When we of the present day read of the deeds of the corsairs we are filled with horror, we fail to understand how such things could have been tolerated, we seek for some explanation. When we hear of a “League of Christian Princes,” and find that all its members could accomplish was to turn their arms the one against the other, we are even still more puzzled. What was it, then, that lay at the root of this problem? The answer would appear to be in the ethical standpoint of the sixteenth century. We are so accustomed in the present day to hear of the rights of man that we are apt to forget that, in the time of Barbarossa, of Dragut, of Charles V., and the Medicean Popes such a thing did not exist, and the only rights possessed by the common man were those vouchsafed to him by his sovereign lord. We have also to take another factor into consideration, which is that what we call “humanity” simply did not exist, the result being that the raids of the Sea-wolves were not judged by the great ones of the earth from the standpoint of the amount of suffering which they inflicted, but in what manner these proceedings affected the wealth and power of the lord of the territory which had been despoiled. So differently was society constituted in those days that the very victims acquiesced more or less meekly in their fate, each one unconsciously voicing that most pathetic saying of the Russian peasant that “God is high and the Czar is far away.” The fact of the intolerable lot of the common man in these times helps us to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem: which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred? The life of the common soldier or sailor did not offer many advantages; it was generally a short and anything but a merry one, and the thing by which it was most profoundly affected was capture by the corsairs. When this happened he became either a “gallerian,” rowing out his heart on the benches of the Moslem galleys, or he festered in some noisome dungeon in Algiers, Oran, or Tlemcen. For him, however, there was always one avenue of escape open: he had but to acknowledge that Mahomet was the Prophet of God and the prison doors would fly open, or the shackles be knocked off the chain which bound him to the hell of the rower’s bench. Many of the Christian captives had really nothing to bind them to the faith of their fathers—neither home nor lands, wealth nor kindred, and they were doubtless dazzled by the amazing success which accompanied the arms of the leaders of the pirates. Is it wonderful, then, that such men in such an age should grasp at the chance of freedom and throw in their lot with their captors?