_Turkey and France._--The following fact, taken from the foreign
correspondence of _The Times_, may suitably seek perpetuity in a corner of
"N. & Q."
"I wish to mention a curious fact connected with the port of Toulon,
and with the long existing relations between France and Turkey, and
which I have not seen mentioned, although it is recorded in the
municipal archives of this town. In the year 1543, the sultan, Selim
II., at the request of the King of France, sent a large army and fleet
to his assistance, under the command of the celebrated Turkish admiral
Barbarossa, who, according to the record, was the grandson of a French
renegade. This army and fleet occupied the town and port of Toulon at
the express wish of Francis I., from the end of September 1543, to the
end of March 1544. And on this day, the last of March 1854, a French
army and fleet has sailed from the same port of Toulon to succour the
descendant of the Sultan Selim in his distress. What a remarkable
example of the rise and fall of empires!"
It will not invalidate the force of the foregoing extract to state, that
Selim II. did not become sultan until 1566, and that it must have been his
father Suleyman (whom he succeeded) who came to the rescue of France in
1543. The same Turkish fleet was afterwards nearly annihilated by the
Venetians in 1571, at the battle of Lepanto.