The Sultan's Admiral (25 page)

Indeed, if that day of disaster for the Emperor proved anything, it was that fact—so well known in warfare—that it is not numbers that count, but discipline, training, and morale. Only the Knights of Malta seem to have emerged with credit from the bedraggled withdrawal of the imperial troops. Morgan tells in his

History of Algiers that “whenever any skirmish or action happened, and particularly in that notable encounter, talked of by the Turks, to this very day, when the Cavaliers of Malta, gathering into a body, broke and defeated a strong party of Turks, and advanced so far as even to stick their daggers in the City Gate, called Beb-Azoun, it was Hassan Aga himself who, in person, repaired thither with the utmost diligence to remedy that disorder . .

Hassan at the head of his Turks now forced the knights to withdraw, but not to yield. Fighting all the way, they withstood the onslaught of Hassan’s mounted troops and thus gave the army time to withdraw to its established positions; Charles V, his staff, and part of the troops taking up their station on a hillside overlooking the sea and the disembarkation point. Finally, late in that long, hard day, the Emperor and his cavalry came down in a body to help their gallant rear guard. Hassan’s forces withdrew, but not before the Knights of Malta had lost a large part of their small force. “And to this day,” as Morgan wrote, “the place where those valiant gentlemen bravely lost their lives, is usually pointed to by the Turks themselves, who call it the Cavaliers’ Sepulchre, and largely commend their gallantry …”

The wind now reached gale force, and burst upon the anchored armada and the harsh Algerian shore. It veered from north to northeast, and the rolling breakers had the full fetch of the sea behind them, all the way from the Gulf of Genoa over six hundred miles away. The sailing galleons dragged as the raging winds seized upon their heavy top hamper, their lofty masts, and awkward yards. Some managed to claw their way offshore, but most of them were powerless to move. One after another they fell foul of their neighbours, or staggered with dragging anchors onto the rocks that fringed the foam-lashed beach. It was one of the worst maritime disasters in history. Throughout the night of the 25th and the morning of the following day, 140 sailing ships came to grief on the Algerian coast. So violent was the gale that for centuries afterwards it was referred to in Algiers as “Charles’s Gale.”

Hassan and his Turks, the native Berbers, and the expatriate Moors from Spain did not waste their opportunity. They fell upon the soldiers and sailors who staggered ashore and massacred them. “As the light increased, the scene appeared more horrible. The ships in the Bay had either broke their cables, or lost their anchorage, driving about at sea and dashing each other to pieces, or else running ashore and bilging on the rocks and strands. The same fate attended all the ships which had doubled the promontory of Apollo … The country Moors, beholding this destruction, swarmed to the seaside; and as the poor people were driving ashore, and in hopes of getting to the camp, they were piteously stripped naked and pierced through with lances by those merciless Africans, of both sexes, who were there waiting.”

“Thy will be done”—these are reputedly the words of Charles V as he gazed down at his shattered fleet and ruined army. A retreat was ordered to the Bay of Matifou, some twenty miles east of Algiers, where the remnants of the fleet under Andrea Doria had managed to reassemble after the gale had blown itself out. Demoralised, lashed by blinding rain, the army was under constant attack from Hassan and his Turks, as well as all the local irregulars. Even when they had regained the ships their sufferings were not at an end, for a further northerly gale burst upon them. The fleet for a second time was scattered up and down the coast. When the Emperor and his ruined army and navy finally reached Spain at the end of November they had lost 8000 troops, 300 officers of the Spanish nobility, innumerable galleys, and 150 sailing ships. Spanish arms were not to suffer so great a disaster until the loss of the Armada sent against England by Charles V’s son, Philip II. As Jurien de la Graviere drily remarked: “The climate of Africa was clearly unsuited to deeds of chivalry.”

One thing that the costly failure of Charles’s expedition did establish for centuries to come was the security of the Kingdom of Algiers. Barbarossa’s addition to the Ottoman power was destined to be a thorn in the side of all Europe until the nineteenth century. But whenever any thought of concerted action against the Barbary corsairs occurred to the rulers of Europe, there also returned the memory of that terrible disaster, when the God of Battles had shown himself on the side of the Moslems, and had “breathed and they were scattered.” In Algiers itself the slave market was glutted, and in later years the Turks would often refer to 1541 as “the time when Christians sold at an onion per head.”

