[31] “Les Chevaliers, selon leur ancienne instruction, pansoient et servoient les malades, mesme le grand maistre: ce qui fit admirer toute la ville de Messine, et les autres villes où les Chevaliers ont demeurés.” (Goussancourt.)
[32] Lord Carlisle, in his Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters, speaking of the present relative condition of Rhodes and Malta, says, “I have qualified myself for adjudging that, in most respects, the tables are now turned between the two islands; and they certainly afford a very decisive criterion of the results of Turkish and Christian dominion.”
[33] A few weeks before their removal, in the spring of 1527, the Imperialists, who were marching to the sack of Rome under the Constable Bourbon, spared Viterbo, out of respect, it is said, for the grand master; although they plundered the neighbouring town, ill treated the inhabitants, burned down the churches, and committed excesses rivalling in atrocity those of the Turks themselves.
[34] Some account of these English martyrs may not be here out of place. The first knight who suffered death in England for the faith was Adrian Fortescue, beheaded on the 8th of July 1539. After him followed two others, Ingley and Adrian Forrest, “who,” says Goussancourt, “being called on to recognise the king as head of the Church and to approve of his ordinances, chose, rather, courageously to suffer death than to live in delicacy, having made shipwreck of the faith. Thus they gave their lives as gloriously at home as they could ever have done in combat.” Henry offered Sir William Weston, Lord Prior of England (the priors sat in parliament on an equality with the first barons of the realm), a pension of 1000l. a-year; but that knight was so overwhelmed with grief at the suppression of his order that he never received a penny, but soon after died, and was buried in the chancel of the old church of St. James, Clerkenwell. Marmaduke Bohun, whom Goussancourt calls “the blessed,” was beheaded under Queen Elizabeth in 1585. Many others died in prison, in the same reign, from the horrible sufferings endured in their confinement; among whom we find the names of Sir Thomas Mytton and Sir Edward Waldegrave.
[35] “Here lies Virtue victorious over Fortune.”
[36] It was arranged by a secret treaty between Ferdinand and Zapolya that the latter should retain the crown till his death, when the whole of the kingdom should revert to Austria, Zapolya’s son retaining only his hereditary dignity of countship of Zips. But at Zapolya’s death his widow asserted the rights of her son as king of Hungary, and called in the sultan to her aid. Solyman turned the country into a Turkish province, professing all the time to be merely holding it until the child had attained his majority. War with Austria continued for many years, until, in 1547, a truce for five years was concluded, which left the sultan in possession of nearly the whole of Hungary and Transylvania, and which bound Ferdinand to the humiliating condition of paying a tribute of 30,000 ducats a-year. Hostilities were resumed on the very day the armistice expired.
[37] Von Hammer, as cited in Two Sieges of Vienna (Murray).
[38] Khaireddin, better known in Europe by his surname of Barbarossa, was a native of Mitylene, and with his brothers practised piracy in the reigns of Bajazet and Selim, the latter of whom he formally recognised as his sovereign. He seized the strong city of Algiers, desolated the coasts of Naples, and captured Tunis. Solyman took him into his service, and conferred upon him the highest naval dignity, making him his admiral, or kapitan pasha. In the great battle off Previsa, September 28th, 1538, he defeated the combined fleets of the Pope (Paul III.), the emperor, and the republic of Venice.
[39] At the taking of Tunis (July 21st, 1535) the Imperialists and liberated slaves committed such frightful excesses that Vertot says, it seemed as if Christians tried to rival and even to surpass the worst barbarians in cruelty and licentiousness. The details he gives are of the most revolting description. Tunis was retaken by the corsair Ouloudj Ali, in 1570, with the exception of the citadel, which was still held by the Spaniards. Don John of Austria retook it; but at the end of eighteen months it again fell into the power of the Turks, in whose possession it has since remained.
[40] European historians (e. g. Vertot) have confounded this place with the town of Africa, or Afrikiya. (Von Hammer.)