they could have stormed, sacked, and plundered the city, and carried off the Pope himself into slavery without any possibility of defence on the Christian side.  This point has not been taken into due consideration by modern writers; the fortifications of Rome, designed or begun or finished at the time of Paul III., have nothing to do with the sack of 1527, with the Connetable de Bourbon, or with the Emperor Charles V. All the bastions, that of the Belvedere excepted, point towards the sea-coast, which was perpetually harried and terrified by Turkish or Barbary pirates.  These would appear with lightning-like rapidity in more than one place at a time, and carry off as many unfortunate men, women, and children as they could collect....  To prevent the recurrence of such disasters the sea-coast was lined with watch-towers, the guns of which could warn the peasants of the approach of suspicious vessels.”

That Paul III. had good warrant for the precautions which he designed to take is not only instanced by the fact of Barbarossa anchoring in the mouth of the Tiber on the occasion of the raid with which we are at present concerned, but from what had occurred to his predecessor on the Papal throne in 1516.  Pope Leo, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was accustomed to leave Rome in the autumn for hunting, and fishing in the sea, of which latter pastime he was particularly fond.  One of his favourite resorts was the castle of Magliana, five miles from Rome, on the banks of the Tiber.  On September 18th, 1516, he left Rome and proceeded to Civita Lavinia, on the Laurentian coast.  Here he was waited for by the corsair Curtogali, who, with fifteen ships off the coast and an ambush on shore, was ready to carry him off.  Curtogali is supposed to have derived his information as to the movements of the Pope from some traitor about the Papal Court who desired the downfall of “the fatal House of Medici.”

Some one, however, warned the Pope, who fled, accompanied by his retinue, at a headlong gallop to Rome, never drawing bridle until he reached the safe seclusion of the Vatican.

We must now return, however, to that eagle who fluttered so sorely the dovecotes, both Christian and Moslem, and whose loudly proclaimed faith in the Prophet never permitted his religion to stand inconveniently in the way of his material advancement in the world.  The soldiers and sailors of the corsair entered Bizerta shouting for Soliman and Barbarossa.  There was no mention of Raschid, that Prince of the Hafsit dynasty, whom Kheyr-ed-Din had declared to the townspeople he had come to restore to the throne of his ancestors.  Too late the town sprang to arms, under a chief named Abdahar, and in the first instance accomplished a considerable success.  Barbarossa’s men were unprepared, and a number of them were slain.  Driven into a bastion of the walls, a party of the corsairs were desperately defending themselves, when one Baetio, a Spanish renegado, discovered that a cannon