This treatment of royal ambassadors as though they were spies was not uncommon at the Porte. The King of Poland had been forced to complain of the rough handling of his envoys by Sultan Bayazid (Suleiman’s grandfather), saying they were not only detained for months before they were given audience, but were thrown into prison, and instead of being lodged like the envoys of a king, who would naturally feel that it accorded with his honor to send only the sons of the noblest families to represent him, were treated as criminals, and that promises made to such envoys were often broken.[127] Busbequius, himself an ambassador, who was detained for months and sharply watched, recounted another instance, that of Malvezzi, whom the Sultan held responsible for the broken faith of his master Ferdinand, and threw into prison when Ferdinand took Transylvania in 1551.[128] It was a Turkish maxim that ambassadors were responsible for the word given by their masters, and that in their capacity as hostages they must expiate its violation; moreover power was often conceived to reside in an ambassador, who therefore was kept in durance in the hope that he could be brought to terms. Such treatment, however naïve and unjust, is nevertheless an improvement on the reception by Hungary of the ambassador sent to announce the accession of Suleiman, whose nose and ears were slit. Further illustrations of the way ambassadors were liable to be treated in Europe were the assassination of Rincon, envoy of France, connived at by Charles V, and the murder of Martinez, a Spanish ambassador to the Porte, instigated by Ferdinand. Ibrahim’s usual way of opening an audience was to brow‐beat the ambassador, and he indulged in frequent sarcasm and scornful laughter. To the envoys of Ferdinand in 1532 he railed at Ferdinand and “his tricks” and gibed at his faithlessness. “How is a man a king” he said “unless he keeps his word?”[129] To Lamberg and Juritschitz (1530)[130] he spoke of the quarrels among Christian rulers, twitting his auditors with Charles’s treatment of the Pope and of Francis I, declaring that the Turks would never do “so inhuman a thing,” and following this by a long talk “full of scorn and irony.”[131] Ibrahim was enormously inquisitive, seeming to look upon a foreign embassy as an opportunity for gaining all sorts of general information. Sometimes he asked about such practical matters as the fortification of certain forts; at other times he asked such trivial questions as how old the rulers were, and how they pronounced their names. He once remarked that a man who did not try to learn all things is an incompetent man. Several times he boasted that in Turkey they knew all that was taking place in Europe.