Katzianer in three successive instances. Several Spaniards and Germans had been buried or blown into the air by the explosion; others were hurled back into the city without serious injury. The explosions would have been more effective if the besieged had not succeeded in reaching some of the chambers of the mines by countermining, and in carrying off eight tuns of the charge. During the repeated assaults the heaviest artillery of the city was discharged incessantly upon the Turkish cavalry, and with such good aim, that, to use the words of Peter Stern von Labach, man and horse flew into the air. Upon every retreat of the storming-parties, trumpets from St. Stephen's tower, and warlike music on the place of St. Clara, celebrated the triumph of the besieged. The Sultan, dispirited at these repeated failures, adopted a precaution which indicated apprehension on his own part of a sally from the city, for he directed trenches to be dug round the tents of the Janissaries and other picked troops. In the city, when quiet was restored, the old wall was rapidly repaired, a new one constructed, the houses which interfered with it levelled, and their materials employed to fill up the wooden breastwork."—pp. 33, 34.

The great blow, however was not struck till the 14th of the same month. The entire of the previous day was spent in most active preparation, the firing and other offensive operations being suspended for the purpose; and on that evening the Sultan inspected the arrangements in person; expressed his fullest satisfaction, and offered a reward of 30,000 aspers, (nearly £300), to the first soldier who should mount the wall. This trial decided the fate of the expedition.

"At daybreak of the 14th October, the flower of the Turkish army was arrayed in three powerful bodies for the assault, and towards nine o'clock they advanced, led on by officers of the highest rank. On this occasion, however, the desperate courage and cheerful contempt of death which had usually been conspicuous among the Turkish soldiery were no longer distinguishable. It was to no purpose that their officers, the Vizier in person at their head, urged them forward with stick and whip and sabre-edge, they refused obedience, saying they preferred to die by the hands of their own officers rather than to face the long muskets of the Spaniards and the German spits, as they called the long swords of the lanzknechts. Towards noon two mines were sprung to the right and left of the Karnthner gate, but a third, which had been carried under the Burg, was fortunately detected, and its entire charge of twenty barrels of powder fell into the hands of the counterminers. A breach, nevertheless, twenty-four fathoms wide, was the result of the mines which succeeded, and through this, supported by the fire of all their batteries, repeated attempts were made to storm, but in

every instance repulsed as before. These attacks were the last expiring efforts of exhausted men. Two incidents connected with them have been considered worthy of record. The first is the adventure of two officers, a Portuguese and a German, who had quarrelled over night, and were proceeding to settle their difference with the sword in the morning, having selected the breach or its immediate neighbourhood for their place of meeting. Being interrupted by the Turkish assault, they naturally enough, instead of proceeding with their own foolish and useless purpose, agreed to turn their arms against the Turks. The point of the story seems to be, that after one had lost his left arm and the other the use of his right, they stood by one another, making a perfect soldier between them, till both were killed. The other incident is one of more historical importance. It is that of the severe and ultimately fatal wound of the brave Count Salm, who, after escaping all the previous dangers of the siege, was hit on the hip towards 2 P. M. by the splintered fragments of a stone, and carried from the breach, which till then he had never quitted. He survived till the spring of the following year, when he died of the effects of this injury at his residence of Salm Hoff, near Marchegg in Lower Austria. King Ferdinand caused a sumptuous monument to be erected to this deserving soldier in the church, then existing, of St. Dorothea, in which was the family vault of the Salms. This church was pulled down in 1783, when the Salm family took possession of the monument, and removed it to their residence at Raitz in Moravia.

"On the failure of these last attacks, Soliman abandoned all hope of gaining possession of the city, and the troops received accordingly a general order of retreat. Its execution was attended by an act of atrocity which throws a shadow over the character of the sovereign by whose servants it was perpetrated, a shadow not the less deep because contrasted with many recorded indications of a noble and generous nature. It may, indeed, possibly be considered as another specimen of unavoidable condescension to the passions of an ill-disciplined soldiery, such as the massacre of the garrison of Pesth, and rather as an exhibition of the weakness than the misuse of despotic rule. The Janissaries broke up from their encampment an hour before midnight, and set on fire their huts, forage, and every combustible article which they could not or would not carry with them. Under this latter head they included the greater portion of the vast swarm of prisoners of all ages and both sexes collected in their quarters. Of these the younger portion alone, boys and girls, were dragged along with their retiring columns, tied together by ropes, and destined to slavery. The old of both sexes and the children were for the most part flung alive into the flames of the burning camp, and the remainder cut to pieces or impaled. The glare of the conflagration and the shrieks of the sufferers disturbed through the night the rest so dearly earned by the brave defenders of the city, and though their

approaching deliverance might be read in the one, it was probably easy to conjecture from the other the horrors by which that deliverance was accompanied. When this act of cowardly vengeance was accomplished, a parting salvo from all their fire-arms was discharged at the walls; and after all remaining buildings in the suburbs and adjacent villages had been set on fire, the army commenced its retreat."-pp. 38-40.

It is almost ludicrous to read, that notwithstanding this signal and disastrous failure, (which involved a loss to the invading army variously estimated from thirty to eighty thousand men,) the Sultan halted in the very midst of his retreat, to receive the congratulations of his principal officers on the fortunate issue of the campaign. On their being admitted to kiss hands for the purpose, they received rich rewards from the Sultan himself in person, so that it is computed that this farcical termination of the siege, cost the conqueror,' ,"in mere money distributed as the reward of successful valour, no less a sum than £125,000. The tone of the bulletins was in keeping with this absurd display. One of these documents, which is preserved by the great orientalist Von Hammer, concludes with the following monstrous "official lie;" monstrous even when we remember the proverbial privilege of lying attributed or assumed in all such compositions.

