It is not easy to learn what thoughts possessed the hearts of the members of the Ruling Institution. Enough is recorded, however, to show that not all who turned Moslem did so without mental reservation, and to prove that it was possible to hold fast to an inward belief in the superiority of Christianity through many years spent in the sultan’s service. It has been said sometimes that the converted Christians were more severe than the Moslems toward their brethren who remained steadfast.[175] This would be natural both because of the zeal of new converts, and because Christianity is intrinsically less tolerant than Mohammedanism; but the accusation does not seem to be supported as against the members of the Ruling Institution. A distinction must be drawn between behavior in time of war and in time of peace. The Janissaries were fierce fighters and terrible enemies; but religiously they belonged to a sect which was so liberal as to be accused of rank heresy, and even, it is said, to have been denied the name of true believers.[176] Many of the renegades were persons who held no sort of religion.[177] The grand vizier Rustem told Busbecq, after offering him great rewards if he would turn Moslem, that he believed in the salvation of those of other faiths;[178] and a _deli_, or scout, in his service confided to a French gentleman that, while he pretended to follow Mohammedanism, he was a Christian at heart.[179] The fact that a Genoese boy, taken at twelve years of age, educated as a favored page for eight or nine years, and evidently trained carefully in Mohammedan beliefs, would seize the first opportunity to escape shows what was possible beneath the surface.[180] Two generations earlier there was a renegade who cursed the day when he had turned Turk, but who felt that he could not go back.[181] Nor were the members of the system always submissive to the stricter rules of Mohammedan ethics. The Janissaries, for example, forced Bayezid II to reopen the wine shops of the capital, which in the religious fervor of his later years he had ordered closed;[182] and the members of the government were led by fondness for display and lavish expenditure into shameless venality, the cause and the effect being equally contrary to the teachings and example of Mohammed. The probability is that large numbers of the sultan’s slaves were merely nominal Mohammedans in religious belief, though they necessarily followed the larger part of the Moslem scheme of life. EFFECT OF THE PROCESS