the supplementing of that
system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself
for service: lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe,
which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and
disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest
Moslems. To sum the matter up in other words: the omnipotence and
indiscipline of the Janissaries; the contumacy of 'Dere Beys' ('Lords of
the Valleys,' who maintained a feudal independence) and of provincial
governors; the concentration of the official mind on things military and
religious, to the exclusion of other interests; the degradation and
embitterment of the Christian elements in the empire; the perpetual
financial embarrassment of the government with its inevitable consequence
of oppression and neglect of the governed; and the constant provocation in
Christendom of a hostility which was always latent and recurrently active--
all these evils, which combined to push the empire nearer and nearer to
ruin from the seventeenth century onwards, can be traced to the brilliant
epoch of Osmanli history associated with the names of Bayezid II, Selim I,
and Suleiman the Magnificent.

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