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 148 DESTEUCTION OF THE GREEK EMPIRE Turks which he had largely increased, and especially by the addition to it of the north-west portion of Asia Minor, was for a time shattered to pieces. The sons of the vanquished sultan, after the departure of Timour and his host, were quarrelling over the possession of what remained. Three of them gained territories in Asia Minor, while the eldest, Suliman, retook possession of the lands held by his father in Europe. Most of the leaders of the Ottoman host, the viziers, governors, and scheiks, had been either captured or slain, and in consequence the sons of Bajazed fighting in Asia Minor found themselves destitute of efficient servants for the organisation of government in the territories which they seized on the departure of Timour. The progress of the great Asiatic horde created a pro- found impression in Western Europe. The eagerness of the Genoese to acknowledge the suzerainty of Timour gives an indication of their sense of the danger of resistance. The stories of the terrible cruelties of the Tartars lost nothing in their telling. When the news reached the neighbouring nations of Hungary and Serbia and the republics of Italy of the defeat of Bajazed, the capture of Brousa, of Smyrna, of every other town before which the Asiatic army had sat down, and of the powerlessness of the military knights, it appeared as if the West were about to be submerged by a new flood from Asia. No terror so great had threatened Europe since the time when Charles Martel defeated the Moslem hordes on the plains around Tours, or since the even more threatening attack upon Christendom when the main body of the Arab armies sat down for successive years before Constantinople and were signally defeated by the obstinacy of its defenders. Then, when news came of the sudden departure of the Asiatics and of the breaking up of the Ottoman power, hope once more revived, and it appeared possible to the pope and Christian peoples to complete the work which Timour had begun by now offering a united opposition to the restoration of an Ottoman empire. Constantinople itself when Bajazed passed it on his way to Angora was almost the last