The last years of Barbarossa were marked, politically, by the conclusion of what has sometimes been called “the impious alliance” between France and the Sublime Porte. Francis I, that ruler so typical in many ways of Renaissance Man, was typical also in his cynicism when it came to politics. In his determination to counteract the ambitions of Charles V, he had early seen that the power of the new Turkish navy, which Kheir-ed-Din had created, had introduced a new factor upon the Mediterranean and, therefore, the European scene.

As early as 1536 a small combined force of Turkish and French ships had engaged in company against ships of the Spanish navy, and had subsequently wintered together in Marseilles. Although there is no documentary evidence to prove it, it seems more or less conclusive that at some time or other during this year a formal alliance between the two powers had been signed. If the aims of Francis I in aligning himself, at any rate at sea, with the Ottoman Empire are clear enough, it is hardly less difficult to comprehend the motives of that astute diplomat and ruler the Sultan Suleiman. His aim was the ultimate conquest of Europe, and if these Christians were divided one against another, then it was clearly to his advantage to make what use he could of their rivalries, enmities, and intrigues. As has been remarked before, the contempt in which the Moslem Turk held the European Christian was largely due to the patent evidence that these so-called lovers of the Prince of Peace were no more than self-seeking adventurers—less united, indeed, by their faith than were the nations of the Moslem world.

Although a number of French historians have recoiled from this alliance with the enemy of the Christian world, and although a number of historians of other European nations have enjoyed exposing the perfidy of France, there was little new in the situation. The French, for political, geographic, and economic reasons, have always been compelled to seek whatever alliances best suited their temporary convenience. They had not been slow to fall in with the plans of the Venetians in the thirteenth century to dismember the Christian Byzantine Empire for the mutual enrichment of France and Venice. They were not to be slow in later centuries to engage in treaties and agreements that may make the moralist raise his hands in pious despair. Curiously enough, the epithet “Perfidious Albion,” conferred upon Great Britain by the French some centuries later, was perhaps not so much a mark of abuse as an unwilling compliment—the British had once or twice defeated the French at their own national game.

For Barbarossa, as for the Sultan, the alliance seemed to promise only advantage. He knew as well as his master that the real enemy of Turkey-in-Europe was the power of Spain and the Empire. Anything that served to hasten the dissolution of that complicated political and military machine could only be to the good of Turkey. He was well aware that the French navy was virtually negligible, and that it was only the coalition of Spain with Venice and Genoa which could in any way threaten Turkish supremacy in the Mediterranean. The obvious course of action, therefore, was to work with the French to the detriment of Charles V. If ever the Emperor could be brought to the ground, there would then be little difficulty in disposing of France.

Sir Godfrey Fisher in
Barbary Legend
comments upon the political situation of the period: “As the rest of Christendom [at this time] appears to have lived in dread of the ‘universal domination’ of Spain, and the rift between France and Venice was so fundamental that they are said never to have fought side by side officially after 1504, it is not perhaps surprising that not only the inhabitants of Tunis but Catholics, Lutherans, and Greeks in Europe often preferred Turkish protection or rule, that oppressed Christians fled to the more free and enlightened atmosphere of Algiers, just as the Hungarians did to Turkish territory, and that even in distant England there was an element anxious to establish relations with the Sultans of Morocco and Turkey and with Kheir-ed-Din . .

It has to be remembered that the Moslem attitude towards other faiths and other nations was often more tolerant than that of the newly emergent European powers. The latter were so bedevilled by their militant nationalism that they could not comprehend how they might best work together to their common advantage. An almost identical situation to that of sixteenth-century Europe may be observed in parts of Africa and Asia in the second half of the twentieth century.

So, in 1543, at the pressing invitation of Francis I, the Sultan sent out his High Admiral with a fleet of one hundred galleys to assist the French against the Emperor. Clearly the aim of the expedition was to do as much harm to the Emperor’s dominions as possible, and Barbarossa did not neglect any opportunities. Reggio, guarding the Strait of Messina from the north, was yet again sacked. According to one account, the Governor’s daughter was captured and became Barbarossa’s wife. “A most beautiful damsel,” says Morgan, “of eighteen; with whom he became so enamoured that he married her, and in regard to his new spouse, released both her parents . .

