the part of the historian; at the same time, when
Dragut was at the height of his activities there is no doubt that any one
passing through those seas ran a great risk of capture; so much so in fact
that at this period, from 1538, the date of the battle of Prevesa, until
Lepanto in 1571, all maritime commerce in the Mediterranean was greatly
circumscribed. At the beginning of this epoch, which saw the rise of the
Moslem corsairs, these robbers perforce confined themselves more to the
North African coast than was the case later on. The pioneers of the
piratical movement, after the fatal date 1492, which saw the wholesale
expulsion of the Moors from Spain, were comparatively speaking inexpert
practitioners in the art and mystery of piracy; they had not the habit of
the sea, and in consequence confined their depredations to the
neighbourhood of their own selected ports in Africa, which dominated that
sea lane running east and west through the Mediterranean, which then, as
now, was one of the greatest highways of commerce of the world. Gradually,
as we have seen, under the able guidance of the two Barbarossas, but
particularly that of the second and greater of the two, piracy became a
commonplace in the north, as well as in the south, of the tideless sea; the
corsairs, as time went on, even devoting more time and attention to the
coast of Italy and the islands of the archipelago than they did to the
recognised trade routes. These latter had become by 1540 similar to an
estate which has been shot over too frequently; birds had become both wild
and scarce, it was hardly worth while to go over the ground, except now and
again on the chance of picking up a straggler. Towns and islands, on the
other hand, even if they did not yield much in the way of actual plunder,
were always good cover to beat for slaves, which had a certain value in the
markets of Algiers and Tunis. Another circumstance which had led to the now
frequent raids on the littoral of the European countries was the
countenance and support accorded to the corsairs by the Grand Turk: so
admirably did they fit into the scheme of his ambitions, that by the time
Dragut arrived at a commanding position they were, so to speak, officially
recognised as a fighting asset of the Sublime Porte; and, as we have seen,
the Sultan did not hesitate to lend his picked troops, the Janissaries, to
the corsairs when engaged in their ordinary piratical business. To the
Grand Turk the cors