Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  THE SOLDIERS who might have made the difference to Portuondo’s fate were at that moment preparing for Charles’s festivities at Bologna. On November 5, 1529, Charles entered the city in preparation for his coronation two months later. It was a carefully staged set piece of imperial theatre, modeled on the triumphs of Roman emperors—an extraordinary declaration of the emperor’s claim to the terrestrial globe. Charles rode through triumphal arches, accompanied by the pope and all the notables of his domains. Musicians played, drummers beat battering tattoos, and the populace, exuberant at the prospect of feasting, shouted “Caesar, Charles, Emperor!” Charles rode in stately procession under a brocaded canopy carried by four plumed knights. His own elaborate helmet was surmounted by a golden eagle, and he carried the imperial scepter in his right hand. Among the sea of banners embroidered with the emblems of emperor and pope was a Crusader’s flag decorated with the crucified Christ. During the months of celebration that followed, the artist Parmigiano started work on an immense allegorical portrait of the emperor. It showed the infant Hercules offering Charles the globe, turned not to the Indies or his possessions in Europe but to the Mediterranean, the center of the world, and ordained to be ruled by Caesar.

  IN TRUTH, THE HUMILIATION of the imperial galleys ten days earlier had revealed the hollowness of this pantomime. After twelve years of warfare with the Barbarossas, Charles’s only tangible trophies were Oruch’s skull and his crimson cloak, now displayed in Córdoba cathedral as an object of venerable dread. The Spanish position in the Maghreb was precarious; the seas had never been less safe. The Western Mediterranean was in danger of being overrun by these outriders of the Ottoman Empire. On November 15, Charles received a letter in Bologna from the archbishop of Toledo, outlining the situation in stark terms. Immediate action was now critical. “Unless this disaster is reversed,” he wrote, “we will lose the commerce of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the east.” Now only decisive action would suffice. He urged the emperor to construct a new fleet of twenty ships and “sailing with a great armada to hunt out Barbarossa in his own house [Algiers], for money spent solely for defence will otherwise be wasted.” The Empress Isabella wrote in the same vein. Algiers was the key to Christian peace, but Barbarossa was the key to Algiers.

  THERE WERE TWO balancing consolations for Charles as he contemplated these letters. The first was not inconsiderable. In the autumn rain, Suleiman’s great siege of Vienna had ground to a halt. By early October it was getting cold; his supply lines were overextended and the season late. On the fourteenth of the month, Suleiman made a short entry in his campaign journal in customary telegraphic style, as if it were a detail of no import: “Explosion of mines and new breaches in the walls. Council. Fruitless attack. The orders are given to return to Constantinople.” The briefest of notes sketch a bitter retreat: “17. The army arrives at Bruck. Snow. 18. We cross three bridges near Altenburg. A considerable quantity of baggage and part of the artillery are lost in the marshes. 19. Great difficulty in crossing the Danube. The snow continues to fall.” It was the first Ottoman setback in two hundred years. Suleiman was compelled to organize his own face-saving victory celebrations for the people of Istanbul.

  The second consolation for Charles was more immediate. In anticipation of Toledo’s advice, the emperor had just provided himself with the means to strike back. In 1528 he managed to steal the services of Andrea Doria, the great Genoese admiral of the age, from Charles’s rival the king of France. Doria was a member of the old nobility of the city and a condottiere, a soldier of fortune. Disillusioned with Francis I, Doria switched sides for a handsome fee, but he represented good value and would prove durably loyal. The admiral brought with him his own galley fleet, use of Genoa’s strategic port, and immense experience of sea warfare and anti-corsair activity. Doria had his drawbacks. Because the galleys were his private property, he was excessively cautious in their use, but he was by far the most astute Christian naval commander in the emperor’s domains. At a stroke the sea-lanes between Spain and its Italian possessions became safer—Genoa gave Charles strategic control of his coasts and a substantial fleet with which to defend them. It was through Doria that he intended to halt the Hapsburg decline in the Mediterranean and wage aggressive war.

