those who are acquainted with history, that in the wars which have taken place since the invention of this new system of tactics, the Ottomans have been most frequently worsted, because they found it impossible to make use of their sabres among the infidels as they wished to do; for their regular troops keep in a compact body, pressing their feet together that their order of battle may not be broken; and their cannon being polished like one of[86]Marcovich’s watches, they load twelve times in a minute, and make the bullets rain like musket balls; thus they keep up an unintermitted discharge of artillery and small arms. When the Islamites make an attack upon them with infantry or cavalry, the enemies of our faith observe a profound silence, till the soldiers of Islam are come close up to their front, and then at once giving fire to some hundred carriage-guns, and to seventy or eighty thousand muskets, overturn our men in heaps without so much as receiving a bloody nose. When they have thus by a few volleys caused thousands of the people of Islam to drink the sherbet of martyrdom, the surviving remnant are wont to fly. Our troops perceiving how skilful the enemy are in the use of fire-arms, and seeing many thousand men slain in the space of half an hour, while they are unable to avenge themselves on their opponents, have necessarily begun to lose courage. But although the wicked infidels, exerting their whole strength, have with great prudence and boldness invented so masterly an art of war, yet the soldiers of Islam, who have not been able to make any stand against them, may justly assert that the fault does not belong to themselves; for since the enemy sends us eighty thousand charges of grape before a thousand of our men have time to fire their muskets, it is certain that resistance in such a case is beyond their power. Thus during the period which elapsed before the reign of his Highness Sultan Mustapha Khan, although we were sometimes victorious and sometimes vanquished, yet success was, for the most part, on the side of the infidels.