The Sultan's Admiral (6 page)

While the winter harassed the Mediterranean, and while throughout all its ports seamen and merchants withdrew into the interior world of home, market place, and tavern, Aruj and his men quietly prepared for the coming spring. They were rich now, rich in possessions such as jewels and clothing, as well as in slaves. They could afford to enjoy the pleasures of a city like Tunis, whose comparatively unsophisticated inhabitants were still unaware that, though the Turk is a Moslem, he is a very different man from his Arabic coreligionists.

When the spring came, the almond blossom to break in bloom, and the short-lived wild flowers to carpet all the Mediterranean islands, two galleots and one galley left the ancient Goletta of Tunis. They turned to the northeast and made their way towards the coast of Sicily. Aruj was well aware that, with the beginning of the sailing season, he might expect to find galleys making their way down from Italy to trade with Palermo or Messina. He passed the small sleepy Aegadian Islands lying off Trapani in western Sicily, while from the vantage point of the high peak of Marettimo the frightened islanders waited and watched to see whether these invaders of their waters would land in search of food, women, and slaves. But the galleots and the galley went on steadily to the north. In the narrow strait to the east of them lay the island of Favignana. Off here, in 241 B.C. the galleys of the newly founded Roman navy had won the First Punic War by annihilating the Carthaginian fleet. The waters off Sicily, so it was said, had run red that day, as they still do after the mattanza when the giant tunny are slain. Now, issuing out of the Gulf of Tunis, so close to ancient Carthage, came galleys from the east destined to take their revenge upon the west. The eternal pendulumlike swing of power in the Mediterranean basin was about to reverse itself.

The galleys altered course north of Cape San Vito and began to patrol to the eastward, hoping to catch some early merchantman laden from Italy, and eager to do business with the fruit market of Sicily at Palermo. They slid gently towards the Lipari Islands, sometimes being lucky enough to catch a favourable wind on their quarter so that they could hoist the sails and give the oarsmen some relief. The islands came up ahead of them, Alicudi, Filicudi, harsh Salina, tempestuous Vulcano, and smouldering away on the northern horizon the domed sides of Stromboli, where the lava ran down hissing into the sea. At night they saw its peak pulsating with fire. The ancients had graphically termed it “the lighthouse of the Mediterranean.”

It was after several days of stormy weather from the northwest that the lurking galleots saw their prize. She was a large Spanish sailing vessel that had wallowed far to the south of her course—blown in the direction of the Liparis, when she should have been heading up for Naples and its sheltering bay. The galleots closed in on the great ship, and found to their surprise that they met with no resistance at all. So they “had the good fortune to take, without striking a stroke, a very large ship, on which were five hundred Spanish soldiers, and a great quantity of pieces of eight, sent from the Catholic king to recruit and pay his army in the Kingdom of Naples.”

The reason the Turks were able to capture the ship without firing a shot was that the troops aboard were all either devastated by seasickness or worn out by working at the pumps of the leaking and waterlogged vessel.‘This year 1505 was indeed a bad one for King Ferdinand of Spain. It is interesting to note that this is the first occasion we hear from the Spanish chronicler Zurita of the activities of Turkish corsairs in the waters of Italy and Sicily. The. previous year’s attack and capture of the two papal galleys had certainly not gone unremarked in Rome and Italy, but this year’s capture of the money destined to pay the garrison in Naples—as well as the troops intended to relieve some of the Spanish soldiers stationed there—was important enough to cause a considerable stir in the Spanish court. That the Turks were masters of most of the eastern Mediterranean was a fact well enough known to the European powers. But now they suddenly found that the waters of the western Mediterranean, hitherto secure for their navigation, were invaded. Small vessels adventuring off the Barbary Coast of North Africa, able to prey only upon local trading vessels, had long been an accepted hazard. But the arrival of determined Turks—Turks who seemed so quickly to have learned the arts of navigation and of sea warfare—was a bad blow to European morale. It was seen, at last, that the fall of Constantinople to the soldiers of the Sultan was not just an obscure event happening far away in the Levant, but something that would affect the fortunes of Europe for centuries to come.

