Soliman was succeeded on the throne by Selim II., son of a favourite slave, Roxalana. The male issue of the other inmates of the royal harem, whether wives or concubines, had been remorselessly sacrificed to secure the undisputed succession of one who proved the first of his race to set an example of degeneracy from the qualities which had made his predecessors the terror of Christendom. Under the rule of Soliman the power and reputation of the Porte had reached a point of elevation from which it rapidly declined under his sensual and inactive successor, and to which it has never re-ascended. The structure, indeed, raised by the warrior founders of the Ottoman dynasty, survived, without suffering material injury or diminution, too long for the peace and safety of Europe; but this permanence was due less to its own solidity than to the jealousies and dissensions of the Christian powers, political and religious, but more especially the latter. Within two years of Selim’s accession, in 1568, he concluded with the Emperor Maximilian an armistice on the basis of their respective occupation of territory, by which the Turk remained in possession of Lower Hungary. In 1575 this compact was renewed for eight years. The younger Zapolya had previously agreed that after his decease the government of Transylvania should devolve by election upon a Wayvode, a subject of the crown of Hungary; and on his death, in 1571, Steven von Bathory had been accordingly elected. This prince subsequently attained the crown of Poland, and in 1589 his cousin, Sigismund, made over Transylvania to Hungary. In 1590, in the reign of Rodolph II., son and successor to Maximilian, war again broke out between Austria and Turkey, and was prosecuted with much bitterness, but with alternations of success which led to no important results. In 1595 the Turks, after two years of discomfiture, recovered themselves so far as to approach the Austrian frontier in force, and seriously to threaten Vienna. The landsturm of that city was called out, and the defences were strengthened in all haste; but the force of Turkish invasion spent itself upon Upper Hungary. Several strong places in that district having been surrendered, as was alleged, by treason and cowardice, Vienna became during several years the scene of bloody executions. Thus, in 1595, Ferdinand Count Hardegg, and several of his officers, expiated on the scaffold the surrender of Raab. In the same year an engineer, Francis Diano, was executed on a charge of having undertaken to blow up the Rothenthurm bastion on the appearance of a Turkish force. Raab, after three years and a half possession by the Turks, was retaken by the Austrian commanders, Rodolph Schwarzenberg and Nicholas Palfy, an important service which the Emperor Rodolph acknowledged by the erection of columnar monuments, and by the addition of a raven to the escutcheon of the Schwarzenbergs. One of the columns remains to this day in the neighbourhood of Mödling.