? why, not a Christian only, but any philosopher of this world would have known what was to be the end, in spite of existing appearances. All earthly power has an end; it rises to fall, it grows to die; and the depth of its humiliation issues out of the pride of its lifting up. This is what even a philosopher would say; he would not know whether Soliman, the tenth conqueror, was also to be the last; but if not the tenth, he would be bold to say it would be the twelfth, who would close their victories, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth. But what a philosopher could not say, what a Christian knows and enjoys, is this, that one earthly power there is which is something more than earthly, and which, while it dies in the individual, for he is human, is immortal in its succession, for it is divine.

It was a remarkable question addressed by the savage Tartars of Zingis to the missionaries whom the Pope sent them in the thirteenth century: "Who was the Pope?" they asked; "was he not an old man, five hundred years of age?"[67] It was their one instinctive notion of the religion of the West; and the Turks in their own history have often had cause to lament over its truth. Togrul Beg first looked towards the West, in the year 1048; twenty years later, between the years 1068 and 1074,[68] his successor, Malek Shah, attracted the attention of the great St. Gregory the Seventh. Time went on; they were thrown back by the impetuosity of the Crusaders; they returned to the attack. Fresh and fresh multitudes poured down from Turkistan; the furious deluge of the Tartars under Zingis spread itself and disappeared; the Turks sunk in it, but emerged; the race seemed indestructible; then Othman began a new career of victory, as if there had never been an old one, and founded an empire, more stable, more coherent than any Turkish rule before it. Then followed Sultan after Sultan, each greater than his predecessor, while the line of Popes had indeed many bright names to show, Pontiffs of learning, and of piety, and of genius, and of zeal and energy; but still where was the destined champion of Christendom, the holy, the inflexible, the lion-hearted, the successor of St. Gregory, who in a luxurious and a self-willed age, among his other high duties and achievements, had the mission, by his prayers and by his efforts, of stopping the enemy in his full career, and of rescuing Catholicism from the pollution of the blasphemer? The five hundred years were not yet completed.

But the five hundred years at length were run out; the long-expected champion was at hand. He appeared at the very time when the Ottoman crescent had passed its zenith and was beginning to descend the sky. The Turkish successes began in the middle of the eleventh century; they ended in the middle of the sixteenth; in the middle of the sixteenth century, just five hundred years after St. Gregory and Malek Shah, Selim the Sot came to the throne of Othman, and St. Pius the Fifth to the throne of the Apostle; Pius became Pope in 1566, and Selim became Sultan in that very same year.

O what a strange contrast, Gentlemen, did Rome and Constantinople present at that era! Neither was what it had been, but they had changed in opposite directions. Both had been the seat of Imperial Power; Rome, where heresy never throve, had exchanged its Emperors for the succession of St. Peter and St. Paul; Constantinople had passed from secular supremacy into schism, and thence into a blasphemous apostasy. The unhappy city, which with its subject provinces had been successively the seat of Arianism, of Nestorianism, of Photianism, now had become the metropolis of the false Prophet; and, while in the West the great edifice of the Vatican Basilica was rising anew in its wonderful proportions and its costly materials, the Temple of St. Sophia in the East was degraded into a Mosque! O the strange contrast in the state of the inhabitants of each place! Here in the city of Constantine a God-denying misbelief was accompanied by an impure, man-degrading rule of life, by the slavery of woman, and the corruption of youth. But there, in the city which Apostles had consecrated with their blood, the great and true reformation of the age was in full progress. There the determinations in doctrine and discipline of the great Council of Trent had lately been promulgated. There for twenty years past had laboured our own dear saint, St. Philip, till he earned the title of Apostle of Rome, and yet had still nearly thirty years of life and work in him.

There, too, the romantic royal-minded saint, Ignatius Loyola, had but lately died. And there, when the Holy See fell vacant, and a Pope had to be appointed in the great need of the Church, a saint was present in the conclave to find in it a brother saint, and to recommend him for the Chair of St. Peter, to the suffrages of the Fathers and Princes of the Church.

7.

