missed the fruits of a deed which cost him his royal honor and
perhaps also his self-respect. Liberty struggled on still with despotism
in the obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were fought; a
brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field of glory;
and Flanders and Brabant were the schools which educated generals for
the coming century. A long, devastating war laid waste the open country;
victor and vanquished alike were bathed in blood; while the rising
republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry, and out of
the ruins erected the noble edifice of its own greatness. For forty
years a war lasted, whose happy termination was not to bless the dying
eye of Philip; which destroyed one paradise in Europe, to create a new
one out of its shattered fragments; which destroyed the choicest flower
of military youth; and while it enriched more than a quarter of the
globe, impoverished the possessor of the golden Peru. This monarch, who,
even without oppressing his subjects, could expend nine hundred tons of
gold, but who by tyrannical means extorted far more, heaped on his
depopulated kingdom a debt of one hundred and forty millions of ducats.
An implacable hatred of liberty swallowed up all these treasures and
consumed in fruitless labor his royal life. But the Reformation throve
amid the devastation of his sword, and over the blood of her citizens
the banner of the new republic floated victorious.

LEPANTO: DESTRUCTION OF THE TURKISH NAVAL POWER

A.D. 1571

SIR WILLIAM STIRLING-MAXWELL

By the defeat of the Turks in the naval fight near Lepanto their
power was so seriously shaken that its decline may be reckoned to
have begun with that event. For many years, under their great sultan
Solyman, the Magnificent, they had kept Europe in terror of their
assaults. They had taken a recognized place among European peoples.
Before his alliance with Francis I of France (1534), Solyman had
made himself master of Hungary, and by threatening Vienna he so
alarmed Charles V that the Emperor agreed to the Peace of Nuremberg,
in order that he might unite Protestants and Catholics against the
Ottoman foe.

Although Solyman withdrew before the united forces of the Christian
empire, the Turks continued their depredations, especially on the
coasts of Italy and Spain. Charles succeeded