The earliest book that was devoted to a description of Ottoman manners, religion, and government is by Teodoro Spandugino Cantacusino. Born of an Italian father and a Greek mother, he spent his life alternately in the East and the West. His book describes the empire as it was under Bayezid II, who died in 1512, his information about the government being obtained from two very high renegade officials, probably Messih Pasha and Hersek-Zadeh Ahmed Pasha. The earliest edition was printed in French at Paris in 1519 under the title _Petit Traicté de l’Origine des Turcqz_; later editions, with and without his name, or under the name of B. Gycaud, bear the title _La Généalogie du Grant Turc à Présent Regnant_, etc. The edition used here is a reprint of the first French issue, edited with notes by C. Schéfer, Paris, 1896. This writer is sometimes quoted as Spandugino, and sometimes as Cantacusino. The first form is used in the present treatise. A book that is even more valuable in some ways is Giovanni Antonio Menavino’s _Trattato de Costumi et Vita de Turchi_. The edition used here was printed in Florence in 1548. Menavino came of a wealthy Genoese family. About the year 1505, when he was twelve years of age, handsome, bright, and well educated for his years, he was captured near Corsica by corsairs, and set aside as a gift suitable for the sultan. Taken to Bayezid II, he pleased the old sultan greatly, and was placed at once in the school of pages, where, as his book shows throughout, he must have profited greatly by the teaching that he received. He describes the religion, customs, and government of the Ottomans in much detail. In 1514 he was taken by Selim I on the expedition against Persia; but he managed to escape to Trebizond, whence he made his way to Adrianople, Salonika, and thence home to Genoa. A group of excellent sources for studies of both the government and the history of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century is found in the reports which the Venetian _Bailos_ and orators extraordinary presented to their Senate. Venice, says Ranke, “frequently sent her most experienced and able citizens to foreign courts. Not content with the despatches on current affairs regularly sent home every fourteen days, she further required of her ambassadors, when they returned after an absence of two or three years, that they should give a circumstantial account of the court and the country they had been visiting.”[799] Since Constantinople was in the sixteenth century the station of first importance in the Venetian diplomatic service, it is safe to assume that the sons whom she sent there were her most intelligent.