Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  Ottoman Istanbul, the Golden Horn, and the arsenal (foreground, center)

  Hayrettin’s new fleet set a course for revenge. In the summer it struck the coast of Charles’s domains in Southern Italy like a tidal wave. The sultan’s new admiral was evidently well informed. Aware that the Adriatic shore had been fortified with watchtowers, he swung around the heel of Italy and ravaged the western coastline toward Naples, burning villages, destroying ships, enslaving whole settlements. The suddenness and terror of his mass landings, the impact of the churning galley squadrons closing on the unprotected shore, had the heart-stopping terror of Ottoman frontier raids. Detachments of Doria’s fleet at Messina could only hug the harbor and watch the Ottoman fleet sweep by. Reggio, hard opposite Sicily, was abandoned on Barbarossa’s approach. He took six transport ships and burned the town; he left the castle of San Lucido in flames and captured eight hundred people. At Citrero he burned eighteen galleys. Slipping past Naples, he sacked the fishing village of Sperlunga, then landed and struck twelve miles inland in an attempt to seize the beautiful countess of Fondi, Julia Gonzaga, as a present for the sultan’s harem. When the prize eluded him, the corsairs left Fondi ablaze, “massacring many men and seizing all the women and children.” Sixty miles away people began to flee Rome. Turning about, Barbarossa burned six imperial galleys under construction at Naples. And then before anyone could catch their breath, the fleet was gone, slipping off south into the blue, edging past smoldering Stromboli for Tunis. He took with him hundreds, perhaps thousands, of captives, a portion of whom he dispatched back to Suleiman in Istanbul.

  It had been a commanding exercise in terror and revenge, but it was only the start. Hayrettin had his own personal objective on the shores of the Maghreb. On August 16 his flotilla dropped anchor at Tunis and landed his janissaries. The unpopular Arab ruler Muley Hasan abandoned the city without a shot fired. The capture of Tunis doubled Charles’s agitation at a stroke. Situated on the collar of the Maghreb, the city commands the axis of the whole Mediterranean—the narrow straits, a hundred miles wide, that separate North Africa from Sicily, with Malta sitting midstream. It was just twenty hours’ sailing time to the emperor’s lands. Tunis provided a launchpad for massive raiding, or even the invasion of Southern Italy—the natural stepping-stone would be to seize Malta from the Knights of Saint John. It was the traditional route into Southern Europe; the Arabs had passed this way into Sicily in the ninth century. Hayrettin’s “inner voice” had already predicted this move. During his raid on Italy he had been promised the island in a dream.

  By the end of 1534 the whole of the Western Mediterranean was stark with terror at the exponential threat posed by Barbarossa’s new fleet. Deepening unease gripped the littoral of Spain and Italy. Shipping insurance rates rocketed; coastal towns were refortified and villages abandoned, new chains of watchtowers constructed. Doria and the Spanish admiral Álvaro de Bazán tracked every scrap of rumor about Barbarossa’s movements and readied their own galley fleets to scramble at a moment’s notice. “From the Strait of Messina to that of Gibraltar no one in any part of Europe could eat in peace or go to sleep with any feeling of security,” wrote the Spaniard Sandoval. Even the neutral Venetians in their secure lagoon felt uneasy and started to build new ships. This was no longer a case of daring pirate raids—it was the incursion of imperial warfare into the heart of the sea.

  IF CHARLES HAD BEEN WOUNDED by the attack on Southern Italy, he was thoroughly alarmed by the new threat from Tunis. He was clear that it was Suleiman’s riposte for the humiliation in Hungary and for Doria in Greece. And this, in its turn, could not go unanswered. Each action required a larger counterreaction. He was determined “to attack the enemy and chase him from the seas of Christendom.” He resolved to organize a crusade against Barbarossa and lead it in person, even at the risk of his life.

