The wide Ottoman territory held a great number of peoples, marked off by differences of race, language, religion, and customs. The raided belt was inhabited chiefly by Southern Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Poles, and Russians; and the Christian shores and islands of the Mediterranean chiefly by Greeks, Italians, French, and Spaniards. Accordingly, slaves from all these peoples were constantly forwarded to the center and distributed widely—in the service of the sultan, in the households of the great, and on the estates of country gentlemen. They were treated without prejudice in accordance with their abilities, and in the end the great majority were brought into the Moslem fold, many of them rising to the highest positions. The inhabitants of the tributary states were left in possession of most of their own institutions, but whether to their advantage in the long run is a question open to debate.[60] They were plundered directly by their own princes and indirectly by the Turks, and they had almost no part in the work and life of the empire. The Mingrelians and Georgians captured and even raised children for the slave-trade of the empire proper and of Egypt.[61] The Egyptian fellahs toiled, as they have done through all ages, to produce wealth for their masters, who were now in two bodies—the Mamelukes, recruited as always from slaves of many races, and the group of officials and Janissaries who aided and sustained the Ottoman pasha. The Berbers of North Africa furnished a sufficient task of government to their rulers, who consisted of a body of officials and Janissaries recruited from captives and from the Turks and other inhabitants of southwestern Asia Minor,[62] but connected only at the top with the central government of the empire. In the region which was under more or less direct administration, Albanians, Servians, Croatians, Bulgarians, and Greeks—in general, the Christian subjects in the Balkan Peninsula—furnished most of the tribute children; but some were taken from the Christians of western and northeastern Asia Minor and the Caucasus region.[63] Kurds and Arabs, being Moslems, could not be enslaved, but they fought for the empire on the eastern frontiers. Armenians and Jews were, by ancient privilege, exempt from both blood tribute and military service.[64]