CIIAP. II.]

ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM.

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onions, nothing else, in what had been the gardensof the peasantry, only food we could find, andglad to get it; but too generally we had to live onair. We never met a living soul for a long time;we had to sleep beneath no roof, for not one didwe ever find; after eight days we entered whatused to be a town, but there too, not a singleliving creature, but only bones and heads: at lastthe King of Hungary arrived with some knights ofRhodes, and then we were assured the Tartars■were gone.” 1

Naillac in person led a party against the fort,held by some Tartars left stationed there byTimour when he returned to Samarcand; and,having exterminated them, built a new, verystrong fortress on what is' supposed by many tobe the precise site of the ancient Halicarnassus,and called it St. Peter’s of the Freed; and about1399 it became the sole asylum for all enslavedChristians to escape to along that coast of AsiaMinor. The knights kept there a famous race ofvery large watch-dogs, who learned to distin-guish men, with an instinct at least equal to thatof those of the Grand St. Bernard. A Christianrefugee, having thrown himself into the bottom of

•' Joannis Thurocz: Chron. Hungarium.—Bib. Crois., iii.215.—Eogcrii Hungari Clnon.