The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Ferdinand preferred to see his Catalan subjects sailing the Mediterranean rather than the Atlantic, and here he was inspired by the same idea that his uncle Alfonso had developed, of a Catalan Common Market encompassing Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, Majorca and newly won possessions in North Africa. In 1497, the duke of Medina Sidonia had already shown how easy it was to capture Melilla on the coast of Morocco; it remains Spanish to this day. With the help of the powerful cleric Cardinal Cisneros, Ferdinand added Oran to his possessions in 1509. Riding a mule and brandishing a silver cross, the aged cardinal processed in front of the Spanish army, urging the men to fight for Christ. His ardour had not been dimmed by the conquest of Granada, where in his contempt for Islam he made great bonfires of Arabic books, happily depriving humanity of vast amounts of knowledge. The fall of Oran was followed by the capture of Bougie and Tripoli in 1510.68 The presence of Spanish garrisons along the coast of North Africa as far east as Libya strengthened the grip of Christendom on the western and central Mediterranean, but also drew the fire of a variety of Muslim foes intent on recovering the cities held by Spain. While Ferdinand was delighted to score points in the holy war he was fighting against Islam, there was a practical dimension to his African ambitions. Control of the coastline of the Maghrib would offer protection to Catalan and other shipping bound for the East, not because European shipping made use of routes along the African coast, but because a Spanish presence deterred Muslim piracy.

  Ferdinand demonstrated how important the Mediterranean was in his thinking when, after Isabella’s death, he spent several months in Naples setting the war-damaged south Italian kingdom back on its feet. He took a new wife, the capable and cultured Pyrenean princess Germaine of Foix, in the hope of producing a male heir to the lands of the Crown of Aragon.69 Yet all his grandiose policies were compromised by the extinction of the male line. The son of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Infante Juan, predeceased his parents. Nor did Germaine of Foix produce a surviving heir. Thus both Castile and Aragon passed through Ferdinand’s demented daughter Juana to his grandson, the Habsburg prince Charles of Ghent.70 Under Charles power within Spain shifted decisively away from Aragon and back towards Castile. With the opening of the New World trade routes, Castile, and especially Seville, boomed, while the Catalan networks in the Mediterranean settled into torpor. Traditional Aragonese interests continued to be prosecuted in Italy, but Castilians increasingly took charge of the Mediterranean empire once ruled from Barcelona and Valencia.71

  3

  Holy Leagues and Unholy Alliances,

  1500–1550

  I

  The reshaping of the Mediterranean in the wake of the Black Death was a slow process. In addition to political changes within the Mediterranean, notably the expansion of Ottoman power, events taking place beyond the Straits of Gibraltar would, in the long term, greatly transform the life of those who lived on its shores and in its islands. The opening of the Atlantic had already begun in the decade before plague arrived, with voyages down the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands, and it continued with the discovery and settlement of Madeira and the Azores by the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century.1 As sugar plantations developed on Madeira, it became possible to supply Flanders and other parts of northern Europe directly from the Atlantic with one of the costly products that had previously been obtained within the Mediterranean. By 1482, with the establishment of a Portuguese fortress at São Jorge da Mina (‘the Mine’) in West Africa, not far north of the Equator, gold was beginning to reach Europe without being channelled across the Sahara and through the Muslim ports of the Maghrib; the opening of this Guinea trade compensated for disappointment at the failure of Ceuta to pay for its upkeep. The Atlantic also became a source of slaves for Mediterranean masters: Canary Islanders, Berbers from the opposite shores of Africa and, increasingly, black slaves carried north from the Mine. Many of these eventually reached Valencia, Majorca and other Mediterranean ports, after passing through Lisbon.2

