Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/310

280 their situation, Rhodes was visited by a succession of the most terrific earthquakes, accompanied by an inundation of the sea or tidal wave. The result of this convulsion of nature was the overthrow of several of the principal buildings in the town and of large portions of the ramparts, which had already been shaken and rendered insecure by the battering they had undergone. Many of the inhabitants called to mind the popular tradition, that the island had originally sprung suddenly from the sea during one of the volcanic upheavals so common in the Levant, and they began to fear that these earthquakes were but the precursors of an equally sudden disappearance. Such a complication of disasters might surely have dismayed the stoutest heart; it required all the fortitude which even the heroic D’Aubusson could summon to his aid to bear him through the dreadful crisis.

Desperate as the situation seemed to he, and hopeless as was the prospect of a successful resistance to the gigantic force which Mahomet was preparing, the Grand-Master nevertheless continued to press forward such restorations as his limited means and the shortness of time permitted. Had the sultan lived to carry his project into execution, he would have been met as boldly and resisted as firmly as his lieutenant was in the previous year. That such resistance could have been for the second time successful was, under the circumstances, hopeless, but he would have entered a city in ruins only over the lifeless body of the last of its defenders. Providentially for the knights, this sad catastrophe was averted. In his march across Asia Minor at the head of his forces Mahomet was taken suddenly ill of a colic, and died in the village of Nicomedia, on the 3rd of May, 1481. Great as had been his successes, and numerous his conquests, the haughty emperor scorned to enumerate their catalogue upon his tomb. Looking rather to the grand conceptions which were teeming within his ambitious brain than to the acquisitions he had actually made, he directed the following simple epitaph to be placed over his grave, “My intention was to have captured Rhodes and to have subjugated Italy.”

The death of the sultan was hailed with joy throughout Europe, and nowhere more so or with greater reason than at