Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  Charles granted Comares ten thousand men and the money to inspire a full-blown Arab revolt. For once the Spanish acted decisively. Moving fast, they cut the supply route to Algiers, blockaded Tlemcen, and subjected it to a long siege. As the defenses crumbled, Oruch played out his last act. With Arabic voices shouting “Kill him!” the corsair king slipped the city with a small band of followers and galloped away. They were spotted and pursued by Spanish troops. Oruch scattered the treasure of Tlemcen behind him in the dust. Many of the rank and file stopped to gather the trail of gems and coins, but a determined group pressed on and finally cornered Oruch in an arid stretch of upland country. Calling on Saint James for aid, they closed in for the kill. The Turks fought to the last man, Oruch wielding an axe with his one good arm until he was run through with a pike. He managed to inflict a last savage bite on the man who dispatched him; Don Garcia Fernandez de la Plazza carried the legendary wound for the rest of his days. The Spaniards hacked off the metal arm as a trophy and mounted the head on a lance. The body they nailed to the walls of Tlemcen by torchlight. It was an act of superstitious dread, like impaling a vampire. The grotesque red-bearded head, its eyeballs still glaring defiance, was processed throughout the Maghreb as proof of death, before being sent, now putrescent, to Spain. People stared at it, crossed themselves, and recoiled.

  IT WAS A SIGNAL TRIUMPH for Charles at the opening of his reign, but the advantage was almost immediately lost. Spain never had a coherent policy for solving the North African problem; instead of marching on Algiers and eliminating the corsair threat, the army retired to Spain. The ghost of Oruch, nailed to the walls, rose almost immediately from the dead in the person of his younger, and more astute, brother. Hizir, who never forgot or forgave an injury or insult, carried forward the commitment to holy war in the western seas. His first act was literally to take on the mantle and myth of his older brother: the dark-haired Hizir hennaed his beard. His second was even more astute.

  Hizir realized that his position in the Maghreb was parlous. He needed not only men and equipment but religious and political authority if he were to survive as a foreign intruder on the Arab shore. He decided to abandon his brother’s dream of an independent state. He sent a ship back to Istanbul with new gifts and a formal submission to the sultan. He requested that Algiers should be included within the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Selim made a gracious response: he formally appointed Hizir governor-general of “Algeria of the Arabs” and sent him the customary badges of office—a horse, a scimitar, and the ceremonial horsetail banner. When Selim died shortly afterward, it was Suleiman’s name that was honored in Friday prayers in the mosques of Algiers and minted on the city’s coins. At a stroke Algeria became a province of the Ottoman Empire, won by enterprising seamen from the Eastern Mediterranean at almost no cost to the imperial treasury. With this act, Hizir acquired both political legitimacy and new resources: gunpowder, cannon, two thousand janissaries. Four thousand volunteers also joined the cause, eager for the spoils of war under this talismanic commander. And it was Suleiman who conferred a new honorific on the young corsair: Hayrettin—“Goodness of the Faith”—so that he would become known in time as Hayrettin Barbarossa.

  These were to prove decisive acts. From the moment that Hayrettin made formal obeisance to Suleiman, “kissing the imperial decree and placing it respectfully on his head with due reverence,” the whole nature of the struggle changed. Henceforth, North Africa was no longer a local difficulty between Spain and a band of troublesome pirates; it became the front line in a contest between Suleiman and Charles that would lead inexorably to full-scale sea war.

  CHAPTER 3

  The King of Evil

  1520–1530

  THE IDEA OF PTOLEMY’S MAP frightened the potentates of Europe, but shortly after the fall of Rhodes, one of the sea captains at the siege presented Suleiman with a remarkable volume that would have doubled Christians’ apprehension, had they known of its existence. Its author was a geographically curious Turkish navigator called Piri Reis—Piri the Captain. He had already produced for the sultans a world map of astonishing accuracy, which included copies of the Columbus maps. The Book of Navigation did something more immediately useful. Alongside accounts of the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, it contained a practical guide to sailing the Mediterranean, drawn from Piri Reis’s voyages. Two hundred ten portolan charts—diagrammatic maps with sailing instructions—expounded the coastal seas. The book explained how to navigate all the coastal waters of the infidel to the straits of Gibraltar. Crucially for oared galleys, which could travel for only a few days without taking on water, it located the position of springs on coasts and islands. Piri showed where a galley might water within a hundred miles of Venice, and right around the coasts of Italy and Spain. His book was a blueprint for fighting naval wars.

