CHAPTER XLI.
The city was now completely invested. Menaced from all sides, thedefenders were not sufficient in numbers to guard the many approaches.Yet the daily fighting was desperate, for the Moslems were inspired bythe certainty of success, while the Christians were nerved with theenergy of despair. To end the siege Mahomet designated a time for acombined assault from sea and land.
As the fatal day dawned, numberless hordes moved towards the walls.The great ditches were soon filled with the dead bodies of thousandsof the least serviceable soldiers, who had been driven from behind bythe lances of the trained bands, that they might thus worry thepatience and exhaust the resources of the brave defenders, withouttaxing the best of the Moslem troops. The carcasses of the slain madea highway for the living, over which they poured against the gate ofSt. Romanus. The four grim towers toppled beneath the pounding ofgreat stone balls hurled from the cannon of Urban. The defenders weredriven off the adjacent walls by the storms of bullets and arrows thatswept them. At the critical moment the Janizaries, unwearied as yet bywatching or fighting, twelve thousand strong, as compact a massbeneath the eye of the Sultan as the weapon he held in his hand, movedto where the breach was widest.
"The spoil to all! A province to him who first enters!" cried theSultan, waving his iron battle mace. Hassan, the giant, first mountedthe rampart, and fell pierced with arrows and crushed with stones. Butthrough the gap his dying valor had made in the ranks of the foe firstrushed the company of Ballaban.
In vain did the people crowd beneath the dome of St. Sophia, graspingwith hopeless hope an ancient prophecy that at the extreme moment anangel would descend to rescue the city. Alas! only the angel of deathcame that day; and to none brought he more welcome news than to theEmperor,--"Thy prayer is answered; for thou hast fallen where the deadlie thickest!" Near the gateway of St. Romanus, where he had met thefirst of the invaders, under the piles of the dead, gashed by sabrestrokes and crushed beneath the feet of the victors, lay the body ofConstantine Palaeologus, the noblest of the Caesars of the EasternEmpire!
The Turks placed his ghastly head between the feet of the bronzehorse, a part of the equestrian statue of Justinian, where it wasreverently saluted even by the Moslems, who paused in the rage of thesack to think upon the virtue and courage of the unfortunate monarch.
Captain Ballaban had pressed rapidly through the city to the doors ofSt. Sophia. The oaken gates flew back under the axes of the Moslems.Monks and matrons, children and nuns, lords and beggars were crowdedtogether, not knowing whether the grand dome would melt away and alegion of angels descend for their relief, or the vast enclosure wouldbecome a pen of indiscriminate slaughter. The motley and helplessmisery excited the pity of the captors. Ballaban's voice rang throughthe arches, proclaiming safely to those who should submit. That hemight the better command the scene, he made his way to the chancel infront of the grand altar. It was filled with the nuns, repeating theirprayers. Among them was the fair Albanian. Her face was but partlytoward him, yet he could never mistake that queenly head. She wasaddressing the Sisters. Holding aloft the bright shaft of a stiletto,she cried,--
"Let us give ourselves to heaven, but never to the harem!"
Ballaban paused an instant. But that instant seemed to him manyminutes. As, under the lightning's flash, the whole moving panorama ofthe wide landscape seems to stand still, and paints vividly itsprominent objects, however scattered, upon the startled eye of thebeholders; so his mind marvellously quickened by the excitement, tookin at once the long track of his own life. He saw a little child'shand wreathing him with flowers plucked beside a cottage on theBalkans; a lovely captive whose face was lit by the blazing home in ahamlet of Albania; a form of one at Sfetigrade lying still and faintwith sickness, but radiant as with the beginning of transfigurationfor the spirit life; and the queenly being who was borne in thepalanquin through the gate of Phranza. But how changed! How much moreglorious now! Earthly beauty had become haloed with the heavenly. Henever had conceived of such majesty, such glory of personality, suchsplendor of character, as were revealed by her attitude, her eye, hervoice, her purpose.
"But now," thought he, "the descending blade will change this utmostsublimity of being into a little heap of gory dust!"
All this flashed through his mind. In another instant his strong handhad caught the arm of the voluntary sacrifice. The stiletto, falling,caught in the folds of her garments, and then rang upon the marblefloor of the chancel. Morsinia uttered a shriek and fell, apparentlyas lifeless as if the blade had entered her heart.
The Janizary stood astounded. A tide of feeling strange to him pouredthrough his soul. For the first time in his life he felt a horror ofwar. Not thousands writhing on the battle field could blanch his cheekwith pity for their pangs: but that one voice rang through and throughhim, and rent his heart with sympathetic agony. Her cry had become acry of his own soul too.
