There was no artifice left untried by the despot of Tunis.  To the African princes, Moors as well as Arabs and Berbers, did Kheyr-ed-Din send embassies.  For these he chose cunning men well versed in the means of exciting the furious passions of these primitive and ferocious peoples, and it was their mission to represent Muley Hassan as an infamous apostate who was prompted by ambition and revenge, not only to become the vassal of a Christian king, but to conspire with him to extirpate the Mohammedan faith.  The subtle policy inflamed these ignorant and bigoted Mohammedans to the point of madness, and from far and near they threw in their lot with the man who represented himself to be the rallying-point for all those in Africa who desired not only to preserve their holy religion but also their personal liberty.  From Tripoli and Jerba, from Bougie and Bona, from the shores of Shott-el-Jerid, through all the dim hinterland that stretches from thence north-westwards to Algiers, the tribesmen came flocking in.  The wild riders of the desert had been rounded up, and it is said that no less than twenty thousand horsemen, in addition to an innumerable crowd of infantry, responded to the call of the master schemer who was but using these guileless savages to further his own personal ends.  The land-pirates of the desert, those stormy petrels whose lives only differed from those of the followers of Kheyr-ed-Din in that they carried on their depredations on the land instead of on the sea, camped in their thousands in the environs of Tunis and boasted of the deeds which they were about to perform.  Kheyr-ed-Din stimulated their enthusiasm with presents of the most costly description.  Ever wise and politic, he knew when it was necessary to pay royally, and on this occasion surpassed himself in prodigality.  For all this he himself cherished no illusions; he had the measure of the fighting men of his foes at his fingers’ ends, and the most that he expected from these wild irregulars was that they might, perchance, stay an onset and worry the imperial army with dashing cavalry raids.  But that they should hold their own with the incomparable infantry of Spain, or make head against the stolid valour of the German men-at-arms, was not contemplated by Barbarossa.  In his Janissaries, in his hard-bitten fighting men from the galleys, he could expect much; but there were but some few thousands of these, while the disciplined host against which he was called upon to combat was at the least twenty-five thousand—­the flower of the imperial forces.  The situation was unique, one on which the world had never looked before—­all the might of Christendom going up against one who, no matter by what titles he might choose to describe himself, was no more than a vulgar robber.  He was, however, a robber on such a scale as had never before been equalled—­a force which remained unsubdued during the whole of his extraordinary and unusually protracted career.

CHAPTER X