Seeking aid from the Pope and the Hospitallers, he promised he would help the Knights retake Rhodes. For the rest of the episode, I quote briefly from a recent account¹⁸:

`The Agà of Rhodes, Ibrahim, was loyal to Ahmed Pasha and encouraged the movement. Intelligence that it would be easy to recapture the island also reached the Grand Master's ears from Rhodian merchants who had met Ibrahim. Antonio Bosio made a secret visit to Rhodes on behalf of the Knights, where he met the Metropolitan Euthymios, leading Greeks and the Turkish Agà and made arrangements with them.' Charles V had offered 25,000 scudi for the campaign; the King of Portugal, 15,000 ducats. However, with Ahmed Pasha's assassination in Egypt, the Rhodians and the Agà `began to fear for their lives'. Antonio Bosio travelled several times to and from Rhodes `until the Turks, suspecting a conspiracy, replaced the garrison, arrested Euthymios, the Agà and other Greek and Muslim nobles and executed them all in 1529.' The Hospitaller squadron immediately left the vicinity of Malta and sailed to Augusta to bring to an end the negotiations that had been temporarily interrupted. On 22 February 1530, celebrating his thirtieth birthday, Charles V was crowned Emperor at Bologna. Within a month, on 23 March, he signed the donation deed at Castelfranco. The

Order had accepted Charles's grant as a perpetual fief in return for the annual gift of a falcon on All Saints' Day. In the long-term perspective of historical development, the heart-felt desires and aspirations which Venice had so gleefully entertained at the fall of Rhodes, and which were so eloquently expressed by the humanist patrician Pietro Zen at the magnificent court of Suleyman, failed to materialize. The eviction of the Hospitallers from the Aegean, however demoralizing the uprooting was, had failed not only to bring an end to the Order, since `the Hospital's existence did not depend upon the occupation of any particular territory',¹⁹ but also to bring any permanent solution to the perennially poisonous problem of piracy and privateering. Suleyman, and each of his successors at the Ottoman Porte, failed to sweep the sea clean of the malignant corsairing activity. And so did the Venetian Republic, which for the last three centuries of its existence had shown increasing signs of weakness which the Knights did not scruple to exploit from distant Malta. Indeed, if there was any one factor which kept constantly souring relations between Venice and the Ottoman Empire and between the Adriatic Republic and the Hospitaller Order of St John, it was precisely the question of piracy and privateering in the Levant.