While it is true that the phrase concerning "the empire on which the sun never sets" had been invented by this time, in reference to that of Spain, the Turkish was regarded as, to quote a traveller of 1612, "the greatest that is, or perhaps ever was from the beginning," just as the phrase "the sick man of Europe" had also been employed, but in reference not to Turkey, but to England (in 1558).[83] To these words may be added those of another level-headed, well-educated Englishman, Sir Henry Blount, "the only modern people great in action and whose empire hath so suddenly invaded the world and fixed itself on such firm foundations as no other ever did." Whereas, late as Blount's visit to Constantinople was, he found the wiser Turks considering the Christians not so strong as they used to be; not so strong as the Persians. Busbecq, too, in his earlier days, sums up the outlook in despair, concluding that the worst feature of it all is that the Turks are used to conquering, the Christians to being conquered; and confirms it later (when he was sixty-three and had had thirty-eight years' experience of European politics, mostly official, including eight years at Constantinople), by writing that the object of the Turks' war (1585) with the Persians is to leave themselves freer to extinguish Christendom, and that, the former war over, "they will fight us for existence and empire; and the chances are greatly in their favour." As late as a century after this the Turks were besieging Vienna with an army 200,000 strong. But the test of the hold of a given idea on the minds of ordinary men, such as these tourists mostly were, is the frequency with which it recurs in the works of their favourite writers. Now, badly off indeed would the seventeenth-century novelist have been without the Turkish corsair to defer the wedding-day for a respectable number of pages; and the echo of the convention has attained immortality in the stock quotation from Molière, "Mais que diable allait-il dans cette galère?" There is a passage, too, in "Othello" which illustrates the above beliefs still better—Othello's last words:— Set you down this— And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the State I took by the throat the circumcised dog And smote him, thus—