The Sultan's Admiral (24 page)

Barbarossa had no more intention of accepting this lure than he had previously had of leaving Preveza. While the main body of his galleys continued their assault on Condalmiero’s galleon, other galleys were thrashing down the coast to pick up whatever stragglers they could find. Barbarossa’s conduct of his ships during this day again irresistibly reminds one of Drake’s tactics during his harrying of the Spanish Armada up the Channel. With fewer ships than the enemy Barbarossa could not, and would not, let himself be drawn into a major fleet action. He contented himself with worrying the flanks of the enemy and picking off stragglers. His instinct and his conduct were right, and he showed himself in every way a superior seaman to Andrea Doria. No doubt, also, Barbarossa—who had a secure port at Preveza to which he could swiftly retire in the event of bad weather—hoped that a gale would spring up and destroy the Christians. In this respect he did not have Drake’s luck. “The winds of God” failed to blow and scatter the enemy.

Doria’s conduct during this day, on the other hand, seems inexcusable—so inexcusable that it has often been hinted that he wished as much as anything to see the Venetians weakened by the loss of their flagship. It is possible. One has to remember that the history of Doria’s life reveals a man who was always capable of changing sides when it suited him, and who had a Machiavellian lack of scruple in politics. He suffered from the greatest defect that an admiral can have: he was a highly political animal, and he was a politician before he was a sailor. But, if one cannot bring oneself to believe that he deliberately left Condalmiero without assistance for political reasons, his behaviour seems incomprehensible. No doubt he would have preferred to fight a set-piece sea battle well out on the open sea, but can he have believed that Barbarossa would leave the coastal waters that suited his fast galleys, and allow himself to be engaged by a vastly superior enemy under the very conditions which suited the enemy’s sailing vessels?

While Doria hauled out to seaward and, in Hamilton Currey’s words, “executed useless parade movements,” the Turkish galleys were busy snapping up any laggards that might come to hand before the sun set. In this way a Venetian galley was cut out from the end of a line, boarded, and captured. Meanwhile the unavailing onslaught against the Galleon of Venice continued, with squadron after squadron withdrawing to lick its wounds before the deadly fire of the huge warship.

By withholding his fire until the gunners were confident of their targets, and by using the ricochet effect with his cannon shot, Condalmiero achieved the most impressive success of the day. He demonstrated once and for all that a stout sailing ship, manned by well-disciplined seamen, was more than a match for any oared galleys. The successful defence of the Galleon of Venice in the Preveza action marked—for those who could read the signs—the writing on the wall for the Mediterranean galley. It seems that Barbarossa was intelligent enough to know when to cease wasting men and ships, for not long before sunset, when the Venetians were expecting a massed attack, the Turkish Admiral ordered his ships to withdraw.

Some historians have held this against Barbarossa as marking a failure of nerve. Certainly the victory was Condalmiero’s, and the gallant Venetian managed to make his way northward overnight to the safety of Corfu. But senseless losses had never been to Kheir-ed-Din’s taste, and in this he was in advance of most Turkish military thinking (Turkish leaders usually being inclined to use masses of men and material in simple “steamroller” techniques). He redeployed his galleys and, in the last hour before darkness fell, used them to cut out a number of smaller sailing galleons that had become detached from the main body of Doria’s fleet. By the end of the day the Ottoman fleet had captured, as well as the Venetian galley, another galley, from the papal squadron, and five Spanish sailing ships. This was no small return for the sinking of one, possibly two, galleys, and for the disablement of several others. Not a single Turkish ship had been captured by Doria’s forces and none had struck her colours. By his refusal to close with the far inferior Turkish forces, and to use his immensely superior fire power, Doria had thrown away all chances of victory. The field was Barbarossa’s.

During the night the southerly breeze freshened. The Turkish fleet withdrew beyond Cape Zuana into the lee presented by the northern coast of Levkas. Doria, who had all the open sea northward to the Corfu channel ahead of his fleet, might well have heaved-to and waited for the. dawn. Then, with the wind under his stern, he would have had the weather gauge of the Turks. But when the dawn came the Turks, to their astonishment, saw the whole of the imperial fleet heading northward for Corfu. Doria had withdrawn from the engagement.

