The horses of the Toorkmans, or Turkmans, are much esteemed in Persia, and in the adjacent countries. Turkestan, the native region of these nomads, lies north-east of the Caspian, but their tribes are widely dispersed over Persia, Asia Minor, and Syria. Their horses are large, swift, and possess extraordinary powers of endurance, though their figures are somewhat ungainly. When a Turkman starts on an expedition, he takes with him some hard balls of barley-meal, which are to serve both him and his horse for subsistence until his return. But sometimes in crossing the Desert, when he finds himself unusually faint and weary, he opens the jugular vein of his horse, and drinks a little of the animal’s blood, by which he is himself refreshed, and thinks that the horse, too, is relieved. Some of these men and horses have been known to travel nine hundred miles, in eleven successive days. The Othmanlis or Ottomans, the founders of the great empire that bears their name, were a branch of the Turkman stock. Othman, the first of their dynasty, was the chief of a small horde, a mere handful of men; his grandson Amurath I, was he who conquered Adrianople. The first conquests of the Turks were achieved by freemen; but, after the taking of Constantinople, a new military institution was established; and the relation between the commander and his warlike servants resembled much more the personal subjection of the Mamelukes to their Beys, than the free allegiance owned by the bands of the west to their Condottieri. The invincible army of the Sultan—the terrible cavalry of whom it was proverbial, that “—where the Spahi’s hoof hath trod, The verdure flies the bloody sod—” and the Janissaries, who boasted that they had never fled in battle, were all slaves; torn from their Christian parents in childhood, and reared up under a system of discipline, admirably adapted to the end proposed. It combined the hardihood of the Spartans, the strictness and decorum of the monastic rule, with every encouragement that could nurture the aspiring spirit, and confirm the devoted fidelity of the young soldier. The youths thus brought up, forgot their childhood, their parents, their homes; knew no native land, but the Serai; no lord and father, but the Grand Signior; no will, but his; no hope, but of his favour: they knew no life, but one passed in rigid discipline and unconditional obedience; no occupation, but war in the Sultan’s service; no personal purpose, unless it were plunder in this life, and, in death, the paradise thrown open to him who fought for Islam. The glory of the Moslem is departed, and the Sultan’s army is now a rabble, more formidable to their friends, than to their enemies—but let us see what they were in the plenitude of their strength.