by Alan Mikhail
In 1513, the year after Selim’s accession to the throne, the brothers ended up in Tunis, which then had a population of over a hundred thousand souls, working for the sultan of the Hafsid empire. Sited on a promontory commanding the sea-lane between Sicily and North Africa, the chokepoint between the western and the eastern Mediterranean, the stronghold of Tunis grew powerful and marvelously wealthy over the years, due chiefly to its corsairing ventures all along the Barbary Coast, as Europeans often called North Africa. (Recall that, in 1472, Columbus had sailed to Tunis in an attempt to retrieve a ship that had been captured from King René of Anjou.) The brothers excelled in their new employ as state-sponsored pirates, and their reputation as cunning and effective professional corsairs spread widely.
Given the brothers’ skill and experience—as well as their extensive personal stockpile of guns and cannons—rulers of Muslim city-states across North Africa competed for their services. In 1514, for example, the elders of Bougie appealed to the Barbarossas for help against the Spanish admiral Pedro Navarro, who had captured their city in 1510. The brothers pummeled the small city with steady bombardments, eventually blasting a hole in Bougie’s thick ramparts. The Barbarossas’ sailors then streamed into the city, engaging the Spanish soldiers stationed there with gunfire and hand-to-hand combat. They soon had to pull back, though, having exhausted their ammunition and needing to tend to Oruç, who took a bullet in his left arm. Bougie therefore remained in Spanish hands, at least for a time. Such confrontations between Muslim and Spanish forces broke out all across North Africa in the mid-1510s, with the Barbarossas and Navarro as the primary warring protagonists. Thus, while Navarro and his men extended Spain’s empire eastward along the North African coast, the brothers, in the employ of various small Muslim states, pushed westward, leading, inevitably, to direct confrontation.
As the Barbarossa brothers were drawn deeper into the Muslim fight against the Spanish in North Africa, their ambitions grew. They realized their need for a forceful and resolute backer, one that could match the resources and power of the Spanish Crown. Without such backing, they might be able to rebuff individual Spanish attacks, but they would never gain the defensible posts they needed to launch their daring forays into the sea, especially against a rival such as Navarro, who enjoyed the full weight of Spain, as well as Pope Leo X, behind him. The ruler of Tunis had offered the brothers a cut of all the booty they collected from raiding ships passing through the strait, but his limited influence meant that this could be no more than a tenuous arrangement. The Barbarossas would find a far more powerful patron in Sultan Selim.
After their failed siege at Bougie in 1514, the brothers sent one of their men to Istanbul to seek a meeting with the Ottoman sultan. The emissary was none other than Piri Reis, the mapmaker Selim would encounter again in his tent in Cairo a few years later. Piri had first met the Barbarossas when they had sailed together on his uncle Kemal’s ships in the western Mediterranean—voyages during which he likely acquired the Columbus expedition maps he would later use for his own world map. After these ventures with his uncle, Piri needed work, so he occasionally joined the Barbarossas’ team of corsairs in Tunis.
Piri arrived in Istanbul in late 1514 weighed down by gifts for Selim from the Barbarossa brothers, letters of support and goodwill, and apologies and pleas that Selim forgive them their treasonous foolishness in having supported Korkud for the throne before 1512. Most important, Piri carried a proposal. The Barbarossas presented themselves and their services to Selim. Rather than being a piddly city-state’s corsairs, they sought to be Selim’s imperial warrior-pirates, the captains of his western Mediterranean fleet. They promised their total and eternal allegiance to him and guaranteed that whatever they gained on the seas would be his. To do their work effectively for him, they asked for supplies, additional ships, and the full backing of his empire against Spain’s reach in North Africa. Selim immediately and unequivocally agreed.
Thus, in early 1515, between his victory at Chaldiran and the beginning of his overland march to Egypt, Selim sent Piri Reis back to Tunis with two war galleys, two jewel-encrusted swords, vast quantities of fresh supplies, new munitions, letters of safe passage, and cash. The Barbarossas now had their imperial patron, and Selim had his long-sought strategic forward naval force in the western Mediterranean.
