The lesson of tolerance was least easily impressed on the nations which had stood in the front rank in the political heyday of Islâm, least of all on the Turks who had played the leading part in the last scene of glory. When in 1258 Bagdad was destroyed by the Mongols and the Abasside Caliphate, dating more than five centuries back, was wiped out, the Mohammedan world was not lifted from its hinges, as would have happened if the Caliphate still had had anything to do with the central government of the Mohammedans. In fact, this princely house had already been living three centuries and a half on the faint afterglow of its ephemeral splendour; and if during that time it was not crowded out by one of the many powerful sultans, its very practical insignificance was the main reason for that. So insignificant had these caliphs in name become that certain European writers sometimes have felt induced to represent them as a kind of religious princes of Islâm, who voluntarily or not had transferred their secular power to the many territorial princes in the wide dominion of Islâm. To them the total lack of secular authority, coupled with the often-manifested reverence of the Moslim for the Caliphate, appeared unintelligible except on the assumption of a spiritual authority, a sort of Mohammedan papacy. Still, such a thing there never was, and Islâm, which knows neither priests nor sacraments, could not have had occasion for it. Here, as elsewhere, the multitude preferred legend to fact: they imagined the successor of the Prophet as still watching over the whole of the Moslim community; as, according to historical tradition, he really did during the first two centuries following the Hijrah, and this long after the institution of the Caliphate had disappeared in the political degeneration of Islâm. However, they did not imagine him as a pope, but as a supreme ruler; above all as the _amîr-al-mu’-minîn_, commander of the legions of Islâm, which sometime would make the whole world bend to its power. The Caliph, the lieutenant of Allah’s Messenger, and the _jihâd_, the holy war against the whole world outside Islâm: with those two names was indissolubly connected the remembrance of those two brilliant centuries in which the course of circumstances seemed to justify the Mohammedan ambition for world-dominion. Whatever disappeared in reality survived in legend; the worship of the shadow-Caliphs of Bagdad made it easier for many Mohammedans to forget the failure of their political ideal.