Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean Part 3

"It is agreed," answered Kheyr-ed-Din, and Ha.s.san Ali.

As the strong sun of a perfect May morning in the Mediterranean leapt above the horizon, Uruj loosed his hounds upon their prey; the oars of the galleys churned the clear blue waters into foam, and the air was filled with the yells of the corsairs. "Allah! Allah!" and "Barbarossa!

Barbarossa!" they cried. It was a war-cry that was destined to re-echo over many a conflict, both by land and sea, in the years that were to come.

In a simultaneous, and as we have seen a concerted attack, the beaks of the galleys crushed into the broadsides of _The Galley of Naples_, and, ever foremost in the fray, Uruj and Kheyr-ed-Din were the first two men to board. Then, when men were hand to hand and foot to foot, when Moslem scimitar rang on Christian sabre, and the air was filled with the oaths and shouts of the combatants, the third remaining pirate craft grappled _The Galley of Naples_ by the stern, and a tide of fresh, unwounded men burst into the fray. This was the end; the Christians were both outnumbered and outfought, for among them were many who were not by profession warriors, whereas no man found a footing among the Sea-wolves, or was taken to sea as a fighting man, unless he had approved himself to the satisfaction of his captain that he was a valiant man of his hands. We have no record or list of the dead and wounded in this battle, but among the latter was Uruj, who was severely hurt. Not so Kheyr-ed-Din, who escaped scatheless and took command now that his brother was incapacitated. The dead were flung overboard with scant ceremony, and the wounded patched up as best might be, and then _The Galley of Naples_ was taken in tow, and the corsairs returned in triumph to Tunis. Faithful to their treaty, so far, they laid one-fifth of their spoils at the feet of the Sultan.

A great procession was formed of Christian captives marching two and two.

Four young Christian girls were mounted on mules, and two ladies of n.o.ble birth followed on Arab horses sumptuously caparisoned. These unfortunates were destined for the harems of their captors. The Sultan was greatly pleased at the spectacle, and as the mournful procession defiled before him cried out, "See how heaven recompenses the brave!" Jurien de la Graviere remarks: "Such was the fortune of war in the sixteenth century. A man leaving Naples to go to Spain might end his days in a Moorish bagnio and see his wife and daughters fall a prey to miscreants of the worse description."

It was not till the following spring that Uruj was fit once more to pursue his chosen calling, so severe had been his wounds; but once he was whole and sound again he put to sea accompanied by Kheyr-ed-Din, and this time he had conceived a singularly bold and desperate enterprise. Two years before the famous Spanish captain, Pedro de Navarro, had seized upon the coast town of Bougie, and had unfortunately left it in the hands of a totally insufficient garrison. This departure from the sound rules of warfare had already been punished as it deserved, as the garrison was perpetually hara.s.sed and annoyed by the surrounding Arab tribes. The idea of Uruj was to seize upon Bougie by a _coup de main_. The corsair, however, was a far finer fighter than he was a strategist, and was possessed of a most impatient temper. All went well to begin with, as he managed to intercept and to capture a convoy of Spanish s.h.i.+ps sent to revictual the place, and had he been content to wait he might have counted with certainty on reducing the garrison by starvation, as it depended on this very convoy for its supplies. In vain the wary and cool-headed Kheyr-ed-Din counselled prudence and delay, but these words were not to be found in the vocabulary of his elder brother. "What had to be done," he replied, "had better be done at once," and at the head of only fifty men landed and a.s.saulted the still uncompleted ramparts of Bougie.

But if Uruj were rash and headstrong, so was not the commander of the Spanish garrison, who, ma.s.sing his men for the repulse of the a.s.sault, waited till the last moment, and then received them with a volley of arquebuses, which laid many of them low, and so badly wounded their leader that he had to have his arm amputated on the spot: it says much for his const.i.tution that he survived the operation.

