e
success could not be sustained. Repeated effort was rapidly exhausting
Osmanli strength, sapped as it was by increasing internal disease: and
when a crisis arrived with the accession of the Empress Catherine, it
proved too weak to meet it. During the ten years following 1764 Osmanli
hold on the Black Sea was lost irretrievably. After the destruction of the
fleet at Chesme the Crimea became untenable and was abandoned to the brief
mercies of Russia: and with a veiled Russian protectorate established in
the Danubian principalities, and an open Russian occupation in Morean
ports, Constantinople had lost once more her own seas. When Selim III was
set on a tottering throne, in 1787, the wheel of Byzantine destiny seemed
to have come again almost full circle: and the world was expecting a
Muscovite succession to that empire which had acknowledged already the
Roman, the Greek, and the Osmanli.

Certainly history looked like repeating itself. As in the fourteenth
century, so in the eighteenth, the imperial provinces, having shaken off
almost all control of the capital, were administering themselves, and
happier for doing so. Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Trebizond
acknowledged adventurers as virtually independent lords. Asia Minor, in
general, was being controlled, in like disregard of imperial majesty, by a
group of 'Dere Beys', descended, in different districts, from tribal
chieftains or privileged tax-farmers, or, often, from both. The latter
part of the eighteenth century was the heyday of the Anatolian feudal
families--of such as the Chapanoghlus of Yuzgad, whose sway stretched from
Pontus to Cilicia, right across the base of the peninsula, or the
Karamanoghlus of Magnesia, Bergama, and Aidin, who ruled as much territory
as the former emirs of Karasi and Sarukhan, and were recognized by the
representatives of the great trading companies as wielding the only
effective authority in Smyrna. The wide and rich regions controlled by
such families usually contributed neither an _asper_ to the sultan's
treasury nor a man to the imperial armies.

On no mountain of either Europe or Asia--and mountains formed a large part
of the Ottoman empire in both--did the imperial writ run. Macedonia and
Albania were obedient only to their local beys, and so far had gone the
devolution of Serbia and Bosnia to Janissary aghas, feudal beys, and the
Beylerbey of Rumili, that these provinces hardly concerned themselves more
with the capital. The