by Alan Mikhail
In November 1518, Shah Ismail moved a rebuilt force of twelve thousand soldiers to Baghdad, in preparation for launching attacks to the west, against the Ottomans’ new and still vulnerable eastern border. Selim countered by amassing his own troops in Syria—always mindful of the difficulties he faced in defending this distant frontier from his command post in Edirne. Direct confrontations between Selim’s and Ismail’s forces began in early 1519, despite that winter’s bitter cold and heavy snowfall. In far eastern Anatolia and northern Syria, Ismail had been able to capture several abandoned hilltop castles to use as lookout points and shelters for his troops during the extreme cold. Pre-Islamic kingdoms, the short-lived medieval Crusader states, and the powerful Abbasid Empire (whose capital was Baghdad) had constructed these fortifications in order to spot enemies coming over the horizon. When, in March 1519, the weather began to improve, the Ottomans attempted to retake one of the captured castles, but Safavid forces soundly repelled them, using guns they had recently acquired from the Portuguese to kill about a thousand Ottoman fighters. Reports even surfaced of Ottoman soldiers defecting to the Safavids.
As both armies began a total mobilization, this military confrontation between Muslim empires far off in the remote navel of the Middle East steadily drew in European powers, who understood its ramifications for their trading interests in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Not only did the Portuguese arm the Safavids, but Venetian spies relayed Selim’s plan to travel to the front so that he could personally lead his soldiers into Syria in June to wipe out the Safavids’ gains in the region. (Venetian reconnaissance reports serve as the most complete record of the course of the war in these years.) Still regretting his hurried retreat from Tabriz in 1514, Selim, now forty-nine, hungered to chase the Safavids out of Syria and all the way back to their capital, and to seize it for a second (and final) time. He dispatched a thousand gunners and a thousand additional soldiers to the east that June. At the same time, he received reports that the Safavids had sacked Mosul, in the north of Iraq. In that ancient, fiercely independent city on the banks of the Tigris, the Safavids slaughtered every Turk they could find. They did the same in Baghdad that summer, killing some twelve thousand Ottoman soldiers and civilians who had arrived there during one of the Ottomans’ thwarted campaigns for the city. Refugees able to flee to the safety of the Ottoman Empire reported that Ismail had somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand cavalry in Iraq, many guns from the Portuguese, and about 1,500 Ottoman defectors on his payroll. He had, in addition, enlisted Georgians and Tatars to fight alongside his troops. Since Selim had raided and antagonized both of these communities when he was governor of Trabzon, they stood more than ready to take up arms in Ismail’s employ.
In response to this troubling news, Selim—still in Edirne, but preparing to make his way to Istanbul—dispatched an imposing fleet of a hundred ships from the Danube to head east across the Black Sea to Trabzon with reinforcements of soldiers and supplies. He asked the empire’s leading clerics to renew their fatwas designating Shiites heretics and therefore sanctioning war against them. And he mobilized a force of nearly fifteen thousand troops to march east from Aleppo toward the Safavid front. Along the way, the soldiers faced jeers and harassment from disgruntled townspeople who were suffering not only from outbreaks of plague but also from lack of food—there was a drought that year—and who blamed the Ottomans for exacerbating their hardships. Retaliation by Ottoman soldiers and the commandeering of food supplies of course angered the local population even more. Recognizing an opportunity, Safavid forces campaigning in northern Syria won support by styling themselves the people’s defenders against their new and oppressive Ottoman rulers—the same tactic that the Ottomans had used to co-opt discontented populations to support them against the Byzantines in past centuries, and more recently against the Mamluks.
Throughout late 1519 and early 1520, Selim’s troops chased down internal enemies whom they suspected of supporting the Safavids. In March 1520, for example, a rebellion some ten thousand strong erupted in the north-central Anatolian towns of Amasya and Tokat. Many of the agitators were indeed Shiites acting in support of Ismail’s cause; many others joined the revolt not for ideological reasons, but to protest against recent imperial predations in their region. The Ottoman army’s monopolization of resources, and the security measures instituted because of the impending war, had made enemies out of otherwise loyal Sunni subjects.
