In 1573 the Bashalic of Algiers passed into the hands of Arab Ahmed, and in this same year Don John of Austria recaptured Tunis from the Turks.  Ali, with a fleet of two hundred and fifty galleys and forty smaller vessels, recaptured it again in a siege lasting forty days, and once more returned to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of Spanish captives.  He was yet to live some years to harass the Christians, against whom he ever displayed a most inveterate rancour.  In 1576 he set out from Constantinople with sixty galleys and ravaged the Calabrian coast, where he had been born.  In 1578, the Janissaries of Algiers having assassinated Arab Ahmed the Basha, he was sent to chastise them, which he did with a heavy hand.

Ali was never married, and left no descendants; in the later years of his life he built himself a sumptuous palace some five miles from Constantinople, and no man in all the realm save the Sultan himself was so great a man as the Calabrian renegado, the unknown waif from Southern Italy who possessed neither name nor kindred.  He was tall and robust in stature, but all his life suffered from “scald-head”; for a definition of which ailment we may refer the curious to the dictionary.  He possessed, for a chieftain and a fighting man, the disadvantage of a voice so hoarse as to be inaudible at a few paces distant.  In default of offspring he maintained at his charges five hundred corsairs, whom he called his children.  He died in the year 1580, and with him what has been called the “Grand Period of the Moslem Corsairs” in this book may be said to have come to an end.

By the men whose deeds have been here chronicled the pirate States of Northern Africa were established; and, as we have seen, they maintained an unceasing warfare against all that was mightiest in Christendom, aided and abetted by the Sultans of Constantinople.  In the sixteenth century the Sea-wolves had this at least to recommend them, that they feared neither King nor Kaiser, albeit these great ones of the earth were bent on their destruction.  Villains as they were, they were none the less men to be feared, men in whom dwelt wonderful capabilities of leadership.  Such, however, was not the case with those by whom they were succeeded; and the great and civilised nations of the world tolerated for centuries in their midst a race of savage barbarians whose abominable insolence and fiendish cruelty were only equalled by their material weakness and military impotence.  Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli became recognised States, and the Great Powers degraded themselves by actually accrediting diplomatic agents to the “Courts” of these people.

“The Algerines are robbers, and I am their chief,” was the remark made by the Dey of Algiers to the English Consul in 1641, and the man spoke the plain unvarnished truth.  Yet at this time the Algerines had no more than sixty-five ships, and no organisation which could have held out for twenty-four hours against such attacks as had been successfully resisted on many occasions in the previous century.