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The great battle off Prevesa was in the memory of many an old sailor as the galleys came to the rendezvous in the autumn of 1571. But there was an essential difference between then and now. Prevesa was lost by divided counsels; at Lepanto there was but one commander-in-chief.
This business being settled, Ali turned to another which had long been on his mind. We have seen how Ismail Pacho Bey escaped the assassins sent to murder him. A ship, despatched secretly from Prevesa, arrived at the place of his retreat. The captain, posing as a merchant, invited Ismail to come on board and inspect his goods.
Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa commanded the Ottoman fleet at the great battle of Prevesa, at which he met with his life-long competitor at sea, the famous Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria.
Not only were the Arabs constantly on the look-out to dislodge their unwelcome visitors, but the Turks attacked them likewise, with a navy from the side of the Persian Gulf, and the naval victory gained by the Portuguese off Maskat in 1554 is considered by Turkish historians to have been a greater blow to their power than the better known battle off Prevesa in 1538, when D'Oria defeated Barbarossa and obliged Solyman to relinquish his attempt on Vienna.
His argument, embodied in a long and technical harangue, may be reduced to the following: If we cannot go straight at the enemy and force our way through the entrance under his cannon why should we not reduce the fortress of Prevesa by a siege? Once masters of this height, we could close the strait by sinking in it vessels laden with stones, and we then have the Ottoman fleet at our mercy.
It may seem a contradiction in terms to speak of the moral courage of a pirate; but if ever that quality were displayed to its fullest extent it was exhibited by Barbarossa in the Prevesa campaign. In his intellectual outlook on all that was passing, both inside and outside of the Gulf of Arta, in this September of 1538, we see Kheyr-ed-Din at his best.
That "no vessel durst pass from Spain to Italy" is no doubt a picturesque form of exaggeration on the part of the historian; at the same time, when Dragut was at the height of his activities there is no doubt that any one passing through those seas ran a great risk of capture; so much so in fact that at this period, from 1538, the date of the battle of Prevesa, until Lepanto in 1571, all maritime commerce in the Mediterranean was greatly circumscribed.
Finally, he endeavoured to establish a line of semaphores between Janina and Prevesa, in order to have prompt news of the Turkish fleet, which was expected to appear on this coast.
At this juncture Barbarossa hesitated; had he not done so, and had he followed Grimani to Corfu, he might have destroyed both him and Vincenzo Capello in detail before the arrival of Doria. The Prevesa campaign is a curious study of hesitation on both sides, and the idea naturally occurs were not the corsair and the Christian commanders-in-chief too old for the work on which they were engaged?
In consequence, he steered for Prevesa and entered the Gulf of Arta, which is approached by a long narrow strait, dominated by the castle of Prevesa. Once inside he anchored his galleys in such a position that they could fire direct out to sea, thus overwhelming with their fire any vessel attempting to enter. Barbarossa now occupied the same position as did Octavius in his combat with Antony.
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