Before the close of the fourteenth century the Ottoman
sultan had transferred his capital to Adrianople, and had become
immeasurably the strongest power in the Balkan peninsula.

After that the end came quickly. At Constantinople the Romaic dynasty of
Palaiologos had upheld a semblance of the Empire for more than a century
after the Latin was expelled. But in 1453 the Imperial city fell before
the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the conqueror
eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from Peloponnesos
to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the uniformity of the
Ottoman domain. Under his successors the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled
on for half a century more over south-eastern Europe, till it was stayed
on land beneath the ramparts of Vienna,[1] and culminated on sea, after
the systematic reduction of the Venetian strongholds, in the capture of
Rhodes from the Knights of St. John.[2] The Romaic race, which had been
split into so many fragments during the dissolution of the Empire, was
reunited again in the sixteenth century under the common yoke of the Turk.

[Footnote 1: 1526.]

[Footnote 2: 1522.]

Even in the Dark Age, Greece had hardly been reduced to so desperate a
condition as now. Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained a
continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to repeople it
with a Turkish majority from Anatolia. Greek commerce would naturally have
benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the Levant, had not the
Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to the Jews expelled from
Spain. These Sephardim established themselves at Constantinople, Salonika,
and all the other commercial centres of the Ottoman dominion, and their
superiority in numbers and industry made them more formidable urban rivals
of the Greeks than the Venetians and Genoese had ever been.

Ousted from the towns, the Greek race depended for its preservation on the
peasantry, yet Greece had never suffered worse rural oppression than under
the Ottoman regime. The sultan's fiscal demands were the least part of the
burden. The paralysing land-tax, collected in kind by irresponsible
middlemen, was an inheritance from the Romaic Empire, and though it was
now reinforced by the special capitation-tax levied by the sultan on his
Christian subjects, the greater efficiency and security of his government
probably compensated for the additional charge. The vitality o