CHAPTER XV
Since the beginning of time men have preyed upon their fellows; and since the building of the first navigable ships, piracy had existed in the Mediterranean. Since the Dark Ages it had been practised by Christians and Muslims alike, with or without the excuse of war and often with the clearest of consciences. To the Turks, the activities of the Knights of St John during their years in Rhodes would have merited no other name; while Ferdinand and Isabella, after their defeat of the Kingdom of Granada, would hardly have seen the constant harassment of Spanish shipping by Muslim raiders from North Africa as an honourable continuation of the war on the part of the vanquished. Yet such, in the eyes of those raiders, it was, and as the sixteenth century got under way, so this harassment took on a new dimension: the Barbary–or Berber–Coast became synonymous with piracy.
After the first appearance of the Arabs nearly nine hundred years before, the North African coast–with the exception of Melilla, which had been occupied by the Spaniards in 1497 and remains to this day Spanish territory139–had been controlled by the Umayyad, Abassid and Fatimid Caliphates, the Almoravids and the Almohads, and various other smaller dynasties such as the Beni Hafs in Tunis, the Beni Ziyan in the central Maghreb and the Beni Merin in Morocco. Their rule, for the most part, was not unenlightened. They allowed freedom of worship to such modest Christian communities as existed within their borders; in the thirteenth century there was even a Bishop of Fez, where Leo Africanus–whose writings remained, for some four centuries, one of Europe’s principal sources of information about Islam–had served as a registrar in the ‘strangers’ hospital’. He testified in about 1526 to the ‘civilitie, humanitie and upright dealing of the Barbarians…a civill people [who] prescribe lawes and constitutions unto themselves’ and were learned in the arts and sciences. It seems, moreover, that they normally enjoyed fairly close commercial relations with Sicily and the Italian mercantile republics, and were well known even to the English merchants of the fifteenth century, for whom Algiers was a good deal more easily accessible than Constantinople or even Venice. But although their rulers could prohibit piracy, they could never prevent private freebooters from setting sail, and the Christian victims–especially the Sardinians, Maltese, Genoese and Greeks–gave as good as they got. Until the end of the fourteenth century, indeed, they gave rather better; they, rather than the Muslims, were the chief terrorists of the Mediterranean. Only with the coming of the large commercial fleets did their occupation lose something of its savour; thenceforth it is the Moorish corsairs who assume centre stage.
The fifteenth century, as we have seen, witnessed two cataclysmic events, one at each end of the Middle Sea: in the east, the fall of Constantinople in 1453–with the consequent closure of the Black Sea to Christian navigation–and in the west the gradual expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the years following 1492. Both led to a proliferation of rootless vagabonds–in the east Christians, in the west Muslims–all of them ruined, disaffected and longing for revenge; and many of them adopted the buccaneering life. The Christians would normally establish their bases in the central Mediterranean: in Sicily, or Malta, or among the countless islands off the Dalmatian coast. The Muslims, on the other hand, could only join their co-religionists in North Africa. Between Tangier and Tunis there were some 1,200 miles and, in what was for the most part a fertile and well-watered coastal strip, innumerable tideless natural harbours ideal for their purposes. And so the legend of the Barbary Coast was born.
Of all the pirates of that coast, the two greatest were brothers: Aruj and Khizr–better known as Kheir-ed-Din–Barbarossa. Born on the island of Mytilene (the modern Lesbos), they were the sons of a retired Greek-born janissary, then working as a potter, and his wife who was formerly the widow of a Greek priest. (Since all janissaries had originally been Christians before their forcible conversion, the Barbarossa brothers possessed not a drop of Turkish, Arab or Berber blood–a fact to which their famous red beards were further testimony.) In his early youth Aruj–the elder of the two–had taken part in an unsuccessful expedition against the Knights of St John, during which he had been captured and forced to serve in their galleys. Ransomed–we have no idea by whom–he was soon afterwards entrusted with a privateer by merchants of Constantinople, and served under the Mameluke ruler of Egypt.
Some time during the very first years of the century, he and his brother appeared in Tunis with two galleots–basically open boats with about seventeen oars a side, each oar manned by two or perhaps three rowers; and in 1504, in the channel that runs between the island of Elba and the Italian mainland, Aruj won his first major prizes: two papal galleys, loaded to the gunwales with precious goods from Genoa. They were bound for Civitavecchia, but they never reached it; boarded and captured, they were brought proudly back to Tunis.
In the following years several Spanish vessels were also attacked, with similar results; and at last, in 1509, Cardinal Ximenes despatched the celebrated Don Pedro Navarro, with no less than ninety ships and an army of 11,000, ostensibly to spread Christianity along the North African coast but in fact to bring the miscreants to book. When Oran was captured at the cost of only thirty Spanish lives, 4,000 of its inhabitants were massacred in cold blood and 5,000 carried off to Spain, together with plunder valued at 500,000 gold ducats; in the year following, Bougie and Tripoli went the same way. But Aruj, who had by now taken over the island of Djerba as his base of operations, was growing steadily stronger, and in 1512 he responded to an appeal by the exiled ruler of Bougie–forced out by Don Pedro–to restore him in return for the free use of the port. After a week of heavy bombardment, the Spanish garrison was about to surrender when a lucky shot took off Aruj’s left arm; the siege was raised and the fleet returned to Tunis, though not without capturing a Genoese galleot on the way.
