Barbarossa, as we have seen, frankly acknowledged that he sought his own advantage, and, when he possessed himself of Tunis, made no pretence of any altruistic motive. The Emperor, on the other hand, having come in the guise of a Christian reformer, simply stole the kingdom from Barbarossa and kept it for himself. Incidentally he released the captives, which enabled him to pose once more as the great champion of the oppressed. But, however this may have been, there is no doubt that he had performed a notable feat of arms, and even the most mighty monarch then in Europe felt uplifted by the fact that he had defeated the greatest of the corsairs: accordingly, on July 25th Charles wrote to England, France, Portugal, Milan, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Siena, Mantua, and Naples: “De manera que en pocas dias se supo in toda Europa su buena fortuna.” (So it was in a few days the whole of Europe was acquainted with his good fortune.)
Martin Nunez, “Caballero de Toledo,” was sent on a special embassy to the Pope to acquaint the Pontiff at first hand of all that happened, and the success which had attended the arms of the Emperor, and also to thank his Holiness for the assistance which he had rendered by sending the Papal galleys. Jorge de Melo, a Portuguese caballero, was sent to his own country with despatches, and other nobles and high officials were despatched to the Emperor’s Viceroys in the various parts of his dominions. In the long circular letter which Charles addressed to all these potentates—and which is reproduced in its entirety by Sandoval—he says “that the Christian captives found in Tunis amounted to something like eighteen to twenty thousand, that Barbarossa had escaped with some five thousand Turks, corsairs, and renegadoes, of which three thousand were on horseback and two thousand afoot; that, as they suffered from great scarcity of provisions, and the almost total lack of water, many were falling by the way, and many others were being murdered by their quondam allies for such goods as they possessed, or for the value of their arms and clothing.”
We must now return to Kheyr-ed-Din. What the sufferings of that chieftain and the remnant of his gallant army must have been in their flight to Bona they alone knew. It was the height of summer, and burning tracks of desert and rugged mountain passes had to be surmounted; naturally they could have carried but very little food, and water they had to find on the way. In addition to this, as we have seen in the despatch of Charles, the tribesmen turned against them, cutting off stragglers and murdering and plundering as opportunity offered. Barbarossa himself was an old man, so old that it seems nothing short of a miracle that he should have survived the hardships of this awful march. Not only did he do this, but apparently arrived at Bona in condition to continue his journey by sea at once, had he cared to do so. He had lost his newly acquired kingdom, he had lost nearly his entire fleet, his arsenal and stores were in the hands of his enemies; if ever a man was completely crushed it was he on this memorable occasion. As we have said before, however, it was in times of the greatest stress when the indomitable character of this man rose to meet the occasion, and, while his foes were congratulating one another that at last there was an end of the scourge of the Mediterranean and the bugbear of Christendom, the hunted fugitive was merely preparing himself for fresh acts of aggression.
The real fact of the matter was that he was above all and before all a seaman. The defeat of Kheyr-ed-Din meant merely the transference of his malign activities from one sphere to another—from the sea to the land, or from the land to the sea. King he called himself, and king de facto he was both in Algiers and Tunis, reigning with unexampled cruelty, a prototype of those other corsair kings by whom he was succeeded. But the real source of his power lay, not in stone walls and fortifications, nor in ill-trained levies of African tribes, but in his own genius for command at sea, and the manner in which he was able to inspire with his own dauntless and desperate spirit those hardy mariners who followed in his train, the descendants of the “Moriscoes” who hailed from the ancient Moorish kingdoms of Cordoba and Granada.