For the time being the brothers had had enough of sh.o.r.e enterprises, and confined themselves strictly to their piratical business at sea, which prospered so exceedingly that they became exceedingly rich and their fame and power increased day by day. As time went on and the wealth of the brothers and partners increased, there entered into the calculating brain of Kheyr-ed-Din the idea that the payment of one-fifth share to the Sultan of Tunis was but money thrown away. Twenty per cent, was eating into the profits of the firm in an unwarrantable manner, he considered, and now that the active partners therein had established so good a business connection, they were quite strong enough to dispense with a sleeping partner. Times had changed for the better, and Kheyr-ed-Din was anxious to take full advantage of the fact; if possible he determined to seize upon and hold some port, in which, not only would they be exempt from tribute, but also in which he and his brother Uruj should be the supreme arbiters of the fate of all by whom it might be frequented.

Of Bougie and its stout Spanish garrison the brothers had had quite enough for the present: they sought, in consequence, for some harbour which presented equal advantages of situation, and their choice fell upon Jigelli, then belonging to the Genoese, who occupied a strong castle in this place.

Jigelli lies well outside the confines of the kingdom of Tunis, about equi-distant from Bougie and Cape Bougaroni, some forty miles from each. It would appear that on this occasion it was the younger of the two brothers who took charge of the enterprise, and there were no slap--dash, unconsidered methods employed. By this time the fame of the Barbarossas had gone abroad from Valencia to Constantinople, from Rome to the foot--hills of the Atlas Mountains, and, to circ.u.mvent the Genoese garrison of Jigelli, Kheyr-ed-Din called to his aid the savage Berber tribes of the hinterland of this part of Northern Africa.

Turbulent, rash, unstable as water, were these primitive dwellers of the desert; but they were fighters and raiders to a man, and ready for any desperate encounter if only it held out the promise of loot: they were as veritably the pirates of the land as were the Barbarossas pirates of the sea.

Small chance, indeed, had the five hundred Genoese soldiers by which Jigelli was garrisoned when attacked from the sea by the Barbarossas and by land by an innumerable horde of Berbers who were reckoned to be as many as 20,000. Invested by land and sea, the garrison did all that it was possible for men to do. Provisions and water ran short, ammunition was failing, the ring of their enemies was encircling them day by day closer and ever closer. From the land nothing could be expected but an augmentation of their foes, and day by day the commander of the garrison strained his eyes seaward to watch if haply the proud Republic, to which he and his men belonged, would send succour, or the redoubtable Knights of Saint John would come to his aid.

But the days lengthened into weeks, and the soldiers were gradually becoming worn out by the perpetual strain imposed upon them. There was one chance left, and one alone, which was to cut their way out through the besieging lines. Ma.s.sacre to a man was their fate in any case, and thus it was that the commander, whose name has not come down to us, mustered his men for the last supreme effort. At dead of night the garrison, having destroyed as far as possible all that might be of use to the enemy, sallied out to their doom. They fought as men fight who know that the end has come; but valour could not avail against the numbers arrayed on the side of the enemy, and they were wiped off the face of the earth. The tribes looted the castle of everything portable, and then retired from whence they had come.

For this Kheyr-ed-Din cared nothing; they were welcome to the poor possessions of some hundreds of half-starved Italian soldiers--let them take the sh.e.l.l, for him remained the kernel in the shape of a strong place of arms.

Hardly, however, had the brothers succeeded in this enterprise when that tireless fighter Uruj again attempted the capture of Bougie; but his second attempt was even more disastrous than his first, and he lost half his flotilla. Then he asked for succour from Tunis; but the Sultan, much offended at the idea of the brothers setting up in a piratical business in which he was no longer a sleeping partner, angrily refused.

CHAPTER IV

THE DEATH OF URUJ BARBAROSSA

The events recorded in the last chapter bring us down to the end of the year 1515, and while every endeavour has been made to present affairs in chronological sequence, it must be remembered that the dates of piratical expeditions are often impossible to obtain: the wrath of the chroniclers at the nefarious deeds of the corsairs greatly exceeding their desire for a meticulous accuracy in the matter of the exact time of their occurrence.

