awaiting him at Rhodes, to implore his assistance against the Egyptian Saracens. The king was a Greek schismatic; and at a time when the jealousies between Greek and Latin were at their height, many might have hesitated to risk the success of such an enterprise. Not so, however, with Deodato the Magnanimous: “frill of zeal,” says Vertot, “and animated with the true spirit of his institute, he would not abandon the Christians to the fury of the barbarians.” So a powerful force was despatched to Armenia; nor did it return till the last of the Saracen invaders was driven from the country. And yet at the very time of these achievements, whilst the treasury of the order was being exhausted by its disinterested exertions, and its blood was flowing freely on every coast of the Archipelago, the old murmurs were being repeated, and representations were constantly made at the papal court that the knights were idling away their time in their luxurious palaces, employed in the amassing of vast treasures, and the enjoyment of a life of ease. Nor was this all: not a post or embassy from Europe but brought them a fresh budget of advice. Rhodes was unfit for the residence of the order; they ought to be somewhere on the mainland; they should be in the Morea, which the Turks were threatening to overrun; and above all, why did they not return to the Holy Land? This last suggestion was seriously propounded in an embassy despatched from Rome, at whose head appeared one of their own brethren, Heredia, grand prior of Castile,—a man of consummate abilities, but who, for the gratification of his boundless ambition, had separated himself from the interests of the order, and had succeeded in gaining extraordinary influence in the councils of the Pontiff, Innocent VI. This continual interference from authorities in Europe, to whom the real state of affairs was wholly unknown, caused the grand masters much embarrassment, which was increased by the internal dissensions which rose out of the new division of the order into languages. This division had gradually been adopted for the convenience it afforded in several ways, but was only formally acknowledged in the grand chapter held under Helion de Villeneuve in 1322. Each language then had its inn, as it was called, where the knights met for meals in common, and to debate in their own tongue. But the evil effects of this arrangement were soon felt in the growth of national jealousies, and the unity of the order was severely injured by it. To it may be attributed the failure and disappointment of many a noble plan: as when the heroic Raymund Beranger, grand master of the order in 1365, after a bold and successful enterprise against Alexandria, which he took by surprise, entirely destroying the piratical fleet of the Saracens, addressed letters to all the powers of Christendom to implore their assistance against the threatened invasion of his island by the sultan of