Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  The imperial fleet with which Suleiman had provided Barbarossa—one hundred twenty galleys and support sailing vessels—rampaged down the west coast of Italy with unstoppable force. Charles’s coastal defenses had no answer to such a heavily armed and mobile enemy. At word of Barbarossa’s approach, people simply fled. Empty villages were burned to the ground; sometimes the invaders would follow the fleeing populace several miles inland. If the people retreated into a secure coastal fort, the galley captains turned their prows to the shore and pulverized the walls or dragged the cannon ashore and instigated a major siege for as long as it took. Barbarossa’s men had no fear of counterattack. Only a few small detachments of Spanish soldiers guarded isolated towers. Out at sea, Doria’s nephew, Giannetto, tracked the fleet with his twenty-five galleys but was forced to scurry back to Naples at any sign of an engagement.

  Day after day Maurand watched the fleet at work. A combustible mixture of jihad, imperial warfare, personal plunder, and spiteful revenge fueled their rampage. The priest witnessed slave-taking on an enormous scale. From each assault, long lines of men, women, and children were led down to the shore in chains, where they risked the equal perils of the sea. Sometimes a coastal village would try to bargain part of its population in a cruel lottery. Port’Ercole offered eighty people, to be chosen by Barbarossa, in return for thirty going free. He accepted the bargain but torched their village anyway. Only one house was left standing. Fortifications were destroyed as a matter of course. Finding Giglio deserted, the seamen razed it, but the castle resisted and had to be blasted into submission and ruined. The 632 Christians who surrendered were enslaved, but their leaders and priest were beheaded in front of Barbarossa to discourage resistance. It was a calculated and effective means of breaking morale. “It’s an extraordinary thing,” Maurand testified, “how the very mention of the Turks is so horrifying and terrible to the Christians that it makes them lose not only their strength but also their wits.” Barbarossa employed the exemplary brutality of Genghis Khan.

  Some of his reprisals were acts of personal revenge, conducted even beyond the grave. Singling out the coastal town of Telamona, he had the body of the recently deceased Bartolome Peretti ripped from its tomb, ritually disemboweled, chopped into pieces, and burned in the public square, along with the corpses of Peretti’s officers and servants. When Barbarossa left, the smell of burned flesh hung in the air. The terrified populace crept from their hiding places shaken and appalled. It was payback for Peretti’s attack on Barbarossa’s home island of Lesbos the previous year, when his father’s house had been destroyed.

  The Ottomans sailed on. The fleet burned several villages on the island of Ischia and took two thousand slaves. Naples crouched behind its shore guns as the fleet swept past like a black wing darkening the sun. Salerno, farther south, was saved only by a miracle. The galleys were closing in after dark, so near that Maurand could see the lights in the windows, when “God in his mercy” intervened. A sudden storm arose and there was “a cruel sea from the southwest and a blackness so thick that the galleys couldn’t see one another, together with a rain falling without ceasing from the sky that was quite unbearable.” The Christian slaves, huddling on the exposed deck like “drowned ducks,” were cruelly beaten. One galliot, overloaded with captives, foundered in the storm: “They all drowned, except for some Turks who escaped by swimming.”

  Unloading slaves at Algiers

  The last straw for the increasingly appalled French contingent came at Lipari, the largest of the volcanic islands off the coast of Sicily. The Lipariots had been warned of the approaching fleet. They strengthened their defenses but declined to evacuate the women and children and withdrew into their well-prepared fortress. Hayrettin landed five thousand men and sixteen cannon and settled down for a long siege. As he blasted away, the defenders tried to negotiate; when they offered fifteen thousand ducats, Barbarossa demanded thirty thousand and four hundred children. Eventually they thought they had brokered a deal with a payment to be made for each person. They gave up the keys to the castle, but he enslaved them all anyway, except for the richest families, who paid sizeable ransoms for their liberty. The ordinary people were ordered past the implacable pasha one by one. The old and useless were beaten with sticks and released. The rest were chained and marched down to their own harbor. A few of the most aged were found sheltering in the cathedral church. The corsairs seized them, stripped off their clothes, and cut them open while still alive, “out of spite.” Maurand was totally unable to comprehend these actions. “When we asked these Turks why they treated the poor Christians with such cruelty, they replied that such behavior had very great virtue; that was the only answer we ever got.” Nor could the priest understand why God permitted such sufferings; he could conclude only that it was because of Christian sin, in the case of the Lipariots because they were said to be “much given to sodomy.”

