The knights at once set the woodwork of the battery on fire, hurled the guns down into the ditch, and then returned triumphantly into the town, the dashing feat completely reinstating them in the good opinion of the grand master and their comrades.

The incident showed the pasha that he must neglect no precautions, and, accordingly, he commenced his works at a distance from the walls, and pushed his approaches regularly forward until he again established a battery on the site of that from which his troops had been so unceremoniously ejected.  While forming the approaches, the workmen had been constantly harassed by the fire from the guns on the walls, suffering considerable loss of life; but their numerical superiority was so vast that the loss in no way affected the plans of the pasha.

As soon as the battery was completed, gangs of men, accustomed to mining operations, set to work in its rear to drive sloping passages downwards, opening into the face of the great cutting, and through these vast quantities of earth and stones were poured, so as to afford a passage across it, the depth being largely diminished by the great pile of rubbish that had already fallen from the breached wall.  This novel mode of attack was altogether unexpected.  The knights had regarded the fosse that had been cut at such an enormous expenditure of labour as forming an altogether impassable obstruction, and were dismayed at seeing the progress made in filling it up.  D’Aubusson himself, full of resources as he was, saw that the defence was seriously threatened, unless some plan of meeting this unexpected danger could be devised.

He consulted Maitre Georges; but the latter could make no suggestion; his only advice being the erection of a battery at a spot where it was almost self evident that it could be of no utility whatever.  Other circumstances combined to render the suspicions D’Aubusson had entertained of the good faith of the renegade almost a certainty.  Georges was seized, tried, and put to torture, and under this owned that he had been sent into the town for the purpose of betraying it; and he was, the same day, hung in the great square.  His guilt must always be considered as uncertain.  There was no proof against him, save his own confession; and a confession extorted by torture is of no value whatever.  There are certainly many good grounds for suspicion, but it is possible that Georges really repented his apostacy, and acted in good faith in deserting the standard of Paleologus.  He was undoubtedly a man of altogether exceptional ability and acquirements, and even the knights who have written accounts of the siege do justice to the fascination of his manner and the charm of his conversation.