When, therefore, Andrea Doria and his captains laid siege to the city, they murmured against its defence, desiring ardently to enter into some sort of treaty with the besiegers; they had had enough of war, they said, and wished to end their days in peace if possible.

Aisa Reis, however, would hear no word of surrender, telling those who murmured against the defence that “if he heard a word more of these plots he would infallibly sacrifice every mother’s son amongst them, and then lay the town in ashes.”  Having already had a taste of the quality of this redoubtable corsair, and feeling perfectly certain that should the occasion arise he would be as good as his word, there was no more disaffection among the inhabitants, who had to put up with their native place being made a cockpit for Doria and Dragut to fight out their quarrel.  It is permissible to sympathise very sincerely with these unfortunates, who, having been betrayed in the first instance, were compelled to stand a siege in the second.

Aisa had a picked force of his uncle’s men, some seventeen hundred foot and six hundred horse, all seasoned and formidable veterans, inured to warfare by land and sea.  On these of course he could rely to the death.  The common folk of the town were inclined to make common cause with the corsairs in resistance to their hereditary enemy the Christians; but the magistrates and members of the council, the grave and reverend signiors, held so conspicuously aloof that Aisa was constrained into forcing them to aid in the defence when he had time to attend to the matter.  As Dragut was not actually present at the siege it falls outside the scope of this chronicle; he was without the walls when the besiegers arrived, but all that he could do, that he did.  With a body of his own men reinforced by a rabble rout of Berber tribesmen, he harassed the Christian army; they were, however, in far too great numbers for him to make any impression, and after several desperate skirmishes he recognised that the day was lost, and re-embarking in his galleys sailed away.  The town after a desperate and prolonged resistance was at last taken by storm; and Doria captured Aisa, a Turkish alcaid, and ten thousand prisoners of the baser sort.  Of these, however, there was scarce one who owed allegiance to Dragut; the warriors of this chief neither gave nor accepted quarter, as they feared the wrath of the terrible corsair even more than death itself.

Don Juan de Vega put his son Don Alvaro in command of the city and set out in search of Dragut with twenty galleys, but the sea leaves no traces by which a fugitive can be tracked, and his search proved as fruitless as had been that of Doria in the previous year.  The rage and the disappointment of the admiral were beyond all bounds; what to him was the value of the capture of Aisa, of the Turkish alcaid, of the ten thousand of the baser sort; nay, what to him was the value of “Africa” itself when once again like a mocking spirit Dragut had glided beyond the sea horizon to devastate, to plunder, and to slay once more, the scourge and the menace of Christendom.