I
The reshaping of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Black Death was a slow process. In addition to political changes within the Mediterranean, notably the expansion of Ottoman power, events taking place beyond the Straits of Gibraltar would, in the long term, greatly transform the life of those who lived on its shores and in its islands. The opening of the Atlantic had already begun in the decade before plague arrived, with voyages down the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands, and it continued with the discovery and settlement of Madeira and the Azores by the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century.1 As sugar plantations developed on Madeira, it became possible to supply Flanders and other parts of northern Europe directly from the Atlantic with one of the costly products that had previously been obtained within the Mediterranean. By 1482, with the establishment of a Portuguese fortress at São Jorge da Mina (‘the Mine’) in West Africa, not far north of the Equator, gold was beginning to reach Europe without being channelled across the Sahara and through the Muslim ports of the Maghrib; the opening of this Guinea trade compensated for disappointment at the failure of Ceuta to pay for its upkeep. The Atlantic also became a source of slaves for Mediterranean masters: Canary Islanders, Berbers from the opposite shores of Africa and, increasingly, black slaves carried north from the Mine. Many of these eventually reached Valencia, Majorca and other Mediterranean ports, after passing through Lisbon.2
Then, with Columbus’s entry into the Caribbean islands in October 1492, Castile also acquired a source of precious metal that was ruthlessly exploited by imposing heavy taxes in gold on the Indians, even though they were supposedly free subjects of the Crown. The Genoese, despite their unpopularity in Spain, installed themselves in Seville and, with royal approval, ran the trans-Atlantic trading operations. At the same time, they turned their hands to finance. Turkish pressure on the Genoese possessions in the eastern Mediterranean increased, and so the Genoese allied themselves more insistently with Spain, the power that seemed best able to stand up to the Turks. As Mediterranean navigation became more dangerous, the Venetians also reconsidered their options. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Venice had become embroiled in the tortured politics of Renaissance Italy, acquiring, under Doge Francesco Foscari, a mainland dominion far in excess of the small tracts it controlled a century earlier. The writ of Venice reached as farwest as Bergamo, where the lion of St Mark brushed against the serpent of Milan. This is not to say that Venice abandoned its Mediterranean interests, but the Serenissima Repubblica was beginning to acquire the assets on the Terraferma, or Italian mainland, that would enable it to turn in that direction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it gradually lost its eastern Mediterranean dependencies to the Ottomans.3 Venice felt itself increasingly exposed, and its leaders were aware that their reluctance to use their navy to challenge the Ottomans exposed them in western Europe to accusations of hypocrisy and opportunism.
The sense that the seas were less safe was not an illusion. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards pirates ranged across the Mediterranean, raiding ships, coasts and islands from which they carried off thousands of slaves each year.4 Among the Christian lands most severely affected by Muslim piracy were Calabria, Sicily and Majorca; these regions had not experienced Muslim piracy on this scale since the Saracen raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. Piracy became endemic; the long-standing control of the seas by Italian and Catalan merchants was turning into a memory. There were both Christian and Muslim pirates; among the Christians, the Knights of St John on Rhodes were the most active. They remained committed to the ideal of a holy war against Islam, and they could draw on their estates in western Europe to pay for the upkeep of perhaps half a dozen well-equipped galleys. On the other side, the Barbary corsairs threatened Christendom for three centuries. They had the backing of the Ottoman court; they established secure bases in North Africa; they were led by energetic and talented commanders; and they brought the war between Christian and Muslim navies deep into the western Mediterranean.5