As the Barbarossas had hoped, Selim’s backing forced a complete realignment of power in North Africa among local rulers, the Ottomans, the Spanish, and the Mamluks. Given the immense power and resources now behind them, the Barbarossas—much as Kemal Reis had done previously, on a much smaller scale—were able to forge regional coalitions, having convinced most of the Muslim rulers of North Africa that the Ottomans represented the best guarantor of their interests. They raised troops from local communities as well as from among the recently arrived Spanish Muslim refugees, and even sent ships to Granada to rescue Ibero-Muslims and resettle them in North Africa. During these missions, the Barbarossas’ men observed the dire situation of Muslims in post-Reconquista Spain. They reported back, for example, that “the Unbelievers took young women with children and gave them to Christians—that is they could not be married to Muslims. Their desire was to cut out the Islamic population from their society.” Selim’s arrangement with the Barbarossas even allowed them to recruit young boys from Anatolia to fight for them in North Africa—rather like a private Janissary Corps.
The brothers’ efforts to bypass the authority of the established rulers of port city-states across the western Mediterranean naturally created both intense animosities against and new opportunities for the brothers and their new patron. For a few years after their 1515 agreement with Selim, the Barbarossas danced carefully between selective alliance- and enemy-making, in the process refashioning older political and military arrangements that often stretched from North Africa to capitals across the Mediterranean. Although they enjoyed all the advantages that came with the support of one of the Mediterranean’s largest empires, it would be another year before Selim would defeat the Mamluks, and even longer before he would be able to secure much of North Africa, both the Mamluks’ holdings and independent regions. Before late 1517, Ottoman power in North Africa remained rather anemic, and thus the Barbarossa brothers still needed the support of local populations and at least some of the region’s rulers to be able to ply the coast.
The first test of the brothers’ Ottoman backing came in August 1515, when they prepared to attack the city of Bougie for a second time. Even though the deposed Muslim ruler of Bougie had, just the previous year, hired the Barbarossas to retake the city from the Spanish, he now feared that the brothers—no longer operating as mercenaries but as agents of the Ottoman Empire, with its own potentially hostile agenda—would take Bougie not just from the Spanish but also from him. This, peculiarly, resulted in an alliance between the city’s Muslim rulers and their historic Spanish enemies, pitted against the Ottoman-backed Barbarossas. In the summer of 1515, the Barbarossas lost at Bougie for the second time.
In the spring of 1516, as Selim was preparing to march into Syria, a variation on the Bougie scenario played out in the much larger city of Algiers, strategically located in the center of North Africa. The Muslim ruler of Algiers, the head of the Tha‘āliba tribe, sought help from the Barbarossas to eject the Spanish from his city; they agreed, and after only one day of fighting stood victorious. It was not long, however, before a dispute erupted over who should rule the city, with its enormous protected harbor. As representatives of the Ottoman state—and in a declaration of their growing personal aspirations—the Barbarossas demanded some amount of political authority in Algiers in exchange for their defeat of the Spanish. When the city’s ruler refused, the brothers responded with the sword, killing him and forcibly taking his city for themselves and, ostensibly at least, for their patron, Selim.
The Ottoman capture of Algiers represented a fundamental shift in the geopolitics of North Africa: it was the first territory conquered in the name of the Ott
oman Empire. No longer was the empire merely making strategic military and economic alliances and sponsoring Spain’s enemies in the Mediterranean. Now, Selim’s grand colonial ambitions were revealed. By the time Algiers was in the Barbarossa brothers’ hands, Selim had entered Syria, allowing the Ottomans to attack the Mamluks from both the north and west.
