he crushing defeat of the
Turks, Ali took the sea with two hundred and fifty galleys besides smaller
vessels. So powerful had he now become that Selim nominated him as his
Admiralissimo, allowing him also to retain the Bashalic of Algiers. With
his new fleet he sought out the allies once more, finding them at anchor in
a port in the Morea. He lay outside the harbour defying them to come out,
which they refused to do--"but they parted without bloody noses"--is
Morgan's comment. Haedo attributes this inertia on the part of the allies
to dissension among their leaders; but, however that may have been, Ali
gained almost as much favour with the Sultan as if he had defeated them in
a pitched battle. "But these are the judgments of God and things ordered by
His divine providence and infinite wisdom," says Haedo. The connection is
somewhat hard to establish.

In 1573 the Bashalic of Algiers passed into the hands of Arab Ahmed, and in
this same year Don John of Austria recaptured Tunis from the Turks. Ali,
with a fleet of two hundred and fifty galleys and forty smaller vessels,
recaptured it again in a siege lasting forty days, and once more returned
to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of Spanish captives. He was yet
to live some years to harass the Christians, against whom he ever displayed
a most inveterate rancour. In 1576 he set out from Constantinople with
sixty galleys and ravaged the Calabrian coast, where he had been born. In
1578, the Janissaries of Algiers having assassinated Arab Ahmed the Basha,
he was sent to chastise them, which he did with a heavy hand.

Ali was never married, and left no descendants; in the later years of his
life he built himself a sumptuous palace some five miles from
Constantinople, and no man in all the realm save the Sultan himself was so
great a man as the Calabrian renegado, the unknown waif from Southern Italy
who possessed neither name nor kindred. He was tall and robust in stature,
but all his life suffered from "scald-head"; for a definition of which
ailment we may refer the curious to the dictionary. He possessed, for a
chieftain and a fighting man, the disadvantage of a voice so hoarse as to
be inaudible at a few paces distant. In default of offspring he maintained
at his charges five hundred corsairs, whom he called his children. He died
in the year 1580, and with him what has been called the "Grand Period of
the Moslem Corsairs" in this book may be said to have come to an en