



Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)







Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  - The book uses both Palaeologus and Palaelogus.
  - The book uses both DeStreeses and De Streeses.
  In both cases, both spellings have been retained as printed.

  Page 304:  Ramedan should possibly be Ramadan.





     "_Your swarthy hero Scanderbeg,
     Gauntlet on hand and boot on leg,
     And skilled in every warlike art,
     Riding through his Albanian lands,
     And following the auspicious star
     That shone for him o'er Ak-Hissar._"

     LONGFELLOW




     THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES

     _A STORY OF THE TIMES OF SCANDERBEG
     AND
     THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE_

     BY JAMES M. LUDLOW, D.D. LITT.D

     ELEVENTH EDITION


     NEW YORK AND LONDON
     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS




     Copyright, 1886, by DODD, MEAD & CO.

     Copyright, 1890, by JAMES M. LUDLOW.

     _Electrotyped by Dodd, Mead & Co._




PREFACE.


The story of the Captain of the Janizaries originated, not in the
author's desire to write a book, but in the fascinating interest of
the times and characters he has attempted to depict. It seems strange
that the world should have so generally forgotten George Castriot, or
Scanderbeg, as the Turks named him, whose career was as romantic as it
was significant in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Gibbon
assigns to him but a few brief pages, just enough to make us wonder
that he did not write more of the man who, he confessed, "with unequal
arms resisted twenty-three years the powers of the Ottoman Empire."
Creasy, in his history of the Turks, devotes less than a page to the
exploits of one who "possessed strength and activity such as rarely
fall to the lot of man," "humbled the pride of Amurath and baffled the
skill and power of his successor Mahomet." History, as we make it in
events, is an ever-widening river, but, as remembered, it is like a
stream bursting eastward from the Lebanons, growing less as it flows
until it is drained away in the desert.

Though our story is in the form of romance, it is more than "founded
upon fact." The details are drawn from historical records, such as the
chronicles of the monk Barletius--a contemporary, though perhaps a
prejudiced admirer, of Scanderbeg--the later Byzantine annals, the
customs of the Albanian people, and scenes observed while travelling
in the East.

The author takes the occasion of the publication of a new edition to
gratefully acknowledge many letters from scholars, as well as notices
from the press, which have expressed appreciation of this attempt to
revive popular interest in lands and peoples that are to reappear in
the drama of the Ottoman expulsion from Europe, upon which the curtain
is now rising.




THE CAPTAIN OF THE JANIZARIES.

CHAPTER I


From the centre of the old town of Brousa, in Asia Minor--old even at
the time of our story, about the middle of the fifteenth
century--rises an immense plateau of rock, crowned with the fortress
whose battlements and towers cut their clear outlines high against the
sky. An officer of noble rank in the Ottoman service stood leaning
upon the parapet, apparently regaling himself with the marvellous
panorama of natural beauty and historic interest which lay before him.
The vast plain, und