The eastern Mediterranean became an Ottoman lake during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. An obvious explanation for Ottoman expansion is the desire to spread the faith, and the sultans did not forget their ancestors who had waged war against the Byzantines as ghazis, holy warriors for Islam; however, in the Balkans they preferred to leave most of their subjects as Christians or Jews, reasoning, as had the Arab caliphs of the early Middle Ages, that the Peoples of the Book were a valuable source of tax revenue. They sought to protect trade, partly in order to supply their magnificent court and their teeming capital city with silks, jewels, gold and humbler supplies such as grain, and partly because they understood that functioning trade routes were another source of plentiful revenue – hence their willingness to protect the Ragusans and to offer trade treaties to the Venetians and Genoese.6 Elsewhere, they tried to impose their will. In 1516 Ottoman armies crushed the Mamluks in Syria, opening the way for a quick and easy occupation of Egypt. This left the Christians in charge of a scattering of islands: in the isles of the Aegean, sundry Italian lords (themselves often pirates) were picked off by the Turks over several decades; Cyprus remained in Venetian hands, and Chios in Genoese hands, but Rhodes was subjected to a long and harsh siege in 1522. This provided the new Ottoman sultan, Süleyman, with an opportunity to prove his military abilities. He was there in person to avenge the defeat at Rhodes in 1480. The citadel had been impressively strengthened in anticipation of a Turkish siege, but the active defenders were few – only 300 Knights, though there were many others of lesser rank. Süleyman refused to abandon his siege even as the weather turned, and battered Rhodes into submission. The Knights surrendered in December 1522, and were granted generous terms, for the Ottomans sometimes showed respect to those who had fought gallantly against them.7
Now homeless, the Hospitallers were determined to renew the fight against the Muslims. Fortunately, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of the lands of the Crown of Aragon (including Sicily), had a ready answer. He granted the Knights a magnificent charter in March 1530, in which he pointed out that they had ‘wandered for several years’ and sought a ‘fixed residence’; he was ready to dispose in their favour of several dependencies of the kingdom of Sicily: Tripoli, on the coast of Africa, along with Malta and Gozo. In return, all that was required in recognition of Sicilian sovereignty was a gift of a falcon to the viceroy of Sicily each All Saints’ Day. Ferdinand the Catholic had installed a Spanish garrison in Tripoli in 1510, though it was proving difficult to hold the town against the Berbers who pressed in from each landward side.8 For Charles, holding Tripoli was what mattered; it was lost in 1551, after which it became obvious that holding Malta was no less important.
The Barbary corsairs at first sight seem very different from the highly organized Knights Hospitallers. Yet the corsairs too were warriors who had travelled far to earn their reputation. A number were the descendants of Greeks, renegades who had themselves renounced the Christian faith; others were of Calabrian, Albanian, Jewish, Genoese, even Hungarian origin.9 They were not, or not all, roving psychopaths dedicated solely to their own profit and amusement. They included skilled navigators, notably Piri Reis, whose detailed maps of the Mediterranean and the world beyond furnished the Ottoman court with precise information in the age of discovery.10 But the most famous corsair was Barbarossa, so called in the West because of his red beard. In fact he was not one but two pirates, Uruj, or Oruc, and his younger brother Hizr, or Khizr. Around these men there developed a whole series of stories, and it is not always clear what is fable. It is generally agreed that the brothers were born in Lesbos in the days of Mehmet the Conqueror, who conquered the island from its Italian duke, Niccolò Giustiniani. Their father had probably been born a Christian, had served in the Ottoman army as a Muslim janissary and had then settled down with a Christian wife; he traded in ceramics all round the Aegean, as far north as Constantinople itself, and often took his sons along with him. It was on these journeys that the Barbarossa brothers acquired their skill as seamen. On one journey Uruj collected timber from the shores of Anatolia, only to find his vessel pursued byOur Lady of the Conception, a Hospitaller galley out of Rhodes. Uruj was captured and sent to toil as a galley slave, though after a couple of years he was ransomed, which was not unusual; nonetheless, a story of heroic escape began to be told. He happily returned to the sea, spending time in the waters between Spain and the Maghrib in the company of Hizr; it is claimed that they helped ferry Jewish and Muslim refugees out of Spain in 1492.11