The Genoese were shortly to have their revenge; their admiral Andrea Doria sped with twelve galleys to Tunis, sacked the fortress and captured half the pirate fleet. But Aruj, his wound healed, returned to the attack and in 1516 received another appeal–this time from Prince Selim of Algiers. The city had not been conquered by Don Pedro, but two years before, in an attempt to prevent the constant Algerian attacks on Spanish shipping, the Spaniards had fortified an offshore island in the bay known as the Penon, from which they virtually controlled the harbour, threatening all traffic in both directions. Aruj did not hesitate. Bad luck had prevented him from regaining Bougie, but Algiers was a far bigger prize and would, incidentally, make a superb capital for the great Barbary kingdom that had long been his dream.
By now Aruj was powerful enough to mobilise a fleet of sixteen galleots–under the command of his brother Khizr–and an army of some 6,000 men. With this he marched along the coast to Algiers, pausing only at Cherchel, some miles to the west, where another sea adventurer, a Turk named Kara Hassan, had carved out a little sultanate for himself and amassed a small army of Moors and Turks, together with a number of ships. These Barbarossa needed, but rather than negotiate an alliance with Kara Hassan he found it simpler, with a blow of his scimitar, to strike off his head. Arrived in Algiers, he at once began a heavy bombardment on the island fortress; three weeks later, however, he had made little appreciable impact and so, being clearly in danger of losing face with the Prince, changed his plan. A few days later Selim was murdered in his bath, and Aruj had himself formally proclaimed Sultan.
The people of Algiers saw all too clearly the mistake they had made in inviting Barbarossa to help them, and it was not long before they opened secret talks with the Spanish garrison on the Penon to bring about his downfall. But Aruj, with his network of spies throughout the city, soon got wind of what was happening. One Friday, when all the leading citizens were gathered in the great mosque, the doors were slammed shut and the worshippers found themselves surrounded by armed men. One after another they were bound with their own turbans, and were then led to the main door to witness the beheading of the chief conspirators.
News of the coup soon reached Spain, where Ximenes was seriously alarmed. In May 1517 he sent out his second expedition against Aruj: 10,000 men under the leadership of the country’s leading admiral, Diego de Vera. Once again, Barbarossa acted quickly. Falling on the Spaniards while they were still unloading and before they had time to reform, he killed some 3,000 of them. The remainder hastily re-embarked and fled for their lives. Even then, luck was against them. Towards nightfall a sudden storm sprang up and drove many of the ships ashore, where Barbarossa’s men were waiting. It was a dismally depleted fleet that struggled back to its homeland. A month later the ruler of Tenes, a city some ninety miles west of Algiers, was foolhardy enough to march against the corsair; his army in its turn was smashed to bits, and, although he himself managed to escape to the hills, a few days later his city fell to Aruj, who once more proclaimed himself Sultan. The city of Tlemcen, 200 miles further to the west and some way inland, quickly followed; when Aruj entered it in September, the head of its former ruler was borne before him on a lance. With the exception of Oran, Bougie, the Penon and a few other fortresses along the coast, Aruj Barbarossa was now master of virtually all the territory that forms the modern republic of Algeria. It had taken him just thirteen years.
But Oran was to prove his Achilles’s heel. Soon after the arrival in Spain of Charles I–later the Emperor Charles V–in September 1517, the city’s governor, the Marquis of Comares, had returned to Spain to pay him homage and to discuss the general situation in North Africa, which was now becoming desperate. The Barbarossas were growing more powerful with every month that passed; the few remaining Spanish possessions on the coast were increasingly threatened. Now, surely, was the moment to strike again, before it was too late; this time, however, the enemy’s strength and military skill must not be underestimated, as they had so tragically been on previous occasions. The young King was quick to agree. He immediately gave orders for an expedition to be prepared through the coming winter. It was to sail in the early spring, when it had orders to track down Barbarossa and destroy him.
This time it was a veritable armada that reached Oran in the first months of 1518, and an army of trained veterans that at once set out for Tlemcen. Mistrusting the defences of the city, Aruj sent an urgent appeal for additional men and equipment from the Sultan of Fez, but the Sultan prevaricated; meanwhile, the Spanish army was approaching and there was no time to be lost. Tlemcen would have to be sacrificed; Aruj had no choice but to retreat to Algiers. But–probably owing to his fruitless waiting for the aid from Fez that never came–he had left it too late. Comares learned of his departure and set off in pursuit. Aruj had excellent horses, but they were no match for the Spanish thoroughbreds, and through forced marches the Spaniards steadily gained on him. It is said that Aruj scattered gold and jewels behind him to delay his pursuers, but Comares forbade his men to dismount and finally caught up with him as he and his army were fording a mountain river. Aruj and his vanguard had already crossed it, but he turned back to join the remainder who had not yet done so, thus presenting a united front to the Spanish force. It was on that riverbank that he made his last stand, and there, still laying about him with his one arm, that he was struck down in his forty-fourth year.
His end was worthy of all that had gone before. He had been fearless, sometimes reckless, perhaps the very first and greatest of those swash-buckling corsairs who were to blaze their trail through succeeding centuries. Of all his contemporaries, it was said that only Hernán Cortés was his equal for bravery. It might be added that in his own astonishing achievement–starting as he did a discredited foreigner without allies and, in the teeth of local hostility and everything that Spain could hurl against him, creating through sheer force of character in a few short years a strong and durable North African state–only he was the equal of the greatest of the conquistadors.
