_ 189 _ do not engage in a great battle of cavalry, so they cannot be routed and taken with their arms and destroyed completely for the sake of the faith. So it is more consistent if the Grand Sultan seeks his vengeance by threatening that he will capture the Holy Sepulchre, and his complaint will be more just against us, for when he sees his undoing, which with the help of God will be soon, and when he laments his adverse fortune he will in effect proclaim our merits and the glory and diffusion of the Catholic faith. These things, Holy Father, are not vain things nor very difficult to achieve, because conquest is our intention. What we have done here with arduous beginnings and fearful means have been attained and achieved in so short a course of time with the help of God, up to now with great and prosperous fortune. Any Catholic who considers them without witnessing them will believe that they have rather been done miraculously by the hand of God than with the counsel and strength of men, which will be received with more glory because there is a great hope that his true faith will spread. Although this pious and profitable conquest is to be praised highly, for sixty years up to the present the kings of Portugal our predecessors and we have continued to carry it on, with many deaths [...] of captains and noble lords and many of our soldiers, with unwished-for dangers and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTg0NzAy