Thus it was in the present instance. He had been unable to withstand the might of Cæsar and his legions, but Tunis was not the whole of Northern Africa, nor had quite all his eggs been kept in that one basket. He had kept fifteen galleys in reserve at Bona, and, in consequence, on his arrival there, was able to embark at once. This he did, and hardly had he done so when there appeared upon the scene fifteen galleys commanded by Adan Centurion and John Doria. Kheyr-ed-Din had had enough of fighting just for the present; his men and he were wearied out by the hardships of their flight, and accordingly he drew up his galleys under the fort at Bona and awaited an attack, should the enemy care to deliver one. But Adan Centurion’s heart failed him; to cut out the old Sea-wolf from under one of his own batteries was more than he had the stomach for, and he accordingly sailed away. “Fue sin duda la perdida grande” (this no doubt was a great pity), is the comment of Sandoval, who goes on to say that, had the Genoese been the men that they had been aforetime, this would never have been, and that they would have gone in and burnt or disabled the galleys of the corsair, slain their leader, or driven him ashore. Hot on the tracks of Adan Centurion and his nephew John came the veteran Andrea Doria with forty galleys, but he was too late, and the bird had flown; had it been he who had arrived in the first instance, then it is more than probable that matters would have turned out differently, and Kheyr-ed-Din had then and there terminated his career. It is true that Andrea possessed himself of Bona, and the Corsair King was shorn of yet another of his land-stations, but for the time he had cut himself adrift from the land, and had gone back to that element in which he was particularly at home.
Doria left Bona in the charge of Alvar Gomez and a company of Spanish troops and then sailed away, if possible to find and capture Barbarossa, thus to set the seal of completeness on the victory which had been won by his master the Emperor. Another stronghold of the corsairs was now in most competent hands, as Alvar Gomez Zagal was one of the most renowned caballeros of Spain, son of that Pero Lopez de Horusco on whom the Moors themselves had bestowed the title of “Al Zagal,” or “The Valiant,” on account of his extraordinary bravery.
On August 17th Charles re-embarked his army and evacuated the country, leaving, however, one thousand Spanish veterans, under the command of Bernard de Mendoza, in charge of the Goletta, as a permanent memorial of the expedition, and as a guarantee that the wretched Muley Hassan should fully comply with the treaty obligations which had been imposed upon him. It is true that Barbarossa had not been captured, but his city had been taken, his fleet had been destroyed, and he himself was now a fugitive, unable any further to trouble the peace of Christendom or the dignity of the Emperor by whom he had been so soundly chastised. In consequence the Cæsar departed well pleased with himself and with those who had been acting under his orders, to whom he distributed orders and titles, as a memento of the occasion upon which they had finally broken up the power of those by whom his peace had so long been troubled.
One of the difficulties in dealing with the career of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa is that, in times when he was unsuccessful, or when, as on the present occasion, he had received a severe setback, it is next to impossible to find out what he was doing or where exactly he was preparing for his next coup. In this case, in particular, the old-time historians were thanking God that the Emperor had rid the world of a particularly pestilent knave, and ceased to trouble themselves much about him until he forced himself once more upon their notice. Had Charles at this time recognised the greatness of the man whom he had just so signally defeated he might have changed the course of history. Had he, instead of sailing back to Europe, content with that which he had accomplished in Tunis, pushed his attack home on Algiers, he might have made himself master of the whole of Northern Africa, as, in the disorganised state in which the corsairs now found themselves, they could certainly have offered no effective resistance. But to the Emperor these rovers of the sea presented themselves merely in the light of robbers. Robbers, it is true, on a somewhat large scale, but still not persons of sufficient importance to detain him from the infinitely more pressing affairs which awaited him on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
In addition to the fifteen galleys which Kheyr-ed-Din picked up at Bona he had in reserve at Algiers some fifty others. Escaping the attention of Adan Centurion and John Doria, and the infinitely more formidable squadron of Andrea, he headed once more for Algiers, and for a time seems to have remained quiet, no doubt recuperating from the fatigues, disappointments, and physical hardships which he had so recently undergone. He was apparently undisturbed during the winter by his Christian enemies, and was in consequence able to think out his future plans of campaign and to collect and put heart into his scattered followers, who, in ones and twos, were gradually, such of them as were left, finding their way back to the headquarters of piracy and its indomitable chieftain.
