Algiers as it was shown on a map of 1620 by the English mariner and cartographer Robert Norton. The city is ringed by walls, while a string of forts covers its landward and seaward approaches.
Algiers
Algiers was the largest and most populous port on the Barbary Coast between Tangier and Tunis, but it was never a significant pirate base before the Barbarossa brothers took control of it in 1516. In theory, Algiers formed part of the Hafsid Kingdom of Ifriquiya and was subject to the Hafsid sultans in Tunis. In practice, Algiers was ruled by the Emir Sālim al-Tūmī, who also controlled a hinterland extending as far west as the inland town of Tlemcen. A 16th- century Spanish writer described Algiers as ‘a big city, well-populated, and surrounded by vast walls’. Another Spaniard, Jean Léon, recorded that the walls were strongly built using stone taken from the ruins of the small Roman town of Icosium which had stood on the site.
The inner harbour of Algiers was protected by a mole extending from the small islet of Le Peñón, using stone salvaged from the remains of the Spanish fort there after it was recaptured by the Muslims in 1539. Some of this stone was also used to build the small artillery fort on the islet, which anchored the seaward defences of the harbour.
In 1516 Algiers had no thriving merchant community and no network of trading links. Contemporary Arab writers paid it scant attention, regarding the place as a pleasant backwater. Its harbour was sheltered by a small hammer-shaped island (named in Spanish Le Peñón, ‘rock fortress’), which was joined to the city by a sandspit. As Algiers lacked a sizeable army the emir was unable to fight the Spaniards without outside help. In 1505 the Spanish captured the port of Mers-el-Kebir, and four years later they also took Oran; it was clear that Algiers was likely to be their next target.
The blow fell in 1510. First, the Spanish marched inland and captured Tlemcen; then they landed on Le Peñón and built a gun battery that commanded Algiers harbour. The island was fortified and a permanent garrison was established; effectively the Spanish now controlled the port, and the emir was obliged to pay a regular financial tribute to the garrison. This continued for five years, at which point Sālim al-Tūmī was forced to travel to Seville to pledge his fealty to King Ferdinand II of Aragon. This proved to be a humiliation too far: on his return in 1516 the emir sent a courier to the Barbarossa brothers, soliciting their help in driving out the Spaniards.
The Barbarossas were then based at Djidjelli (now Jijel), 150 miles to the east. While his brother Khizr stayed to supervise their privateering interests, Oruç set off for Algiers, but his intervention did not consist of driving the Spanish from their island fortress. Instead, it led to the murder of the emir in a coup, and with the help of 1,000 Turkish janissaries Oruç seized control of Algiers. The following year he defeated a Spanish force sent to capture the city, but he then relinquished control of his emirate and offered it to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I. This sacrifice of his autonomy in return for Turkish military support was well judged; but though it brought Oruç appointment as governor, he soon overreached himself.
In 1517, while Khizr raided the coasts of southern Italy, Oruç inflicted a costly defeat on a Spanish force that landed west of Algiers in May. For some reason its commander, Diego de Vara, did not throw up fortifications for his men and guns, and under cover of a sand-laden wind from the desert Oruç led janissaries and Moorish exiles at the spearhead of a shock attack that cost the Spanish some 3,000 killed and 400 captured before their galleys could evacuate the survivors.
Oruç then led a small army out of Algiers and headed into the hinterland, intending to secure control of the region to thwart any further Spanish landings. He seized Médéa to the south, then moved west to Miliana, before marching north-west to capture the Spanish-held port of Ténès; Khizr supported his brother by assaulting this port from the sea. Assured of Ottoman support, but without waiting for reinforcements to actually arrive, Oruç then marched on Tlemcen, 200 miles to the south-west. Since 1512 Tlemcen had been a Spanish vassal state; Oruç defeated its Zayyanid puppet ruler and captured the town. Early in 1518 the Spanish responded, predictably, by sending an army to recapture Tlemcen; during the siege that followed Oruç was killed, and the city was recaptured by the Spanish.
