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

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.