For the Marquis of Comares, the death of the first Barbarossa and the destruction of his army opened the way to Algiers. Had he marched on the city, it would surely have fallen, and with Algiers in Spanish hands, the rest of North Africa would soon have been his. But he did nothing of the kind. Instead, he returned directly to Oran–and the opportunity was lost to Spain for three hundred years. Meanwhile, Khizr–or, as we must now call him, Kheir-ed-Din–Barbarossa took on the mantle of his brother.
It was a hard act to follow, but Kheir-ed-Din had never lacked confidence. He may not have had quite the panache of Aruj, but he possessed all his brother’s ambition, all his courage, and–arguably–rather more statesmanship and political wisdom. It is unlikely, for example, that Aruj would ever have considered sending ambassadors to Constantinople to make a formal presentation of the new Province of Algiers to the Sultan. For Selim I, who had conquered Egypt only the year before, here was an invaluable westward extension to his African empire. He instantly appointed Kheir-ed-Din his beylerbey, or governor-general, and provided him with a guard of honour of 2,000 janissaries. With their help all the Spanish conquests except Oran and the nigh-impregnable Penon outside the harbour of Algiers were regained.
Next, alliances were sealed with all the principal Arab and Berber tribes of the interior. In a remarkably short time the second Barbarossa, considerably more powerful than the first had ever been, dominated the central and western Mediterranean. Around him he gathered a splendid company of corsair captains. They included Dragut, another converted Christian, who became known as ‘the Drawn Sword of Islam’; Sinan, ‘the Jew of Smyrna’, who was suspected of the black arts because he could take a declination reading with a crossbow; the redoubtable Aydin Reis, known by the Spaniards as Cachadiablo; and perhaps half a dozen others, all of them superb seamen. Between May and October of every year no foreign vessel was safe from their attacks; nor did they hesitate to pass through the straits to the open Atlantic, where they would lie in wait for the Spanish galleons returning from the Caribbean to Cadiz. But it was not only treasure that they were looking for; every bit as profitable were Christian prisoners, who could either be enslaved and set to work in the galleys or, occasionally, ransomed for gold.
One incident in particular illustrates the effect of the Barbary pirates in the Middle Sea. In 1529 Aydin Reis set out with fourteen small galleots on a raiding expedition to Mallorca, where he heard of a large party of Moriscos–‘converted’ Muslims–who wished to escape from their Spanish masters and were ready to pay good money for a passage to North Africa. Landing secretly by night, he embarked 200 families and, with a considerable amount of treasure, set sail for home. It happened that at just that moment there arrived a fleet of eight large Spanish galleons under a certain General Portundo. It was returning from Genoa, whence Portundo had escorted Charles V to be crowned Emperor by the Pope at Bologna, and carried numerous grandees who had attended the ceremony. Aydin quickly landed his passengers then swung out to sea, attacked and boarded the flagship. In the hand-to-hand fighting that followed, Portundo was killed. By the time the battle was over, one of the galleons had escaped to Ibiza; the other seven had all been captured. The Muslim galley slaves were released from their chains, to be replaced at the oars by their erstwhile masters; the damaged ships were repaired; the Moriscos were re-embarked; and the seven great prizes–with their distinguished passengers, for whom good fat ransoms could be expected–were towed back in triumph.
At last Barbarossa felt himself ready to tackle the Penon. Situated as it was at the very entrance to Algiers harbour, it had long been a menace to his shipping, but it was only now that he had sufficient heavy artillery to make the necessary impact. On 6 May 1560 the attack began. The fortress was bombarded day and night for fifteen days before he ordered the final assault, by which time the men of the Spanish garrison had no fight left in them. The building was then dismantled and Christian slaves were employed for the next two years, to construct, using the stones, the huge mole which joins the island to the mainland and still protects the harbour on its western side.
Why, in the first half of the sixteenth century, did the Muslim world enjoy such a degree of naval supremacy in the Mediterranean? First of all, because it had few Christian competitors. Venice and Genoa controlled the Adriatic, together with the Ionian Sea immediately to the south, but the Knights of St John–the finest fighting seamen of their day–had been expelled from Rhodes in 1522 and found their new home in Malta only seven years later; it would be some time before they could hope to regain their former influence and strength. Spain, as we have seen, did her best to play an active part, but her principal energies were directed towards the New World. Besides, Christianity remained hopelessly divided. If Spain and France, Pope and Empire, the Eastern and the Western Churches, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily and the princes of north Italy could have made common cause, the outlook for the subjects of the Sultan might have been grim indeed, but Europeans always seemed far more interested in killing one another than in making a united stand against the Turk. Islam, by contrast, remained virtually united.
One Christian admiral only seemed able to hold his own. In 1532 the Genoese Andrea Doria won several victories over Ottoman fleets in Greek waters. Paradoxically, however, it was these successes that brought Barbarossa what was almost certainly the most glorious moment of his career. To Sultan Süleyman it was all too clear that the Turkish navy was vastly inferior to that of the corsair and must be drastically reorganised if it was to hold its own in the Mediterranean. Moreover, there was only one man who could do it. Thus it was that in the spring of 1533 a delegation from the Sublime Porte arrived in Algiers, commanding Kheir-ed-Din to come at his earliest convenience to Constantinople.