His decision remains incomprehensible, and it is extremely difficult to see how, after the battle of Preveza, he ever managed to retain his commanding prestige with the Emperor. Sandoval, in his
History of Charles V
, says that Barbarossa, when retelling the story in later years, used to shake with laughter and maintain that Doria had even extinguished his admiral’s lantern on the poop—so that no one could see him slipping away. The only excuse one can possibly find in mitigation of Doria’s conduct is that he was a Mediterranean admiral, accustomed to galleys but with little experience in handling large numbers of sailing ships. The mixed composition of his fleet was a bugbear to him from the very start. It seems that his fear of losing the Emperor’s galleons through bad weather on a lee shore crippled his courage and his judgement.

If the one occasion in their lives when the two most famous seamen of their time met with their combined fleets proved to be an inconspicuous engagement, there could be no doubt who had emerged the victor. In every respect Barbarossa had shown himself superior to Andrea Doria. He was outnumbered by nearly fifty ships, many of which had an individual fire power equivalent to a whole squadron of galleys. Yet he had seven captured vessels to his credit when Doria withdrew. He had shown his sagacity at Preveza when he had refused to be lured from his lair. He had outmanoeuvred Doria during the action on September 28, and but for the damage inflicted on his galleys by the inspired resistance of Condalmiero, he would have achieved all this with hardly any casualties.

While the imperial fleet was reanchoring in Corfu, prior to departing for the home ports of its various units (and it can be imagined with what feelings the Venetians left for the Adriatic) Barbarossa returned to Preveza. Relays of horsemen carried the news to the Sultan of the defeat of the Emperor’s fleet, and of the flight of Andrea Doria and the combined forces of three great Christian powers. Suleiman the Magnificent was at Yambol in Bulgaria when the report of his High Admiral’s victory finally reached him. He had the whole town illuminated as a mark of triumph and sent a despatch to Constantinople ordering processions to be made to Santa Sophia (once the heart of Eastern Christendom) and to the other mosques, to give thanks to

Allah for the success of the Sultan’s arms. In recognition of the fact that it was above all Kheir-ed-Din’s victory he increased his Admiral’s annual income by one hundred thousand aspers.

By the time that the victorious fleet reached Constantinople there was no corner of the Ottoman Empire which had not heard how “the King of the Sea” had proved his right to that title. He had given the Sultan the mastery of the western Mediterranean, and he had now given him the mastery of the eastern basin as well. From the waters of the Black Sea to the Atlantic coast of Morocco there was no one to challenge the Sultan. His Admiral was supreme in the Mediterranean Sea, and had turned it for his master into “a Turkish lake.” If the years from 1538 until the death of Sultan Suleiman in 1566 were the most glorious in the history of the Ottoman Empire, it was largely owing to Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa.

Barbarossa was blessed by fate in the last years of his life. For him there was to be no decline in mental or physical vigour, nor did he suffer any eclipse in fame and fortune such as bedevilled the closing years of Francis Drake. Esteemed throughout his own country as the greatest seaman in Turkish history, a favored confidant of the Sultan, and feared and respected throughout Europe second only to the Sultan himself, he was fortunate enough to enjoy the success that he had earned. From Haedo and from Morgan we learn that among other things, “he erected and nobly endowed a most magnificent Mosque, and near it a stately dome for his own sepulchre, about five miles from that large suburb of Constantinople called Galata, not far from the coast, a little before the mouth or entrance of Kara Dengis, or the Black Sea: all which shore is adorned with most beautiful and delicious gardens, vineyards and pleasure-houses, not unlike the fine river of Genoa. At Constantinople, he likewise built a very large and commodious Bagnio, or Public Bath . .

But these were the private achievements of his life ashore. He continued active afloat, and in the year following the victory at Preveza he successfully laid siege to the fortress of Castelnuovo which the Turkish army had failed to capture a few months previously. When the Spanish Governor, Don Francisco Sarmiento, finally surrendered, he and his remaining garrison were honorably and chivalrously treated. As the Abbe de Brantome remarked of the expedition, “It was one of the greatest that he ever made against the Christians.” In two years Barbarossa had shown himself superior to Doria at sea, and superior to his own Turkish army commanders in a military operation. It was no mean achievement for a man in his late fifties.