Their original equipment was a light galley, crewed by about 100 volunteers, all in search of booty and glory, and around 1502 their base became Jerba, long a nest of pirates and the scene of conflict between Christian invaders and Muslim defenders. They built ties to the court in Tunis, operating as licensed pirates of the Hafsid sultan; in 1504, they set sail for Elba, whose deep coves favoured corsairs, and swooped on two galleys which proved to be sailing in the service of Pope Julius II, as well as a Spanish ship carrying 300 soldiers and sixty Aragonese noblemen to Naples. They easily took the galleys, enormously enhancing their reputation as heroes in Tunis and as fearsome enemies in Rome. By 1506 they possessed eight ships, but their successes had earned them so much fame that the Ottoman sultan bestowed on them the honorific title ‘Protector of the Faith’,khayr-ad-din, or, in Turkish, ‘Hayrettin’. A war of attrition was being fought between Muslim corsairs and their Christian foes; these were not just Genoese and Catalan sailors (whether merchants or corsairs) but the Portuguese and the Spaniards, who insistently intruded themselves into coastal forts along the Mediterranean and Atlantic shores of Morocco. Despite their successes at Melilla and Oran, the best the Spaniards could achieve at Algiers was the capture of some isolated rocks guarding the port, which were fortified with cannon in 1510 but were no substitute for control of the city.12
During these conflicts, the Muslims had one great advantage: they could call on the support of warrior chieftains in the Moroccan hinterland around Tetuan. They spent their summers on the sea, raiding towards Spain and carrying off thousands of slaves, whom they put to work building up the defences of Tetuan. Hizr claimed to have captured twenty-one merchant vessels and 3,800 Christian slaves (including women and children) in a single month. The brothers raided relentlessly towards Majorca, Minorca, Sardinia and Sicily, and the impact of their raids can be measured in the number of towns and villages that moved away from the dangerously exposed coasts of the western Mediterranean islands, to be rebuilt several miles inland.13 Uruj acquired a thoroughly bloodthirsty reputation as the sort of man who would bite out a victim’s windpipe like a mad mastiff, but he was an astute politician, and utilized his reputation to achieve political ends. He created his own realm, starting with the town of Jijelli on the Algerian coast. Its inhabitants were impressed when he seized a Sicilian galley laden with wheat at a time when their own supplies were very low. They invited him to take charge, and before long he launched a coup in Algiers. He exploited a succession crisis in Tlemcen, an important city situated a little way back from the sea, and made himself its master in 1517. All of this was of deep concern to the Spaniards based at Oran, who had been trying to develop friendly links with local chieftains.14 Spain’s new ruler, Charles of Habsburg, understood the need to mobilize troops in his North African possessions. Fortunately, the problem of Tlemcen was resolved by the inhabitants, who saw Uruj as an agent of Turkish rule; chased out, he was trapped by Spanish troops and killed in battle.
The second Barbarossa, Hizr, more often known as Hayrettin, now acquired an even more fearsome reputation than Uruj. To emphasize his succession to the elder, red-bearded, Barbarossa, he dyed his own beard red. He consolidated his hold over the coastal towns of the Maghrib, managing to prise from the Spaniards the forts on the islands at the entrance to Algiers in 1529.15 The same year he defeated a Spanish flotilla off Formentera in the Balearic islands, which were now easily within range, carrying off seven galleys along with their captains; when he became irritated with the captains he had them sliced up with sharp knives.16 Algiers became Barbarossa’s capital, but he took care to seek the protection of the Ottoman sultan. He was far enough from Constantinople to retain autonomy, and he was valuable enough to the Ottoman sultan to benefit from the material support of the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman sultans switched their attention back and forth from the Mediterranean to the Balkans to Persia, and their struggles with the Safavid shahs in the East often distracted them from Mediterranean affairs. It made good sense to work through the agency of Hayrettin Barbarossa rather than to commit all their resources to one of these theatres of war. Barbarossa received official recognition as emir of Algiers, and liked to call himself kapudan pasha, ‘captain general’. Sultan Selim I sent him a Turkish standard, cannons and war munitions, along with 2,000 janissaries.
