Page:Adventures of Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw of Mitrowitz (1862).djvu/104

 it should be returned back again to me.” Their children do not inherit any landed property, unless their father secretly provides them with ready money, or helps them, in his lifetime, to some office, or procures for them an estate, or a current pension from the Emperor. Never, therefore, did I hear it said of any pasha, or observe, either in Constantinople, or in the whole land of Turkey, that any pasha was a natural-born Turk; on the contrary, they are either the kidnapped children of Christian parents, or persons captured in childhood, or persons who have turned Turks.

They told us, for instance, that Cykula Pasha was captured, when twelve years old, in a boat with his father, and that when the Turks promised him that they would release his father from captivity provided he turned Turk, he did so, wishing to aid his father. The Turks, certainly, did release the father; but sent him home so carefully that he died within three days. The son, who had become a Turk, having once tasted Turkish freedom and pleasures, proceeded gradually to worse and worse, till now he will have nothing to do with Christianity; but, on the contrary, is pasha and high-admiral, and is a great enemy of the Christians, as he showed in the battle of Erlau, in Hungary, in the year 1596. In that battle, when our soldiers had given themselves up to plundering the Turkish tents, he, with his fifteen renegades, or Christians who had become Turks, charged back again upon our men, forced them to flee, and was the cause that so many Bohemians and good men were slain.

Synan Pasha, (who was at this time mazul, that is, deprived of all his offices, and being, as it were, in dis-