In the year 1571, in alliance with Rome and Venice, Spain arrested the westward–flowing flood of Mohammedanism at Lepanto, one of the “decisive battles of the world,” when one hundred and thirty Turkish galleys were wrecked or captured, twenty–five thousand Turks were killed, twelve thousand Christian galley slaves liberated from their living death, and vast booty taken from the enemy. Lepanto was the western limit of Islam’s latest advance in Europe; after that fateful battle it receded toward the Orient. But for King Philip’s insane jealousy of his half–brother, Don John of Austria, who so bravely led the Christian hosts, the allied forces might have laid siege to Constantinople; as it was, Don John sailed across the Mediterranean with twenty thousand men and captured Tunis, on the African coast. It was soon after retaken by the Turks, and many years later the other Spanish dependencies went the same way. On the other side of the Pyrenees, in France, an event occurred in 1572 peculiarly acceptable to Philip—the atrocious massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s night, when four thousand Huguenots were murdered in cold blood, through the treachery of the queen regent, Catherine de’ Medici, and her son Charles IX. In the provinces of France at least thirty thousand more fell victims of the hate and fury of their compatriots who differed from them in their religious belief; and they could not fly to Spain for succour, for there sat their inveterate enemy, who was only too anxious to interfere in the affairs of France. He had his hands full, with the encroaching Moslems on one side and the obstinate Netherlanders on the other; yet he found time to attend to all these things, and to manage the affairs of his vast empire in the New World also.