  In the years ahead, the The Book of Navigation would be widely carried by Suleiman’s fleets, yet at the time the sultan seems to have regarded it, and its author, with a disdain indicative of his attitude toward the sea. In the 1520s Suleiman was largely indifferent to the Mediterranean, beyond claiming it for his own. His ambitions were firmly territorial. The sea was alien and barren—better left to the corsairs. Only the conquest of territory could bring glory, new titles, and the land and booty to appease his army. Rhodes was to prove Suleiman’s only personal Mediterranean venture; it was against Hungary and Charles’s Austrian dominions that he swung into the saddle in 1526. Initially the Mediterranean war would be fought by frontiersmen such as Hayrettin.

  DESPITE THE INFUSION of military aid, the corsair’s immediate position remained precarious, but Charles was in no position to profit. He was beset by other difficulties. Anticipating the Ottoman onslaught along the Danube, he passed control of his Austrian domains to his brother Ferdinand, and turned his attention to yet another war—with his Christian neighbor, Francis I of France, piqued by failure to win the post of Holy Roman Emperor. It was a hampering contest that would continue on and off for the rest of both their lives. With this distraction, the years after Oruch’s death marked an unhalted decline for Spanish fortunes in the Maghreb. A succession of badly coordinated expeditions came to spectacular grief. An attempt on Algiers in 1519 ended in shipwreck and massacre. Its leader, Hugo de Moncada, escaped ingloriously by hiding among the butchered corpses on the shore. Barbarossa was fueled by anger at his brother’s death and in no mood to ransom prisoners. When Charles offered a large sum for the captured officers, Barbarossa had them killed. Offered another sum for the return of the bodies, he threw them into the sea, so that “if the parents of any of the dead ever came to Algiers, they would not know the burial place of their father or brother, nor be able to see the ashes, but only the waves.” With the Spanish fleet decimated, he could now raid Charles’s coasts at will.

  Rhodes and the coast of Asia Minor in The Book of Navigation

  Hayrettin’s position continued to wane and wax—he was briefly ousted from Algiers by a coalition of Arabs and Berbers in 1520—but the Spanish failed to prosper. They never mastered the complex winds of the Barbary Coast and invariably sailed too late in the year. A second Moncada expedition in 1523 led to a more spectacular shipwreck, “which destroyed twenty-six great ships and many small ones.” Algiers was doomed to be a place of collective grief for Christian crusaders. The Spanish managed to retain some kind of hold over the city through their looming fort on the Peñón, but morale throughout the chain of fortresses on the Barbary Coast was dangerously low. North Africa was the forgotten frontier; there were other priorities and prizes that demanded more urgent attention. It was a war no one wanted to fight. The soldiers were badly paid, if they were paid at all. Supplies for the forts were so irregular that it was not unknown for men to die of hunger. Soldiers looked enviously over their shoulders at reports from the New World. “It’s not Peru, where you can go out and collect precious stones,” muttered one military commander. “It’s Africa and all we have here are Turks and Moor
s.” Soldiers would defect and renounce their faith, enlist for service in the Americas, or pay people-smugglers to ferry them back to Spain. Only the political instability of the Maghreb permitted the Spanish to cling on.

