This was typical of that “Golden Age of the Renaissance” in which it took place; when real devotion to all arts, sciences, and amenities of a higher civilisation went hand in hand with crime of the vilest and treachery of the basest description. Well might Barbarossa, and such as he, laugh to scorn the pretension that his Christian enemies were one whit better than were they, when they could point to the fact that, to serve a private revenge, a great Christian king could betray his co-religionists to their Moslem foes. Shamelessly did the Sea-wolves seek their prey wherever it was to be found; their methods were villanous and seemingly without excuse, but, after all, there was some colour, some shadow of right in what they did, for their argument was that they were merely getting back from Christendom that which had been reft from them in the near past in the kingdoms of Còrdova and Granada. But who shall find excuse for the Christian kings, governors, and princes at this epoch? They sought their prey no less ravenously than did the pirates, and with just about the same amount of justification: witness the sacking of Rome by Charles V. in 1527, and the unexampled act of treachery just recorded of Francis of France. Kheyr-ed-Din had lived all his turbulent life among wars and rumours of wars: the head of the tiller, the hilt of the scimitar, the butt of the arquebus, had been in his hand since early youth; bloodshed and strife were the atmosphere in which he lived and breathed. Desperate adventures by land and sea had been his ever since he could remember; there was no hazard that he had not run, no peril which he had not dared. But now even he, the veteran of far more than one hundred fights, was grave and preoccupied when he considered the greatness, the imminence of his peril. The “Clerigo Francese” had put him in possession of the fact that Carlos Quinto was exerting all his strength for the combat which was to come; and Barbarossa was far too old a fighter, far too wise a warrior, to underrate by one soldier or by one galley the forces that the Emperor could put into line against him; from far and near his foes were gathering for his destruction, and he did not deceive himself in the least as to what the fate of his followers and himself would be should the Christian hosts be victorious.