But when this period of their supposed decline had set in, the Mohammedans, for the first time, ceased to be content with the Mediterranean and began to practise—
Keeping in awe the bay of Portingale
And all the ocean by the British shore,
as Marlowe phrases it on behalf of Tamburlane. In 1616 Sir G. Carew writes to Sir T. Roe that the Turks are passing out of the Mediterranean now, had just carried off all the inhabitants of St. Marie, one of the Azores, and might be looked for round England soon.[76] In 1630 they took six ships near Bristol and had about forty of their vessels in British seas.[77] In the following year they sacked Baltimore in Ireland; but so far was the English government from being able to assert itself that Robert Boyle writes of his passage from Youghal to Bristol past Ilfracombe and Minehead in 1635, that he passed safely "though the Irish coasts were then sufficiently infested with Turkish galleys,"[78] while in 1645 they called at Fowey and carried off into slavery two hundred and forty persons, including some ladies.[79]
Where the English were fortunate was in the raiders having made so late a start. Throughout the previous century the inhabitants of south-Europe coasts were always expecting the Turks. Philip II kept sixteen hundred coast-guardsmen always patrolling on the lookout for them: but then he was their chief enemy. More remarkable is the league[80] of the south of France maritime towns in 1585 to take steps to prevent their ruin from this cause; seeing that France had been the ally of the "Grand Turk" for half a century. In 1601 the Duke of Mantua and his sister, the Duchess of Ferrara, were captured close to the shore near Loreto by a Turkish galley.[81] As for the tourists themselves, Moryson passed a village near Genoa destroyed by Turks just before his arrival, when the belle of the district had been carried off the day after her wedding; and had Montaigne been but a few miles nearer to the coast than he actually was on a certain date we should perhaps never have had the "Essais"—thanks to the Turks. This would have been no more than a parallel case to that of Padre Jeronimo Gracián, St. Teresa's confessor, who was captured between Messina and Rome in 1592, stripped naked, and made to row on the benches of a galley. He had with him his book "Armonía mistica," which he had just finished, and had to look on while the pirates cleaned their firearms with leaves from it.[82]
Some preface of this kind is necessary to explain the view tourists habitually take of the Ottoman power, because the naval strength is less often alluded to than its achievements by land and its position as an Eastern conqueror. But even these latter call for a word or two to complete the picture.
While it is true that the phrase concerning "the empire on which the sun never sets" had been invented by this time, in reference to that of Spain, the Turkish was regarded as, to quote a traveller of 1612, "the greatest that is, or perhaps ever was from the beginning," just as the phrase "the sick man of Europe" had also been employed, but in reference not to Turkey, but to England (in 1558).[83] To these words may be added those of another level-headed, well-educated Englishman, Sir Henry Blount, "the only modern people great in action and whose empire hath so suddenly invaded the world and fixed itself on such firm foundations as no other ever did." Whereas, late as Blount's visit to Constantinople was, he found the wiser Turks considering the Christians not so strong as they used to be; not so strong as the Persians. Busbecq, too, in his earlier days, sums up the outlook in despair, concluding that the worst feature of it all is that the Turks are used to conquering, the Christians to being conquered; and confirms it later (when he was sixty-three and had had thirty-eight years' experience of European politics, mostly official, including eight years at Constantinople), by writing that the object of the Turks' war (1585) with the Persians is to leave themselves freer to extinguish Christendom, and that, the former war over, "they will fight us for existence and empire; and the chances are greatly in their favour." As late as a century after this the Turks were besieging Vienna with an army 200,000 strong.
But the test of the hold of a given idea on the minds of ordinary men, such as these tourists mostly were, is the frequency with which it recurs in the works of their favourite writers. Now, badly off indeed would the seventeenth-century novelist have been without the Turkish corsair to defer the wedding-day for a respectable number of pages; and the echo of the convention has attained immortality in the stock quotation from Molière, "Mais que diable allait-il dans cette galère?" There is a passage, too, in "Othello" which illustrates the above beliefs still better—Othello's last words:—
Set you down this—
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,