stunned were the maritime States that they took no action, letting "I dare not wait upon I would." Their indecision was fatal. Had the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Catalans at this juncture formed an alliance, they might have chased the Turks from off the face of the waters; but to mutual jealousy and indecision was added fear—fear of this new and mighty power which had arisen and had swept away one of the landmarks of Europe. So it fell out that Genoa entered into an arrangement with the Grand Turk, and Venice concluded a treaty of commerce on April 18th, 1454. It was the Caliph Mahomet who first fortified the Dardanelles, where he mounted thirty heavy guns before which Jacques Loredano, the Venetian admiral, recoiled, reporting to the Republic that henceforward none could pass the Straits. We have, however, nothing to do with the Grand Turk in these pages, save, and except in so far, as he had an effect on the lives of the corsairs. This effect will develop itself as we proceed.

There is one body of men, however, concerning whom it may be as well to treat of briefly in this place, as the lives which they led and the deeds which they performed were inextricably entangled with those of the corsairs. These men were the members of that association first known as the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, later as the Knights of Malta. Between them and the corsairs it was war to the death; and not only with these robbers, but also with any ship which sailed beneath the insignia of the Crescent.

In 1291 the Soldan of Egypt chased the Knights Hospitallers, as they were also known, from the soil of the Holy Land; Philip IV. of France welcomed them in the island of Cyprus, and gave them the town of Limasol as an asylum. This for the time the knights were bound to accept, but they were impatient of charity, resentful of tutelage, proud and independent. Considering their own order as the greatest and most stable bulwark of the Christian faith, they bowed before neither King nor Kaiser; and the only boon they asked of great potentates, when allied temporarily with them in their eternal warfare, was that on all occasions theirs should be the post of the greatest danger.

This, indeed, they did not ask as a favour, but claimed as a right. It is easily understood that such desperate warriors, who fought only to conquer or die, were allies sought for eagerly by all professing the same faith.

Fulke de Villaret, Grand Master of the order in 1310, seized upon Rhodes, which, though nominally belonging to Greece, was at this time a refuge for bad characters of all nationalities. This island was in the most advantageous position, as it commanded the sea-route from Constantinople to Egypt and the ports of Asia Minor, and was also in close proximity to the coast of Caramania, from whence the order could draw the necessary timber for the building of their galleys and incidentally their motive power—in the shape of slaves—for the oars by which they were propelled.

The knights fortified the island until it was practically unassailable in that age. In the meanwhile their navy grew so rapidly that, in 1436, they were actually in a position to fight the Turks in line of battle. To Rhodes came the younger sons of noble families from every nation in Europe, all aflame with ardour to fight for "the religion"; and the great nobles themselves did not disdain to take service in so chivalrous an order.

Their former enemy, the Soldan of Egypt, made a descent on the island in 1440, and in 1444 besieged the place in form; but he was beaten off, after forty-two days' ceaseless fighting, with great slaughter.

"Soldier and sailor too" were the bold Knights of Saint John; for them no toil was too arduous, no danger too great. In heat and cold, in storm and tempest, they plied their trade of war, their holy crusade to extirpate the infidel from off the face of the waters. They looked for no material reward, and riches and honours they contemptuously rejected. Strong in their marvellous faith that on their shoulders rested the propagation of Christianity in these latter days, they swept the seas with a calm assumption of victory which caused it to be half assured before the fight began. And when the battle was joined, where could be found such paladins as these men who claimed it as an inalienable right to head the hurricane rush of the boarders from the decks of their galleys, to be ever the leaders when the forlorn hope should mount the breach? Life for the knights of this order was looked at literally with a single purpose—the advancement of Christianity and the downfall of that pestilent heresy which proclaimed that Mahomet was the prophet of God. Against all who bowed the knee in the mosques of the false prophet their lives were vowed, and it is but the barest justice to them to record that on the altar of this their faith these were ungrudgingly poured forth.

Naturally reprisals were the order of the day. Equally fanatical was he who held to the Moslem faith; in consequence many were the attempts to stamp out, once and for all, the prime enemies of the Ottoman Empire. In 1480 a Turkish fleet of one hundred and forty ships issued from the Dardanelles, an army awaited it on the coast of Caramania which was rapidly embarked, and on May 23rd the fleet anchored a few miles from the town of Rhodes. Here, then, was a trial of strength in which the Hospitallers delighted. After repeated attacks in detail, on July 28th a grand assault was made which the Turks considered would be absolutely decisive: it was decisive, but not in the fashion which they anticipated.

The standard of the Janissaries already floated on the first curtain of the rampart when Pierre D'Aubusson rallied the knights for one last desperate effort. "Shall it be said in days to come that 'the Religion' recoiled before a horde of Moslem savages; that the banner of Saint John was soiled by their infamous touch? But this is no time for talk. Ye have swords, Messires; use them!"

Thus the Grand Master; and then the knights, in their battered armour and with their hacked and dinted swords, flung themselves once more upon the foe. The Janissaries closed in around them; but these fine troops were not what they had been two months before, and the close contact with the Hospitallers, which had endured sixty-five days, had been to them a lesson fraught with disaster: they had already lost six thousand men, and their adversaries were still absolutely undismayed. His helmet gone, his banner held aloft over his head, Pierre D'Aubusson was ever in the thickest of the fray unconquered, unconquerable; and pressing close behind him came the knights, each jealous for the glory of his "Auberge." French, Venetian, Catalan, Genoese German, none can tell who fought best that day; but the Janissaries were beaten, and three thousand of their corpses cumbered the ditch into which they were hurled by their foes; there were besides fifteen thousand wounded in the Turkish camp.

The heart was out of that great army which had embarked to the sound of trumpets and the blessings of the Mullahs but ten weeks before, and they sailed away a beaten force. Mahomet II. swore to avenge his defeat, but his days were numbered, and he died at Scutari on May 3rd, 1481, at the age of fifty-two, and in the thirteenth year of his reign.

In the year 1499 Daoud Pasha, Admiralissimo to Bajazet, the successor to Mahomet II., defeated Antonio Grimani the Venetian admiral in that combat known to the Republic as "La deplorabile battaglia del Zonchio." The populace of Venice demanded that Grimani should be instantly beheaded, but he not only escaped their vengeance but lived to be nominated as Doge on June 6th, 1521, at the age of eighty-seven: certainly a curious record for an unsuccessful admiral of that date.

In 1500 was formed the "Alliance of Christian Princes" at the initiative of the