a solitude, without either men or houses; and the population of the capital expected, in trembling anticipation, the alternative of death or slavery; but their apprehensions were relieved on the second day by a firman, forbidding, under pain of death, all injury to their persons or property. Yet, notwithstanding the vigilance of the officers, a fire, ascribed to the negligence or disappointment of the soldiery, broke out on the third night; and though the grand-vizir repaired in person to the spot to direct its extinction, it continued to rage through the following day, and consumed great part of the town, with the cathedral and many other public buildings. In the mean time, the royal palace was rapidly dismantled of its remaining treasures, which were embarked in barges on the Danube, and sent off as trophies to Constantinople, with all the artillery and warlike stores found in the arsenal, including two enormous guns, or rather mortars, which had fallen into the hands of Hunniades at the memorable repulse of Mohammed II. before Belgrade, in 1456. Among the spoil are also specified three antique bronze statues of Apollo, Diana, and Hercules, which Ibrahim ordered to be erected in the At-meidan, opposite to one of his palaces an innovation commented upon by several Turkish writers of the time as an infinite scandal to the faithful, whose literal interpretation of the second commandment leads them to regard all effigies of the human figure as an idolatrous abomination. But by far the greatest loss to Christendom and civilization which resulted from the capture of Buda, was the removal or destruction of the magnificent library, containing 50,000 MSS., which had been amassed at the close of the preceding century, by the liberality of Matthias Corvinus. The fate of this celebrated collection, like that of the Alexandrian library, is variously related. The Hungarians assert that the volumes were used by the Turks as fuel, to light the stoves

of their baths; but (independently of this legend being a palpable reproduction of the popular tale of the Alexandrian conflagration †) such an act of barbarism would have been equally at variance with the personal character of Soliman, and with the advanced state of literature among the Turks at this period: as the army, moreover, quitted Buda on the eighth day after its entrance, an additional refutation is afforded by the shortness of the time. The account given by the Ottoman writers is more probably correct, that the greater part of the books were transferred to Constantinople, and were there destroyed by the great fire of 1755, which consumed the old palace of the Porte-a part, however, were certainly left at Buda, where Lambecius, having instituted a search in the castle by permission of the governor Kasim-Pasha, found several hundred volumes still remaining in 1666.

While the work of spoliation was in progress, the engineers had been employed in the construction of a floating bridge over the Danube; and on the 17th of September, the army commenced its passage to the left bank of the river: an operation which the frequent breaches of the frail structure extended over seven days. During this interval, Soliman is described by the historian, Solak Zadah, as having received a deputation from the nobles of Hungary, and informed them of his intention to bestow the kingdom, which had fallen into his hands by right of conquest, on the vaivode John Zapolya as a tributary vassal of the Porte: but as this remarkable interview is neither mentioned by Broderith, nor alluded to in the journal of Soliman himself, it is probable that it should be referred to a later period, when the views of the sultan with reference to Hungary were more matured and extended than they appear to have been at this juncture. When the whole force was again concentrated at Pesth, a grand review was held (Sept. 24) on the Rakös

plain, where in ancient times the Magyar nobles met by thousands, mounted and armed as for war, in their tumultuous diets, either for the election of a new king, or to extort from the reigning monarch the recognition of their rights and privileges. Having thus displayed his power before the eyes of the Hungarians, on the spot which had often witnessed the confirmation and renewal of their liberties, Soliman "beat the drums of retreat, and set forward on his return to the Abode of Islam," (Constantinople,) without leaving a single soldier in Buda or any other Hungarian town.

The troops, however, which had at first appeared before the capital, consisted principally of janissaries and spahis, the élite of the army; the bulk of the irregulars had continued to overrun all the country on the right bank of the Danube, carrying with them such desolation and havoc as had not been seen in Hungary since the Mogul invasion of 1241.* At Fünfkirchen, which had submitted on promise of safety, the inhabitants were collected by the akindjis in the market place, and all, excepting a few exempted for slavery or ransom, slaughtered without mercy. At Maroth, near Strigonium, many thousands of the country people had drawn together into a strong position, which they had fortified after the Tartar custom with a triple circle of waggons: but these rude intrenchments were forced by the artillery brought against them by the Turks, and a carnage ensued, in which the number of the slain, according to the report of Broderith, equalled those who had fallen at Mohácz. The fame of one of the victims of this massacre, a heiduk, or common soldier, named Michael Doböczy, has survived even to this day in the popular ballads of the district-mounted on a swift horse, and carrying his bride on the croup, he endeavoured to escape from the fatal enclosure; but finding his retreat cut off in every direction, he first stabbed his wife to the heart, and

then rushing into the midst of the Turks, met the death which he no longer sought to avoid-a deed which Istuanfi characterises as "eximia virtus ac clarum facinus!" But in many instances the native Magyar valour of the peasants stood them in good stead. Wissegrad, the ancient fortress of the royal line of Arpad, where the sacred crown of St Stephen was kept, was victoriously defended by a handful of monks and peasants; and at Strigonium or Gran, the citizens and burghers, roused by the exhortations of Michael, appropriately surnamed Nagy, or the Great, mustered on their ramparts, and repelled with loss, during several days, the assaults of the invaders.

