Fortunately, Don Garcias de Toledo, the viceroy of Sicily, came with sixty galleys to their assistance. During the four months of the siege the Turkish forces fired seventy-eight thousand rounds of artillery, and lost fifteen thousand soldiers and eight thousand sailors. [Illustration: Fig. 144.--The French Priory at Rhodes (Fifteenth Century).--State of the Ruins in 1828.] The knights of the order had on their side to deplore the loss of more than three thousand of their brethren. Their grand master decreed that annually, on the eve of the festival of Our Lady of September, prayers should be offered up in all the churches of the order, thanking God for the providential succours which had delivered the besieged, and that on the preceding day a commemorative service should be celebrated in honour of those who had fallen in defence of the faith. Henceforward neither the town nor the island, which remained the head quarters of the order, was again disturbed by the Turks, and Jean de la Valette built a new city in Malta, which was called Valetta, after him. The members of the Order of Malta were divided into three classes: the knights, the chaplains, and the serving brothers. The first comprised those whose noble birth and previous rank in other armies marked them out for military service. The second consisted of priests, and ecclesiastics who performed all the ordinary religious duties, and who acted as almoners in time of war. The last were neither nobles nor ecclesiastics; and all that was necessary to admit an individual to this class, was for him to prove that he was born of respectable parents, who had never exercised any handicraft. The serving brothers were distinguished at a later period by a coat-of-arms of a different colour to that of the knights. The aspirants were termed _douats_ or _demi-croix_. The Order of St. John of Jerusalem had merely a nominal existence in the statutes of the Order of Malta, although the knights of the latter, on their reception into the order, were still termed “servants of the sick and needy.” For a long time there existed in Spain, Lady Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, who devoted themselves to hospital work and deeds of charity (Fig. 145). Every country in Europe furnished its quota to the Order of Malta, which had entirely replaced that of St. John, and was divided into eight different tongues or nations, each under the direction of a grand prior, viz., Provence, Auvergne, France, Italy, Aragon, Germany, Castile, and England. These national grand priors were termed _piliers_, or _monastic bailiffs_. Each nation was subdivided into a number of lesser commands, to hold one of which was equivalent to holding an ecclesiastical benefice, and which were subordinate to their grand prior alone.