The corsair accepted with alacrity. As a loyal subject of the Sultan–which he undoubtedly was–he must have fully appreciated the honour that was being done him, but he also had reasons of his own. For some time he had had his eye on Tunis, his immediate neighbour to the east. It had once been his and his brother’s headquarters, but in recent years neither he nor Aruj had paid it any particular attention. In 1526, however, a new ruler of the Beni Hafs dynasty had come to the throne, after the murder of (it is said) twenty-two of his brothers.140 He had quickly proved a disaster, and by 1532 Barbarossa was receiving regular appeals from his friends in Tunis to assume power there himself. Before he could take such a step, however, he needed the Sultan’s blessing; if he could also persuade Süleyman to provide him with arms and men, so much the better.
He set sail the following August, laden with appropriate presents for the Sultan which included–if we are to believe Sandoval, Bishop of Pamplona–some 200 young Christian women for his harem, each of them carrying in her hand a gift of gold or silver; and he was received in similar style. A few days later, with the title of Pasha, he was appointed member of the Divan and Captain General of the Fleet. He was to remain in Constantinople nearly a year, during which time he virtually created the Ottoman navy. The French Secretary in the city, Jean Chesneau, reported in 1543:
The supremacy of Turkey at sea dates from Kheir-ed-Din’s first winter in the dockyards of this city…Over at Pera [the northeastern side of the Golden Horn] there is a shipyard on the shore where they both build and maintain galleys and other ships. Normally there are two hundred skilled master-craftsmen working here…In charge of all this there is a Captain-General, whom the Turks call the Beylerbey of the Sea, who also has charge of the navy when it goes out…Before he took charge the Turks, apart from a few corsairs, knew nothing of the seaman’s art. When they needed crews for a fleet, they went into the mountains of Greece and Anatolia and brought in the shepherds…and put them to row in the galleys and to serve aboard the other ships. This was quite useless, for they knew neither how to row or to be sailors, or even how to stand upright at sea. For this reason the Turks never made any showing. But all at once Barbarossa changed the entire system…Inspiring his men with his own marvellous energy, he laid out sixty-one galleys during the winter, and was able to take to the sea with a fleet of eighty-four vessels in the spring.
In July 1534 Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa led his new fleet out of the Golden Horn, through the Sea of Marmara and down the Hellespont into the Mediterranean. Rounding the toe of Italy, he seized and sacked Reggio, then passed through the Straits of Messina and headed up the coast towards Naples. Oddly enough, there was no reaction from the Spanish viceroy; did he, one wonders, receive a secret message from the corsair promising that if he met with no opposition the city would be left untouched? At any rate, Naples was spared, and the fleet sailed on to Sperlonga141 which proved rather less fortunate, the cream of its womanhood being seized and loaded on to the ships.
Barbarossa, however, had set his sights on one woman in particular–a woman whom he saw as a very special gift to the Sultan: Giulia Gonzaga, the exquisite young widow of Vespasiano Colonna. Generally accounted the most beautiful woman of her day, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian, her praises sung by Ariosto and Tasso, she kept an elegant and cultivated little court in her palace at Fondi. This town lies some twelve miles inland from Terracina, and Kheir-ed-Din with his small raiding party had hoped to take it, and Giulia, by surprise. Fortunately she received warning a few minutes before their arrival and, still in her nightdress, made her escape with a single retainer–whom she later condemned to death on the grounds that he had taken advantage of her distress and been over-bold. (In the circumstances, one suspects, he probably had.) Fondi, as might have been expected, paid the usual price.
Laden with the captive women–most of them destined for the Turkish slave markets–and with loot from the pillaged towns, a few vessels now returned to Constantinople. They also carried the greater part of the janissaries made available by Sultan Selim–probably ordered home by Süleyman, who had gone to war with Persia and needed all the manpower he could lay his hands on. The bulk of the fleet, however, headed southwest, towards Tunis. For Barbarossa his Italian expedition had been merely a preliminary, a harmless little exercise designed to impress the Sultan with his new fleet in general and his new admiral in particular. Now it was time for the serious business: the toppling of Moulay Hassan and the annexation of his Tunisian kingdom. He arrived outside the harbour on 16 August and immediately began the bombardment, only to find that Moulay Hassan had already taken flight. Two days later, with 1,000 local irregulars, the fugitive ruler made a half-hearted effort to return, but when the corsairs opened fire a second time he once again hastily withdrew. All that winter Barbarossa kept his men busy, strengthening the harbour defences and building an imposing new fortress, big enough to accommodate a garrison of 500 men.
He need not have bothered, for this time he had overreached himself. Perhaps, when planning the Tunis operation, he had underestimated the probable reaction of Charles V, and the Emperor’s power to retaliate; in any case, he had made a serious mistake. A glance at the map will show that Charles could not conceivably accept his annexation of a country less than 100 miles away from the two prosperous ports of western Sicily–Trapani and Marsala–and only very little more from Palermo itself. The idle and pleasure-loving Moulay Hassan had constituted no danger, but now that Barbarossa was in Tunis the Emperor’s own hold on Sicily was seriously threatened. As soon as he heard the news, he began to plan an immense expedition to recover the city. The invasion fleet would number ships from Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Malta–where the Knights of St John had recently established themselves following their eviction from Rhodes–and Genoa; Andrea Doria would once again be in command. The Emperor himself with the Spanish contingent–estimated at some 400 ships–sailed from Barcelona at the end of May 1535 to the agreed rendezvous at Cagliari in Sardinia, where they arrived on 10 June and picked up another 200. Then on the 13th they turned to the south, and on the following day hove to in the roadstead outside the port of Tunis.
