During the first of these three periods, as David Hannay has pointed out, the beylerbeys were admirals of the sultan commanding great fleets and conducting serious naval operations for political ends, for at that time, it should be remembered, under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was at the zenith of its power and glory, Turkish rule extending from Germany to Zanzibar, from Persia to the borders of Morocco. The beylerbeys were slave-hunters, and their methods were ferocious, but the reader should be reminded that their Christian enemies were neither more chivalrous nor more humane. Plunder, however, was the sole object of the pashas who succeeded them after 1587—plunder of all who went upon the sea and of the native tribes on land. The maritime side of this wholesale and systematic brigandage was conducted by the captains, or _reises_, who formed a sort of guild, a veritable pirates’ union. Cruisers were fitted out by capitalists, just as privateers were fitted out by private parties, both in the North and the South, during the Civil War, each being commanded by a _reis_. Most of the ships were built at Bougie, the timber being obtained from the forests of the adjacent hinterland. Ten per cent of the value of the prizes was paid to the Turkish ruler—variously known as pasha, agha, bey, or dey—of the Barbary state from which they came. Until the seventeenth century the corsairs used galleys, long single-decked vessels propelled by fifty or more oars, the rowers being prisoners of war who were chained to the sweeps, sometimes even when their vessel was in harbor. The Algerines were eventually taught the superiority of sailing-ships, however, by a Flemish renegade named Simon Danser, and among them for a time was an English gentleman adventurer of the distinguished Buckinghamshire family of Verney—the original, perhaps, of Rafael Sabatini’s “Sea Hawk.” Though the fleets put into commission at Algiers were so much the most formidable that the name of Algerine became a synonym for Barbary pirate; the same lucrative trade was carried on, though on a smaller scale, from Tripoli and Tunis, as well as from various Moroccan seaports, the most notorious being Salé, which gave its name to the Sallee rovers. The introduction of sailing-vessels enabled the pirates greatly to extend the theater of their operations. The galleys, being unfit for the high seas, were confined to the Mediterranean coasts, but the sailing-ships passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and ranged far into the Atlantic, burning seaports in the Canaries, harrying the western seaboard of Spain; and in 1631 two private crews under the command of Murad Reis, a native of Flanders, landed at Baltimore in Ireland and carried off its inhabitants, who were sold into slavery in Algiers.