It was necessary, Suleiman saw, to continue war, to find employment for his turbulent force; and in 1526 he marched against Hungary with a force of a hundred thousand men. At Mohacz the Christian army was utterly defeated after a gallant fight, in which Suleiman himself was for a time in great danger, and in which at the end the flower of Hungarian chivalry with their King at their head perished by the sword or in the river through which they tried to escape. Buda Pesth fell into the hands of the conqueror. All the prisoners taken at Mohacz were massacred, and over a hundred thousand slaves were led back to Turkey. The spoils were enormous. The library of the old Seraglio and the treasury still hold some of the choicest manuscripts of the famous library of Mathias Corvinus. Suleiman returned in triumph to Constantinople. To the passage of armies on their way to victory the people of the great city had now become familiar as in the greatest days of the Empire. Thirteen times, it is said, did Suleiman pass through the gates on warlike expeditions and thirteen times did he return a conqueror. He led his forces to the walls of Vienna, and though he was at length compelled to withdraw, he inflicted a blow on the Empire which it took long to recover, and he showed to Europe that a new and terrible power had come to take part in the affairs of the West. In Persia, if he was not entirely successful, yet he added new territories to the Empire. A pirate fleet under his sanction swept the seas. He defeated the combined fleets of Spain, Italy, and Venice. During a reign of forty-six years he kept Europe and Asia at war. But his greatest triumphs were not those of the battlefield. He made the great Sovereigns of Christendom count him as their equal. Every prince of the time was anxious to enter into negotiation with him. Their envoys came to Constantinople, and were treated as suppliants. To every indignity they submitted for the sake of winning the alliance of "the grand Turk," the Sultan whom Europe came to call "the magnificent." France was the first to make alliance with the infidel; and in spite of the papal curse the Mohammedan power was introduced as a prominent actor in the politics of Europe by the most Christian King, Francis I. The Sultan of sultans, King of kings, giver of crowns to the kings of the world, the shadow of God upon the earth, Suleiman, the ever victorious, assured the prostrate King of France that he need not fear, for that every hour his horse was saddled, his sword girt on, and he was ready to defend and to overthrow. A solemn treaty in February 1535 united France and Turkey in bonds of perpetual amity. It was renewed in 1553; and the alliance remained an important fact in the politics of Europe for more than two hundred years.