Juan's rank
gave him early the opportunity of displaying in high command his marked
genius for war. He was employed in expeditions in the Mediterranean, and
directed the suppression of the Moorish revolt in Granada in 1570. He was
then named "Capitan-General del Mar"--High Admiral of the Spanish fleets.
Young as he was when Pius V appointed him commander-in-chief of the forces
of the Holy League, his services by land and sea, as well as his princely
rank, gave him the necessary prestige to enable him to command even older
generals like Marco Antonio Colonna, the leader of the papal and Italian
forces, and the veteran Sebastian Veniero, who directed those of Venice.

During the period of concentration it was Veniero who had the most
difficult problem to solve. The Venetian fleet had separated into two
divisions at the close of the campaign of 1570. The weaker wintered in the
harbours of Crete. The stronger detachment passed the winter at Corfu, in
the Ionian islands. In the early summer of 1571 Veniero took command at
Corfu, and occupied himself with preparing the fleet for sea, and
reinforcing it with new galleys from the arsenal of Venice, and newly
raised drafts of sailors, rowers, and fighting-men. Before his
preparations were complete, the vanguard of the Turkish armada, continually
reinforced from the East, appeared on the western coasts of Greece. To
attack them with the force he had at hand would be to court destruction.
Ulugh Ali, who commanded the vanguard of the enemy, was perhaps the
best-hated of the Moslem admirals. A Calabrese fisherman, he had been
captured as a young man by one of the Barbary corsairs, and spent some
miserable years chained as a galley-slave at an oar. At last his endurance
broke down, and he escaped from his misery by becoming a Mohammedan. Under
his new name he rose rapidly to command, enriched himself by successful
piracy, and before long won himself the rank of a Pasha and a vice-royalty
in North Africa. But, happily for Europe at large, though unfortunately for
many a village along the shores of Greece and Illyria, Ulugh Ali as admiral
of the Turkish fleets remained still a pirate, with the fixed idea that a
plundering cruise was better than a naval campaign. Had the renegade been
more admiral than pirate, he had an opportunity of changing the course of
history in that early summer of 1571.

His fleet cruising off the coasts of Epirus held a central strategic
position in relation to