The Sultan's Admiral (17 page)

During that winter, with the assistance of the Vizir Ibrahim, Barbarossa convinced the Sultan that the division of power in Europe would be best maintained by aiding the French at the expense of the Emperor Charles V. The Sultan’s interests lay in expanding his land empire; Barbarossa’s in maintaining his sea empire. The natural enemy of the Sultan and the ruler of Algiers was Charles V. But, to aid France against the Emperor, a really efficient fleet was essential; a fleet that could successfully challenge Charles’s Admiral, Andrea Doria, on the high seas.

Barbarossa turned his attention first of all to the dockyard of the capital. He soon found that there was general waste and confusion, and that the Turks seemed to know little about ship construction or design. Now Barbarossa and his lieutenants were not only skilled men of the sea, but they had had to learn during their roving years a great deal about ship repair and building. They had also had plenty of experience in battle and had minutely examined innumerable captured ships—galleasses from Spain, galleys of Naples, and large trading carracks. There can have been few seamen anywhere in the Mediterranean, not exeluding admirals like Doria, who had any such comparable knowledge of everything to do with ships—from their construction to their maintenance and repair, and to the handling of them in action.

Ibrahim, the Grand Vizir, on his first meeting with Kheir-ed-Din had quickly discerned his qualities and had had no hesitation in writing to the Sultan: “We have set our hand upon a veritable man of the sea. Have no hesitation in naming him Pasha, Member of the Divan, and Captain General of the Fleet.” Reinforced by his official appointment, and by the approval shown him by both Sultan and Vizir, Barbarossa set to work to transform the dockyard of the Sublime Porte. Indeed, as Jean Chesneau, French Secretary at Constantinople, reported in 1543: “The supremacy of Turkey at sea dates from Kheir-ed-Din’s first winter in the dockyards of this city.”

There was no shortage of pine, fir, or cypress in the domains of Turkey; nor were competent carpenters and craftsmen difficult to find among the Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, and other races in the Ottoman Empire. What had previously been lacking was a co-ordinating intelligence, coupled with advisers in design and construction. All these things Barbarossa supplied. To quote Jean Chesneau again: “Over at Pera [the northern 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, who each earn ten aspers a day, and fifty superintendents earning twelve aspers a day. Working in the dockyard are a great number of labourers who are paid four aspers a day … In charge of all this there is a Captain-General, whom the Turks call a Beylerbey of the Sea, who also has charge of the navy when it goes out. In the past this Beylerbey was always the Commander of Gallipoli. But after the Grand Turk gave the office to Barbarossa (who received 14,000 ducats a year for the position), this revenue was drawn out of the islands of Mitylene, Rhodes and Euboea—from which, in fact, he extracted three times as much . . It is interesting to note that Barbarossa’s salary was derived from the three most important islands in the Aegean at that time, and that his own birthplace, Mitylene, was among the main subscribers.

Chesneau goes on to explain the state of the Turkish navy prior to Barbarossa’s reformation: “Before he took charge, the Turks, with the exception of some corsairs, did not know anything about the seaman’s art. When they wanted to find the crews for a fleet, they went into the mountains of Greece and Anatolia and brought in the shepherds (whom they call ‘gouiounari’, that is to say, ‘sheep-watchmen’) and put them to row in the galleys and to serve aboard the other ships. This was quite hopeless, for they knew neither how to row or be sailors, or even how to stand upright at sea. For this reason the Turks never made any showing at sea. But all at once Barbarossa changed the whole system.” Admiral Jurien de la Graviere confirmed this when he commented on the above: “He changed it so much that in a few years they acquired the reputation of being invincible.”