That cool calculator of the chances of life knew that this must be so; the power of the corsairs generally had received the worst blow it had ever encountered since the dispossessed Moriscoes had taken to the sea for a living; those of them who remained alive were without ships—that is to say, without their only means of making a livelihood—and that they should gravitate towards Algiers and its master was as nearly a certainty as anything human could be. And, as was anticipated by the chief, so it came to pass. Into the city straggled broken, starving, sullen men who had lost their all, for whom the future held nothing but misery and despair unless they could get to sea once more.
It was on occasions such as this that the intellectual eminence of Barbarossa was so marked. Rough and cruel as he was, he possessed nevertheless a magnetic power over the minds of men, on which, when it so pleased him, he could play with the most extraordinary effect. And now, when the rank and file of the corsairs were ragged, hungry, and smarting under defeat, he dealt with them tenderly and graciously; and the sum of his teaching was to the effect that they had but to follow him once more and all the evils from which they were suffering would be presently remedied. So it came about that men who, before the defeat, had commanded ships of their own, were glad enough to become units on board the galleys of Kheyr-ed-Din, animated by the pleasing hope that soon again, under the leadership of this man, they might regain all, nay more, than they had lost. It must be remembered that Barbarossa argued from sound premises when he held out such hopes as these to the desperate remnant of the corsairs in Algiers in that sad winter of 1535. He was the greatest of them all, and they, as well as he, knew this to be a fact: if they had lost their all in the past battles, they had been fighting in a common cause to preserve their own lives and their liberty to plunder the Christian at sea. And now there was work and there was bread to eat for those who once again would throw in their lot with their old leader; and, although it may be said that these men had no alternative, still they threw themselves with heartiness into that which the master mind decreed should be their work, and this was none other than the preparation of the galleys for another campaign against the Christian.
“What matter, comrades?” said the veteran on one occasion when he was superintending the fitting out of the galleys. “These dogs have gone back from whence they came, and they have left that creature, Muley Hassan, to do their will in Tunis. It is true that there is Mendoza and his thousand Spaniards in the Goletta, but did not Martin de Vargas hold the Peñon here? And where is De Vargas, and in whose hands is the Peñon now? We know from whence the garrisons of Spain draw their supplies, and believe me that there will be hungry men in the Goletta in this coming year. Once we get to sea again, there will be more than enough for every good man who believes in the Prophet, and who has the sense to follow Barbarossa. For every ducat that you have lost see, in the coming year, if you do not gain ten; the Christians are off their guard now, and they think that they have done with me because they have captured Tunis.” He laughed his great, jovial laugh. “By the beard of the Prophet—upon whom be peace!—they have yet to find out the man with whom they have to deal.”
It took a master mind to instil heart of grace into men who so recently had had so bad a beating as these; but in the end they began to cheer up, and to recollect how Barbarossa had sooner or later always risen from defeat as strong or stronger than before; also they recalled the fact that he was the chosen of the Padishah, and that that potentate, the representative of the Prophet on earth, would assuredly come to his assistance now that Tunis, which had been taken in his name, had been reft from Barbarossa by the Christians. Gradually hope took the place of despair, and when the corsairs took to the sea in the early part of the following year it was with renewed confidence in both themselves and their leader.
At the coming of spring Barbarossa was at sea again with thirty-two ships ready for any eventuality, his crews aflame with ardour for revenge against those by whom they had been so roughly handled. He chose for the scene of operations a place on the coast of Majorca some fifteen miles from Palma; from here he commanded the route of the Spaniards from their country to the African coast, and it was against this nation that he felt a great bitterness owing to recent events. Eagerly did the corsair and his men watch for the Spanish ships, the heavier vessels lying at anchor, but the light, swift galleys ranging and questing afar so that none might be missed. Very soon the vigilance of the Moslems was rewarded by the capture of a number of vessels, sent by Bernard de Mendoza laden with Turkish and Moorish slaves, destined to be utilised as rowers in the Spanish galleys. These men were hailed as a welcome reinforcement, and joyfully joined the forces of Kheyr-ed-Din when he moved on Minorca, captured the castle by a surprise assault, raided the surrounding country, and captured five thousand seven hundred Christians, amongst whom were173 eight hundred men who had been wounded in the attack on Tunis—all these unfortunates were sent to refill the bagnio of Algiers.
