Osmanli. But that corner, the Cilician plain, promised
trouble, since it was held by another Islamic power, that of the Egyptian
Mamelukes, which, claiming to be at least equal to the Osmanli, possessed
vitality much below its pretensions. The temptation to poach on it was
strong, and any lord of Constantinople who once gave way to this, would
find himself led on to assume control of all coasts of the easternmost
Levant, and then to push into inland Asia in quest of a scientific
frontier at their back--perilous and costly enterprise which Rome had
essayed again and again and had to renounce in the end. Bayezid II took
the first step by summoning the Mameluke to evacuate certain forts near
Tarsus, and expelling his garrisons _vi et armis_. Cilicia passed to the
Osmanli; but for the moment he pushed no farther. Bayezid, who was under
the obligation always to lead his army in person, could make but one
campaign at a time; and a need in Europe was the more pressing. In
quitting Cilicia, however, he left open a new question in Ottoman
politics--the Asiatic continental question--and indicated to his successor
a line of least resistance on which to advance. Nor would this be his only
dangerous legacy. The prolonged and repeated raids into Adriatic lands, as
far north as Carniola and Carinthia, with which the rest of Bayezid's
reign was occupied, brought Ottoman militarism at last to a point, whose
eventual attainment might have been foreseen any time in the past century--
the point at which, strong in the possession of a new arm, artillery, it
would assume control of the state.

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 a