There was in Ali the same dauntless quality of never knowing when he was beaten which had distinguished Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa. His exploits at Lepanto had secured him the high favour of the Sultan, which he used in a manner most grateful to that sovereign by approaching him with a request that he might be allowed to fit out another fleet to revenge himself on the Christians. The Sultan acceded to his request, and such diligence did he use that in June 1572, only eight months after the 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 end.