OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

169

unequal arms, Scanderbeg resisted twenty-threeyears the powers of the Ottoman empire ; andtwo conquerors, A mu rath the second, and hisgreater son, were repeatedly baffled by a rebel,whom they pursued with seeming contempt andimplacable resentment. At the head of sixtythousand horse and forty thousand janizaries,Amurath entered Albania : he might ravage theopen country, occupy the defenceless towns, con-vert the churches into moschs, circumcise theChristian youths, and punish with death his adultand obstinate captives; but the conquests of thesultan were confined to the petty fortress of Sfe-tigrade; and the garrison, invincible to his arms,was oppressed by a paltry artifice and a super-stitious scruple/ Amurath retired with shameand loss from the walls of Croya, the castle andresidence of the Castriots: the march, the siege,the retreat, were harassed by a vexatious, andalmost invisible adversary ; 5 and the disappoint-ment might tend to embitter, perhaps to shorten,the last days of the sultan/ In the fulness ofconquest, Mahomet the second still felt at hisbosom this domestic thorn: his lieutenants were

’ There were two Dibras, the upper and lower, the Bulgarian andAlbanian : the former, 70 miles from Croya (1. i, p 17), was contigu-ous to the fortress of Sfetigrade, whose inhabitants refused to drinkfrom a well into which a dead dog had traitcrously been cast (1. v, p.139, 140). We want a good map of Epirus.

* Compare the Turkish narrative of Cantemir (p 92) with the pom-pous and prolix declamation in the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of theAlbanian priest, who has been copied by the tribe of strangers andmoderns.

' In honour of his hero, Barletius (1. vi, p. lSS-lf'2) kills the sultan,by disease indeed, under the walls of Croya. But this audacious fic-tion is disproved by the Greeks and Turks, who agree in the time andmanner of Amurath’s death at Adrianople .

CHAP.

LXVII.