ever, he made no sign,
treating Kheyr-ed-Din with distinguished courtesy, but making no reference
to the future. Soliman was revolving the problem in his acute mind,
doubtless weighing the unpopularity of the step which he had taken against
the services likely to be rendered to him by his strange guest. And thus
several weeks passed at Constantinople, probably amongst the most trying of
all those in the unusually prolonged life of Kheyr-ed-Din.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RAID ON THE COAST OF ITALY; JULIA GONZAGA

The Grand Turk had spoken, the appointment had been made, Barbarossa had
arrived; but though autocrats can cause their mandate to be obeyed, they
cannot constrain the inward workings of the minds of men. In spite of the
awe in which Soliman the Magnificent was held, there were murmurs of
discontent in the capital of Islam. The Sultan had been advised to make
Barbarossa his Admiralissimo by his Grand Vizier Ibrahim, who was, as we
have said, his _alter ego_. This great man had risen from the humblest of
all positions, that of a slave, to the giddy eminence to which he had now
attained by the sheer strength of his intellect and personality. The Grand
Vizier it was who had pointed out to his master that which was lacking in
the Ottoman navy: brave men and desperate fighters he had in plenty, but
the seaman who cleared the Golden Horn and made his way through the
archipelago into the open sea beyond had forces with which to contend
against which mere valour was but of small avail. Out there, somewhere
behind the blue line of the horizon, did Andrea Doria lie in wait; and if
the Moslem seaman should escape the clutches of the admiral of the
Christian Emperor, were there not those others, the Knights of Malta, who,
under the leadership of Villiers de L'lsle Adam, swept the tideless sea in
an unceasing and relentless hostility to every nef, fusta, and galley which
flew the flag of the Prophet?

It had come to a pass when the Ottoman fighting man was by no means anxious
to go to sea. He was still as brave as those marvellous fanatics of seven
centuries before, who, in the name of God and of His Prophet Mahomet, had
swept all opposition aside from the path of Islam, had conquered and
proselytised in a manner never paralleled in the world before. At the call
of the Padishah, for the honour of the Prophet, the sons of Islam were as
ready to march and to fight as had ever been the warriors of the earlier
Caliphs. But th