The position at this time was one of surpassing interest.  Here at long last the two most renowned sea-captains of the time were face to face.  Each was aware that his antagonist was worthy of his steel, also that great issues, political and national, hung upon this conflict; which was no mere affair of outposts, but a struggle to the death as to whether the Crescent or the Cross was in time to come to be supreme in the tideless sea.  And yet—­such is the irony of fate—­this battle proved indecisive, and it was not until thirty years later, at the battle of Lepanto, that this momentous question was set at rest for a time.

Would Doria, greatly daring, go in and risk all in attacking a fortified position; or would Barbarossa make a sally and fight it out to the death on the element on which he was so supremely at home?

But Doria had no mind to attack a fleet anchored under the guns of a fortress; Barbarossa would not risk all in an encounter with a foe possessed of great numerical superiority without orders from Constantinople.  On Doria’s side nothing but a disembarkation and a land-attack would offer a fair security for success, Kheyr-ed-Din, who held, as we have said, the interior position, was well aware of this fact, and in this supreme moment of his career was not disposed to give away any advantage.  The situation occupied by Kheyr-ed-Din at the battle of Prevesa was, in a sense, different from any which he had held before, as he was in this case hampered by his sense of responsibility as Admiralissimo to the Grand Turk.  What happened on the distant shores of Africa mattered but little to that monarch, and he had been content to allow his admiral an entirely free hand; here in Europe, on the shores of Greece, so close relatively to his own capital city, it was a very different matter, and Soliman was kept in touch with the happenings of his fleet as far as was possible in those days.  But if the great corsair did not add to his reputation in this eventful campaign he still displayed an aptitude in realising the situation which, it is safe to say, was shown by none of those under his command.

Prevesa illustrates for us more than any other action the difficulties with which the path of the partisan leader in these days must always have been filled; and how it was that personal ascendancy was the only force to which such a leader had to trust Sheer dominance of the minds, the wills, and the bodies of others had placed Kheyr-ed-Din where he was; all his life he had commanded undisciplined pirates, and yet now, when he was the properly accredited officer of a mighty monarch, when he might have expected far more discipline and subordination than had ever been his lot in the past, he was met with a contumaciousness which he was unable to quell, and was forced into taking steps which, in his own unequalled knowledge of war, he knew to be doomed to disaster.