very much chance against the foes of Soliman for the present.  When that opportunity offered he promised himself that the courtiers and the soldiers of the Grand Turk would very soon discover that the fame of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa was no empty matter, and that there existed no seaman in all the Ottoman dominions with whom they could compare the “African pirate,” as he had reason to believe that he was scornfully called behind his back.

A weaker man would have been daunted by his surroundings, by the manifestly unfriendly atmosphere in which he lived, and by the dread that perhaps, after all, Soliman might go back upon his word.  There were no lack of counsellors, he knew very well, who would advise the Sultan to his undoing, if that monarch gave them the opportunity; and, as time passed, so his anxiety grew.  Soliman also could not have felt particularly comfortable at this juncture, with a sullen spirit possessing his men “con carga de guerra,” bitterly resenting the step which he had taken, and the appointment which he had made.  For the present, however, he made no sign, treating Kheyr-ed-Din with distinguished courtesy, but making no reference to the future.  Soliman was revolving the problem in his acute mind, doubtless weighing the unpopularity of the step which he had taken against the services likely to be rendered to him by his strange guest.  And thus several weeks passed at Constantinople, probably amongst the most trying of all those in the unusually prolonged life of Kheyr-ed-Din.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RAID ON THE COAST OF ITALY; JULIA GONZAGA

The Grand Turk had spoken, the appointment had been made, Barbarossa had arrived; but though autocrats can cause their mandate to be obeyed, they cannot constrain the inward workings of the minds of men.  In spite of the awe in which Soliman the Magnificent was held, there were murmurs of discontent in the capital of Islam.  The Sultan had been advised to make Barbarossa his Admiralissimo by his Grand Vizier Ibrahim, who was, as we have said, his alter ego.  This great man had risen from the humblest of all positions, that of a slave, to the giddy eminence to which he had now attained by the sheer strength of his intellect and personality.  The Grand Vizier it was who had pointed out to his master that which was lacking in the Ottoman navy:  brave men and desperate fighters he had in plenty, but the seaman who cleared the Golden Horn and made his way through the archipelago into the open sea beyond had forces with which to contend against which mere valour was but of small avail.  Out there, somewhere behind the blue line of the horizon, did Andrea Doria lie in wait; and if the Moslem seaman should escape the clutches of the admiral of the Christian Emperor, were there not those others, the Knights of Malta, who, under the leadership of Villiers de L’lsle Adam, swept the tideless sea in an unceasing and relentless hostility to every nef, fusta, and galley which flew the flag of the Prophet?