Uruj, as has been seen, had by his headstrong folly once again placed his brother and himself in a decidedly awkward situation. By the losses which he had incurred in his second ill-advised attempt on Bougie he had so weakened the piratical confederation that the countenance of some potentate had again become necessary for their continued existence, and the Sultan of Tunis had now repudiated all connection with these ingrates.

But, if craft and subtlety were not to be found in Uruj there was one who never failed to exhibit these qualities when they became necessary, and Kheyr-ed-Din once more came to the front. The Russian peasantry have a saying that "G.o.d is high and the Czar is far away." In the sixteenth century the Grand Turk was in every sense "far away" from the struggling corsairs on the littoral of Northern Africa, and was a sovereign of such great and mysterious might that any man with a less fine instinct into the psychology of the times in which he lived than Kheyr-ed-Din would have hesitated long and anxiously before addressing him directly; would probably in the end not have done so at all. But desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and the politic corsair well knew that even the moral support of such an one as the Sultan of Constantinople was worth more than even material aid from a Sultan of Tunis.

Consequently, greatly daring, he sent an emba.s.sy to the Sublime Porte with one of his most trusted captains at its head to lay the homage of the corsairs at the feet of Selim I. Very naturally these amba.s.sadors did not go empty-handed, but took with them rich presents and numerous slaves.

Selim was much pleased at the attention, coming as it did from such a distance--we have to remember that the coast of North Africa was an immense journey from Constantinople in those days--and the insight of Kheyr-ed-Din was triumphantly vindicated. Not only did the Sultan send a gracious reply in return, but--what was far more to the purpose--he sent a reinforcement of fourteen vessels to the corsairs bidding them to go on and prosper in their efforts to spread the true faith among the Christian heretics.

There is nothing more curious in the history of the corsairs than the perpetual ups and downs of their lives. Thus in the present instance the ill-advised attack of Uruj on Bougie had reduced them to terrible straits; immediately afterwards the action of the Grand Turk once more set them upon their feet and enabled them to pursue an unchecked career of devastation.

Aided by the reinforcements sent by Selim, their depredations a.s.sumed ever larger proportions, and, had they continued to receive this a.s.sistance, the course of history itself might have been changed. Ground to powder beneath the iron heel of their ruthless conquerors, the Moriscoes of Southern Spain were ever waiting the chance to rise and shake off the yoke by which they were so sore oppressed; from far and near reports were coming to hand of the continued successes of the corsairs, and all Andalusia seethed with pa.s.sionate hope that the day of deliverance was at hand.

But, alas for the vanity of human wishes! in the opening months of the year 1516 Selim recalled his s.h.i.+ps and the chance was gone, never again to arise.

It may have been that "the sorrowful sighing of the captives" never reached the ears of the successor of Othman in his palace on the sh.o.r.es of the Golden Horn; in any case, the Sultan was preparing for the conquest of Egypt, and in consequence recalled the s.h.i.+ps which he had lent to a.s.sist the corsairs. The Moriscoes were thus left without hope, but so far as the corsairs were concerned they were enabled to strike another bargain with the Sultan of Tunis. This monarch had now got over his fit of the sulks, and discovered that customs dues from the peaceful trading mariners, although desirable enough, were not by any means so lucrative a form of revenue as was the one-fifth share of the booty of the pirates. Uruj and Kheyr-ed-Din for their part, although they had captured Jigelli, were totally unable to hold it: the capture had indeed been princ.i.p.ally due to the a.s.sistance which they had received from the Berber tribesmen, but these nomads had disappeared into the deserts from whence they came, once the looting of the town and fortress had been completed.

