But from the middle of the seventeenth century a change came over the spirit of the Sultanate in Turkey. Instead of identifying themselves with the life of their people and priding themselves on being the light that guided them, the Sultans now retired into the harems and gave themselves up to a life of ease and indulgence utterly foreign to the habits and principles of their great predecessors. They surrendered the reins of government into the hands of their Kizlar‐Agassi (chiefs of eunuchs), or Bostandji Bashi, and as one favourite succeeded another, or one palace clique displaced another, so vizier followed vizier in rapid and bewildering succession. All the corrupt and turbulent elements in the State were now unchained, justice was sacrificed to private interests, the muscles of the State were relaxed, and its most vital interests neglected and ignored. To such a pass had things come in this “State of Denmark,” that when at last a reforming Sultan arose in the person of Selim III., he had to pay with his life his reforming ardour, and leave to his successor, Mahmoud II., a task almost beyond human strength to accomplish. The reigns of the next three Sultans after Selim are the history of honest, though intermittent, struggles against the fatal legacies of the past two centuries, and of many abortive attempts to grapple with the evils that a departure from the primitive Constitution of the Empire had entailed on it, aggravated as these evils were by revolutions organised across its borders, and the systematic intrigues and almost uninterrupted hostility of its nearest neighbours. But in following the evolution of the struggle between autocracy and the Ottoman people, and endeavouring to trace its origin, we have been anticipating the chronological order of events. We must now return to the narrative of the military movement of the eighteenth century, from the time that Peter the Great turned the energies of his diplomacy and his armies in the direction of the Ottoman provinces. The first collision between the armed forces of Turkey and Russia ended unfavourably for the latter. By the treaty of Falksen (1711), Russia was compelled to restore Azov, that she had seized, and to undertake to abstain from meddling in the affairs of Poland. But for the treachery of Baltadji Mehemet Pasha, it is probable that this first campaign would have ended still more disastrously for Russian arms, and possibly the final partition of Poland would have been averted. That unhappy country found, at this crisis of her history, in the Sultan of Turkey her sole champion and defender among the sovereigns of Europe, and her name figured for the last time in history in a public instrument in which her rights were safeguarded by a Mahomedan sovereign against the deadly machinations of her Christian neighbour.