Constantine, who lay concealed several days in my house at Venice; for Macedonia and Thessaly, which formerly belonged to Alexander the Great, were his inheritance. Valona is situated in them; Scutari and Croia are not far off; but in his time his father or uncle[374] mortgaged them to the Venetians, who lost Croia, and Scutari was surrendered to the Turk upon articles of peace[375]. The said Lord Constantine was at that time within three leagues of them; and the enterprise would have been executed, had not the Archbishop of Durazzo stayed at Venice some time after Constantine’s departure. I pressed him hard to depart, for I thought him a person that could not keep a secret long; and he went up and down boasting that he was about an affair which would make him celebrated all over Christendom. By ill fortune, on the very day that the Venetians had news of the death of the Turk’s brother, whom the Pope had delivered to our king, they resolved to give notice of it to the Sultan by one of their secretaries; and being assured that whoever brought the first news would be certain of a great reward, they ordered that no vessel should pass between the two castles in the night (which castles command the entrance of the gulf of Venice); to prevent which they posted guards at both of them, being fearful of nothing so much as the small vessels and grips[376], as they call them, of which there are great numbers in the ports of Albania, and their islands in Greece. The poor archbishop happened that very night to set out upon the Lord Constantine’s enterprise, and carrying along with him abundance of swords, bucklers, and javelins, for the use of his confederates who wanted them; as he passed between the two castles he was stopped and taken, and himself and servants secured in one of them; but the vessels had leave to go on. They searched him, and found letters about him that discovered the whole plot; and the Lord Constantine has told me since that the Venetians sent immediate notice to all the Turkish garrisons that were near, and an express to the Grand Signor himself; so that, had it not been for the grip which they suffer to pass (whose master was an Albanian who gave him notice), the Lord Constantine had been taken; but he escaped by sea, and got away into Apulia. CH. XVIII.—A Digression or Discourse, by no Means unconnected with the main Subject, in which Philip de Commines, Author of this present Book, speaks at some Length of the State and Government of the Signory of Venice, and of what he saw, and what was done, while he was Ambassador from the King of France in the City of Venice.—1495.