By the early 1530s Hayrettin had won the trust of Selim’s successor, Süleyman, and was even summoned to the court in Constantinople to advise on strategy in the western Mediterranean, for the great question was how intensely the Turks should maintain pressure on their Spanish rivals. The Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, is said to have encouraged Barbarossa to launch a daring attack on Fondi, on the Italian coast south of Rome, in the hope of capturing the beautiful widow Giulia Gonzaga, whose husband had been lord of the region. According to legend, she escaped half-naked as the Turks battered on the gates of Fondi, though in reality she was not even in Fondi that night.17 The viceroy of Naples took the gloomy view that southern Italy was the new Rhodes, the last frontier post on the edge of Turkdom.18 Not surprisingly, it was Hayrettin who commanded a fleet the Ottoman sultan sent to Tunis in 1534 after its king, known for his suspicion of the Turks, died and a succession struggle broke out. Barbarossa pounced on the city, though Charles V then counter-attacked, pressing on despite Barbarossa’s threat to exterminate 20,000 Christian slaves held inside Tunis. Charles recaptured Tunis in 1535, pragmatically entrusting it to the youngest son of the previous king, though he demanded a heavy tribute: 12,000 gold pieces, twelve falcons and six fine steeds.19 But if Charles felt he earned the congratulations of his subjects on his victory at Tunis, he was soon to realize that he had been over-optimistic. Within a few months a flotilla slipped out of Algiers and headed for Minorca, where Barbarossa’s men impudently raised Spanish flags on their masts and brazenly entered the massive natural harbour of Mahón. They sacked the town and acquired 1,800 slaves.20
II
Christian reactions to the extension of Turkish influence into the western Mediterranean took two forms: confrontation and accommodation. The French king, Francis I, proved willing to cooperate with the Turks, to the scandal of his many rivals; in Spain, though, the struggle with the Ottomans was seen as a continuation and accentuation of the great crusade that Christians had long been fighting against the Moors. Charles V sought ‘the aid and guidance of our Creator’, in the hope that with divine assistance he would manage to do ‘what seems most effective against Barbarossa’.21Under the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria a Christian counter-attack began.22 Doria’s family had produced many of the great Genoese admirals of the previous centuries, and Andrea was his own master: he showed his independence by failing to participate in person in an attack on Naples launched by Francis I in 1528, and then switched sides from Francis to Charles V. But it is likely that he was lured into the service of Charles V more by money than by principle. He operated his own fleet, though he had access to the dockyards of his native city; he employed volunteer crews, to whom were added an assortment of convicts; his run of successes made him popular with the volunteers, even though he imposed a moral regime in which blasphemy was strictly forbidden.23 In many ways he is a mirror image of Hayrettin Barbarossa, combining a degree of independence with willingness to work for a cause. Sent against Greece in 1532, he amply proved his worth to his new master with the brilliantly executed capture of the naval base of Coron on the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Doria penetrated a Turkish cordon and landed his own troops, to the amazement of his enemies. In their heyday Coron and Modon had been ‘the two eyes of the Venetian Empire’, protecting the trade routes running east from the Ionian Sea. Recovering Coron from the Turks was a great strategic victory; Süleyman despatched sixty galleys in the expectation of winning it back again, but Doria saw them off.24
Concern in the West grew in 1537 when Süleyman sent 25,000 men under Hayrettin against Corfu. A Turkish siege of Corfu was an obvious threat to the West: the Ottomans would acquire a launch-pad for attacks on Italy, and would be able to control traffic into the Adriatic. A Holy League was formed at Nice under papal patronage, bringing together Doria, the Spaniards and Venice, which was traditionally so cautious in its dealings with the Sublime Porte. Early in 1538, Hayrettin responded with a series of assaults on the Venetian bases in the eastern Mediterranean, which included Nafplion and Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. This was not simply tit-for-tat warfare: taken together, the Venetian islands and coastal stations offered supply lines and protection to western shipping. The Ottomans