286 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY Peaceful abroad and quarrelsome at home, they earned the character, which they enjoy to-day, of being at once the best fighters and the most industrious traders of the Soudan.

Eastward again of Haussaland and its multitudes, including the settlements which have been already mentioned of Fulanis, Wangaras, and all the southern pagan states, lay the well-organised Empire of Bornu, occupying on the western side of Lake Chad a territory more extensive, but not widely different from, its present position, as shown upon modern maps, while to the north and east it spread round the shores of the great lake, and extending far into the desert, was almost conterminous with the Egyptian frontiers of the Turkish Empire.

It will be remembered that in the contemporary life of Europe Mohammedanism had been steadily gaining in the East, under the Turks, what it had been losing in the West under the Saracens. The Seljukian Turks had overrun Egypt itself in the middle of the thirteenth century. Their Mamelukes or foreign soldiery elected a Sultan for themselves in Cairo in the year 1260, and though the Abbasside Caliphs preserved a nominal supremacy, which was chiefly religious, Egypt was, in fact, governed by the Mameluke Sultans, until they in turn were overthrown by the Ottoman Turks. The Ottoman Turks were established in Europe, in the Balkan Peninsula, in 1353, exactly one hundred years before their final conquest of Constantinople. About the year 1389 their famous leader, Bajazet, accepted the title of Sultan firom the Abbasside Caliph of Egypt, who still kept the name of Head of the Moslem Church. Shortly after accepting the title of Sultan he defeated the confederate army of the Christian powers at Nicropolis, and while an attack of the gout prevented him from fulfilling a vow to stable his horse in St. Peter's at Rome, he was able so closely to besiege Constantinople that it must have fallen in 1402 but for the intervention of Tamerlane.