Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (13 page)

By around 1500 the Greeks of the Cyclades, under the original crusaders and their successors, had enjoyed reasonable stability for three centuries, but now the situation changed. Dynastic disputes arose on Náxos, Páros and Ándhros. As well as internal disruption, external threats were increasing. In the years between 1500 and 1521 the Turkish
navy carried out raids on most of the islands in the central and western Cyclades – larger islands such as Náxos and Ándhros, smaller ones such as Mílos and Kéa. Often the islanders resisted fiercely, and the damage done was limited: a fortification destroyed, a few men captured. But after the Turks seized Rhodes from the Knights of St John in 1522, and for the first time had a naval base in the southern Aegean, the Turkish threat became increasingly clear.

It became a reality with Barbarossa’s incursions in 1537 and 1538. Barbarossa, to the Turks Khair-ed-din, was a Turk from the island of Lésvos, born in 1466. As a pirate he established himself on the Barbary coast of north Africa, but entered Turkish service some time before 1520. Algiers was by now annexed to the Ottoman Empire and Barbarossa was appointed its governor, under whom it soon became a thriving city-state. In 1533 Suleyman the Magnificent appointed Barbarossa as kapitan pasha, that is supreme commander of the Turkish navy, with a seat alongside the grand vizier in the imperial council and a residence in the Galata quarter of Constantinople. This was the representative and wielder of Turkish power, with a fearsome reputation in his own right, who now descended on the islands of the Cyclades.

Barbarossa left Constantinople in the summer of 1537 with a fleet of about 100 ships. His first target was Venetian Corfu, but he was repulsed. Sailing back round the Peloponnese he had more success at the island of Éyina (Aegina) near Athens, where reputedly all the male inhabitants were killed, to be replaced by Albanian immigrants; 6,000 women and children were taken away as slaves.

When Barbarossa reached the Aegean his first target was Páros, which surrendered to him after a few days. The island was sacked, some of the inhabitants were killed, and the young girls forced to dance on the beach in ‘un ballo alla greca’ so that the Turks could make their selection for the Sultan’s harem. According to some sources one of these girls was Cecilia Venier, daughter of a previous ruler of Páros, who rose from the harem to become the Sultana Nur Banu, powerful queen-mother and the first to use the title officially. Genealogists note that thus a descendant of the first Duke of Náxos, Marco Sanudo, became one of the most influential figures in the Ottoman Empire.
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Barbarossa now moved on to Náxos. Neither he nor the Duke of Náxos Giovanni IV wanted a battle, Barbarossa because it was now late in the campaigning season and the island was well defended, Giovanni IV because he had no strong loyalty to Venice. So the island offered surrender at once, which was accepted on condition that it recognised Ottoman sovereignty and paid an annual tribute. At the end of the year
Barbarossa returned in triumph to Constantinople with booty, it was said, of 400,000 ducats, 1,000 boys and 1,500 girls.