  Profoundly shaken, the French ransomed a few of the Lipariot captives at their own expense and watched the rest being led away, seeing “the tears, groans, and sobs of the pitiful Lipariots leaving their own city to be led away into slavery; fathers looking at their sons, mothers their daughters, were unable to hold back the tears in their sad eyes.” Charles at Tunis, Hayrettin at Lipari: the battle for the Mediterranean had become a war waged against civilians. The castle, the cathedral, the tombs, and the houses were ransacked and burned. Lipari was a smoking ruin. While Barbarossa arranged a truce and offered to sell his new captives back in nearby Sicily, the French galleys made their excuses and sailed on alone.

  In the summer of 1544 Barbarossa took some six thousand captives from the coasts of Italy and the surrounding seas. On his way home the boats were so dangerously overloaded with human cargo that the crews threw hundreds of the weaker captives overboard. He entered the harbor in triumph to the firing of cannon and nighttime fires illuminating the Horn. Thousands of people gathered on the shore to witness the triumphant return of “the king of the sea.” It was to be his last great expedition. In the summer of 1546, at the age of eighty, he was carried off by a fever in his own palace in Istanbul to the universal mourning of the people. He was buried in a mausoleum on the shores of the Bosphorus that became an obligatory place of pilgrimage for all departing naval expeditions, saluted with “numerous salvoes from cannon and muskets to give him the honor due to a great saint.” After so many decades of terror, Christians could scarcely believe that “the king of evil” was gone; so great was the superstitious dread attached to his name that legend persisted he could leave his tomb and walk the earth with the undead. Apparently it took a Greek magician to fix the problem: burying a black dog in the tomb appeased the restless spirit and returned it to Hades.

  And in a real sense Barbarossa returned unceasingly to terrorize the Christian shore. A new generation of corsair captains sprang up in his wake; the greatest of whom—Turgut, Dragut to the Christians, born on the Anatolian coast—would replicate the career of his mentor, moving from enterprising freebooter on the shores of the Maghreb and battle experience at Preveza to imperial service under Suleiman during the twenty years after 1546. The king of evil had sowed dragon’s teeth in the sea.

  Barbarossa’s last great raid of 1544 had shown that Muslim fleets could roam at will. These huge sweeps were campaigns in a full-scale Mediterranean war that the Ottomans were winning. Slave-taking was an instrument of imperial policy, and the damage was immense. In the four decades following the launch of Barbarossa’s first imperial fleet in 1534, thousands of people were snatched from the coasts of Italy and Spain: eighteen hundred from Minorca in 1535, seven thousand from the Bay of Naples in 1544, five thousand from the island of Gozo off Malta in 1551, six thousand from Calabria in 1554, and four thousand from Granada in 1566. The Ottomans could apply sudden and overwhelming force at precise points; they could land at and destroy fair-size coastal towns with impunity and threaten even the major cities of Italy. When Andrea Doria’s nephew trapped and captured Turgut on the Sardinian shore in 1
540 and condemned him to the galleys, Barbarossa threatened to blockade Naples unless Turgut was ransomed; the Genoese thought it wisest to comply. Doria and Barbarossa met in person to agree the terms. The thirty-five hundred ducats would prove a bad bargain for the Christians: eleven years later Turgut would blockade Genoa himself. The Christians had no adequate naval presence to respond to such threats after Preveza. Charles was too busy attending to multiple other wars to frame—or pay for—a coherent maritime response. By now it was all that the Dorias could do to apply some counterpressure.

