The tolerance which the Jews have always enjoyed in Turkey is well known. At the time when they were being burnt at the stake in the public square in the town of Valladolid in Spain, Jewish overseers were deputed by the Jewish community in Constantinople to sit in the public bakehouses and see that the bread which was baked for Jewish consumption was prepared according to Jewish rites. Individual Jews were even permitted by the authorities to exercise a kind of police supervision over the Turks themselves at a time when their co-religionists were being exterminated like vermin in some Christian countries. Under Sultan Suleyman, one of the most influential of Turkish Ministers of Foreign Affairs was a Christian, Ludovico Gritti, a son of Andrea Gritti, the Doge of Venice. Sultan Suleyman even went so far as to have his portrait painted by a Christian, Melchior Lorenz, an inhabitant of Flensburg. One of the men most honoured by Sultan Mohammed Fatè, the conqueror of Constantinople, was again a Christian, an Italian of the name of Gentil Gellini, who was treated by the Turkish monarch with the greatest distinction. When subsequently war broke out between Venice and Turkey, the Sultan commissioned Gellini to take back to Venice the body of Enrico Dandolo, a former Doge, the first conqueror of Constantinople, during the Fourth Crusade, whose sarcophagus was found in the Church of Saint Sophia. Even the outbreak of war and all the supposed fanaticism of the Turks did not prevent a Turkish Sultan from pursuing a course of conduct which, even after five centuries, would be looked upon as an exceptionally chivalrous action among Christians. When I was in Salonica there was no virulent Turkish Press to hound on the Turks against the Greeks, although a large proportion of the inhabitants in Salonica, albeit Turkish subjects, were Greeks in open sympathy with the Greek cause, even joining Greek committees, an act of high treason—in every country but Turkey. Nor did the Greeks take any trouble to hide this feeling, poring over the Greek newspapers in public as they arrived day by day. Yet no signs of popular resentment were visible during my stay on the part either of the populace or of the soldiery. The same passive toleration was to be observed in Constantinople, where the narrow streets leading to the French Consulate in Pera were crowded with Greeks seeking to obtain the protection of the French Embassy. They were not molested in any way. This might, perhaps, seem to be a matter of course, if we were not reminded of what happened to the Germans in Paris at the outbreak of the war in 1870.