spoil of their Asiatic
conquests was the Caliphate. Hulaku, the sacker of Bagdad, had put the
Caliph Mustasim to death, and the remnant of the Abbasids had kept up a
shadowy succession at Cairo, under the protection of the Sultan of
Egypt. Selim the Osmanli, when he entered Cairo as a conqueror in 1517,
caused the contemporary Abbasid to cede his title, for what it was
worth, to him and his successors. It was a doubtful title, scorned by
all Shias and regarded coldly by many Sunni rulers who were unwilling to
recognise a spiritual superior in their most formidable temporal rival.
But such as it was, it strengthened the Osmanli's hold on his dominions.
Caliph of Islam, victorious guardian of the Moslem marches, and heir by
conquest of imperial Rum, the Osmanli Sultan held his Asiatic provinces
with ease; but the best security for his tenure was the misery to which
they were reduced. Commerce and cultivation ebbed, population dwindled,
and nomads still drifted in upon what once had been settled lands. The
Ottoman Government, desiring a barrier against Persia, encouraged the
Kurds to spread themselves over Armenia; it welcomed less the Shammar
and Anazeh Arabs, who broke over the Euphrates about the year 1700 and
turned the last fields of Northern Mesopotamia to desolation; but it was
too impotent or indifferent to turn them out. Western Asia lay fallow
under the Ottoman cannon-wheels. There have been fallow periods before
in the slow rhythm of its life--under the Persians, for instance, who
overran all lands and peoples of the East in the sixth century B.C.,
overshadowed the Greeks for a moment, as the Osmanlis overshadowed
Europe, halted, too massive for offence but seemingly unassailable, and
then collapsed pitifully before the probing spears of Alexander.

The Osmanlis are passing at this moment as the Achaemenids passed then.
They lost the last of Europe in the Balkan War, and with it their
prestige as increasers of Islam; the growth of national consciousness
among their subjects, not least among the Turks themselves, has loosened
the foundations of their military empire, as of the other military
empires with which they are allied. They forfeited the Caliphate when
they proclaimed the Holy War against the Allied Powers--inciting Moslems
to join one Christian coalition against another, not in defence of their
religion, but for Ottoman political aggrandisement. They lost it morally
when this incitement was left unheeded