A compact yet widely spread collection of kingdoms and of provinces obeyed the head of the Mohammedan world. Northern Africa, Western Asia, Eastern Europe were ruled from the Bosphorus. All the chief centres of ancient civilization, Rome alone excepted, Thebes, Nineveh and Babylon, Carthage, Athens and Constantinople, bowed beneath the Crescent. The southern frontiers of the Sultan's territories reached beyond the Tropic of Cancer, the northern touched nearly the latitude of Paris. The modern kingdoms of Greece, Servia, Roumania were wholly his; the kingdom of Hungary, the dominions of Austria and of Russia were in part his also. The Black Sea was entirely encircled with Turkish or tributary territory; no other power possessed the same extent of coast line on the Mediterranean. Not only the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile, but the Danube, the Boug, the Dneister, the Dneiper and the Don flowed for a great part of their course between banks subject or tributary to the Porte, and reached the sea by mouths wholly under Turkish control. [Illustration: _Territory ceded by Turkey in 1699._] The armies of the Sultan were unapproachable in numbers, unsurpassable in valour, by those of the Christian powers. Their discipline and warlike science were no longer what they once had been, the first in Europe; but their inequality in these respects to their enemies was not yet so marked as at present. Military and administrative skill were yet to be found in their empire. From the first appearance of the Turks in Europe Mohammedan rule had been, on the whole, extending. The Christian reconquest of Spain was balanced by the inroads of this new enemy upon the Eastern Empire. The Spanish reconquest of Grenada, in the fifteenth century, was more than counterbalanced by the Turkish conquest of Hungary in the sixteenth. The Turks upon the middle Danube were a menace at once to Poland, Germany, and to northern Italy. Nor was this a mere temporary inroad of theirs. Two-thirds of Hungary were then more firmly held in their grasp than Macedonia is at present, and their frontiers were not going back. In the seventeenth century the Ottoman power still more than held its own in Eastern Europe. Though the Spaniards and Venetians had destroyed their fleet at Lepanto in 1571, though Montecuculi at the head of the Imperial troops had routed their armies at St. Gotthard in 1664, though Sobieski and the Poles made the great slaughter of Choczim in 1673, yet the frontiers of the Turks were advanced by every war. After Lepanto, the peace confirmed them in the possession of the newly acquired Cyprus; after St. Gotthard, they retained the strong city of Neuhausel, which they had just won, in Hungary, and conquered Candia; after Choczim, they were confirmed in their possession of the province of Podolia, and their supremacy over the Ukraine, the Marchland of Poland.