Against such an armada, Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa knew that there was little hope of retaining his hold on the city. Having no intention, however, of losing more ships than necessary, he had taken the precaution of sending fifteen of his best vessels along the coast to Bône, about half-way to Algiers, where they could be kept safely in reserve. He and his men fought valiantly, as they always did, but on 14 July–exactly a month after Charles’s arrival–the fortress of La Goletta that defended the inner harbour was stormed by the Knights of St John, and a week later the 12,000 Christian captives who were being held in the city somehow smashed their way to freedom and flung themselves on their erstwhile captors. Tunis was effectively lost–and now it was Barbarossa’s turn to flee. In company with his two fellow captains, Aydin Reis and Sinan, and as many other of his men who were able to follow him, he slipped out of the city and made for Bône.
At this point Charles should have ordered his army to leave at once in pursuit and force Kheir-ed-Din into a pitched battle. Had he done so, he might have destroyed the corsair forever, and the Emperor’s 600 ships should have had no difficulty in preventing him from escaping by sea. But the soldiers–and probably the sailors too–were far too busy raping and plundering, as the rules of war allowed them to do for three days and nights. Having agreed to pay the Emperor an annual tribute, Moulay Hassan was then formally reinstated in the empty shell of his city, and the Spaniards, having repaired and refortified La Goletta, declared it Spanish territory and equipped it with a permanent garrison. The expedition, the victorious Christians all agreed, had been a huge success. Tunis was once again in friendly hands, Sicily was secure, thousands of their co-religionists had been freed from captivity, and–best of all, perhaps–the previously invincible Barbarossa had been conclusively defeated. They could all return to their various homelands, well satisfied with what they had achieved.
Or so they thought. The Emperor actually sent Andrea Doria on an expedition westward along the coast to find the fugitive corsair and bring him to book. He did not know his man. It was typical of Kheired-Din Barbarossa that, instead of slinking back to Algiers as they had assumed he would, he put in at Bône only to collect more ships and supplies before immediately heading north to the Balearic Islands. As his squadron approached, the islanders understandably assumed it to be part of the imperial fleet returning to Barcelona, an impression confirmed when it was seen to be flying the imperial colours; there was no resistance, therefore, when it glided soundlessly into the harbour of Mahon in the southeast corner of Minorca. A Portuguese merchantman which was lying there at anchor fired a friendly salute; then, suddenly, the squadron opened fire. The Portuguese, taken by surprise, defended themselves as well as they could; but their ship was easily captured. It was only a matter of hours before the whole port, and indeed the whole city, was sacked and destroyed.
In the late autumn of 1535 Barbarossa made his second journey to Constantinople. He was never to return to North Africa. His final years were to be spent less as a corsair than as Admiral of the Ottoman fleet, confounding the Sultan’s enemies, notably the Spaniards, Venetians and Genoese. Until this time Venice had been allowed to pursue her mercantile activities largely unopposed. Süleyman’s brilliant Grand Vizir, Ibrahim Pasha, is believed to have been born a Venetian citizen on the Dalmatian coast; certainly, after his forcible conversion to Islam, he always kept a soft spot for Venice in his heart and did his best to respect her Mediterranean possessions. In the spring of 1536, however, Ibrahim was murdered at the instigation of Süleyman’s wife Roxelana, who wanted his post for her son-in-law Rüstem Pasha.142 Henceforth the Serenissima would be as open to attack as were Spain and Genoa.
That same year an imperial fleet under Andrea Doria captured ten Turkish merchantmen off Messina, following up this coup with an intrepid raid on a section of the Ottoman fleet off Paxos, in the Ionian Sea. The Sultan, determined that these two insults should be properly avenged, conceived a daring plan. In the spring of 1537 he personally would lead an army of 20,000 men through Thrace and down the Balkan peninsula as far as Valona, in what is now Albania; meanwhile, Barbarossa would sail with a fleet of 100 ships to the same port. There he would embark the army and carry it across to Brindisi, whose governor had been suborned and had promised to open the city gates. Unfortunately for Süleyman, this plan misfired when the governor’s treachery was discovered just in time. With both his army and navy already in the Adriatic, the Sultan had to decide quickly on an alternative. While he was deliberating, Barbarossa staged a series of lightning raids along the coast of Apulia, returning with the usual shiploads of treasure and slaves to learn that his master had decided to besiege the island of Corfu.
The largest of the Ionian Islands, Corfu had technically been a Venetian colony since the Fourth Crusade.143 In the distribution of the former Byzantine territories of 1204, old Doge Dandolo had laid claim to a huge share, for which the Republic had no real appetite nor any means of properly digesting it. She had therefore had no choice but to leave the Ionian Islands to the Greek and Italian adventurers who occupied them. Since then Corfu had fallen into several successive hands. At first occupied by the Venetian family of Venier, it had at various times been held by the Despotate of Epirus, Manfred of Sicily and the house of Anjou, returning to Venice in 1386. Unlike all its neighbouring islands except Paxos, however, it had never been taken by the Ottomans (and, incidentally, never would be). In recent years it had been protected by its Venetian status, but Ibrahim Pasha was now dead and to Süleyman with his huge army it must have seemed easy prey. He landed his entire army and all his ordnance–some thirty cannon, including a gigantic fifty-pounder, the largest in the world at that time–surrounded the chief citadel of the town and began to pound it into submission.
