empire, and the first conflict experienced with Russia. The year 1600 marked the point of greatest territorial extent.
Then followed a decline; Turkey itself receded, then it was dismembered. Hungary was first lopped off, then Transylvania, then Wallachia, and so on; and the empire had to acknowledge the independence of peoples once subject to it. We have noted the causes of growth: those of decline are no less evident. In the first place, Turkey has ever been a consumer, not a producer: a military power, she has fattened on what conquered lands could give her: she gave them nothing. Often she gave them worse than nothing—cruelty, brutal lust, slavery. After Suleiman—a prince who held his own in that Renaissance age which saw a Charles V, an Elizabeth, a Francis I, a Leo X—there was, in place of barbaric but direct government, indirection and the growing seclusion of the Sultan, induced largely by the pernicious harem influence. The first ten sultans had been robust, able, cruel; the last twenty-five (save Mahmud II) have been no less cruel, but no longer robust, no longer able. There were now, however, external causes to accentuate the internal, the chief of which was Russia's rise. By 1700 the Turkish dominions in Europe had shrunk to half their former extent. The next century saw Russian aggrandizement come to such a point that not only did the Crimean Khanate become independent of Turkey, but gates at Moscow and Kherson were inscribed "The Way to Constantinople," and Constantine became henceforth an honored name in the Russian Imperial family. Later events—Navarino, the disaffection of Egypt, the treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi lately rumored to have been readopted), the
