Meantime the Ottomans were with cruel severity, organizing a terrible power for further conquest. The captured provinces of Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Servia, became the perpetual recruiting ground for the Turkish army. After the royal fifth of the captives was diminished by conquest, an inhuman tax of the fifth child or of every fifth year was rigorously levied on the Christian families. At the age of twelve or fourteen, the most robust youths were torn away from their parents to be trained for the army or for civil service. They might pass through four successive schools according to their development or promise and then found themselves without friendships, outside their own number, without parents, without homes, dependent on the will of the despot on the throne, whose hand, on the slightest displeasure could break in pieces "these statues of glass." Thus with satanic craftiness and cruelty were the stolen children of Christian races trained to become the destroyers of a Christian empire, which, for more than a thousand years had stayed the flood of barbarism from sweeping over all Europe. Freeman, the historian, declares that we may take Mohammed II., as the ideal of his race, the embodiment in their fullest form of Ottoman greatness and Ottoman wickedness. A general and a statesman of the highest order, he was also a man of intellectual cultivation in other ways, a master of many languages and a patron of the art and the literature of his time. At the same time the three abiding Ottoman vices, cruelty, lust and faithlessness, stand forth in terrible preëminence. His first act was the murder of his infant brother and he made the murder of brothers the standing law of his empire. He made the Ottoman power what it has been ever since. He defined its northern and western boundaries. "The Ottoman Empire as our age has to deal with it, is before all things the work of Mohammed the Conqueror." His reign was from 1451 to 1481. Coming to the throne at the early age of twenty-one, he had read Plutarch assiduously and studied the careers of Alexander, Cæsar and other great conquerors; causing also the biographies of illustrious men to be translated into Turkish, to give to himself and to his people the emulation of glory.