That Ibrahim married need not astonish us, for marriages arranged with eunuchs by fathers of many daughters were not uncommon. Sometimes a sultana was married to a eunuch for his fortune, in which case he generally died soon after his marriage; sometimes no other suitable husband being found for her, she was given to a eunuch of high rank. In stories we occasionally read of a father who marries his daughter to a eunuch as a punishment. Ibrahim probably married a sultana, which curiously enough would be a more natural marriage than with a woman of lower rank, for it has never been deemed advisable that the daughters of sultans should have male children, and if such were born, they were condemned to immediate death by the omission to knot the umbilical cord. This measure became a law in the reign of Ahmed I,[27] with the idea of saving the country from the civil war of rival princes of the blood, but was probably a custom long before it was legalized. Therefore Suleiman may have thought that the marriage of his relative to a man of Ibrahim’s position, fortune, and charm, was a happy fate for a princess who might not hope to be a mother. We have seen that the fact that Ibrahim was a Greek, and a Christian by birth, was no barrier to his rise, so long as he adopted Islam. Many of the great officials of Turkey were of Christian extraction; as for instance, the two men who succeeded Ibrahim Pasha as Grand Vizirs, Rustem Pasha and Mehmet Sokolli, considered the greatest of Turkish vizirs and both Croats by birth. Furthermore his humble family was no obstacle, for in Turkey it has always been possible for a bootblack or a grocer to rise to the highest position, if good fortune or marked ability led him thither. Ibrahim suffered from still another disability, as we in the Occident would consider it: he was a slave. How did that affect his advancement? To understand the position of a slave in Turkey in the fifteenth century we must recognize at the outset the fact that Turkish slavery was quite different from that of the Occident, and so approach the subject free from our natural prejudice. The only slavery sanctioned by Islam is that imposed on infidels as a result of supposed inferiority of race and religion,[28] and has never in fact included the _rayahs_ (Christian subjects) but only prisoners of war. The _rayah_ might not be enslaved but neither might he hold slaves, except in very rare instances before 1759, and not at all after that date.[29]