As to the army, it kept the basis marked out for it by Ala-ed-Din. The élite body of the Janitschars still formed the chief protection of the Sultan’s power. From the regular tribute of blood only Constantinople, Athens, Rhodes, a few other islands, and the Mainotes, the Laconian mountaineers, were exempted. Every five years the officers of the Sultan passed through the villages where children of the peasants were collected, and each fifth one was taken. Oftentimes Christian families were glad to pay the exaction even before the tax collectors appeared. Many of the members of the corps preserved traces of their early faith, and so drank wine without scruple. The solidarity of the body was maintained by exceptional privileges; their pay was large; they had a special share of the booty, or regular donatives, and the assurance of a pension for old age. The Janitschars were forbidden to marry or to engage in any trade. They could be punished only by their own officers, and even the grand vizier had no jurisdiction over them. In the time of Souliman they numbered 12,000, and as their numbers increased their turbulence grew. Selim attempted to meet this difficulty by incorporating in their body 7000 of the palace servants, and by dividing the command. In the government of the subject peoples no uniformity was observed. The inhabitants of mountain regions, the Albanians, the Montenegrins, the Mainotes, the dwellers on Mt. Libanus, were protected from tyrannical actions. Where the country was level, there were no bounds to the barbarity of Turkish governmental methods. The vassal states, such as Transylvania, Moldavia, Georgia, were still ruled by native princes. But under Ottoman rule, in spite of the constant wars and the attendant anarchic conditions, there was worked out a crude kind of unity throughout the Empire. At least, with an Ottoman overlord, there prevailed a condition of internal peace between the various portions of the Empire, that gave stability to commercial relations and rendered communication easy between distant parts. Religious persecution in the sense in which it had existed in the Byzantine Empire, and in the Eastern domains of the Italian municipalities, was now unknown. At Rhodes the Greeks preferred the new régime to the rule of the Knights Hospitalers, who, as Latins, had showed no sympathy with the Orthodox Church. In Crete and Greece the Turks were more popular as masters than the Venetians; and the Servians, Hungarians, and Roumanians preferred Moslem control to that of Catholic Austria.