This could have created a power vacuum in the newly created Ottoman Regency of Algiers, but Khizr Barbarossa promptly stepped into his elder brother’s shoes. He assumed the title of Beylerbey (supreme governor, or ‘lord of lords’ – a rank superior to Bey, ‘lord’ or governor). For the rest of his career Khizr, now the only ‘Barbarossa’, juggled his personal interests as a privateering commander with the duties of an Ottoman Beylerbey, and also (when occasion demanded) of an admiral of the Ottoman fleet.
This 17th-century engraving depicts a Spanish fleet arriving off Tunis. Although less than accurate, it captures the basic tactical geography of the place: the city lying on the far side of a large lagoon, protected in the foreground by the fortifications on La Goletta, the island linked to the mainland by a wide sandspit.
Barbarossa strengthened the defences of Algiers, and with an influx of Turkish janissaries, artillery, ships and men he turned the city into a near-impregnable fortress. Nevertheless, it would be 1539 before his successors finally managed to capture Le Peñón. This obstacle had been avoided by anchoring ships or beaching galleys out of artillery range of its battery; small vessels berthed on the beach north-west of the city, while larger ships anchored in the outer bay. Barbarossa also built a customs house to control the landing of booty, an arsenal and a kasbah (‘citadel’). After the capture of Le Peñón its walls were levelled and much of the stone was used to build a long mole, which greatly improved shelter within the harbour.
When Barbarossa left Algiers in 1533 he handed control to his khalifa (‘deputy’), Hasan Agha. This officer successfully defended Algiers against a Spanish attack in 1541, but four years later he relinquished his title to Hasan Pasha, Khizr Barbarossa’s son. After the death of his famous father in 1545 Hasan was replaced by Turgut (or Dragut) Reis, Barbarossa’s gifted deputy. These successive rulers built Algiers into the largest privateering base on the Barbary Coast. In 1580, when the Spanish and Ottomans signed a peace treaty, the sultan downgraded the ruler from a Beylerbey to a Bey. Nevertheless, even after the golden age of the Barbary pirates had passed 70 years later the ‘eternal war’ would continue, and each spring Algerine corsairs would still set out in search of fresh prizes and a new crop of slaves.
Spanish galleys and sailing ships – armed carracks – are shown bombarding the defences of La Goletta during the capture of Tunis by the Emperor Charles V in 1535. This is an unusually accurate depiction of galleys in action, with the masts stepped before going into action to reduce the risk of damage.
Tunis
In 1504, when Oruç Barbarossa returned to Tunis with his captured Papal flagship, the city was ruled by the Sultan Muhammad IV, latest in a long line of Berber kings of the Hafsid dynasty. While his family had ruled the region for the best part of 300 years, the sultan now faced a definite threat from the Spanish to the west, and a potential one from the Ottomans to the east. The Turks were poised to wrest control of Egypt from its Mamluk rulers, and it seemed possible that the Barbary states would be next. In 1504 Muhammad IV had been in power for a decade, during which he had greatly strengthened his city’s defences and boosted the port’s trade revenues.
A fanciful 17th-century depiction of veteran Spanish soldiers scaling the walls of Tunis during the final assault in 1535. In fact access to the city was provided by Christian slaves, who rose in revolt and threw open one of the city gates just as the attack was being launched.
Tunis was a thriving fortified city, set 6 miles from the sea at the end of a large, shallow lagoon. At its mouth was the city’s main harbour, La Goletta (now La Goulette), sited on one of the two arms of land that all but encircled the lagoon mouth. Ships could cross the shallow lagoon by means of a dredged canal, and unload their cargoes directly beneath the city walls. This G
oletta canal was dominated by a large tower called the Rades, built in the lagoon itself. Additional gun batteries covered the seaward and landward approaches to La Goletta, while a ring of marshy salt pans hampered any approach to the city’s landward sides. Tunis attracted the admiration of travellers for the bustling industry of its port, its prosperity and its cosmopolitan markets, where merchants from most of Italy’s city-states rubbed shoulders with Arab slave-traders. Before 1500 Tunis was not a major haven for pirates, but the arrival of the Barbarrossa brothers and others like them gradually transformed it.
Tripoli viewed from seaward, in an early 17th-century engraving. Here the entrance was covered by a modern artillery bastion, while a string of rocks covered the direct approach to the inner harbour (left). This smallest of the three main Barbary ports was held by the Knights of St John from 1523 until 1551.
