The Captain of the Janizaries A story of the times of Scanderberg and the fall of Constantinople — A Closer Reading

A little hamlet lay, like an eagle's nest, high on the southern slope of the Balkan mountains. The half dozen huts of which it consisted were made of rough stones, daubed within and without thick with clay. The roofs were of logs, overlaid with mats of brushwood woven together by flexible withes, and plastered heavily. The inhabitants were goatherds. Their lives were simple. If they were denied indulgence in luxuries, they were also removed from that contact with them which excites desire, and so were contented. They seldom saw the faces of any from the great world, upon so large a portion of which they looked down. Their absorbing occupation was in summer to watch the flocks which strolled far away among the cliffs, and in winter to keep them close to the hamlet, for then terrific storms swept the mountains and filled the ravines with impassable snow.

Milosch and his good wife, Helena--Maika Helena, good Mother Helena, all the hamlet called her--were blessed with two boys. Their faces were as bright as the sky in which, from their lofty lodgings, they might be said to have made their morning ablutions for the eleven and twelve years of their respective lives. Yet they were not children of the cherubic type; rather tough little knots of humanity, with big bullet-heads thatched over with heavy growths of hair, which would have been red, had it not been bleached to a light yellow by sunshine and cloud-mists. Instead of the toys and indolent pastimes of the nursery they had only the steep rocks, the thick copse, the gnarled trees, and the wild game of the mountains for their play-things. They thus developed compactly knit muscles, depth of lung and thickness of frame, which gave agility and endurance. At the same time, the associations of their daily lives, the precipitous cliff, the trembling edge of the avalanche, the caves of strange beasts, the wild roaring of the winds, the awful grandeur of the storms, the impressive solitude which filled the intervals of their play like untranslatable but mighty whispers from the unknown world taking the place of the prattle of this,--these fostered intrepidity, self-reliance, and balance of disposition, if not of character. For religious discipline they had the occasional ministrations of a Greek priest or missionary monk from the Rilo Monastir, many leagues to the west of them. They knew the Creed of Nicæa, the names of some of the saints; but of truly divine things they had only such impressions as they caught from the great vault of the universal temple above them, and from the suggestions of living nature at their feet.

By the side of Milosch's house ran--or rather climbed and tumbled, so steep was it--that road over the Balkans, through the Pass of Slatiza, by which Alexander the Great, nearly two thousand years before, had burst upon the Moesians. Again, within their father's memory, Bajazet, the "Turkish Lightning" as he was called because of the celerity of his movements, had flashed his arms through this Pass, and sent the bolts of death down upon Wallachia, and poured terror even to the distant gates of Vienna. Often had Milosch rehearsed the story of the terrible days when he himself had been a soldier in the army of the Wallachian Prince Myrtche; and showed the scar of the cut he had received from the cimeter of a Turkish Janizary, whom he slew not far from the site of their home.

Their neighbor, Kabilovitsch, a man well weighted with years, not only listened to these tales, but added marvellous ones of his own; sometimes relating to the wars of King Sigismund of Hungary, who, after Prince Myrtche, had tried to regain this country from the cruel rule of the Moslems; more frequently, however, his stories were of exploits of anonymous heroes. These were told with so much enthusiasm as to create the belief that the narrator had himself been the actor in most of them. For Kabilovitsch was a strange character in the little settlement; though not the less confided in because of the mystery of his previous life. He had come to this out-of-the-way place, as he said, to escape with his little daughter the incessant raids and counter-raids of Turks and Christians, which kept the adjacent country in alarm.

Good Uncle Kabilovitsch--as all the children of the hamlet called him--named his daughter, a lass of ten summers, Morsinia, after the famous peasant beauty, Elizabeth Morsiney, who had so fascinated King Sigismund.