built on Mount Sceberras.  The Turks abandoned the siege and returned to Constantinople on the arrival of some insignificant reinforcements from Sicily.  So terrible had been the resistance of the Knights that no heart was left in their armada.  Of Dragut there remains but little to be said:  he was perhaps the best educated of the corsairs and less cruel than was usually their habit.  Although not so renowned as his more celebrated master, Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, this is, perhaps, because his career was cut short at the siege of Malta at a comparatively early age.  Although he never attained the rank of Admiralissimo to the Grand Turk, that potentate, as we have seen, placed in him the greatest confidence, and relied largely on his judgment, especially when sea-affairs were in question.  Like the Barbarossas before him, he rose from nothing to the height to which he eventually attained by sheer force of intellect and character.  In the stormy times in which his lot was cast he never faltered in his onward way, never repined, never looked back, sustained as he was by a consciousness of his own capability to rule the wild spirits by whom he lived surrounded.  So it is that, whatever other opinion we may hold of Dragut, we cannot deny that in this captain of the Sea-wolves were blended rare qualities, which caused him to shine as a capable administrator, a fine seaman, but above all as a supreme leader of men.  Dragut died with arms in his hands fighting those whom he considered to be his bitterest enemies.  He did not live to see the repulse of Piali and Mustapha, and it is to be presumed that he died assured in his own mind that victory would rest with the Moslem host.  For such a man as this no death could have been more welcome.

CHAPTER XXI

ALI BASHA

Ali, the Basha of Algiers, succeeds to Dragut—­He conquers the Kingdom of Tunis, captures four galleys from the Knights of Malta, joins Piali Basha in his raidings preliminary to the battle of Lepanto—­The gathering of the Christian hosts and the arrival of Don John of Austria in the Mediterranean to take command.

“Now I have heard several mariners and captains of the sea, nay, even Knights of Malta, debate among themselves this question, as to which was the greater and better seaman, Dragut or Occhiali?  And some held for one and some for the other; those who held for Occhiali declaring that he had held greater and more honourable charges than Dragut, because he commanded as General and Admiral for the Grand Turk and that il fit belle action at the battle of Lepanto.”  Pierre de Bourdeille, the Seigneur de Brantome, from whom we make the above quotation, was himself present at the siege of Malta and, besides this, as is well known, gossiped in his own inimitable way concerning men and women of his time, from corsairs to courtesans.  When such contemporary authorities as those mentioned