For the tourist, it has already become evident that he was almost certain to be confronted with the subjects, or the agents, of the Ottoman Empire, sooner or later; and then was to be made aware that, if one of the two existed on sufferance, that one was himself. Here is the beginning of a prayer introduced into the English liturgy in 1565;[74]—"O Almighty and Everlasting God, our Heavenly Father, we thy disobedient and rebellious children, now by thy just judgment sore afflicted, and in great danger to be oppressed, by thine and our sworn and most deadly enemies, the Turks...." Historians agree that it was in the third quarter of the sixteenth century that the Turks' power reached its height. Rarely, later than that, are they mentioned otherwise than incidentally in the books from which modern Christendom draws its information, and their earlier appearances are rather on account of sensational events and minor indirect influence than as one of the Powers of Europe. Yet throughout this period, that is, for three-quarters of a century after decline, according to historians, had begun, the Turks were not only one of the Powers, but the chief one, equal with any in diplomacy, superior to any by land and by sea. At a date when our text-books represent England as wresting the supremacy on the water from Spain, contemporary opinion regarded Turkey as the first naval power. The chief of the sensational events just referred to, the battle of Lepanto, is made to stand out, as that of Agincourt in English history, not because it typifies the course of events, but because it is a bright spot for the Christian pupil's eye to rest on. Within one year afterwards the Turks were ready to meet the Christians again: within two years they had the biggest fleet in the world: within three the Venetians agreed to pay 300,000 ducats (worth now about £500,000) as indemnity; and the fifth year afterwards the Venetian Lippomano takes it for granted, in speaking before the Signory—in other words, a man representing the pick of the diplomatists of the day speaking, after full consideration, to the most critical of audiences—that without the joint help of the Muscovites and Poles Christendom can never hope really to get the upper hand of the Turks.[75] It must be remembered, too, that the Atlantic then was what the Pacific is now, the ocean of the future; "command of the sea" meant, to the average sixteenth-century man, command of the Mediterranean, from the basin of which had risen all the civilisations of which he had any knowledge, through which lay the most used trade-route, and round which lay the biggest cities known to him: Cairo, Constantinople, Aleppo, and Fez (all Mohammedan). But when this period of their supposed decline had set in, the Mohammedans, for the first time, ceased to be content with the Mediterranean and began to practise— Keeping in awe the bay of Portingale And all the ocean by the British shore,