The Sultan's Admiral (20 page)

While Andrea Doria, at the Emperor’s command, was searching for Barbarossa along the North African coast, the latter was busy in the Emperor’s domain. Port Mahon was sacked, six thousand were carried into slavery, and the defenses of the port and the great harbour were totally destroyed. Many cannon were carried off (some recompense for those that had been lost in the Goletta), and all the stores and valuables from the harbour warehouses were loaded aboard the galleots and the captured Portuguese merchantman.

Barbarossa had indeed lost Tunis, but he showed by this master stroke that he understood better than any in his day and age the proper uses of sea power. As they left the sacked city, the flames crackling against the night sky and lighting up the waters of its gracious bay, he is said to have turned to his lieutenants who had counselled him to be cautious and asked: “What think you then? Is this not better than going to the Levant?”

Barbarossa had established the Kingdom of Algiers, and he left it a secure dependency of the Ottoman Empire. He had failed to hold Tunis, but its loss was to become relatively unimportant within his own lifetime. Muley Hassan did not live long to enjoy his vassalship to the Emperor, and his successors soon saw that their fortunes were linked with those of Turkey and not those of Spain. Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa, whose initial fortunes had been founded upon the sea, was now to retire from the land and devote himself almost entirely to his native element.

Leaving the administration of Algeria in the hands of his friend and confidant the eunuch Hassan Aga, he set sail for Constantinople in the late autumn of 1535. For over thirty years he had lived in North Africa, and had made the western Mediterranean his home. Now he left the area where he had made Barbarossa a name with which Christians frightened their unruly children. He went back to the waters of the Levant where he had spent his early youth. He never saw Algiers again.

Morgan says that the reason for his withdrawal was that “regretting the loss of so fine a state as that of Tunis [he was] determined personally to solicit Sultan Suleiman for a powerful reinforcement, in order to its recovery.” There are no known records, and although it is possible that Barbarossa hoped to get the Sultan to lend him a number of ships and a force of janissaries to regain Tunis, the Sultan had more important projects at hand for his greatest sea captain. In that first winter in the dockyards of Constantinople Barbarossa had shown that he not only knew about ships, but that he had outstanding administrative ability. The Sultan needed a High Admiral, and he needed a thoroughly efficient navy. In recent years, the Venetians and the Genoese had been increasingly active in the Ionian and the Adriatic. The capture of Patras, the occupation of Modon, the imposition of a Spanish garrison in the fort commanding the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, all these showed Suleiman that, strong though he might be on land, he needed a powerful navy to secure his coastlines. Barbarossa, Beylerbey of Algiers, was now officially summoned home to take command of the Ottoman navy. He had established a Turkish dependency on the flank of the principal Christian power, the Kingdom of Spain. He was now to be asked to hang a Turkish fleet like a leech on the long leg of Italy.

In the spring of 1536 an event occurred which, although it had little effect on Barbarossa’s career, cannot be omitted since it was symptomatic of an illness that would ultimately serve to destroy the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim, the Grand Vizir of Suleiman, was murdered at the instigation of the famous (or infamous) Roxelana. The daughter of a Russian priest and a Russian mother, Roxelana had already persuaded Suleiman to have his son Mustafa murdered, so that her own son Selim (ultimately Selim II, known as “Selim the Sot”) might inherit the throne. The murder of Ibrahim was promoted by Roxelana’s desire that his place as Grand Vizir should be taken by her son-in-law, Rustem Pasha. Ibrahim had been a model Grand Vizir and was a man of exceptional intelligence and ability. His death was Turkey’s loss and her enemies’ gain. With Roxelana, the harem Sultana, there began that disastrous influence of women on Turkish affairs of state which was ultimately to weaken the whole administration of the Empire. The boudoir politics of eighteenth-century France were almost petty, and certainly comparatively civilised, compared with the intrigues in the seraglio. There, like a nest of female spiders (each intent that only her own offspring should survive and inherit), the favourites of the Sultans were to weave their webs of murderous intrigue.

It was on Ibrahim’s advice that Kheir-ed-Din had been appointed High Admiral, and everyone who had been favoured by the late Vizir now came under suspicion. But political power and influence within the Ottoman court were of little interest to Barbarossa. He had learned over the past thirty years how to survive against Spaniards, Italians, Algerians, Moors, and Berbers alike, and he had no intention of running his head into a noose, however silken it might appear. Fortunately for him, Roxelana had no ambitions for any of her relatives in the fleet. Even more important was the fact that, although he owed his position to Ibrahim, Barbarossa’s own policy for the use of the navy he was building was in complete opposition to that of the late Vizir.