66

"An unbeliever came out from the fortress and brought intelligence of the submission of the princes and of the people, on whose behalf he prayed for grace and pardon. The Padischah received his prayer with favour, and granted them pardon. Inasmuch as the German lands were unconnected with the Ottoman realm, and that hence it was hard to occupy the frontier places and conduct their affairs, the faithful would not trouble themselves to clear out the fortress, or purify, improve, and put it into repair; but a reward of 1000 aspers was dealt out to each of the Janissaries; and security being established, the horses' heads were turned towards the throne of Solomon."-p. 41.

The same extravagant assumption pervades even the professedly historical narratives which the Turkish writers of the day have left us. The following extract from the historian Ferdi may be taken as a sample.

"As it came to the ear of His Majesty that a portion of the Christian army had shut itself up in the city, and from this it was to be conjectured that the accursed Ferdinand was among them; the victorious army besieged the said fortress for fifteen days, and

overthrew the walls in five places by mines, so that the unbelievers prayed for mercy from the faithful. As some of the garrison were taken prisoners, and from these it was ascertained that the accursed was not in the fortress, the Imperial mercy forgave their offence, and listened to their entreaties; but His Majesty, who governs the world, to gain the merits of this holy war, and to ruin the aforesaid accursed, had sent out the Akindschis, the runners and burners, in all directions into Germany, so that the whole country was trodden down by the hoofs of the horses, and even the lands north of the Danube wasted with fire by the crews of the vessels. Cities and hamlets, market towns and villages, blazed up in the fire of vengeance and destruction. The beautiful land, the treasury of spring and abode of joy, was trodden down by the horsemen and filled with smoke. Houses and palaces were left in ashes. The victorious army dragged away captive the inhabitants, great and small, high and low, men and women, strong and weak. In the bazaars were sold many fair ones with jasmine foreheads, eyebrows arched and thick, and countenances like Peris; and the booty was incalculable. Property, moveable and immoveable, men and cattle, the speaking and the dumb, the rational and the senseless, were destroyed and slaughtered at the edge of the sabre. Thus on the page of time was written the fulfilment of the prophecy of the Koran, Thus deal we with the wicked.'"-p. 44, 45.

Amid the cruelties and atrocities which marked both the advance and the retreat of the Turkish army, it is interesting to record one instance of generosity on the part of the Sultan. On the morning which brought the assurance of the city's safety, the joy of the citizens broke forth in a general discharge of artillery from the walls, in bursts of warlike music through the streets and squares, in merry peals of the bells so long condemned to silence, and in joyous processions, chaunting the Te Deum in thanksgiving for their deliverance. The Sultan asked the prisoner, Cornet Zedlitz, (to whom we have already alluded,) what was the cause of these unusual sounds? The blunt and manly soldier did not hesitate, even in the midst of the solemn flatterers who surrounded the Sultan, to tell him that it was the joyous triumph of the citizens at their deliverance; and Soliman, far from being offended at his frankness, took that occasion of setting him at liberty, presenting him with a richly embroidered robe as a mark of his esteem, and sending him home in safety accompanied by two of his fellow-prisoners who had been taken in the course of the siege.

The failure of this expedition did not prevent Soliman

from renewing, a few years later, his ambitious projects of western conquest. But the expedition of 1532, though the army, according to the most probable account, consisted of little less than 500,000 men, of whom three-fifths were cavalry, was equally unsuccessful. Hostilities were renewed in 1541, and though suspended in 1547 by an armistice of five years purchased by humiliating concessions on the part of Austria, they were resumed at the very moment of its expiration, and continued without much decisive result, till after the death of Ferdinand in 1564.

The campaign of 1566, is memorable by the almost unexampled defence of the small and unimportant Hungarian fortress Szigeth, under the celebrated Nicholas, Count Zriny, at that time entrusted with the chief command on the right bank of the Danube.

"Soliman had undertaken the siege of Erlau; and the Pacha of Bosnia was on the march with reinforcements, when he was attacked near Siklos by Zriny, completely defeated, and slain. The Sultan, furious at this disaster, raised the siege of Erlau and marched with 100,000 men upon Zriny, who, with scarcely 2500, flung himself into Szigeth, with the resolution never to surrender it; a resolution to which his followers cheerfully bound themselves by an oath. To the utmost exertion of his vast military means of attack, Soliman added not only the seduction of brilliant promises, but the more cogent threat of putting to death the son of Zriny, who had fallen into his hands. All was in vain. The Sultan's letter was used by Zriny as wadding for his own musket; and for seventeen days the town held out against repeated assaults. The enfeebled garrison were then driven to the lower castle, and at last to the upper one. No hope remained of repelling another general assault, for which the Turkish preparations were carried forward with the utmost vigour under the eye of the Sultan, who, however, was not destined to witness their issue. On the 6th of September he was found dead in his tent, having thus closed, at the age of seventy-six, by a tranquil and natural death, a reign of forty-five years, which for activity and variety of military enterprise, for expenditure of human life, and for the diffusion of the miseries of warfare, unmitigated by the conventional usages and inventions of later times, could scarcely find its parallel. His decease afforded no respite to the besieged. The event was kept a rigid secret from the soldiery by the Vizier Ibrahim, who adopted the Oriental precaution of putting to death the physicians in attendance. Zriny did not wait for the final assault. On the 8th September the Turks were pressing forward along a narrow bridge to the castle, when the gate was suddenly flung open, a large mortar loaded with broken iron, was discharged into their ranks, according to their own historians killing 600