The finance of the Empire under Solyman was most carefully husbanded. He fully recognized the strength given to his country by a well-filled treasury. In spite of his many wars, there were only two years in which he found it necessary to levy exceptional taxes. In other years the ordinary revenue sufficed. Taxation was comparatively light. His wars in part paid for themselves by levies and exactions on the invaded countries, and by the sale of captives. Janissaries and Spahis, numbering together about fifty thousand, formed the standing army, and were well paid. The holders of fiefs throughout the Empire were bound to military service in time of war, and to bring horses and arms. They numbered about eighty thousand, and received no pay. Neither did the horde of irregular cavalry, Tartars, and others who accompanied his armies, receive pay. They provided for themselves by ravaging the countries they passed through. Under these conditions, the wars of Solyman were not burdensome to the State. Like so many of his predecessors, Solyman had a strong bent to literary studies and poetry. His poems have a reputation among his countrymen for dignity. He compiled a daily journal of his campaigns which is of historical value. He was a liberal patron of science and art. His reign was the Augustan age of Turkey. He was generous in his expenditure on mosques, colleges, hospitals, aqueducts, and bridges, not only in Constantinople, but in all the principal cities of his Empire. It is to be noted that the sobriquet ‘Magnificent’ was given to Solyman by contemporaries in Europe. In Turkey, he was known as ‘the Legislator.’ His reign was conspicuous for great reforms in every branch of the law—all aimed at justice. The land laws were overhauled. The feudal system of fiefs, which had been partially adopted on the model of other countries in Europe, was simplified and improved. The position of the ‘rayas,’ was ameliorated. Something like fixity of tenure was secured to them. The condition of the peasantry in Turkey was distinctly better than that of the serfs in Hungary and Russia. The Greek population of the Morea preferred Turkish rule to that of the Venetians. A certain number of Hungarian peasants voluntarily left their country and settled under the more humane government of Turkey in Roumelia. A further proof of the general contentment of the people through the great expanse of the Turkish Empire was that during the forty-six years of Solyman’s reign there was no outbreak among any one of the twenty different races which inhabited it—and this in spite of the fact that the country districts were denuded of troops for the many campaigns in Hungary and Persia. While giving Solyman full credit for all these great achievements of his reign, it is necessary to point out that impartial historians have detected defects in his system of government, which grew apace under his incompetent successors, and led inevitably to the decadence of the Ottoman Empire.