From the eighth century Turks drifted southwestward in ever-increasing numbers out of Chinese territory into the declining Saracen Empire. Early in the eleventh century an army followed this course and set up the vast but short-lived empire of the Seljuk Turks. These broke the eastern frontier of Asia Minor, which had protected the Greeks and Romans for fourteen hundred years, and pushed on until they could see the domes of Constantinople. The eastward pressure of the crusading period kept them from European shores for two centuries, near the close of which the Mongols overran their disintegrated lands. A remnant, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, struggled on in Asia Minor until the close of the thirteenth century, when it fell into ten parts. The East Roman, or Byzantine Empire, had by that time also been thoroughly wrecked, and the Balkan Peninsula was divided among Frank, Italian, and Catalan, Greek, Serb, Albanian, Wallach, and Bulgarian. The people of one of the ten fragments of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm took the name of Osmanlis from their chief Osman. Located on the border of the Greek and Turkish groups of principalities, they drew men and governmental ideas from both. The rapidity of their growth from so small a beginning, and under such apparently unfavorable circumstances, into a durable state is one of the marvellous things of history. In about two and a quarter centuries from the time of their independence they were able to attempt for the last time to unite the entire Mediterranean civilization into one empire. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Armenia, Asia Minor, Greece, the Balkan Peninsula, a large part of modern Austria-Hungary and of modern Russia, were theirs; they threatened Italy, Central and Eastern Europe, and Persia. They thus held all three of the earliest centers of Mediterranean civilization, the western half of the Old Persian Empire, and all the dominions of Rome except the northwestern one-third. Apart from Spain and the lands east of the Zagros Mountains, they ruled the Saracen Empire. With the exception of Italy (with Illyricum and the adjacent islands) and the short-lived Byzantine conquests in Spain, the empire of Justinian lay within their boundaries. The later Byzantine Empire became the heart of their dominions, and its two chief supports—the trade which passed through the Bosphorus and the products and men of Asia Minor—became their own principal supports. The inheritance of lands and of institutions by the Ottoman Turks from the two great medieval empires of the Levant, the Saracen and the East Roman, is by all odds the most pregnant fact of their existence. They were the immediate heirs of a part of the territory and of the whole of the culture of the Seljuk Turks. The scene of the “world’s debate” formed but an insignificant part of their dominions. They gathered into one net all the shoal of feudal, royal, and imperial