On coarse fare and scanty
drink, in that dark vault, he had struggled by sheer obstinacy of
vitality into recovery. In the very height of midsummer alone did
the sun peep through the grating of his cell, and he had newly hailed
this cheerful visitor when he was roughly summoned, placed on
horseback with eyes and hands bound, and only allowed sight again to
find himself among a herd of his fellow Germans in the Turkish camp.
They were the prisoners of the terrible Turkish raid of 1475, when
Georg von Schenk and fourteen other noblemen of Austria and Styria
were all taken in one unhappy fight, and dragged away into captivity,
with hundreds of lower rank.
To Sir Eberhard the change had been greatly for the better. The Turk
had treated him much better than the Christian; and walking in the
open air, chained to a German comrade, was far pleasanter than pining
in his lonely dungeon. At Adrianople, an offer had been made to each
of the captives, if they would become Moslems, of entering the
Ottoman service as Spahis; but with one voice they had refused, and
had then been draughted into different divisions.
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