crescent has been planted on the dome of Saint Sophia.

A brief comparison of this prophecy, with the history of the eventful period in which our best commentators have placed its fulfilment, will serve more fully to identify the progress of the Turkish whirlwind, under the princes of the house of Seljuk and their successors, with the course of the king of the North.

"And the king of the North shall come against him like a whirlwind; -and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over."] "In the eleventh century," says Mr. Gibbon, the victorious arms of the Turks presented a real and urgent apprehension.† They

I have already noticed the first appearance of the Turks; and the names of the fathers, of Seljuk and Othman, discriminate the two successive dynasties of the nation, which emerged in the eleventh century from the Scythian wilderness. The former established a potent and splendid kingdom from the banks of the Oxus to Antioch and Nice; and the first crusade was provoked by the violation of Jerusalem, and the danger of Constantinople. From an humble origin the Ottomans arose; the scourge and terror of Christendom. Constantinople was besieged and taken by Mahomet II., and his triumph annihilates the remnant, the image, the title of the Roman empire in the East." Decline and Fall, vol. ix. pp. 8, 9.

+"Hisce gladiis, ô nobilissima Constantinopolis," is the trembling exclamation of a contemporary writer, "solum tibi stagni interstitium præsidio 'fuit." Ekkehard. Abbat. Libell. ap. Martene et Durand. Vet. Monum. Collect. tom. v. f. 515.

The precise nature of the barrier, which should, for a time, arrest the king of the North, in the midst of his conquering career, is expressively indicated in the prophecy, by the words, he "shall overflow and pass over. The position of the Hellespont, so long the impregnable defence of Constantinople, and an invincible obstacle to the progress of the Ottomans,

had subdued, in less than thirty years, the kingdoms of Asia as far as Jerusalem and the Hellespont; and the Greek empire tottered on the verge of destruction."

"He shall enter also into the glorious land."] "The most interesting conquest of the Seljukian Turks," proceeds the historian of the empire, "was that of Jerusalem, which soon became the theatre of nations." This conquest took place A.D. 1076, when Jerusalem and Palestine fell into the hands of Sultan Toucush, brother of Malek Shah.

"And many countries shall be overthrown."] "From the Chinese frontier he [Malek Shah] stretched his immediate jurisdiction or feudatory sway to the west and south, as far as the mountains of Georgia, the neighbourhood of Constantinople, the holy city of Jerusalem; and the spicy groves of Arabia Felix."

"And the land of Egypt shall not escape."] A.D. 1163, Egypt was permanently occupied by the Turks, under the successors of the Seljukian dynasty, Noureddin and the celebrated Saladin. And A.D. 1187, Jerusalem was retaken from the

points out geographically the prophetic impediment. The incidental testimony of Ekkehard fully establishes the fact, and the exactness of the fulfilment.

crusaders by Saladin, never since to pass from under the Turkish yoke.

Thus accurately does the first irruption of the king of the North, under the sultans of the house of Seljuk, follow the geographical course pointed out specifically by the prophecy. But the trait properly characteristic of his prophetic career is to be found in the unswerving aim of the Turkish power, from its earliest beginnings, at the destruction of the Greek empire. Its conquests spread far and wide, but the end continually in its view was Greece and Constantinople: however distant, the spider still wove his web* around the trembling and conscious victim.

Between the spoiler and his prey, however, a natural obstacle intervened, which all the power of the Saracens had proved unequal to surmount. A narrow strait only separates the opposite shores of Asia and Europe; but the command of the seas must be acquired, before this strait could be

passed over." Let the prophecy be compared with Turkish history in this particular view, and their coincidence may well satisfy the severest judgment.

"And the king of the North shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and

* The spider has woven his web, in Cæsar's palace;

The owl has sung her watch-song, on the towers of Afrasiab.

Lines quoted from the Persic, in the hour of his triumph, by Mahomet II.

with horsemen, and with many ships."] A. D. 1084, the Seljukian kingdom of Roum, " pregnant with mines of silver and iron *, of alum and copper," extended" from the Black Sea to the confines of Syria, from the Euphrates to Constantinople." This seat of empire was still safe behind the waters of the Bosphorus; but already the victorious Soliman was bent on its subversion. Ships must be provided to effect the conquest and that part of the prophecy which makes mention of them, had, accordingly, its first fulfilment, in the strenuous efforts of the Turkish sultan to erect a naval power. "The Turkish ignorance of navigation protected, for a while, the inglorious safety of the emperor; but no sooner had a fleet of two hundred ships been constructed by the hands of the captive Greeks, than Alexius trembled behind the walls of his capital." +

The prophetic career run by the princes of the house of Seljuk was re-enacted by the Ottoman sultans. The design, under both dynasties, was, throughout, the same; the difference lay only in the success. The conquest of Greece, and capture of Constantinople, which had been aimed at by the former, were effected by the latter. When Greece had fallen a prey to the destroying armies of the Amuraths and Bajazets, * Compare Daniel, xi. 43.

† Gibbon.

and when the limits of the empire had been thus reduced, on all sides, to the walls of the capital *, the prophecy of Daniel concerning the king of the North too plainly drew near to its fatal accomplishment; when the last of the Constantines resigned his sceptre with his life, in the breach, which, to use the words of an eye-witness, "Heaven had opened for the passage of the Turks."

The end proposed in this prophecy, the overthrow of the Greek empire, requires to be held specially in view in the interpretation of an apparently obscure part of it: "But tidings out of the East and out of the North shall trouble him therefore he shall go forth with great fury to destroy, and utterly to make away many."

The subversion of the eastern empire being the appointed work of the king of the North, the tidings out of the East and out of the North which were to trouble him, must have reference to providential interpositions from those quarters, operating directly to interrupt his progress, and for yet a little season to avert its fall.

* The imperious mandate of Bajazet I., surnamed Ilderim, to the Emperor Manuel, marks out, as the last boundary of the Greek empire, the walls of this devoted city, already nodding to their fall: "Our invincible scymitar has reduced Asia with many and large countries in Europe, excepting only the city of Constantinople; for beyond the walls thou hast nothing left. Resign that city: or tremble for thyself and thy unhappy people." Decline and Fall, vol. xi. p. 458.