of the Padishah, notorious throughout the whole world of Europe for his implacable enmity to the Knights.  The first preoccupation of the corsair was to inform himself as to the conduct of the operations.  These, when disclosed to him, by no means met with his approval.  This real leader immediately made it clear to Piali and Mustafa that which they should have done.  In the first place they should have made themselves masters of the castle of Gozo, and then captured the Citta Notabile.  By doing this the supplies to the town and fortress of Il Borgo would have been cut off:  besides—­and more important than aught else—­they would in this manner have closed the road to those succours expected by the Christians.  Piali, who had desired from the first to undertake nothing without the advice of Dragut, now said that the siege of St. Elmo was not so far advanced after all, and, if the Basha of Tripoli should so direct, it could be raised at once.  To this, however, Dragut would by no means consent.

“That would have been well enough,” he said, “if the affair had not gone so far; but, after the opening of the trenches and several days of attack, it is not possible to raise the siege without sullying the honour of the Sultan and discouraging the valour of the soldiers.”

It cannot be denied that, in acting as he did, the corsair displayed a self-restraint and a loyalty to the Sultan hardly to be expected in the circumstances.  The jealousy which so often obtains among rival commanders was singularly in evidence in the forces of the Padishah:  Dragut had good cause to be dissatisfied with the dispositions which had been made, and yet, for the reasons which we have quoted, he allowed them to proceed.  Before the Basha had left Tripoli he had been engaged in communications with Muley Hamid, the then King of Tunis, who was feudatory of Spain.  Anxious as was the corsair to aid in attacking his implacable enemies, the Knights, he could not afford to leave his own flank unguarded in Africa.  He succeeded, however, in arriving at an understanding with the King of Tunis, and, further than this, he had assured himself, by means of his spies, that the succours which were to be sent from Sicily by the Spanish King could not possibly arrive for another two months.  It was the negotiations which he was obliged to undertake with Muley Hamid which had caused his late arrival.  As far as it is possible to judge, it was this circumstance, which (added to their own incomparable valour) turned the scale in favour of the Knights.

Among all those brave men at Malta, on both sides, in this flaming month of June 1565, there were none who excelled the Basha of Tripoli.  “No one had ever seen a more intrepid general officer,” says de Vertot.  “He passed entire days in the trenches and at the batteries.  Among his different talents none understood better than did he the direction and conduct of artillery, which was his special metier.  By his orders on June 1st a second battery was constructed closer to the fort and parallel to the one already in existence, in order that an absolutely continuous fire might be maintained.  He mounted four guns on the opposite side of Marsa Muzetto Harbour on a projecting point of land, from which a further enfilading fire smote the doomed fortress on the flank:  this point has been known ever since as the Point Dragut.”