  Nor was this assault conducted just through large fleet actions. War between Charles and Suleiman ebbed and flowed, depending on the timing of their conflicts, but when they signed a peace in 1547 so that the sultan could campaign in Persia, the big maritime expeditions were temporarily suspended; warfare continued anyway under another name. Enterprising corsairs from the Maghreb filled the vacuum and inflicted a different style of misery on Christian shores. Where the imperial fleets had brazenly smashed their way through local defenses, these lesser carnivores proceeded by ambush and stealth. It was a subtler kind of terror. Surprise replaced brute force.

  The corsairs’ tactics were soon horribly familiar. A few galliots might loiter offshore, below the rim of the horizon, sitting out the heat of the day. A captured fishing boat would be sent in to scout the coast, maybe with a local renegade to identify suitable targets. In the small hours of the morning the corsairs would make a move, the black, low-slung shapes of the vessels cutting the night sea beneath a sprinkle of stars. There were no lanterns; the Christian galley slaves were gagged with cork dummies to prevent them from calling out. When the prows touched the beach, the corsairs would hit the village at speed; doors were kicked in and the occupants dragged naked from their beds, the church bell rope slashed to forestall an alarm; a few screams and dog barks would echo in the square and a confused straggle of captives were marched down to their own beach and hustled aboard; then they would be gone. “They grabbed young women and children,” recalled a Sicilian villager of one such raid, “they snatched goods and money, and in a flash, back aboard their galleys, they set their course and vanished.” The terror lay in the surprise.

  BY THE MID-CENTURY the Mediterranean was a sea of disappearances, a place where people working the coastal margins simply vanished: the lone fisherman setting out in his boat; a shepherd with his flock on the seashore; laborers harvesting corn or tending vines, sometimes several miles inland; sailors working a small tramp ship around the islands. Once seized they could be in the slave mart at Algiers in a couple of days—or they could be subjected to a lengthy cruise in pursuit of other prizes. Those who weakened or died en route would be dumped overboard.

  In a particularly cruel twist, the captives might reappear at their home village a day or two later. The raiders would materialize offshore, hoist a flag of truce, and display the victims for ransom. The grieving relatives would be given a day to raise funds; the families might mortgage their fields and boats to the local moneylender and enter a spiral of inescapable debt. If they failed, the hostages would be gone forever. The illiterate peasantry too poor to be ransomed seldom saw their birthplace again.

  The sudden terror of these visitations cast a profound dread over the Christian sea. Those who were taken, such as the Frenchman Du Chastelet, seized in the seventeenth century, never forgot the trauma of their capture. “As to me,” he wrote, recalling the nightmarish moment, “I noticed a great Moor approaching me, his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, holding a sabre in his large hand of four fingers; I was left without words. And the ugliness of this carbon face, animated by two ivory eyeballs, moving about hideously, terrified me a good deal more than were frightened the first humans at the sight of the flaming sword at the door of Eden.”

  This was a terror sharpened by racial difference; across the narrow sea two civilizations communicated through abrupt acts of violence and revenge. Europe was on the receiving end of the slavery it was starting to inflict on West Africa—though the numbers slaved to Islam far exceeded the black slaves taken in the sixteenth century, and where Atlantic slaving was a matter of cold business, in the Mediterranean it was heightened by mutual religious hatred. The Islamic raids were designed both to damage the material infrastructure of Spain and Italy and to undermine the spiritual and psychic basis of Christians’ lives. The ransacking of tombs and the ritual desecration of churches that Jérome Maurand witnessed in 1544 were acts of profound intention. The Italian poet Curthio Mattei mourned “the outrage done to God”—the holy images skewered to the floor with daggers, the mocking of the sacraments and altars. Mattei was equally appalled by the disinterring of corpses and the destruction of generations of past people: “The bones of our dead are not secure underground…dozens of years after death.” The corsairs entered Italian folklore as agents of hell, and what made it more difficult to bear was that as often as not Satan’s emissaries were renegade Christians who had defected to Islam through circumstance or choice, and who were extremely well placed to maximize damage on their native lands.