claimed to have taken twenty-five islands out of the hands of Venice, sometimes by sacking them and sometimes by imposing tribute.25 The impression that Doria was ultimately his own master was confirmed, however, by his lacklustre performance when the massed forces of the Holy League – 36 papal galleys, 10 Hospitaller ships, 50 Portuguese ships, as many as 61 Genoese ships – met the Ottoman fleet, commanded by Hayrettin, at the battle of Preveza, off Corfu, on 28 September 1538.26 Once he saw that the western fleet was suffering losses, he pulled back rather than continuing to fight. As a Genoese he had no great interest in protecting Venetian interests, and – though well aware of the threat from Süleyman and Hayrettin – his priority was the defence of the western Mediterranean. A contemporary French observer compared Doria and Barbarossa to wolves who do not eat each other or crows ‘who do not peck out each other’s eyes’.27
III
The king of France offered a different solution to the question of how to deal with the Turks. Francis I was locked in conflict with Charles V over historic claims to parts of Italy – the duchy of Milan, to which his predecessor Louis XII had possessed a claim, and the kingdom of Naples, already invaded by both Charles VIII and Louis XII. Whereas Charles had seen the conquest of Naples in 1495 as the first step on a victorious crusade to Constantinople and Jerusalem, Louis XII, who reigned from 1498 to 1515, looked towards a narrower horizon. He did launch a naval expedition to Lesbos, but this was a disaster, and cured him of any ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean. He became involved in the ever-turbulent affairs of Genoa in 1507, suppressing a revolt within the city, but his aim was, once again, to consolidate his hold in north-western Italy rather than to launch a great French enterprise against the Turks. He underestimated the ability of Ferdinand of Aragon to mobilize opposition within northern Italy. Defeat at Ravenna in 1511 forced Louis to withdraw from Italy; nevertheless, his successor, Francis, resolved to avenge France on its Habsburg foes, first recovering Milan and then unfurling ever more ambitious plans, which culminated in his humiliating defeat and capture at the great battle of Pavia in 1525.28 After his release from prison in Madrid, Francis rapidly abandoned his promise to live in peace alongside his Habsburg neighbours, for France was flanked on all its frontiers by lands owing allegiance in various degrees to Charles V. Some of these neighbours were not particularly loyal to Charles, and Francis had less reason to fear encirclement than he may have imagined, but he also knew that he could pursue his dream of an empire in Italy only by maintaining pressure on the Habsburgs.29
The French king attempted to resolve his difficulties within western Europe by meddling in the Mediterranean wars between the Spaniards and the Turks.30 Ultimately, his aim in seeking an alliance with the Turks was not peace but mischief. In 1520 he sent an emissary to Tunis, urging the corsairs ‘to multiply the difficulties of the emperor in his kingdom of Naples’, a plan that showed scant regard for the interests of the inhabitants in southern Italy, whose sovereign Francis aspired to become.31 For the moment, the alliance between the French and the Turks was a secret one, and much of the interference took place within the Balkans, where French agents encouraged Christian warlords to work alongside the Turks in attacking the Habsburg territories. Francis sent embassies to Süleyman in 1529, keen to avenge himself against Andrea Doria following the admiral’s defection; the same year the French supplied cannons that were used in the reduction of the Spanish fort at the entrance to Algiers harbour. Seven years later Charles V heard reports of an understanding between the French and Ottoman courts to attack the Habsburg dominions simultaneously. Charles tried to box Francis into a corner by appealing for the creation of a Holy League against the Turks, since if it came into being the French king would be forced to choose publicly between Christian unity and a Turkish alliance; for Francis what mattered was the balance of power, since the Ottomans could be used, he imagined, as a counterweight against the Habsburgs.32 One wonders how Francis would have reacted had Süleyman’s attack on Vienna in 1529 succeeded. An embassy to the sultan in 1532 expressed Francis’ priorities with ruthless clarity: Süleyman was urged to concentrate on Italy rather than Hungary and Austria. Francis imagined that Süleyman’s troops could chase the Habsburgs out of the peninsula, upon which he would raise the banner of Christ and enter Italy as its divinely appointed saviour. Süleyman, however, was increasingly distracted by conflict with the Shah of Persia, and left the management of the Mediterranean war to Hayrettin Barbarossa in North Africa. The impression is of pure cynicism on the French king’s part. By 1533 the alliance was no secret: embassies from Hayrettin were received in France, and a few months later eleven fine Turkish galleys arrived, bringing the emissaries of the sultan himself. Negotiations culminated in a trade treaty, the ‘Capitulations’, which masked a political alliance.33
