four years of this
veritable hell upon earth, there sailed one day into the harbour of Genoa
the great Kheyr-ed-Din himself. The Admiralissimo of the Grand Turk, full
of years, honours, and booty, was on his last cruise, and one of the last
acts of his active life was the rescue of Dragut, the man who had served
him so well, and for whom he had so high a regard as a resourceful mariner,
from the degrading servitude into which he had fallen. The Spanish
historian, Marmol, recounts that the sum of three thousand ducats was paid
by Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa for the redemption of Dragut. As this history
was published in 1573, we must conclude that the author who wrote of these
events so soon after they had happened is correct; at the same time,
Barbarossa was in command of one hundred galleys of the Grand Turk, and it
was never his custom to pay for anything which he could take by force.
However this may have been, and the point is not one of very great
importance, the Genoese Senate was terrified lest their territory should be
ravaged; they wrote accordingly to their Grand Admiral, requesting that
Dragut might be released and sent on board of the galley of the admiral
basha. This was immediately done, and the man who for four years had tugged
at the Christian oar was once again in a position to make war on those who
had been for that period his masters.

Not only had he tugged at the Christian oar, but also he had tasted of the
Christian whip--and of very little else, as the food of the rower was as
scanty as it was disgusting; in consequence, if he had been an implacable
foe to Christendom before this event, he was not likely to have become less
so while toiling in the Genoese galley.

The practical retirement of Barbarossa from that sphere of activity in
which his life had been passed now left Dragut-Reis the most feared and the
most formidable of all the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean. From the
time of his release by Barbarossa until the day of his death at the siege
of Malta in 1565, he followed the example shown him by that prince among
pirates with so much assiduity as to render him only second to Kheyr-ed-Din
in the detestation in which he was held. Says Morgan: "The ill-treatment he
had met with during his four years' captivity was no small addition to the
Innate Rapaciousness of his Disposition."

In the year 1546, Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa died, and to replace him the
Sultan Soliman ordered all the mariners i