Barbarossa’s Legacy
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Ottoman on Thursday, January 12, 2012
Hayreddin Barbarossa
In the summer of 1544 Barbarossa took some six thousand
captives from the coasts of Italy and the surrounding seas. On his way home the
boats were so dangerously overloaded with human cargo that the crews threw
hundreds of the weaker captives overboard. He entered the harbor in triumph to
the firing of cannon and nighttime fires illuminating the Horn. Thousands of
people gathered on the shore to witness the triumphant return of “the king of
the sea.” It was to be his last great expedition. In the summer of 1546, at the
age of eighty, he was carried off by a fever in his own palace in Istanbul to
the universal mourning of the people. He was buried in a mausoleum on the
shores of the Bosphorus that became an obligatory place of pilgrimage for all
departing naval expeditions, saluted with “numerous salvoes from cannon and
muskets to give him the honor due to a great saint.” After so many decades of
terror, Christians could scarcely believe that “the king of evil” was gone; so
great was the superstitious dread attached to his name that legend persisted he
could leave his tomb and walk the earth with the undead. Apparently it took a
Greek magician to fix the problem: burying a black dog in the tomb appeased the
restless spirit and returned it to Hades.
And in a real sense Barbarossa returned unceasingly to
terrorize the Christian shore. A new generation of corsair captains sprang up
in his wake; the greatest of whom—Turgut, Dragut to the Christians, born on the
Anatolian coast—would replicate the career of his mentor, moving from
enterprising freebooter on the shores of the Maghreb and battle experience at
Preveza to imperial service under Suleiman during the twenty years after 1546.
The king of evil had sowed dragon’s teeth in the sea.
Barbarossa’s last great raid of 1544 had shown that Muslim
fleets could roam at will. These huge sweeps were campaigns in a full-scale
Mediterranean war that the Ottomans were winning. Slave-taking was an
instrument of imperial policy, and the damage was immense. In the four decades following
the launch of Barbarossa’s first imperial fleet in 1534, thousands of people
were snatched from the coasts of Italy and Spain: eighteen hundred from Minorca
in 1535, seven thousand from the Bay of Naples in 1544, five thousand from the
island of Gozo off Malta in 1551, six thousand from Calabria in 1554, and four
thousand from Granada in 1566. The Ottomans could apply sudden and overwhelming
force at precise points; they could land at and destroy fair-size coastal towns
with impunity and threaten even the major cities of Italy. When Andrea Doria’s
nephew trapped and captured Turgut on the Sardinian shore in 1540 and condemned
him to the galleys, Barbarossa threatened to blockade Naples unless Turgut was
ransomed; the Genoese thought it wisest to comply.
Doria and Barbarossa met in
person to agree the terms. The thirty-five hundred ducats would prove a bad
bargain for the Christians: eleven years later Turgut would blockade Genoa
himself. The Christians had no adequate naval presence to respond to such
threats after Preveza. Charles was too busy attending to multiple other wars to
frame—or pay for—a coherent maritime response. By now it was all that the
Dorias could do to apply some counterpressure.
Nor was this assault conducted just through large fleet
actions. War between Charles and Suleiman ebbed and flowed, depending on the
timing of their conflicts, but when they signed a peace in 1547 so that the
sultan could campaign in Persia, the big maritime expeditions were temporarily
suspended; warfare continued anyway under another name. Enterprising corsairs
from the Maghreb filled the vacuum and inflicted a different style of misery on
Christian shores. Where the imperial fleets had brazenly smashed their way
through local defenses, these lesser carnivores proceeded by ambush and
stealth. It was a subtler kind of terror. Surprise replaced brute force.
The corsairs’ tactics were soon horribly familiar. A few
galliots might loiter offshore, below the rim of the horizon, sitting out the
heat of the day. A captured fishing boat would be sent in to scout the coast,
maybe with a local renegade to identify suitable targets. In the small hours of
the morning the corsairs would make a move, the black, low-slung shapes of the
vessels cutting the night sea beneath a sprinkle of stars. There were no
lanterns; the Christian galley slaves were gagged with cork dummies to prevent
them from calling out. When the prows touched the beach, the corsairs would hit
the village at speed; doors were kicked in and the occupants dragged naked from
their beds, the church bell rope slashed to forestall an alarm; a few screams
and dog barks would echo in the square and a confused straggle of captives were
marched down to their own beach and hustled aboard; then they would be gone. “They
grabbed young women and children,” recalled a Sicilian villager of one such
raid, “they snatched goods and money, and in a flash, back aboard their
galleys, they set their course and vanished.” The terror lay in the surprise
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