Never was a struggle for life and death carried on in so haphazard a fashion. Resistance in the Mediterranean was purely local. The Knights-Hospitallers disputed for years with the conqueror for the possession of their island fortress of Rhodes, and hurled him back eventually in confusion from the rocks of Malta. The Venetians kept the whole Turkish fleet at bay before Candia for twenty years at a most critical period of Ottoman rule. The Pope and the Venetians entered into piratical competition with the corsairs of Greece and Africa, in which the desire to gain money was more conspicuous than the ambition to overcome the infidel. Even the great victory of Lepanto in 1571, at the news of which all Christendom rejoiced, was decisive, not so much because it marked the successful effort of allied Christian powers to resist a common danger, but because it happened to take place at the beginning of a period of intestine troubles within the bosom of the Ottoman empire itself. On land the story is a similar one. Piece by piece, leaf by leaf, the artichoke of the Balkan peninsula was eaten by the invader, but the process of digestion was a difficult one. The crescent was first seen in the plains of Hungary in the middle of the fifteenth century, yet at the time of their greatest power under Suleiman the Magnificent the Turks never acquired the whole country. Transylvania and Moldavia gave in their adherence to the Porte early in the sixteenth century, the Tartars of the Crimea acknowledged Mohammed II. fifty years earlier, yet they never became anything more than vassal states. Even in Bosnia and Servia, though the Turkish rule was everywhere established, a great deal of local independence was left. Nothing stands out clearer in the history of the Ottoman Turks in Europe than the fact that the limits of their conquests were fixed not by the prowess and skill of their adversaries but by their own inherent defects. When Sigismond of Hungary and the flower of the Franco-Hungarian chivalry went down before Bajazet I. on the field of Nicopolis in 1396, when the flag of Mohammed II. floated proudly over the ramparts of Otranto in 1480, there seemed nothing to prevent the triumphant march of the infidel to the heart of European civilisation, over the wasted lands of the king of Hungary and the ruins of the Christian Papacy. [Sidenote: =Inherent defects of the Turks.=]