that their facilities were greater now than they had been under Greek rule.  The Venetians, for example, enjoyed in perfect liberty a virtual monopoly of the Aegean and Euxine trade.  The social condition of the peasantry seems to have been better than it had been under Greek seigneurs, whether in Europe or in Asia, and better than it was at the moment in feudal Christendom.  The Osmanli military organization was reputed the best in the world, and its fame attracted adventurous spirits from all over Europe to learn war in the first school of the age.  Ottoman armies, it is worth while to remember, were the only ones then attended by efficient medical and commissariat services, and may be said to have introduced to Europe these alleviations of the horrors of war.

Had the immediate successors of Mohammed been content—­or, rather, had they been able—­to remain within his boundaries, they would have robbed Ottoman history of one century of sinister brilliance, but might have postponed for many centuries the subsequent sordid decay; for the seeds of this were undoubtedly sown by the three great sultans who followed the taker of Constantinople.  Their ambitions or their necessities led to a great increase of the professional army which would entail many evils in time to come.  Among these were praetorianism in the capital and the great provincial towns; subjection of land and peasantry to military seigneurs, who gradually detached themselves from the central control; wars undertaken abroad for no better reason than the employment of soldiery feared at home; consequent expansion of the territorial empire beyond the administrative capacity of the central government; development of the ‘tribute-children’ system of recruiting into a scourge of the rayas and a continual offence to neighbouring states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service:  lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems.  To sum the matter up in other words:  the omnipotence and indiscipline of the Janissaries; the contumacy of ‘Dere Beys’ (’Lords of the Valleys,’ who maintained a feudal independence) and of provincial governors; the concentration of the official mind on things military and religious, to the exclusion of other interests; the degradation and embitterment of the Christian elements in the empire; the perpetual financial embarrassment of the government with its inevitable consequence of oppression and neglect of the governed; and the constant provocation in Christendom of a hostility which was always latent and recurrently active—­ all these evils, which combined to push the empire nearer and nearer to ruin from the seventeenth century onwards, can be traced to the brilliant epoch of Osmanli history associated with the names of Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent.