Turk; for reasons of policy that monarch employed them and entrusted them with the conduct of important affairs.  The bargain was really a good one on both sides; as to the sea-wolves was extended the aegis of one of the mightiest empires of the earth; while to the Sultan came “veritable men of the sea,” hardened in conflict, as fearless of responsibility as of aught else; capable in a sense that hardly any man could be capable who had grown up in the atmosphere of the court at Constantinople.  To Kheyr-ed-Din the Sultan had extended his fullest confidence; he had been rewarded by seeing the renowned Doria forsake the field of battle at Prevesa, and by the perpetual slights and insults put upon his Christian foes by that great corsair.  To Dragut he had now turned, and, as we have said, when Sinan Basha sailed from the Golden Horn he had orders to attempt nothing important without the advice of the corsair.  It is impossible to say why the command-in-chief had not been entrusted to him, as the Sultan had the precedent of Kheyr-ed-Din upon which to go.  It can only be conjectured that Soliman, having discovered how unpopular that appointment had been amongst his high officers, did not care to risk the experiment the second time; and in consequence employed Sinan.  To this officer the aphorism of Seignelay applies in its fullest force.  He was as brave a man as ever drew a sword in the service of his master; he was, however, a hesitating and incompetent leader, with one eye ever fixed on that distant palace on the shores of the Golden Horn in which dwelt the arbiter of his destiny and of all those who sailed beneath the banner of the Crescent.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE KNIGHTS OF ST. JOHN

The Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, afterwards known as the Knights of Rhodes, and eventually as the Knights of Malta—­A brief sketch of the Order, including the relation of how Gozon de Dieu-Donne, subsequently Grand Master, slew the great Serpent of Rhodes; also some account of Jean Parisot de la Valette, forty-eighth Grand Master, who commanded at the Siege of Malta, in which the arms of Soliman the Magnificent were defeated after a siege lasting one hundred and thirteen days.

Amongst all those principalities and powers against which Dragut contended during the whole of his strenuous existence, there was no one among them which he held in so much detestation as the famous Knights of Saint John, known in the sixteenth century as the Knights of Malta.  This militant religious organisation had its origin in Jerusalem in peculiar and interesting circumstances.  After the death of Mahomet, his followers, burning with zeal, put forward the tenets of their religion by means of fire and sword; during the years which followed the Hegira, 622 A.D., the arms of the Moslems were everywhere successful, and amongst other places conquered by them was Palestine.  So great was the renown acquired by the Emperor Charlemagne