This private war of revenge was, however, destined soon to come to an end, as Soliman the Magnificent in this year became involved in disputes with the Venetian Republic, and recalled “that veritable man of the sea,” as Barbarossa had been described by Ibrahim, to Constantinople.
In this city by the sea there had taken place a tragedy which, although it only involved the death of a single man, was nevertheless far-reaching in its consequences; for the man was none other than that great statesman Ibrahim, Grand Vizier, and the only trusted counsellor of the Padishah. He who had been originally a slave had risen step by step in the favour of his master until he arrived at the giddy eminence which he occupied at the time of his death. It is a somewhat curious commentary on the essentially democratic status of an autocracy that a man could thus rise to a position second only to that of the autocrat himself; and, in all probability, wielding quite as much power.
Ibrahim had for years been treated by Soliman more as a brother than as a dependent, which, in spite of his Grand Viziership, he was in fact. They lived in the very closest communion, taking their meals together, and even sleeping in the same room, Soliman, a man of high intelligence himself, and a ruler who kept in touch with all the happenings which arose in his immense dominions, desiring always to have at hand the man whom he loved; from whom, with his amazing grip of political problems and endless fertility of resource, he was certain of sympathy and sound advice. But in an oriental despotism there are other forces at work besides those of la haute politique, and Ibrahim had one deadly enemy who was sworn to compass his destruction. The Sultana Roxalana was the light of the harem of the Grand Turk. This supremely beautiful woman, originally a Russian slave, was the object of the most passionate devotion on the part of Soliman; but she was as ambitious as she was lovely, and brooked no rival in the affections of Soliman, be that person man, woman, or child. In her hands the master of millions, the despot whose nod was death, became a submissive slave; the undisciplined passions of this headstrong woman swept aside from her path all those whom she suspected of sharing her influence, in no matter how remote a fashion. At her dictation had Soliman caused to be murdered his son Mustafa, a youth of the brightest promise, because, in his intelligence and his winning ways he threatened to eclipse Selim, the son of Roxalana herself.
This woman possessed a strong natural intelligence, albeit she was totally uneducated; she saw and knew that Ibrahim was all-powerful with her lover, and this roused her jealousy to fever-heat. She was not possessed of a cool judgment, which would have told her that Ibrahim was a statesman dealing with the external affairs of the Sublime Porte, and that with her and with her affairs he neither desired, nor had he the power, to interfere. What, however, the Sultana did know was that in these same affairs of State her opinion was dust in the balance when weighed against that of the Grand Vizier.
Soliman had that true attribute of supreme greatness, the unerring aptitude for the choice of the right man. He had picked out Ibrahim from among his immense entourage, and never once had he regretted his choice. As time went on and the intellect and power of the man became more and more revealed to his master, that sovereign left in his hands even such matters as despots are apt to guard most jealously. We have seen how, in spite of the murmurings of the whole of his capital, and the almost insubordinate attitude of his navy, he had persevered in the appointment of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, because the judgment of Ibrahim was in favour of its being carried out. This, to Roxalana, was gall and wormwood; well she knew that, as long as the Grand Vizier lived, her sovereignty was at best but a divided one. There was a point at which her blandishments stopped short; this was when she found that her opinion did not coincide with that of the minister. She was, as we have seen in the instance of her son, not a woman to stick at trifles, and she decided that Ibrahim must die.
There could be no hole-and-corner business about this; he must die, and when his murder had been accomplished she would boldly avow to her lover what she had done and take the consequences, believing in her power over him to come scatheless out of the adventure. In those days, when human life was so cheap, she might have asked for the death of almost any one, and her whim would have been gratified by a lover who had not hesitated to put to death his own son at her dictation. But with Ibrahim it was another matter; he was the familiar of the Sultan, his alter ego in fact. It says much for the nerve of the Sultana that she dared so greatly on this memorable and lamentable occasion.