For the first time he realized the dignity of woman's character. Thiswoman was not even wounded. She had fallen beneath the stroke of athought, a sentiment, a woman's notion of her honor! The women he hadknown had no such fatal scruples. Other captive beauties soon becameaccustomed to their new surroundings. Many even offered to buy withtheir charms an exchange of poverty for the luxuries of the harem ofPashas and wealthy Moslems. Was this a solitary woman's tragedy ofvirtue? Or was it some peculiar teaching of the Christian's faith thatinspired her to such heroism? However it came, the man knew that withher it was a mighty reality; this instinct of virtue; this sanctity ofperson.
And this woman was his dream made real! A celestial ideal which he hadtouched!
The man's brain reeled with the shock of these tenderer and deeperfeelings, coming after the wildness of the battle rage. He grasped thealtar for support. The blood seemed to have ceased to bound in hisveins, the temples to be pulseless; a band to have been drawn tightlyabout his brain so as to paralyze its action. He felt himself falling.A deathly sickness spread through his frame. He was sure he hadfainted. He thought he must have been unconscious for a while. Yetwhen he opened his eyes, the soldier near him was in the same attitudeof dragging a nun by her wrists as when he last saw him. Time hadstood still with his pulses. He shuddered at the cruelty on everyside, as the shrieks from the high galleries were answered by those indistant alcoves and from the deep crypt. He watched the groups of oldmen and children, monks and senators, nuns and courtesans, tiedtogether and dragged away, some for slaughter, some for princelyransom, some for shame.
The building was well emptied when the Sultan entered.
He at once advanced to the altar and proclaimed:
"God is God; there is but one God, and Mahomet is the apostle of God!"
"But whom have we here, Captain Ballaban?"
"Your Majesty, I am guarding a beautiful captive whom I would not havefall into the hands of the common soldiers; I take it, of highestate," replied the Janizary, knowing that such an introduction tothe royal attention alone could save her from the fate which awaitedthe unhappy maidens, most of whom were liable to be sold to brutalmasters and transported to distant provinces.
The Sultan gazed upon the partly conscious woman, and commanded,----
"Let her be veiled! Seek out a goodly house. Find the Eunuch Tamlich."Ballaban shuddered at this command, and was about to reply, when hisjudgment suggested that he was impotent to dispute the royal willexcept by endangering the life or the welfare of his captive.
The safest place for her was, after all, with the maidens who wereknown to be the choice of the Sultan, and thus beyond insult by anyexcept the imperial debauchee.
Mahomet II. gave orders for the immediate transformation of theChristian temple of St. Sophia into a Mosque. In a few hoursdesolation reigned in those "Courts of the Lord's House," which, whenfirst completed, ages ago, drew from the imperial founder, the remark:"Oh, Solomon! I have surpassed thee!" and which, though the poverty oflater monarchs had allowed it to become sadly impaired, was yetregarded by the Greek Christians as worthy of
being the vestibule ofheaven.
The command of the Sultan: "Take away every trace of the idolatry ofthe infidel!" was obeyed in demolishing the rarest gems of Christianart to which attached the least symbolism of the now abolishedworship. The arms were chiseled off the marble crosses which stood outin relief from the side walls, and from the bases of the giganticpillars. The rare mosaics which lined the church as if it were a vastcasket--the fitting gift of the princes of the earth to the King ofKings--were plastered or painted over. The altar, that marvellouscombination of gold and silver and bronze, conglomerate with athousand precious stones, was torn away, that the red slab of theMihrab might point the prayers of the new devotees toward Mecca. Thefurniture, from that upon the grand altar to the banners and mementoesof a thousand years, the donations of Greek emperors and sovereigns ofother lands, was broken or torn into pieces. There remained only thegrand proportions of the building--its chief glory--enriched bypolished surfaces of marble and porphyry slabs; the superb pillarsbrought by the reverent cupidity of earlier ages from the ruinedtemple of Diana at Ephesus, the temple of the Sun at Palmyra, thetemple on the Acro-Corinthus, and the mythologic urn from Pergamus,which latter, having been used as a baptismal font by the followers ofJesus, was now devoted to the ablutions of the Moslems.
From St. Sophia the Sultan passed to the palace of the Greek Caesars.
"Truly! truly!" said he "The spider's web is the royal curtain; theowl sounds the watch cry on the towers of Afrasiab," quoting from thePersian poet Firdusi, as he gazed about the deserted halls. He issuedhis mandate which should summon architects and decorators, not onlyfrom his dominions, but from Christian nations, to adorn the splendidheadland with the palatial motley of walls and kiosks which were toconstitute his new seraglio.
The considerateness of Ballaban led him to select the house of Phranzaas the place to which Morsinia was taken. The noble site andsubstantial structure of the mansion of the late chamberlain commendedit to the Sultan for the temporary haremlik; and the familiar roomsalleviated, like the faces of mute friends, the wildness of the griefof their only familiar captive.
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