Yea! As long as a babe shall be born, Or there resteth a man in the land-- So long as a blade of corn Shall be reaped by a human hand, So long as the grass shall grow On the mighty plain of Kossovo-- So long, so long, even so Shall the glory of those remain Who this day in battle were slain. From the day of Kossovo the ultimate conquest of Eastern Europe by the Turks became a certainty. Lack of ambition on the part of some of the sultans and a life and death struggle in which others found themselves involved in Asia Minor against Tartar tribes merely deferred the time of reckoning, but it came at last in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Mohammed II, ‘the Conqueror’, determined to reign in Constantinople. This Mohammed, famous in mediaeval history, was the son of a Serbian princess, and he is said to have grown up indifferent alike to Christianity or Islam. He is described as having ‘a pair of red and white cheeks full and round, a hooked nose, and a resolute mouth’, while flatterers went still farther and declared that his moustache was ‘like leaves over two rosebuds, and every hair of his beard a thread of gold’. In character, from a fierce, undisciplined boy he grew into a self-willed man, intent upon the satisfaction of his ambitions and desires. He could speak, or at least understand, Arabic, Greek, Persian, Hebrew, and Latin; and chroniclers record that it was in reading the triumphs of Alexander and Julius Caesar that he was first inspired with the thought of becoming a great general. His rival, Constantine XI, the last and best of the Paleologi, was a man of very different type from the Turk, or indeed from his own ancestors. He was devoted to the Christian religion and Greece--brave, simple, and generous. When he first became aware of Mohammed’s aggressive hostility he attempted to disarm it by liberating Turkish prisoners. ‘If it shall please God to soften your heart’, he sent word, ‘I shall rejoice; but however that may be, I shall live and die in the defence of my people and of my Faith.’ His words were put to the test when, in the autumn of 1452, the siege of Constantinople began. [Sidenote: Fall of Constantinople] The Emperor looked despairingly for Western aid, in order to secure which the Emperor John V had himself in years gone by visited Rome and made formal renunciation to the Pope of all the views of the Greek Church that disagreed with Catholic doctrine. One of the chief points of controversy had been the Catholic use of unleavened bread in the Sacrament of the Mass; another, the words of the Nicene Creed, declaring that the Holy Ghost ‘proceeded’ from the Son as well as from the Father.