CRESCENT, originally the waxing moon, hence a name ap plied to the shape of the moon in its first quarter. The crescent is employed as a charge in heraldry, with its horns vertical; when they are turned to the dexter side of the shield, it is called increscent, when to the sinister, decrescent. In modern armory a crescent is used as a difference to denote the second son of a house; thus the earls of Harrington place a crescent upon a crescent, as descending from the second son of a second son. An order of the crescent was instituted by Charles I. of Naples and Sicily in 1268, and revived by Rene of Anjou in 1464. A Turk ish order or decoration of the crescent was instituted by Sultan Selim III. in 1799, in memory of the diamond crescent which he had presented to Nelson after the battle of the Nile, and which Nelson wore on his coat as if it were an order.
The crescent is the military and religious symbol of the Otto man Turks. Ala ud-din, the Seljuk sultan of Iconium and Ertoghrul, his lieutenant and the founder of the Ottoman branch of the Turkish race, assumed it as a device, and it appeared on the standard of the janissaries of Sultan Orkhan (1326-6o). Since the new moon is associated with special acts of devotion in Turkey—where, as in England, there is a popular superstition that it is unlucky to see it through glass—it may originally have been adopted in consequence of its religious significance. Ac cording to Professor Ridgeway, however, the Turkish crescent, like that seen on modern horse-trappings, has nothing to do with the new moon, but is the result of the base-to-base conjunction of two claw or tusk amulets, an example of which was brought to light during the excavations of the site of the temple of Ar temis Orthia at Sparta (see Athenaeum, March 1908). There is nothing distinctively Turkish in the combination of crescent and star : it is also doubtful whether any opposition between crescent and cross, as symbols of Islam and Christianity, was ever intended by the Turks and it is an historical error to attrib ute the crescent to the Saracens of crusading times or the Moors in Spain.
Crescent is also the name of a Turkish musical instrument. In architecture, a crescent is a street following the arc of a circle ; the name in this sense was first used in the Royal crescent at Bath.