gates. "They would not have listened," says the historian Ducas, "to an angel from heaven, bidding them be at peace with Rome." It would seem that the popular and monastic sentiment was fanatical to a degree which even those who are most familiar with the extremes of religious bitterness would find it hard to realise. Some, indeed, of the higher ecclesiastics, who were no doubt men of culture, were free from this shocking infatuation, but the general tone of the citizens rendered patriotism impossible, and almost compels us to believe that they thoroughly deserved their fate.
The "great destroyer," as Gibbon calls Mahomet II., succeeded to his father Amurath at the age of twenty-one. To the emperor, who knew something of his tastes and character as a boy, he did not at first seem likely to be very formidable or dangerous. Constantine underrated his capacity, and perhaps now and then flattered himself with the idea of a brief respite for his city. He was soon undeceived. The young sultan began his reign with the murder of an infant brother, and with the maturer wisdom of his later years he obtained from his legal advisers a formal sanction of the practice of imperial fratricide for "his illustrious descendants, in order to secure the repose of the world." Then, it is said, he went on to murder certain ministers who had dissuaded his father from trusting him with power during his own lifetime. He could be, it was clear, savagely cruel, and it might be fairly presumed that he would be unscrupulous and perfidious; and now it began to be whispered that bad times were in store for the feeble and unfortunate
