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Heritage and Expansion of Byzantine Empire

On the morrow of his victory, Mohammed the Conqueror took pains to make it clear that his introduction of a new heaven did not entail a new earth.  As little as might be would be changed.  He had displaced a Palaeologus by an Osmanli only in order that an empire long in fact Osmanli should henceforth be so also de jure.  Therefore he confirmed the pre-existing Oecumenical patriarch in his functions and the Byzantine Greeks in their privileges, renewed the rights secured to Christian foreigners by the Greek emperors, and proclaimed that, for his accession to the throne, there should not be made a Moslem the more or a Christian the less.  Moreover, during the thirty years left to him of life, Mohammed devoted himself to precisely those tasks which would have fallen to a Greek emperor desirous of restoring Byzantine power.  He thrust back Latins wherever they were encroaching on the Greek sphere, as were the Venetians of the Morea, the Hospitallers of Rhodes, and the Genoese of the Crimea:  and he rounded off the proper Byzantine holding by annexing, in Europe, all the Balkan peninsula except the impracticable Black Mountain, the Albanian highlands, and the Hungarian fortress of Belgrade; and, in Asia, what had remained independent in the Anatolian peninsula, the emirates of Karamania and Cappadocia.

Before Mohammed died in 1481 the Osmanli Turco-Grecian nation may be said to have come into its own.  It was lord de facto et de jure belli of the eastern or Greek Empire, that is of all territories and seas grouped geographically round Constantinople as a centre, with only a few exceptions unredeemed, of which the most notable were the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Krete, still in Latin hands.  Needless to say, the Osmanlis themselves differed greatly from their imperial predecessors.  Their official speech, their official creed, their family system were all foreign to Europe, and many of their ideas of government had been learned in the past from Persia and China, or were derived from the original tribal organization of the true Turks.  But if they were neither more nor less Asiatics than the contemporary Russians, they were quite as much Europeans as many of the Greek emperors had been—­those of the Isaurian dynasty, for instance.  They had given no evidence as yet of a fanatical Moslem spirit—­this was to be bred in them by subsequent experiences—­and their official creed had governed their policy hardly more than does ours in India or Egypt.  Mohammed the Conqueror had not only shown marked favour to Christians, whether his rayas or not, but encouraged letters and the arts in a very un-Arabian spirit.  Did he not have himself portrayed by Gentile Bellini?  The higher offices of state, both civil and military, were confided (and would continue so to be for a century to come) almost exclusively to men of Christian origin.  Commerce was encouraged, and western traders recognized