h of the former had long ceased to reside at all in Constantinople.
The last Greek emperor died a martyr, but not a champion.

3

_Heritage and Expansion of Byzantine Empire_

On the morrow of his victory, Mohammed the Conqueror took pains to make it
clear that his introduction of a new heaven did not entail a new earth. As
little as might be would be changed. He had displaced a Palaeologus by an
Osmanli only in order that an empire long in fact Osmanli should
henceforth be so also _de jure_. Therefore he confirmed the pre-existing
Oecumenical patriarch in his functions and the Byzantine Greeks in their
privileges, renewed the rights secured to Christian foreigners by the
Greek emperors, and proclaimed that, for his accession to the throne,
there should not be made a Moslem the more or a Christian the less.
Moreover, during the thirty years left to him of life, Mohammed devoted
himself to precisely those tasks which would have fallen to a Greek
emperor desirous of restoring Byzantine power. He thrust back Latins
wherever they were encroaching on the Greek sphere, as were the Venetians
of the Morea, the Hospitallers of Rhodes, and the Genoese of the Crimea:
and he rounded off the proper Byzantine holding by annexing, in Europe,
all the Balkan peninsula except the impracticable Black Mountain, the
Albanian highlands, and the Hungarian fortress of Belgrade; and, in Asia,
what had remained independent in the Anatolian peninsula, the emirates of
Karamania and Cappadocia.

Before Mohammed died in 1481 the Osmanli Turco-Grecian nation may be said
to have come into its own. It was lord _de facto et de jure belli_ of the
eastern or Greek Empire, that is of all territories and seas grouped
geographically round Constantinople as a centre, with only a few
exceptions unredeemed, of which the most notable were the islands of
Cyprus, Rhodes, and Krete, still in Latin hands. Needless to say, the
Osmanlis themselves differed greatly from their imperial predecessors.
Their official speech, their official creed, their family system were all
foreign to Europe, and many of their ideas of government had been learned
in the past from Persia and China, or were derived from the original
tribal organization of the true Turks. But if they were neither more nor
less Asiatics than the contemporary Russians, they were quite as much
Europeans as many of the Greek emperors had been--those of the Isaurian
dynasty, for instance. They had given