Fourth and last, the great task before the Ottoman Turks was a work of unification. Lands which had been united under the great Theodosius, and then during eleven centuries had been more and more disintegrated by invasion of German, Slav, Arab, Tatar, and Turk, by war of Byzantine, Persian, Moslem, Crusader, and Mongol, by destruction of roads and safe water-routes, and by general decay of civilization, until confusion and disorder reigned and anarchy seemed not far ahead—these lands were once more brought under a single control. Was it their destiny to be genuinely reunited, not merely in a common subjection, not merely by an external shell of authority, but in the pulsing life of a vigorous nation, harmonious in every part and run through by patriotism? This was the well-nigh insoluble problem which the Ottoman Turks attempted bravely. How they solved the administrative and governmental phase of it the present treatise will try to show. Religious unity was out of the question; and in the sixteenth century, in East and West alike, social and cultural unity waited upon the religious. Had the Ottoman Empire been able four hundred years ago to set apart religious considerations as matters for the individual—a process which affords the chief hope of the new Turkey of the twentieth century—her whole subsequent history must have been very different. But in the measure in which unity was attained in the Levant under the Ottoman authority, in that measure did the Ottoman Empire render service to civilization and humanity. After the close of the thirteenth century Western Europe, absorbed in its own affairs, was able to give little attention to the East. Two centuries were taken up with the consolidation of national powers, chiefly at the expense of feudalism and the medieval church. By the sixteenth century a measure of internal solidarity had been attained and the struggle for external supremacy over the West had been begun. The whole situation was complicated by the actively leavening force of the New Learning and the explosively rending force of the Reformation. Under such circumstances even the advance of the Turks into Central Europe could only temporarily divert attention from absorbing problems and direct it toward the East. To what a state of minute division and infinite disorder the Levant would have come by that time, had the Ottoman Empire not grown up, can only be imagined. Egypt, the only Levantine power of consequence after the close of the crusades, had reached the natural limits of her dominion, and had she aimed at wider conquests the Mameluke government would scarcely have been capable of imperial sway. No other of the countless principalities of the eastern Mediterranean showed enough life to accomplish unity. But the Ottoman Turks, cruelly and destructively, imperfectly and clumsily, yet surely and effectively, built up and maintained a single authority, to which the