French support for the Turks was shameless. In 1537 twelve French galleys set out to resupply 100 Turkish ships, chasing around the central Mediterranean in search of Hayrettin’s fleet, and dodging the ships of the Maltese Knights. In 1543 a French ambassador accompanied Hayrettin’s fleet as it savaged the coasts of southern Italy, carrying off the daughter of the governor of Reggio. The sultan even offered to lend Barbarossa’s ships to the French king. Barbarossa’s fleet arrived in Marseilles amid fanfares and public celebrations. Francis was happy to offer food not just for the great feast held in honour of the Turkish navy, but also to supply Hayrettin’s war fleet, so that ‘he would be master of the sea’. The Turks then amused themselves with raids along the coast to the east, which lay under the dominion not of France but of the duke of Savoy, an imperial vassal: Nice was besieged and the nuns of Antibes were carried into slavery.
At this point the most extraordinary event in the curious history of the Franco-Turkish alliance occurred. Francis opened up Toulon to the Turkish ships, inviting Hayrettin’s men to spend the winter there. Francis presented Barbarossa with a clock and silver plate. Thirty thousand Turks were dispersed within the town and its suburbs, and Toulon Cathedral was transformed into a mosque. A slave market was established, for the Turks continued to pick up men and women from the surrounding countryside, pressing some of the men into galley service. Turkish coin circulated in place of French money. The city council complained that the Turkish troops consumed too many olives, and supplies of food and fuel became short in a region not bountifully endowed with natural resources. Barbarossa was well aware of the controversy that had developed over his presence in France, and he was also worried by the failing provisions; he persuaded the king to give him 800,000 gold écus, and sailed away in May 1544. Further depredations resumed, on a savage scale, when Barbarossa left Toulon, having persuaded the French fleet to join him: Talamone on the Tuscan coast was sacked; Ischia was devastated after refusing to pay off the attackers with money, boys and girls; and all this was witnessed by Francis’s embarrassed ambassador, le Paulin.34 Later in 1544 Francis shamefacedly made peace with Charles V, promising to unite with Spain against the Turks, but in reality Francis and his successor Henry III had no compunction about collaborating with Turkish fleets, including the Barbary corsairs, in raids on the territory of the common Habsburg enemy. In the late 1550s, for instance, the navies of France and Algiers joined in attacks on Minorca, always exposed and vulnerable, and on Sorrento, within sight of Naples.
Charles V was not so principled that he was unwilling to collaborate occasionally with Muslim rulers within the Mediterranean, most obviously the rulers of Tunis. Venice, too, had a tradition of appeasing the Ottomans in order to serve its commercial interests. The neutrality of Dubrovnik was assured by tribute payments to the Sublime Porte. But King Francis pursued his own interests more ruthlessly than his Christian rivals, and did so in the hope that this would win him territories in Italy and glory as a military commander. Charles V was a more sober figure, careful in framing his policies, which in large measure were reactive: he saw Islam expanding in the Mediterranean at the same time as Protestantism was expanding in Europe, while France was challenging the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Spanish kingdoms that now lay under his rule. Charles’s political passions were determined by the confrontation with Süleyman the Magnificent and with Martin Luther and his successors. When he abdicated in 1556, not long before he died, the balance of forces within the Mediterranean remained delicate. Three events within the next sixteen years would confirm the division of the Great Sea between a partly Christian West and a mainly Muslim East: the siege of Malta, the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus and the battle of Lepanto.
