Several days were given to preparations for the assault. The Sultan proclaimed it throughout the camps, and dervishes, fired their religious fanaticism by going through the ranks and haranguing the Moslems: "It was the last step of Islam in Europe to sweep off the last focus of idolatry on the two continents. Their bows and their scimitars were the weapons of Allah the true God. Those who vanquish in his name will possess the earth; those who fall will possess the houris and the fountains of Paradise." On the eve of the day of the assault an illumination of joy suddenly lighted up the camps of the Ottomans from the hills of the Bosphorus of Europe to the sea of Marmora. Every soldier had his torch of resinous pine, and thousands of fires burned all night long, and the three contiguous seas were reddened with an anticipated reflection of the conflagration of the doomed city. Constantinople lighted up as it were by its own funeral pyre watched and wept and prayed during the night. Endless processions of priests, monks, nuns, and other women thronged the streets chanting with mournful voice, "Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy. Lord, rise in our defence." The whole city ran to the altars; no one except Constantine and his few soldiers ran to arms: and he was everywhere posting his generals and giving orders for the morrow. The morning dawned with the four hundred thousand men in order of battle. The disciplined and veteran troops were carefully arranged in several lines of battle, Mohammed himself at the center and in their front with his twenty thousand Janizaries waiting for the decisive moment to arrive. Between the city and the camp were the two hundred thousand motley volunteers whom he would send first into the battle to tire the defenders and fill the trenches with their dead bodies. Constantine went with the nobles of his court to the Church of St. Sophia seeking to draw from the religion of his fathers the courage and perhaps the fortune of saving its altars. He attended a short service, as if it were his own funeral service. He received communion from the hands of the Patriarch; made with tears a public confession of his sins to which the sobbings of the people were the only audible response. After this he repaired to his palace, his household and his family, where says one of his auditors in his farewell, he pronounced the funeral oration of the Greek Empire. He then threw aside the robes of royalty, keeping on only his shoes embroidered with a golden eagle, and his purple mantle, mounted on horseback in the costume of a private soldier, and went forth for the last time to battle in the front ranks of the defenders of the faith. Such men only four hundred years ago did Western Christian Europe willingly let die when she failed to stand beside him to beat back the Turkish hordes and warriors to their desert plains in Asia.