These boys were placed under a rigid military training, with rich rewards and indulgences for zeal and aptitude, and terrible disgrace and punishment for the reverse. They were familiarized with awful atrocities, their sensibilities destroyed, and at the same time intelligence rendered acute by severe intellectual training. In this way was developed the strongest, the fiercest military corps, the most terrible instrument for the use of despotic power, ever created by subtle craft or employed by fanaticism. They were called the Janizaries. And the very name struck a terror which almost conquered in advance. When Orkhan led his first 1,000 boys to a dervish priest to bless them, he flung the sleeve of his robe over the head of one of them, and asked that the great God of Mahomet would make "their arrows keen, and their swords deadly." Thereafter, the dervish cap which they wore had always a long sleeve-like pendant behind. And the prayer of the dervish was certainly answered. One thousand boys recruited these ranks every year; and as the years rolled into centuries, the organization became a more and more terrible instrument of vengeance in the hands of the Sultan, whose body-guard it formed. The line of Sultans following Othman was characterized by intellectual force of a high order. There was a swelling and irresistible tide of conquest which moved not only toward Europe, but into Asia. One tribe after another was absorbed, until all the strongholds of the old Saracen Empire were in the hands of the Sultans, who replaced the Caliphs; and like them were not alone temporal rulers, but the representatives of Mahomet himself. Composed in this way of a great heterogeneous mass of races, hostile to each other, and to the Turk, the Ottoman Empire had but one element common to all. That was its religion. The Sultan stood to them in the place of the Prophet--hence they dared not defy nor resist his will. And it is this power of religious fanaticism which not alone created the Empire, but has held it together long after its vital forces have departed. * * * * * In the year 1453 the dream of Othman was realized. The long-hoped-for and long-dreaded event had come. Constantinople was in the hands of the Turks! No event since the Christian era had been more momentous, more fraught with good and with evil. The Ottoman Power had secured the most beautiful, the most coveted, and the most impregnable position in Europe. But Europe was strangely enriched by the result. Driven out of its old home, Greek culture took refuge in other places, and what had been the exclusive possession of a few became the heritage of a continent.