The reputation, too, for justice and moderation enjoyed by the early Ottoman sovereigns was no insignificant factor in conciliating the goodwill and blunting the opposition of nations, who might under different conditions have opposed a more serious resistance to the advance of the Ottoman armies. Sixty years before the appearance of the Turks before Constantinople, the people of the ancient kingdoms of Roumania were called upon to choose between the Magyars—who, in conformity with their traditional policy, desired to Magyarise Wallachia—and the Ottoman sovereign, who offered the inhabitants the enjoyment of their religious and civil liberty. They did not hesitate between the two, and Mircea signed, with the Sultan Bayazid, the first capitulation of Roumania (1393). Twenty‐six years later, in 1419, the Servian ruler Brankovich, pressed by John Hunyadi, ruler of Hungary, to join him in an alliance against the Turks, invited him to state the policy in respect to religion that he proposed to adopt, in the event of victory attending their joint military efforts. Hunyadi answered without periphrasis, that the Servians would have to adopt the Catholic worship. Brankovich then addressed a similar question to Mehemet I. “I propose,” replied the latter, “to build a church next to every mosque, and proclaim that every one shall be at liberty to follow his own worship and religion.” Brankovich rejected the Hungarian alliance, and declared himself the vassal of the Turkish Sultan. But, it has been contended, the condition of the Christian populations (_Raias_) of the countries actually conquered by Islam was very different; and there is even a widespread popular belief that these populations were forced to “opt” (to use a modern phrase) between the religion of the conquerors and death, the poll‐tax (_kharadj_) being the money composition imposed in commutation of the death sentence. Nothing can be more erroneous. The _kharadj_ was the tax imposed on the Christian population in lieu of the military service and other similar duties from which they were exempted, disabilities generally regarded by them as privileges, and in consequence of which they have increased and multiplied and become rich and prosperous in the land. An entirely false interpretation has been given to a passage in the Koran, which was even quoted by the Austrian plenipotentiaries at the Conference of Niemirow, in 1737, in support of the “Death or Koran” theory here referred to. The true answer, which indeed is obvious from the context, was given by the Ottoman negotiators on this occasion, viz., that the text quoted applied only to idolaters and not to the “people of the Book.” Anyone who knows anything of the religion of Mahomet is aware of the important distinction recognised therein between the “people of the Book” (_kitabi_) and idolaters (_medjous_), and knows that whereas little mercy, it is true, was shown to the latter, the former were