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Updated: May 31, 2025
A most sanguinary combat ensued, in which the forces of Kheyr-ed-Din were decidedly worsted. For a considerable period his fate hung in the balance. Then occurred one of those singular and remarkable things only possible in such an age of anarchy and bloodshed. Barbarossa had in his train sixty Spanish soldiers captured by him from the force of Don Hugo de Moncada.
Soon the eyes of the Sultan were rejoiced with the sight of a Barbary fleet, gaily dressed with flags and pennons, rounding Seraglio Point, and, in perfect order, entering the deep water of the Golden Horn; and presently Kheyr-ed-dīn and his eighteen captains were bowing before the Grand Signior, and reaping the rewards due to their fame and services.
So it came about that men who, before the defeat, had commanded ships of their own, were glad enough to become units on board the galleys of Kheyr-ed-Din, animated by the pleasing hope that soon again, under the leadership of this man, they might regain all, nay more, than they had lost.
Kheyr-ed-Din, among his other qualities, possessed in the highest degree that of a successful stage-manager; no pageant which he undertook was ever likely to fail from the want of the striking and the dramatic.
His was the absolutely finite intellect of the tactician as opposed to the strategist, who, seeing his objective, was capable of dealing with circumstances as they immediately arose; but, partly no doubt from defective education, but principally from the lack of intellectual appreciation of the problems of the time in which he lived, could never rise to the heights which were scaled by Khizr, better known by the title conferred upon him later on by the Grand Turk as "Kheyr-ed-Din," or "The Protector of Religion."
How he became Lieutenant to Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa His capture by Jannetin Doria His four years as a galley slave His ransom by his old chief.
Suleymān the Magnificent saw the necessity of combination; he knew that Kheyr-ed-dīn could teach the Stambol navigators and ship-builders much that they ought to learn; his Grand Vezīr Ibrahīm strenuously urged a closer relation between the Turkish powers of the east and west; and Kheyr-ed-dīn received the Imperial command to present himself at Constantinople. See The Story of Turkey, 136.
To Kheyr-ed-Din the Sultan had extended his fullest confidence; he had been rewarded by seeing the renowned Doria forsake the field of battle at Prevesa, and by the perpetual slights and insults put upon his Christian foes by that great corsair.
In character, in capability, in strategic insight, in tactical ability, not one of the predecessors or the successors of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa can be compared to him; he was the greatest and most outstanding figure of all those corsairs of whose deeds we hear so much during the sixteenth century, the man above all others who was feared and hated by his contemporaries in Christendom.
We have not closely followed the succession of the Pashas or Beglerbegs of Algiers, because more important affairs absorbed the whole energies of the Turkish galleys, and the rulers on land had little of consequence to do. Ochiali was the seventeenth pasha of Algiers, but of his predecessors, after the deaths of Urūj and Kheyr-ed-dīn Barbarossa, few attained special eminence.
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