Janissaries who dared to ask for an increase of pay were also condemned to death. The first recorded act of Selim’s reign was to strike dead with his own sword a Janissary who was deputed by the corps to ask for the accustomed presents on his accession. It does not appear that these events cast gloom on Selim’s Court. They soon lost the sense of novelty. There were plenty of applicants for the vacant posts, willing and eager to run the risks of office. Selim was agreeable in his conversation and life was gay. He did not indulge in refinements of cruelty like his grandfather Mahomet. He acted from a sense of public duty. If he spilled much blood, he restored and maintained discipline in the army and stemmed the course of corruption. He was distinctly popular with his subjects, with whom, as in most Eastern countries, affection was in part inspired by terror. As was to be expected, Selim’s two elder brothers, Khorkand and Ahmed, whose claims to the Sultanate had been set aside, and who were at the head of important governments in Asia Minor, took up arms against him. Selim, without loss of a moment, led an army to Brusa against them. Khorkand, taken unawares, was quickly defeated. He was allowed an hour’s respite before being bow-strung. During this short interval he wrote a poem deprecating his brother’s cruelty. Selim wept over the poem and ordered a State funeral for his brother. At Brusa a horrible scene of slaughter took place. Five nephews of Selim—possible claimants to the throne—were collected there. They were of varying ages, from five to twenty. They were all strangled by order of the Sultan—the eldest of them resisting with terrible struggles, the youngest with plaintive cries for mercy, while Selim from an adjoining room was a witness of the scene, and urged his mutes to hasten their task. Ahmed, the second and favourite son of Bayezid, made a longer resistance in the field, but a few months later he was defeated and put to death. Selim, now safe on his throne, turned his attention to war with Persia. The principal cause of conflict arose out of a dispute on religion. From an early time the Mahommedan world had been divided into two hostile sects—the Sunnites and the Schiis. The point of difference was whether authority should be attributed to the writings of the four immediate descendants of the Prophet, as the Schiis contended, or whether the words of the Prophet alone should be conclusive on matters of dogma. It would seem that the smaller the difference in dogma between two sects of a religious body, the worse they hate one another; and just as the Christians of the Greek and Latin Churches hated one another more than they hated the followers of Mahomet, so the Sunnites and the Schiis hated one another to the point that they were each bent on exterminating the other—though the difference between them might seem to outsiders to be no greater than that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.