We can perhaps best understand Evelyn's account of Sabatai Sevi, "the Messiah of Ismir," against this background of English Protestant millennial thinking, admirably summarized in Michael Fixler's recent study.[4] As Fixler suggests, it was possibly to discredit the Fifth-Monarchy men that Rycaut first included the account in what was to become his _History of the Turkish Empire_. At any rate, Sevi himself was hardly the mere con-man Rycaut and Evelyn portray; the mask, indeed, is _erepta_ only with the greatest of difficulty. Because Rycaut was interested in trade and cultural _mores_, his (and consequently, Evelyn's) account neglects features of the story which are of primary interest to more psychologically inclined readers. We are told almost nothing, for example, of the details of Sevi's solitary youth; his physical attractiveness; his clear voice as well suited to lascivious Spanish love-songs (interpreted mystically) as to Psalms; and his early rejection of the Talmud for the practical Cabala, with its strenuous, self-mortifying asceticism. One would gather from Evelyn that only the deluded followers of the "impostor" and not Sevi himself imposed such punishments as self-burial, and bathing in the sea, even in midwinter. More surprising, perhaps, is the almost total neglect of Sarah, Sevi's third wife, mentioned in the _Pretended Messiah_ only as the "Ligornese Lady" whom Sevi acquired after freeing himself "from the Incumbrances of a Family." In fact, the beautiful and engaging Sarah seems to have become an integral part of the movement, a movement which in its early stages was all-male. A prostitute notorious in her own right, primarily for her claims to be the destined bride of the Messiah, Sarah apparently escaped miraculously from a Christian convent after being cared for as an orphan of the savage Chmielnicki massacres in Poland. As he was later to do with a more formidable rival to his exclusive claims (Nehemiah ha-Kohen, who ultimately exposed him as a fraud) Sevi called Sarah to Cairo in 1664, claiming to have dreamed of her as _his_ future bride. Eventually, after his "conversion," she followed him even into the Turkish seraglio where he bore the title Mahmed Effendi.