Ibrahim had been born a Venetian subject in Dalmatia, and had always maintained an affection for Venice, with the result that during his years of office friendly relations had been maintained between the two powers. This was the reason why many of the Aegean Islands, Crete among them, had remained Venetian possessions and had been untroubled by the Turks. Barbarossa, on the other hand, having established Turkish sea power in the western and central Mediterranean, was resolved to eradicate the Christian powers from the Levant, the Aegean, and the

Adriatic. It must have seemed irrational to him that it was only in the waters nearest Turkey-in-Europe that the Ottoman flag did not reign supreme. Seeing that Suleiman’s policy was to extend his empire steadily westward into Europe, Barharossa had no difficulty in pointing out to the Sultan that, to realise his ambitions, he must have the sea lanes nearest his possessions under complete Turkish control.

Previously it had been the Spaniards and the Genoese who had been Barbarossa’s main enemies, but now their place was taken by the Venetians. Although the Republic of Venice and the Sublime Porte were technically, at peace, some foolhardy Venetians had recently taken to raiding the Sultan’s ships on passage between Constantinople and North Africa. If the Sultan was affronted by this, his new Admiral was furious. He could not allow these “Cross-kissing Christians” to behave in his master’s waters as he himself had been doing for so many years out of Algiers and the Barbary Coast. Throughout 1536 the shipyards and the arsenals of Constantinople were a hive of activity.

As if to provoke the Sultan and his High Admiral even further, Andrea Doria now had the temerity to sally out of Messina with a force of twenty-five galleys and capture ten Turkish merchantmen. Not content with this, having secured his slaves and his looted cargo back in Sicily, he made his way across the summer Ionian Sea. Doria was at this time seventy years old and an impressive figure of a man (even if politically he was as guileful as Machiavelli’s ideal Prince). He had been largely responsible for Barbarossa’s expulsion from Tunis, and he was now bent on carrying the war into the enemy’s territory.

Ten miles south of Corfu lies the small island of Paxos. It was in these waters that, many centuries before, a naval engagement between the ancient Corfiote Greeks and the Corinthians had precipitated the fatal Peloponnesian War that was to be the ruin of Athens (now no more than a poor Turkish village). Into this same area there swept the galleys of Andrea Doria, to inflict a sharp defeat upon a section of the Turkish fleet under the command of the Lieutenant to the Governor of the Dardanelles. At the conclusion of the action, the captured Turkish galleys were towed through the narrow entrance channel into the little harbour of Paxos. The native Greeks and the Venetians who manned the harbour defences of the island were overjoyed to see the hated Turks ironed and set to work at the oar benches of the victor.

It is certainly true that until the advent of Barbarossa upon the Turkish naval scene the conduct of the Ottoman ships and their commanders seems to have been inefficient in the extreme. This was all to change, and in the very near future. But for the moment the indignity of this defeat was deeply felt in Constantinople. The Sultan, and his High Admiral in particular, felt that something must be done to wipe out the loss and the disgrace which Doria’s two new successes had inflicted. Barbarossa had been given the men and the materials; he had brought with him his reputation for being the foremost seaman of his time; it was up to him to justify his name and his position.

In May 1537 Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa led the Turkish fleet out of the still waters of the Golden Horn. With over one hundred galleys behind him (some accounts say as many as two hundred) he now had the means with which to achieve his ambitions. The Turkish plan was well thought out: a sea attack on the east coast of Italy and a sweep up the Adriatic, while the Sultan himself took an army of twenty thousand men across to Valona in what is now Albania. The plan was for the Sultan and the army to be transported across the narrow strait between Valona and Brindisi and, having captured that great and ancient seaport, to sweep northwards through Italy. The Governor of Brindisi, who was on the Sultan’s payioll, was prepared to open the gates of the city to the Turks. In the event, the plan miscarried, because the Governor’s treachery was discovered a few days before the attack was due to be launched.