Barbarossa was a practical man first and foremost; he was also a man of vast and far-reaching ambition. Unlike Aruj, the brilliant soldier-of-fortune, Kheir-ed-Din was a planner who worked carefully. It is possibly true that, as Ekrem Rechid wrote of him, “he saw the earth, the entire earth with its continents, its seas, its coasts and its vast expanses of desert, and he dreamed of a wonderful empire which could stretch all the way from the East to the West—to the West, beyond the ocean, and the New World. He dreamed of populating the New World with virile men and of planting there his Standard and his Religion. He dreamed of conquering the Indies and of reaching China …” This poetic conception of the great Kheir-ed-Din is, perhaps, not so far removed from the truth. Yet it is also true that he pursued his objectives (whatever they may ultimately have been) in a pragmatic fashion. His object in Constantinople was not only to endear himself to the Sultan and to improve the latter’s navy, but also to achieve his own ambitions.

Tunis was Barbarossa’s main preoccupation at this moment. If he made sure that the dockyard of the Sultan never ceased from work throughout that winter, it was not only that he had the Sultan’s welfare at heart. True, he had promised the Sultan the Kingdom of Tunisia (which he, Barbarossa, would rule for him), but he hoped to secure for himself and his successors a kingdom that would stretch from the Strait of Gibraltar to Tripoli. Master of all that was worth having on the North African coast, he would then be in a position to talk with considerable authority at the divan with the Sultan of the Ottomans. Moreover, as master of the ships that gave the Sultan freedom of the Mediterranean (and would one day, perhaps, transport his troops to the mainland of Italy and Spain), he may well have seen how even the all-conquering Sultan might come to regard him as indispensable. “Inspiring his men with his own marvellous energy, he laid out sixty-one galleys during the winter, and was able to take the sea with a fleet of eighty-four vessels in the spring.”

Any idea that Turks like Barbarossa, even when it came to the skills of the navigator, were less efficient than their western confreres must be immediately dismissed. The science of navigation had, indeed, been promoted in Moslem countries, and a large part of the European knowledge of the subject came from their contacts over the past two centuries with Moslem sea captains. It is worth noting, for instance, that when Henry the Navigator was beginning his attack on the Atlantic sea routes in the early fifteenth century it was to Mallorcan Jews like Jafuda Cresques that he looked for information. The charts of the Arabs and their knowledge of the west African world and of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean were eagerly sought after. Was it not written in the Koran that “It is Allah who hath appointed for you the stars, so as to guide yourselves in the darkness of land and sea. The signs have been made distinct for those people who have been given the knowledge”?

In an Arabic manuscript dated as early as 1282 there is a section that indicates clear knowledge of the magnetic compass: “Sea-captains of Syria, when the night is dark and they cannot see the stars which show the four cardinal points, take a vessel of water which they shelter from the wind by going below. They take a needle which they thrust into a piece of acacia or a straw so that it forms a cross. They throw it into the water. The captains then take a lodestone of a size to fill the hand or smaller. They bring it towards the surface of the water and make a circular movement from the right with the hand: the needle follows it round. Then they abruptly withdraw it, and the needle turns to stand in the north-south line. This operation I saw myself on a voyage from Tripoli in Syria to Alexandria in 1242-3.”

Certainly there can be no doubt that the compass was first introduced into Europe by the Arabs, who, almost certainly, derived their knowledge from the East and from China. Tira-boschi, in support of his theory that the compass was introduced into Europe by the Arabs, mentions the fact that they were superior to Europeans in scientific learning and in navigation. In later centuries, European writers (Sir J. Chardin [1643-1713], for instance) were only too prone to assume that “the Asiatics are beholden to us for this wonderful instrument.” Yet, as early as 1498, we gather from a Portuguese description of a chart shown to Vasco da Gama by an Arab that it not only had compass points on it, but that “the coast was laid down with great certainty by these two bearings of North and South, and East and West.”

The Arabs, from whom the Turks learned their navigation, were extremely skilled. As the historian Sismondi remarked: “It is characteristic of the Middle Ages that when all their pretended discoveries are mentioned, they are always spoken of as if they were just in general use. Gunpowder, the compass, Arabic numerals, and paper—none of them are mentioned as new and original discoveries. Yet they must have effected a complete change in war, navigation, science, and education.”

