The Mediterranean custom was different. The Marquis of Villafranca,
whose advice was sought by Don John of Austria, thought there should
not be more than two discharges before the galleys close, that the
arquebussiers should not fire the second time until the blood of the
man hit should splash back in their faces, and that the noise of the
discharge should coincide with the ramming of the hostile vessel. But
all the guns employed in the Mediterranean sea-fights were not of this
order. In the tremendous struggle between the Cross and the Crescent
much heavier artillery was used. One siege gun is said to have thrown
a shot of 160 lb. During this struggle the Knights of Malta, after
the capture of St. Elmo by the Turks, when the latter dishonoured the
bodies of the slain knights, retaliated by beheading their Turkish
prisoners and firing the heads back into the camp of the besieging
Turks. The Knights combined unswerving fidelity to their principles and
their masters, when they acknowledged any, with the utmost bravery,
ferocity, and cruelty. There was little to choose between the leaders
on either side, but the palm must be given to the Mohammedan leaders
for their fertility of resource in extricating themselves from
apparently hopeless situations. The chief of these were the brothers
Barbaroussa, one of whom made himself King of Algiers, and they and
others of the band were the greatest of the Barbary pirates, dreaded
from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. The elder Barbaroussa
and his worthy successor, Dragut Reis, became the chief admirals of the
Turkish forces, the latter being killed in that terrible struggle at
Malta in which St. Elmo fell, a fate which was only averted from the
whole fortress by the remarkable genius of the greatest commander the
knights ever possessed. By way of commemorating the services of the
brothers Barbaroussa, the present Turkish government has named after
them the two second-hand German warships it recently bought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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