  Over the winter of 1534–1535 Charles threw himself personally into planning an expensive maritime expedition to Tunis. He requisitioned men and ships from across his empire. Transports sailed from Antwerp with chained Protestants to row the galleys. Troops marched from Germany, Spain, and Italy to the collection points at the coast. Doria assembled his galley fleet at Barcelona; Bazán sailed from Malaga. The Knights of Saint John came from Malta in their great carrack, the Saint Anne, the largest ship in the world; the Portuguese sent twenty-three caravels and another carrack; a detachment was funded by the pope. Genoa and Barcelona were a hubbub of men and ships, busy with the loading of barrels of biscuits, water, and gunpowder, horses, cannon, and arquebuses. Charles proved himself an accomplished military planner. The expedition was conceived on a huge scale and was unusually well coordinated by Hapsburg standards; for once it did not sail too late in the year. In early June 1535, the armada assembled off the coast of Sicily: seventy-four galleys, three hundred sailing ships, thirty thousand men. The fleet review was a calculated showpiece of religious iconography and imperial splendor. Charles had commissioned a ship worthy of his position as the defender of Christendom—a quadrireme, an immense galley rowed by four men to a bench, with a castellated and gilded poop and a canopy of red and gold velvet, flying heraldic flags from its masts. One depicted the crucified Christ with Charles’s personal motto, “Further,” another a radiant star surrounded by arrows and the legend “Show me your ways, O God.” On June 14, this expedition departed from Sardinia with great show. The oarsmen propelled the splendid craft along a water lane through the anchored fleet, to the braying of trumpets and the thunderous cheering of the men. Charles took with him his own official war artist, Jan Vermeyen, to record the impending victory. The emperor was intent on controlling his own image.

  The fleet took less than a day to reach the North African shore. By the morning of June 15, it had anchored off the site of ancient Carthage and was preparing to besiege La Goletta, “the throat,” the fortress that controlled the channel into the inner lake on whose banks sat Tunis “the Green.” Charles took a month to reduce this obstacle, harassed continuously by Hayrettin’s sorties from the city. On July 14, after a furious bombardment from the great carrack and the galleys advancing in successive waves to pummel the defenses with their bow guns, the walls were breached and the fortress stormed with great loss of life. Among the ruins, the Spanish were surprised to find cannonballs stamped with the fleur-de-lis of France.

  Hayrettin watched in consternation as the army advanced on Tunis. His position was becoming precarious; he was particularly concerned at the possibility of revolt by the thousands of chained Christian slaves. He proposed to kill them all, but this was strongly resisted by those around him. It was not squeamishness that prevented a massacre; slave owners were simply unwilling to destroy their own wealth. In the event, Barbarossa was justified. After fierce fighting, he withdrew his army to the walls of Tunis. Within the city, a group of renegades, sensing the drift of events, switched sides and started to slip the prisoners’ shackles. The Christians seized the arsenal, armed themselves, and burst out into the streets. With no secure base behind him, Barbarossa had no option but to flee. He slipped away toward Algiers with several thousand Turks. On the morning of July 21, Charles entered Tunis in unopposed triumph, his horse high-stepping over the corpses of slaughtered Muslims.

  The aftermath was bloody. Charles had promised his men the customary right to pillage, due in cases where a city had not surrendered; they accordingly subjected Tunis to a fearful massacre. The mosques were plundered and stripped; thousands of surrendering Tunisians, no more enthusiastic about Hayrettin than they had been about Muley Hasan, were cut down in the street; ten thousand more were sold into slavery. The savagery was fueled by personal and national vengeance for the raids on Italy, the taking of slaves, the twenty years of misery inflicted by the Barbarossas on the Christian shore. It was hate at a visceral level.

  Charles emerged from the bloodbath with his reputation enormously enhanced in Catholic Europe. He had personally risked his life in the assault of Tunis and proved his courage, resolution, a
nd military judgment. According to contemporary Spanish accounts, he had fought in the front line, advancing “with lance in hand, putting himself in the same danger as a poor common soldier,” and had felt the bullets whistle past his head. His horse was shot from under him, while his page was killed by his side. The Spanish chroniclers ensured that his deeds were widely reported. Charles felt justified in calling himself the emperor of war.

  The practical gains were considerable: the puppet ruler Muley Hasan was restored to the throne of Tunis, and La Goletta garrisoned with Spanish troops. Most significant of all, Charles had burned almost the complete fleet that had sailed so proudly out of Istanbul the previous spring. Eighty-two ships were destroyed in the lake at Tunis. Charles had wanted to follow Barbarossa and take Algiers, but the army had been struck down by dysentery. On August 17 he sailed back to Naples in pomp, confident that his adversary had been negated.

