The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  In the following years several Spanish vessels were also attacked, with similar results; and at last, in 1509, Cardinal Ximenes despatched the celebrated Don Pedro Navarro, with no less than ninety ships and an army of 11,000, ostensibly to spread Christianity along the North African coast but in fact to bring the miscreants to book. When Oran was captured at the cost of only thirty Spanish lives, 4,000 of its inhabitants were massacred in cold blood and 5,000 carried off to Spain, together with plunder valued at 500,000 gold ducats; in the year following, Bougie and Tripoli went the same way. But Aruj, who had by now taken over the island of Djerba as his base of operations, was growing steadily stronger, and in 1512 he responded to an appeal by the exiled ruler of Bougie–forced out by Don Pedro–to restore him in return for the free use of the port. After a week of heavy bombardment, the Spanish garrison was about to surrender when a lucky shot took off Aruj’s left arm; the siege was raised and the fleet returned to Tunis, though not without capturing a Genoese galleot on the way.

  The Genoese were shortly to have their revenge; their admiral Andrea Doria sped with twelve galleys to Tunis, sacked the fortress and captured half the pirate fleet. But Aruj, his wound healed, returned to the attack and in 1516 received another appeal–this time from Prince Selim of Algiers. The city had not been conquered by Don Pedro, but two years before, in an attempt to prevent the constant Algerian attacks on Spanish shipping, the Spaniards had fortified an offshore island in the bay known as the Penon, from which they virtually controlled the harbour, threatening all traffic in both directions. Aruj did not hesitate. Bad luck had prevented him from regaining Bougie, but Algiers was a far bigger prize and would, incidentally, make a superb capital for the great Barbary kingdom that had long been his dream.

  By now Aruj was powerful enough to mobilise a fleet of sixteen galleots–under the command of his brother Khizr–and an army of some 6,000 men. With this he marched along the coast to Algiers, pausing only at Cherchel, some miles to the west, where another sea adventurer, a Turk named Kara Hassan, had carved out a little sultanate for himself and amassed a small army of Moors and Turks, together with a number of ships. These Barbarossa needed, but rather than negotiate an alliance with Kara Hassan he found it simpler, with a blow of his scimitar, to strike off his head. Arrived in Algiers, he at once began a heavy bombardment on the island fortress; three weeks later, however, he had made little appreciable impact and so, being clearly in danger of losing face with the Prince, changed his plan. A few days later Selim was murdered in his bath, and Aruj had himself formally proclaimed Sultan.

  The people of Algiers saw all too clearly the mistake they had made in inviting Barbarossa to help them, and it was not long before they opened secret talks with the Spanish garrison on the Penon to bring about his downfall. But Aruj, with his network of spies throughout the city, soon got wind of what was happening. One Friday, when all the leading citizens were gathered in the great mosque, the doors were slammed shut and the worshippers found themselves surrounded by armed men. One after another they were bound with their own turbans, and were then led to the main door to witness the beheading of the chief conspirators.

  News of the coup soon reached Spain, where Ximenes was seriously alarmed. In May 1517 he sent out his second expedition against Aruj: 10,000 men under the leadership of the country’s leading admiral, Diego de Vera. Once again, Barbarossa acted quickly. Falling on the Spaniards while they were still unloading and before they had time to reform, he killed some 3,000 of them. The remainder hastily re-embarked and fled for their lives. Even then, luck was against them. Towards nightfall a sudden storm sprang up and drove many of the ships ashore, where Barbarossa’s men were waiting. It was a dismally depleted fleet that struggled back to its homeland. A month later the ruler of Tenes, a city some ninety miles west of Algiers, was foolhardy enough to march against the corsair; his army in its turn was smashed to bits, and, although he himself managed to escape to the hills, a few days later his city fell to Aruj, who once more proclaimed himself Sultan. The city of Tlemcen, 200 miles further to the west and some way inland, quickly followed; when Aruj entered it in September, the head of its former ruler was borne before him on a lance. With the exception of Oran, Bougie, the Penon and a few other fortresses along the coast, Aruj Barbarossa was now master of virtually all the territory that forms the modern republic of Algeria. It had taken him just thirteen years.

