The _Reis Effendi_ was at that time, it would seem, little more than recording secretary of the Divan.[612] The reasons for the later change in the relative importance of these two officials probably lay in the withdrawal of the sultan into his inner palace, and the development of foreign relations. As the sultan became more sequestered, the _Nishanji’s_ personal relation to him was gradually cut off; for the same reason the grand vizier came to be more heavily burdened, and left more responsibility on the _Reis Effendi_. Beginning with Suleiman’s reign, relations with the Western European nations became ever closer and more complicated. Cared for in his time by the grand viziers Ibrahim, Rustem, and Ali,[613] they were entrusted in later reigns to the _Reis Effendi_. Presently, then, this official displaced the _Nishanji_ at the head of the chancery, and the latter was gradually reduced almost to the functions of a name-stamp. Aside from this important difference, and the general fact that the business of the chancery was not so extensive in Suleiman’s time as it became later, and that the functions of separate officials had not come to be so rigidly defined, the inference may be made that the description of the late eighteenth century holds good generally of the Ottoman chancery of the sixteenth century. Little evidence appears as to the status of the personnel of the treasury and chancery departments. The upper officials were drawn from the quieter and more studious members of the school of pages;[614] in the time of Mohammed II the _Nishanji_ might be drawn from the ranks of the _Ulema_.[615] Junis Bey refers to the employees of the bureaus sometimes as slaves and sometimes as companions or scribes. They were paid not in money but by fiefs. Near the close of Suleiman’s reign, it is said, the chancery clerks were Turks, whereas they had been Christians and Greeks not long before, and had written their documents in Greek.[616] Whether or not this be true, the books of the treasury department had been kept in Turkish from the first;[617] but it does not follow, of course, that the clerks of this department had always been Ottomans, or that, if they were, they had been regularly either Moslem-born or renegades. The general reasons which led the sultan to build the Ruling Institution out of slaves in its other aspects would tend to operate here also; on the other hand, the nature of the work demanded persons of quiet tastes and, for many positions, those of considerable learning in language and law, and such persons were more easily to be found in the Moslem-born population than among the Christian subjects or renegades. It would seem that in Suleiman’s time, or shortly before, the personnel of the chancery changed from Christian-born to Moslem-born. Naturally, then, the personnel of the treasury would have been likely to undergo a similar transformation at the same time.