Barbarossa ordered the soldier to be brought before them, and, having nearly flogged him to death, had him beheaded.  He then presented the head to De Vargas, saying: 

“You observe my complaisance.  I now ask you to embrace the Mohammedan faith; then I will overwhelm you with benefits and honours, and make you the Captain-General of my guards.”

De Vargas looked at him in indignation and replied: 

“Dost thou believe that I, who but now demanded the just punishment of a man who had forsworn himself, could stoop to such an act of baseness as this?  Keep your ill-gotten riches; confer your dignities on others; insult not thus a caballero of Spain.”

There was a breathless pause.  None had ever used such language to Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa and lived to tell the tale.  Nor was it to be so in this case.

“You and yours have caused me too much trouble,” he answered indifferently.  He made a sign to the executioner who had beheaded the soldier, and the next moment the head of De Vargas was swept from his body.

The gallant Spaniard, it is to be hoped, came by his end in the way just narrated; but the chroniclers disagree among themselves, and “El Senor Don Diego de Haedo, Arcobispo de Palermo y Capitan General del Reyno de Sicilia por El Rey Felipe nuestro senor,” states that Barbarossa kept De Vargas in confinement for three months and then had him beaten to death.  One can only sincerely hope that the first account is the true one; but Haedo was nearer to the time of the occurrence, and, as he wrote in the reign of Philip II., is more likely to have known the facts.  But however this may have been, there was an end for all time of Spanish domination on the north coast of Africa, and from this we may date the permanent establishment of those piratical States in that part of the world.

The star of Kheyr-ed-Din was once more in the ascendant.  Not only had he crushed out the incipient mutiny of Venalcadi and taken his life, but he had consolidated his power by the taking of the Penon d’Alger.  He celebrated this occasion in the most practical manner possible:  a stop was put to the indiscriminate massacre of the garrison, and five hundred of the Spaniards were captured alive; it was their dreary fate to pull down entirely the tower of Pedro Navarro, which they had defended so gallantly and to utilise the material in making a causeway from the Penon to the shore.  Barbarossa was determined that on no future occasion should his enemies have the chance of dominating his town of Algiers.  He was now a sovereign in fact and in deed, regarding even so mighty a monarch as Charles V. with comparative equanimity.  Terrible was the wrath of the latter when the news of the fall of the Penon, the massacre of the garrison, and the death of his trusty servant De Vargas, was brought to him.  The Sea-wolves seemed to exist but to exasperate him, and this latest news came just at one of the most prosperous epochs of his career.