fallen upon them during the five centuries before the chrysalis formed.
The break-up of the Arab Caliphate of Bagdad had led to an
interminable, meaningless conflict among a host of petty Moslem States;
the wearing struggle between Islam and Christendom had been intensified
by the Crusades; and waves of nomadic invaders, each more destructive
and more irresistible than the last, had swept over Moslem Asia out of
the steppes and deserts of the north-east. The most terrible were the
Mongols, who sacked Bagdad in 1258, and gave the _coup de grâce_ to the
civilisation of Mesopotamia. And then, when the native productiveness of
the Near East was ruined, the transit trade between Europe and the
Indies, which had belonged to it from the earliest times and had been
the second source of its prosperity, was taken from it by the western
seafarers who discovered the ocean routes. The pall of Ottoman dominion
only descended when life was extinct.

The Osmanlis, whose nomadic forefathers had fled before the face of the
Mongols out of Central Asia, took the heritage which had slipped from
the Mongols' grasp, and gathered all threads of authority in Western
Asia into their hands. The most valuable spoil of their Asiatic
conquests was the Caliphate. Hulaku, the sacker of Bagdad, had put the
Caliph Mustasim to death, and the remnant of the Abbasids had kept up a
shadowy succession at Cairo, under the protection of the Sultan of
Egypt. Selim the Osmanli, when he entered Cairo as a conqueror in 1517,
caused the contemporary Abbasid to cede his title, for what it was
worth, to him and his successors. It was a doubtful title, scorned by
all Shias and regarded coldly by many Sunni rulers who were unwilling to
recognise a spiritual superior in their most formidable temporal rival.
But such as it was, it strengthened the Osmanli's hold on his dominions.
Caliph of Islam, victorious guardian of the Moslem marches, and heir by
conquest of imperial Rûm, the Osmanli Sultan held his Asiatic provinces