St Carlo Borromeo,[69] the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was the nephew of the Pope who was just dead, and though he was only twenty-five years of age at the time, nevertheless, by the various influences arising out of the position which he held, and from the weight attached to his personal character, he might be considered to sway the votes of the College of Cardinals, and to determine the election of a new Pontiff. It is remarkable that Cardinal Alessandrino, as St. Pius was then called, (from Alexandria, in North Italy, near which he was born,) was not the first object of his choice. His eyes were first turned on Cardinal Morone, who was in many respects the most illustrious of the Sacred College, and had served the Church on various occasions with great devotion, and with distinguished success. From his youth he had been reared up in public affairs, he had held many public offices, he had great influence with the German Emperor, he had been Apostolical Legate at the Council of Trent. He had great virtue, judgment, experience, and sagacity. Such, then, was the choice of St. Carlo, and the votes were taken; but it seemed otherwise to the Holy Ghost. He wanted four to make up the sufficient number of votes. St. Carlo had to begin again; and again, strange to say, the Cardinal Alessandrino still was not his choice. He chose Cardinal Sirleto, a man most opposite in character and history to Morone. He was not nobly born, he was no man of the world, he had ever been urgent with the late Pope not to make him Cardinal. He was a first-rate scholar in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; versed in the Scriptures, ready as a theologian. Moreover, he was of a character most unblemished, of most innocent life, and of manners most popular and winning. St. Pius as well as St. Carlo advocated the cause of Cardinal Sirleto, and the votes were given a second time; a second time they came short. It was like holy Samuel choosing Eliab instead of David. Then matters were in confusion; one name and another were mentioned, and no progress was made.

At length and at last, and not till all others were thought of who could enter into the minds of the electors, the Cardinal Alessandrino himself began to attract attention. He seems not to have been known to the Fathers of the conclave in general; a Dominican Friar, of humble rank, ever taken up in the duties of his rule and his special employments, living in his cell, knowing little or nothing of mankind--such a one St.

Carlo, the son of a prince and the nephew of a Pope, had no means of knowing; and the intimacy, consequent on their cooperation in behalf of Cardinal Sirleto, was the first real introduction which the one Saint had to the other. It was just at this moment that our own St. Philip was in his small room at St. Girolamo, with Marcello Ferro, one of his spiritual children, when, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and going almost into an ecstasy, he said: "The Pope will be elected on Monday."

On one of the following days, as they were walking together, Marcello asked him who was to be Pope. Philip answered, "Come, I will tell you; the Pope will be one whom you have never thought of, and whom no one has spoken of as likely; and that is Cardinal Alessandrino; and he will be elected on Monday evening without fail." The event accomplished the prediction; the statesman and the man of the world, the accomplished and exemplary and amiable scholar, were put aside to make way for the Saint.

He took the name of Pius.

I am far from denying that St. Pius was stern and severe, as far as a heart burning within and melting with the fulness of divine love could be so; and this was the reason that the conclave was so slow in electing him. Yet such energy and vigour as his was necessary for his times. He was emphatically a soldier of Christ in a time of insurrection and rebellion, when, in a spiritual sense, martial law was proclaimed. St.

Philip, a private priest, might follow his bent, in casting his net for souls, as he expressed himself, and enticing them to the truth; but the Vicar of Christ had to right and to steer the vessel, when it was in rough waters, and among breakers. A Protestant historian on this point does justice to him. "When Pope," he says, "he lived in all the austerity of his monastic life, fasted with the utmost rigour and punctuality, would wear no finer garments than before ... arose at an extremely early hour in the morning, and took no _siesta_. If we doubted the depth of his religious earnestness, we may find a proof of it in his declaration, that the Papacy was unfavourable to his advance in piety; that it did not contribute to his salvation and to his attainment of Paradise; and that, but for prayer, the burden had been too heavy for him. The happiness of a fervent devotion, which often moved him to tears, was granted him to the end of his life. The people were excited to enthusiasm, when they saw him walking in procession, barefooted and bareheaded, with the expression of unaffected piety in his countenance, and with his long snow-white beard falling on his breast. They thought there had never been so pious a Pope; they told each other how his very look had converted heretics. Pius was kind, too, and affable; his intercourse with his old servants was of the most confidential kind. At a former period, before he was Pope, the Count della Trinita had threatened to have him thrown into a well, and he had replied, that it must be as God pleased. How beautiful was his greeting to this same Count, who was now sent as ambassador to his court! 'See,' said he, when he recognized him, 'how God preserves the innocent.' This was the only way in which he made him feel that he recollected his enmity. He had ever been most charitable and bounteous; he kept a list of the poor of Rome, whom he regularly assisted according to their station and their wants." The writer, after proceeding to condemn what he considers his severity, ends thus: "It is certain that his deportment and mode of thinking exercised an incalculable influence on his contemporaries, and on the general development of the Church of which he was the head. After so many circumstances had concurred to excite and foster a religious spirit, after so many resolutions and measures had been taken to exalt it to universal dominion, a Pope like this was needed, not only to proclaim it to the world, but also to reduce it to practice; his zeal and his example combined produced the most powerful effect."[70]

8.

