The Sultan's Admiral (26 page)

Barbarossa, after his disgust at French inefficiency in Marseilles, was probably prepared for what happened. The French King proposed an attack on Nice, to which the Turkish Admiral agreed. But the troops who were provided for the operation were no more efficient than the dockyard and commissariat of Marseilles, and when the combined Franco-Turkish fleet appeared off the city it was found that once again inefficiency reigned. Barbarossa is reputed to have exclaimed “What soldiers are these—that fill their vessels with wine casks and forget to bring their powder!” Even Montluc, the French Ambassador to Venice, was honest enough to admit in 1544 that during the Turkish expedition of the previous year the conduct, administration, and discipline of the Turkish forces had been far superior to that of any European powers. “They are more hardy,” he wrote, “more obedient, and more enduring than us. They have one great advantage, that they think about nothing except war …” The Turks in fact were professionals—as they soon showed in the siege of Nice.

It was principally through the efficiency of the Turkish siege artillery that the city fell so quickly, a large breach having been opened in its walls. As was customary at the time, once the breach had been opened, the Governor of the besieged city or fortress was entitled to ask for honourable terms of surrender. Only if the besieged continued to resist until overwhelmed was a city deemed open to loot and slaughter. On this occasion the Governor formally surrendered his city, and the Franco-Turkish troops marched in. What happened next is not too difficult to disinter from the records that remain. It is important to do so, for the reason that later French libels accused the Turks of breaking faith and putting the city to fire and the sword. Nice, in any event, was sacked and burned to the ground. But who was responsible? Spanish accounts are unanimous that it was the French who burned the town, and having done so, then retreated to their base at Toulon. All the evidence goes to show that, at the time when Nice was sacked and burned, the Turkish fleet and gunners—their part in the operation already completed— had withdrawn to their anchorage at Villefranche. It was the French who had been left behind to garrison the town, for Barbarossa certainly had no interest in maintaining any troops there. In this connection Sir Godfrey Fisher quotes the evidence of the French Marshal Vieilleville: “The town of Nice was sacked in defiance of the capitulation terms, and it was then burned. But for this one must not blame Barbarossa and his troops, for they were already far off when this happened … This slander was put upon the unfortunate Barbarossa in order to uphold the honour and the reputation of France, indeed Christendom itself.” Since there are sufficient tributes, both from French and Spanish sources, to the high quality of the discipline in Barbarossa’s fleet and army, there can be no doubt where the truth of the matter lies.

Before withdrawing to his winter quarters of Toulon, Kheir-ed-Din despatched a squadron of galleys under Salah Rais to harry the Emperor’s native Spain. They fell upon the unsuspecting coastline of Catalonia—for the Spaniards were under the impression that all Barbarossa’s ships were in France—and sacked a number of ports and harbours. Salah Rais then withdrew to winter in Algiers, while Barbarossa and his fleet moved to Toulon. He had executed the Sultan’s orders with his usual thoroughness. On both sides of the Mediterranean, in Italy and in Spain, he had inflicted considerable damage on Charles V’s lands and peoples. He had done what was required of him by the French. He had shown all of Europe whose fleet it was that dominated the Mediterranean.

It is doubtful, however, whether the campaign had been of much real benefit to the Sultan, and certainly the French were not particularly reliable when it came to meeting their side of the bargain. In any case, within a year, the alliance was dead. Francis I, with yet another of his mercurial changes in foreign policy, had effected a pact with Charles V. By means of this both France and Spain were soon happily enabled to carve out considerable additions to their kingdoms from the northern Italian states. For the moment, though, the French and Turkish fleets rode out the winter side by side in Toulon harbour.

The alliance of Catholic French and Moslem Turk was curiously and obviously manifest to the French themselves, as well as to the rest of Europe, during those months. It is said, though on doubtful authority, that Barbarossa even forbade the French to have the church bells of Toulon rung to call the Christians to Mass. Certainly there was some incongruity in the spectacle of this great Moslem fleet, with its imams reciting the Koran to the faithful, at anchor in the main naval base of Catholic France. There was something incongruous, too, in the fact that aboard these vessels, and in the quarters set up for them ashore, the oarismen were largely enslaved Italians, Spaniards, and even Frenchmen. The power of the Sultan and Barbarossa was never so manifest to Europe as in that winter of 1543.