Fortunately, Corfu’s defences were strong. The town, half-way up the eastern coast of the island, lay behind and below the high citadel crowning the rocky peninsula that juts out towards the shores of Albania, commanding the approaches from both land and sea. Within this citadel was a garrison of some 2,000 Italians and roughly the same number of Corfiots, together with the crews of such Venetian vessels as happened to be in port at the time. Food and ammunition were in plentiful supply; morale was excellent. It needed to be, for the defenders now found to their dismay that they were faced not just with an attack from the sea but with a combined naval and military operation, carefully planned and on a considerable scale. The devastation suffered by the local peasants, as well as by the ordinary citizens, was appalling, but the citadel, despite constant battering from Turkish cannon on land and sea and several attempts to take it by storm, somehow stood firm. Then, mercifully, came the rain. Corfu has always been famous for the ferocity of its storms, and those which burst upon it in the early days of September 1537 seem to have been exceptional even by local standards. The cannon became immovable in the mud; dysentery and malaria spread through the Turkish camp. After barely three weeks’ siege, the Ottoman army re-embarked on the 15th, leaving a triumphant if still somewhat incredulous garrison to celebrate its victory.
But the war was not over. Barbarossa’s fleet was still active, and the other Mediterranean harbours and islands that remained in Venetian hands were not as defensible as Corfu. Many of them, though theoretically under the protection of the Republic, were in fact ruled by private families who had no means of staving off any sustained attack. But Barbarossa was remorseless. One by one they fell: Nauplia and Malvasia (now Monemvasia) on the east coast of the Peloponnese, then the islands–Skyros, Aegina, Patmos, Ios, Paros, Astipalaia–all of them considerably nearer to the Turkish mainland than to Venice, whose fleet was now blocked by the throng of Ottoman ships in the Adriatic narrows.
The Most Serene Republic had been brought to her knees, and it was Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa who was responsible for her humiliation. No wonder that when he returned to Constantinople it was to a hero’s welcome such as had never been known. But he gave as good as he received: 400,000 gold pieces, 1,000 young women and 1,500 youths. There was also a personal present for the Sultan: 400 more youths, dressed in scarlet and carrying vessels of gold and silver, bales of precious silks and embroidered purses almost bursting with gold coins.
For the Venetians, by the time the triumphant Barbarossa sailed into the Golden Horn the victory of Corfu had already gone sour; every week was now bringing them reports of new defeats, new losses. In 1538 he was again on the warpath, terrorising first Skyros and Skiathos in the Sporades and then Andros in the Cyclades, and many smaller islands nearby. From the larger and more important islands he exacted an annual tribute; the smaller were obliged to provide manpower for the galleys, since the vast fleet that he was building needed literally thousands of oarsmen, of whom there was a chronic shortage. He then turned south to Crete, still Venice’s chief colony in the eastern Mediterranean. The fortifications of the capital, Candia, proved impregnable, but over eighty villages along the coast and several of the outlying islands were not so lucky.
Meanwhile, the European powers seemed incapable of forming alliances that were not poisoned by mutual suspicion and petty bickering almost before they began. In the summer of 1538 one such attempt, embarked upon by the Emperor, the Pope and Venice with all the fervour of a Crusade and a degree of optimism such that the participants actually made advance plans for the division of the Ottoman Empire between them, ended not as they had imagined, with the capture of Constantinople, but with a resounding victory for Barbarossa. It was while he was ranging along the south coast of Crete that he received reports of a huge combined fleet heading south down the Adriatic towards the Ionian Islands. The Venetian contingent alone consisted of eighty-one ships–some under sail but the majority oared galleys–under one of the Republic’s leading admirals, Vincenzo Cappello; the papal contribution, of another thirty-six galleys, was commanded by another Venetian, Marco Grimani, and these were joined when they reached Corfu by another thirty from Spain. Yet even this was only the vanguard: expected shortly were the forty-nine vessels sent by the Emperor, which had been delayed pending the arrival of his secret weapon: a further squadron of fifty so-called galleons–literally, ‘large galleys’–square-sailed and heavily armed, which had proved their worth in the Atlantic and the New World but which had never yet been seen in the Mediterranean. Predictably, Charles had entrusted the command of the whole enterprise to his trusted admiral Andrea Doria.
To set against this, Barbarossa could muster about 150 ships of his own, under Dragut, Sinan and several other former corsairs of long experience and tested courage. Here too was a formidable force; if numbers were all, however, it would have been no match for its opponents. But the Turkish fleet was united; the Christian was anything but. No Venetian, for a start, would willingly submit to being commanded by a Genoese; nor was there any love lost between Italians and Spaniards. There were differences, too, in long-term objectives. Cappello was interested above all in protecting the Ionian Islands, commanding as they did the gateway to the Adriatic. Grimani’s chief concern was Italy’s western seaboard, the ports of Civitavecchia and Ostia and indeed Rome itself, only a few miles from Ostia up the Tiber. The Spaniards cared for neither of these things: Spain was too far away. They doubtless hoped to teach the Turks a lesson, but when that was done they wanted above all to get home with any prizes that might be obtainable. Discord, in short, could be virtually guaranteed, and tempers were not improved by the continued delay of Doria and his fleet, thanks to which the enforced inactivity at Corfu was prolonged from days into weeks.