It is certain that Barbarossa and his lieutenants had a great deal to teach the Turkish shipmasters in navigation, as much as anything else. Whereas the latter had been almost entirely engaged in the island-studded Aegean, the others had had to confront the long silent seas north of Africa and the reaches between Algiers, Gibraltar, and beyond. A German monk, Felix Faber, on a voyage to the Holy Land in 1483 gave an interesting picture of the navigational methods in current use aboard a merchantman: “Besides the pilot, there were other learned men, astrologers and watchers of omens who considered the signs of the stars and sky, judged the winds and gave directions to the pilot himself. And they were all of them expert in the art of judging from the sky whether the weather would be stormy or tranquil, taking into account besides such signs as the colour of the sea, the movements of dolphins and of fish, the smoke from the fire, and the scintillations when the oars were dipped into the water. At night they knew the time by an inspection of the stars …” The monk’s description is interesting, for apart from the fact that he confused technicians with auruspices or “watchers of omens,” he shows quite clearly how the navigation department of a large ship at that time was organised and run. Aboard a small Turkish galleot there would not have been such a complement of specialists—possibly two or three, including the rais, or master.

Felix Faber also mentions the charts used by the mariners as being marked “in a scale of inches showing length and breadth,” and describes the rhumb lines which were delineated on most charts of that period. Certainly there can be no doubt that the Turkish captains of Barbarossa’s time did not wander vaguely over the sea, were far from incompetent in their navigation, and were perfectly able to rendezvous at a chosen place without much difficulty. All this adds up to a fair skill in navigation and a fair skill in their chart-makers. Quite apart from the fact that in the comparatively small area of the Mediterranean there was not much call for astronomical navigation—the ancients had got on well enough by simple observations of the Pole Star at night and the rising and the setting of the sun to give them a direction —the galley masters had so expert a knowledge of their vessels’ capabilities that they could rely very well on dead reckoning. There are also no tides worth speaking of in the Mediterranean, which makes calculation by dead reckoning much simpler and more accurate than in the oceans.

They did, however, have a simple and ingenious instrument for measuring their latitude, the kamal. This was no more than a small wooden tablet, in its simplest form with a knotted string through the centre. It worked upon the principle that “an object of fixed length will measure the height of any heavenly body above the horizon according to the distance at which it is held from the eye … In the simplest instruments the user had the known star altitude for each port on his route knotted on the string and recognised them according to each length found. But more usually the string was knotted at distances corresponding to isbas of 1 ° 36’, each four of which make a dubban of 6° 24’ …” The kamal was a forerunner of the cross-staff, which was also in wide use by the sixteenth century.

It is evidence enough of Barbarossa’s capabilities at sea that we never hear of any vessels being lost by stranding throughout his campaigns. Also, unlike the Spaniards, who were constantly falling foul of the treacherous coastline and weather of North

Africa, the ships under Barbarossa’s command do not seem to have been hazarded on expeditions at unsuitable seasons of the year.

A great sea captain must also be a considerable navigator, and there is no doubt that Barbarossa, like Drake, had mastered the art of navigation long before he became the Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman fleet. Although his service was in the hot, tideless Mediterranean, and not on the great oceans of the world, he, too, had learned from his youth onward, by the true symbiosis of sailor and sea, the feel of the winds and weather. He knew in the palms of his hands the dead swell from an old storm centre, the new swell presaging wind on the way, the movement of coastal currents, and the pattern of solar winds. He knew the marobbio that, suddenly and without any warning, can surge round the southern coast of Sicily, raising the sea level two or three feet in calm weather. He knew the khamsin or gibleh when it blew hot as a furnace off the deserts of North Africa and then, picking up moisture as it moved over the sea, turned into the sirocco that plagues the Maltese archipelago as well as all southern Italy and Sicily.

The Sultan’s new Admiral was, like all great sailors, familiar with all the aspects of the sea—so much so, that he seemed as much a part of it and it of him as if their natures were indissolubly linked together. He knew in himself the violence and the fury, and the long calms of easy weather. He knew, too, its indestructible energy. It is hardly surprising to read that, all that winter, “Barbarossa was continually in the arsenal, where he did both eat and drink to lose no time.”