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4 to aid him in his struggle with a Christian rival. On his accession he expressed his desire to unite all Christian Princes against the Turks, and he joined the League formed by Pope Leo X in 1517, despatching a naval force against the African corsairs. But his defeat and capture at Pavia in 1525 effected his conversion, and led to the first alliance between the ruler of a great Christian State and the Turk. Since all Europe was on the side of the Emperor, the King turned to the Turks, whose armies could attack his rival from the Hungarian plains and whose fleets swept unchallenged through the Mediterranean. Sultan Suleiman was almost as eager for an alliance as the captive monarch, for the Turks lived under the perpetual menace of a combination of Christian Powers. To detach from this potential coalition the Most Christian King and the nation which had inspired the Crusades was to insure his dominions in Europe and to render possible their extension. The theoretical unity of Christendom vanished when France substituted the policy of interest for the policy of principle, and when the dream of delivering the Eastern Christians from the infidel was replaced by the ambition to dominate Europe.

While Francis was a prisoner in Madrid, his mother sent an envoy to the Sultan imploring intervention on behalf of her son. The envoy and his suite, who carried rich presents, were murdered in Bosnia; but at the end of the same year (1525) another envoy arrived in Constantinople and began negotiations, which eventually led to a treaty signed in 1536. The original has not been preserved, but its outlines may be recovered from the pact of 1553 which renewed it. In return for handsome payment the Sultan engaged to send a fleet to the western Mediterranean to cooperate with the navy of France. The vessels of the Emperor Charles and his allies captured by the Ottoman Fleet should belong to the Sultan, the conquered towns should be given up to plunder by the Turks and their inhabitants become their prisoners and slaves, the towns themselves, with their munitions of war, falling to the King of France.