The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (42 page)

One incident in particular illustrates the effect of the Barbary pirates in the Middle Sea. In 1529 Aydin Reis set out with fourteen small galleots on a raiding expedition to Mallorca, where he heard of a large party of Moriscos–‘converted’ Muslims–who wished to escape from their Spanish masters and were ready to pay good money for a passage to North Africa. Landing secretly by night, he embarked 200 families and, with a considerable amount of treasure, set sail for home. It happened that at just that moment there arrived a fleet of eight large Spanish galleons under a certain General Portundo. It was returning from Genoa, whence Portundo had escorted Charles V to be crowned Emperor by the Pope at Bologna, and carried numerous grandees who had attended the ceremony. Aydin quickly landed his passengers then swung out to sea, attacked and boarded the flagship. In the hand-to-hand fighting that followed, Portundo was killed. By the time the battle was over, one of the galleons had escaped to Ibiza; the other seven had all been captured. The Muslim galley slaves were released from their chains, to be replaced at the oars by their erstwhile masters; the damaged ships were repaired; the Moriscos were re-embarked; and the seven great prizes–with their distinguished passengers, for whom good fat ransoms could be expected–were towed back in triumph.

At last Barbarossa felt himself ready to tackle the Penon. Situated as it was at the very entrance to Algiers harbour, it had long been a menace to his shipping, but it was only now that he had sufficient heavy artillery to make the necessary impact. On 6 May 1560 the attack began. The fortress was bombarded day and night for fifteen days before he ordered the final assault, by which time the men of the Spanish garrison had no fight left in them. The building was then dismantled and Christian slaves were employed for the next two years, to construct, using the stones, the huge mole which joins the island to the mainland and still protects the harbour on its western side.

Why, in the first half of the sixteenth century, did the Muslim world enjoy such a degree of naval supremacy in the Mediterranean? First of all, because it had few Christian competitors. Venice and Genoa controlled the Adriatic, together with the Ionian Sea immediately to the south, but the Knights of St John–the finest fighting seamen of their day–had been expelled from Rhodes in 1522 and found their new home in Malta only seven years later; it would be some time before they could hope to regain their former influence and strength. Spain, as we have seen, did her best to play an active part, but her principal energies were directed towards the New World. Besides, Christianity remained hopelessly divided. If Spain and France, Pope and Empire, the Eastern and the Western Churches, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and the princes of north Italy could have made common cause, the outlook for the subjects of the Sultan might have been grim indeed, but Europeans always seemed far more interested in killing one another than in making a united stand against the Turk. Islam, by contrast, remained virtually united.

One Christian admiral only seemed able to hold his own. In 1532 the Genoese Andrea Doria won several victories over Ottoman fleets in Greek waters. Paradoxically, however, it was these successes that brought Barbarossa what was almost certainly the most glorious moment of his career. To Sultan Süleyman it was all too clear that the Turkish navy was vastly inferior to that of the corsair and must be drastically reorganised if it was to hold its own in the Mediterranean. Moreover, there was only one man who could do it. Thus it was that in the spring of 1533 a delegation from the Sublime Porte arrived in Algiers, commanding Kheir-ed-Din to come at his earliest convenience to Constantinople.

The corsair accepted with alacrity. As a loyal subject of the Sultan–which he undoubtedly was–he must have fully appreciated the honour that was being done him, but he also had reasons of his own. For some time he had had his eye on Tunis, his immediate neighbour to the east. It had once been his and his brother’s headquarters, but in recent years neither he nor Aruj had paid it any particular attention. In 1526, however, a new ruler of the Beni Hafs dynasty had come to the throne, after the murder of (it is said) twenty-two of his brothers.
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He had quickly proved a disaster, and by 1532 Barbarossa was receiving regular appeals from his friends in Tunis to assume power there himself. Before he could take such a step, however, he needed the Sultan’s blessing; if he could also persuade Süleyman to provide him with arms and men, so much the better.