  Then, with Columbus’s entry into the Caribbean islands in October 1492, Castile also acquired a source of precious metal that was ruthlessly exploited by imposing heavy taxes in gold on the Indians, even though they were supposedly free subjects of the Crown. The Genoese, despite their unpopularity in Spain, installed themselves in Seville and, with royal approval, ran the trans-Atlantic trading operations. At the same time, they turned their hands to finance. Turkish pressure on the Genoese possessions in the eastern Mediterranean increased, and so the Genoese allied themselves more insistently with Spain, the power that seemed best able to stand up to the Turks. As Mediterranean navigation became more dangerous, the Venetians also reconsidered their options. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Venice had become embroiled in the tortured politics of Renaissance Italy, acquiring, under Doge Francesco Foscari, a mainland dominion far in excess of the small tracts it controlled a century earlier. The writ of Venice reached as far west as Bergamo, where the lion of St Mark brushed against the serpent of Milan. This is not to say that Venice abandoned its Mediterranean interests, but the Serenissima Repubblica was beginning to acquire the assets on the Terraferma, or Italian mainland, that would enable it to turn in that direction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it gradually lost its eastern Mediterranean dependencies to the Ottomans.3 Venice felt itself increasingly exposed, and its leaders were aware that their reluctance to use their navy to challenge the Ottomans exposed them in western Europe to accusations of hypocrisy and opportunism.

  The sense that the seas were less safe was not an illusion. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards pirates ranged across the Mediterranean, raiding ships, coasts and islands from which they carried off thousands of slaves each year.4 Among the Christian lands most severely affected by Muslim piracy were Calabria, Sicily and Majorca; these regions had not experienced Muslim piracy on this scale since the Saracen raids of the ninth and tenth centuries. Piracy became endemic; the long-standing control of the seas by Italian and Catalan merchants was turning into a memory. There were both Christian and Muslim pirates; among the Christians, the Knights of St John on Rhodes were the most active. They remained committed to the ideal of a holy war against Islam, and they could draw on their estates in western Europe to pay for the upkeep of perhaps half a dozen well-equipped galleys. On the other side, the Barbary corsairs threatened Christendom for three centuries. They had the backing of the Ottoman court; they established secure bases in North Africa; they were led by energetic and talented commanders; and they brought the war between Christian and Muslim navies deep into the western Mediterranean.5

  The eastern Mediterranean became an Ottoman lake during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. An obvious explanation for Ottoman expansion is the desire to spread the faith, and the sultans did not forget their ancestors who had waged war against the Byzantines as ghazis, holy warriors for Islam; however, in the Balkans they preferred to leave most of their subjects as Christians or Jews, reasoning, as had the Arab caliphs of the early Middle Ages, that the Peoples of the Book were a valuable source of tax revenue. They sought to protect trade, partly in order to supply their magnificent court and their teeming capital city with silks, jewels, gold and humbler supplies such as grain, and partly because they understood that functioning trade routes were another source of plentiful revenue – hence their willingness to protect the Ragusans and to offer trade treaties to the Venetians and Genoese.6 Elsewhere, they tried to impose their will. In 1516 Ottoman armies crushed the Mamluks in Syria, opening the way for a quick and easy occupation of Egypt. This left the Christians in charge of a scattering of islands: in the isles of the Aegean, sundry Italian lords (themselves often pirates) were picked off by the Turks over several decades; Cyprus remained in Venetian hands, and Chios in Genoese hands, but Rhodes was subjected to a long and harsh siege in 1522. This provided the new Ottoman sultan, Süleyman, with an opportunity to prove his military abilities. He was there in person to avenge the defeat at Rhodes in 1480. The citadel h
ad been impressively strengthened in anticipation of a Turkish siege, but the active defenders were few – only 300 Knights, though there were many others of lesser rank. Süleyman refused to abandon his siege even as the weather turned, and battered Rhodes into submission. The Knights surrendered in December 1522, and were granted generous terms, for the Ottomans sometimes showed respect to those who had fought gallantly against them.7

  Now homeless, the Hospitallers were determined to renew the fight against the Muslims. Fortunately, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of the lands of the Crown of Aragon (including Sicily), had a ready answer. He granted the Knights a magnificent charter in March 1530, in which he pointed out that they had ‘wandered for several years’ and sought a ‘fixed residence’; he was ready to dispose in their favour of several dependencies of the kingdom of Sicily: Tripoli, on the coast of Africa, along with Malta and Gozo. In return, all that was required in recognition of Sicilian sovereignty was a gift of a falcon to the viceroy of Sicily each All Saints’ Day. Ferdinand the Catholic had installed a Spanish garrison in Tripoli in 1510, though it was proving difficult to hold the town against the Berbers who pressed in from each landward side.8 For Charles, holding Tripoli was what mattered; it was lost in 1551, after which it became obvious that holding Malta was no less important.

