Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 by Roger Crowley Read Free Book Online

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