  In the Eastern Mediterranean, the Maghreb was the New World. As Hayrettin’s reputation continued to grow, a stream of corsairs sailed west in his wake. The motivation was not lost on the Spanish themselves. “Because of the story of the great riches…gained on the Barbary Coast, men hurried there with the same fervor that compelled the Spanish to the mines of the Indies,” wrote the chronicler Diego de Haëdo. By the late 1520s there were at least forty corsair captains on the Barbary Coast, deployed by Hayrettin to harry the Christian sea. Hayrettin himself assumed an awesome presence: invincible, frightening, brilliant. He projected himself as the manifestation of the will of God and the imperial authority of Suleiman, as one whose prescient dreams allowed him to escape ambushes, dodge storms, and capture cities. He came, in his own words, among the Christian fleets, “like the sun among the stars, at whose appearance, their light vanished.” His flagship, the Algerian, rowed by 108 men, carried at its masthead a red banner studded with three silver moons and at its stern two interlaced inscriptions in Arabic. One said: “I will conquer” the other, “God’s protection is better than the strongest armor and the tallest tower.” At its approach, Christian ships surrendered without a struggle, or their crews hurled themselves overboard, preferring a quick death to the protracted torture of the galleys. His stratagems were said to be legion, his cruelties refined, his anger volcanic. Hayrettin’s knowledge of the sea, drawn from thousands of voyages, was unmatched, and his intelligence on enemy intentions, gathered from the interrogation of captured crews and from the freely given advice of Spanish Muslims, allowed him to strike unpredictably and at will. He made one or two sweeps a year with a flotilla of eighteen vessels, snatching merchant ships, burning coastal villages, and abducting populations. Over a ten-year period, he took ten thousand people from the coastline between Barcelona and Valencia alone—a stretch of just two hundred miles.

  Hayrettin’s skill and propaganda burned a deep hole in the popular imagination of Christian Europe. With the reputation of Oruch fading, he became known simply as Barbarossa, the lurid subject of countless stories and songs. The printing presses fed this avid horror with a stream of news sheets and woodcut likenesses. The French writer Rabelais sent one to a friend from Rome in 1530, “drawn,” he assured its recipient, “from life.” Prints show an imposing turbaned figure, clad in an opulent caftan, whose massive hands grasp a scroll and hawk-headed scimitar. The eyes are deep set and glaring, with the frizzled beard of an ogre and an expression of vulpine rapacity. New technology let Europe gaze on the mythic pirate and find there its template for cruelty. “Barbarossa, Barbarossa, you are the king of evil,” they sang up and down the Spanish coast.

  Contemporary print of Hayrettin

  THE CORSAIRS WHO accompanied him and answered to his iron will—and gave him 12 percent of their takings—trailed their own smaller appalling legends across the sea. They came from all points of the compass. Many were renegade Christians for whom there was no way back, exiled from their native lands through crime or capture by corsairs, and converted, at least nominally, to Islam. They lived and died by the sea and gave their ships beautiful names—the Pearl, the Door of Neptune, the Sun, the Golden Lemon Tree, the Rose of Algiers—that belied their purpose. The corsairs’ short, vivid careers summarized the poverty, violence, and dislocation of the Mediterranean world. Salah Reis, who tied his captives over the mouth of a cannon and blasted them to pieces, died of plague. Ali the Karaman, “Scarface,” lacked two fingers and was so hated along the coasts of Italy that the Genoese had sworn to display him in an iron cage. Al Morez, “the Cretan,” beat his oarsmen with a severed arm. “More cruel than Al Morez?” Tunisian peasants would ask when trying to determine the exact measure of a man’s brutality. Elie the Corsican, a master of marine ambushes, was crucified on his own mast; Aydin the Ligurian, “the Devil Hunter,” drowned in an Algerian river. These men were the squadron commanders in Hayrettin’s holy war, who gathered sacks of noses and hands as prizes and fought without rules.

  During the 1520s the level of their maritime plunder grew steadily, but Charles only worsened his own plight. In the age of inquisition, the remnant Muslim population of Spain remained an unfinished project. The Moorish inhabitants of Valencia were conspicuously loyal to the emperor during an uprising in the early 1520s. They were cruelly rewarded. Charles was not fanatical by nature, but he was conscious of his responsibility before Christendom as Holy Roman Emperor. In 1525 he authorized the proclamation known as the Purification of Aragon—an edict that required the conversion or exile of all the Muslims in that part of Spain. Baldly put, the terms were: convert or die. Barbarossa promptly answered the plight of the Valencian Moors. Large numbers were ferried across to the Maghreb to swell the pirate wars and suggest suitable targets for revenge attacks. There was no bay, no coastal village, no island unvisited. The complaints of Spanish subjects to their king became ever louder.

