“The Turks were of Tartar or Scythian origin, from the northern regions of Asia, whence also the Huns hived upon Europe during the fourth and fifth centuries.  The latter passed to the north of the Black sea from Russia, and swept the regions of the Danube and the Rhine.  The Turks, passing to the east of the same, fell upon the empire from that quarter.  They took possession of Armenia Major in the ninth century, where they increased, and in the space of two hundred years became a formidable power, being at the end of this period combined into four Sultanies, the heads of which were at Bagdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Iconium.  The first of these was erected A.D. 1055; the two next A.D. 1079, and the last A.D. 1080—­all of them within twenty-five years, and the three last within two.”

These four Sultanies are doubtless signified by “the four angels” that were bound in the river Euphrates.  The Euphrates here is employed as a symbol, not of the Turks themselves—­for the horsemen are their symbol, as we shall see—­but of the binding of the angels.  The use of this word as a symbol is derived from a fact of history, being the object, according to Herodotus, that kept Cyrus back from entering the city of Babylon.  While the Persian monarch surrounded the walls of that ancient metropolis of the Babylonian empire, with his army, he was held in restraint by the river Euphrates; and it was not until he had diverted its waters into an artificial channel that he gained an entrance.  So, also, these Sultanies, or leaders of the Turks, were held under restraint as if bound by the river Euphrates, until the time appointed for them to go forth on their mission of conquest.  Different causes held them back.  For a long time they were involved in fierce and almost continuous wars with the neighboring Tartar tribes on the east and the north, and at the same time the Crusaders of Europe were carrying on a determined war with the Saracens for the possession of the Holy Land.  For two centuries the armies of Christendom poured into Syria and Palestine to recover from the hands of the “infidels,” as they were called, the holy sepulchre and the country that gave birth to Christianity; but when Europe finally abandoned the project, then went forth the command to loose the four angels, “which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of man.”  To kill men symbolically, I have already shown, signifies the destruction either of an empire as a political body or of the church (that is, the so-called church) as a religious body.  The locusts under the fifth trumpet were to do neither; but the symbolic characters of this vision are “to slay the third part of men,” by which is set forth the fall and subjugation of the Eastern empire and church; just as, under the fifth trumpet, the fall of the Western empire was described by the darkening of a third part of the sun, moon, and stars.