Of Aruj and his subsequent triumphal return to Tunis we learn that “Returning to the Goletta, he brake up his gallies, and some other prizes, and built two stout galleots, which vessels, being light and nimble, he found more to his purpose than heavy gallies. These, with two others, he equipped out to the best advantage, and, being already possessed of many Christians, he culled such as were fitted for the oar . . But it is doubtful whether Aruj departed so much from his normal practice of having Turkish freemen at the oars of his galleots.

By 1510, five years after this successful exploit, Aruj was one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. He and Khizr were the masters of eight stout galleots, owners of property and slaves, and must have felt themselves kings of the Mediterranean Sea. From the horned Gulf of Tunis, through the strait of Sicily, to the far-off coasts of Calabria, Sardinia, and Corsica, their ships swept the merchantmen of France, Italy, and Spain into their bulging nets.

Tunis was not enough. The Barbarossas needed a base to themselves, where they would not be hampered by local rulers, and where they would not have to pay a tithe of their takings to a ruling Sultan. By now they knew the coastline of this part of North Africa better than any seafarers since the distant days of the Roman galley masters. They had found what seemed the ideal and perfect haven, the island of Djerba. In the year 1510 the red-bearded brothers, together with their sailors and fighting men, moved from Tunis and left behind the sheltering arms of the Goletta. They made their way southward to Djerba, famous in antiquity as the home of the lotus-eaters, but destined to become even more famous among Europeans as “the lair of the Corsairs.”

For the next few years the Barbarossas were to make their home, and their main base for naval operations, in the sandy, sunburned island of Djerba. The large lagoon between the island and the mainland, Bahiret el Bu Grara, some ten miles from east to west by fifteen from north to south, was ideal for harbouring the galleys and galleots. The local Berber people were friendly, and the island, as well as the mainland behind it, was rich in fruits and corn and grapes. Not all Turks, even at this time, were strict Moslems when it came to alcohol, and the vine had been cultivated along this section of coast since the days of the Roman Empire.

The island was well protected. A fortress guarded the entrance to the lagoon from the west, and it was not long before the brothers began to improve its defences. They did this to ensure that they would run no risk of being trapped in the lagoon by a superior naval force bursting through the western entrance, the Ajim channel. A low-lying island, except in the centre where a few hillocks run up to a height of about one hundred feet, Djerba was protected on the north by off-lying banks of mud where even a mild breeze can raise heavy breaking seas, and on the northwest by further banks running out from the mainland coast. It was a tricky place for any navigator unfamiliar with the area—highly suitable, therefore, for a sea rover’s hideout. Other shoals and shifting sandbanks along the coast on both sides of the island added to the hazards. Aruj and his men would soon grow familiar with all this coast. They could enter or leave as, and when, they wished, yet still retain the comfortable knowledge that few other seamen in the Mediterranean would willingly come down into this treacherous southern corner of the Gulf of Gabes.

Until 1510 the island had been held secure for Spain by a garrison in the fort commanding the entrance, but in that year “Don Garcia de Toledo, son of the Duke of Alva … received that notable overthrow, and lost his life in the island.” Morgan maintains that the reason the Barbarossas went to Djerba was that the Sultan of Tunis was afraid the Spaniards would come back to- take their revenge for their loss, and that he offered them the island, thinking that they would be well able to look after it without any cost to himself. There may be something in this argument. Djerba was a technical possession of Tunis, but like so many of the harbours and small coastal towns at that time, it was constantly changing hands between the local rulers and the Spaniards. The Spanish interest along all the North African coast was to maintain garrisons wherever possible, and to ensure Spain’s right to trade and the security of her merchant shipping upon these waters which, even before the arrival of the Turks, had been subjected to the activities of local corsairs operating in small galleots.

Aruj Barbarossa was soon to remind His Most Catholic Majesty that the loss of Djerba was not just a small local disaster. From the moment of his arrival in 1510 and throughout the following year, “he continued his excursions, miserably ravaging all the Italian coasts; nor any trading vessel being able to stir out without immense peril, insomuch that all Europe began to ring of his depredations.” The Spanish Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were now exposed to the violence of the Turkish raiders, while their sea communications between Spain and Italy were daily at hazard. The appearance of Barbarossa’s squadron rowing purposefully up the coast of Sicily, or gliding through the Aegadian Islands northward bound, to fall upon some unsuspecting coastal town or port, caused the working population to flee to the mountain villages inland. Not only was the Spanish trade route being disrupted, but even the agriculture and fishing were being brought to a standstill in the hot summer “months of the raiders.” Meanwhile, after every successful attack upon a merchant ship or raid upon some undefended village, the slave markets of Tunis grew rich with the captured.

