Had their envoys to the Porte succeeded in their negotiation, the throne of Philip might have trembled; but Selim hated the Republic of Venice as much as he loved the wine of Cyprus.

While the Moors were gasping out their last breath in Granada and Ronda, the Turks had wrested the island of Venus from the grasp of the haughty Republic Fainagosta had fallen; thousands of Venetians had been butchered with a ferocity which even Christians could not have surpassed; the famous General Bragadino had been flayed; stuffed, and sent hanging on the yard-arm of a frigate; to Constantinople, as a present to the Commander of the Faithful; and the mortgage of Catherine Cornaro, to the exclusion of her husband's bastards, had been thus definitely cancelled.

With such practical enjoyments, Selim was indifferent to the splendid but shadowy vision of the Occidental caliphate--yet the revolt of the Moors was only terminated, after the departure of Don John, by the Duke of Arcos.
The war which the Sultan had avoided in the West, came to seek him in the East.

To lift the Crucifix against the Crescent, at the head of the powerful but quarrelsome alliance between Venice, Spain, and Rome, Don John arrived at Naples.

He brought with him more than a hundred ships and twenty-three thousand men, as the Spanish contingent:--Three months long the hostile fleets had been cruising in the same waters without an encounter; three more were wasted in barren manoeuvres.