  IN THIS ATMOSPHERE, Charles’s failure to retake Algiers in 1541 assumed a grave significance. The city, now protected by a breakwater and powerful defenses, became the center of piracy. It was a gold rush town, a place where a man might dream of becoming as rich as Barbarossa. Adventurers, freebooters, and outcasts came from across the impoverished sea and from both sides of the religious divide to try their luck at “Christian stealing.” The city resembled in part a gaudy bazaar where humans and booty were bought and sold, in part a Soviet gulag. Thousands of prisoners were kept in slave pens—the dark, crowded, fetid converted bathhouses—from whence they would be taken daily in chains to work. Wealthy captives such as the Spanish writer Cervantes, held in Algiers for five years, might enjoy tolerable conditions, awaiting liberation through ransom. The poor would lug stones, fell timber, dig salt, build palaces and forts, or, worst of all, row galleys until disease, abuse, and malnourishment finished them off.

  It is impossible to know how many slaves were being taken in the decades after 1540, but it was not a one-way trade. Both sides were engaged in “man-taking” throughout the whole length of the sea, and if Islam was in the ascendancy, there were small correctives. The Knights of Saint John were ruthless slavers, particularly La Valette, the French knight who had fought as a young man at Rhodes. Putting out a small force of heavily armed galleys from Malta, the knights returned to their old haunts in the Aegean, disrupting the Ottoman sea-lanes between Egypt and Istanbul. They could be as unscrupulous as any corsair on the high seas. Jérome Maurand reached the Venetian island of Tinos shortly after a visit by a knight with some ships. The islanders had greeted the visitors “as friends and Christians,” until one morning, after most of the island men had left the town to work in the fields, “this Knight and his men, seeing that there were only a few men at the castle, killed them, sacked the castle, and took away the women, boys, and girls as slaves.” This treacherous act soon got its own comeuppance; the knight was in turn seized by Turkish corsairs and taken off to Istanbul, where Maurand was in time to witness his execution. Changes of fortune could be abrupt.

  The knights were not alone; any small-scale Christian pirate might try his hand at raiding the eastern sea; Livorno and Naples on the Italian coast had active slave markets. Muslims disappeared into the Malta slave pens or the pope’s imperial galleys, but their numbers were far fewer than those taken to the Maghreb or Istanbul. There is a vast literature of Christian slave narratives; about the Muslims almost nothing. Occasional muffled accounts of personal suffering break the general silence. In the late 1550s Suleiman was bombarded by tearful requests from a woman called Huma for the restoration of her children, taken on a voyage to Mecca by the Knights of Saint John. The two daughters had been abducted to France, converted to Christianity, and married off. Distraught and persistent, Huma was a familiar figure in the Istanbul streets, trying to push a petition into the sultan’s hand as h
e rode by. Twenty-four years after their disappearance, Sultan Murat III could still write that “the lady named Huma has time and again presented written petitions to our imperial stirrup.” As far as we know the girls never came back; a further brother probably died at the oars of a Malta galley. There were countless thousands of such small tragedies on both sides of the religious divide, familiar tales of abduction and loss.

  THE INSTRUMENT OF ALL this chaotic violence was the oared galley. These fast, fragile, low-slung racing craft were the war machines of the Mediterranean, bred by the conditions of the sea. They dictated absolutely how, where, and when wars could be fought. The advantages of a shallow draft allowed the vessels to be easily beached for amphibious operations; they could lurk in ambush close to the shore and spin on a sixpence around a lumbering sailing ship, whose powers of maneuver were limited by the sea’s uncertain winds. At the same time, the galleys’ extraordinarily poor seaworthiness and dependence on continuous supplies of fresh water for the rowing crews tied them umbilically to land. Galleys needed to put ashore every few days, which meant their range of operation was limited and their deployment strictly seasonal; winter storms ensured that warfare was suspended every year between October and April. Crucially, the dynamo of maritime war was human labor; in all the motivations for slaving in the sixteenth century, snatching men for the rowing benches assumed an important role.