  But Oran was to prove his Achilles’s heel. Soon after the arrival in Spain of Charles I–later the Emperor Charles V–in September 1517, the city’s governor, the Marquis of Comares, had returned to Spain to pay him homage and to discuss the general situation in North Africa, which was now becoming desperate. The Barbarossas were growing more powerful with every month that passed; the few remaining Spanish possessions on the coast were increasingly threatened. Now, surely, was the moment to strike again, before it was too late; this time, however, the enemy’s strength and military skill must not be underestimated, as they had so tragically been on previous occasions. The young King was quick to agree. He immediately gave orders for an expedition to be prepared through the coming winter. It was to sail in the early spring, when it had orders to track down Barbarossa and destroy him.

  This time it was a veritable armada that reached Oran in the first months of 1518, and an army of trained veterans that at once set out for Tlemcen. Mistrusting the defences of the city, Aruj sent an urgent appeal for additional men and equipment from the Sultan of Fez, but the Sultan prevaricated; meanwhile, the Spanish army was approaching and there was no time to be lost. Tlemcen would have to be sacrificed; Aruj had no choice but to retreat to Algiers. But–probably owing to his fruitless waiting for the aid from Fez that never came–he had left it too late. Comares learned of his departure and set off in pursuit. Aruj had excellent horses, but they were no match for the Spanish thoroughbreds, and through forced marches the Spaniards steadily gained on him. It is said that Aruj scattered gold and jewels behind him to delay his pursuers, but Comares forbade his men to dismount and finally caught up with him as he and his army were fording a mountain river. Aruj and his vanguard had already crossed it, but he turned back to join the remainder who had not yet done so, thus presenting a united front to the Spanish force. It was on that riverbank that he made his last stand, and there, still laying about him with his one arm, that he was struck down in his forty-fourth year.

  His end was worthy of all that had gone before. He had been fearless, sometimes reckless, perhaps the very first and greatest of those swash-buckling corsairs who were to blaze their trail through succeeding centuries. Of all his contemporaries, it was said that only Hernán Cortés was his equal for bravery. It might be added that in his own astonishing achievement–starting as he did a discredited foreigner without allies and, in the teeth of local hostility and everything that Spain could hurl against him, creating through sheer force of character in a few short years a strong and durable North African state–only he was the equal of the greatest of the conquistadors.

  For the Marquis of Comares, the death of the first Barbarossa and the destruction of his army opened the way to Algiers. Had he marched on the city, it would surely have fallen, and with Algiers in Spanish hands, the rest of North Africa would soon have been his. But he did nothing of the kind. Instead, he returned directly to Oran–and the opportunity was lost to Spain for three hundred years. Meanwhile, Khizr–or, as we must now call him, Kheir-ed-Din–Barbarossa took on the mantle of his brother.

  It was a hard act to follow, but Kheir-ed-Din had never lacked confidence. He may not have had quite the panache of Aruj, but he possessed all his brother’s ambition, all his courage, and–arguably–rather more statesmanship and political wisdom. It is unlikely, for example, that Aruj would ever have considered sending ambassadors to Constantinople to make a formal presentation of the new Province of Algiers to the Sultan. For Selim I, who had conquered Egypt only the year before, here was an invaluable westward extension to his African empire. He instant
ly appointed Kheir-ed-Din his beylerbey, or governor-general, and provided him with a guard of honour of 2,000 janissaries. With their help all the Spanish conquests except Oran and the nigh-impregnable Penon outside the harbour of Algiers were regained.

  Next, alliances were sealed with all the principal Arab and Berber tribes of the interior. In a remarkably short time the second Barbarossa, considerably more powerful than the first had ever been, dominated the central and western Mediterranean. Around him he gathered a splendid company of corsair captains. They included Dragut, another converted Christian, who became known as ‘the Drawn Sword of Islam’; Sinan, ‘the Jew of Smyrna’, who was suspected of the black arts because he could take a declination reading with a crossbow; the redoubtable Aydin Reis, known by the Spaniards as Cachadiablo; and perhaps half a dozen others, all of them superb seamen. Between May and October of every year no foreign vessel was safe from their attacks; nor did they hesitate to pass through the straits to the open Atlantic, where they would lie in wait for the Spanish galleons returning from the Caribbean to Cadiz. But it was not only treasure that they were looking for; every bit as profitable were Christian prisoners, who could either be enslaved and set to work in the galleys or, occasionally, ransomed for gold.

