It was the custom of the corsair and his chief adherents to attend the principal mosque on Fridays; and therefore, when the conspirators were cordially invited to attend on the following Friday, and, after the service was over, to attend Uruj to his dwelling and there confer with him, they went, nothing doubting, to their deaths. As the discourse of the Mullah came to an end a crash resounded throughout the building: six stalwart swordsmen had flung the great gates of the mosque together, and barred all exit. Excepting the conspirators, twenty-two in number, the remainder of the edifice was filled with the galley’s crews of the corsair, men who, had he given the order, would have cheerfully set alight to the sacred building itself and roasted the Mullahs themselves in the flames. To the corsairs, after they were seated in the mosque, the word had been passed that the Berber tribesmen had meditated this treachery against them, which, had it succeeded, would have meant the death or enslavement of them all. It was therefore a trap of a singularly deadly description into which the countrymen of Selim Eutemi walked on this Friday morning. The doors being closed, the conspirators were one by one dragged before Uruj, who, bitterly reproaching them, gave order for their instant death. They were haled out through rows of jeering pirates, and beheaded in the street immediately in front of the principal entrance of the mosque. When the slaughter of the twenty—two was accomplished Uruj strode from the mosque over the weltering corpses of the traitors amid the plaudits of his own men, ever ready to acclaim deeds of blood and cruelty. After this there were no more plots against the corsair in Algiers. News of all these desperate doings in Algiers had by this time filtered across into Spain, and El Maestro Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval recounts how, when the tidings came to Fray Francisco Ximenes, the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, that that prelate, much scandalised that the might of Imperial Spain should be flouted by a mere pirate, sent Don Diego de Vera with some fifteen thousand men to recapture the town, and relieve the beleaguered garrison in the tower. This was in the month of September 1516. Don Diego landed “en el dia de San Hieronymo,” and threw up entrenchments within gunshot of the town. Great things were expected of this expedition, as Sandoval notes that in 1513 Don Diego de Vera, in the war against the French, had gained the approval of Count Pedro Navarro (“avia bien aprovado con el Conde Pedro Navarro”), and it was not expected that a mere pirate rabble would ever make head against the Spanish troops. De Vera opened fire on the walls of the town from his entrenchments, but hardly had he done so when Uruj, leading his corsairs, which formed the spearhead to an innumerable army of Berbers and Arabs, made a sortie.