Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or "The Lightning" who came to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself--the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear--the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience. The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.