  Charles also buttressed the defenses on Italy’s southern flank. Since the fall of Rhodes, the Knights of Saint John had been homeless wanderers in the Mediterranean. L’Isle Adam had petitioned the potentates of Europe, one by one, for a new base from which to carry on the Order’s mission of holy war. In London, Henry VIII had received the old man graciously and given him guns, but only Charles provided the possibility of a permanent home. He offered the barren and impoverished island of Malta, south of Sicily, in the path of every corsair raid on the Italian coast. The present came with strings attached—Charles did not give something for nothing; the knights also had to defend the emperor’s fort at Tripoli on the Barbary shore. It was an unattractive prospect but L’Isle Adam had no alternatives; without a base for piracy, the Order would certainly collapse. In 1530 Charles dispatched the fateful document to L’Isle Adam, “bestowing on the Knights in order that they may perform in peace the duties of their Religion for the benefit of the Christian community and employ their forces and arms against the perfidious enemies of Holy Faith—the islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino in return for the yearly presentation, on All Saint’s Day, of a falcon to Charles, Viceroy of Sicily.” This bargain placed the knights at the very center of the sea, in the eye of a rising storm.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Voyage to Tunis

  1530–1535

  CHARLES’S NEED TO STRIKE COUNTERBLOWS was not confined to the shores of Spain and Italy. By 1530 warfare between sultan and emperor stretched diagonally across the whole of Europe, and Christendom perceived itself everywhere on the back foot. The central metaphor of Martin Luther’s famous protestant hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” was not randomly chosen: Suleiman was besieging Vienna at the time. Where the Ottomans thought of advance and encirclement, the Christian mind-set was obsessively defensive. Exorbitantly expensive fortress chains dotted the Hungarian plains; the Italians were busy constructing watchtowers along their vulnerable shores; the Spanish forts clung precariously to the shipwrecking coasts of the Maghreb. Everywhere the threat of Islam seemed to press.

  THE SCALE OF THE CONFLICT dwarfed all preconceptions. The early sixteenth century witnessed a new concentration of imperial power: the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks were able to aggregate men and resources on an unprecedented scale—and to find the means to pay for them. The engines of warfare were the centralized bureaucracies in Madrid and Istanbul, which could raise taxes, levy men, dispatch ships, organize supplies, manufacture cannon, and mill gunpowder with a comparative efficiency unimaginable in the hand-made wars of the Middle Ages. Armies became bigger, cannon more powerful, logistics and resource allocation—within the limitations imposed by traveling times and communications—more sophisticated. It was a struggle between empires with global reach; the 1530s would see the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro conquer Peru, the Ottomans attack India. A grid of interconnections between distant places drew the world together. The Austrians sought treaties with the Persians, the Ottomans with the French; the cause of German Lutherans was furthered by decisions taken in Istanbul; New World bullion paid for wars in Africa. If the commitment to holy war was the lever to empire, there were other forces at work. In Europe, the decline of Latin, new notions of national identity, and protestant revolt were shaking old certainties. The whole basin was prey to mysterious forces. Populations and cities grew rapidly, cash replaced barter, inflation effortlessly leaped the frontiers of faith.

  In the 1530s, this sense of global disturbance was widely felt across the Mediterranean. Millennial expectations gripped the popular imagination. Within Islam it was thought that the tenth century of the Muslim era would usher in the end of history; in Christendom, 1533 was taken to be the fifteen hundredth ann
iversary of the crucifixion. Prophecies abounded on both sides of the religious divide. It was widely believed that Suleiman and Charles were embarked on a contest for the world. In 1531, the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote to a friend, “the rumour here—indeed not a rumour, but public knowledge—is that the Turk will invade Germany with all his forces, to do battle for the great prize, whether Charles or the Turk be monarch of the entire globe, for the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky.” The notion of a world ruler was much discussed by Charles’s advisers, though the emperor himself, more prudent about how such claims might be received in France or Protestant Germany, was less explicit. He was the defender of the faith against the infidel, both Islamic and Protestant. Suleiman, in a more unified Islamic world, could be forthright. “Just as there is only one God in heaven, there can be only one empire on earth,” his chief vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, roundly declared to visiting ambassadors. “Spain is like a lizard, pecking here and there at a bit of weed in the dust, while our sultan is like a dragon which gulps down the world when it opens its mouth.”

