these instructions were studiously disregarded. Dreams of a vast African empire, first suggested by the Pope before Lepanto, and sedulously fostered by his private secretary Escovedo, floated before the vain, ambitious imagination of Don John. So far from dismantling or destroying, he appointed the celebrated Gabriel Sorbellone, who with Pacioti had designed the almost impregnable defences of Antwerp, to the post of Captain-General of Tunis, with instructions to fortify the military position by the strengthening of the old works and by the building of a new fortress with all possible speed.1 During the last week in October, Don John sailed for Europe, leaving behind him a considerable force under Sorbellone and Portocarrero, the military governor of Goletta. Lope de Figueroa's regiment was quartered in Sardinia. In the April of 1574, Marcello Doria suddenly removed this corps to Genoa, where, owing to the internecine jealousies between the Portici of St. Luke and St. Peter, serious disturbances, bordering almost on civil war, had broken out with such acuteness as to call for the personal intervention of Don John. In the Galatea and the Novelas, Cervantes has left many a trace of his wanderings-many a sketch of Genoa's gleaming walls, of Ancona's silent bay, of Bologna's half-Spanish University, of Florentine palaces and Venetian splendour. The disturbances in Genoa were scarcely quelled when rumours of a Turkish descent on 1 Torres y Aguilera and Vanderhammen, passim. See also the "Relaciones, etc., de Antonio Pérez " (Paris, 1598), pp. 270-275. Tunis caused Don John to sail from Spezia, with Figueroa's regiment and other troops, for Naples, where he landed on August 24, 1574. On July 12, his old enemy Aluch Ali Pasha, with a fleet of three hundred sail and forty thousand men, had appeared before Tunis, while a vast cloud of Arab horsemen and Turkish irregulars from Fez and Tripoli, advanced along the right bank of the Medjerdah. Aluch Ali's Chief of the Staff was an engineer, Jacopo Zitolomini, an Italian renegade who had formerly served at Tunis in the Spanish legion. Zitolomini had once been a hanger-on at the Court of Philip: one of the needy, threadbare gentlemen who haunted the ante-chambers of the palace with requests for employment. In an unfortunate hour for Spain, Zitolomini was cudgelled by one of the alguazils at Philip's Court, and, unable to obtain redress from King or Ministers, the exasperated adventurer had betaken himself to Constantinople, abjured Christianity, entered the service of the Sultan, and, assuming the name of Mustafa, had risen to dignity and fortune. His hour had at last arrived; his "vigil long" was over. His minute and exact knowledge of the position and defensive works of Goletta and Tunis stood him in good stead. On August 23, Goletta was taken by storm, and on September 13, the position of Tunis was carried at a cost of thirty thousand lives, Mustafa falling dead in the breach as he led on his troops against his countrymen. The miserable tragi-comedy of Famagosta was practically repeated. Don John had sailed with his fleet from Naples to Messina, and thence to Palermo, where the news of the fall of Goletta reached him during the last days of September. There was, however, still hope of relieving Tunis itself; but all Don John's efforts were frustrated by a storm which forced him to put into Trapani, where he lay landlocked and tempest-bound when, on October 3, he received the news of the loss of Tunis and the capture of the gallant Sorbellone, just as, three years previously, he learned at Cephalonia the loss of Famagosta and the capture of Bragadino. With the force at his disposal any attempt to retrieve the disaster was impossible, and nothing remained for him but to accept with sullen acquiescence the annihilation of his vague ambitions and golden dreams, and to return with his galleons to Naples. Here Cervantes remained for almost a year, under the command of the Duque de Sesa, Viceroy of Sicily, and it is doubtless to this long sojourn that we owe the enthusiastic reference in the Viaje del Parnaso: Esta ciudad es Nápoles la ilustre, Que yo pisé sus ruas mas de un año : De Italia gloria, y aun del mundo lustre. And here Cervantes' campaigning days are practically In September, 1575, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and, armed with recommendatory letters from over. 1 Torres y Aguilera, ff. 110-123. Vanderhammen, ff. 175-189. Sorbellone (the Gabrio Cerbello of the Spanish writers) was ultimately ransomed. For a brief sketch of his career see "Scena d' huomini illustri d'Italia del Co. Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato" (Venezia, 1659). The pages of this volume are not numbered, but what relates to Sorbellone may be found under the letter G. Don John himself (who, in June, had returned from a visit to Philip) and the Sicilian Viceroy, he embarked on board the Sol with his brother Rodrigo, Juan de Valcázar, and Pedro Carillo de Quesada, once Governor of Goletta, and now indirectly the godfather of Don Quixote himself. On the morning of September 26, the Sol was sighted by a squadron of Algerine pirates who swooped down upon her, captured the crew after a desperate resistance, and carried them into Algiers. For the present, then, Cervantes' fighting days are ended. He had had his desires. He had kept safely out of range of Philip's alguazils; he had drunk deep of the fountain of Italian letters; he had seen life and men and cities. He had served in Italy and Sardinia, at Lepanto, at Corfu, at Navarino, Goletta, and Tunis. He had borne arms for five years; he was a crippled man, and had found promotion's path a slow one. was twenty-eight years old, and had touched the period when the faint penumbra of retrospect first darkens the disk of life. Some of the best part of youth lay behind him, and all his glory, his battles, and his hard blows had left him still a simple soldier. But fortune seemed about to smile on him at last. Some little prospect of advancement seemed about to dawn when the young warrior, crowned with his Carthaginian laurels, stepped on board the Sol. That vision faded into the painful distance as Arnaut Mamí led him into his Babylonian captivity. He CHAPTER III. THE CAPTIVITY. The city is of night, perchance of death. . . . Her subjects often look up to her there: JAMES THOMSON, The City of Dreadful Night. IN the modern Gallicised Algiers few indeed are the remains of those bad old Moorish times when the imprisonment of Cervantes began and ended. In those days the ill-paved streets of the nine-gated town wound their narrow length along in serpentine folds so much more close than the tortuous by-ways of Toledo and Granada, that two men could scarcely walk abreast with ease. The low, deep, confronting houses, with the emblematic aloe-plant above each door, approximated so closely that an active lad could leap from a balcony 1 The chief authorities which I have followed in writing this chapter are Haedo's "Topographia é Historia General de Argel," and Pierre Dan's "Histoire de Barbarie et de ses Corsaires" (Paris, 1649). I have also made free use of the documents found in Seville in 1808 by Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, reprinted and condensed by Navarrete, pp. 312-349. |