Hassan remitted the sentence, and, remarking that ‘so long as he had the maimed Spaniard in custody, his Christians, ships and the entire city were safe,’ he redoubled his vigilance. For two years the prisoner made no move, but plainly he was not resigned nor disheartened, for he conceived the idea of inducing the Christian population of Algiers to rise and capture the city. It was no mad, impossible project; a similar rising had been successful at Tunis in 1535, and there were over twenty thousand Christians in Algiers. Once more Cervantes was betrayed, and once more he escaped death. A less ambitious scheme also miscarried. In 1579 he took into his confidence a Spanish renegade and two Valencian traders, and persuaded the Valencians to provide an armed vessel to rescue him and some sixty other Christian slaves; but before the plan could be carried out it was revealed to Hassan by a Dominican monk, Juan Blanco de Paz. Very little is known of Blanco de Paz, except that he came from Montemolín near Llerena, and that he gave himself out as being a commissary and familiar of the Inquisition. Why he should turn informer at all, is a mystery: why he should single out Cervantes as the special object of his hatred is no less a mystery. The Valencian merchants got wind of his treachery, and, dreading lest they might be implicated, begged Cervantes to make his escape on a ship which was about to start for Spain. To accept this proposal would have been to desert his friends and to imperil their lives: Cervantes rejected it, assuring the alarmed Valencians that he would not reveal anything to compromise them, even if he were tortured. He was as good as his word. Brought into Hassan’s presence with his hands tied behind him and the hangman’s rope round his neck, he was threatened with instant death unless he gave up the names of his accomplices. But he was undaunted and immovable, asserting that the plot had been planned by himself and four others who had got away, and that no one else had any active share in it. Perhaps there was a certain economy of truth in this statement, but it served its immediate purpose: though Cervantes was placed under stricter guard, Hassan spared the other sixty slaves involved.