The corsair had to be armed at all points, in the moral as well as the material sense, as he was the enemy of all men, and all were vowed to his destruction. Every cruise which he took raised up against him fresh hatred and a more bitter animus, and we must remember that it was not only men individually, but Princ.i.p.alities and Powers that were arrayed in line of battle for his destruction. At the present juncture Spain was specially hostile, for not only had her possession of Bougie been twice attacked by the Sea-wolves, but a valuable convoy had been captured. An expedition, in consequence, was sent by the Spaniards against the Barbarossas, but this effort did not result in much damage being done to the offenders. The Spaniards destroyed four piratical vessels which had been abandoned by their crews at Bizerta, and pushed a strong reconnaissance into the Bay of Tunis itself. Here shots were exchanged between the Spanish fleet and the forts--under which Kheyr-ed-Din had drawn up his s.h.i.+ps--and the Spaniards then abandoned the enterprise and returned from whence they had come.

In the year 1510 the Spaniard, Count Pedro Navarre, had seized upon Algiers, which town was at this time one of the princ.i.p.al refuges of the Moorish fugitives, who had been driven from Granada, from Crdoba, and from Southern Spain generally by Ferdinand and Isabella eighteen years previously. To say that the condition of these people was desperate is to speak but the bare truth, for what could exceed the misery of the situation in which they were left after the successful incursion of their Christian foes? What we are apt to lose sight of in the light of present-day circ.u.mstances is the fact that these Spanish Moors were a most highly civilised people, far more so indeed than their Christian contemporaries; that they had been driven with fire and sword from the land in which they and their forefathers had dwelt for over seven centuries, and that they now had been cast out literally to starve on the inhospitable sh.o.r.es of Northern Africa. So it came about that the common people exchanged the life of the peaceful and prosperous artisan or husbandman for that of the hand-to-mouth pirate, and the case of knight and n.o.ble among them was no better--perhaps rather worse--than the meanest among those who had been expropriated.

Those who know the region in which these unhappy folk lived are aware of the material monuments which still exist and testify to the glorious past; and, seeing what they have seen, it is no great stretch of the imagination to picture to themselves the comfort, the elegance, and the luxury with which the inhabitants of Granada and Crdoba lived surrounded. Over there, away across some few leagues of s.h.i.+ning blue water, were the ruined homes of which many of the banished people still possessed the keys, awaiting the day when Allah and the Prophet should vouchsafe to them that return which they so naturally and ardently desired. To this day the key of the great Mosque at Cordoba is preserved at Rabat as a sacred relic of former dignity and power--a symbol to the Moslem of his perpetual banishment. If Cordoba with its mosque--still one of the wonders of the world, with its eleven hundred marble columns--were the princ.i.p.al shrine and holy of holies to these people, there were in addition hundreds of other temples of their faith now for ever desecrated in their eyes by the misfortune which had placed them in Christian hands. In Andalusia were the dishonoured graves of their kinsfolk, and, last and worst of all, in this land still dwelt thousands upon thousands of their co-religionists held in a degrading bondage by their implacable enemies.

The capture of Algiers by Count Pedro Navarro was a crowning misfortune for the exiles, and when this commander seized upon the place he extracted from the inhabitants an oath of fidelity to the Spanish crown; he further erected a strong tower to overawe the town, and to keep its turbulent inhabitants in order. But such an oath as this, extracted at the point of the sword, was writ in water; it meant, of course, the suppression of piracy, and it also meant the starvation of most of those persons who dwelt in the vicinity. How the Moslem population existed for the six years after the incursion of Navarro is a mystery; but they probably moved their galleys, of which they possessed some twenty, further along the coast out of the range of the guns from Navarro's Tower, and secure from the observation of those who held it for the Spanish king.