  Charles was never a man to be constrained by cost in his pursuit of war, but the expenditure on Tunis had been immense. When planning the campaign, he had faced huge financial difficulties. Galley fleets were ruinously expensive and the emperor had just laid out nine hundred thousand ducats on the Danube campaign against Suleiman. In prospect, the armada to Tunis would cost another million, a sum of money Charles did not have. The expedition against Barbarossa took place only because of events on the other side of the world. On August 29, 1533, Francisco Pizarro had strangled Atahualpa, the last king of the Incas, at Cajamarca in the Andes, having extracted an immense quantity of gold for his ransom. Spanish galleons supplied Charles with a windfall 1,200,000 ducats of South American gold for “the holy enterprise of war against the Turk, Luther and other enemies of the faith.” The treasure house of Atahualpa paid for Charles’s crusade. It was the first time that the New World had altered the course of events in the Old.

  To Charles, it was God who provided this means for his signal victory; and it was as God’s champion that he sailed home again. “Your glorious and incomparable victory at Tunis seems to me, by my faith as a Christian, of a dignity which far surpasses all others of ever-lasting memory,” wrote the toadying chronicler Paolo Govio. Charles’s artist, Jan Vermeyen, designed a set of twelve tapestries commemorating scenes from the campaign that would travel with Charles wherever he went, to bear witness to this triumph. It was the high point of the emperor’s military career.

  THE DESTRUCTION of Barbarossa’s power base and the cutting of the link between the Maghreb and Istanbul was a momentous event throughout the Western Mediterranean. Charles reached Naples amidst an explosion of popular rejoicing. There were widespread rumors that Barbarossa himself was dead; the coasts were in festive mood; the news was celebrated with church services, gunfire, pageants, and festivals. In Toledo and Granada processions of the faithful sang hymns and prostrated themselves at the feet of the Virgin. The Knights of Saint John held services of thanksgiving and ignited fireworks in the night sky over Malta, while for the Venetians, further removed from the consequences and generally of a more frivolous frame of mind, it provided the excuse for carnivals and masked balls. Nowhere was the joy more rapturous than on the Balearic Islands. Majorca and Minorca had suffered cruelly at the hands of the corsairs. At Palma, on Majorca, they staged a cheerful reenactment of their tormentor’s downfall. A convicted criminal, with his beard hennaed and his tongue cut out, was dressed in Turkish costume and hustled into the main square. The startled man was burned alive to the screams of the crowd. Joy, cruelty, revenge, religious deliverance, exaltation, mystical fervor—powerful emotions swept across the sea.

  It was in this carnival atmosphere that a flotilla of galleys flying Spanish flags rowed into the port of Mahon on the island of Minorca one day in October. Those watching from the shore shouted out cheerful greetings, thinking it was Doria back from a sweep of the North African coast. They could distinguish the Christians on board by their clothes and rang the church bells in welcome as the ships pulled steadily nearer. A Portuguese caravel lying at anchor in the harbor fired off a friendly salute. It was met by a furious burst of cannon fire. Astonished beyond surprise, the Portuguese ran to arm themselves but it was already too late to register the galleys of Barbarossa bearing down on them. The old corsair was far from dead. He had slipped free from Tunis and regrouped; he had held fifteen galleys back at Bona, farther west. Here he had evaded Doria, sailed off to Algiers, and added more ships to his fleet. Now he was back to inflict terror on the Christian sea. The disguised galleys fell on Mahon like the vengeance of God. Barbarossa took the caravel, comprehensively sacked the town, and carried off eighteen hundred people. There was a glut of goods in the slave market of Algiers.

  Galley going with the wind

  It was a sickening lurch back into nightmare for the Christian sea. An involuntary shudder ran along the coasts, passing from ship to ship, through the ports of Spain and Italy, the undefended islands and coastal towns. Charles’s huge expenditure of effort and money had almost been negated. He had only scotched Barbarossa. By the end of the year the sultan’s admiral was back in Istanbul. The usually intolerant Suleiman forgave him for the loss of his ships and ordered the construction of a new fleet.

