For a long time it was the task of the armies of western Europe to set bounds to the Turkish sway. Today the powers of Europe seem anxious to keep the Turkish state in existence. Not so very long ago serious concern was felt lest Islam gain the upper hand in a great part of the West, as it had done in the Orient. The adherents of the prophet had conquered countries where Christianity had been rooted for centuries. The classic soil of the apostles, Corinth and Ephesus, Nicea (the city of synods and churches), also Antioch, Nicomedia, and Alexandria had yielded to their strength. Even the cradle of Christianity and the grave of the Saviour, Palestine and Jerusalem, did homage to the Infidels, who held their possessions against the united armies of the western knights. It was left to the Infidels to put an end to the long existence of the Roman Empire, and to dedicate St. Sophia, where Christ and the saints had been worshipped for almost one thousand years, to Allah and his prophet. At the very time when people were wrangling about religious dogmas in Constance, when the reconciliation between the Greek and the Catholic churches had failed, and the defection of forty million people from the rule of the Pope was threatening, the Moslems advanced victoriously to Steiermark and Salzburg. The noblest prince of Europe at that time, the Roman King, fled from his capital before them; and St. Stephen in Vienna came near being turned into a mosque, like St. Sophia in Byzantium. At that time the countries from the African desert to the Caspian Sea, and from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, obeyed the orders of the Padisha. Venice and the German Emperors were registered among the tributaries of the Porte. From it three quarters of the coastlands of the Mediterranean took their orders. The Nile, the Euphrates, and almost the Danube had become Turkish rivers, as the archipelago and the Black Sea were Turkish inland waters. And after barely two hundred years this same mighty empire reveals to us a picture of dissolution which promises an early end. In the two old capitals of the world, Rome and Constantinople, the same means have been employed to the same ends, the unity of the dogma to obtain unrestricted power. The vicar of St. Peter and the heir of the calif have fallen thereby into identical impotency.