As if proof of God’s love for his shadow, Ferdinand died—on January 23, 1516, at the age of sixty-three—just as Selim prepared to move against the Mamluks, relieving Selim of any concern about interference from the Iberian peninsula in his imminent attempt to assert power over the Mamluk dominions in North Africa. After Isabella’s death, Ferdinand had accomplished little of substance. He had defied her final directive, keeping the crown of Castile for himself instead of passing it to their daughter Joanna, and broke a deathbed promise by remarrying within a year, this time to Germaine of Foix, thirty-six years his junior. Despite his betrayals, he was buried next to Isabella in the Alhambra, and his body was moved along with hers to the new cathedral of Granada in 1521. Because of the complex—even byzantine—politics of European marriage alliances, his death put Castile and Aragon into the hands of the northern European Habsburgs. Combined with a succession crisis—a period of instability that eventually gave Spain to Charles V—the transfer of power north, away from the Mediterranean, meant that the reconfigured Habsburg Spanish Empire largely ignored North Africa for the next several years, directing its gaze westward across the ocean. Thus, the Barbarossas could continue to chip away at Spain’s outposts, folding them into the expanding Ottoman state.
Mamluk power in North Africa had been waning during the previous few years, as the empire had been forced to focus its attention and military resources on the Ottomans in northern Syria and southern Anatolia and the Portuguese in the Red Sea. Due in large measure to the Barbarossas’ balancing act of alliances, the takeover of the region progressed rather smoothly, eased by Selim’s usual policy of cutting deals with local potentates. Hayreddin Barbarossa was appointed governor of Algeria—now the empire’s westernmost border and a staging ground for a potential invasion of Morocco—and also governor-general of the entire western Mediterranean. Placing one of the Barbarossa brothers in charge of that region (Oruç would die in 1518) proved both expedient and effective, since they had had long experience in the western Mediterranean, had ingratiated themselves with many of the region’s potentates, had already pledged their allegiance to Selim, and were respected and feared by their rivals. Selim supported Hayreddin with further troops, ships, and cannons, which Hayreddin used to great effect as he attempted to impose Ottoman authority in the interior of Algeria—even to the point of perfecting a technique for attaching sails to wheeled cannons to move them through the Sahara.
Hayreddin Barbarossa and Suleyman
Queen Isabella of Castile would have shuddered with fear and quaked with anger to see what her feckless husband Ferdinand had allowed to happen.
AS SELIM CONTEMPLATED AN invasion of Morocco in 1518, he turned to Hayreddin Barbarossa for insight and advice. Hayreddin, far less enthusiastic than his sultan, explained how Morocco differed from the rest of North Africa and why it would prove enormously difficult to conquer.
Like no other territory in North Africa, Morocco’s heavily populated and ecologically diverse interior was ruled by a stable, powerful agrarian state. For centuries, a series of dynasties—the Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, and Wattasids—had successfully resisted Spanish, Portuguese, and Mamluk penetration of Morocco’s stunning yet forbidding interior of soaring mountains and deep river valleys. In Selim’s day, the Saadian Empire controlled the territory. They had risen to power in 1509 and would, Hayreddin reported to Selim, very likely repel the Ottomans just as they had other invaders over the previous decade. While the Ottomans, with the Barbarossas’ maritime expertise, had managed to conquer the string of cities beaded along Africa’s northern coast, they had failed to make inroads into the interior. Thus, much like another of the Ottoman Empire’s new territorial extremities, Yemen, Africa’s northwest corner was a land of stubborn geography that had historically ensured political independence.
Moreover, the Saadians—far from being small-scale upstart rulers of a tiny city-state bound to the sea—had inherited the advantages of the dynasties that ruled Morocco before them: a standing army, a loyal population, immense land resources, impregnable mountain fortresses, and plenty of cash. In several ways, their rule was similar to that of the Ottomans: in their tax-revenue-based economy, military organization, and family politics. Hayreddin also informed Selim that the Saadians had been expanding their arsenal over the past decade. Anyone who had tried to operate in North Africa in recent years understood the realities of Morocco’s military power and had generally steered clear of it. As with Yemen, sending troops and supplies over such a long distance would prove an enormous challenge for the Ottomans. All of this, needless to say, boosted the Saadian leader Ahmad al-A‘raj’s confidence. He proved this by directing insults at the Ottomans, mocking them as a bunch of fishermen who would never be able to penetrate even a short distance beyond the coast.