In the spring of the following year, with the rations and pay of his fleet finally provided under the contract with Francis I, Kheir-ed-Din sailed for Constantinople. Despatches from the Sultan had no doubt advised him of the forthcoming
rapprochement
between Francis I and Charles V. In any case, even if he was not aware of this new shift in European alignments, the Sultan was unwilling to have the major part of his fleet absent from Constantinople for too long. The Knights of St. John were already beginning to show signs of increasing activity, now that they had established themselves in their new base in Malta. Individual pirates were still active in the Aegean, and there were many problems still unresolved in the islands of the archipelago.

On his passage back along the Riviera and through the Ligurian Sea, Barbarossa behaved with the absolute propriety of a visiting admiral on a fleet cruise. Indeed Ambassador Montluc again commented on the behavior of his fleet, and said that no other force, whether Moslem or Christian, had ever conducted itself so well. It was a different matter, of course, as soon as he came within reach of the territories of Charles V. The island of Elba, where so many years ago his brother Aruj had carried out that first successful attack on the papal galley, was ransacked. Moving on southward, right in the teeth of Charles’s city of Naples, Kheir-ed-Din stormed the little island of Procida before turning upon fertile and gracious Ischia where he stored his ships with fruit, food, women, and men. The Lipari Islands, lying across the path of his advance southwards to Sicily, were also forced to pay their tribute of human beings and provisions.

In deference to his new wife and her parents, Reggio was left without any further depredation. The fleet turned eastward across the long acres of the soft Ionian and made its way to the Aegean. The High Admiral’s homecoming was worthy of his achievements. From Santa Sophia and from all the great new mosques of Constantinople the lights shone out across the water as the people gathered in their thousands to witness the return of this man who had become a myth in his own lifetime. The straining oars beat up against the cold’ current of the Bosphorus as the ships rounded Seraglio Point and began to stream into the placid waters of the Horn. They had gold aboard and slaves, loot from Italy and Spain, money and gifts from France, and tribute from the Greek islands that had formerly belonged to Genoa and Venice. It was one of the greatest moments in the history of that fabulous harbour—a harbour which, in its time, had witnessed many triumphant scenes. The return of the King of the Sea to the Sublime Porte, to the capital of the giant Ottoman Empire, was one of the peaks in that empire’s history. Eastern Europe lay humbled beneath the Sultan’s armies, western Europe trembled at the threat of his approach, and east as far as Persia Turkish arms were supreme.

In July 1546, within sight and sound of that fast-flowing current which had so often hurled his galleys southwards into the Aegean, Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa died in his palace on the Bosphorus. Contrary to a later malicious French report that “he died exhausted by the manifold vices of the harem,” Kheir-ed-Din was carried o2 by a fever—something that was not uncommon in midsummer Constantinople. He was sixty-three years old. He left only one known son, Hassan, the child of an Algerian woman, who was destined in his turn to become Pasha of Algiers and ruler of the Ottoman Kingdom of Algeria.

“Never even among the great Greek and Roman conquerors of lands and kingdoms,” wrote the Abbe de Brantome, “was there another such as he.” This tribute coming from a Christian is all the more convincing since the Abbe was one of the greatest admirers of the Knights of St. John, Barbarossa’s deadliest enemies. It may well have reflected the opinion of the knights themselves, for the Abbe spent some considerable time in Malta, even going out in the knights’ galleys on their “caravans,” or offensive sweeps against the Turks. “France or any other country,” he added, “would have been proud to claim him as her son.”

If his Christian contemporaries could find so much to admire in Kheir-ed-Din, it is hardly surprising that to the Turks he was, and remains, the epitome of the manly virtues. It was not only the fact that he was a great warrior—something which Turks have always respected—but he was also the first seaman of his time. Furthermore, by his industry, endurance, and patience he had founded a great kingdom that was to last for centuries.