He set sail the following August, laden with appropriate presents for the Sultan which included–if we are to believe Sandoval, Bishop of Pamplona–some 200 young Christian women for his harem, each of them carrying in her hand a gift of gold or silver; and he was received in similar style. A few days later, with the title of Pasha, he was appointed member of the Divan and Captain General of the Fleet. He was to remain in Constantinople nearly a year, during which time he virtually created the Ottoman navy. The French Secretary in the city, Jean Chesneau, reported in 1543:

The supremacy of Turkey at sea dates from Kheir-ed-Din’s first winter in the dockyards of this city…Over at Pera [the northeastern side of the Golden Horn] there is a shipyard on the shore where they both build and maintain galleys and other ships. Normally there are two hundred skilled master-craftsmen working here…In charge of all this there is a Captain-General, whom the Turks call the Beylerbey of the Sea, who also has charge of the navy when it goes out…Before he took charge the Turks, apart from a few corsairs, knew nothing of the seaman’s art. When they needed crews for a fleet, they went into the mountains of Greece and Anatolia and brought in the shepherds…and put them to row in the galleys and to serve aboard the other ships. This was quite useless, for they knew neither how to row or to be sailors, or even how to stand upright at sea. For this reason the Turks never made any showing. But all at once Barbarossa changed the entire system…Inspiring his men with his own marvellous energy, he laid out sixty-one galleys during the winter, and was able to take to the sea with a fleet of eighty-four vessels in the spring.

In July 1534 Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa led his new fleet out of the Golden Horn, through the Sea of Marmara and down the Hellespont into the Mediterranean. Rounding the toe of Italy, he seized and sacked Reggio, then passed through the Straits of Messina and headed up the coast towards Naples. Oddly enough, there was no reaction from the Spanish viceroy; did he, one wonders, receive a secret message from the corsair promising that if he met with no opposition the city would be left untouched? At any rate, Naples was spared, and the fleet sailed on to Sperlonga
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which proved rather less fortunate, the cream of its womanhood being seized and loaded on to the ships.

Barbarossa, however, had set his sights on one woman in particular–a woman whom he saw as a very special gift to the Sultan: Giulia Gonzaga, the exquisite young widow of Vespasiano Colonna. Generally accounted the most beautiful woman of her day, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian, her praises sung by Ariosto and Tasso, she kept an elegant and cultivated little court in her palace at Fondi. This town lies some twelve miles inland from Terracina, and Kheir-ed-Din with his small raiding party had hoped to take it, and Giulia, by surprise. Fortunately she received warning a few minutes before their arrival and, still in her nightdress, made her escape with a single retainer–whom she later condemned to death on the grounds that he had taken advantage of her distress and been over-bold. (In the circumstances, one suspects, he probably had.) Fondi, as might have been expected, paid the usual price.

Laden with the captive women–most of them destined for the Turkish slave markets–and with loot from the pillaged towns, a few vessels now returned to Constantinople. They also carried the greater part of the janissaries made available by Sultan Selim–probably ordered home by Süleyman, who had gone to war with Persia and needed all the manpower he could lay his hands on. The bulk of the fleet, however, headed southwest, towards Tunis. For Barbarossa his Italian expedition had been merely a preliminary, a harmless little exercise designed to impress the Sultan with his new fleet in general and his new admiral in particular. Now it was time for the serious business: the toppling of Moulay Hassan and the annexation of his Tunisian kingdom. He arrived outside the harbour on 16 August and immediately began the bombardment, only to find that Moulay Hassan had already taken flight. Two days later, with 1,000 local irregulars, the fugitive ruler made a half-hearted effort to return, but when the corsairs opened fire a second time he once again hastily withdrew. All that winter Barbarossa kept his men busy, strengthening the harbour defences and building an imposing new fortress, big enough to accommodate a garrison of 500 men.