The Sultan of Tunis welcomed the arrival of the Barbarossas. A 19th-century history claimed that ‘Aruj and his brother Hayreddin were kindly received by the king, who granted them free entrance and protection in his ports, with liberty to buy whatever they wanted. In return for which favour, the corsairs agreed to give him the tithe of all their purchases or booty.’ After Oruç’s success off Elba other prizes followed, and the number of corsairs based in Tunis grew. That attack inside the Tyrrhenian Sea had demonstrated that, unlike their small-scale predecessors, this new breed of pirates were willing to penetrate into waters that the European powers had previously considered safe. Such increasingly bold attacks attracted the attention of the Spanish, who captured Tripoli in 1510, but the Barbarossa brothers repulsed an attack on Djerba. Tunis now had two major Christian-held ports to its east: Tripoli, and Valetta in Malta.
Before the Spanish fleet arrived off Djerba the Barbarossa brothers had left Tunis to bolster that island’s defences. This, and the brothers’ subsequent moves to Djidjelli and then Algiers, did little to improve the safety of Tunis. When Muhammad Mulay al-Hasan succeeded to his father’s throne in 1526 he did his best to improve relations with the Turkish sultan, but Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’ had already decided that the Hafsid ruler had to go. In 1533 Barbarossa was recalled to Istanbul; while his official task was to raise a fleet to raid Calabria the following year, he was also given another mission. In August 1534 he landed outside Tunis, captured the city, and expelled the Hafsid sultan. For a time Tunis was controlled directly by the corsairs; Mulay al-Hasan begged the Spanish for help, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was happy to offer it. He gathered an armada of 76 warships and a fleet of transports, and in May 1535 he appeared off Tunis, landing some 30,000 troops and laying siege to the city. He concentrated on La Goletta, and after breaching the port’s defences it was stormed and captured. Next, breaches were made in the city walls and, on 1 June, Tunis was assaulted and taken. Barbarossa escaped, but Tunis was now a Christian-held port.
Charles V returned Sultan Mulay al-Hasan to power, and he fortified La Goletta, turning it into an island fortress similar to Le Peñón at Algiers. However, the reign of the puppet was short-lived; Mulay al-Hasan had been an unpopular ruler before 1535, and now he was shunned by his own people. In 1540 his son Ahmad staged a coup, blinding and imprisoning his father. Three years later the deposed ruler was quietly killed, and Ahmad was proclaimed the new Hafsid sultan. In 1570 Uluç Ali, an Italian-born privateer commander and the newly appointed Beylerbey of Algiers, defeated Ahmad and captured the city, leaving the last Hafsid to seek asylum with the Spanish garrison of La Goletta.
In 1573 Don John of Austria, the victor of Lepanto, arrived off Tunis with a fleet almost as large as the one commanded by his father in 1534. He recaptured the city, but decided not to reinstate Ahmad; instead he appointed the Italian condottiere Gabrio Serbelloni as governor at the head of a Spanish garrison. The Turkish Sultan Selim II ordered Uluç Ali to recapture Tunis, and early in August 1574 a fleet of more than 200 galleys arrived off La Goletta. The Spanish withdrew to the island, but after three weeks of bombardment the fortress was forced to surrender. Until 1580 the government of the new Ottoman Regency of Tunis was supervised by the Beylerbey of Algiers. Subsequently lesser Beys governed the region, but from 1591 they were superceded by a self-appointed Dey – the commander of the city’s janissaries. The Ottomans liked strong leadership, so these Deys remained in control of Tunis for the remainder of our period.
Tripoli
The least important of the great Barbary ports, Tripoli was still a bustling entrepôt where merchants from Europe, Africa and the Middle East gathered to do business. Founded by the Phoenicians, and later the Roman port of Regio Tripolitana, by the time of the Arab conquests it was known simply as Tripoli. The Arabs were taken by the beauty of the place, and called it Arūsat el-Bahr or ‘Bride of the Sea’; in their turn, Christian traders called it ‘the Mermaid of the Mediterranean’. In the early 13th century it had become part of the Berber Hafsid kingdom ruled from Tunis.