IV
A glance at the naval forces arrayed in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean reveals that the coming of the Ottomans had created a new order, reminiscent, if anything, of the early days of Islam. Now that a Muslim empire was once again seeking to expand its power by land and sea in all directions, navies under Muslim command gained control of the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and challenged Christian navies in the western Mediterranean by means of their proxies, the rulers of the Barbary coast. It was an extraordinary transformation. After centuries in which Muslim navies had exercised tentative control of waters close to the Islamic states – Mamluk fleets off Egypt and Syria, Moroccan ships in the far west, Turkish emirs within the Aegean – Muslim sea power had expanded outwards on a massive scale.35 Constantinople became the command centre of an enormous fleet, in great contrast to the Byzantine era, when naval power had increasingly fallen into the hands of the Genoese and Venetians. Skilled admirals became expert in the art of war at sea. This was not just a fighting force; the sultans were also keenly interested in provisioning their capital, both with wheat for its ever-expanding population and with luxuries for its imperial court.36 Meanwhile, in the West, Spanish naval power came to rely on Italian resources. Most of the ‘Spanish’ ships that will appear in the next chapter, fighting the Turks at Malta and Lepanto, were supplied by Spanish Naples and Sicily.37 The arsenal at Messina had been active for centuries; but the role of Sicily and southern Italy in the struggle for naval command within the Mediterranean had not been so significant since Charles of Anjou attempted to create a maritime empire in the thirteenth century.
Alongside these changes there was conservatism. One of the extraordinary features of the history of the Mediterranean is the longevity of the galley. The ships themselves, especially when built by the Ottomans out of unseasoned or ‘green’ timber, did not last as long as the great Roman grain ships of antiquity. But the basic design of the galley had changed rather little, if one sets aside the massive galleasses built by the Venetians – slow and cumbersome vessels that had to be towed to their stations, and that developed out of the large merchant galleys built to service the late medieval trade to Flanders and the Levant.38 The length of a Spanish galley might be about forty metres and the width only five or six, making a ratio of roughly 8:1. As in antiquity, there was a raised deck running along the length of the ship, with rowing benches placed at a lower level. A vessel of this size would have about twenty-five benches down each side, typically seating five oarsmen.39 Sail-power was also used when appropriate, and in the western Mediterranean there was a preference for larger sails than in Venice and the Ottoman Empire. This may have suited navigation across the more open seas of the western Mediterranean, while in the Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean Seas galleys tended to hop from island to island and to crawl along the sharply indented coastlines – there existed quite an intense network of communication by galley in the Ottoman Aegean.40 Under sail, speeds were respectable, and might reach ten or even twelve knots, but a mere three knots was a normal cruising speed under oar, which could be more than doubled when a quick spurt was needed, in pursuit or escape. Naturally, the men could not maintain high speeds for long; a rate of twenty-six strokes per minute could probably be kept up for only twenty minutes. The old problems remained: low freeboards were easily swamped in high seas, and it was difficult to supply the rowers with sufficient water and food without making frequent halts.41 These problems could be resolved by not sailing too far out of sight of land in squally weather, so galleys still hugged the shores. Yet they had the advantage of manoeuvrability precisely because they were not entirely dependent on the vagaries of the Mediterranean winds, and a well-trained crew could turn the vessel about in a narrow space.