He need not have bothered, for this time he had overreached himself. Perhaps, when planning the Tunis operation, he had underestimated the probable reaction of Charles V, and the Emperor’s power to retaliate; in any case, he had made a serious mistake. A glance at the map will show that Charles could not conceivably accept his annexation of a country less than 100 miles away from the two prosperous ports of western Sicily–Trapani and Marsala–and only very little more from Palermo itself. The idle and pleasure-loving Moulay Hassan had constituted no danger, but now that Barbarossa was in Tunis the Emperor’s own hold on Sicily was seriously threatened. As soon as he heard the news, he began to plan an immense expedition to recover the city. The invasion fleet would number ships from Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta–where the Knights of St John had recently established themselves following their eviction from Rhodes–and Genoa; Andrea Doria would once again be in command. The Emperor himself with the Spanish contingent–estimated at some 400 ships–sailed from Barcelona at the end of May 1535 to the agreed rendezvous at Cagliari in Sardinia, where they arrived on 10 June and picked up another 200. Then on the 13th they turned to the south, and on the following day hove to in the roadstead outside the port of Tunis.

Against such an armada, Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa knew that there was little hope of retaining his hold on the city. Having no intention, however, of losing more ships than necessary, he had taken the precaution of sending fifteen of his best vessels along the coast to Bône, about half-way to Algiers, where they could be kept safely in reserve. He and his men fought valiantly, as they always did, but on 14 July–exactly a month after Charles’s arrival–the fortress of La Goletta that defended the inner harbour was stormed by the Knights of St John, and a week later the 12,000 Christian captives who were being held in the city somehow smashed their way to freedom and flung themselves on their erstwhile captors. Tunis was effectively lost–and now it was Barbarossa’s turn to flee. In company with his two fellow captains, Aydin Reis and Sinan, and as many other of his men who were able to follow him, he slipped out of the city and made for Bône.

At this point Charles should have ordered his army to leave at once in pursuit and force Kheir-ed-Din into a pitched battle. Had he done so, he might have destroyed the corsair forever, and the Emperor’s 600 ships should have had no difficulty in preventing him from escaping by sea. But the soldiers–and probably the sailors too–were far too busy raping and plundering, as the rules of war allowed them to do for three days and nights. Having agreed to pay the Emperor an annual tribute, Moulay Hassan was then formally reinstated in the empty shell of his city, and the Spaniards, having repaired and refortified La Goletta, declared it Spanish territory and equipped it with a permanent garrison. The expedition, the victorious Christians all agreed, had been a huge success. Tunis was once again in friendly hands, Sicily was secure, thousands of their co-religionists had been freed from captivity, and–best of all, perhaps–the previously invincible Barbarossa had been conclusively defeated. They could all return to their various homelands, well satisfied with what they had achieved.

Or so they thought. The Emperor actually sent Andrea Doria on an expedition westward along the coast to find the fugitive corsair and bring him to book. He did not know his man. It was typical of Kheired-Din Barbarossa that, instead of slinking back to Algiers as they had assumed he would, he put in at Bône only to collect more ships and supplies before immediately heading north to the Balearic Islands. As his squadron approached, the islanders understandably assumed it to be part of the imperial fleet returning to Barcelona, an impression confirmed when it was seen to be flying the imperial colours; there was no resistance, therefore, when it glided soundlessly into the harbour of Mahon in the southeast corner of Minorca. A Portuguese merchantman which was lying there at anchor fired a friendly salute; then, suddenly, the squadron opened fire. The Portuguese, taken by surprise, defended themselves as well as they could; but their ship was easily captured. It was only a matter of hours before the whole port, and indeed the whole city, was sacked and destroyed.

In the late autumn of 1535 Barbarossa made his second journey to Constantinople. He was never to return to North Africa. His final years were to be spent less as a corsair than as Admiral of the Ottoman fleet, confounding the Sultan’s enemies, notably the Spaniards, Venetians and Genoese. Until this time Venice had been allowed to pursue her mercantile activities largely unopposed. Süleyman’s brilliant Grand Vizir, Ibrahim Pasha, is believed to have been born a Venetian citizen on the Dalmatian coast; certainly, after his forcible conversion to Islam, he always kept a soft spot for Venice in his heart and did his best to respect her Mediterranean possessions. In the spring of 1536, however, Ibrahim was murdered at the instigation of Süleyman’s wife Roxelana, who wanted his post for her son-in-law Rüstem Pasha.
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Henceforth the Serenissima would be as open to attack as were Spain and Genoa.