The following day he reviewed the state of his military force, one hundred thousand foot, fifty-five thousand horse, and thirteen hundred elephants of battle. He again wept at the instability of human greatness."

After Mahmud was removed, the Turkish princes of the race of Seljuk, by whom he had been defeated, erected a splendid and solid empire on the ruins of the Caliphate. The first of this dynasty was Togrul, or as he is sometimes called Tangrolipix, the grandson of Seljuk; he began to be famous about the year 1038. After conquering Bagdad, he was clothed with the imperial purple, by the caliph Cayem A.D. 1055, and constituted the ruler of the kingdom, "the temporal vicegerent of the Moslem world." This inaguration was the grand downfall of the Saracenic empire, and the first important rise of the Turks.

2nd. This brings us to the second idea conveyed by this command to the sixth angel, that the people to whom it points were prominently in sight, and had been let loose upon the Roman world before they were "bound;" that they had, after the fall of the Saracens, begun their devastations, but were providentially restrained-there appears otherwise no point in the expression. And such was the case with the Turks. Under the successor of Togrul,they invaded the Roman empire with "myriads of Turkish horse;"* and, adds the historian, "the blood of one hundred and thirty thousand Christians was a grateful sacrifice to the

* Gibbon.

Arabian prophet." The Sultan passed the Euphrates at the head of his cavalry, and entered Cæsarea, the metropolis of Cappadocia; and before his death the fairest provinces of Roman Asia were irretrievably sacrificed, and subject to his laws; while twelve hundred kings or chiefs stood before his throne, and two hundred thousand soldiers marched under his banners.

His son and successor was Malek Shah, who reigned from the year 1072 to the year 1092; was, it is said, the greatest prince of his age; and "marched at the head of innumerable armies." From the Chinese frontier he stretched his immediate jurisdiction, or feudatory sway, to the west and to the 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 in his reign Asia Minor began to be known by the name of Turkey.

3rd. The third idea conveyed by this command is, that those instruments of Divine vengeance were, at the time they were bound, not, as we have just contemplated them, a united but a divided people, "Loose the four angels which are bound upon the river Euphrates."

Accordingly, after the death of Malek Shah, A. D. 1092, the greatness and unity of this race of the Turkish sultans expired in the four-fold division of their hitherto united empire, and the vast fabric fell

* Gibbon.

to the ground. "After a series of civil wars," observes Mr. Mills, "four dynasties, contemporary, and not successive, were formed:" all of the house of Seljuk. The first commanded Persia at large, the second that of Kerman, an extensive though obscure dominion on the shores of the Indian ocean: the third, a large portion of Syria, including Aleppo and Damascus; and the fourth Roum, or the Roman provinces of Asia Minor.* It is true that this quadruple division did not long continue; but from the circumstance of its being made at the time the restraint was first put upon the threatening power of the Turks-in other words, at the time of their being bound-it is here brought forward as a mark of identity, in a similar manner to the fourfold division of the empire of Alexander the Great.

This mark of identity is further strengthened by these four divisions of the Turkish empire being all situated in regions bordering on the river Euphrates, which was the confines and last bounds of the Roman world in Asia, and from its continuing to be the place or neighbourhood of their residence during the two hundred years they were bound or restrained; and it makes the recognition complete.

These instruments of destruction or judgment are called angels, as representing messengers who execute the providential designs of the Most High. In this prophecy they are frequently mentioned, both as messengers of mercy and of anger, both of good

*

History of Mahom. p. 223. See likewise Gibbon.

and evil. In this place they appear to be used much in the sense of those mentioned in the 49th verse of the 78th Psalm: "He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them."

With these preliminary observations, we now come to the more immediate identification in the text their being bound. It is very evident, that with such an immense and victorious power as that which was possessed by the three successive Turkish Sultans above described, and whose armies were almost at the very gates of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire must, to all human appearance, soon have fallen. Such, however, not being the decree of Heaven, this great calamity was postponed, until the middle of the fifteenth century, and therefore a serious and effectual check was to be put to their progress. The first means employed was their own fatal divisions, which weakened the empire to that degree, that they at once lost their imposing and formidable attitude, and the Turkish veterans were employed or consumed in civil wars. The chief means, however, by which their power was restrained, and most effectually checked, and which confined them for the space of two hundred years within the bounds of the Euphrates, was the desperate, formidable, enthusiastic attacks made upon them by the combined nations of the West, in what are called the Crusades. The first of these commenced A. D. 1095, about three years after the Sultan Malek Shah, and, therefore, immediately after the four fold division of

his empire consequent upon that event; it may, therefore, with strict propriety be said, the four nations of the Turks were then bound in the Euphrates.

The occasion of these romantic and deeply disastrous expeditions, it is well known, was the rough treatment which pilgrims to the Holy Land had received from the hands of the Turks, and which caused Europe to resound with their complaints. The Saracens, whilst it was in their possession, had allowed them to visit the city of Jerusalem, on payment of a small tribute; but the place being taken, in the year 1065, by the more fierce and barbarous Turks, it could no longer be approached with safety. It soon became the theatre of nations, the central point of the most destructive and long continued warfare; in the course of which, the power of the Turks was so completely broken, that they were almost removed from sight, and the only adversaries the Crusaders had to deal with, were at length the Mamelukes of Egypt.

A third cause, which contributed still further to weaken and restrain the power of the Turks, were the various revolutions of Asia during this period, occasioned chiefly by the conquests of Zingis Khan, the first emperor of the Moguls or Tartars, who reigned from A. D. 1206 to 1227; and his successors. In 1258, one of the latter extinguished the Saracenic Caliphs, who had, since the fall of the Turkish Sultans, recovered the possession of Bagdad; and, about the same time, when the power of the Crusaders in the Holy Land was decaying, they made