The Sultan heard the scuffle, and asked what was the matter; Villelongue cried with all his might, “Amman, Amman” (mercy), and pulled out the letter. The Sultan commanded that he should be brought before him. Villelongue hastened forward, and embracing his stirrup gave him the paper, saying, “Sued call dan” (the King of Sweden gives it to thee). The Sultan put the letter in his breast, went on to the mosque, and Villelongue was secured in one of the out-houses of the seraglio. The Sultan read the letter on his return from the mosque, and resolved to examine the prisoner himself. He changed the Imperial coat and turban, and, as he often does, took the disguise of an officer of janissaries, and took an old Maltese with him as interpreter. Thanks to his disguise Villelongue had a private talk of a quarter of an hour with the Turkish Emperor, an honour that was never done to any other Christian ambassador. He did not fail to detail all the King of Sweden’s hardships, accusing the minister and demanding vengeance with the greater freedom, because he was throughout the conversation talking to the Sultan as to an equal. He had recognized the Sultan, although the prison was very dark, and this made him the bolder in his discourse. The seeming officer of the janissaries said to him, “Christian, be assured that the Sultan my master has the soul of an Emperor, and that if the King of Sweden is in the right he will do him justice.” Villelongue was soon released, and some weeks after there was a sudden change in the seraglio, which the Swedes attribute to this conference. The mufti were deprived, the Kan of Tartary banished to the Rhodes, and the serasquier Pasha of Bender to an island in the Archipelago. The Ottoman Porte is so subject to such storms that it is hard to say whether this was an attempt to appease the King of Sweden or not; his subsequent treatment by the Porte showed little anxiety to please him. Ali-Coumourgi, the favourite, was suspected of having made all these changes for some private ends of his own; the pretext for the banishment of the Kan and the serasquier of Bender was that they had given the King 1,200 purses against the express orders of the Sultan. He put on the Tartar throne the son of the deposed Kan of Tartary, a young man who cared little for his father and on whom Ali counted for military help. Some weeks after this the Grand Vizir Joseph was deposed, and the Pasha Soliman was declared Prime Vizir. I must say that M. de Villelongue, and many Swedes, have assured me that the letter he gave was the cause of these changes, but M. de Fierville denies this, and I have in other cases met with contradictory accounts. Now, an historian’s duty is to tell plain matter of fact, without entering into motives, and he must relate just what he knows, without guessing at what he does not know.