UNLIKE PREVIOUS SULTANS, Selim had concentrated his military operations almost exclusively in the east. As he wrote in verse of his own reign in these years:
From Istambol’s throne a mighty host to Iran guided I;
Sunken deep in blood of shame I made the Golden Heads [the Safavids] to lie.
Glad the Slave [the Mamluks], my resolution, lord of Egypt’s realm became:
Thus I raised my royal banner e’en as the Nine Heavens high.
From the kingdom fair of Iraq to Hijaz these tidings sped,
When I played the harp of Heavenly Aid at feast of victory.
But despite Selim’s “feast of victory” in the east, by the spring of 1520 he had redirected his attention to one particular territory in the west: Morocco. His defeat of the Mamluks had earned him control of large portions of the North African coast as far west as Algeria, and he dreamed of going even farther. The northwest corner of Africa—opposite the Iberian peninsula—was potentially even more strategic than the continent’s northeast corner, the recently conquered Egypt.
Thus, even as Selim began to wage yet another war on his far eastern border, his mind’s eye kept watch on his new far western border in North Africa. Pushing west from Algeria into Morocco would give the Ottomans their first outpost on the Atlantic and put them on the threshold of the Iberian kingdoms. We can imagine Selim perched on his hunting steed in the quiet forests of Edirne, contemplating crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, like the Muslim conquerors of the eighth century, to retake Granada, or thinking back to his meeting with Piri Reis in Cairo. Perhaps, it had been a mistake to relinquish the Atlantic portion of Piri’s map after all. Capturing Morocco would bring Selim closer than any of his predecessors to making Vilayet Antilia a province of the Ottoman Empire.
CHAPTER
22
FULCRUM OF THE ATLANTIC
Sixteenth-century map of North Africa
AFTER WHAT ISABELLA AND FERDINAND INTERPRETED AS THEIR divinely scripted conquest of Granada in 1492, the end of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula, they understood that the only way to secure the city and their other gains along the peninsula’s long southern coastline was to bring North Africa squarely under Spanish control. Otherwise, Granada and the south would forever be vulnerable to a Muslim Reconquista. Muslim North Africa had long been a thorn in their side, and it remained a far more immediate concern than Columbus’s adventure into the still-unknown New World. During the 1490s, the Ottomans edged ever farther west in the Mediterranean, making the threat of Islam ever more pressing. After a brief military distraction in 1497, when they had to divert their forces to defend against a French invasion of their territories on the Italian peninsula, Isabella and Ferdinand launched what they described as a new Crusade against Islam in North Africa.
The first armed venture in this renewed Spanish effort, in September 1497, quickly captured the Moroccan coastal city of Melilla on the peninsula of Cape Three Forks. This almost effortless victory fueled the fire of those Spaniards who supported a more aggressive policy of penetration in North Africa. Within the Spanish court, others pressed Isabella and Ferdinand to focus their efforts on the consolidation of the peninsula rather than on foreign wars. The hawks, with Isabella at their head, carried the day, insisting that vengeful Iberian Muslims, who had been expelled from Spain in 1492, were collaborating with North African Muslims to launch attacks on Spain from across the sea. The only way to properly defend the Spanish mainland, they claimed, was to forge a territorial buffer zone.
For this Spanish imperialist faction,
a series of domestic uprisings between 1499 and 1501, known as the Rebellion of the Alpujarras, proved the critical need for a determined North Africa campaign. In the hilly southern region near Granada, local Muslims led a series of insurrections against Spanish attempts to forcibly convert a remaining pocket of Islam to Catholicism. As the Crown worked incessantly to eradicate any lingering remnants of Islam, burning Qur’ans and other Arabic texts, forbidding the speaking or writing of Arabic, and banning Muslim garb, it was met, not surprisingly, with strident resistance. The revolt of the Muslims of Alpujarra became increasingly violent and soon erupted into full-scale war. Ferdinand himself collected some of the massive firepower the Crown had assembled during the siege of Granada and led an army to battle the rebels.
