But the Messiah’s reign was brief and his end inglorious. Sabbataï resolved to repair to Constantinople that he might proclaim his advent from the very capital of the East. He was not unexpected. In the Straits of the Dardanelles Turkish officers arrested him, and took him fettered to Stamboul. The landing-place was crowded with a multitude of believers and others, all eager to behold the man who had filled the world with so singular an epidemic. Among the latter class of spectators was a pasha who welcomed the Redeemer with a vigorous slap in the face. The treatment subsequently meted out to poor Sabbataï was in harmony with this reception. He was thrown into prison, and nothing but the Grand Vizier’s unwillingness to create a new martyr saved him from death. Finally he was summoned before the Sultan. After a short audience, the Messiah issued forth from the Padishah’s presence a turbaned Mohammedan, and his name was Mehmed Effendi. But even this catastrophe failed to break the spell which Sabbataï’s personality had cast over the minds of men. The masses clung to the hope which he had raised for ages after his death. Some of his adherents, including his wife, imitated his example and embraced Islam. The sect of these Hebrew Mohammedans, under the name of _Dunmehs_, or Converts, still endures at Salonica and other cities of the Ottoman Empire, and among them the belief prevails that Sabbataï is not really dead. They form a body apart, knit together by ties of consanguinity, detested by their former brethren in the faith as a sect of apostates and suspected by their new brethren as a sect of hypocrites. The further decay of the Ottoman Empire, which brought humiliation to the conquerors and kindled the desire for national rehabilitation among their Christian subjects, however, brought peace and commercial prosperity to the Jews. ♦1717♦ Lady Mary Wortley Montague, in her account of the policy and the manners of the Turks in the eighteenth century, gives a glowing description of the Jewish colony of Adrianople.