The Hungarian army returned in triumph to Buda. Close upon their heels followed the sultan’s envoy, begging for peace. All he now asked for was to be let alone in his own country, and he in turn would not molest Hungary. This was an important concession, for the faith of the sultans had heretofore been held to forbid them to enter into a parley with, and still less to entreat peace of, the infidel Christians. But the sultan had just now a special reason for peace. Half of his empire had risen in arms against him—the Albanians in Europe and Mohammedan rebels in Asia. As usual with states based upon violence, the discontented rose on all sides at the news of the first lost battle. This was the effect of Hunyadi’s campaign. The terms of peace offered by the sultan were of the most flattering and tempting nature. He promised a great deal of money, territory, mines, and captives. Hunyadi was now in favor of peace; he felt that he must gather strength. Peace was therefore concluded, the king swearing by the Gospel and the sultan by the Koran. The ambassadors of the sultan had hardly left Hungary when Cardinal Julian, the pope’s nuncio, arrived in the country and declared, in the pontiff’s name, the oath of Uladislaus, the Hungarian king, to be null and void, adjuring him, at the same time, by all the saints, to hasten and make use of this opportunity to annihilate the Turks, and insisting that one so favorable would never occur again. All Europe’s eyes were upon them, he added, and all Europe wished to take part in the struggle. And, indeed, the Christian princes hastened to protest against the peace, and offered money and soldiers in abundance to continue the war. Meanwhile news arrived that the Italian naval squadron had appeared in the Turkish waters to intercept the sultan’s crossing over from Asia to Europe. It was urged that now had come the time to fall upon the Turkish empire, which was without a master. The papal nuncio summoned all his eloquence to prove that the peace concluded with the Turk was not valid, for the word given to an unbeliever was not binding, and God did not listen to an oath deposited into pagan hands. “All Europe,” he continued, “scoffed at this peace, and the honor and martial glory of the Hungarian nation will be like naught if she persisted in keeping it. It will disgrace her heroic name.”