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.

In the year 1499 Daoud Pasha, Admiralissimo to Bajazet, the successor to Mahomet II., defeated Antonio Grimani the Venetian admiral in that combat known to the Republic as “La deplorabile battaglia del Zonchio.”  The populace of Venice demanded that Grimani should be instantly beheaded, but he not only escaped their vengeance but lived to be nominated as Doge on June 6th, 1521, at the age of eighty-seven:  certainly a curious record for an unsuccessful admiral of that date.

In 1500 was formed the “Alliance of Christian Princes” at the initiative of the Borgia Pope Alexander VII.  Louis XII., King of France, and Ferdinand V. of Spain announced their adherence to this effort against the Turk, and Pierre D’Aubusson, the veteran Grand Master of the Knights of Saint John, was nominated as Captain-General of the Christian armies.  For the purposes of this war the admiral of the Papal galleys in the Mediterranean, Lodovico del Mosca, purchased from Ferdinand, King of Naples, all his artillery, of which a description is given by the Padre Alberto Guglielmotti, a Dominican friar, author of a work entitled, “La Guerra dei Pirati e la Marina Pontifica dal 1500 al 1560 A.D.”  “There were thirty-six great bombards, with eighty carts pertaining to them; some drawn by horses, some drawn by buffaloes harnessed singly, or two, four, or even six together; two waggons laden with arquebuses for ships’ boats; nine with about forty smaller bombards (bombardelles) placed three, four, or even six on each waggon; twelve with ordinary pieces of artillery; as many more for the service of twelve big guns; thirty-seven carts of iron balls; three with gunpowder; and finally five laden with nitre, darts, and bullets.  Splendid artillery of most excellent workmanship and great power escorted by two thousand men under arms, without mentioning the companies who marched before and after each waggon.”