On March 5th, 1536, Ibrahim, went to the royal seraglio, and, following his ancient custom, was admitted to the table of his master, sleeping after the meal at his side. At least so it was supposed, but none knew save those engaged in the murder what passed on that fatal night; the next day his dead body lay in the house of the Sultan.
Across the floor of jasper, in that palace which was a fitting residence for one rightly known as “The Magnificent,” the blood of Ibrahim flowed to the feet of Roxalana. The disordered clothing, the terrible expression of the face of the dead man, the gaping wounds which he had received, bore witness that there had taken place a grim struggle before that iron frame and splendid intellect had been levelled with the dust. This much leaked out afterwards, as such things will leak out, and then the Sultana took Soliman into her chamber and gazed up into his eyes. The man was stunned by the immensity of the calamity which had befallen him and his kingdom, but his manhood availed him not against the wiles of this Circe. Ibrahim had been foully done to death in his own palace, and this woman clinging so lovingly around his neck now was the murderess. The heart’s blood of his best friend was coagulating on the threshold of his own apartment when he forgave her by whom his murder had been accomplished. This was the vengeance of Roxalana, and who shall say that it was not complete?
The Ottoman Empire was the poorer by the loss of its greatest man, the jealousy of the Sultana was assuaged, the despot who had permitted this unavenged murder was still on the throne, thrall to the woman who had first murdered his son and then his friend and minister. But the deed carried with it the evil consequences which were only too likely to occur when so capable a head of the State was removed at so critical a time. Renewed strife was in the air, and endless squabbles between Venice and the Porte were taking place. With these we have no concern, but, in addition to other complaints, there were loud and continuous ones concerning the corsairs. Venice, “The Bride of the Sea,” had neither rest nor peace; the pirates swarmed in Corfu, in Zante, in Candia, in Cephalonia, and the plunder and murder of the subjects of the Republic was the theme of perpetual representations to the Sultan. The balance of advantage in this guerilla warfare was with the corsairs until Girolame Canale, a Venetian captain, seized one of the Moslem leaders known as “The Young Moor of Alexandria,” The victory of Canale was somewhat an important one as he captured the galley of “The Young Moor” and four others; two more were sunk, and three hundred Janissaries and one thousand slaves fell into the hands of the Venetian commander. There being an absence of nice feeling on the part of the Venetians, the Janissaries were at once beheaded to a man.
The whole story is an illustration of the extraordinary relations existing among the Mediterranean States at this time. Soliman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey, had lent three hundred of his Janissaries, his own picked troops, to assist the corsairs in their depredations on Venetian commerce. Having done this, and the Janissaries having been caught and summarily and rightly put to death as pirates, the Sultan, as soon as he heard of what had occurred, sent an ambassador, one Yonis Bey, to Venice to demand satisfaction for the insult passed upon him by the beheading of his own soldiers turned pirates. The conclusion of the affair was that the Venetians released “The Young Moor of Alexandria” as soon as he was cured of the eight wounds which he had received in the conflict, and sent him back to Africa with such of his galleys as were left. There was one rather comical incident in connection with this affair, which was that when Yonis Bey was on his way from Constantinople to Venice he was chased by a Venetian fleet, under the command of the Count Grandenico, and driven ashore. The Count was profuse in his apologies when he discovered that he had been chasing a live ambassador; but the occurrence so exasperated Soliman that he increased his demands in consequence.
Barbarossa, who had spent his time harrying the Spaniards at sea ever since the fall of Tunis, was shortly to appear on the scene again. He received orders from the Sultan, and came as fast as a favouring wind would bring him. Kheyr-ed-Din had been doing well in the matter of slaves and plunder, but he knew that, with the backing of the Grand Turk, he would once again be in command of a fleet in which he might repeat his triumph of past years, and prove himself once more the indispensable “man of the sea.”
