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CHAP.LX VIII.

THE DECLINE AND FALL

pushing their approaches lo the edge of the ditch,attempted to till the enormous chasm, and tobuild a road to the assault/ Innumerable fas-cines, and hogsheads, and trunks of trees, wereheaped on each other; and such was the impe-tuosity of the throng, that the foremost and theweakest were pushed headlong down the preci-pice, and instantly buried under the accumula-ted mass. To fill the ditch was the toil of thebesiegers; to clear away the rubbish was thesafety of the besieged; and, after a long andbloody conflict, the web that had been wovenin the day was still unravelled in the night. Thenext resource of Mahomet was the practice ofmines; but the soil was rocky; in every attempt,he was stopped and undermined by the Christianengineers; nor had the art been yet invented ofreplenishing those subterraneous passages withgunpowder, and blowing whole towers and citiesinto the air. 5 A circumstance that distinguishesthe siege of Constantinople , is the reunion of theancient and modern artillery. The cannon wereintermingled with the mechanical engines forcasting stones and darts; the bullet and thebattering-ram were directed against the same

f I have selected some curious facts, without striving to emulate thebloody and obstinate eloquence of the abbe de Vertot, in his prolix de-scriptions of the sieges of Rhodes, Malta, drc. But that agreeable his-torian had a turn for romance j and as he wrote to please the order, hehad adopted the same spirit of enthusiasm and chivalry.

* The first theory of mines with gunpowder appears in 1480, in aMS. of George of Sienna (Tiraboschi, tom. vi, p. i, p. 324 They werefirst practised at Saizanella, in 1487; but the honour and improve-ment, in 1603, is ascribed to Peter of Navarre, who used them withsuccess in the wars of Italy (Hist, de la Ligue de Cambray, tom. li,p. 93-07).