to obtain possession of the claimant to the Ottoman throne, and were ready to pay large sums in hard cash to enjoy the privilege of using this specially dangerous instrument against the Sultan's peace. D'Aubusson was not averse to taking the money, but he did not wish to give up his captive; and his knightly honour felt no smirch in taking 20,000 ducats from Jem's desolate wife (who probably had not heard of the fair Hélène) as the price of her husband's release, while he held him all the tighter. Of such chivalrous stuff were made the famous knights of Rhodes; and of such men as D'Aubusson the Church made cardinals! A new influence now appeared upon the scene of Jem's captivity. Charles VIII. of France considered that the Grand Master had made enough profit out of the unlucky prince, and the king resolved to work the oracle himself. His plan was to restore Jem to a nominal sultanate by the aid of Matthias Corvinus, Ferdinand of Naples, and the Pope. He took Jem out of the hands of the knights, and transferred him to the custody of Innocent VIII., who kindly consented to take care of the prince for the sum of 40,000 ducats a year, to be paid by his grateful brother at Constantinople." Innocent's successor, the terrible Borgia, Alexander VI., unsatisfied with this liberal allowance, opened negotiations with Constantinople looking to the payment of some heavy lump sum for summary riddance of poor Jem. But the sinister bargain was interrupted by Charles VIII. of France, who invaded Italy at this juncture, passed through Rome, and took the captive prince in his train when he went on to Naples. Jem died on the way, and few have doubted that Pope Alexander poisoned him, as he had poisoned many before. "The curious conclusion one draws from the whole melancholy tale is, that there was not apparently a single honest prince in Christendom to take compassion upon the captive." In 1512 Bayezid was deposed by his son Selim, and did not long survive the humiliation. To avoid troubles of the Prince Jem character, Selim slew all his brothers and nephews, eleven in number, making a family solitude around the throne. Then he prepared himself for foreign conquest by exterminating the sometimes troublesome sect of the Shias, or Shiites, in his dominions. "A carefully organized system of detectives, whom Selim distributed throughout his Asiatic provinces, revealed the fact that the number of the heretical sect reached the alarming total of 70,000. Selim … secretly massed his troops at spots where the heretics chiefly congregated, and at a given signal 40,000 of them were massacred or imprisoned. … Having got rid of the enemy within his gates, Selim now proceeded to attack the head of the Shias, the great Shah Ismail himself [the founder of the Sufi line of Persian