Ali,
with a fleet of two hundred and fifty galleys and forty smaller vessels,
recaptured it again in a siege lasting forty days, and once more returned
to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of Spanish captives. He was yet
to live some years to harass the Christians, against whom he ever displayed
a most inveterate rancour. In 1576 he set out from Constantinople with
sixty galleys and ravaged the Calabrian coast, where he had been born. In
1578, the Janissaries of Algiers having assassinated Arab Ahmed the Basha,
he was sent to chastise them, which he did with a heavy hand.
Ali was never married, and left no descendants; in the later years of his
life he built himself a sumptuous palace some five miles from
Constantinople, and no man in all the realm save the Sultan himself was so
great a man as the Calabrian renegado, the unknown waif from Southern Italy
who possessed neither name nor kindred. He was tall and robust in stature,
but all his life suffered from "scald-head"; for a definition of which
ailment we may refer the curious to the dictionary. He possessed, for a
chieftain and a fighting man, the disadvantage of a voice so hoarse as to
be inaudible at a few paces distant. In default of offspring he maintained
at his charges five hundred corsairs, whom he called his children. He died
in the year 1580, and with him what has been called the "Grand Period of
the Moslem Corsairs" in this book may be said to have come to an end.
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