1571.

The failure of the siege of Malta was a sensible rebuff, yet it cannot
be said that it seriously injured the renown of the Turks in the
Mediterranean. They had been resisted on land; they had not yet been
beaten at sea. Nor could they look back on the terrible months of the
siege without some compensating feeling of consolation. They had taken
St. Elmo, and its fall had aroused general jubilation in every Moslem
breast; the Moors of Granada went near to rising against the Spaniards
on the mere report of this triumph of the Turkish arms. Though they
had failed to reduce St. Michael, the cause was to be found, at least
in part, in a false alarm and an unreasoning panic. To be defeated by
such warriors as the Knights of St. John was not a disgrace; like the
Highlanders in the Crimean War, these men were not so much soldiers,
in their opponents' eyes, as veritable devils; and who shall contend
against the legions of the Jinn? Moreover, forced as they were to
abandon the siege, had they not left the island a desert, its people
reduced by half, its fortifications heaps of rubbish, its brave
defenders a handful of invalids?

So reasoned the Turks, and prepared for another campaign. They had
lost many men, but more were ready to take their place; their immense
fleet was uninjured; and though Dragut was no more, Ochiali--as the
Christians called 'Ali _El-Ul[=u]ji_ "the Renegade"--the Turks dubbed
him _Fart[=a]s_, "Scurvied," from his complaint--was following
successfully in his old master's steps. Born at Castelli (Licastoli)
in Calabria about 1508,[46] Ochiali was to have been a priest, but his
capture by the Turks turned him to the more exciting career of a
Corsair. Soon after the siege of Malta he succeeded Barbarossa's son
Hasan as pasha or Beglerbeg of Algiers (1568), and one of his first
acts was to retake Tunis (all but the Goletta) in the name of Sultan
Sel[=i]m II., who, to the unspeakable loss of the Mohammedan world,
had in 1566 succeeded his great father Suleym[=a]n. In July, 1570, off
Alicata, on the southern coast of Sicily, Ochiali surrounded four
galleys of "the Religion"--they then possessed but five--and took
three of them, including the flagship, which Saint-Clement, the
general of the galleys, abandoned in order to throw himself and his
treasure on shore at Montichiaro. One galley alone, the _St. Ann_,
made a desperate resistance; the others surrendered. Sixty Knights or
Serving Brothers of the O