  One incident in particular illustrates the effect of the Barbary pirates in the Middle Sea. In 1529 Aydin Reis set out with fourteen small galleots on a raiding expedition to Mallorca, where he heard of a large party of Moriscos–‘converted’ Muslims–who wished to escape from their Spanish masters and were ready to pay good money for a passage to North Africa. Landing secretly by night, he embarked 200 families and, with a considerable amount of treasure, set sail for home. It happened that at just that moment there arrived a fleet of eight large Spanish galleons under a certain General Portundo. It was returning from Genoa, whence Portundo had escorted Charles V to be crowned Emperor by the Pope at Bologna, and carried numerous grandees who had attended the ceremony. Aydin quickly landed his passengers then swung out to sea, attacked and boarded the flagship. In the hand-to-hand fighting that followed, Portundo was killed. By the time the battle was over, one of the galleons had escaped to Ibiza; the other seven had all been captured. The Muslim galley slaves were released from their chains, to be replaced at the oars by their erstwhile masters; the damaged ships were repaired; the Moriscos were re-embarked; and the seven great prizes–with their distinguished passengers, for whom good fat ransoms could be expected–were towed back in triumph.

  At last Barbarossa felt himself ready to tackle the Penon. Situated as it was at the very entrance to Algiers harbour, it had long been a menace to his shipping, but it was only now that he had sufficient heavy artillery to make the necessary impact. On 6 May 1560 the attack began. The fortress was bombarded day and night for fifteen days before he ordered the final assault, by which time the men of the Spanish garrison had no fight left in them. The building was then dismantled and Christian slaves were employed for the next two years, to construct, using the stones, the huge mole which joins the island to the mainland and still protects the harbour on its western side.

  Why, in the first half of the sixteenth century, did the Muslim world enjoy such a degree of naval supremacy in the Mediterranean? First of all, because it had few Christian competitors. Venice and Genoa controlled the Adriatic, together with the Ionian Sea immediately to the south, but the Knights of St John–the finest fighting seamen of their day–had been expelled from Rhodes in 1522 and found their new home in Malta only seven years later; it would be some time before they could hope to regain their former influence and strength. Spain, as we have seen, did her best to play an active part, but her principal energies were directed towards the New World. Besides, Christianity remained hopelessly divided. If Spain and France, Pope and Empire, the Eastern and the Western Churches, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and the princes of north Italy could have made common cause, the outlook for the subjects of the Sultan might have been grim indeed, but Europeans always seemed far more interested in killing one another than in making a united stand against the Turk. Islam, by contrast, remained virtually united.

  One Christian admiral only seemed able to hold his own. In 1532 the Genoese Andrea Doria won several victories over Ottoman fleets in Greek waters. Paradoxically, however, it was these successes that brought Barbarossa what was almost certainly the most glorious moment of his career. To Sultan Süleyman it was all too clear that the Turkish navy was vastly inferior to that of the corsair and must be drastically reorganised if it was to hold its own in the Mediterranean. Moreover, there was only one man who could do it. Thus it was that in the spring of 1533 a delegation from the Sublime Porte arrived in Algiers, commanding Kheir-ed-Din to come at his earliest convenience to Constantinople.

  The corsair accepted with alacrity. As a loyal subject of the Sultan–which he undoubtedly was–he must have fully appreciated the honour that was being done him, but he also had reasons of his own. For some time he had had his eye on Tunis, his immediate neighbour to the east. It had once been his and his brother’s headquarters, but in recent years neither he nor Aruj had paid it any particular attention. In 1526, however, a new ruler of the Beni Hafs dynasty had come to the throne, after the murder of (it is said) twenty-two of his brothers.140 He had quickly proved a disaster, and by 1532 Barbarossa was receiving regular appeals from his friends in Tunis to assume power there himself. Before he could take such a step, however, he needed the Sultan’s blessing; if he could also persuade Süleyman to provide him with arms and men, so much the better.