Despite the warnings from Hayreddin Barbarossa, Selim began formulating a strategy for invading Morocco. He was a man driven by challenges, and he hoped to force Spain completely off the African continent and secure the mouth of the Mediterranean, which only a few Ottoman sailors—Kemal Reis foremost among them—had ever seen. The Mediterranean would, then, be well on the way to becoming an Ottoman lake. If Morocco were made Ottoman, God’s shadow could stretch into the Atlantic—and perhaps even cross that ocean, an unthinkable notion only a couple years earlier—affording Selim’s empire a potentially vastly different future.
Unlike those who had preceded him and failed, Selim would not commence his attack on Morocco from the sea. Rather, he planned first to secure the interior, marching his troops overland from Algeria and then north and west to capture the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, which would require traversing the extremely rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains. Since the Spanish had never possessed all of Algeria, as Selim did after the conquest of the Mamluk Empire, they had never had the territorial advantage needed even to contemplate such an inside-out strategy. Selim settled on the town of Tlemcen, which lay in a valley about forty miles south of the Mediterranean, behind the coastal hills, as the most suitable border crossing. In late 1517, very soon after Algeria was secured, the Ottomans led a series of test raids west from Tlemcen. These failed. After several armed clashes, they had gained almost nothing and so pulled back.
These skirmishes demonstrated to Selim that he would need far more troops and provisions in Algeria if he was to mount a real attack into the belly of Saadian power in Morocco. Undeterred by the overwhelming challenges—the great distance from Istanbul, the landlocked location of Tlemcen itself—he began moving men and matériel by ship, and also undertook the enormous expense of transporting goods overland from Syria—across the desolation of Sinai, through Egypt’s irrigated delta towns, and then across the expanse of the Sahara Desert. (Hayreddin’s sail-equipped cannon technology no doubt aided in this operation.)
When the Ottomans began amassing forces in western North Africa, tocsins rang out across Spain. Although stretched by their many new interests in the New World, Spain recognized the existential threat represented by Ottoman designs on Morocco: if Morocco fell to the Ottomans, Iberia could be next. Promptly they reshuffled their military resources. Fresh from fighting their new infidel enemies in the Americas, thousands of Crusading Spanish soldiers were quickly redispatched to battle their original infidel nemesis in North Africa. Even Hernán Cortés himself eventually returned from Mexico to wage the final battle of his long and storied military career against Hayreddin Barbarossa in Algiers in 1541. Despite their vaunted reputation as conquistadors in the New World, this generation of Spanish soldiers, of which Cortés was the most prominent exemplar, began and ended their careers warring against Muslims in the Old World.
/> When they returned from the Americas after 1517, these conquistador-Crusaders encountered a world vastly different from the one they had left behind. Martin Luther had announced himself as an internal enemy in the very heart of Catholic Europe, plunging Christendom into a religious civil war. The Ottoman Empire possessed immeasurably more territory around the Mediterranean than it had in 1492, and was on the very doorstep of Spain. The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and the establishment of European trading posts around the Indian Ocean had created a completely different geography of European imperial ambitions. And the existence of Native Americans in the New World posed a theological challenge to almost everything Christians had understood about God’s creation for more than a millennium.
Morocco, therefore, was much more than a frontier between empires. It stood as the fulcrum between the past and the future, between Islam and Christianity, between Eurasia and the Atlantic world. The battle for Morocco would determine whether Catholicism or its enemies prevailed, whether the Old World or the New would prove the key to global domination, whether the Ottomans or the Europeans would shape the course of world history in the early sixteenth century and beyond.
IN THE EARLY AUTUMN of 1518, the Ottomans, the Spanish, and the Saadians stood poised for a triangular war in Morocco. On September 20, a fleet left Spain for its North African holdings, only to have high winds slam twelve of the ships into rocks on the Moroccan coast, completely destroying them. All three thousand Spanish soldiers on board six of these vessels perished, and the horses on the other six ships drowned as well. But this was just the first of several waves of Spanish military transports to cross the sea. Soon Crown soldiers were flowing steadily into Morocco.
