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 favouring 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 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