The outstanding event of the next few years was one in which Kheir-ed-Din personally took no part. Yet the whole action and the results stemming from it must be seen as owing themselves to the achievements of the two Barbarossa brothers. To avenge the defeat at Preveza, and to try to secure the western Mediterranean for his own navy and merchant marine, Charles V determined yet again to remove the threat of the Barbary corsairs— most of whom were men who had received their training under Kheir-ed-Din. The Kingdom of Algiers which the brothers had founded was proving an impossible irritant on the flank of Spain, and the raiders from North Africa had in no way declined in spirit since Barbarossa had left them in 1535. Under Barbarossa’s successor, Hassan, the war against the Christian powers was prosecuted with a relentless venom. The Emperor decided that the only way to deal with the problem was to strike at its heart— Algiers. Though he had failed against the city in 1519, he would now have his revenge.

Throughout the winter of 1540 he had the dockyards of Spain and Naples busy with the preparation of an immense fleet, a fleet which would dwarf even the one with which Andrea Doria had so lamentably failed against Barbarossa. Unfortunately, the Emperor made the same mistake that had ruined the previous naval expedition—he sailed far too late in the year. It was not until

October that all the ships from Spain, from Genoa, from the papal dominions, and from Naples were assembled off Palma in Mallorca. The climate of adulation that surrounds kings and emperors is one which inevitably conditions them to believe that if they themselves are present nothing can go wrong with their plans. Despite the protests of Andrea Doria, the Emperor insisted that it was not too late to descend upon the city of Algiers and take it by storm.

On October 19 a fleet of over five hundred ships—already battered by a mistral—staggered into the Bay of Algiers. There were over one hundred Spanish sailing vessels laden with imperial troops from Germany and Italy; transports from Naples and Sicily; and all the chivalry of Spain embarked in two hundred galleons, escorted by fifty galleys. Among the Spanish gentlemen was Hernando Cortes, future conqueror of Mexico. It is estimated that about twenty-five thousand soldiers were embarked in the vast fleet that now prepared to invest Algiers.

Four days later the troops were all ashore. It looked as if Doria’s gloomy prognostications about weather conditions off the Algerian coast were to be disproved. The sun shone, the sea was calm, and everything seemed set fair for a successful campaign. The local troops, Berbers and Moors, hurriedly withdrew before the overwhelming forces that were being landed. Almost without opposition the great invasion army began its march towards the city. To Hassan it must have seemed as if the end of his stewardship had come, and as if all that he had been entrusted with by Barbarossa would surely be lost to the Christians: just as the latter’s brother, Aruj, had been lost in that lonely valley near Tlemcen twenty-three years ago.

Within a day of landing, the city was invested on all sides save the north. The cannon were being brought into position for the first onslaught, and the imperial troops and their master felt confident that at long last they would cut out the cancer of Algiers from North Africa. The first attack was scheduled for the morning of October 24, by which time the powder and shot and other stores and materiel should have been landed in sufficient quantities for the assault to begin. But on this occasion, unlike Doria at Preveza, the Emperor was not to be lucky with his weather. During the night of the 23rd, a typical autumn downpour developed. A cold front came sweeping down from the Mediterranean, to deluge the mountains behind the city and to turn the littoral into a morass of mud.

The morning of the 24th found the army harassed by gale-force winds and by cold driving rain. Powder got sodden, and the slow matches for the arquebuses and the cannon could scarcely be protected or kept alight. Far from this being the day when the great attack should have begun, the army now found itself in the unhappy role of being on the defensive.

Hassan and his Turks sallied out from the threatened city and put the attackers to flight. Demoralised by the weather, the Italian troops were the first to retire, soon to be followed by the Germans and the Spaniards. Only those indomitable warriors the Knights of Malta (who had provided a squadron of ships and a contingent of men for the expedition) refused to be stampeded by the attacking enemy. They chose, as always, the place of honour. If they had been attacking the city they would have been first into the breach, but now—since the army was retreating—it was they who formed the rear guard. As Lane-Poole wrote in
The Barbary Corsairs
: “The Knights of Malta, last of all, their scarlet doublets shining like a fresh wound, and their faces to the foe, covered the retreat.”