  The Barbary corsairs at first sight seem very different from the highly organized Knights Hospitallers. Yet the corsairs too were warriors who had travelled far to earn their reputation. A number were the descendants of Greeks, renegades who had themselves renounced the Christian faith; others were of Calabrian, Albanian, Jewish, Genoese, even Hungarian origin.9 They were not, or not all, roving psychopaths dedicated solely to their own profit and amusement. They included skilled navigators, notably Piri Reis, whose detailed maps of the Mediterranean and the world beyond furnished the Ottoman court with precise information in the age of discovery.10 But the most famous corsair was Barbarossa, so called in the West because of his red beard. In fact he was not one but two pirates, Uruj, or Oruc, and his younger brother Hizr, or Khizr. Around these men there developed a whole series of stories, and it is not always clear what is fable. It is generally agreed that the brothers were born in Lesbos in the days of Mehmet the Conqueror, who conquered the island from its Italian duke, Niccolò Giustiniani. Their father had probably been born a Christian, had served in the Ottoman army as a Muslim janissary and had then settled down with a Christian wife; he traded in ceramics all round the Aegean, as far north as Constantinople itself, and often took his sons along with him. It was on these journeys that the Barbarossa brothers acquired their skill as seamen. On one journey Uruj collected timber from the shores of Anatolia, only to find his vessel pursued by Our Lady of the Conception, a Hospitaller galley out of Rhodes. Uruj was captured and sent to toil as a galley slave, though after a couple of years he was ransomed, which was not unusual; nonetheless, a story of heroic escape began to be told. He happily returned to the sea, spending time in the waters between Spain and the Maghrib in the company of Hizr; it is claimed that they helped ferry Jewish and Muslim refugees out of Spain in 1492.11

  Their original equipment was a light galley, crewed by about 100 volunteers, all in search of booty and glory, and around 1502 their base became Jerba, long a nest of pirates and the scene of conflict between Christian invaders and Muslim defenders. They built ties to the court in Tunis, operating as licensed pirates of the Hafsid sultan; in 1504, they set sail for Elba, whose deep coves favoured corsairs, and swooped on two galleys which proved to be sailing in the service of Pope Julius II, as well as a Spanish ship carrying 300 soldiers and sixty Aragonese noblemen to Naples. They easily took the galleys, enormously enhancing their reputation as heroes in Tunis and as fearsome enemies in Rome. By 1506 they possessed eight ships, but their successes had earned them so much fame that the Ottoman sultan bestowed on them the honorific title ‘Protector of the Faith’, khayr-ad-din, or, in Turkish, ‘Hayrettin’. A war of attrition was being fought between Muslim corsairs and their Christian foes; these were not just Genoese and Catalan sailors (whether merchants or corsairs) but the Portuguese and the Spaniards, who insistently intruded themselves into coastal forts along the Mediterranean and Atlantic shores of Morocco. Despite their successes at Melilla and Oran, the best the Spaniards could achieve at Algiers was the capture of some isolated rocks guarding the port, which were fortified with cannon in 1510 but were no substitute for control of the city.12