At last Marco Grimani could stand it no longer. Leading the papal squadron out of Corfu, he sailed south to Preveza at the entrance to the Bay of Arta. This huge inlet of the Ionian Sea is in fact more of a gulf than a bay. Covering some 250 square miles, it is entered by a narrow, winding channel in places only a quarter of a mile wide. It thus provides an extraordinary natural harbour, and Grimani’s purpose may well have been to satisfy himself that the Turkish fleet was not lying in wait there. It proved not to be; on the other hand, the fortress of Preveza was fully garrisoned and disposed to fight, and its cannon inflicted considerable damage on the raiders before they escaped to safety.
Had Grimani delayed his little expedition by another few days, he would have found his worst fears confirmed. Barely had his squadron disappeared over the northern horizon than Barbarossa’s fleet sailed up from the south and turned straight into the bay. Here, off Actium, at the very spot where Octavian had met Mark Antony 1,570 years before, he prepared for battle.
It was not until 22 September that Andrea Doria finally arrived at Corfu with his galleons. By this time reports of Barbarossa’s movements had reached the island, and on the 25th the entire fleet hove to off Preveza. But what was it to do next? To sail up the narrow channel in line under the guns first of the fortress and then of the Turkish fleet would have been suicidal; in the circumstances it would have been better to attack the fortress, capture it, and turn its guns against the enemy. Doria, however, refused to consider such a course. Any serious losses on land might disastrously weaken his fleet if a sea battle were to follow; he knew, too, that this was the season of the equinoctial gales, when the Mediterranean was at its most treacherous. In the event of a sudden storm–and September storms could blow up in half an hour from a clear blue sky–he might be obliged to withdraw the fleet to some lee shore, leaving any land forces unsupported. The situation looked suspiciously like a stalemate.
It was doubtless for this reason that, on the night of the 26th, Doria gave the order to weigh anchor and head south into Turkish waters. Barbarossa, fully conscious of his enemy’s strength but with no idea of his destination, would have no option but to pursue him, and the two fleets could meet in the open sea. To this degree Doria was right; as his ships sailed down the west coast of the island of Leucas, the Turks did indeed emerge from the Bay of Arta and follow them. His problem was that his fleet, consisting as it did partly of oared galleys and partly of sailing galleons, was impossible to keep together. When the wind was fresh, the galleons swept ahead; when it suddenly changed or dropped, the galleys either overtook them or threw away their advantage and–to the immense relief of the oarsmen–waited for them to catch up. Thus it was that by the time his flagship was rounding the southwestern cape of Leucas some of the heaviest galleons were lying almost becalmed only a few miles from their point of departure.
And then the wind did indeed change. On the morning of the 28th it was blowing from due south, and the fleet was strung out all along the west coast of the island. This, surely, would have been the moment for Doria to return, with all sails set, to the north, regroup his ships and meet the Turks head on. Inexplicably, he remained where he was. Meanwhile, the Ottoman fleet–almost entirely oared–rounded the northern tip of Leucas, Barbarossa in the centre, with Dragut commanding the right wing and Salah Reis the left. There, dead ahead of them, was the largest, strongest, heaviest and therefore–in the conditions prevailing–the slowest of all the allied vessels. She was known as the Galleon of Venice. Commanded by one of the Republic’s most promising young captains, Alessandro Condulmer, she carried a huge weight of cannon–as much as the average coastal fortress–and was well able to defend herself; but, sheltered as she now was by the mountains of Leucas, she was immobile. Her commander despatched a fast pinnace to his admiral with an urgent appeal for help.
Barbarossa attacked, but Condulmer gave as good as he got–indeed rather better, waiting until the attacking Turkish ships came within point-blank range and then blasting them one after another out of the water. He knew, however, that he could not hold out indefinitely against such an enemy; everything depended on the swift arrival of Doria’s galleys. But they did not come. With the wind behind them–which it was–they could have made the journey in three hours at the most; we know too that both Vincenzo Cappello and Marco Grimani pressed their admiral hard to sail with his whole fleet to the rescue. Dusk was falling when he eventually agreed; even then he insisted on taking the fleet in a wide arc to the west.
So Condulmer was obliged to fight on unaided–demonstrating, incidentally, that a sturdy galleon with a highly-trained, well-disciplined crew, even when becalmed, was a more effective fighting weapon than any number of oared galleys. Consequently he, his ship and most of his men survived. But he could not affect the outcome of the battle. By the time Barbarossa turned his ships back to Preveza at sunset he had captured at least two galleys, one Venetian and one from the papal squadron, and five Spanish sail. Doria, with the wind behind him, could still have pursued his adversary at first light the next morning. His forces were far stronger, his firepower infinitely superior. With no difficulty at all he could have turned the tables and inflicted heavy damage on the Turkish fleet. Instead, he ignored it utterly and headed back to Corfu.
Why did Genoa’s foremost naval commander act as he did? In the words of a French naval historian–who was also an admiral–‘For less than this the English shot Admiral Byng in 1756.’144 Was it simply Doria’s hatred of Venice? Since he was neither a coward nor a fool, treachery or deliberate malice are the only possible explanations. Whichever is the true one, by his refusal to engage with a vastly inferior enemy he threw away an excellent chance of a decisive victory. Thanks exclusively to him, that victory belonged to Barbarossa. The immediate loser, beyond a shadow of doubt, was Venice.