There are few success stories equal to his. Born in a Greek island, the youngest son of an obscure Turkish soldier, he had risen by sheer force of character and endeavour to be the equal, and in many cases the superior, of kings and rulers who had been born to the purple. Morgan, quoting Haedo, remarks that his memory “is yet held in such veneration among the Turks, particularly the seafaring people, that no voyage is undertaken from Constantinople, by either public or private persons, without their first visiting his tomb, whereat they say a
Fedha
, or formulary sort of prayer for success, being the first chapter of the Koran; saluting the remains of so efficacious an individual with repeated vollies of great and small fire-arms, both at their arrival and departure. All of which is done with much ceremony and singular solemnity …”

In 1551, five years after his death, his great lieutenant, Torghoud, or Dragut as he was known in Europe, managed to wrest the fortress of Tripoli away from the Knights of St. John, thus posing yet a further threat to Spanish communications with Sicily and the Levant. Dragut, who was as formidable at sea as Barbarossa—he has been described as “a living chart of the Mediterranean”—became Sultan of Tripoli, where his tomb can still be seen. In 1565, aged eighty, he was killed during the siege of Malta. But prior to this, he had achieved another major success for Turkish arms. In 1560 in company with Piali, Barbarossa’s successor as Admiral of the Fleet, he had inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Spanish navy in the vicinity of Barbarossa’s old hideout, the island of Djerba. Philip II had by now succeeded his father, Charles V, to the throne of Spain, and it was said that the two greatest defeats he suffered in his lifetime were the Armada against England and the battle off Djerba against the Turks.

In the years that were to follow, the stability of Turkish Algeria was even further ensured by Hassan, the son of Barbarossa. He drove the Spaniards out of all but their last remaining position of importance in North Africa, the city of Oran. A few years later another great Turkish sea captain, Ochiali, was harrying the coast of Spain and making active preparations for the reconquest of Tunis. Tunis together with its Spanish fortress of La Goletta finally fell to the Turks in 1574.

The great setback to Ottoman sea power during the years following Kheir-ed-Din’s death was of course the defeat at Lepanto in 1571. It is worth remarking that the only section of the navy which distinguished itself in this battle was the Algerian squadron under the command of Ochiali. Lepanto, that last great sea battle in which the oared galley predominated, was a triumph for the European powers. Yet, curiously enough, within a very few years the over-all picture of sea power in the Mediterranean was hardly any different from that which had existed at the peak of Kheir-ed-Din’s career. With nearly the whole of the North African coast, including both Tunis and Algiers, in Turkish hands, the galleys, galleots, and the new sailing galleons of the Ottoman Empire in the West were able to roam almost unchallenged from the Atlantic to the Levant.

The two great events which shook Turkish sea power during these years were the failure of Turkish arms at the siege of Malta in 1565, and the decisive defeat of the fleet at Lepanto six years later. But both these failures proved in the end to have relatively little effect upon the Ottoman dominance of the inland sea.

It was not until the nineteenth century that American and British successes in Tripoli and Algiers paved the way for the subjugation of North Africa by the French. It was, indeed, the French who administered the
coup de grace
on July 5, 1830, when the last Mohammedan ruler of Algiers sailed in exile for Naples. Norman Douglas is correct, however, when he remarks in Old Calabria: “It is all very well for Admiral de la Graviere to speak of ‘Gallia Victrix’—the Americans, too, might have something to say upon that point. The fact is that neither European nor American arms crushed the pest. But for the invention of steam, the Barbary corsairs might still be with us.”

French rule in North Africa has proved to be only temporary. Today, once again, a succession of Mohammedan kingdoms stretches from Egypt in the east to Morocco in the west. The shadow of Kheir-ed-Din, “the Protector of Religion,” has never left these shores. He lived in the last great age of the galleys, the vessel that had dominated naval warfare in the Mediterranean since the days of the Carthaginians. He lived to see the age when heavy cannon mounted aboard large sailing vessels rendered the galley obsolete. The battle of Preveza, where the distinguished Venetian Alessandro Condalmiero showed how to manage a galleon in action, foreshadowed the end of the galley. Nevertheless, galleys continued to be used by navies in the Mediterranean well into the nineteenth century.