Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  SULEIMAN RETURNED TO Istanbul in triumph. In just eighteen months, the taciturn young ruler had laid down an emphatic statement of imperial intent. Belgrade opened up Hungary and central Europe; Rhodes stripped the Eastern Mediterranean of its last militant Christian stronghold. Ottoman ships, “agile as serpents,” were poised to sweep the central seas. These were the opening shots in a huge contest that would stretch from the gates of Vienna to the Gates of Gibraltar.

  The reign that sprang from these conquests was destined to be the longest and most glorious in Ottoman history. The man the Turks called the Lawgiver and Christians the Magnificent would wage war on an epic scale and lift his empire to the summit of power. None would equal the tenth sultan for majesty, justice, and ambition. Yet Suleiman’s golden age would be tarnished by the troublesome Knights of Saint John: forty years later, they would return to haunt him, in the person of La Valette. The sultan’s youthful act of generosity at Rhodes was to prove a costly mistake. And if after 1522 Suleiman claimed to be advancing under the legitimate banners of heaven, he was not alone. At the far western edge of Ptolemy’s map, there was a Christian counterweight.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Supplication

  1517–1530

  Five years earlier. Fifteen hundred miles west. Another sea.

  IN NOVEMBER 1517, a fleet of forty sailing vessels was dipping and plunging across the Bay of Biscay in dirty weather. They were Flemish ships from Vlissingen in the Netherlands bound for the north coast of Spain. These stout carracks were built to withstand the long Atlantic rollers. Each one carried yards of canvas; their mainsails swelled in the fierce winter blow. Fists of squally rain whipped across the gray water, blotting out the vessels, then revealing them again in the dull light. A coastline slowly formed through the mizzle.

  Even from a distance, one ship stood out from the rest. The Real was carrying the young Charles, duke of Burgundy, to claim his crown as king of Spain, and its sails were elaborately decorated with symbols of religious and imperial power.

  On its mainsail was painted a picture of the crucifixion, between the figures of the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist, the whole enframed between two pillars of Hercules which appear on the royal arms, together with the king’s motto “Further,” written on a scroll twined around the said pillars. On the topsail was painted a representation of the Holy Trinity, and at the mizzen that of St Nicholas. On the foresail was a picture of the Virgin with her Child, treading on the moon, and surrounded by the rays of the sun, with a crown with seven stars above her head; and over it all there was painted the figure of St James, the lord and patron of Castile, slaying the infidels in battle.

  CHARLES WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD. Through the complexities of dynastic succession, he was the inheritor of the largest domain in Europe since the time of Charlemagne. His realms were the mirror image of the Ottoman Empire, and he claimed a litany of titles to equal Suleiman’s. It took scribes two long-winded pages to record them: king of Aragon, Castile, and Navarre, Naples and Sicily; ruler of the Burgundian territories; duke of Milan; head of the house of Hapsburg, of Franche-Compte, Luxemburg, and Charolais; and so on. His territories, dotted across Europe like the black squares on a chessboard, stretched from Hungary in the east to the Atlantic in the west, from Amsterdam to the shores of North Africa, and beyond—to the newfound Americas.

  The imagery on the sails had been carefully chosen by the young king’s Flemish advisers both to appeal to his new Spanish subjects and to declare their king’s claim to empire and leadership of holy war. In the Spanish age of discovery, Charles’s domains would extend far beyond the Gates of Gibraltar—they would encompass the earth. With the crown, he inherited the honorific title of the Catholic King and the commitment to crush the moon of Islam and trample its soldiers underfoot in the name of Saint James.

  From the start his advisers promoted the idea that their sovereign had been chosen by God to be emperor of the world. He inherited from the Austrian Hapsburgs the motto “It is for Austria to rule the entire earth.” Two years later, in 1519, he would be elected, not without heavy bribes, to the office of Holy Roman Emperor. It was a purely honorific title, to which neither lands nor revenue attached, but in an age of imperial epithets, it conferred enormous prestige. It designated Charles as the secular champion of Catholic Europe against Muslims and heretics. And Charles would soon be described as the ruler of the empire on which the sun never sets. In the year of his election Magellan departed on the voyage that would throw a Spanish girdle around the earth.