Soon after his arrival his ambitions were gratified, and he found himself with a fleet of one hundred ships. Since the death of Ibrahim, and the incident which terminated with the despatch of Yonis Bey to Venice, the relations between the Grand Turk and the Venetian Republic had become steadily worse, and at last the Sultan declared war. On May 17th, 1537, Soliman, accompanied by his two sons, Selim and Mohammed, left Constantinople. With the campaign conducted by the Sultan we are not concerned here; it was directed against the Ionian Islands, which had been in the possession of Venice since 1401. On August 18th Soliman laid siege to Corfu, and was disastrously beaten, re-embarking his men on September 7th, after losing thousands in a fruitless attack on the fortress. He returned to Constantinople utterly discomfited. It was the seventh campaign which the Sultan had conducted in person, but the first in which the ever-faithful Ibrahim had not been by his side.
This defeat at the hands of the Venetians was not, however, the only humiliation which he was destined to experience in this disastrous year; for once again Doria, that scourge of the Moslem, was loose upon the seas, and was making his presence felt in the immediate neighbourhood of Corfu, where the Turks had been defeated. On July 17th Andrea had left the port of Messina with twenty-five galleys, had captured ten richly laden Turkish ships, gutted and burned them. Kheyr-ed-Din was at sea at the time, but the great rivals were not destined to meet on this occasion. Instead of Barbarossa, Andrea fell in with Ali-Chabelli, the lieutenant of Sandjak Bey of Gallipoli. On July 22nd the Genoese admiral and the Turkish commander from the Dardanelles met to the southward of Corfu, off the small island of Paxo, and a smart action ensued. It ended in the defeat of Ali-Chabelli, whose galleys were captured and towed by Doria into Paxo. That veteran fighter was himself in the thickest of the fray, and, conspicuous in his crimson doublet, had been an object of attention to the marksmen of Chabelli during the entire action. In spite of the receipt of a severe wound in the knee, the admiral refused to go below until victory was assured. He was surrounded at this time by a devoted band of nobles sworn to defend the person of their admiral or to die in his defence. His portrait has been sketched for us at this time by the Dominican Friar, Padre Alberto Gugliel-motto, author of “La guerra dei Pirati e la marina Pontifica dal 1500 al 1560.” The description runs thus: “Andrea Doria was of lofty stature, his face oval in shape, forehead broad and commanding, his neck was powerful, his hair short, his beard long and fan-shaped, his lips were thin, his eyes bright and piercing.”
Once again had he defeated an officer of the Grand Turk; and it may be remarked that Ibrahim was probably quite right in the estimation, or rather in the lack of estimation, in which he held the sea-officers of his master, as they seem to have been deficient in every quality save that of personal valour, and in their encounters with Doria and the knights were almost invariably worsted. For the sake of Islam, for the prestige of the Moslem arms at sea, it was time that Barbarossa should take matters in hand once more.
The autumn of this year 1537 proved that the old Sea-wolf had lost none of his cunning, that his followers were as terrible as ever. What did it seem to matter that Venetian and Catalan, Genoese and Frenchman, Andalusian and the dwellers in the Archipelago, were all banded together in league against this common foe? Did not the redoubtable Andrea range the seas in vain, and were not all the efforts of the Knights of Saint John futile, when the son of the renegado from Mitylene and his Christian wife put forth from the Golden Horn? What was the magic of this man, it was asked despairingly, that none seemed able to prevail against him? Had it not been currently reported that Carlos Quinto, the great Emperor, had driven him forth from Tunis a hunted fugitive, broken and penniless, with never a galley left, without one ducat in his pocket? Was he so different, then, from all the rest of mankind that his followers would stick to him in evil report as well as in the height of his prosperity? Men swore and women crossed themselves at the mention of his name.
“Terrible as an army with banners,” indeed, was Kheyr-ed-Din in this eventful summer: things had gone badly with the crescent flag, the Padishah was unapproachable in his palace, brooding perchance on that “might have been” had he not sold his honour and the life of his only friend to gratify the malice of a she-devil; those in attendance on the Sultan trembled, for the humour of the despot was black indeed.
