THE CORSAIR ADMIRALS.
III.
URŪJ BARBAROSSA.
1504-1515.
The island of Lesbos has given many gifts to the world—Lesbian wine and Lesbian verse, the seven-stringed lyre, and the poems of Sappho; but of all its products the latest was assuredly the most questionable, for the last great Lesbians were the brothers Barbarossa.
When Sultan Mohammed II. conquered the island in 1462, he left there a certain Sipāhi soldier, named Ya’kūb—so say the Turkish annalists, but the Spanish writers claim him as a native Christian—who became the father of Urūj Barbarossa and his brother Kheyr-ed-dīn. Various stories are told of their early career, and the causes which led to their taking to the sea; but as Lesbos had long been famous for its buccaneers, whether indigenous or importations from Catalonia and Aragon, there was nothing unusual in the brothers adopting a profession which was alike congenial to bold hearts and sanctioned by time-honoured precedent.[5] Urūj, the elder, soon became the reïs, or captain, of a galleot, and finding his operations hampered in the Archipelago by the predominance of the Sultan’s fleet, he determined to seek a wider and less interrupted field for his depredations. Rumours had reached the Levant of the successes of the Moorish pirates; prodigious tales were abroad as to great argosies, laden with the treasures of the New World, passing and repassing the narrow seas between Europe and Africa, and seeming to invite capture; and it was not long (1504) before Captain Urūj found himself cruising with two galleots off the Barbary coast, and spying out the land in search of a good harbour and a safe refuge from pursuit.