At the same time Fate, rather than any sultan, must be blamed.  It was impossible to forgo some further extension of the empire, and very difficult to arrest extension at any satisfactory static point.  For one thing, as has been pointed out already, there were important territories in the proper Byzantine sphere still unredeemed at the death of Mohammed.  Rhodes, Krete, and Cyprus, whose possession carried with it something like superior control of the Levantine trade, were in Latin hands.  Austrian as well as Venetian occupation of the best harbours was virtually closing the Adriatic to the masters of the Balkans.  Nor could the inner lands of the Peninsula be quite securely held while the great fortress of Belgrade, with the passage of the Danube, remained in Hungarian keeping, Furthermore, the Black Sea, which all masters of the Bosphorus have desired to make a Byzantine lake, was in dispute with the Wallachs and the Poles; and, in the reign of Mohammed’s successor, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came up above its northern horizon—­the harbinger of the Muscovite.

As for the Asiatic part of the Byzantine sphere, there was only one little corner in the south-east to be rounded off to bring all the Anatolian peninsula under the Osmanli.  But that corner, the Cilician plain, promised trouble, since it was held by another Islamic power, that of the Egyptian Mamelukes, which, claiming to be at least equal to the Osmanli, possessed vitality much below its pretensions.  The temptation to poach on it was strong, and any lord of Constantinople who once gave way to this, would find himself led on to assume control of all coasts of the easternmost Levant, and then to push into inland Asia in quest of a scientific frontier at their back—­perilous and costly enterprise which Rome had essayed again and again and had to renounce in the end.  Bayezid II took the first step by summoning the Mameluke to evacuate certain forts near Tarsus, and expelling his garrisons vi et armis.  Cilicia passed to the Osmanli; but for the moment he pushed no farther.  Bayezid, who was under the obligation always to lead his army in person, could make but one campaign at a time; and a need in Europe was the more pressing.  In quitting Cilicia, however, he left open a new question in Ottoman politics—­the Asiatic continental question—­and indicated to his successor a line of least resistance on which to advance.  Nor would this be his only dangerous legacy.  The prolonged and repeated raids into Adriatic lands, as far north as Carniola and Carinthia, with which the rest of Bayezid’s reign was occupied, brought Ottoman militarism at last to a point, whose eventual attainment might have been foreseen any time in the past century—­ the point at which, strong in the possession of a new arm, artillery, it would assume control of the state.