It is not to be supposed that a Saint on whom lay the "solicitude of all the churches," should neglect the tradition, which his predecessors of so many centuries had bequeathed to him, of zeal and hostility against the Turkish power. He was only six years on the Pontifical throne; and the achievement of which I am going to speak was among his last; he died the following year. At this time the Ottoman armies were continuing their course of victory; they had just taken Cyprus, with the active cooperation of the Greek population of the island, and were massacring the Latin nobility and clergy, and mutilating and flaying alive the Venetian governor. Yet the Saint found it impossible to move Christendom to its own defence. How, indeed, was that to be done, when half Christendom had become Protestant, and secretly perhaps felt as the Greeks felt, that the Turk was its friend and ally? In such a quarrel England, France, and Germany were out of the question. At length, however, with great effort, he succeeded in forming a holy league between himself, King Philip of Spain, and the Venetians. Don John, of Austria, King Philip's half brother, was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces, and Colonna admiral. The treaty was signed on the 24th of May; but such was the cowardice and jealousy of the parties concerned, that the autumn had arrived, and nothing of importance was accomplished.

With difficulty were the armies united; with difficulty were the dissensions of the commanders brought to a settlement. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were scouring the Gulf of Venice, blockading the ports, and terrifying the city itself.

But the holy Pope was securing the success of his cause by arms of his own, which the Turks understood not. He had been appointing a Triduo of supplication at Rome, and had taken part in the procession himself. He had proclaimed a jubilee to the whole Christian world, for the happy issue of the war. He had been interesting the Holy Virgin in his cause.

He presented to his admiral, after High Mass in his chapel, a standard of red damask, embroidered with a crucifix, and with the figures of St.

Peter and St. Paul, and the legend, "_In hoc signo vinces_." Next, sending to Messina, where the allied fleet lay, he assured the general-in-chief and the armament, that "if, relying on divine, rather than on human help, they attacked the enemy, God would not be wanting to His own cause. He augured a prosperous and happy issue; not on any light or random hope, but on a divine guidance, and by the anticipations of many holy men." Moreover, he enjoined the officers to look to the good conduct of their troops; to repress swearing, gaming, riot, and plunder, and thereby to render them more deserving of victory. Accordingly, a fast of three days was proclaimed for the fleet, beginning with the Nativity of our Lady; all the men went to confession and communion, and appropriated to themselves the plentiful indulgences which the Pope attached to the expedition. Then they moved across the foot of Italy to Corfu, with the intention of presenting themselves at once to the enemy; being disappointed in their expectations, they turned back to the Gulf of Corinth; and there at length, on the 7th of October, they found the Turkish fleet, half way between Lepanto and the Echinades on the North, and Patras, in the Morea, on the South; and, though it was towards evening, strong in faith and zeal, they at once commenced the engagement.

The night before the battle, and the day itself, aged as he was, and broken with a cruel malady, the Saint had passed in the Vatican in fasting and prayer. All through the Holy City the monasteries and the colleges were in prayer too. As the evening advanced, the Pontifical treasurer asked an audience of the Sovereign Pontiff on an important matter. Pius was in his bedroom, and began to converse with him; when suddenly he stopped the conversation, left him, threw open the window, and gazed up into heaven. Then closing it again, he looked gravely at his official, and said, "This is no time for business; go, return thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious." As the treasurer went out, he saw him fall on his knees before the altar in thankfulness and joy.

And a most memorable victory it was: upwards of 30,000 Turks are said to have lost their lives in the engagement, and 3,500 were made prisoners.

Almost their whole fleet was taken. I quote from Protestant authorities when I say that the Sultan, on the news of the calamity, neither ate, nor drank, nor showed himself, nor saw any one for three days; that it was the greatest blow which the Ottomans had had since Timour's victory over Bajazet, a century and a half before; nay, that it was the turning-point in the Turkish history;[71] and that, though the Sultans have had isolated successes since, yet from that day they undeniably and constantly declined, that they have lost their _prestige_ and their self-confidence, and that the victories gained over them since are but the complements and the reverberations of the overthrow at Lepanto.

Such was the catastrophe of this long and anxious drama; the hosts of Turkistan and Tartary had poured down from their wildernesses through ages, to be withstood, and foiled, and reversed by an old man. It was a repetition, though under different circumstances, of the history of Leo and the Hun. In the contrast between the combatants we see the contrast of the histories of good and evil. The Enemy, as the Turks in this battle, rushing forward with the terrible fury of wild beasts; and the Church, ever combating with the energetic perseverance and the heroic obstinacy of St. Pius.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Formby's Visit to the East.

[58] The three remaining of the thirty are Orchan, Ibrahim, and Abdoul Achmet.

