Soon after his arrival his ambitions were gratified, and he found himself with a fleet of one hundred ships.  Since the death of Ibrahim, and the incident which terminated with the despatch of Yonis Bey to Venice, the relations between the Grand Turk and the Venetian Republic had become steadily worse, and at last the Sultan declared war.  On May 17th, 1537, Soliman, accompanied by his two sons, Selim and Mohammed, left Constantinople.  With the campaign conducted by the Sultan we are not concerned here; it was directed against the Ionian Islands, which had been in the possession of Venice since 1401.  On August 18th Soliman laid siege to Corfu, and was disastrously beaten, re-embarking his men on September 7th, after losing thousands in a fruitless attack on the fortress.  He returned to Constantinople utterly discomfited.  It was the seventh campaign which the Sultan had conducted in person, but the first in which the ever-faithful Ibrahim had not been by his side.

This defeat at the hands of the Venetians was not, however, the only humiliation which he was destined to experience in this disastrous year; for once again Doria, that scourge of the Moslem, was loose upon the seas, and was making his presence felt in the immediate neighbourhood of Corfu, where the Turks had been defeated.  On July 17th Andrea had left the port of Messina with twenty-five galleys, had captured ten richly laden Turkish ships, gutted and burned them.  Kheyr-ed-Din was at sea at the time, but the great rivals were not destined to meet on this occasion.  Instead of Barbarossa, Andrea fell in with Ali-Chabelli, the lieutenant of Sandjak Bey of Gallipoli.  On July 22nd the Genoese admiral and the Turkish commander from the Dardanelles met to the southward of Corfu, off the small island of Paxo, and a smart action ensued.  It ended in the defeat of Ali-Chabelli, whose galleys were captured and towed by Doria into Paxo.  That veteran fighter was himself in the thickest of the fray, and, conspicuous in his crimson doublet, had been an object of attention to the marksmen of Chabelli during the entire action.  In spite of the receipt of a severe wound in the knee, the admiral refused to go below until victory was assured.  He was surrounded at this time by a devoted band of nobles sworn to defend the person of their admiral or to die in his defence.  His portrait has been sketched for us at this time by the Dominican Friar, Padre Alberto Gugliel-motto, author of “La guerra dei Pirati e la marina Pontifica dal 1500 al 1560.”  The description runs thus:  “Andrea Doria was of lofty stature, his face oval in shape, forehead broad and commanding, his neck was powerful, his hair short, his beard long and fan-shaped, his lips were thin, his eyes bright and piercing.”

Once again had he defeated an officer of the Grand Turk; and it may be remarked that Ibrahim was probably quite right in the estimation, or rather in the lack of estimation, in which he held the sea-officers of his master, as they seem to have been deficient in every quality save that of personal valour, and in their encounters with Doria and the knights were almost invariably worsted.  For the sake of Islam, for the prestige of the Moslem arms at sea, it was time that Barbarossa should take matters in hand once more.