  UNFORTUNATELY, NONE OF THIS imperial splendor was apparent in Charles’s farcical landfall in November 1517. As the ships drew near the Spanish coast, the Flemish navigators were mortified to discover that they were a hundred miles west of their true objective. They made an unannounced arrival at the small port of Villaviciosa, where the local inhabitants failed to read the majestic symbols on Charles’s sails and mistook them for pirates. The townspeople panicked and fled into the hills with their belongings and prepared for battle. Shouts of “Spain, it’s the king” failed to clarify the situation—it was well known that pirates would descend to any ruse to lull the unwary—and it was a good while before the banners of Castile were recognized by someone braver than the rest, “approaching covertly through the bushes and hedgerows.” Charles’s thunderstruck subjects finally pulled themselves together and laid on an impromptu bullfight.

  It was not a glorious start. Nor did the seventeen-year-old groggily setting foot on Spanish soil cut any kind of figure. Where the young Suleiman’s calculated imperial demeanor struck all who saw him, Charles just looked an imbecile. Generations of inbreeding within the Hapsburg dynasty had bequeathed an unkind legacy. His eyes bulged; he was alarmingly pale. Any redeeming physical features that he did possess—a well-formed body, a broad forehead—were immediately offset by the long protruding lower jaw that frequently left his mouth hanging open, which to those impolite enough or royal enough to remark on it, lent the young man an aspect of vacant idiocy. His grandfather Maximilian bluntly called him a heathen idol. Facial deformity made it impossible for Charles to chew food properly, so that he was troubled all his life by digestive problems, and the deformity left him with a stammer. The king spoke no Spanish. He seemed grave, tonguetied, stupid—hardly the prospective emperor of the terrestrial globe. The Venetians considered him the pawn of his advisers. But appearances would prove deceptive. The unprepossessing exterior hid an independence of mind, the taciturn silence an unblinking commitment to imperial duty and the protection of Christendom. “There is more at the back of his head,” a papal legate judiciously observed, “than appears in his face.”

  The young Charles

  Charles’s landfall was symbolic of all the difficulties that instantly confronted him. It was said that only those regions that had not set eyes on their French-and Flemish-speaking king refrained from revolt at the start of his reign. And in addition to the internal problems of the Iberian Peninsula, Charles was almost immediately plunged into the whole entangled history of Christian Spain’s relations with Islam. The Gates of Gibraltar that featured so prominently on Charles’s sails were not only the portal to the Americas and the Indies; they were also the frontier with an increasingly hostile Muslim world, just eight miles across the straits. Soon after Charles’s arrival, the situation was laid out in detail by the marquis of Comares, the military governor of Oran on the North African shore. He came in the company of a man in Arab dress to pay homage and present a petition that promptly tested the king’s ambitions.

  THE ROOTS OF COMARES’S suit lay centuries deep, in the Arab occupation of southern Spain and the long Christian counter-crusade, the reconquista, but it also involved the Knights of Saint John. The watershed year was well within living memory—1492, the year of Columbus—when Isabella and Ferdinand, monarchs of Aragon and Castile, had dislodged the last Moorish kingdom in Granada. The Muslims who had lived peacefully on the Iberian Peninsula for eight hundred years were at onc
e out of place. Many crossed the straits to North Africa. The tens of thousands who remained were subject to increasing restrictions in an atmosphere of growing Christian intolerance. By 1502 the Muslims of Castile were given a stark choice: convert or leave Spain. Many embittered subjects again departed; those who stayed—the so-called Moriscos or New Christians, often converted only in name—remained suspect to their increasingly twitchy masters.

  These events had a galvanizing effect across the water in the land the Europeans called the Barbary Coast and the Arabs the Maghreb (the West)—that strip of North Africa occupying the footprint of modern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Sea robbery had always been endemic on both sides of this maritime frontier. Now the expulsion of a vengeful Muslim population injected a new bitterness. Piracy was no longer an act of random plunder; it was holy war. From secure havens of the Barbary shore, raids were becoming intense and grievous. Christian Spain began to reap the whirlwind of its internal crusade. The new breed of Islamic corsairs knew the coasts of Spain ominously well; they spoke the language and could pass themselves off as Spanish; worse still, they had the active cooperation of disaffected Moriscos on the northern shore. Christian Spain started to feel itself under siege. In response, the Christians seized the pirate strongholds on the Barbary coast and constructed a chain of forts as a defensive Maginot Line against Islam.

