Perhaps the chief explanation of the lack of distinction between freeman and slave lay in the fact that the Turks had very little conception of freedom, and the man legally free was practically almost as bound as the slave. As we have seen in the introduction to this study, loyalty and obedience were the two great virtues in the eyes of the Turks, so that in the idea of service there was no degradation. All who served the Crown were called _Kol_, or slaves of the Sultan, even the grand vizir receiving this title, which was much more honorable than that of _subject_, the kol being able to insult the subject with impunity, while the latter could not injure a royal slave in the slightest degree without subjecting himself to punishment.[43] Turkey was a land of slaves with but one master, the sultan, even the brothers and sons of the monarch being kept in durance for the greater part of their lives. In the case of women, no practical distinction that we should recognize existed between slave and free. The mother of the sultan was always a slave, one of the sultan’s titles being “Son of a Slave”. Most of the pashas were born of slave mothers, as the Turks had more children by their slaves than by their wives.[44] Such conditions rendered obviously impossible the sharp line which is drawn in the West between the freeman and the despised slave, and placed the slave potentially with the highest of the land. Slavery was certainly the Greek Ibrahim’s opportunity. Slavery brought him into the court, placed him before the sultan, educated him, gave him ambition, and finally gratified it. When Ibrahim was freed, no one thinks it worth while to record; certainly before his marriage, perhaps much before. But evidently the moment when Suleiman said to him: “Thou art enfranchised, thou art free”[45] was a moment not worth recording, so natural and inevitable was his enfranchisement the moment that slavery ceased to be the ladder of his advancement. It is evident, then, that Ibrahim’s lowly birth, his Christian origin, his experience as a slave, and his being a eunuch were none of them barriers to a great career. What was there, on the other hand, to give him such a career? His extraordinary ambition, his marked ability, and above all his immense good‐fortune in falling into the hands of the sultan and winning his affection, so that Suleiman was dominated by his love for Ibrahim, and unable to resist any of his caprices;[46] these were the prime factors in his extraordinary rise.