In character, in capability, in strategic insight, in tactical ability, not one of the predecessors or the successors of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa can be compared to him; he was the greatest and most outstanding figure of all those corsairs of whose deeds we hear so much during the sixteenth century, the man above all others who was feared and hated by his contemporaries in Christendom.  He lived, as we have said, for another eight years after the battle of Prevesa, but his great age prevented him from pursuing a very active career.  There were, however, other and younger men, trained in the terrible school of hardship in which his life had been passed, who proved themselves to be his very worthy successors, even if they did not display the same genius in war and statecraft.  The conditions of this period are somewhat remarkable when we come to consider them; Europe, which had been sunk in a rude and uncultured barbarism during the middle ages, was emerging under the influence of the Renaissance into a somewhat higher and nobler conception of life.  It is true that the awakening was slow, that morally the plane on which the peoples stood was far from being an elevated one, that altruism was far from being the note of the lives lived by the rulers of the so-called civilised nations.  For all this they had emerged from that cimmerian darkness in which they had lived so long, and the dawn of better things, of more stable government, of some elementary recognition of the rights of those governed, was beginning to show above the murky horizon.

But if the sun of European progress was slowly and painfully struggling through the clouds, the light which had shone brightly for over seven centuries of Moslem advance was certainly and surely dying.  Beneath the mail-clad heel of the Christian warrior the torch of learning which had burned so brightly in Cordova and Granada had been extinguished and ground into the dust, and the descendants of the alumni of those universities were seeking their bread in the Mediterranean Sea in the guise of bloodthirsty and desperate pirates.

There were no longer among the Moors of Andalusia learned philosophers, expert mathematicians, wise astronomers, and practical agriculturists; there was among them but one art, one science, one means of gaining a livelihood—­the practice of war—­and their very existence depended on the spoils which could be reft from the hereditary enemy.  The corsair who grew to man’s estate, brought up in Algiers, Tunis, Tenes, Jerba, or any other of the lurking places in which the sea-wolves congregated, had as a rule no chance but to follow the sea, to exist as his father had existed before him; he must fight or starve, and in a fighting age no youngster was likely to be backward in taking to the life of wild excitement led by his elders.  Unless following in the train of one of the leaders, such as Barbarossa, the Moslems were apt to take to the sea in a private capacity; a certain