Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/372

342 This piece of information had been forwarded to Constaninople by a spy who had been maintained in Rhodes for some years in the pay of the Ottoman government. He was a Jewish physician who had been despatched thither by the emperor Selim for the express purpose of obtaining intelligence as to the state of the city. His profession had secured him a ready entrance and a warm welcome at Rhodes, where the impending prospect of a siege seemed to render him a valuable acquisition, and he maintained his clandestine correspondence with the Porte for a considerable time unsuspected. It was only at the very crisis of the siege that his treachery was discovered, and he himself rendered incapable of inflicting any further mischief.

Chief amongst those who urged Solyman to undertake an attack on Rhodes were his brother-in-law, Mustapha pasha, and the pirate Curtoglu, both of whom trusted to derive wealth and distinction by the enterprise. Their counsels, which accorded so well with the promptings of his own ambition, decided the emperor to carry out the project. As a preliminary measure, and to test the determination of his antagonists, he wrote to the new Grand-Master a letter couched in the following terms:—“Solyman the sultan, by the grace of God, king of kings, sovereign of sovereigns, most high emperor of Byzantium and Trebizond, very powerful king of Persia, of Arabia, of Syria, and of Egypt, supreme lord of Europe and of Asia, prince of Mecca and Aieppo, lord of Jerusalem and ruler of the universal sea, to Philip Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Grand-Master of the island of Rhodes, greeting, I congratulate you upon your new dignity and upon your arrival within your territories. I trust that you will rule there prosperously and with even more glory than your predecessors. I also mean to cultivate your favour. Rejoice then with me as a very dear friend that, following in the footsteps of my father, who conquered Persia, Jerusalem, Arabia, and Egypt, I have captured that most powerful of fortresses, Belgrade, during the late autumn, after which, hiving offered battle to the Giaours, which they had not the courage to accept, I took many other beautiful and well-fortified cities, and destroyed most of their inhabitants either by sword or fire, the remainder being reduced to slavery. Now, after sending my numerous and victorious army into their winter