Turkish Sultan had faced the chivalry of the West, there is little reason to suppose that the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula would ever have been effected. Attacked in its own home the Hungarian--perhaps even the Servian--state could in the fourteenth century put into the field armies equal in numbers and individually superior to the Ottoman horsemen[123]. But the Servian and the Hungarian, like the Persian and the Mameluke, did not possess any solid and trustworthy body of infantry. To face the disciplined array of the Janissaries they had only the chaotic and half-armed hordes of the national levy. To this we must ascribe the splendid successes of the Sultans: however the tide of battle might fluctuate, the Janissaries would stand like a rock behind their stakes, and it was almost unknown that they should be broken. Again and again they saved the fortune of the day: at those few fights where they could not, they at least died in their ranks, and saved the honour of their corps. At the disaster of Angora they continued to struggle long after the rest of the Turkish army had dispersed, and were at last exterminated rather than beaten. No steadier troops could have been found in any part of Europe. Perhaps the most interesting of Ottoman fights from the tactician’s point of view was the second battle of Kossova (1448). This was not-- like Varna or Mohacs--an ill-advised attempt to break the Turkish line by a headlong onset. John Huniades, whom long experience had made familiar with the tactics of his enemy, endeavoured to turn against Sultan Murad his own usual scheme. To face the Janissaries he drew up in his centre a strong force of German infantry, armed with the hand-guns whose use the Hussites had introduced. On the wings the chivalry of Hungary were destined to cope with the masses of the Timariot cavalry. In consequence of this arrangement, the two centres faced each other for long hours, neither advancing, but each occupied in thinning the enemy’s ranks, the one with the arbalest-bolt, the other with the bullet. Meanwhile on the wings desperate cavalry charges succeeded each other, till on the second day the Wallachian allies of Huniades gave way before the superior numbers of the Ottomans and the Christian centre had to draw off and retire. So desperate had the fighting been, that half the Hungarian army and a third of that of Murad was left upon the field. The tactical meaning of the engagement was plain: good infantry could make a long resistance to the Ottoman arms, even if they could not secure the victory. The lesson however was not fully realized, and it was not till the military revolution of the sixteenth century that infantry was destined to take the prominent part in withstanding the Ottoman. The landsknechts and hackbut-men of Charles V and Ferdinand of Austria proved much more formidable foes to the Sultans than the gallant but undisciplined light cavalry[124] of Hungary. This was to a great extent due to the perfection of