These crews were typically a combination of slaves and free men. The art in managing a crew was, of course, to instil an awareness of the need for teamwork. It was common practice to seat free and unfree oarsmen side by side; free oarsmen had greater privileges and could be used to watch over their unfree neighbours, who were generally shackled. Ottoman fleets, though, might be composed of a mixture of ships, some manned by slaves and others by volunteers. A sixteenth-century report refers to a fleet of 130 ships, of which forty were rowed by slaves, sixty by free Muslim conscripts, who received a stipend, and another forty by Christian volunteers, who were paid as well; the report also stresses that in time of war care was taken to recruit free Muslims because they alone were fully trusted. Villages were expected to send conscripts and to pay for their maintenance – about one oarsman for every twenty to thirty households.42 Venice had its Milizia da Mar, a government agency established in 1545 to organize conscription in Venice and its dependencies; nearly 4,000 oarsmen were owed by the Venetian guilds and confraternities, and at any time over 10,000 conscripts were on the books, from whom galley crews would be selected by lot.43 Free and unfree rowers were subjected to tight discipline, whether they served on Christian or Muslim ships. It was obviously essential that all rowers kept time and carried the weight of the oar (some galleys had individual oars, but many were quinquiremes, where five men manipulated one massive oar). Conditions on board were very unpleasant when under way: oarsmen had to relieve themselves where they sat, though a sensible commander would make sure that faeces and other rubbish were washed away every couple of days. In the meantime, the air became fetid. There was a little space in which to store goods and curl up for the night under the benches and in the gangways. Shackled slaves had no chance of escaping when a galley was swamped and sank; this was the fate of enormous numbers on both sides at the great battle near Lepanto in 1571. Under way, many rowed almost naked; dehydration was a problem in the summer heat of the Mediterranean, and some died at their niches, but a captain with an ounce of sense knew that he could not afford to lose his oarsmen. A shift system meant that oarsmen had time to recover their energy. Those who proved most cooperative would be promoted up the ship’s command structure, and released from the tedium and squalor below decks to help keep time or to perform other vital functions. Up to a point, then, the stark picture of misery on board the galleys needs to be modified, though it would be equally erroneous to try to present the treatment of the slaves, or indeed the volunteers, as positive and considerate. Iron discipline ruled.
Galley slaves in the Ottoman fleet were marked out by their shaven heads, with one lock left dangling in the case of Muslim slaves; they wore an iron ring on one foot as a symbol of their captivity. They were therefore easily identifiable on land. And it was on land that they spent much of their time. Although winter voyages were not rare (ferrying embassies, carrying out lightning raids, and so on), galley slaves were mostly laid off in the winter, and were often employed in activities that had nothing to do with the sea, for instance as spare hands in market gardens and workshops; some would trade on their own account, technically against the rules (at least in Venice), but important if they aimed to raise money with which to purchase their freedom. Even during the sailing season, they had to spend time on land awaiting orders to sail, and quarters, or bagni, were provided, often consisting of caverns and cells built deep within city walls and forming a reserved area with its own shops and markets. Conditions within the bagni varied from tolerable to miserable; homosexual rape was common. On the other hand, bagni often contained prayer-spaces: a mosque in the bagno of Livorno; room for church services in the bagno of Algiers. Tolerance of different religions was counterbalanced by a trend in some areas, such as North Africa, to change religion in order to win freedom, and Christian renegades played a major role in the Barbary fleets, often winning command.44
The oarsmen seem to have been well enough fed to carry out their arduous duty, accentuating the need for frequent landfalls. Different fleets supplied different combinations of diet, as in earlier centuries: in 1538 the rations for an oarsman, or ciurma, in the Sicilian galleys of the Spanish navy were 26 ounces of ship’s biscuit each day, with four ounces of meat on three days a week, substituted by stew (mainly vegetable) on the remaining four days. Ships out of Spain favoured chickpeas and the amount of meat on offer declined during the sixteenth century. Over this period, galleys were built to larger and larger measurements, while the cost of food was rising across western Europe. This meant that the cost of supplying the galleys became prohibitive by the late sixteenth century: ‘the appetite of the Mediterranean war galley, like that of Tyrannosaurus rex, had outgrown the capability of its environment to support it’.45 The enormous expense of the land campaigns of the Turks in the Balkans and Persia, and of the Spaniards in the Netherlands, which rose in revolt under Charles V’s son and successor, the dour Philip II, left little money to spare for the Mediterranean fleets of both sides, which became locked in stalemate.