  BENEATH THE BRAGGING, there was popular fear in Istanbul of Charles’s aggressive intentions. Anxiety and pessimism, amplified by the failures in Hungary, dogged the city; omens were widely cited to suggest that the wheel of fortune would reverse again and restore Christian Constantinople. Like plague and a shortage of bread, these were symptoms of troubled times, but they reflected matching fears. If Charles’s dream was the restitution of Constantinople, Suleiman’s was the capture of Rome. Both men were committed to leading their armies in person, though careful to choose their terrain. By 1530 this contest had become increasingly personal. It centered on their rival claims to the crucial title, Caesar, and ownership of the center of the world. Nothing enraged Suleiman as much as the accounts of Charles’s coronation in 1530. “He detests the emperor and his title of Caesar, he, the Turk, causing himself to be called Caesar,” declared Francis I of France. The sultan was set on a face-to-face trial of strength with the man he only ever called “the king of Spain.” In the spring of 1532, Suleiman prepared to march his army up the Danube again and delivered a thunderous challenge: “The king of Spain has for a long time declared his wish to go against the Turks; but I by the grace of God am proceeding with my army against him. If he is great of heart, let him await me in the field, and then, whatever God wills, shall be. If, however, he does not wish to wait for me, let him send tribute.” Charles’s response appeared unequivocal. He wrote to his wife, “In the light of duty I have to defend the faith and the Christian religion in person.”

  Competition focused on the emblems of power. The details of Charles’s entry into Bologna had been minutely reported to the sultan. On his march north, Suleiman staged his own rival triumphs, contriving a matching iconography. From the Venetians he had commissioned a set of ceremonial objects worthy of a Roman emperor: a scepter, a throne, and an extraordinary jeweled helmet-crown, which the Italians claimed had been a trophy of Alexander the Great. He entered Belgrade in a cavalcade of opulent pageantry, “with great ceremony and pomp and with pipes and the sound of different instruments, that it was an extraordinary thing to marvel at and he went through triumphal arches along the streets of his progress, according to the ancient customs of the Romans.” It was propaganda war on a grand scale. Charles, detained by tetchy negotiations with the German Protestants, raised a substantial army and prepared to float it down the Danube. The stage seemed set for a final confrontation.

  Yet the definitive battle never happened. Suleiman was held up for weeks by the heroic defense of the small fortress of Köszeg in central Hungary; Charles was probably too prudent to risk open-field warfare anyway. Bogged down in the rain, Suleiman was again forced to retreat. It was an exhausting slog home across mountain passes and swollen rivers: “continuous rain…difficult river crossing…the fog so thick it’s impossible to tell one person from another” the campaign diary has a familiar ring to it. There were the habitual celebrations in Istanbul on Suleiman’s return—triumphant processions and nighttime illuminations to celebrate the happy conclusion to the war against the king of Spain. It was given out that “the miserable fugitive had fled to save his life and abandoned his unbelieving subjects.” The Hapsburgs concocted their own fictional triumph: artists set to work on engravings that showed Charles liberating Vienna from the Turks. The gap between imperial rhetoric and reality was equally wide on both sides. The truth was, the Ottomans were operating at the limits of their range within the span of a campaigning season, and Charles’s globe was always turned toward the Mediterranean. He never personally chose the Danube basin as a theatre of operations. While Suleiman was at Köszeg, Charles was two hundred miles away. It was the closest the two men ever got.

  Suleiman’s jeweled helmet-crown

  SIMULTANEOUSLY CHARLES CHOSE this moment to shift the whole focus of the contest. While the two men were shadowboxing along the Danube, Charles authorized a diversionary attack. In the spring of 1532, he ordered Andrea Doria to ransack the coast of Greece. Forty-four galleys sailed east from Sicily. Doria was brutally effective. On September 12, as Suleiman was tramping home again, Doria stormed the strategic Ottoman stronghold of Coron in the southern Peloponnese and ravaged the surrounding coastline. A garrison secured Coron for the emperor. Suleiman was furious. The following spring, when he sent a hastily assembled fleet to retake the castle, Doria redoubled the humiliation. Sixty Ottoman galleys blockaded Coron; Doria simply broke the cordon and routed them.

