Bayezid’s seed was harvested by Selim.  First in a long series of praetorian creatures which would end only with the destroyer of the praetorians themselves three centuries later, he owed his elevation to a Janissary revolt, and all the eight bloody years of his reign were to be punctuated by Janissary tumults.  To keep his creators in any sort of order and contentment he had no choice but to make war from his first year to his last.  When he died, in 1520, the Ottoman Empire had been swelled to almost as wide limits in Asia and Africa as it has ever attained since his day.  Syria, Armenia, great part of Kurdistan, northern Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, and last, but not least, Egypt, were forced to acknowledge Osmanli suzerainty, and for the first time an Osmanli sultan had proclaimed himself caliph.  True that neither by his birth nor by the manner of his appointment did Selim satisfy the orthodox caliphial tradition; but, besides his acquisition of certain venerated relics of the Prophet, such as the Sanjak i-sherif or holy standard, and besides a yet more important acquisition—­the control of the holy cities of the faith—­ he could base a claim on the unquestioned fact that the office was vacant, and the equally certain fact that he was the most powerful Moslem prince in the world.  Purists might deny him if they dared:  the vulgar Sunni mind was impressed and disposed to accept.  The main importance, however, of Selim’s assumption of the caliphate was that it consecrated Osmanli militarism to a religious end—­to the original programme of Islam.  This was a new thing, fraught with dire possibilities from that day forward.  It marked the supersession of the Byzantine or European ideal by the Asiatic in Osmanli policy, and introduced a phase of Ottoman history which has endured to our own time.

The inevitable process was continued in the next reign.  Almost all the military glories of Suleiman—­known to contemporary Europe as ’the Magnificent’ and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli sultans—­ made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire.  His earliest operations indeed, the captures of Rhodes from the Knights and of Belgrade and [)S]abac from the Hungarians, expressed a legitimate Byzantine policy; and the siege of Malta, one of his latest ventures, might also be defended as a measure taken in the true interests of Byzantine commerce.  But the most brilliant and momentous of his achievements bred evils for which military prestige and the material profits to be gained from the oppression of an irreconcilable population were inadequate compensation.  This was the conquest of Hungary.  It would result in Buda and its kingdom remaining Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia abiding under the Ottoman shadow even longer, and passing for all time out of the central European into the Balkan sphere; but also it would result in the Osmanli power finding itself