But Dragut was not destined to end his life as a galley slave, for, when indeed hope must have died within him, after more than four years of this veritable hell upon earth, there sailed one day into the harbour of Genoa the great Kheyr-ed-Din himself. The Admiralissimo of the Grand Turk, full of years, honours, and booty, was on his last cruise, and one of the last acts of his active life was the rescue of Dragut, the man who had served him so well, and for whom he had so high a regard as a resourceful mariner, from the degrading servitude into which he had fallen. The Spanish historian, Marmol, recounts that the sum of three thousand ducats was paid by Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa for the redemption of Dragut. As this history was published in 1573, we must conclude that the author who wrote of these events so soon after they had happened is correct; at the same time, Barbarossa was in command of one hundred galleys of the Grand Turk, and it was never his custom to pay for anything which he could take by force. However this may have been, and the point is not one of very great importance, the Genoese Senate was terrified lest their territory should be ravaged; they wrote accordingly to their Grand Admiral, requesting that Dragut might be released and sent on board of the galley of the admiral basha. This was immediately done, and the man who for four years had tugged at the Christian oar was once again in a position to make war on those who had been for that period his masters. Not only had he tugged at the Christian oar, but also he had tasted of the Christian whip—and of very little else, as the food of the rower was as scanty as it was disgusting; in consequence, if he had been an implacable foe to Christendom before this event, he was not likely to have become less so while toiling in the Genoese galley. The practical retirement of Barbarossa from that sphere of activity in which his life had been passed now left Dragut-Reis the most feared and the most formidable of all the Moslem corsairs in the Mediterranean. From the time of his release by Barbarossa until the day of his death at the siege of Malta in 1565, he followed the example shown him by that prince among pirates with so much assiduity as to render him only second to Kheyr-ed-Din in the detestation in which he was held. Says Morgan: “The ill-treatment he had met with during his four years’ captivity was no small addition to the Innate Rapaciousness of his Disposition.” In the year 1546, Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa died, and to replace him the Sultan Soliman ordered all the mariners in his dominions to acknowledge Dragut-Reis as their admiral, and to obey him in the same manner as they had obeyed his predecessor. From this date he was the foremost corsair in the Mediterranean, and the feats which were performed by him showed that the Padishah had not erred in his selection.