The sun-baked coastline and villages of Calabria once more saw the advancing crescent of Turkish sails. The people fled inland to hill villages perched high above the azure sea, as the Turks, like fishermen dragging in a net, scooped up all the coastal traffic and all the men, women, and poor valuables of that impoverished land. Norman Douglas, recording in his
Old Calabria
the many tragedies that have befallen that part of southern Italy, remarks that though the portrait that has been painted of these Turkish raids is black enough, yet there were others even more culpable than the Moslems: “In Saracen times the Venetians actually sold Christian slaves to the Turks. Parrino cites the seven enactments which were issued in the sixteenth century against Christian sailors who decoyed children on board their boats and sold them as slaves to the Moslems. I question whether the Turks were ever guilty of a corresponding infamy.” Describing the watchtowers which are so noticeable a feature of all this coast, he goes on to say: “The ominous name
Torre di Guardia
(tower of outlook)—a cliff whence the sea was scanned for the appearance of Turkish vessels—survives all over the south. Barbarossa, too, has left his mark; many a hill, fountain, or castle has been named after him . .

Passing north of Naples the fleet invested the castle that guarded the ancient city of Gaeta. Clearly this was more than a simple piratical raid—as some historians have described Kheir-ed-Din’s campaign of 1543. The raider or corsair does not attack fortified cities like Reggio, or deliberately lay siege to strong fortresses like that of Gaeta. It is quite clear that the Sultan’s instructions to his High Admiral had been to inflict as much damage as possible upon the lands and dominions of the Emperor. Having captured the fortress and sacked the city, the fleet moved on northward for its rendezvous with the French forces in the Gulf of Lions at Marseilles.

That summer witnessed the surprising sight of a fleet belonging to the Sultan—a Moslem fleet, theoretically the enemy of all Christendom—passing peaceably along the Riviera coast of France. Once he had put the territory of Charles V behind him, Barbarossa saw to it that the conduct of his ships and sailors was impeccable. Of his later stay at Toulon one visitor to the city wrote, “To see Toulon one might imagine oneself at Constantinople, everyone pursuing his business with the greatest order and justice … Never did an army live in stricter or more orderly fashion than that one.”

On arrival at Marseilles, Barbarossa was furious to find that none of the arrangements for which he had asked had been made. The French had failed to have the correct weight of provisions ready, the naval stores that had been requested had failed to arrive, and, in short, there was every evidence of dilatory incompetence. The man who had reorganised the dockyards of the Sultan, built the Turkish navy, and made it the most effective instrument in the Mediterranean was not used to such inefficiency. Received by the young Duke of Enghien, Francois de Bourbon, Barbarossa had no hesitation in telling him exactly what he thought of the arrangements—or, rather, the lack of them. He himself, observers noted with some surprise, was treated by the Duke and by all the nobility and senior French officers as a man of great consequence.

But despite the evidence of a number of chroniclers, the legend of the violent, piratical Old Man of the Sea dies hard. It is significant that it is mainly in French accounts that Barbarossa has acquired so unattractive a reputation. The reason for this is not too difficult to find. Barbarossa had been duped by the French and had been badly let down by them. Furthermore, it was the French themselves who later committed the atrocities which they then, and subsequently, found convenient to lay at the door of the Sultan’s Admiral.

Having asked for the assistance of his Turkish ally, Francis I now found himself in the awkward position of being compelled to take action against Charles V. Yet he did not feel strong enough to engage the Emperor in a serious campaign, and he was also being roundly attacked in France for having allied himself with the Turks. It would have been bad enough, some reasoned, to conclude such an alliance (although possibly political advantageous). To have an immense Turkish fleet actually visiting the ports of France, thus openly proclaiming the alliance to all of Europe, was stupid and dangerous. It gave the enemies of France a good propaganda weapon against her, and it even inspired affection for the Emperor from people who otherwise resented his ambitions. Nevertheless, Francis had to produce some evidence that he was serious in his request for help, and that his troops were ready to take the field.