  These actions sent shock waves through the eastern Aegean. The Ottomans considered Greece to be their home waters but had been incapable of defending them. If Doria could take Coron, what was to prevent him from striking Istanbul? The shortcomings of the official Ottoman navy had been badly exposed; it represented a horrible vulnerability. For the sake of his security, as well as his honor, Suleiman grasped that the Mediterranean was no longer a sideshow—it was a principal theatre of war, and it must now be fought for.

  The sultan’s response was prompt. He summoned Hayrettin from Algiers as the only man with the experience to mount an adequate riposte. In the summer of 1533, the legendary corsair sailed fourteen galleys into the Golden Horn, “amid the firing of numerous salutes,” and presented himself to the sultan, “taking with him eighteen captains, his companions, and rich presents, where he had the honour of kissing the royal hand, and had innumerable favours conferred upon him.” With the backing of the chief vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, he was appointed the sultan’s admiral and tasked with the construction of a new fleet, the reversal of Coron, and striking back at the impudent king of Spain. Hayrettin was not only given the official title of kapudan-i-derya, grand admiral of the Mediterranean fleet, Suleiman also created a new governorship for him—the Province of the Archipelago—formed from the coasts of the Ottoman Mediterranean. It was a measure of how seriously he now regarded the struggle for the sea.

  HAYRETTIN WAS SIXTY-SEVEN or sixty-eight years old and at the height of good fortune, his energy apparently undiminished by age. In the winter of 1533–34 he set about reconstructing the Ottoman navy in the arsenal on the Golden Horn. He was able to harness all the natural advantages of the empire. Shipbuilding is a hungry consumer of raw materials; vast quantities of timber, pitch, tallow, iron, and sailcloth are required. All these things could be supplied from within the empire’s own resources, and the manpower to build, sail, and row the vessels—a perennial problem for Christian fleets—could be efficiently levied by a centralized administration, unmatched in its reach and efficiency. With these resources, Hayrettin worked unceasingly to construct an imperial fleet worthy of the ruler of the White Sea. European spies and diplomats closely monitored his progress—no hard thing, as the arsenal was not surrounded by any enclosing wall. “Barbarossa was continually in the arsenal,” it was reported back to the west, “where he did both eat and drink to lose no time.”

  On May 23, 1534, as Suleiman swung himself into the saddle for yet another campaign—a
gainst the shah of Persia—Barbarossa’s new fleet nosed its way out of the Golden Horn, to the triumphal firing of cannon. The Flemish diplomat Cornelius de Schepper saw it go and wrote Doria an ominous report. Altogether there were seventy serviceable galleys, including three commander’s ships with stern lanterns. Hayrettin’s ornate flagship was rowed by one hundred sixty Christian slaves. “In all he had 1,233 Christian slaves…the rest of the oarsmen were Serbians and Bulgarians, all of whom were chained because they were Christians.” Each galley had bronze cannon firing stone shot, and between one hundred and one hundred twenty fighting men, “many of whom were in his expedition without pay, because of his fame and the expectation of plunder.” The fleet carried a substantial treasury to pay the salaried men: fifty thousand gold ducats, forty thousand ducats’ worth of precious stones, three hundred bolts of gold cloth. Suleiman had been able to aggregate huge resources.

  With hindsight, the French ambassador in the city was fully able to grasp the significance of this moment. “The supremacy of Turkey dates from Hayrettin’s first winter in the dockyards of the city,” he wrote ten years later. The fleet rowing smartly down to Gallipoli represented a major escalation of naval power. It was the start of an era of full-blown sea warfare. Almost every spring for the next forty years European spies would send back ominous rumors of huge fleets preparing to devastate the vulnerable shores of Christendom.