  During these conflicts, the Muslims had one great advantage: they could call on the support of warrior chieftains in the Moroccan hinterland around Tetuan. They spent their summers on the sea, raiding towards Spain and carrying off thousands of slaves, whom they put to work building up the defences of Tetuan. Hizr claimed to have captured twenty-one merchant vessels and 3,800 Christian slaves (including women and children) in a single month. The brothers raided relentlessly towards Majorca, Minorca, Sardinia and Sicily, and the impact of their raids can be measured in the number of towns and villages that moved away from the dangerously exposed coasts of the western Mediterranean islands, to be rebuilt several miles inland.13 Uruj acquired a thoroughly bloodthirsty reputation as the sort of man who would bite out a victim’s windpipe like a mad mastiff, but he was an astute politician, and utilized his reputation to achieve political ends. He created his own realm, starting with the town of Jijelli on the Algerian coast. Its inhabitants were impressed when he seized a Sicilian galley laden with wheat at a time when their own supplies were very low. They invited him to take charge, and before long he launched a coup in Algiers. He exploited a succession crisis in Tlemcen, an important city situated a little way back from the sea, and made himself its master in 1517. All of this was of deep concern to the Spaniards based at Oran, who had been trying to develop friendly links with local chieftains.14 Spain’s new ruler, Charles of Habsburg, understood the need to mobilize troops in his North African possessions. Fortunately, the problem of Tlemcen was resolved by the inhabitants, who saw Uruj as an agent of Turkish rule; chased out, he was trapped by Spanish troops and killed in battle.

  The second Barbarossa, Hizr, more often known as Hayrettin, now acquired an even more fearsome reputation than Uruj. To emphasize his succession to the elder, red-bearded, Barbarossa, he dyed his own beard red. He consolidated his hold over the coastal towns of the Maghrib, managing to prise from the Spaniards the forts on the islands at the entrance to Algiers in 1529.15 The same year he defeated a Spanish flotilla off Formentera in the Balearic islands, which were now easily within range, carrying off seven galleys along with their captains; when he became irritated with the captains he had them sliced up with sharp knives.16 Algiers became Barbarossa’s capital, but he took care to seek the protection of the Ottoman sultan. He was far enough from Constantinople to retain autonomy, and he was valuable enough to the Ottoman sultan to benefit from the material support of the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman sultans switched their attention back and forth from the Mediterranean to the Balkans to Persia, and their struggles with the Safavid shahs in the East often distracted them from Mediterranean affairs. It made good sense to work through the agency of Hayrettin Barbarossa rather than to commit all their resources to one of these theatres of war. Barbarossa received official recognition as emir of Algiers, and liked to call himself kapudan pasha, ‘captain general’. Sultan Selim I sent him a Turkish standard, cannons and war munitions, along with 2,000 janissaries.

  By the early 1530s Hayrettin had won the trust of Selim’s successor, Süleyman, and was even summoned to the court in Constantinople to advise on strategy in the western Mediterranean, for the great question was how intensely the Turks should maintain pressure on their Spanish rivals. The Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, is said to have encouraged Barbarossa to launch a daring attack on Fondi, on the Italian coast south of Rome, in the hope of capturing the beautiful widow Giulia Gonzaga, whose husband had been lord of the region. According to legend, she escaped half-naked as the Turks battered on the gates of Fondi, t
hough in reality she was not even in Fondi that night.17 The viceroy of Naples took the gloomy view that southern Italy was the new Rhodes, the last frontier post on the edge of Turkdom.18 Not surprisingly, it was Hayrettin who commanded a fleet the Ottoman sultan sent to Tunis in 1534 after its king, known for his suspicion of the Turks, died and a succession struggle broke out. Barbarossa pounced on the city, though Charles V then counter-attacked, pressing on despite Barbarossa’s threat to exterminate 20,000 Christian slaves held inside Tunis. Charles recaptured Tunis in 1535, pragmatically entrusting it to the youngest son of the previous king, though he demanded a heavy tribute: 12,000 gold pieces, twelve falcons and six fine steeds.19 But if Charles felt he earned the congratulations of his subjects on his victory at Tunis, he was soon to realize that he had been over-optimistic. Within a few months a flotilla slipped out of Algiers and headed for Minorca, where Barbarossa’s men impudently raised Spanish flags on their masts and brazenly entered the massive natural harbour of Mahón. They sacked the town and acquired 1,800 slaves.20