the establishment of a Consulate and freedom of religion for French subjects. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, various religious orders (Capuchin, Carmelite, Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit) were established, as chaplains of the French ambassadors and consuls, in major Ottoman cities (Istanbul, Alexandria, Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, etc.), Lebanon and the islands of the Aegean Archipelago. They assembled the Catholics to instruct and confirm them in the Catholic faith, opened schools to which flocked the children of all rites, relieved the spiritual and corporal miseries of the Christians in the Turkish prisons, and nursed the pest-stricken, which last office made many martyrs of charity. French influence reached its peak during the reign of Louis XIV, whose prestige, due to his victories and conquests, was significant at the Porte. Louis XIV gave the missionaries material and moral support. Thanks to him, the often precarious tolerance, on which the existence of the missions had previously depended, was officially recognized in 1673, when on 5 June, Mehmed IV not only confirmed the earlier capitulations guaranteeing the safety of pilgrims and the religious guardians of the Holy Sepulchre, but signed four new articles, all beneficial to the missionaries. The decrees secured the tranquil possession of their churches, explicitly to the Jesuits and Capuchins, and in general "to the French at Smyrna, Saïd, Alexandria, and in all other ports of the Ottoman Empire". The reign of Louis XIV marked the apogee of the French Protectorate in the East, for not only the Latin missionaries of all nationalities, but also the heads of all Catholic communities, regardless of rite or nationality, appealed to the king, and at the recommendation of his ambassadors and consuls to the Porte and the pashas, obtained justice and protection. In 1740 the French succeeded in securing the renewal of the capitulations, with additions which explicitly confirmed the right of the French Protectorate. By the eighty-seventh of the articles signed on 28 May 1740, Sultan Mahmud I declared: "...The bishops and religious subject to the Emperor of France living in my empire shall be protected while they confine themselves to the exercise of their office, and no one may prevent them from practicing their rite according to their custom in the churches in their possession, as well as in the other places they inhabit." In subsequent treaties between France and Turkey, the capitulations were not repeated verbatim, but they are recalled and