the Turkish
marine, which had been almost ruined by the repeated naval victories of
the Venetians, an overture was made to the English ambassador, Lord
Winchilsea, for permission to hire the services of a number of British
vessels; but this strange request being evaded, the expedition was
postponed for a year, while every nerve was strained in the building and
equipment of galleys; and at length, in the autumn of 1666, the fleet
set sail from Monembasia in the Morea, under the command of the
Capitan-pasha Mustafa, surnamed _Kaplan_, or the Tiger, the
brother-in-law of Kiuprili, and anchored off Canea in the beginning of
November. But before we proceed to narrate the closing scenes of the
Cretan war, we must retrace our steps, to give some account of its
origin and progress.

The dominions of the Venetian Signory in the Levant, which had at one
time comprehended, besides the scattered isles of the Cyclades, the
three subject _kingdoms_ (as they were proudly called) of Candia,[11]
Cyprus, and the Morea, were confined, in the middle of the seventeenth
century, to the first-named island--the last relics of the Morea having
been wrested from the republic by the arms of Soliman the Magnificent in
1540, and Cyprus having been subdued by the lieutenants of his son
Selim, a few months before the destruction of the Turkish fleet at the
battle of Lepanto in 1571.[12] The sovereignty of Candia had been
acquired by purchase from the Marquis of Montferrat, to whom it was
assigned on the partition of the Greek empire, after the conquest of
Constantinople, in 1204, by the Latins of the fourth crusade: but the
four centuries and a half of Venetian rule present little more than an
unvarying succession of revolts, oppression, and bloodshed. In pursuance
of their usual system of colonial administration, which strangely
contrasted with their domestic policy, they had introduced into the
island a sort of modified feudal system, in order to rivet their
ascendancy over this remote possession, by the interposition of a class
of resident proprietors, whose interest it would be to maintain the
dominion of the parent state: but the _cavaliers_, as the Venetian
tenants of Cretan fiefs were termed, proved at times even more
refractory than the candidates themselves, and made the island for many
years a source of endless difficulties to the Signory. In 1363,
complaining of their exclusion from the high dignities of the republic,
the _cavaliers_ open