One of the most conspicuous features of their discipline was the order, temperance, and cleanliness of an Ottoman camp, as constrasted with the drunken, dissolute, and filthy habits of the armies of Christendom[12]. Frequently encamped as they were in the pestilential districts which proved disastrous to the French and English armies at the commencement of the late Russian war, we can easily understand how great an advantage over their opponents these wise regulations secured them in their campaigns. The fiery valour of the Christian knights might surpass the more patient courage of the Ottoman troops, but their pride of birth, and spirit of independence would not brook the discipline, nor render the obedience, for which the Janissaries were remarkable; and to this may be attributed the fatal results of the battle of Nicopolis. At Kossova the Asiatic wing of the Turkish army had recoiled from the repeated onsets of the Bosnian king and his warriors, but the Janissaries ‘fighting with the zeal of proselytes’ against their Sclavonic brethren recovered the fortunes of the day for Amurath[13]. At Varna the panic which had spread through the Turkish troops from the furious attacks of Ladislaus and Hunyades was only checked by the firm resistance, the unflinching endurance of the Janissaries[14]. When the desperate and heroic resistance of the last Greek Emperor, and his few brave adherents, had driven back the Anatolian soldiery, and the fate of Constantinople was still hanging in the balance, it was their surpassing valour that turned the scales of victory, bore down all resistance, and won Eastern Rome for the capital of the Ottoman Empire. At the great crises of their history we have seen how it was the power of the Janissaries that saved the Ottomans; but in every battle, in every campaign, the possession of a formidable corps of well-disciplined infantry at a time when their opponents had no regular infantry at all, gave them a continual advantage. It has been remarked that the Ottomans never encountered the forces of the only two European nations who had at this time any organized foot-soldiers[15]. We all know how the chivalry of France fell before the English bowmen at Cressy and Poictiers, and how the troops of Austria fled before the halberdiers of Switzerland, and we may doubt whether the Janissaries would have been equally invincible had they met the English or the Swiss on the battle-fields of Servia.