  The policy proved to be half-baked and badly executed. The Spanish forts, clinging tenuously to an alien shore, were poorly resourced and hemmed in by a resentful, unassimilated population. Spain had more pressing interests in Italy and the New World. North Africa possessed no ready wealth to reinforce the zeal of Spain’s crusading bishops; it remained a largely forgotten frontier. And now Spain was paying the price in the shape of a band of Turkish adventurers who were threatening to turn the whole of the Western Mediterranean into a major war zone. It was about the Barbarossas that Comares had come to petition.

  The two brothers Oruch and Hizir, whom the Christians called the Barbarossas—the Redbeards—were adventurers from the Eastern Mediterranean. They had been born on the island of Lesbos on the fragmenting maritime frontier between Islam and Christendom before the siege of Rhodes, and they spanned both worlds. Their father was an Ottoman cavalryman, their mother a Greek Christian. Their commitment to piracy in the name of Islam had been shaped by the Knights of Saint John. Oruch was captured by the knights in an encounter that left another brother dead. He toiled for two years as a shackled slave on the new fortifications at Rhodes and as an oarsman in their galleys, until he filed off his chains and swam away. It was a formative experience that would shape his self-projection as an Islamic warrior.

  The brothers appeared abruptly on the shores of the Maghreb sometime around 1512. They were adventurers with nothing to lose, caught on the wrong side of an Ottoman civil war and forced to flee the Aegean. They came with nothing but their skill as sailors: their ability to navigate by the stars, to read the sea and take risks. They were the Ottoman equivalent of the Spaniard Cortez, about to conquer Mexico in the name of a parallel faith, and like Cortez, they would fall on their western frontier with the force of destiny. “It was the start of all the evils that our Spain received at the hands of the corsairs,” the chronicler López de Gómara wrote later, “the moment that Oruch Barbarossa began to sail our seas, robbing and pillaging our land.”

  Oruch and his band established themselves on the island of Djerba, hard against the shore of modern Tunisia—a sandy, palm-fringed haven with a secure deepwater lagoon on its landward side, ideal for piracy. From here the enterprising corsairs were well placed to plunder traffic passing between North Africa and the Italian coast. The annual pattern quickly became familiar. When the spring sailing season began, they would strike out in a handful of ships—usually one large galley rowed by Christian slaves and several small galliots to do the fighting—and raid the shipping lanes between Spain and Italy. Their initial targets were lone merchantmen carrying bulk goods—cloth, arms, wheat, and iron—ambushed in the lee of islands with bloodcurdling shouts of “Allah!” Everything they seized was used to advance their position in the Maghreb. The ships would be sailed back to Djerba, broken up, and the timbers used to build more raiding vessels on the treeless shore. The Barbarossas cut a commercial deal with the sultan of Tunis to operate from the city’s port, La Goletta, and wooed both sultan and populace with slaves and gifts, the religious leaders with their appeal to holy war. They prowled the coasts of Spain, evacuating Spanish Muslims across the straits and using their knowledge to raid Christian villages. The coastline of southern Italy and the great islands—Majorca, Minorca, Sardinia, and Sicily—also started to live in waking fear of these corsairs. Their sweeps were sudden, unpredictable, and terrifying, the damage immense. In one month Hizir claimed to have taken twenty-one merchant ships and thirty-eight hundred men, women, and children.

  As the fame and notoriety of the Barbarossas’ exploits spread, so did the legends. Oruch, short, stocky, powerful, given to explosions of rage, with a gold ring in his right ear and with his red beard and hair was a figure of inspiration and dread. In the oral history and poetry of the Maghreb and among the oppressed Muslims of Spain, he was an Islamic Robin Hood with the talismanic powers of a sorcerer. It was whispered that his resources were limitless, that God had rendered him invulnerable to sword thrusts, that he had signed a pact with the devil to make his ships invisible. These were matched by fantastic accounts of cruelty. Oruch was said to have ripped out the throat of a Christian with his teeth and eaten the tongue, killed fifty men with his scimitar, tied the head of a Hospitaller knight to a rope and twirled it like a globe until the eyeballs popped. In Spain and Southern Italy people crossed themselves at his name. The new printing presses of Southern Europe hurried out lurid pamphlets detailing his atrocities. Immense sums were offered to privateers for his capture, dead or alive.

