The members of the Ruling Institution had not always had their own system of justice; they had long been under the jurisdiction of the ordinary Moslem courts. This had led to an essential difficulty; the ordinary courts were part of another institution and were recruited in a wholly different way; their judges had risen through a rival system of education, and were men of letters rather than men of war; the favored _kullar_ of the sultan had, therefore, come to feel averse to obeying them.[409] Accordingly, Bayezid II had ordered that the members of his family should be judged by their own officers.[410] This was a radical change; for it brought into prominence the distinction between the two institutions, and had the further effect of setting off the _kullar_ from all the rest of the population of the empire, and of constituting them almost a separate nationality. Their position became one greatly to be desired. The Moslem-born population came to feel that somewhere there was a great injustice. They whose ancestors had shed their blood for the faith were, in the lands which their fathers had conquered, denied admittance to the class which not only filled most of the offices of army and state but enjoyed high privileges. Sons of the conquered inhabitants, infidel-born, might alone become nobles, paid by the state rather than contributing to its expenses, not subject to the judges trained from boyhood in the Sacred Law; while their own Moslem sons were rigidly excluded from the honored class, were obliged to bear a part in the burdens of the state with small hope of sharing its glory, and were expected to take their chances before the same courts to which Christians and Jews were brought for civil and criminal cases. The very extent of the privileges of the _kullar_ made toward the break-down of the system. NOBILITY NOT HEREDITARY The privileges of the sultan’s _kullar_ fell short of those of Western nobility in one very important respect, namely, that they could not normally be handed on to the descendants and heirs of those privileged. This exception is so important that various Western writers have affirmed that the Turks had no nobles.[411] As the word is used in this treatise, heredity is not regarded as of the essence of nobility; the latter is considered to lie in the possession of special personal privilege, recognized in the structure of the state.