At the beginning of 1538 Barbarossa sailed again for the Cyclades, on the way attacking the Sporades islands of Skiáthos, Skópelos and Skíros and bringing them under Turkish rule. Ándhros submitted on the same terms as Náxos had in the previous year. Tínos initially surrendered to him, or possibly only some villages did so. But Tínos quickly repudiated this surrender and successfully resisted Barbarossa’s attacks, remaining a Venetian possession. Each year thereafter, on 1 May, a grand procession would make its way to the Venetian castle on the hilltop ten miles north of the main town, where the air would be rent with gunfire commemorating the island’s resistance and with cries of ‘Viva San Marco.’
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By the end of 1538 all the Cyclades islands except Tínos were under some form of Turkish control, six of the smaller islands, including Míkonos, under direct Turkish rule, the rest paying tribute. The terms on which the islands became tribute-paying vassals of the Sultan were not onerous. Possession of the island remained with its ruler, and would pass to his heirs. There would be no devshirme. Islanders could trade with the Turks, and if necessary obtain provisions that the bey of neighbouring Évia would be ordered to supply. If an islander was captured by a Turkish ship he would be set free. The only obligations were that any refugee Turk should be handed over, and that the annual tribute should be paid punctually. For both Náxos and Ándhros, the two largest islands, the tribute amount was 6,000 ducats, about the same as for Chíos. The Sultan’s firman setting out these terms was benign in tone: ‘I wish absolutely that nobody should cause any trouble to the inhabitants of this island, nor take anything from them by force; that none of the islanders should be taken as janissaries; and that no Turk, whoever he is, should dare to offer them the least insult.’
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The status of the main islands as tribute-paying vassals of the Sultan was only temporary, and by 1617 all were under direct Turkish rule with the head of the Turkish navy, the kapitan pasha, as their overlord. The kapitan pasha appointed as governor of the islands a bey, usually absentee, who in turn appointed to act for him a local representative, often Christian rather than Muslim. This direct Turkish rule brought a number of advantages. The islanders were specifically given the right to take complaints to Constantinople, whereas in the past they had to go to Venice, which was three times as distant. Turkish taxation was based on a detailed census rather than on than the previous, often arbitrary, basis. The Catholic Church was already in decline on most of the islands, and the last Duke of Náxos, Giovanni IV, complained about the riffraff
of mendicant monks and Italian adventurers whom Rome sent out as bishops. The Catholics now declined still further; there were 26 Catholic clergy on Náxos in 1539, but by 1600 only nine. The Greek Orthodox community by contrast became stronger. The Orthodox churches took back their possessions, which had previously been taken by the Catholics. Many Catholics converted to Orthodoxy apparently without religious scruples; perhaps this step was taken because the Turks were less suspicious of those who, as Orthodox, were subject to the Turks’ agent the patriarch than of those who, as Catholics, had allegiance to the Turks’ enemy the Pope. No mosques were built in the Cyclades. Though the islanders’ privileges were not quite as great as those for Chíos, Turkish rule was relatively benign.

With the acquisition of Chíos and the Cyclades the Turkish navy became dominant in the eastern Mediterranean, facing only two threats. One was from piracy, and the other was from joint action by the fleets of Europe if such a combination could be put together. In 1570 the powers of Europe did agree on joint action, and Turkish naval dominance received a sharp reverse at the battle of Lepanto.

6

Pirates and Slaves

F
rom the sixteenth century onwards, the crews of any ship attacking another one or raiding a coast were designated as pirates. ‘Pirate’ was a beguiling term, with its whiff of romance when used by the perpetrators and an even stronger whiff of illegality when used by its victims. But distinctions need to be made between different types of sea raider.

A pirate ship was, strictly speaking, one owned by private persons, usually forming an association, who provided the ship, the finance and the officers, and who after rewarding the crew kept the plunder for themselves. Privateers were different: they were privately owned but carried letters of marque, that is government authority to attack the ships of a named enemy state. Finally, a state’s official navy could in time of war legitimately attack any enemy ship.

However, in practice these distinctions were very elastic. The term corsair, though strictly speaking synonymous with privateer, was used indiscriminately for both true pirates and for privateers. Letters of marque to legitimise a privateer could be acquired from two or even three different states. What counted as time of war, justifying state naval action, was also indeterminate, being stretched to cover unofficial hostilities or long-running antagonism, such as that between Spain and the African states bordering the Mediterranean.

The position was further complicated by two other factors. One was the question of cargoes: did licence to attack, say, Turkish shipping also extend to English or French ships carrying Turkish goods or passengers? The other ambiguity was over the issue of English Mediterranean passes, which gave a ship the right of free passage to an Ottoman port and so in theory guaranteed it against attack. Initially these passes were available for a small fee from consuls in Mediterranean ports and easily acquired by foreigners. Samuel Pepys, as Secretary of the Navy in the 1670s, tried to put a stop to this by requiring that passes be issued only by the Admiralty in London or, under strict controls, at foreign ports. But the abuse continued, and passes were valuable enough to be bought and sold. By the time of the Napoleonic wars it was claimed that, of 800 ships carrying English
passes, 90 per cent were owned and operated by Genoese, other Italians, Greeks and Albanians.

The most renowned centre of sea raiding in the Mediterranean was the Barbary coast. This stretched from Tripoli in Libya westward as far as Rabat in Morocco on the Atlantic, a coastline of some 1,400 miles. Its main bases were at Algiers, facing Spain, and Tunis and Tripoli facing Sicily. It was aggressive action by Spain that brought the states of the Barbary coast into prominence.