But “the veritable man of the sea” was in some sort to console him for that which he had lost; as never in his own history—and there was none else with which it could be compared—had the Corsair King made so fruitful a raid. He ravaged the coasts of the Adriatic and the islands of the Archipelago, sweeping in slaves by the thousand, and by the end of the year he had collected eighteen thousand in the arsenal at Stamboul. Great was the jubilation in Constantinople when the Admiralissimo himself returned from his last expedition against the infidel; stilled were the voices which hinted disaffection—who among them all could bring back four hundred thousand pieces of gold? What mariner could offer to the Grand Turk such varied and magnificent presents?
Upon his arrival Barbarossa asked permission to kiss the threshold of the palace of the Sultan, which boon being graciously accorded to him, he made his triumphal entry. Two hundred captives clad in scarlet robes carried cups of gold and flasks of silver behind them came thirty others, each staggering under an enormous purse of sequins; yet another two hundred brought collars of precious stones or bales of the choicest goods; and a further two hundred were laden with sacks of small coin. Certainly if Soliman the Magnificent had lost a Grand Vizier he had succeeded in finding an admiral!
All through the earlier months of 1538 the dockyards of Constantinople hummed with a furious activity, for Soliman had decreed that the maritime campaign of this year was to begin with no less than one hundred and fifty ships. His admiral, however, did not agree with this decision; to the Viziers he raged and stormed. “Listen,” he said, “O men of the land who understand naught of the happenings of the sea. By this time Saleh-Reis must have quitted Alexandria convoying to the Bosphorus twenty sail filled with the richest merchandise; should he fall in with the accursed Genoese, Doria, where then will be Saleh-Reis and his galleys and his convoy? I will tell you: the ships in Genoa, the galleys burned, Saleh-Reis and all his mariners chained to the rowers’ bench.”
The Viziers trembled, as men did when Barbarossa stormed and turned upon them those terrible eyes which knew neither fear nor pity. “We be but men,” they answered, “and our lord the Sultan has so ordained it.”
“I have forty galleys,” replied the corsair; “you have forty more. With these I will take the sea; but, mark you,” he continued, softening somewhat, “you do right to fear the displeasure of the Sultan, and I also have no wish to encounter it; but vessels raised and equipped in a hurry will be of small use to me. In the name of Allah the compassionate and his holy Prophet give me my eighty galleys and let me go.”
In Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa sound strategical instinct went hand in hand with the desperate valour of the corsair. To dally in the Golden Horn while so rich a prey was at sea to be picked up by his Christian foes was altogether opposed to his instincts: never to throw away a chance in the game of life had ever been his guiding principle.
Soliman, great man as he undoubtedly was, had not the adamantine hardness of character which enabled his admiral to risk all on the hazards of the moment; or possibly the Grand Turk was deficient in that clearness of strategical instinct which never in any circumstances forgoes a present advantage for something which may turn out well in a problematical future. Soliman, sore, sullen, and unapproachable, dwelt in his palace brooding over the misfortunes which had been his lot since the death of Ibrahim. Barbarossa, who so recently had lost practically all that he possessed, and who had reached an age at which most men have no hopes for the future, was as clear in intellect, as undaunted in spirit, as if he had been half a century younger: to be even once more with those by whom he had been defeated and dispossessed was the only thing now in his mind. The capture of Saleh-Reis and his convoy would be a triumph of which he could not bear to think. Further, it would add to the demoralisation of the sea forces of the Sultan, which were sadly in need of some striking success after the defeats which had so recently been their portion. The Sultan had decided that one hundred and fifty ships were necessary; his admiral thought otherwise. There was too much at stake for him to dally at Constantinople; his fiery energy swept all before it, and in the end he had his way. On June 7th, 1538, he finally triumphed over the hesitations of the Viziers and put to sea with eighty sail.
The Sultan, from his kiosk, the windows of which opened on the Bosphorus, counted the ships.
“Only eighty sail; is that all?” he asked.
The trembling Viziers prostrated themselves before him.
“O our Lord, the Padishah,” they cried, “Saleh-Reis comes from Alexandria with a rich convoy; somewhere lurking is Andrea Doria, the accursed; it was necessary, O Magnificent, to send succour.”
