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One writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more addicted than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord Lyttelton charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons of the house of Guise, and with the massacre of St.
It often happens in the history of states and races, in which there is found first a rise and then a decline, that the greatest glories take place just then when the reverse is beginning or begun. Thus, for instance, in the history of the Ottoman Turks, to which I have not yet come, Soliman the Magnificent is at once the last and greatest of a series of great Sultans.
It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition. Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think.
All this is said with a quiet dignity, as though to remind me that I have fallen among people of some distinction, and the effect is only spoilt by the recollection that nearly every headman has the same tale to tell. Sultans, pretenders, wazeers, and high court functionaries are passed in critical review, their faults and failings noted.
The route is full of villages and people who have plenty of goats, and very cheap. They number fifteen stations, or sultans, as they call the chiefs, and will be at Bagamoio in two months: 1. Chasa; 2. Lombé; 3. Ucheré; 4. Nyamiro; 5. Zonda; 6. Zambi; 7. Lioti; 8. Méreré; 9. Kirangabana; 10. Nkongozi; 11. Sombogo; 12. Suré; 13. Lomolasenga; 14. Kapass; 15, Chanzé.
Having thus spoken, he drew his sabre, and rushing upon the two guilty princes struck them dead, each at one blow. He would, in his rage, have attacked his father; but the sultans prevented him, and having reconciled them, the old sultan promised to leave him his heir, and to restore his mother to her former rank and consequence.
This desolation is no accident of a declining empire; it dates from the very time that a Turk first came into the country, from the era of the Seljukian Sultans, eight hundred years ago. We have indirect but clear proof of it in the course of history following their expulsion from the country by the Crusaders.
Courage and military talent must have been the surest roads to advancement, but sometimes, as under the Arab caliphs and the Ottoman sultans, the caprice of the sovereign would lead him to raise a man from the lowest ranks to the highest dignities of the state. The régime of Assyria may be described in the words applied to that of Russia, it was despotism tempered with assassination.
And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in the arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and you especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.
At the full of the moon cause the bands of thy musicians and thy tymbals to be heard; depart from thy palace surrounded by all the pageants of majesty; thy most faithful slaves, thy best beloved wives, thy most magnificent litters, thy richest leaden camels, and set forward on thy way to Istakhar; there await I thy coming; that is the region of wonders; there shalt thou receive the diadem of Gian Ben Gian, the talismans of Soliman, and the treasures of the Pre-Adamite Sultans; there shalt thou be solaced with all kinds of delight.
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