Affairs in Transylvania did not mend even after the capture of Regall, and of the three Turks' heads, and the destruction of so many villages.This fruitful and strong country was the prey of faction, and became little better than a desert under the ravages of the contending armies.The Emperor Rudolph at last determined to conquer the country for himself, and sent Busca again with a large army.
Sigismund finding himself poorly supported, treated again with the Emperor and agreed to retire to Silicia on a pension.But the Earl Moyses, seeing no prospect of regaining his patrimony, and determining not to be under subjection to the Germans, led his troops against Busca, was defeated, and fled to join the Turks.Upon this desertion the Prince delivered up all he had to Busca and retired to Prague.Smith himself continued with the imperial party, in the regiment of Earl Meldritch.About this time the Sultan sent one Jeremy to be vaivode of Wallachia, whose tyranny caused the people to rise against him, and he fled into Moldavia.Busca proclaimed Lord Rodoll vaivode in his stead.But Jeremy assembled an army of forty thousand Turks, Tartars, and Moldavians, and retired into Wallachia.
Smith took active part in Rodoll's campaign to recover Wallachia, and narrates the savage war that ensued.When the armies were encamped near each other at Raza and Argish, Rodoll cut off the heads of parties he captured going to the Turkish camp, and threw them into the enemy's trenches.Jeremy retorted by skinning alive the Christian parties he captured, hung their skins upon poles, and their carcasses and heads on stakes by them.In the first battle Rodoll was successful and established himself in Wallachia, but Jeremy rallied and began ravaging the country.Earl Meldritch was sent against him, but the Turks' force was much superior, and the Christians were caught in a trap.In order to reach Rodoll, who was at Rottenton, Meldritch with his small army was obliged to cut his way through the solid body of the enemy.A device of Smith's assisted him.He covered two or three hundred trunks--probably small branches of trees--with wild-fire.These fixed upon the heads of lances and set on fire when the troops charged in the night, so terrified the horses of the Turks that they fled in dismay.
Meldritch was for a moment victorious, but when within three leagues of Rottenton he was overpowered by forty thousand Turks, and the last desperate fight followed, in which nearly all the friends of the Prince were slain, and Smith himself was left for dead on the field.
On this bloody field over thirty thousand lay headless, armless, legless, all cut and mangled, who gave knowledge to the world how dear the Turk paid for his conquest of Transylvania and Wallachia--a conquest that might have been averted if the three Christian armies had been joined against the "cruel devouring Turk." Among the slain were many Englishmen, adventurers like the valiant Captain whom Smith names, men who "left there their bodies in testimony of their minds."And there, "Smith among the slaughtered dead bodies, and many a gasping soule with toils and wounds lay groaning among the rest, till being found by the Pillagers he was able to live, and perceiving by his armor and habit, his ransome might be better than his death, they led him prisoner with many others." The captives were taken to Axopolis and all sold as slaves.Smith was bought by Bashaw Bogall, who forwarded him by way of Adrianople to Constantinople, to be a slave to his mistress.So chained by the necks in gangs of twenty they marched to the city of Constantine, where Smith was delivered over to the mistress of the Bashaw, the young Charatza Tragabigzanda.
III
CAPTIVITY AND WANDERING
Our hero never stirs without encountering a romantic adventure.
Noble ladies nearly always take pity on good-looking captains, and Smith was far from ill-favored.The charming Charatza delighted to talk with her slave, for she could speak Italian, and would feign herself too sick to go to the bath, or to accompany the other women when they went to weep over the graves, as their custom is once a week, in order to stay at home to hear from Smith how it was that Bogall took him prisoner, as the Bashaw had written her, and whether Smith was a Bohemian lord conquered by the Bashaw's own hand, whose ransom could adorn her with the glory of her lover's conquests.
Great must have been her disgust with Bogall when she heard that he had not captured this handsome prisoner, but had bought him in the slave-market at Axopolis.Her compassion for her slave increased, and the hero thought he saw in her eyes a tender interest.But she had no use for such a slave, and fearing her mother would sell him, she sent him to her brother, the Tymor Bashaw of Nalbrits in the country of Cambria, a province of Tartaria (wherever that may be).
If all had gone on as Smith believed the kind lady intended, he might have been a great Bashaw and a mighty man in the Ottoman Empire, and we might never have heard of Pocahontas.In sending him to her brother, it was her intention, for she told him so, that he should only sojourn in Nalbrits long enough to learn the language, and what it was to be a Turk, till time made her master of herself.Smith himself does not dissent from this plan to metamorphose him into a Turk and the husband of the beautiful Charatza Tragabigzanda.He had no doubt that he was commended to the kindest treatment by her brother; but Tymor "diverted all this to the worst of cruelty."Within an hour of his arrival, he was stripped naked, his head and face shaved as smooth as his hand, a ring of iron, with a long stake bowed like a sickle, riveted to his neck, and he was scantily clad in goat's skin.There were many other slaves, but Smith being the last, was treated like a dog, and made the slave of slaves.
The geographer is not able to follow Captain Smith to Nalbrits.