Everywhere throughout the land the Albanian people rose to cast out the Turk from their borders. Scanderbeg soon had 11,000 men under him, and won back all the possessions belonging to his family. Even the Venetians, who had tried to seize an Albanian town, were glad to come to terms with him, and to become his financial agents. He was accepted as chief of all the forces operating against the Ottomans, and a relief expedition of 40,000 men, under the command of Ali Pascha, the vizier, was caught in the fastnesses of the Albanian mountains and slowly exterminated. (1443.) Another Turkish army fared no better than that under Ali Pascha, and it lost 10,000 men. When Murad himself undertook to repress the rebellion, bringing with him the overwhelming force of 100,000 men, he took two cities, but left 20,000 of his men dead in the narrow defiles of Albania. Two years afterwards Murad began the siege of Croia, trusting to specially powerful artillery to overwhelm the enemy. But Scanderbeg, by skilful manœuvers, not only held the Sultan in check, but actually enveloped his army. Murad, seeing his danger, offered peace, on condition that Scanderbeg would acknowledge his sovereignty, and pay tribute to him. This was refused, and Murad abandoned his efforts to arrest the stubborn guerrilla warfare in which the Albanian chieftain had proved himself a master. In the Morea, where the Byzantine princes, the sons of Manuel II, were gaining ground at the expense of one of the Latin feudal lords, the Florentine Acciajuoli, who had accepted the Sultan as his overlord, Murad’s army of 60,000 men achieved decisive successes. The wall across the Isthmus of Corinth was taken by the Ottoman artillery, and the Peloponnesus was overrun by the invaders. Corinth was seized and burnt; but Patras, by its stout resistance, held the Sultan in check until terms were made, by which the invaders withdrew, on condition of receiving an annual tribute. (1446.) But the dynastic disputes of Constantinople weakened the Greek power of resistance as much as did their failure in warfare. On the death of John VIII, in 1448, the dispute between his sons as to the succession was settled by Murad, who decided in favor of Constantine, the valiant defender of Patras. There was, however, no ceremony of coronation; therefore, strictly speaking, the last Christian Emperor of the East appears in the long line of the successors of Constantine the Great,--his namesake,--with a tinge of irregularity in his record. Soon after this elevation Murad died, February 8, 1451. His virtues are celebrated by the western chronicler, Brocquière, in the words, “a mild person, kind and generous in according lordship and money.” V MOHAMMED II