  In May 1529, all these forces came to a head when Spain’s neglect of its African outposts brought a defining catastrophe. The Peñón of Algiers, the small fort that throttled the city and its port, ran short of gunpowder. Spies reported the situation to Hayrettin, who immediately stormed it. The commander, Martin de Vargas, was offered the choice of conversion to Islam or execution. He chose to die. He was beaten to death in front of the janissaries—a slow and painful end. Shortly afterward, a relief fleet of nine Spanish ships arrived at the Peñón, unaware of the catastrophe, and were all captured.

  It was a loss that would have long-lasting consequences for the Western Mediterranean. Hayrettin demolished the castle, connected its island to the mainland by a causeway, and secured a safe harbor of immense strategic value. This victory strengthened the corsairs’ hand enormously. Algiers the White, glittering above the blue sea, became the sea robber’s kingdom and souk, the Baghdad or Damascus of the Maghreb, where ships could be safely harbored, booty collected, and human beings bought and sold. It was now a permanent problem for Charles. Algiers was the western marker of a war that stretched all the way to the Danube. Ten days before the Peñón fell, Suleiman departed from Istanbul with seventy-five thousand men to march on Vienna.

  It was Charles’s brother Ferdinand who braced himself for this onslaught. For once Charles was more pleasantly occupied. After an eight-year struggle with France, he was in the act of signing what he hoped would be a lasting peace. Temporarily free from the burden of war, he set off for the greatest triumph of his life: his coronation in Italy as Holy Roman Emperor, the champion of the Christian world. He departed from Barcelona with the imperial galleys under their general in chief, Rodrigo de Portuondo, to a volley of ceremonial cannon shot.

  It was to prove a moment of hubris. Charles might aspire to be the ruler of the world, whose kingdom stretched from Peru to the Rhine, but on the coast of Spain he was horribly vulnerable. In the summer of 1529 there was suddenly no protecting fleet, and Hayrettin quickly knew it. Immediately he dispatched Aydin the Devil Hunter, his most experienced corsair, with fifteen galliots to ransack the Balearic Islands and the Spanish coast. Revenge centered on Valencia. After snaffling a succession of passing merchant ships, Aydin’s pirates descended abruptly on a religious festival and seized a sizeable band of pilgrims, then rescued two hundred Muslims from the same coast, and made off.

  Portuondo had delivered the emperor to Genoa and was on his way home when news of this raid reached him. Spurred on by a reward of ten thousand escudos for the return of the Muslim vassals, he turned to head off Aydin. He caught the corsair’s ships, totally unprepared, beached on the shore of the deserted island of Formentera, southwest of Majorca. Portuondo’s nine heavily armed war galleys had the lighter galliots totally at their mercy; he could and should have blasted them out of the water. But Portuondo had left half his complement of
soldiers in Genoa to escort the emperor, and his ten thousand escudos depended on returning the Muslims alive. He decided not to use his guns, then dithered and missed his chance. Aydin’s galliots were able to push off from the shore, catch the galleys sideways, and counterattack. The Spaniards were taken by surprise. Portuondo was killed by an arquebus shot; his flagship surrendered. Panic spread to the rest of the fleet. Seven galleys were taken in all; the eighth rowed away to tell the tale. Aydin’s fleet, now doubled in size, returned to Algiers with guns firing and flags flying. The ships had so many Christian slaves on deck, including Portuondo’s son, “that they could not move.”

  It was the first significant open sea engagement against Barbarossa’s corsair fleet and it ended in humiliation. “It was the greatest loss that had ever happened to the Spanish galley fleet,” wrote López de Gómara dramatically. The Spanish chronicler, not known for his objectivity, gave a ghastly account of the crew’s fate. The son of Portuondo “Barbarossa impaled with many other Spaniards…and they say that he subjected some of the captives to a form of torment and death that was as cruel as it was new. On a flat part of the countryside he had holes dug that were waist-deep and had the Spanish put in them; he buried them alive, leaving the arms and heads exposed, and he had many horsemen trample them.” Barbarossa’s own chronicle puts it differently: “Hayrettin spread his name and reputation through all regions and countries of both the Christians and Moors, and sent the sultan two galleys, one of these with Portuondo and all the other leading Christians.” In the deeds of the great corsair, the boundaries of truth remain hard to establish.