Spain had completed the expulsion of the Moors from her territory, the Reconquista, with the capture of the city of Granada in 1492 – the same year as Columbus sailed for America. Not content with reconquest, Spain now embarked on conquest of the Moors in north Africa. The campaign was prompted by the archbishop of Toledo, Francesco Jimenez de Cisneros, a bigoted zealot otherwise known as Ximenes, who championed the dying request of Queen Isabella that her husband Ferdinand II should devote himself ‘unremittingly to the conquest of Africa and to the war of the Faith against the Moors’.
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The enthusiastic slogan of the Spanish soldiers was ‘Africa for King Ferdinand.’
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Spain was initially successful. In 1497 Spanish forces took Melilla, west of Oran, and the island of Jerba, south of Tunis, and went on to more important gains, with the bloody seizure of Oran in 1509, and the capture of Bougie and Tripoli in 1510. But by now the local Arab rulers had appealed for help against Spain to the Sultan, who in response sent a small fleet and appointed as bey of Tunis Aruj, the elder of the brothers known as Barbarossa, the name Barbarossa being perhaps a corruption of Baba Aruj. It was the younger brother Khair-ed-din, born in 1466, who became generally known as Barbarossa.

The elder brother Aruj recaptured Jerba in 1510 and in 1516 achieved his greatest triumph, the capture of Algiers, but two years later he was killed in action against the Spanish. He was succeeded by his younger brother Khair-ed-din (henceforth referred to simply as Barbarossa), whom the Sultan recognised as bey of Algiers. Barbarossa had an early stroke of good fortune. In May 1520 the Spanish navy left the Mediterranean for operations against the Netherlands, leaving him as master of 600 miles of the Barbary coast from Tlemcen to Tunis and without a dominant enemy at sea. In 1533 Barbarossa was summoned to Constantinople and appointed kapitan pasha in command of all Turkish naval forces, and, as we have seen, it was he who five years later brought most of the Aegean islands under Turkish rule.

Barbarossa’s appointment is often presented as an astonishing elevation from pirate to Turkish admiral. However as bey of Algiers he
commanded a state navy, so was not strictly speaking a pirate at all. Also, although the exploits at sea of his brother Aruj are documented, a modern historian writes that, apart from one doubtful instance, ‘I know of no record of his prowess on the high seas.’
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In Algiers he was primarily a colonial governor, and naval duties were the responsibility of a lieutenant who later became an officer directly responsible to the Sultan. So it is likely that it was Barbarossa’s administrative skills rather than any naval exploits which led the Sultan to appoint him as kapitan pasha.

Barbarossa was vilified in his own day, and for centuries afterwards, as a pirate – the Great Corsair – but the historian Godfrey Fisher, in his book
The Barbary Legend
, sets some facts against the myths. Barbarossa, writes Fisher, was actually ‘in his own age reputed by Christians generally to be a wise statesman, an able administrator, and a great soldier, noted for his orderly and civilized conduct of war and courted in turn or simultaneously by the greatest princes, spiritual and temporal, of the Mediterranean.’
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Fisher also demolishes with relish a number of other legends about the Barbary coast. For example the main Barbary ports, especially Algiers, have been represented as brutal and chaotic dens, lairs or nests of pirates – even wasps’, hornets’ or vipers’ nests. Fisher points out that ‘the
standard of law and order throughout most of Barbary was reputed to be higher than in Europe.’
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In support he cites the evidence of the French official Nicholas de Nicholay, who in 1551 visited Algiers, by then under the rule of Barbarossa’s son and successor Hassan, and other neighbouring towns. Nicholay described Algiers as ‘very merchant-like, inhabited of Turkes, Moores and Jewes in great number which with marveilous gaine exercise the Trade of Merchandise’ and as a populous, bustling, well-ordered city, with ‘very faire houses, a great number of Bathes and Cookes houses, a busy port, with numerous trades, and fertile countryside separated from the city on the west by many faire and pleasant gardens’.
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Nicholay was equally complimentary about the Algerian towns of Dellys and Bône. In short, we are invited to see the Barbary coast in a very favourable light.