United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For an oath taken under such circumstances would be no oath at all, inasmuch as Schamyl holding to the Mahometan as well as Romanist doctrine that no faith is to be kept with infidels, and considering the Muscovites to be not only such but even half devils, and feroe naturoe, would feel himself in conscience under no obligations whatever to abide by what he had sworn to. So it was arranged.
Captain G- said the Turkish ships were as well manned, as well kept, and as well manoeuvred, as any vessels in any service; and intimated a desire to command a Turkish seventy-four, and a perfect willingness to fight her against a French ship of the same size. But I heartily trust he will neither embrace the Mahometan opinions, nor be called upon to engage any seventy-four whatever.
But the Mahometan religion is destitute of priesthood or sacrifice; and the independent spirit of fanaticism looks down with contempt on the ministers and the slaves of superstition.
The first voice appalled me, for I did not know but what I was going to receive the stroke of a dagger through the deep gloom, in case of my refusing to comply with repeating the Mahometan formula, or confession of faith; but the second voice reassured me, I felt the parties were begging in the style of Ouweek, "Your money or your life."
What experience and what fate awaited the kingdom after this will be seen in the remarkable narration which follows. Almost at the beginning of Almeric's reign the affairs of the Latin kingdom became complicated with those of Egypt; and the Christians are seen fighting by the side of one Mahometan race, tribe, or faction against another.
If the Christian should reply to this, by ascribing the success of Mahometanism to the sword, the Mahometan might reply, with truth, that it was a vulgar error; for that vastly more nations embraced Islamism voluntarily, than there were who freely received Christianity; and he might remind him, how much Christianity owed to the accession of Constantine; to Charlemagne; and the Teutonic Knights; and bid him recollect that the monks were assisted by soldiers to convert to Christianity almost every nation in Modern Europe.
Mahomet on his part was not idle; he solicited the assistance of the Mahometan princes, pressed them with all the motives of religion, and obtained a reinforcement of two thousand musketeers from the Arabs, and a train of artillery from the Turks.
For Your Lordships cannot even learn the right nature of those people's feelings and prejudices from any history of other Mahometan countries, not even from that of the Turks, for they are a mean and degraded race in comparison with many of these great families, who, inheriting from their Persian ancestors, preserve a purer style of prejudice and a loftier superstition.
The Spaniards were busied with a crusade nearer home, and were already pushing back to the south the Mahometan dominion which had once threatened to pass the barriers of the Pyrenees and carry the Crescent to the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074. Bollandist. Mai. 5. Ranke's Hist. of the Popes. "The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe." Alison's Europe, vol. ix. p. 95.
Word Of The Day