For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West, more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short; but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge, but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching; he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople, it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour. The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the