In the year in which Selim descended upon Egypt the King of Spain, Ferdinand V., died, and grave troubles immediately broke out in Spain. This was an opportunity too good to be missed, as no reinforcements could possibly be expected for the garrison in Algiers as long as these disturbances lasted, and the Algerines took counsel together as to the best means of driving out their enemies. It is a commentary on the detestation in which they held the Spaniards that they should have allied themselves for this purpose with the savages of the hinterland. This, however, was what they did. As in the case of Jigelli, these people could always be relied upon to go anywhere in search of booty, and one Selim Eutemi entered the town at the head of his tribe. But sheer, stark, savage valour could make no impression on Navarro's Tower and the ordnance that was mounted on its walls. The result was a stalemate, as the Spaniards could by no manner of means get out, and neither could their enemies, who swarmed innumerable in the town and the surrounding country, get in. In time, of course, they might hope to bring the garrison to surrender by starvation; but time pressed, and no man knew when the troubles in Spain might be adjusted and help come to the beleaguered. In the meanwhile Selim Eutemi and his men, who had been taught some rude lessons in the power of firearms, kept out of range of the cannon, while the Algerines held yet another council of war, the result of which was that they decided to ask help from Uruj and Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, and to them they appealed. By this time their fame was known to all men, and they could supply that which was lacking--namely s.h.i.+ps, artillery, a first-cla.s.s fighting force, and last, and best of all, the moral support which would stiffen and put heart into the motley horde which at present surged around the gates of the fortress of Navarro.

The Algerines did not appeal in vain, and an instant promise of succour was forthcoming. Kheyr--ed--Din was away at sea, but Uruj, that indomitable fighter, started at once. From whence we are not told, but he must have been somewhere in the neighbourhood, as he and his men marched along the sh.o.r.e; while, keeping pace with them, came a fleet of eighteen galleys and three barques laden with stores.

But before proceeding to the a.s.sistance of the Algerines Uruj had a personal matter to which to attend, and he wished to combine pleasure with serious business. One of his old companions had seceded from his command and had established himself at Shersh.e.l.l, where he lived the life of an independent corsair within easy striking distance of the Balearic Islands and the coast of Spain, his following composed of a horde of those broken men of whom mention has been made. Shersh.e.l.l was an unfortified town, and surrendered unconditionally upon the arrival of Uruj and his army.

Kara-Ha.s.san, for such was the name of this independent corsair, came out to greet his old-time chief; he was met with violent reproaches, and the altercation ended by Uruj having him beheaded on the spot. It was ill to quarrel with the Barbarossas.

Freed from this rival, the Mitylene corsair had now uncontested supremacy on the coast, a supremacy none was likely to contest in the future, as he brooked no opposition, and had come to consider that independent piracy in the Mediterranean was in some sort an infringement of the rights of himself and his brother. One of the most salient peculiarities of the corsairs at this time was the apparent recklessness with which they a.s.sailed others who were partic.i.p.ants in their nefarious business. Self-interest and policy would seem, to the observer in the present day, to have dictated quite a different course of action; but we shall see, when we come to deal with the life-history of Kheyr-ed-Din, that this infinitely wiser and more intellectual man apparently allowed himself to be swayed by gusts of pa.s.sion, in which he savagely maltreated those with whom he was a.s.sociated, and from whom dangerous hostility was certainly to be feared if they escaped with their lives. At this distance of time it is impossible to gauge the motives by which men such as these were actuated, more particularly in the case of Kheyr-ed-Din, whose character was a blend of the deepest subtlety and calculated ferocity.

Having settled with Kara-Ha.s.san, Uruj continued his march along the coast.

Arrived at Algiers, he opened in form a siege of Navarro's Tower; but, being unable to make any impression on its defences, he abandoned the siege after twenty days' fruitless fighting, during which he lost a number of men in his a.s.saults. Baffled and furious, he turned on the Berber chieftain, the luckless Selim Eutemi, and caused him to be a.s.sa.s.sinated, regarding him as being responsible for the failure. The Spanish chroniclers relate, with some wealth of detail, how Uruj personally fell upon Selim Eutemi, when that chieftain was in his bath, and strangled him with his own hands.

