In reality, however, the flood had already reached high-water mark. The Sultans had begun to prefer a life of ease in the palace of Stamboul to the active leadership of the army, or the laborious administration of the empire. Suleiman himself farmed out the taxes and left the management of the affairs of state mainly to his ministers. Under his feeble successors degeneration grew apace. The reins of power fell from the listless hands of the Sultans into those of incapable and despicable favourites. Palace intrigues decided important affairs of state, and ministers were made and unmade by the cabals of women and eunuchs. Corruption spread like a cancer over the whole administration. Discipline became deteriorated in the army, and the Janizaries, like the Praetorian guard, ceased to be the champions of their country’s ambition, and became but the heroes of domestic revolutions. In a loosely organised empire like that of the Turks, which stretched from Buda to Bagdad, from the Caspian to the Pillars of Hercules, there was no cohesive force except that of the central government, no centre of unity except that of the ruler of Stamboul in his double capacity of Sultan and Caliph. When the head became effete and incapable the life blood of the whole organism failed and decay began. Under Selim the Sot, the successor of Suleiman, Christendom won its great victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571; a battle, which, though its loss was repaired with incredible energy and counterbalanced by the conquest of Cyprus, has nevertheless set for all time the limits of Turkish rule in the Mediterranean, just as the failure of Suleiman’s attack upon Vienna in 1529, and the subsequent partition of Hungary, had fixed the extreme boundaries of Turkish power in the valley of the Danube. [Sidenote: =Loss of the command of the Danube valley in the seventeenth century.=]