What was left for the Byzantines to contribute to the Ottoman? He had received already the main features of his national character,—language, literary influences, law, and religion. One of his two leading institutions was already almost fully developed in Moslem lands, and required only transplantation. The other, however, the institution of war and government, could still be modified considerably; and this was to incorporate much from the Byzantines.[30] Many details of governmental organization, both imperial and local, a supplementary system of taxation, a greatly elaborated taste for court ceremonial and splendor, a plan of organizing foreign residents under a special law, and a host of lesser usages and customs were to be taken over by the Ottomans. The Ottoman feudal system also probably owed its final form to the Byzantines; and perhaps it was from them that the Ottomans learned their abnormal love for fees and gifts. The matchless structure of Saint Sophia served as a model for the superb mosques that lift the shapely masses of their great gray domes, supported by clusters of semidomes and lesser domes, above the cypress trees and gardens of the rounded hills which in Constantine’s city slope down to the blue waters of the Sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn. This sketch of the origin of the elements of Ottoman culture does not profess to be in any sense complete. So great a subject is worthy of separate and extended treatment. No more has been attempted here than partly to prepare the way for an understanding of the strange system of government which the Ottoman Turks developed, and to show that that system was no new creation, but was made of elements which in their origins reached far back into the past. Out of old and tried ideas was built up a double structure which was individual, conservative, and efficient, strong, durable, and useful. CHAPTER I THE CHARACTER OF THE OTTOMAN STATE IN GENERAL DEFINITION The Ottoman Turkish state of the sixteenth century was a despotism, limited and supported by the Mohammedan Sacred Law; it governed a vast territory, which had been gathered by the progressive conquest of many separate lands, and which was consequently held in many diverse relationships; it ruled a multitude of peoples, some of which were favored as holding to the state religion, and others of which, though in an inferior position, had yet the right by sacred compacts to practise other religions and obey other laws.