However this may have been, the Spanish records of the deeds of the corsairs cannot well be taken _au pied de la lettre_; there is no doubt that Selim was murdered, and from that time the Berbers recognised that he who had come to help was now remaining to plunder. Uruj now established himself in the town, and set to work making raids into the adjoining country, carrying off sheep, cattle, and slaves. For the Berbers this was a true awakening. He who now oppressed them had come in the guise of a champion to a.s.sist them in the sack and plunder of Navarro's Tower; they had exchanged King Log, who dwelt securely locked up, for a King Stork of the most active description. Although we cannot sympathise with such people, it is quite possible to understand their very natural annoyance at the turn which things had taken, and it does not surprise us (in this age of "punic faith") that a conspiracy was set on foot between the dwellers of the hinterland and the Spaniards of the fortress.

Uruj was informed of all that was going on through his own spies, and, although he kept his finger on the pulse of the conspiracy, he acted as though the tribesmen were still his very faithful friends and allies. The corsair was more patient than his wont. In this affair he wished for ample proof of delinquency, and also for a vengeance adequate to the occasion when he should discover all the guilty parties; and so some weeks went by while the plot was maturing, apparently, from the point of view of the conspirators, to a successful conclusion. But Uruj had bided his time with a subtlety and _finesse_ which would have done credit to Kheyr-ed-Din himself,

It was the custom of the corsair and his chief adherents to attend the princ.i.p.al mosque on Fridays; and therefore, when the conspirators were cordially invited to attend on the following Friday, and, after the service was over, to attend Uruj to his dwelling and there confer with him, they went, nothing doubting, to their deaths. As the discourse of the Mullah came to an end a crash resounded throughout the building: six stalwart swordsmen had flung the great gates of the mosque together, and barred all exit. Excepting the conspirators, twenty-two in number, the remainder of the edifice was filled with the galley's crews of the corsair, men who, had he given the order, would have cheerfully set alight to the sacred building itself and roasted the Mullahs themselves in the flames.

To the corsairs, after they were seated in the mosque, the word had been pa.s.sed that the Berber tribesmen had meditated this treachery against them, which, had it succeeded, would have meant the death or enslavement of them all. It was therefore a trap of a singularly deadly description into which the countrymen of Selim Eutemi walked on this Friday morning.

The doors being closed, the conspirators were one by one dragged before Uruj, who, bitterly reproaching them, gave order for their instant death.

They were haled out through rows of jeering pirates, and beheaded in the street immediately in front of the princ.i.p.al entrance of the mosque. When the slaughter of the twenty--two was accomplished Uruj strode from the mosque over the weltering corpses of the traitors amid the plaudits of his own men, ever ready to acclaim deeds of blood and cruelty. After this there were no more plots against the corsair in Algiers. News of all these desperate doings in Algiers had by this time filtered across into Spain, and El Maestro Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval recounts how, when the tidings came to Fray Francisco Ximenes, the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, that that prelate, much scandalised that the might of Imperial Spain should be flouted by a mere pirate, sent Don Diego de Vera with some fifteen thousand men to recapture the town, and relieve the beleaguered garrison in the tower. This was in the month of September 1516.

Don Diego landed "en el dia de San Hieronymo," and threw up entrenchments within gunshot of the town. Great things were expected of this expedition, as Sandoval notes that in 1513 Don Diego de Vera, in the war against the French, had gained the approval of Count Pedro Navarro ("avia bien aprovado con el Conde Pedro Navarro"), and it was not expected that a mere pirate rabble would ever make head against the Spanish troops. De Vera opened fire on the walls of the town from his entrenchments, but hardly had he done so when Uruj, leading his corsairs, which formed the spearhead to an innumerable army of Berbers and Arabs, made a sortie.

"Upon them one day did Barbarossa make an onslaught, and when he saw that the Spanish soldiers were ill commanded, he flung his forces upon them with loud cries. And so great was the fear inspired by Barbarossa that they were routed almost without loss to the Moors; and with much ease did these latter slay three thousand men and capture four hundred on the day of San Hieronymo in this year."

