However well this state of affairs may have suited Abd-Allah, the Genoese held that the situation was far from satisfactory.  In consequence they sent an army against Curtogali, and on August 4th, 1516, they captured Bizerta, set free a number of Christian captives, and plundered the town.  But they did not capture Curtogali, who, only five weeks after, made a daring attempt to carry off the Pope in person from the sea-shore in the neighbourhood of Rome.  Curtogali ended his days as the Governor of Rhodes, from which the Knights of Saint John were finally expelled by Soliman the Magnificent on December 22nd, 1522.  This was the greatest blow which the fraternity ever received.  On December 24th the Turks made a triumphal entry into the town, and it was said that “Sultan Soliman was not insensible to the sorrowful position of his vanquished enemies, and when he saw the Christian Commander, Prince Philippe Villiers L’Isle Adam, he remarked:  ’It weighs upon me somewhat that I should be coming hither to chase this aged Christian warrior from his house.’” At the beginning of the following year the knights left the island, never to return.  On the day of this desolate embarcation the herald blew upon his trumpet the “Salute and Farewell” and the identical instrument upon which this call was sounded is still preserved in the armoury at Malta, to which barren island the knights were forced to retreat.

CHAPTER III

URUJ BARBAROSSA

In the year 1457 an obscure Roumelian or Albanian renegado named Mahomedi was banished from Constantinople by the Grand Turk; he established himself in the island of Mitylene and there married a Christian widow named Catalina, by whom he had two sons, Uruj and Khizr.  The father had been a sailor and both sons adopted the same profession.  It is from the pages of El Maestro Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval that we glean these bare facts concerning the birth and parentage of these men who, in after-years, became known to all the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean as the “Barbarossas,” from their red beards.  Sandoval, Bishop of Pampluna, published in the year 1614 his monumental history of the Emperor Charles V., and through his splendid volumes the deeds of the Moslem corsairs run like the scarlet thread which is twisted through a Government rope.  It is evident that the fact of having to deal with such rascals annoys the good Bishop not a little, as his severe and caustic comments frequently display.  There was incident and accident enough in the life of the famous “Carlos Quinto” without the historian having to turn aside to chronicle the deeds of the pirates; but their exploits were so daring, the consequences thereof were so far-reaching, that the ominous crimson thread had to be woven into any narrative of the times in despite of the annoyance of the man by whom the rope was twisted.