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The subsequent occupation of the Byzantine capital by the heirs of the Byzantine system, and their still later assumption of caliphial responsibility, were not needed to cement the union. Even a military occupation by Russia or by another strong power would not detach Anatolia from the Osmanli unity; for a thing cannot be detached from itself.
The religious prestige of the Ottoman power as the repository of caliphial authority and trustee for Islam in the Holy Land of Arabia, is an asset almost impossible to estimate. Would a death struggle of the Osmanlis in Europe rouse the Sunni world? Would the Moslems of India, Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, and Malaya take up arms for the Ottoman sultan as caliph?
True that neither by his birth nor by the manner of his appointment 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.
The expansion of Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples living in incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse political and social conditions, has probably made any universal caliphial authority for ever impossible.
A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad's line at the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body of the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial empires and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine imperial type.
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