  CHAPTER 5

  Doria and Barbarossa

  1536–1541

  CHARLES AND DORIA, SULEIMAN AND BARBAROSSA. After Tunis it was clear that the two potentates who would contest the Mediterranean had chosen their champions and were gathering their forces. If Barbarossa was the sultan’s grand admiral, Doria was Charles’s captain-general of the sea. Both seamen were the executors of their master’s wars. The sea was no longer an outer frontier to be contested by pirates; it had become a major theatre of imperial conflict to rival the plains of Hungary. Year on year the violence grew. When Barbarossa struck Italy again in 1536, Doria responded by capturing Ottoman galleys off the coast of Greece the following year. And the fleets got bigger: in 1534, Barbarossa had built ninety galleys; in 1535, one hundred twenty. The two commanders had repeatedly sailed past each other, tracked each other’s squadrons around the capes and bays of Italy, but they had never fought. The sea war was a series of uncoordinated punches, like a contest between amnesiac boxers. Many factors conspired to hinder coherent battle: the conditions imposed by the sea, the limits of the campaigning season, the logistical time lapses in preparing campaigns, the blind trawling for opponents before the age of radar, and not least the natural caution of experienced sailors. Both men understood the risks of naval warfare. Fractional disadvantages could aggregate great consequences that could hinge on a slight shift in the wind. A safe raid was always better than a chancy battle. Yet by the mid-1530s, the insistent pressure of imperial ambitions and the race for bigger fleets were shrinking the sea.

  The French cannonballs at La Goletta were a disturbing portent for Charles of events about to unfold. In 1536 he embarked on another exhaustive two-year war with Francis, the Valois king of France. It was one of the bitter truths of a fragmented Europe that the Catholic King would spend more time, money, and energy fighting the French and the Protestants than he ever devoted to war with Suleiman. The perceived power of the Hapsburgs frightened rather than united Christendom, and in this climate Suleiman was able skillfully to affect the balance of power in the Mediterranean Sea.

  The French had been flirting with an Ottoman alliance for years, either directly through furtive embassies or by means of the Barbarossas. As early as 1520, they sent an ambassador to Tunis to persuade the corsairs “to multiply the difficulties of the Emperor in his kingdom of Naples.” They supplied Hayrettin with military technology—guns, powder, and cannonballs—and intelligence about the emperor. “I cannot deny,” Francis admitted to the Venetian ambassador, “that I wish to see the Turk all-powerful and ready for war, not for himself—for he is an infidel and we are all Christians—but to weaken the power of the emperor, to compel him to make major expenses and to reassure all the other [Christian] governments who are opposed to [Charles].” In early 1536, Francis and Suleiman
signed an agreement that granted mutual trading rights; behind it lay an understanding that they would fall on Italy in a pincer movement and destroy Charles. The Mediterranean moved center stage in the sultan’s imperial war. Francis was evidently well informed on his ultimate objective. “The Turk will make some naval expedition,” he told the Venetians, “going perhaps as far as Rome, for Sultan Suleiman always says ‘to Rome! To Rome!’” The sultan ordered Barbarossa, now back in Istanbul, “to build two hundred vessels for an expedition against Apulia, to the completion of which he accordingly applied himself.” It was a further escalation of sea power.

  At the top of the Adriatic, the Venetians watched these developments with grave disquiet. An expedition aimed at Rome almost certainly involved encroaching on her home waters in the Adriatic. Venice maintained a queasy balancing act, trying to maintain her independence between two menacing superpowers. Charles had swallowed up all of Italy around her; Suleiman’s navy threatened her maritime possessions. The republic’s sole ambition was to trade profitably on a calm sea. Unable to compete militarily, she had built her security on adroit political maneuvering. No one courted the Grand Turk so assiduously, bribed his ministers so handsomely, spied on him so obsessively. The Venetians sent their top diplomats to Istanbul, where they kept a trained corps of Turkish speakers and cryptographers, who dispatched endless coded reports. It was a policy that had bought them thirty years’ peace. The cornerstone was the special relationship with Ibrahim Pasha, the powerful chief vizier, born a Venetian subject on the shores of the Adriatic. He occupied a uniquely trusted position in the sultan’s favor, but as Suleiman turned his intense gaze on the sea, all this started to unravel.