ABSTRACT
The main eastward and south-eastward expansion of Ottoman power occurred half a century after the fall of Constantinople to their arms, and their completion of the conquest of the Balkans and south Russia. The Grim Sultan proceeded next to defeat the Mamluks of Egypt, make the Nile Valley an Ottoman province, acquire the Hijaz and its Holy Cities, and take with him from Cairo to Istanbul the robes and trinkets of the 'Abbasid Caliph, which honorific rank the Sultan was later to assume. The Islamic religion, retained with full rigid orthodoxy by the Sultanate and the 'Ulama, who provided almost the only Muslim educated class, was throughout much of the Empire defiled with all sorts of heresy and barely-Muslim contamination. Egypt attained full independence as a sultanate, then a kingdom, then a republic. In Turkey the ancient monarchy made way for a modern-type republic, ruling, however, less than half of the former Ottoman territory.
