But whatever may have been his motive, he soon left Rome and its court. In 1571, the Pope, Philip the Second, and the state of Venice, concluded what was called a “Holy League” against the Turks, and set on foot a joint armament, commanded by the chivalrous Don John of Austria, a natural son of Charles the Fifth. The temptations of such a romantic, as well as imposing, expedition against the ancient oppressor of whatever was Spanish, and the formidable enemy of all Christendom, were more than Cervantes, at the age of twenty-three, could resist; and the next thing we hear of him is, that he had volunteered in it as a common soldier. For, as he says in a work written just before his death, he had always observed “that none make better soldiers than those who are transplanted from the region of letters to the fields of war, and that never scholar became soldier that was not a good and brave one.”[88] Animated with this spirit, he entered the service of his country among the troops with which Spain then filled a large part of Italy, and continued in it till he was honorably discharged in 1575. [88] “No hay mejores soldados, que los que se trasplantan de la tierra de los estudios en los campos de la guerra; ninguno salió de estudiante para soldado, que no lo fuese por estremo,” etc. Persiles y Sigismunda, Lib. III. c. 10, Madrid, 1802, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 128. During these four or five years he learned many of the hardest lessons of life. He was present in the sea-fight of Lepanto, October 7, 1571, and, though suffering at the time under a fever, insisted on bearing his part in that great battle, which first decisively arrested the intrusion of the Turks into the West of Europe. The galley in which he served was in the thickest of the contest, and that he did his duty to his country and to Christendom he carried proud and painful proof to his grave; for, besides two other wounds, he received one which deprived him of the use of his left hand and arm during the rest of his life. With the other sufferers in the fight, he was taken to the hospital at Messina, where he remained till April, 1572; and then, under Mark Antonio Colonna, went on the expedition to the Levant, to which he alludes with so much satisfaction in his dedication of the “Galatea,” and which he has so well described in the story of the Captive, in Don Quixote.