This second period of Islam, though containing her greatest glories and her highest worldly prosperity, is held to be less complete by divines than the first thirty years which had preceded it.  Islam was no longer one.  To say nothing of the Persian and Arabian schisms, the orthodox world itself was divided, and rival Caliphs had established themselves independently in Spain and Egypt.  Moreover, during the last two centuries the temporal power of the Caliphs was practically in delegation to the Seljuk Turks, who acted as mayors of the palace, and their spiritual power was unsupported by any show of sanctity or learning.  It was terminated forcibly by the pagan Holagu, who at the head of the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258.

The third period of Caliphal history saw all temporal power wrested from the Caliphs.  Islam, on the destruction of the Arabian monarchy, resolved itself into a number of separate States, each governed by its own Bey or Sultan, who in his quality of temporal prince was head also of religion within his own dominions.  The Mongols, converted to the Faith of Mecca, founded a Mohammedan empire in the east; the Seljuk Turks, replaced by the Ottoman, reigned in Asia Minor; the Barbary States had their own rulers; and Egypt was governed by that strange dynasty of slaves, the Mameluke Sultans.  Nowhere was a supreme temporal head of Islam to be seen, and the name of Khalifeh as that of a reigning sovereign ceased any longer to be heard of in the world.  Only the nominal succession of the Prophet was obscurely preserved at Cairo, whither the survivors of the family of Abbas had betaken themselves on the massacre of their house at Bagdad.

It is difficult to ascertain the precise position of these titular Caliphs under the Mameluke monarchy in Egypt.  That they were little known to the world in general is certain; and one is sometimes tempted to suspect the complete authenticity of the succession preserved through them.  Contemporary Christian writers do not mention them, and it is evident from Sir John Mandeville and others that in Egypt the Egyptian Sultan himself was talked of as head of the Mussulman religion.  I have heard their position compared with that of the present Sheykhs el Islam at Constantinople—­that is to say, they were appointed by the Sultan, and were made use of by him as a means of securing Mussulman allegiance—­and I believe this to have been all their real status.  They are cited, however, as in some sense sovereigns by Hanefite teachers, whose argument it is that the succession of the Prophet has never lapsed, or Islam been without a recognized temporal head.  The Sultans, neither of Egypt nor of India, nor till Selim’s time of the Turkish Empire, ever claimed for themselves the title of Khalifeh, nor did the Sherifal family of Mecca, who alone of them might have claimed it legally as Koreysh.  Neither did Tamerlane nor any of the Mussulman Mongols who reigned at Bagdad.  The fact is, we may assume the Caliphate was clean forgotten at the time Selim bethought him of it as an instrument of power.