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.

I