Apart from this great achievement, he showed inflexible firmness and courage in the great difficulties which confronted him, and almost alone he bore the burden of the State for thirty-one years of unparalleled peril, and often of most serious disaster. It will be seen that, in spite of these high qualities, and in spite of the reform of his army, the losses of territory to his Empire were very serious. In Greece, the Morea, and the provinces north of the Gulf of Corinth up to the frontier of Thessaly, acquired complete independence under the guarantee of the three Great Powers of Europe. Egypt, Moldavia and Wallachia, and Serbia attained almost similar independence, subject only to the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan of Turkey and the payment of fixed tributes. They no longer added to the real strength of the Empire. On the other hand, he completely destroyed the power of the rebellious Pashas of Janina, Widdin, Bagdad, and Acre, and through Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, he subdued the Wahabees and recovered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It should be added that Mahmoud, unlike so many of his predecessors, devoted his life to affairs of his State rather than to his harem. He committed at times acts of great cruelty. He put to death his brother Mustapha and Mustapha’s only son, and caused to be drowned in the Bosphorus four ladies of Mustapha’s harem who were enceinte. He had no scruple in directing the secret assassination of any persons whom he suspected of harbouring schemes in opposition to his own. He authorized the perpetration of ruthless massacres of Greeks in all parts of his Empire at the inception of the revolution in Greece. But these were acts of policy in accord with the traditions of his family, approved by public opinion of the Turks, by whom terrorism and massacre were recognized as justifiable methods of government. The murder of his relatives left him the sole survivor of the Othman race, a position which secured him from intrigues against his throne by the Janissaries. The most serious of the losses to the Empire in Mahmoud’s reign was that of Egypt, for it was a Moslem country, and though for many years previously the hold on it by the Ottoman Porte had been slender, and the Mamelukes had been able, as a rule, to impose their will and to govern the province, yet the Porte could in the main rely on it for support to the Empire in times of emergency. It will be well, therefore, to explain the changes effected in Egypt, for it will be seen that they had a great bearing on events in other parts of the Ottoman Empire.