It had come to a pass when the Ottoman fighting man was by no means anxious to go to sea.  He was still as brave as those marvellous fanatics of seven centuries before, who, in the name of God and of His Prophet Mahomet, had swept all opposition aside from the path of Islam, had conquered and proselytised in a manner never paralleled in the world before.  At the call of the Padishah, for the honour of the Prophet, the sons of Islam were as ready to march and to fight as had ever been the warriors of the earlier Caliphs.  But they had ever been soldiers; the habit of the sea was not theirs, and they found that, time after time, such sea-enterprises as they did undertake were shattered by the genius of Doria, or broken into fragments by the reckless, calculating assaults of the knights.  And so it came about that there was but little heart in the navy of the Padishah, and those who served therein had but slight confidence in those by whom they were led.  To use a metaphor from the cricket-field, it was time “to stop the rot” by sending in a really strong player.  He was not to be found within the confines of orthodox Islam, and must be imported from outside.

The man had been found; could he be forced on an unwilling and discontented populace?  Who, it was asked in Constantinople, was this man who had been called in to command the ships of the Ottomans at sea?  They answered their own question, and said that he was a lawless man, a corsair:  were there not good seamen and valiant men-at-arms like the Bashas Zay and Himeral, who should be preferred before him; this man who had come from the ends of the earth, and of whom nobody knew anything good?  Again, could he be trusted?  Something of the history of the Barbarossas had penetrated to the capital of Turkey, and it was known that scrupulous adherence to their engagements had not always characterised the brothers:  who should say that he might not carry off the galleys of the Grand Turk on some marauding expedition designed for his own aggrandisement?  There was yet more to be urged against him:  not only was he infamous in character, but he was no true Mussulman, for had not his father been a mere renegado, and—­worst of all—­had not his mother been a Christian woman?

It was thus that the talk ran in that blazing autumn in Constantinople.  Naturally there were plenty of persons who carried reports to Kheyr-ed-Din, and that astute individual soon made up his mind as to the most advantageous course for him to pursue.  With the full concurrence of the Sultan, he left Constantinople and journeyed to Aleppo to see Ibrahim.  The latter was both cunning and tenacious.  Removed from the capital, the tide of gossip and discontent only reached him at second-hand; but he was not to be deterred by popular clamour even had he been in the midst of it.  None knew better than he who and what was Barbarossa; in fact, it may be confidently asserted that none in Constantinople had anything like the same