n levies which, in a pitched battle
against European troops, were practically useless owing to their want of
discipline and cohesion. Very soon the hosts of the Emperor had prevailed,
and the Arabs and Berbers had fled back into the wilderness from whence
they had come and whither it was useless to pursue. Barbarossa, at the head
of such of his corsairs and Turks as were left--a number estimated at some
three to four thousand--burst through all opposition and also escaped,
travelling so rapidly that pursuit was abandoned almost at once. And then
the event happened which the Moslem leader had foreseen: some of the
Christian captives managed to get free from their shackles within the city
and released others; they overpowered those left to guard them, and threw
open the gates to the soldiery of the Emperor.

Then occurred one of those awful horrors of which this time was so
prolific: before Charles or his generals could prevent them the soldiery
had swept into the town and commenced to slay, to plunder, and to ravish,
without distinction of age, sex, or nationality. Ostensibly these Christian
warriors had come to rescue the inhabitants of Tunis from the oppression of
Barbarossa, but while that chieftain was in full flight across the
mountains to Bona, those by whom he had been defeated entered the town,
which they had come to save, and perpetrated a massacre so awful that it is
said that no less than thirty thousand people perished. It is a terrible
blot on the escutcheon of the Emperor; as, although he and his generals
deprecated the massacre--and indeed to do them justice tried to prevent
it--this is no excuse for allowing their men to get out of hand, when they
must have been aware of the inevitable result: as the Moslem corsairs at
their worst were equalled in their iniquities by the European soldiery,
once the strong hand of discipline had relaxed its grip.

It may have been that the Emperor was displeased with this excess of zeal
on the part of his army; but, if it were so, the chroniclers are silent
concerning the matter, being far too busy singing the praises of the Caesar
to think of such a trifle as the massacre of most of the persons whom he
had come to deliver. The wretched inhabitants of Tunis must have found it
somewhat difficult to distinguish between the corsair, who killed three
thousand of their fellow townsmen, and the Christian Emperor, who had
massacred ten times that number. Charles, however, reaped g