into
small parties, than all were made prisoners, bound, and robbed of all their
personal property. The Turks had often shown remorseless cruelty after
victory, but they generally observed the terms of a capitulation
honourably. Mustapha's conduct was an unexampled case of treachery and
barbarity.

The Venetian soldiers were sent on board the Turkish galleys and chained to
their oars as slaves. Bragadino saw his officers beheaded before the
Pasha's tent. He might have saved his life by becoming a renegade, but he
was incapable of such apostasy and treason. The barbarian, in whose power
he was, invented new torments for his victim. Bragadino had his ears and
nose cut off, and thus mutilated he was paraded round the Turkish army, and
then rowed in a boat through the fleet, and everywhere greeted with insult
and mockery. Then Mustapha sentenced his prisoner to be flayed alive. The
torture had hardly begun when he expired, dying the death of a hero and a
martyr. Mustapha sent to Selim the Drunkard as trophies of the conquest of
Cyprus the heads of the Venetian nobles and the skin of Bragadino stuffed
with straw. The news of the fall of Famagusta and the horrors that followed
it did not reach the allied fleet till long after it had sailed from
Messina.

But even during the period of preparation there were tidings that might
well have inspired the leaders of the League with a new energy. The danger
from the East was pressing. In the spring the Ottoman fleet in the waters
of Cyprus had been reinforced with new galleys from the arsenal of
Constantinople, and a squadron of Algerine corsairs under the renegade
Pasha Ulugh Ali, one of the best of the Turkish admirals. Thus
strengthened, the fleet numbered some two hundred and fifty sail. Even
before Famagusta fell Mustapha detached powerful squadrons which harried
the Greek archipelago, and then rounding the capes of the Morea, made
prizes of peaceful traders and raided villages along the western shores of
Greece and in the Ionian islands.

During the period of the Turkish power Europe was saved again and again
from grave danger, because the Ottoman Sultans and the Pashas of Barbary
never seem to have grasped the main principles of maritime warfare. They
had no wide views. Most of the men who commanded for them on the sea had
the spirit of pirates and buccaneers rather than of admirals. They put to
sea to harry the trade of the Christian states and to raid their coast
villages