s of the Venetian commander.
There being an absence of nice feeling on the part of the Venetians, the
Janissaries were at once beheaded to a man.

The whole story is an illustration of the extraordinary relations
existing among the Mediterranean States at this time. Soliman the
Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey, had lent three hundred of his
Janissaries, his own picked troops, to assist the corsairs in their
depredations on Venetian commerce. Having done this, and the Janissaries
having been caught and summarily and rightly put to death as pirates,
the Sultan, as soon as he heard of what had occurred, sent an
ambassador, one Yonis Bey, to Venice to demand satisfaction for the
insult passed upon him by the beheading of his own soldiers turned
pirates. The conclusion of the affair was that the Venetians released
"The Young Moor of Alexandria" as soon as he was cured of the eight
wounds which he had received in the conflict, and sent him back to
Africa with such of his galleys as were left. There was one rather
comical incident in connection with this affair, which was that when
Yonis Bey was on his way from Constantinople to Venice he was chased by
a Venetian fleet, under the command of the Count Grandenico, and driven
ashore. The Count was profuse in his apologies when he discovered that
he had been chasing a live ambassador; but the occurrence so exasperated
Soliman that he increased his demands in consequence.

Barbarossa, who had spent his time harrying the Spaniards at sea ever
since the fall of Tunis, was shortly to appear on the scene again. He
received orders from the Sultan, and came as fast as a favoring wind
would bring him. Kheyr-ed-Din had been doing well in the matter of
slaves and plunder, but he knew that, with the backing of the Grand
Turk, he would once again be in command of a fleet in which he might
repeat his triumph of past years, and prove himself once more the
indispensable "man of the sea."

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 dispatch 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 di