  He set sail the following August, laden with appropriate presents for the Sultan which included–if we are to believe Sandoval, Bishop of Pamplona–some 200 young Christian women for his harem, each of them carrying in her hand a gift of gold or silver; and he was received in similar style. A few days later, with the title of Pasha, he was appointed member of the Divan and Captain General of the Fleet. He was to remain in Constantinople nearly a year, during which time he virtually created the Ottoman navy. The French Secretary in the city, Jean Chesneau, reported in 1543:

  The supremacy of Turkey at sea dates from Kheir-ed-Din’s first winter in the dockyards of this city…Over at Pera [the northeastern side of the Golden Horn] there is a shipyard on the shore where they both build and maintain galleys and other ships. Normally there are two hundred skilled master-craftsmen working here…In charge of all this there is a Captain-General, whom the Turks call the Beylerbey of the Sea, who also has charge of the navy when it goes out…Before he took charge the Turks, apart from a few corsairs, knew nothing of the seaman’s art. When they needed crews for a fleet, they went into the mountains of Greece and Anatolia and brought in the shepherds…and put them to row in the galleys and to serve aboard the other ships. This was quite useless, for they knew neither how to row or to be sailors, or even how to stand upright at sea. For this reason the Turks never made any showing. But all at once Barbarossa changed the entire system…Inspiring his men with his own marvellous energy, he laid out sixty-one galleys during the winter, and was able to take to the sea with a fleet of eighty-four vessels in the spring.

  In July 1534 Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa led his new fleet out of the Golden Horn, through the Sea of Marmara and down the Hellespont into the Mediterranean. Rounding the toe of Italy, he seized and sacked Reggio, then passed through the Straits of Messina and headed up the coast towards Naples. Oddly enough, there was no reaction from the Spanish viceroy; did he, one wonders, receive a secret message from the corsair promising that if he met with no opposition the city would be left untouched? At any rate, Naples was spared, and the fleet sailed on to Sperlonga141 which proved rather less fortunate, the cream of its womanhood being seized and loaded on to the ships.

  Barbarossa, however, had set his sights on one woman in particular–a woman whom he saw as a very special gift to the Sultan: Giulia Gonzaga, the exquisite young widow of Vespasiano Colonna. Generally accounted the most beautiful woman of her day, painted by Sebastiano
del Piombo and Titian, her praises sung by Ariosto and Tasso, she kept an elegant and cultivated little court in her palace at Fondi. This town lies some twelve miles inland from Terracina, and Kheir-ed-Din with his small raiding party had hoped to take it, and Giulia, by surprise. Fortunately she received warning a few minutes before their arrival and, still in her nightdress, made her escape with a single retainer–whom she later condemned to death on the grounds that he had taken advantage of her distress and been over-bold. (In the circumstances, one suspects, he probably had.) Fondi, as might have been expected, paid the usual price.

  Laden with the captive women–most of them destined for the Turkish slave markets–and with loot from the pillaged towns, a few vessels now returned to Constantinople. They also carried the greater part of the janissaries made available by Sultan Selim–probably ordered home by Süleyman, who had gone to war with Persia and needed all the manpower he could lay his hands on. The bulk of the fleet, however, headed southwest, towards Tunis. For Barbarossa his Italian expedition had been merely a preliminary, a harmless little exercise designed to impress the Sultan with his new fleet in general and his new admiral in particular. Now it was time for the serious business: the toppling of Moulay Hassan and the annexation of his Tunisian kingdom. He arrived outside the harbour on 16 August and immediately began the bombardment, only to find that Moulay Hassan had already taken flight. Two days later, with 1,000 local irregulars, the fugitive ruler made a half-hearted effort to return, but when the corsairs opened fire a second time he once again hastily withdrew. All that winter Barbarossa kept his men busy, strengthening the harbour defences and building an imposing new fortress, big enough to accommodate a garrison of 500 men.