At the same time that Ferdinand headed south, Isabella’s health began to decline. She would feel weak for months at a time and then recover, only to grow weary once again. In the fall of 1504, she became bedridden, suffering from dropsy (as edema was called then) and fever. On November 26 of that year, Isabella died at the age of fifty-three. Her death ended the reign of one of history’s most significant royals. She oversaw the expansion of Europe to the Americas, the Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Iberia, and the unification of Spain. “In all the realms,” one of her sympathetic court historians wrote, “her death was mourned with such great pain and sentiment, not just by her subjects and countrymen, but commonly by all.” Columbus, who had returned from his fourth and final voyage just a few months before Isabella’s death, deeply mourned the loss of his patron. It was, indeed, a profound loss, as after her death, the situation in the Caribbean—from a Spanish perspective—deteriorated rapidly. In Las Casas’s words, “all these island territories began to go to the dogs once news arrived of the death of our most gracious Queen Isabella.”
Isabella’s last testament made clear what she wanted her legacy to be: the conquest of Muslim Africa and Crusade against Islam. As part of the defense of Spain against another Muslim invasion, she instructed, for example, that Gibraltar should become part of the “permanent properties of the Crown and part of the royal patrimony,” and ordered that proceeds from the sale of her properties should be used to redeem two hundred Christian captives from the hands of the infidel Muslims (she also made provisions for the poor and for the maintenance of churches and convents). Either fittingly or ironically, depending on one’s point of view, Isabella instructed that she be buried in the Alhambra in Granada, the governing seat of the city’s former Muslim rulers, the symbol of the Reconquista, the very epicenter of her defeat of Islam. Freezing rain and mud hampered the progress of her funeral cortege, but she eventually reached her desired resting place. Though, in defiance of her final commands, her body was moved in 1521 to the newly constructed cathedral of Granada, it is her instructions that are the most telling: Isabella wanted to occupy for eternity a structure built by Muslims. Even in death, Isabella would continue to wage war against Islam.
Isabella’s death left the faction advocating for an aggressive policy in North Africa without one of its strongest backers. To steer that policy after her death, Ferdinand appointed a former corsair named Pedro Navarro as captain-general of Spain’s military campaign. Navarro had spent most of his career fighting for the Crown of Aragon in Italy, and had participated in the siege of an Ottoman-held island off the western coast of Greece. In the fall of 1509, he began implementing Ferdinand’s—really Isabella’s—plans. He led an expedition of four thousand men against the independent port of Bougie on the Algerian coast, across the sea from Marseille, in a region dominated by the indigenous Kabyle people. The Ottoman admiral Kemal Reis had temporarily captured Bougie in the late 1480s as a safe haven from which to stage military operations in the western Mediterranean, and Navarro now sought Bougie essentially for the same reasons: its protected harbor and its strategic location between the sea’s western and eastern halves. By the end of 1510, Navarro had captured Bougie as well as several other smaller North African coastal cities: Tenes, Dellys, Mostaganem, and Peñon.
He kept pushing east, all the way to the walled city of Tripoli in Libya, with its distinctive lookout towers. This became the watershed, the farthest eastward extension of Spanish hegemony in North Africa, as the increasing power of the Ottomans in the western Mediterranean would combine with other forces to steadily diminish Spain’s influence in North Africa. Ferdinand would never be able to fulfill Isabella’s final wishes for the destruction of Islam.
Tripoli
THE PEOPLE OF SPAIN’S frontier possessions in North Africa were almost all Muslims, who certainly had no love for Catholic colonial rule. These Christian dots in a sea of Islam, especially those farthest away from Spain, proved enormously difficult to defend and provision with supplies and military equipment. Even in Iberia itself, the Crown had failed to secure its rule over the Muslims who remained in the peninsula after 1492. The Alpujarra revolts, only one of many Muslim rebellions, would rage for years, despite—or, more accurately, because of—the ongoing attempts to forcibly convert Muslims, which continued until the early decades of the seventeenth century.