It was by now clear that Venice must negotiate a peace with the Sultan on whatever terms she could. Of all her recent losses, those which crippled her most were Nauplia and Malvasia, her last trading posts in the Peloponnese, for the return of which she was prepared to pay a ransom of 300,000 ducats. This was by any standards a huge sum, and it was thought that Süleyman would be only too happy to accept it. He proved, however, to be nothing of the kind, and in October 1540 Venice was obliged to agree to a treaty on terms far harsher than she had ever contemplated. The sum she had offered as a ransom was exacted as general reparations, but there was to be no question of the return of Nauplia or Malvasia, or indeed any other of the territories lost in the past three years. In future, too, Venetian ships would not be allowed to enter or leave Turkish ports without permission. It was a blow from which the Republic was never entirely to recover, but it was symptomatic of a situation that was giving increasing concern to the entire Christian Mediterranean. Everywhere it was becoming brutally clear that the days of expansion were gone, that those of retrenchment had set in. The patterns of trade were changing fast; even though the adverse economic effects had not yet proved as bad as the pessimists feared, there were no long-term grounds for optimism. The Turk was at the gates, his advance relentless, his appetite apparently insatiable; and the Christian West had failed to offer him any concerted resistance.
Barbarossa was now about fifty-five. He still had before him some seven years of service to his Sultan, years in which he was to distinguish himself as brilliantly as ever he had, but henceforth he was to fight at the side of a somewhat surprising new ally: Francis I of France. Already two years before, in 1536, we find a Turkish squadron wintering in the harbour of Marseille; in the years following, relations between the two powers–to the disgust of the rest of Christian Europe and indeed of a large number of Frenchmen–seem to have grown steadily more cordial. For Francis, here was an invaluable ally prepared to fight his battles with the Emperor; for Süleyman the Magnificent, an unrivalled chance of splitting the forces of Christendom more drastically then ever.
It was not until 1543 that these improbable allies moved against their common enemy, but when they did so they moved in strength. In the early summer of that year, no less than 100 Turkish galleys attacked Charles where he was at his most vulnerable, in south Italy. Sweeping up from the south, they sacked Reggio–where, according to one account, Barbarossa captured and subsequently married the governor’s daughter–and then, passing through the Straits of Messina, pressed remorselessly up the Calabrian coast, raiding and plundering as they went. On arrival at Gaeta they stormed and seized the fortress and wrought havoc within the city. A few days later they appeared off the mouth of the Tiber and fell upon Civitavecchia, before heading northwest to a prearranged rendezvous with the French at Marseille.
But now the trouble began. There was no sign of the stores and provisions which Barbarossa had ordered and upon which he had relied, and which Francis had promised would be awaiting him. The King’s representative and commander of his galleys, the young Duke of Enghien, grovelled in apology–eyebrows were raised, then and later, at the seemingly exaggerated deference shown to the former pirate by all the leading Frenchmen with whom he came in contact–but Barbarossa made no secret of his dissatisfaction, nor of his contempt for such unpardonable inefficiency; so angry, indeed, was he that he almost refused Enghien’s proposal that the joint fleet should sail east along the coast to Nice. This city, which since the late fourteenth century had enjoyed peace and prosperity under the Dukes of Savoy, had become a bone of contention between Francis and Charles almost as soon as their long rivalry began; now it faced the most merciless bombardment of its history.
If the siege of Nice in August 1543 is remembered at all in the city today, it is because of the courage of its local heroine. Early in the morning of the 15th, Barbarossa and Enghien had opened a breach in the walls near one of the principal towers, and the garrison was on the point of taking flight when a local woman named Caterina Segurana, with a few brave men whom she had summoned to support her, blocked its passage and forced it to stand firm. The town was temporarily saved, but Caterina had only delayed the inevitable. Just a week later, on the 22nd, the governor formally surrendered. In doing so, he was entitled–and doubtless expected–to be offered honourable terms, but within two days Nice was sacked and put to the torch. Inevitably, the Turks were blamed; in fact it was almost certainly the French soldiers who were responsible. Such, certainly, was the opinion of the Maréchal de Vieilleville, dictating his memoirs shortly before his death in 1571:
The city of Nice was plundered and burnt, for which neither Barbarossa nor the Saracens can be blamed, for when it occurred they were already far away…Responsibility for the outrage was thrown at poor Barbarossa to protect the honour and reputation of France, and indeed of Christianity itself.
Although the Ottoman fleet returned to Toulon for the winter, the siege and capture of Nice was the first and last joint operation of the Franco–Turkish alliance. In 1544 Francis made a pact with his old enemy Charles V and Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa returned to a hero’s welcome in Constantinople–ravaging en route Elba, Procida, Ischia and Lipari with its fellow Aeolian islands, all of which were imperial territory. Two years later he was dead, at the age of sixty-three. The only son that we know of, Hassan, in due course became ruler of Algeria, the kingdom that his father and uncle had created, but the old man’s true successor was his long-time lieutenant Dragut–known as ‘the living chart of the Mediterranean’–who continued his work. It was Dragut who in 1551 wrenched Tripoli after sixteen years from the hands of the Knights of St John,145 and who nine years later utterly routed a Spanish fleet sent to dislodge him. He was subsequently rewarded with the Sultanate of Tripoli, but he never hung up his sword; in 1565, aged eighty, he was killed in action during the siege of Malta.
But the siege of Malta is another story.