While Islam was rapidly losing ground, and hurrying to irretrievable destruction on the peninsula south of the Pyrenees, it obtained a fresh foothold on another southern peninsula of Europe, in the regions of the Balkan washed by the Mediterranean Sea, and became there so powerful as to influence, for nearly five centuries, the political destinies of the Western world. At the same time that the power and culture of the Moorish state was declining in Spain, Europe found itself assailed by another Mohammedan nation, the Turks, who, taking up the standard of the crescent, attempted to force upon the Christian world their new ideas, religious, political, and social. On the first appearance of the Turks on the Balkan peninsula, they were met by the two states which opposed their further advance, and the struggle with these began at once. The first, the Byzantine empire, was, however, at this time already an effete and tottering organization, an ancient and venerable ruin, and it was able to make but a feeble resistance. It retreated step by step before the Asiatic conquerors, who got possession, first, of its entire outlying territory, and finally captured (in 1453) the seat of government, Byzantium, the renowned city of Constantine. The second opponent which withstood the advance of the Turks was Hungary, a state which, though still young, had shown a sturdy national vitality, and successively reduced to vassalage the countries of the Balkan, and was steadily engaged in extending its influence and authority towards the East. The Turks could not dispose of Hungary as easily and quickly as of the enfeebled Byzantine empire. More than a century of nearly constant conflict had to elapse before the Hungarian supremacy in the regions of the Balkan was put an end to, and the Turks were able to penetrate as far as Mohács, and there to inflict a mortal blow on the independence of Hungary. During this struggle of a century and a half the name and fame of Hungary were perpetuated by many a brilliant feat of war, and by many glorious victories, and when John Hunyadi, the most formidable foe of the Turks, died, all Europe mourned his death as the loss of the great champion of Christianity. His son, Matthias the Just, one of the greatest kings of Hungary, whose memory is held in pious reverence by the Hungarian people to this day, following in the footsteps of his illustrious father, through his many triumphs, made his own name, too, hardly less formidable to the Turks. But Hungary, as the offspring of the Western Church, the Church of Rome, turned her looks, at that time, to the West rather than to the East, and Hungarian statesmanship was far more intent upon humiliating the emperor of what was then known as the Roman empire, than upon breaking down the power of the Turks. King Matthias captured Vienna, and made large conquests at the expense of the German empire, but he chastised the Turks only