this time a convenient earthquake happened, and the walls of Gallipoli fell down. The Turks immediately marched in, declaring that Providence had opened the city to them, and they could not think of disregarding so clear an instance of divine interposition. From Gallipoli in a few years the Turks had spread over all what is now known as Turkey in Europe, and then began to conquer the outlying provinces—Servia, Bulgaria, Rumania.
This development of Turkish aggrandizement had been a wonderful one, and it occupied only a century and one-half. We shall look far and wide to find a parallel. The reason for this growth was not in the circumstances which surrounded the Turks, but in the great abilities which each of their rulers represented. Cruel they were, and rudely ruled a rude race; yet there is no question as to their pre-eminent power in militarism and statecraft. Now, however, there came an event which not only delayed by fifty years the capture of Constantinople, but seemed to blot out the Ottoman Empire. It was the descent of Tamerlane. This great warrior was himself of Mongol-Turkish race, and had established his dominion throughout lower Russia, Central Asia, India, Persia and Syria, but he had been resisted by the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt and by the Ottoman Sultan of Turkey. The latter was crushed by Tamerlane on that same plain of Angora where the Ottoman Empire had taken its start. The Moslems, believers in fate, regarded the empire doomed where it had begun.
Yet by the energy of a great man—the Sultan Mohammed—the start was made all over again, and only half a century