After Kemal Reis’s missions of the late 1480s, the Ottomans monitored the status of the Muslim populations of Spain and North Africa, eventually emerging as their chief suppliers of matériel, cash, and other resources. The Ottomans also forged alliances with the leaders of the mostly disconnected and often mutually antagonistic North African Muslim principalities—both those notionally held by the Spanish Crown and those that remained independent. Ottoman support for these Muslim city-states—or even the mere rumor of such support—deterred Spain from attempting to forcibly subjugate these communities. More than anything else, Spain did not want war with the Ottomans.
The Ottomans and the Mamluks had already forced the Spanish westward. As the Ottomans gained more and more of the Old World—territories in North Africa, southeastern Europe, western India, and elsewhere as well—Spain tried to make up for its precipitous losses in North Africa with new holdings in Mexico and the Caribbean. It proved far easier, as we have seen, for Spain to fight in the New World than in the Old. Even so, it was only with Cortés’s conquests in Mexico in the 1510s that the Americas began to offer some recompense for Spain’s territorial diminishment at the hands of the Ottomans.
In 1518, Cortés added two million square kilometers of Mexican land to the kingdom of the recently crowned Charles V. The gold and silver that Europeans so coveted began flowing out of the Americas to Iberia. Between 1511 and 1520, for example, 9,153 kilograms of American gold arrived in Seville alone. In the second half of the sixteenth century, close to two-thirds of the world’s silver derived from the mines of Potosí, in what is today Bolivia. Some of this silver flooded the Ottoman market, leading to a catastrophic debasement of the Ottoman currency. The size of the satchels that merchants in Istanbul, Aleppo, and Sofia carried to the bazaar grew over time, as they needed ever-increasing numbers of silver coins to make basic purchases. And while it would take an additional century for New World commerce to overtake Eurasian trade, and for the concomitant upsurge in transatlantic slavery, even in the early sixteenth century Spain increasingly came to see that its “frontier of opportunity lay in the New World, not in Africa.” The Crown hoped that Bernal Díaz’s New World Gran Cairo would eventually prove more valuable than Cairo itself.
Still, even as Selim’s conquests of 1516 and 1517 furthered Spain’s pivot away from North Africa to the Caribbean and Mexico, the monarchy had invested too much in its Mediterranean holdings to relinquish them easily. Moreover, it understood that should Islam conquer the whole of the sea, it might then reconquer the territories it had lost in Spain and perhaps even continue marching north through Iberia into Europe. Propelled in part by its newfound riches in the Americas, Spain therefore redoubled its resolve in North Africa in the 1510s. This became the zone of confrontation between these two powerful empires, whose expanding theaters of war now stretched from the Indian Ocean to the
Mediterranean and across the Atlantic. Indeed, so important was the fight against the Muslim enemy that Spain recalled many of its soldiers from the Americas—soldiers who, often, had begun their military careers in Spain’s Old World wars against its infidel enemies. The two empires would collide in Morocco for their final battle for North Africa.
SELIM’S NORTH AFRICA STRATEGY relied heavily on two brothers, Oruç and Hayreddin Barbarossa. They were born in the 1470s in the town of Mytilene, on the Aegean island of Lesbos, near the Anatolian coast—almost two thousand years after the birth of Lesbos’s most famous resident, the lyric poet Sappho. This hilly island of olive trees and pines has proven of strategic importance to every state that has ruled in the Aegean, from the time of Homer’s Iliad to the present day. Very likely from Christian stock, the Barbarossa brothers—so named because of their red beards—came from a family of mariners who had built their careers as privateers in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. They worked as sailors for hire in commercial transport, raiding, and war. Since the Ottomans had added Lesbos to their expanding empire a few years before the brothers’ birth, they often found themselves in the employ of the Ottoman state or Ottoman merchants. Selim’s half-brother Korkud had hired them to facilitate his naval ambitions against the Knights of St. John and other maritime powers, but when their patron failed in his bid for the throne, the Barbarossas fled the region, fearful for their lives. Mercenaries that they were, they always managed to find work somewhere.