The port of Tripoli as depicted by the 17th-century Dutch maritime artist Reiner Nooms; several Dutch ships can be seen in the roads. After Tripoli was recaptured from the Knights of Malta by Turgut Reis in 1551 it served as a privateering base, but also as a trading centre visited by nations – like the Dutch – who had negotiated commercial treaties with the regency.
In 1510 the Spanish commander Pedro Navarro seized the city on behalf of King Ferdinand II of Aragon. The Spanish were repulsed from nearby Djerba, thanks to the actions of the Barbarossa brothers, but Tripoli would continue to be held by the Christians during the early 16th century. In 1523 the Emperor Charles V ceded it to the Knights of St John (or Knights Hospitaller) to compensate for the loss of their stronghold on Rhodes to the Turks the previous year. The Knights, subsequently based on Malta, held Tripoli and its hinterland for almost 30 years. However, they were unable to drive the privateers off Djerba, and in 1531 these pirates established a secondary base near Tajura just 10 miles east of Tripoli. The catalyst for their final eviction came in 1550, when the great Genoese commander Andrea Doria arrived off Djerba, trapping the fleet of Turgut Reis inside its lagoon. Turgut escaped by dragging his galleys across the sandspit joining the island to the mainland, and made his way to Istanbul, where Suleiman the Magnificent gave him command of a Turkish fleet.
In early August 1551, after capturing and sacking Gozo, Turgut arrived off Tripoli once again; he landed an army of several thousand janissaries, and began bombarding the port. After two weeks the mutinous garrison demanded that their commander, Gaspard de Vallier, surrender. This he did on 15 August, but while he was released, his knights were sold into slavery. Turgut installed Ağa Murat, the commander of Tajura, as the new governor of Tripoli, but by the end of the year Sultan Suleiman named Turgut himself as the Bey – a post he held for five years until he was given the grander title of Pasha of Tripoli. Under Turgut’s rule Tripoli became a privateering port, with rebuilt and strengthened defences. After his death in 1565 the regency changed hands several times, but Tripoli remained an Ottoman province, and continued to provide a safe haven for Barbary pirates until the 19th century.
THE SHIPS
The galiot
When Oruç Barbarossa captured the Papal flagship and its consort in the summer of 1504, the vessel he used was a galiot (or galliot). While the term was used to describe other types of vessel in the 17th and 18th centuries, the galiot used by Oruç was quite clearly defined. Essentially it was a small galley, with just 16 to 20 oars on a side, and usually 18. During this period galleys of various types were almost always classified by the numbers of oars or rowing benches on each side, and the number of oarsmen manning each oar. There was some degree of cross-over in these categories, but essentially the larger a vessel the more men pulled each oar. Larger galiots did exist, some being as large as normal-sized galleys, but unlike the galley, which always had more men on each oar, the smaller galiot was always rowed alla scaloccio, with two rowers per sweep.
These craft also sat lower in the water than galleys, and consequently ha
d a lower freeboard. While this made them less suitable for long open-water voyages, they made up for it by having a very favourable power-to-weight ratio – i.e., their relatively small displacement made them faster and more manoeuvrable than larger oared vessels. They carried a single mast fitted with a large lateen sail – a triangular rig that allowed the vessel to sail close into the wind. While no dimensions of Barbary galiots have survived, Venetian shipbuilding sources reveal that a typical example of the first half of the 16th century, measured in Venetian braccios, was 18½ long, 2 across the beam, and with a draft of just over 11/3 braccios without ordnance, spars or masts. This equates to 27 metres (88½ feet) in overall length, including a spur at the bow; 3m (9¾ft) wide; and 2m (6½ft) in the draft. This lack of water resistance, combined with a healthy suite of oars, was the key to the speed and agility of these vessels. The Venetians recorded that their average 18-bank galiot (i.e., with 18 benches per side) carried 72 oarsmen, supported by 10 gunners and up to 60 marine soldiers. Some contemporary descriptions of Barbary galiots in action mention crews of as many as 200, although this would have made these craft dangerously overmanned for normal navigation. For longer-range voyages, where every square metre was precious, crews cannot have been dissimilar to the totals given by the Venetians.
The Barbary Pirates 15th-17th Centuries Page 4