The passage of the Danube by the entire Turkish force, before the commencement of their retrograde movement, at length relieved the districts on the right bank from the scourge but not less miserable was the fate of the plain country, or Puszta, between the Danube and Theiss, through which lay the homeward route of the invaders. The open towns and villages were reduced to ashes by the myriads of irregular cavalry which preceded the march and covered the flanks of the heavy columns of regu. lars: and though the janissaries hastened their progress in order to share the plunder of Szegedin, they were outstripped by the activity of their light and well-mounted comrades, and found nought remaining on their arrival but the scorched and blackened walls of the castle, the ruins of which still frown over the passage of the Theiss, which it formerly commanded. The desolation of the soil reacted, however, on the marauders themselves, whose horses perished by thousands for want of forage; and Bathyany and Radovich, hovering with small bodies of horse on their flanks and rear, cut off the stragglers whenever opportunity offered. The rich plains to the south, bordering on the Bannat, furnished a more abundant harvest of booty: and at Bacs, on the Danube,

where a fresh scene of slaughter occurred, the spoil was so immense that the shares of the grand-vizir and the defterdar severally amounted to 50,000 sheep. The last act of the bloody drama was the storm of a fortified camp which had been formed in the heart of a morass, and accessible only by a single narrow causeway be. tween Bacs and Peter- Wardein: the Turks were repulsed in three successive assaults, and the aga of the janissaries, with other officers of rank, were slain in heading the attack; but the position was at length carried, and the defenders put to the sword without distinction. Between Peter- Wardein and Karlowitz a floating bridge was again thrown over the Danube; and the Ottomans, laden with spoil, and dragging in their train 100,000 Hungarian captives, repassed the river on the first day of the Mohammedan year 932, (Oct. 8, 1526.) The garrisons of even the Croatian towns captured at the commencement of the campaign, were withdrawn; and Soliman, leaving the grand-vizir to superintend the march of the main body, hastened onwards with a select corps to Constantinople, whither he had been summoned by the news of the alarming revolt in Anatolia, under the dervish Kalendar-Oghlu.

So ended the first great invasion of Hungary by the Turks:-a fearful earnest of the calamities which that unhappy country was destined for two hundred years to undergo, as the arena of the struggle for its sovereignty between the rival Cæsars of Vienna and Constantinople. It is difficult to conjecture what motives can have influenced Soliman so completely to relinquish, for the time, his hold upon the country lying powerless in his grasp, and in the attempt to subdue or even humiliate which, his predecessors had so often been baffled. His aim, indeed, throughout the campaign, (as Von Hammer observes,) seems to have been rather to exhaust Hungary, so as to incapacitate it for resistance in future, than to conquer it; and to this cruel policy must be ascribed the unrestrained license of

bloodshed and devastation permitted to his troops, and which was wholly alien to the generous magnanimity at other times marking his character. Had he emulated the warlike determination of his father Selim, who neither retreated nor halted in his career till he had completed the subjugation of the Mamlukes, the conquest of Hungary might have been at once achieved. But he probably designed to return with augmented forces the following spring, when he hoped to find the Hungarians (still trembling at the recollection of their late chastisement, and further weakened by the civil dissensions to which the loss of their king, and a disputed succession, would inevitably give rise) ready to purchase forbearance and mercy by voluntary submission. If in the midst of the panic arising from the extinction of their royal line, the occupation of their capital, and the desolation of their country - the same terms of tribute and vassalage had been offered to the Hungarians, on which Walachia and Moldavia had already become dependencies of the Ottoman empire, there can be little doubt but that the whole kingdom would have succumbed. Transylvania was in fact brought "under the shadow of the horsetails," a few years later, by John Zapolya, who acknowledged the suzerainté of the sultan as the price of his support against Austria; and it continued more or less tributary and subject to the Porte, till near the close of the seventeenth century. But the Anatolian revolt, combined with other causes, postponed for two years the further prosecution of Soliman's projects; and when they were at length resumed, the vantage-ground had been seized by another aspirant. The contest was no longer with the crushed and dispirited Hungarians, but with the ponderous strength of the Germanic empire: and the Osmanli conqueror speedily perceived that the neglect of the golden opportunity afforded by the victory of Mohácz, could only be remedied by a fresh conflict under the walls of Vienna.

VOL. L. NO, cccxi.

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