Towards the end of the tenth century, a branch of the Turks, henceforth known as the Turcomans, accepted Islam at the hands of the conquering Arabs, and in course of time all of the Turkish peoples became Moslem. Naturally through their religion the Arabs came to exert a strong influence on the rude Turks, so strong that Turkish thought has never since been wholly free from Arabic dominance. The Turks are an exceedingly loyal people, accepting the religion imposed upon them with whole‐heartedness. They are not by nature fanatical; on the contrary they are temperamentally tolerant, fanaticism where it has existed being an outgrowth of political conditions, or a foreign trait taken over with Islam.[4] Rather oddly, and perhaps unfortunately, when the Turks became literate they fell under Persian rather than Arabic influence, and for centuries, indeed up to our own century, Turkish literature has been little more than an imitation of the Persian, very formal and rhetorical. Thus the two great forces engaged in moulding the Turkish mind were Arabic theology and Persian poetry, the large Arabic and Persian element in the Turkish language being a good illustration of this. In the twelfth century the Asiatic hordes pressing into Asia Minor came into contact with the Greeks. But there was no intellectual reaction between Greek and Turk. The Seljouk kingdom rose and fell in Asia Minor; then the chieftain Othman[5] stepped on its ruins and climbed to power. He and his descendants gradually conquered the Greeks until Byzantium was theirs. Ottoman conquests still continued, until a century, after the fall of Constantinople Suleiman pushed his armies to the gates of Vienna and marked the farthest point of the Turkish invasion of Europe. During Suleiman’s reign Turkey not only dominated the Balkan Peninsula from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and north to the Danube, but it also greatly influenced the rest of Europe. There was not a court in Europe that was not forced to reckon with Sultan Suleiman. So the career of Ibrahim, his distinguished grand vizir, is not a mere romance; it is a career which intimately affected the hopes and fears of Ferdinand of Austria, Charles V of Spain, Francis I of France, and even Henry VIII of England, as well as the Pope and the Venetian Signory.