“In matters of State the _Sultan_ demands his opinion, whether it be in Condemnation of any great man to Death, or in making War or Peace, or other important Affairs of the Empire; either to appear the more just and religious, or to incline the People more willingly to Obedience. And this practice is used in business of greatest moment; scarce a Visier is proscribed, or a _Pashaw_ for pretence of crime displaced, or any matter of great alteration or change designed, but the Grand Signior arms himself with the _Mufti’s_ Sentence; for the nature of man reposes more security in innocence and actions of Justice, than in the absolute and uncontroulable power of the Sword. And the Grand Signior, tho he himself is above the Law, and is the Oracle and Fountain of Justice, yet it is seldom that he proceeds so irregularly to contemn that Authority wherein their Religion hath placed an ultimate power of Decision in all their Controversies.”[668] The power of the _Mufti_ in the sixteenth century may be illustrated by one or two instances. In the early years of the century, shortly before the appearance of the Reformation movement in Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire was threatened by the presence of large numbers of heretics in Asia Minor, simultaneously with the rise of a strong Mohammedan heretical power in Persia. Selim the Grim disposed of the heretics in his dominions by wholesale execution,[669] and punished, though he failed to crush, the Persians by the defeat of Khaldiran and the annexation of a large part of their territory. After he had got rid of Mohammedan heresy in his dominions, he was impressed with the absence of unity occasioned by the presence of the Christian subjects.[670] Accordingly he decided to order all these Christians to accept Islam on pain of death. To say that he desired to execute the Christians of his dominions would be to put the emphasis in the wrong place. He seems rather to have had in mind such a process as was carried through in Spain in the course of the sixteenth century, as a result of which none were left in that land who professed another than the dominant religion.