Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/240

214 however, which they founded seemed to survive them, all being due to their own power of generalship and administration. The guiding hand once withdrawn, the empire crumbled to pieces, and remained in a state of disintegration until some new ruler arose with power sufficient to reunite the fragments.

De Naillac seized the earliest opportunity which this suspension of hostilities gave him to replace, as far as possible, the loss sustained by the destruction of Smyrna. The judgment which he displayed in the selection of a new point d’appui on the mainland was such that, so far from being weakened by its loss, the Order found itself in a far more commanding position than before. The point selected was a Turkish castle on the coast of Asia Minor, about twelve miles from the island of Lango. This stronghold had been built on the ruins of Halicarnassus, celebrated as the site of the tomb of king Mausolus, and also as the birthplace of Herodotus. Not deeming this place sufficiently secure for his purpose, de Nailac caused a new work to be erected at the end of a peninsula which jutted out into the sea. This he called the Castle of St. Peter Liberated. It may be noted that the present Turkish name for the fortress, viz., Budrum, is derived from Bedros, signifying, like Peter, a rock.

Nothing was spared which the art of fortification could devise to render this stronghold impregnable, and it remains at this day an imperishable record of the skill of the engineer at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It bore on its walls this inscription, which is still to be seen: “Propter fidem Catholicam tenemus locum istum.” Its present condition is thus described by Newton, the discoverer of the ruins of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus:—

“On the site of the old Greek acropolis Philibert de Naillac built the stately castle which still stands a specimen of the military architecture of the knights, not less worthy of study than the fortress of Rhodes. The position of this castle is one of great natural strength as compared with the means of attack known in the fifteenth century. It is surrounded on three sides by the sea, while on the land side the rocky nature of the soil would have made mining impossible. The castle is entered from the isthmus by a ramp through the western corner of a glacis of unusual size, which forms the outer defence on the