[Footnote 1:  e.g.  Klemoutsi, Glarentsa (Clarence) and Gastouni—­villages of the currant district in Peloponnesos—­and Sant-Omeri, the mountain that overlooks them.]

The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the way of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions, which showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth.  This was the extreme march on the north-western rim of the Anatolian plateau, overlooking the Asiatic littoral of the Sea of Marmora.  It had been founded by one of those Turkish chiefs who migrated with their clans from beyond the Oxus; and it was consolidated by Othman his son, who extended his kingdom to the cities on the coast and invested his subjects with his own name.  In 1355 the Narrows of Gallipoli passed into Ottoman hands, and opened a bridge to unexpected conquests in Europe.  Serbia and Bulgaria collapsed at the first attack, and the hosts which marched to liberate them from Hungary and from France only ministered to Ottoman prestige by their disastrous discomfiture.  Before the close of the fourteenth century the Ottoman sultan had transferred his capital to Adrianople, and had become immeasurably the strongest power in the Balkan peninsula.

After that the end came quickly.  At Constantinople the Romaic dynasty of Palaiologos had upheld a semblance of the Empire for more than a century after the Latin was expelled.  But in 1453 the Imperial city fell before the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the conqueror eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from Peloponnesos to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the uniformity of the Ottoman domain.  Under his successors the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled on for half a century more over south-eastern Europe, till it was stayed on land beneath the ramparts of Vienna,[1] and culminated on sea, after the systematic reduction of the Venetian strongholds, in the capture of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John.[2] The Romaic race, which had been split into so many fragments during the dissolution of the Empire, was reunited again in the sixteenth century under the common yoke of the Turk.

[Footnote 1:  1526.]

[Footnote 2:  1522.]

Even in the Dark Age, Greece had hardly been reduced to so desperate a condition as now.  Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained a continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to repeople it with a Turkish majority from Anatolia.  Greek commerce would naturally have benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the Levant, had not the Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to the Jews expelled from Spain.  These Sephardim established themselves at Constantinople, Salonika, and all the other commercial centres of the Ottoman dominion, and their superiority in numbers and industry made them more formidable urban rivals of the Greeks than the Venetians and Genoese had ever been.