It was nearer than perhaps was expected. Ottoman capacity to administer the overgrown empire in Europe and Asia was strained already almost to breaking-point, and it was in recognition of this fact that Suleiman made the great effort to reorganize his imperial system, which has earned him his honourable title of _El Kanun_, the Regulator. But if he could reset and cleanse the wheels of the administrative machine, he could not increase its capacity. New blood was beginning to fail for the governing class just as the demands on it became greater. No longer could it be manned exclusively from the Christian born. Two centuries of recruiting in the Balkans and West Asia had sapped their resources. Even the Janissaries were not now all ‘tribute-children’. Their own sons, free men Moslem born, began to be admitted to the ranks. This change was a vital infringement of the old principle of Osmanli rule, that all the higher administrative and military functions should be vested in slaves of the imperial household, directly dependent on the sultan himself; and once breached, this principle could not but give way more and more. The descendants of imperial slaves, free-born Moslems, but barred from the glory and profits of their fathers’ function, had gradually become a very numerous class of country gentlemen distributed over all parts of the empire, and a very malcontent one. Though it was still subservient, its dissatisfaction at exclusion from the central administration was soon to show itself partly in assaults on the time-honoured system, partly in assumption of local jurisdiction, which would develop into provincial independence. The overgrowth of his empire further compelled Suleiman to divide the standing army, in order that more than one imperial force might take the field at a time. Unable to lead all his armies in person, he elected, in the latter part of his reign, to lead none, and for the first time left the Janissaries to march without a sultan to war. Remaining himself at the centre, he initiated a fashion which would encourage Osmanli sultans to lapse into half-hidden beings, whom their subjects would gradually invest with religious character. Under these conditions the ruler, the governing class (its power grew with this devolution), the dominant population of the state, and the state itself all grew more fanatically Moslem. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Ahmed I being on the throne, the Ottoman Empire embraced the widest territorial area which it was ever to cover at any one moment. In what may be called the proper Byzantine field, Cyprus had been recovered and Krete alone stood out. Outside that field, Hungary on the north and Yemen (since Selim’s conquest in 1516) on the south were the frontier provinces, and the Ottoman flag had been carried not only to the Persian Gulf but also far upon the Iranian plateau, in the long wars of Murad III, which culminated in 1588 with the occupation of Tabriz and half Azerbaijan.