It was mainly with fustas that the Barbarossa brothers, Baba Aruj and Khair ad Din, carried out the Ottoman conquest of North Africa and the rescue of Mudéjars and Moriscos from Spain after the fall of Granada, and that they and the other North African corsairs used to wreak terror upon Christian shipping and the islands and coastal areas of the Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The name Kurtoğlu means Son of Kurt (Wolf) in Turkish, a family name which Muslihiddin inherited from his father, Kurt Bey, a Turkish seaman from Anatolia who went to northwestern Africa for privateering together with the other Ottoman corsairs of that period such as the Barbarossa brothers, Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa.
Danseker and the English pirate John Ward were the two most prominent renegades operating in the Barbary coast during the early 17th century, both of whom were said to command squadrons in Algiers and Tunis equal to their European counterparts, and represented a formidable naval power as allies (much like Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa the previous century).