But Othman had a dream, which changed all that.  He dreamed that a full moon came from the doctor’s breast and sank into his own.  Immediately a great outspreading tree arose from his loins, and over it hung a crescent moon.  Suddenly a great wind came and dashed the Crescent over against the Cross and the Crown of Constantine, and broke it into pieces.

So the moon-faced maiden was given to Othman just one hundred and seventy years before the Crescent did break the Crown of Constantine in pieces.

Etrogruhl’s clan grew apace; and so did his territory:  the one by accessions from other wandering Turkish tribes, and the other by extending it by force as he had a chance.  Then the Sultan of Iconium died, and his land and authority were divided among ten states, of which Etrogruhl’s was one.  So now he was an independent ruler with none to call him to account.

In the mean time his son Othman had developed great ability as a warrior and as a leader.  He had met the armies of the Byzantine Emperor, and had defeated them, and had captured fortresses and cities.  And the Emperor from the roof of his palace at Constantinople had seen across the Bosphorus the smoke of his burning towns and villages.  So when his father died and Othman came into his inheritance, he found himself the ruler of a powerful and inspiring state, and the Ottoman Empire had commenced its extraordinary career of conquest.

His son and successor, Orkhan, inherited the same commanding qualities and the kind of ability required to organize a new state.

By one terrible stroke of genius he created the most effective military organization which has ever been known—­one which, from that time down to our own century, was the terror of Europe and of Asia.

He conceived the idea of exterminating Christianity by means of Christians.

The plan was, every year to enroll 1,000 Christian boys taken from the Christian families captured in war.  Only the finest were selected.  They must be very young, so that they would have no ties to remember, no human sympathies to enfeeble them.

These boys were placed under a rigid military training, with rich rewards and indulgences for zeal and aptitude, and terrible disgrace and punishment for the reverse.

They were familiarized with awful atrocities, their sensibilities destroyed, and at the same time intelligence rendered acute by severe intellectual training.

In this way was developed the strongest, the fiercest military corps, the most terrible instrument for the use of despotic power, ever created by subtle craft or employed by fanaticism.

They were called the Janizaries.  And the very name struck a terror which almost conquered in advance.

When Orkhan led his first 1,000 boys to a dervish priest to bless them, he flung the sleeve of his robe over the head of one of them, and asked that the great God of Mahomet would make “their arrows keen, and their swords deadly.”