  Oruch

  The brothers consciously promoted these myths. They sought legitimacy on the North African coast as warriors in a holy war under the protection of God. Hizir claimed that “God had made him to frighten Christians so that they dared not sail” and that he was directed by prophetic dreams. Terror and cruelty were weapons of war. When Hizir raided Minorca in 1514, he left a horse on the shore with a message pinned to its tail: “I am the thunderbolt of heaven. My vengeance will not be assuaged until I have killed the last one of you and enslaved your women, your daughters, and your children.” Such presence had the power to terrify the Christian sea.

  ORUCH, THE OLDER OF the two, had ambitions beyond mere piracy. He had arrived in the Maghreb when the traditional kingdoms in North Africa were starting to fragment. The tensions between a group of rival city-states—Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers—and the surrounding tribal groupings of Arabs and mountain Berbers caused continuous and chaotic conflict. It was the power vacuum in the Islamic heartlands that the brothers were poised to exploit with the ruthlessness of conquistadors, bent on carving out kingdoms for themselves in this new world. In 1515, Oruch established a link with the imperial center in Istanbul. He dispatched the navigator and cartographer Piri Reis back to the city with the present of a captured French ship to beg for the protection of Sultan Selim, Suleiman’s father. The sultan reciprocated by bestowing his favor on the enterprising corsairs. He sent honorific gifts—titles, caftans, and jeweled swords—and, more usefully, he dispatched two heavy war galleys with a full complement of troops, gunpowder, and cannon. It was a significant moment: this first contact with the imperial center was the start of a process that would soon draw the Maghreb into the Ottoman Empire.

  The following year Oruch seized control of Algiers in a stunning inter-Islamic coup. He strangled the city’s sultan in his bathhouse with his own hands and flooded the streets with his newly acquired Ottoman troops, heavily armed with muskets. It was the kind of colonial land grab that Spanish privateers were themselves conducting in the New World with a similar use of gunpowder.

  The Spanish were now thorou
ghly alarmed by this triangulation of power between the Ottoman corsairs, the Moriscos, and the sultan in Istanbul. Spanish forts on the North African shore were under continuous pressure. Oruch made two failed attempts on their outpost at Bougie; a Spanish counteroffensive to dislodge the Barbarossas from Algiers ended in hideous failure and the loss of most of the ships and men. Oruch and his Ottoman usurpers, now firmly entrenched, continued their territorial expansion inland. They captured Tlemcen, the old capital city of the central Maghreb, murdered seventy members of the ruling Arab dynasty, and further isolated the forts at the Peñón of Algiers and neighboring Oran. Oruch was quickly master of nearly all the land that constitutes modern Algeria. And the debilitating raids on shipping and coastlines went on; Muslim corsairs took to dumping mutilated captives on the Christian shore with the mocking instruction “Go and tell your Christian kings: ‘This is the crusade you have proclaimed.’” The Spanish felt severely threatened. After several years of warfare, their only triumph had been to smash Oruch’s arm with an arquebus ball at Bougie. Henceforth he gained another nickname: Severed Arm—or in yet another version that reflected the nightmarish image projected into the minds of Christians: Silver Arm. He was said to have had a forearm and hand of pure silver made to replace the amputated limb.

  IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT that the young Charles V received the petition from the marquis of Comares and his Arab ally, the deposed king of Tlemcen. The marquis explained the deteriorating situation in North Africa, the present and future danger to Spain. He now begged the young king to seize a rare moment of opportunity. Comares realized that Oruch had for once overreached himself in Tlemcen. The city lay two hundred miles inland from the corsair’s base at Algiers; his band of Turkish adventurers was small and they had inflamed Arab sentiment against them to the point of revolt. It was an ideal moment to strike back and rid the western seas of the pirates for good. It was a challenge that the young king, pledged to crush the infidel underfoot, could not refuse. He authorized his first Mediterranean venture.