ppointment did Selim satisfy the orthodox caliphial
tradition; but, besides his acquisition of certain venerated relics of the
Prophet, such as the _Sanjak i-sherif_ or holy standard, and besides a yet
more important acquisition--the control of the holy cities of the faith--
he could base a claim on the unquestioned fact that the office was vacant,
and the equally certain fact that he was the most powerful Moslem prince
in the world. Purists might deny him if they dared: the vulgar Sunni mind
was impressed and disposed to accept. The main importance, however, of
Selim's assumption of the caliphate was that it consecrated Osmanli
militarism to a religious end--to the original programme of Islam. This
was a new thing, fraught with dire possibilities from that day forward. It
marked the supersession of the Byzantine or European ideal by the Asiatic
in Osmanli policy, and introduced a phase of Ottoman history which has
endured to our own time.

The inevitable process was continued in the next reign. Almost all the
military glories of Suleiman--known to contemporary Europe as 'the
Magnificent' and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli sultans--
made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire. His earliest operations
indeed, the captures of Rhodes from the Knights and of Belgrade and
[)S]abac from the Hungarians, expressed a legitimate Byzantine policy; and
the siege of Malta, one of his latest ventures, might also be defended as
a measure taken in the true interests of Byzantine commerce. But the most
brilliant and momentous of his achievements bred evils for which military
prestige and the material profits to be gained from the oppression of an
irreconcilable population were inadequate compensation. This was the
conquest of Hungary. It would result in Buda and its kingdom remaining
Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and in the principalities of
Wallachia and Moldavia abiding under the Ottoman shadow even longer, and
passing for all time out of the central European into the Balkan sphere;
but also it would result in the Osmanli power finding itself on a weak
frontier face to face at last with a really strong Christian race, the
Germanic, before which, since it could not advance, it would have
ultimately to withdraw; and in the rousing of Europe to a sense of its
common danger from Moslem activity. Suleiman's failure to take Vienna more
than made good the panic which had followed on his victory at Mohacs.