In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these tribes overran the cradle of modern civilisation, which has given Europe its religion and, to a large extent, its civilisation. At that time these territories were the seats of many peaceful and prosperous nations. The Mesopotamian valley supported a large industrious agricultural population; Bagdad was one of the largest and most flourishing cities in existence; Constantinople had a greater population than Rome, and the Balkan region and Asia Minor contained several powerful States. Over all this part of the world the Turk now swept like a huge, destructive force. Mesopotamia in a few years became a desert; the great cities of the East were reduced to misery, and the subject peoples became slaves. Such graces of civilisation as the Turk has acquired in five centuries have practically all been taken from the subject peoples whom he so greatly despises. His religion comes from the Arabs; his language has acquired a certain literary value by borrowing certain Arabic and Persian elements; and his writing is Arabic. Constantinople’s finest architectural monument, the Mosque of St. Sophia, was originally a Christian church, and practically all Turkish architecture is derived from the Byzantine. The mechanism of business and industry has always rested in the hands of the subject peoples--Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Arabs. The Turks have learned little of European art or science, they have established very few educational institutions, and illiteracy is the prevailing rule. The result is that poverty has attained a degree of sordidness and misery in the Ottoman Empire which is almost unparalleled elsewhere. The Turkish peasant lives in a mud hut in which he sleeps; he has no chairs, no tables, no eating utensils, no clothes except the few scant garments which cover his back and which he usually wears for many years. In the course of time these Turks might learn certain things from their European and Arabic neighbours, but there was one idea which they could never even faintly grasp. They could not understand that a conquered people were anything except slaves. When they took possession of a land, they found it occupied by a certain number of camels, horses, buffaloes, dogs, swine, and human beings. Of all these living things, the object that physically most resembled themselves they regarded as the least important. It became a common saying with them that a horse or a camel was far more valuable than a man; these animals cost money, whereas they could get all the “infidel Christians” they needed for nothing. The usual name applied to the Christian was _rayah_--meaning cattle. It is true that the early Sultans gave the subject peoples and the Europeans in the Empire certain rights, but these in themselves really reflected the contempt in which all non-Moslems were held.