("Salio un dia a el Barbarossa y como vio los soldados Espanoles desmandados di en ellos con gran gritos. Y fue tan grande el miedo que vieron que Barbarossa los desbarat casi sin dano y con mucho facilidad mato tres mil hombres y cautivo quatro cientos dia de San Hieronymo deste ano.")

This quotation is given in full to set out the amazing fact that in this battle over three thousand were killed while only four hundred were captured, which shows that it must have been in the nature of an indiscriminate ma.s.sacre; the only captive of any note was the captain, Juan del Rio. Diego de Vera had had enough of the corsairs, and sailed away with the remainder of his force. Of what became of him or of them there is no record, but he must have been a singularly incompetent commander when he could not make head against a rabble of pirates and Moors with the army at his disposition. Sandoval does not attempt to minimise the defeat, which, of course, would have been impossible; he contents himself with the following delightfully quaint reflection: "But many, many times Homer nods; this disaster must have come upon us for our sins, upon which it is most important that we should always think and meditate."

Who so triumphant now as Uruj Barbarossa? It is true that the fortress of Pedro Navarro still remained in the hands of its splendid and undaunted garrison, and was destined so to remain for some years to come; but they were impotent for harm, and the conqueror of Don Diego now turned his arms in another direction. Kheyr-ed-Din was at Jigelli when he heard of the victory gained by his brother, and sailed at once with six s.h.i.+ps to his support. The town of Tenes fell into the hands of the brothers, with an immense booty, and then Uruj marched on Tlemcen. The Sultan of Tlemcen, the last of the royal race of the Beni-Zian, did not await the coming of the corsair. All through the northern coasts of Africa the name of Barbarossa was a synonym of terror; the sad fate of Selim Eutemi, of Kara-Ha.s.san, of the twenty-two conspirators of the mosque, had been noised abroad, and the superst.i.tious tribesmen firmly believed that these red-bearded corsairs were the accomplices of Shaitan, even if they did not represent him themselves in their own persons. Who were these men, they asked one another tremblingly, who feared neither G.o.d nor devil, and who caused even the redoubtable Spaniards to fly before them like the leaves in front of an autumn gale?

When men begin to talk and to think like this there is not much fight left in them, and so it came about that, after the most feeble of resistances, the Sultan of Tlemcen fled to Fez. Thus, almost without striking a blow, Uruj found himself master of a province from which the Spaniards were accustomed to draw the necessary provisions for the upkeep of the garrison of Oran. But Tlemcen is but some seventy miles from Oran, and Oran is so close to Spain as to be easily reinforced; in consequence Uruj was soon blockaded by the Spaniards, and remained so for seven months. But no blockade could keep Uruj Barbarossa for long within stone walls; sortie after sortie did the gallant corsair lead against the foe, and it was in one of these that he characteristically came by his death. Ever rash and impetuous, he allowed himself to be drawn too far away from possible shelter or support; and, as there was something dramatic in the whole life of this man, so also was there in the manner of his death. They had him trapped at last, this grim Sea-wolf, and he stood at bay in a stone corral used for the herding of goats.

As the wolves in winter circle round the leaguer on the heath, So the greedy foe glared upward panting still for blood and death.

By his side was his faithful lieutenant Venalcadi. In a breathless melee Christian sword and Moslem sabre clashed and rang. His turban gone, his great curved scimitar red to the hilt, the undaunted corsair fought his last fight as became the terror of his name. Almost had he succeeded in breaking through the ring of his foes when Garzia de Tineo, _alferez_ (or lieutenant) to Captain Diego de Andrade, wounded him severely with a pike.

Uruj stumbled, was struck on the head with another weapon; he reeled and fell. The fight was over, and one of the Barbarossas bit the dust. Garzia de Tineo leaped upon the fallen man and cut off his head. It is recorded that Garzia de Tineo was wounded in the finger by Uruj in the course of the combat, and that for the rest of his life he proudly exhibited the scar as a sign that it was none other than he who had killed the famous corsair.