But Barbarossa, meanwhile, in the words of one chronicler, “laid waste the coasts of Apulia like a pestilence.” Andrea Doria, who was at Messina with his galleys, does not seem to have dared to intervene. His fleet was not strong enough to take on the force that Barbarossa had built up over the past twelve months. With thousands of slaves aboard and his holds filled with plunder, the High Admiral reluctantly obeyed a recall from the Sultan. The latter had decided, in view of the rupture of relations with Venice, to lay siege to Corfu, most important of the Ionian Islands and a Venetian possession since the division of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

Despite the fact that the Sultan landed his whole army and thirty cannon—including a monster fifty-pounder, then the largest piece of ordnance in the world—the castle and fortifications of Corfu were still resisting when the approach of autumn determined the withdrawal of the troops and the ships. At first glance, the year’s campaigning had not been very successful. Neither Brindisi nor Corfu had fallen to Turkish arms. But Barbarossa’s earlier raid into Apulia, which had yielded so many slaves and so much plunder, was now to be overshadowed by his devastating sweep down the Ionian and into the Aegean.

Paxos, so recently the scene of Andrea Doria’s triumph, was captured and most of its inhabitants were enslaved. The other Venetian possessions in the Ionian were similarly harried by these raiders from the sea, who proved even more terrible than the earthquakes that regularly plague life on those rocky, olive-starred islands. Rounding Cape Matapan, as the fleet made for its winter headquarters in the Golden Horn, Barbarossa raged through the Aegean more terribly than even the storms of winter. Almost every island that belonged to the Venetians suddenly found that its long years of peace with the Ottomans were at an end. Their trading vessels were seized, their young men put to the oar, and their young women abducted for sale in Constantinople. As if all this was not enough, they were now told that they must pay a yearly tribute to the Sublime Porte if they did not want a further visitation.

Venice had been in conflict with the Turks before, but this was the first time that she had ever had to deal with an Ottoman fleet that was well built, well manned, and led by Barbarossa. How bitterly the Republic must have rued the day when they had been so foolish as to invite this conflict. Venice subsisted by seaborne trade and anything that interrupted this was disastrous for her. Although for nearly two centuries more she was to maintain possessions in Greece and the islands (losing here, recapturing there, and always putting up a brave fight), yet the writing was on the wall for Venice from the moment that Sultan Suleiman called Barbarossa home to reorganise and build up the Ottoman fleet.

The High Admiral entered the Horn to a triumph such as had never been witnessed in those waters in the history of the Porte. It was true that many a Sultan and his armies had returned victorious to the city, at the head of the defeated, having enlarged the Empire by yet another province. But these had all been military victories. It was something novel for the inhabitants of Constantinople to see that ships could secure equal prizes to armies. When Barbarossa returned, in the words of Hajji Khalifa, “to rub his countenance against the royal stirrup,” he brought with him 400,000 pieces of gold, 1000 young women, and 1500 youths. As a personal present for his lord and master he despatched 200 boys dressed in scarlet carrying vessels of gold and silver, and a further 200, some carrying bales of cloth and others holding before them embroidered purses heavy with coin.

“The creator of the Turkish navy, its admiral and its soul,” as Duro remarked of him in his history of the Spanish navy, had more than avenged his Sultan’s withdrawal before the walls of Corfu. But his actions in this campaign must not be seen as little more than a large-scale piece of piracy. Venice had provoked the war with Turkey, and it was in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Sultan’s fleet that Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa had taken the war into Venetian territory. His violence was part of his age and time, and, as has been seen at Tunis, was far from being confined to “the terrible Turks.” Indeed, a French ambassador later commented on Barbarossa’s fleet that there was a discipline and order to be observed in the Turkish galleys which their European enemies would be wise to copy.

The fact that France had concluded an alliance with the Ottomans need not make one suspect the ambassador of any particular bias. Even the Knights of Malta, those eternal enemies of all Moslems, accorded Barbarossa and his successors a respect that they never gave to pirates. In the Wars of Religion, the Grand Master of the Order of St. John was, except for the fact that he was a Christian, occupying a position almost identical to that of Barbarossa. Grand Master La Valette (who was so successfully to defend Malta against the Turks in 1565) had himself served a period at the oars of a Turkish galley. It was no more than what might be expected if you lost in a sea battle. It is reported of La Valette that, stepping aboard a Christian galley on one occasion, he found the great Dragut among the oarsmen. He remarked to him in kindly encouragement: “It is the custom of war, Senor Dragut,” to which the Turkish corsair replied, “Yes, and change of fortune.” It was a hard world. No man in it suffered from the illusion that he possessed any “rights”—except those which his own brains and strength might possibly secure him.