If Aruj had been content with remaining no more than the most successful sea captain and corsair of his day there seems small doubt that he could have stayed in Djerba for years—to die either in battle at sea or of old age in his island retreat. But he was a restless man and the long sand beaches, the softly leaning palm trees, and the great salt lagoon where his ships idled at anchor were not sufficient to contain his ambition. He wished to be a king, ruler of a real city: a city where there would be better opportunities for the exercise of power, and better facilities for shipbuilding. Djerba had disadvantages quite apart from its lack of any real township, the most important of these being the absence of any trees suitable for shipbuilding. We know that a number of Turkish galleots were built out of the wood from captured prizes, but this was an unsatisfactory method, and one that could hardly be relied upon, particularly as the fleet needed to expand.

By 1512, Aruj and Khizr commanded between them twelve large galleots, eight of which belonged to the two brothers, and the other four to Turkish sea captains who had heard of the choice pickings in the central Mediterranean and had sailed down from the Aegean to put themselves under the Barbarossas’ command. Just as Drake, after his first successes in the Caribbean, was never to lack for volunteers to sail under his flag, so these great Turkish captains were never at a loss for ambitious, tough seamen, eager for plunder at the expense of the Christian enemy.

In the spring of 1512, just as the ships were being given their finishing touches before being launched for the cruising season, there arrived in Djerba an emissary from the former Moslem ruler of Bougie. He had been driven from his city by the Spaniards three years before, and had subsequently been forced to live in exile in the mountainous interior. The Spaniards had planted a garrison in Bougie which commanded both the town and the port. The message delivered to Aruj was simple and to the point: “If he was prepared to invest the town from the sea, the exiled king would come down from the mountains with his Zouave troops and engage the Spaniards from inland. In return for this Turkish help, he promised Aruj free use of the port, with no conditions of tithe attached, and all the facilities ashore that he might need for his men and ships.” Possibly Aruj had it in mind that, before very long, he would make himself sole ruler of Bougie, but in any case the offer was an attractive one. The town and the port had everything he needed to further his ambitions.

Lying 120 miles east of Algiers, Bougie had long been one of the most important commercial centres on the North African coast. Its natural harbour, sheltering under the great shoulders of Cape Carbon, could accommodate vessels of almost any draught, while it was protected by fine fortifications that had been erected under the Berber Hammad dynasty and later improved under the Hafsites. About 180 miles southeast of the Balearic Islands, it was in an admirable position for commanding the east-west trade route between Spain, the Strait of Gibraltar, and all the central Mediterranean including Italy and Sicily. Therefore it was better suited than Djerba, which, secure though it was as a refuge, was rather too far to the south of the main shipping routes. Bougie had other attractions. Behind it soared the high peaks of Mounts Babor and Tababor, both crowned with fir and cedar—ideal for shipbuilding—while the surrounding countryside, blessed with a high rainfall, was rich in every kind of vegetable, fruit, and cereal crop. Djerba might, and did, make a fine lair for a corsair, but Bougie was a city and a port fit for a king. Aruj saw himself in this role, and wasted no time in agreeing to the exiled ruler’s suggestion.

That summer, while the men in the forts and watchtowers scattered along the coasts of Sicily and Italy gazed anxiously seaward, expecting the annual visitation that was becoming almost as regular as the flights of migratory birds, Aruj and Khizr and their followers were busy with other things. Guns removed from captured galleys had to be provided with suitable carriages for use as siege weapons, and secured in the galleots for the passage to Bougie. Ammunition and gunpowder had to be secured, soldiers adequately armed for land warfare, and provisions laid in for a campaign that might last several weeks. The watchers along the coastlines of the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were happy to report that the sea wolves were not in evidence that year.