now united in the kingdom of Rumania—were placed in charge of Greek officials with the rank of voivode or prince, and with practically sovereign power within their delegated dominions. A Danubian principality became the reward of a successful dragoman’s career, and these high posts were rapidly monopolized by a close ring of official families, who exercised their immense patronage in favour of their race, and congregated round the Greek patriarch in the ‘Phanari’,[2] the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror. [Footnote 1: 1346-1566.] [Footnote 2: ‘Lighthouse-quarter.’] The alliance of this parvenu ‘Phanariot’ aristocracy with the conservative Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself had greatly extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty. The Ottoman Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral members of the state, and was content to leave their civil government in the hands of their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic emperors would never have tolerated. It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the Greek patriarch’s authority over the other conquered populations of Orthodox faith—Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs—which had never been incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call themselves by the Romaic name. In 1691 Mustapha Köprili recognized and confirmed the rights of all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general organic law. Mustapha’s ‘New Ordinance’ was dictated by the reverses which Christians beyond the frontier were inflicting upon the Ottoman arms, for pressure from without had followed hard upon disintegration within. Achmet’s pyrrhic triumph over Candia in 1669 was followed in 1683 by his brother Mustapha’s disastrous discomfiture before the walls of Vienna, and these two sieges marked the turn of the Ottoman tide. The ebb was slow, yet the ascendancy henceforth lay with Turkey’s Christian neighbours, and they began to cut short her frontiers on every side.