[59] Gibbon.

[60] Gibbon.

[61] Hume's History.

[62] Ranke, vol. i

[63] Turner's History.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Gieseler's Text Book.

[66] Baronius.

[67] Bergeron.

[68] Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074.

[69] Bollandist. Mai. 5.

[70] Ranke's Hist. of the Popes.

[71] "The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe."--Alison's Europe, vol. ix. p. 95. "The powers of the Turks and of their European neighbours were now nearly balanced; in the reign of Amurath the Third, who succeeded Selim, the advantages became more evidently in favour of the Christians; and since that time, though the Turks have sometimes enjoyed a transitory success, the real stability of their affairs has constantly declined."--Bell's Geography, vol. ii, part 2. Vid. also Ranke, vol. i., pp. 381-2. It is remarkable that it should be passed over by Professor Creasy in his "Fifteen Decisive Battles."

IV.

THE PROSPECTS OF THE TURKS.

LECTURE VII.

_Barbarism and Civilization._

1.

My object in the sketch which I have been attempting, of the history of the Turks, has been to show the relation of this celebrated race to Europe and to Christendom. I have not been led to speak of them by any especial interest in them for their own sake, but by the circumstances of the present moment, which bring them often before us, oblige us to speak of them, and involve the necessity of entertaining some definite sentiments about them. With this view I have been considering their antecedents; whence they came, how they came, where they are, and what title they have to be there at all. When I now say, that I am proceeding to contemplate their future, do not suppose me to be so rash as to be hazarding any political prophecy; I do but mean to set down some characteristics in their existing state (if I have any right to fancy, that in any true measure we at the distance of some thousand miles know it), which naturally suggest to us to pursue their prospective history in one direction, not in another.

Now it seems safe to say, in the first place, that some time or other the Ottomans will come to an end. All human power has its termination sooner or later; states rise to fall; and, secure as they may be now, so one day they will be in peril and in course of overthrow. Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, each has had its day; and this was so clear to mankind 2,000 years ago, that the conqueror of Carthage wept, as he gazed upon its flames, for he saw in them the conflagration of her rival, his own Rome. "_Fuit Ilium._" The Saracens, the Moguls, have had their day; those European states, so great three centuries ago, Spain and Poland, Venice and Genoa, are now either extinct or in decrepitude. What is the lot of all states, is still more strikingly fulfilled in the case of empires; kingdoms indeed are of slow growth, but empires commonly are but sudden manifestations of power, which are as short-lived as they are sudden. Even the Roman empire, which is an exception, did not last beyond five hundred years; the Saracenic three hundred; the Spanish three hundred; the Russian has lasted about a hundred and fifty, that is, since the Czar Peter; the British not a hundred; the Ottoman has reached four or five. If there be an empire which does not at all feel the pressure of this natural law, but lasts continuously, repairs its losses, renews its vigour, and with every successive age emulates its antecedent fame, such a power must be more than human, and has no place in our present inquiry. We are concerned, not with any supernatural power, to which is promised perpetuity, but with the Ottoman empire, famous in history, vigorous in constitution, but, after all, human, and nothing more. There is, then, neither risk nor merit in prophesying the eventual fall of the Osmanlis, as of the Seljukians, as of the Gaznevides before them; the only wonder is that they actually have lasted as much as four hundred years.

Such will be the issue and the sum of their whole history; but, certain as this is, and confidently as it may be pronounced, nothing else can be prudently asserted about their future. Times and moments are in the decrees of the All-wise, and known to Him alone; and so are the occurrences to which they give birth. The only further point open to conjecture, as being not quite destitute of data for speculating upon it, is the particular course of events and quality of circumstances, which will precede the downfall of the Turkish power; for, granting that that downfall is to come, it is reasonable to think it will take place in that particular way, for which in their present state we see an existing preparation, if such can be discerned, or in a way which at least is not inconsistent with the peculiarities of that present state.

2.

Hence, in speculating on this question, I shall take this as a reasonable assumption first of all, that the catastrophe of a state is according to its antecedents, and its destiny according to its nature; and therefore, that we cannot venture on any anticipation of the instruments or the conditions of its death, until we know something about the principle and the character of its life. Next I lay down, that, whereas a state is in its very idea a society, and a society is a collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some common possession, and to the extent of that common possession, the presence of that possession held in common constitutes the life, and the loss of it constitutes the dissolution, of a state. In like manner, whatever avails or tends to withdraw that common possession, is either fatal or prejudicial to the social union. As regards the Ottoman power, then, we have to inquire what its life consists in, and what are the dangers to which that life, from the nature of its constitution, is exposed.