More substantial additions to the power of Louis than the precedence of an ambassador or the disgrace of a Pope soon followed. In 1662 he purchased the port of Dunkirk from England, and made it a harbour for warships. In 1663 he sent the count of Schomberg, supported by French officers and French money, secretly to the assistance of Portugal in her war against Spain, and contributed materially to the gaining of the victory of Villa Viciosa in 1665, which established the independence of the country. [Sidenote: =Assistance given by Louis to Portugal, and against the Turks, 1663–64.=] At the same time he proceeded to read the Grand Vizier a lesson by breaking the ancient league of friendship between France and the Sultan, in consequence of an insult offered to the French ambassador in 1661, sent French troops to assist in the defence of Candia, which was then being besieged by the Turks, and supplied the Emperor with a large sum of money and a contingent of 6000 Frenchmen under La Feuillade and Coligny to resist the incursion of the Ottoman armies into Hungary and Croatia in 1664. Chiefly owing to the irresistible valour of the French troops, the imperial general, Montecuculli, was enabled to inflict a crushing defeat upon the grand vizier himself at the battle of S. Gothard on the Raab, and hurl the invaders back behind their own frontiers. [Sidenote: =The War of Devolution, 1667.=] In 1667 broke out the first of the great wars of Louis XIV., the war of devolution. In September 1665 Philip IV. of Spain died, leaving two daughters by his first marriage, of whom the queen of France was the elder, and one son by his second marriage, who succeeded to the crown of Spain under the name of Charles II. Louis immediately laid claim to the Spanish Netherlands in virtue of what was known as the law of devolution. This law was in fact a local custom of the province of Brabant, by which private property in land passed to the female children of the first marriage in preference to the male children of the second marriage. If, therefore, Philip IV. had in his private capacity bought a farm in Brabant, Louis would by the law of devolution have become entitled to it in right of his wife; but to assert that the sovereignty of the Low Countries followed the rule of land tenure in Brabant was one of the most monstrous claims ever put forward by hypocritical ambition. Nevertheless Louis played his part well. The rights of his queen were dwelt upon with much argumentative force by writers and diplomatists, while Turenne at the head of 35,000 men produced more convincing arguments. By August 1667 Charleroi, Tournay and Lille were in his hands, and the whole of the Spanish Netherlands lay open before him. Astonished Europe awoke to see the once formidable power of Spain falling to pieces before its eyes, to find itself threatened by the overweening ambition of a prince, whose will was law from the Rhine to the ocean, and from the Scheldt to the Pyrenees.