[3] The influence of environment and heredity on human evolution in general and on the history of the East in particular, though of great importance, cannot be treated in a summary such as this. The influence of climatic and other environmental factors has been ably treated by Prof. Ellsworth Huntington in his various works, such as _The Pulse of Asia_ (Boston, 1907); _Civilization and Climate_ (Yale Univ. Press, 1915), and _World-Power and Evolution_ (Yale Univ. Press, 1919). See also Chap. III. in Arminius Vambery--_Der Islam im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Eine culturgeschichtliche Studie_ (Leipzig, 1875). For a summary of racial influences in Eastern history, see Madison Grant--_The Passing of the Great Race_ (N. Y., 1916). [4] The Turkish overrunning of Asia Minor took place after the destruction of the Byzantine army in the great battle of Manzikert, A.D. 1071. The Turks captured Jerusalem in 1076. CHAPTER I THE MOHAMMEDAN REVIVAL By the eighteenth century the Moslem world had sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude. Nowhere were there any signs of healthy vigour, everywhere were stagnation and decay. Manners and morals were alike execrable. The last vestiges of Saracenic culture had vanished in a barbarous luxury of the few and an equally barbarous degradation of the multitude. Learning was virtually dead, the few universities which survived fallen into dreary decay and languishing in poverty and neglect. Government had become despotism tempered by anarchy and assassination. Here and there a major despot like the Sultan of Turkey or the Indian "Great Mogul" maintained some semblance of state authority, albeit provincial pashas were for ever striving to erect independent governments based, like their masters', on tyranny and extortion. The pashas, in turn, strove ceaselessly against unruly local chiefs and swarms of brigands who infested the countryside. Beneath this sinister hierarchy groaned the people, robbed, bullied, and ground into the dust. Peasant and townsman had alike lost all incentive to labour or initiative, and both agriculture and trade had fallen to the lowest level compatible with bare survival.