of Greece and the islands fought strenuously on behalf of their infidel conquerors, in order to avoid falling into the hands of their Latin persecutors. [Sidenote: =Want of governance.=] To this inability to assimilate the peoples which he conquered, the Turk added an inability to govern them. He could neither weld together the varied materials of which his loosely jointed empire was composed, nor govern the separate parts. It is singular how few administrators the Ottoman race has produced. It does not possess faculties for government, or for trade, or for art. No sooner had the Turks conquered south-eastern Europe than they found themselves obliged to intrust the administration of their provinces to the children of the people whom they had overcome. Turkish art was but a faint and spoiled copy of Christian and Arab models. Trade remained in the hands of Christian merchants, or fell into the clutches foreign of Christian powers. When the Turks ceased to conquer they ceased to prosper. They became idle, luxurious and inert, lying like an incubus upon the country, deadening and crushing its civilisation and its spirit, hindering all growth, stopping all progress, just as incapable of calling out the resources of a people as of rooting out their national life. [Sidenote: =Reasons for their early success.=] So as the flood of conquest began to abate the submerged races began to reappear. Christendom had not to reconquer Turkish provinces, as Germany has had to reconquer French provinces, it merely had to remove the foreign incubus which was lying upon them and crushing them, to oust the foreign garrison. Accordingly the tide of Turkish invasion had hardly ceased to flow in south-eastern Europe when it began to ebb. The Turks owed their wonderful success to three causes. The disunion of Christendom, the extraordinary vigour and ability of the earlier Ottoman Sultans, and the institution of the Janizaries which gave them the best disciplined army in Europe. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these all combined to advance their power. They came as an army, organised not as a nation but as a camp, led by men second to none among the greatest sovereigns of Europe for military and personal gifts. The strength of their forces lay in the tribute of children exacted from the Christian races, who were brought up in the faith of Islam to be its special defenders and champions in the disciplined life of an army, half fanatical and half professional. They hurled themselves upon Europe at a time when the great powers were slowly and painfully organising themselves into personal monarchies out of the ruins of feudalism, when as yet professional armies were in their cradle. Under Orchan, the founder of the institution of the tribute children, they first crossed over into Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. Under Murad I. they overran Roumelia and Bulgaria, under Bajazet I. they carried their victorious arms into