There was a pause, in which the hearts of men beat as do those who know not but that the next moment may be their last on earth.
The Sultan stared from his window at the retreating ships in a silence like the silence of the grave. At last he turned:
“So be it,” he answered briefly; “but see to it that reinforcements do not lag upon the road.”
If there had been activity in the dockyards before it was as nothing to the strenuous work that was to be done henceforward.
Before starting on this expedition Kheyr-ed-Din had made an innovation in the manning of some of the most powerful of his galleys, which was of the utmost importance, and which was to add enormously to the success of his future maritime enterprises. The custom had always been that the Ottoman galleys had been rowed by Christians, captured and enslaved; of course the converse was true in the galleys of their foes. There were, for the size of the vessels, an enormous number of men carried in the galleys of the sixteenth century, and an average craft of this description would have on board some four hundred men; of these, however, the proportion would be two hundred and fifty slaves to one hundred and fifty fighting men. That which Kheyr-ed-Din now insisted upon was that a certain proportion of his most powerful units should be rowed by Moslem fighting men, so that on the day of battle the oarsmen could join in the fray instead of remaining chained to their benches, as was the custom with the slaves. It is, however, an extraordinary testimony to the influence which the corsair had attained in Constantinople that he had been able to effect this change in the composition of some of his crews; it must have been done with the active co-operation of the Sultan, as no authority less potent than that of the sovereign himself could have induced free men to undertake the terrible toil of rower in a galley. This was reserved for the unfortunate slave on either side owing to the intolerable hardship of the life, and results, in the pace at which a galley proceeded through the water, were usually obtained by an unsparing use of the lash on the naked bodies of the rowers.
This human material was used up in the most prodigal manner possible, as those in command had not the inducement of treating the rowers well, from that economic standpoint which causes a man to so use his beast of burden as to get the best work from him. In the galley, when a slave could row no more he was flung overboard and another was put in his place.
The admiral, however, even when backed by the Padishah, could not man a large fleet of galleys with Moslem rowers, and, as there was a shortage in the matter of propelling power, his first business was to collect slaves, and for this purpose he visited the islands of the Archipelago. The lot of the unhappy inhabitants of these was indeed a hard one. They were nearer to the seat of the Moslem power than any other Christians; they were in those days totally unable to resist an attack in force, and in consequence were swept off in their thousands.
Seven islands cover the entrance to the Gulf of Volo. The nearest to the coast is Skiathos, which is also the most important; it was defended by a castle built upon a rock. This castle was attacked by Barbarossa, who bombarded it for six days, carried it by assault, and massacred the garrison. He spared the lives of the inhabitants of the island, and by this means secured three thousand four hundred rowers for his galleys. He had to provide motor-power for the reinforcements which he expected. In July he was reinforced from Constantinople by ninety galleys, while from Egypt came Saleh-Reis, who had succeeded in avoiding the terrible Doria, with twenty more; the fleet was thus complete.
Barbarossa ravaged Skios, Andros, and other islands, putting them under contribution, and in this manner raised some eight thousand ducats; from a pen of guinea-fowl to a king’s ransom, nothing escaped the maw of this most rapacious of corsairs. Candia and some other islands yielded up some small spoil, but the sufferings of such insignificant folk as the wretched islanders were soon lost to the sight of the Christian world in the magnitude of the events which were now impending.
Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, Corsair, Admiral, and King, the scourge of the Mediterranean, and Andrea Doria, Prince of Oneglia, Admiral of the modern Cæsar, Charles V., Emperor and King, were at last to meet face to face.
Some thirty-five miles to the south-eastward of Cape Bianco (the southernmost point of the island of Corfu) lies Prevesa, at the entrance of the Gulf of Arta, or, as it was known in classic times, the Ambracian Gulf. In these seas, in the year 31 B.C., was fought one of the most memorable battles of antiquity, for it was here that Octavius, afterward Augustus Cæsar, defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra. There have been many controversies of late years as to whom the original idea of breaking the line in naval combats is due: anyhow, it can claim a respectable antiquity, as it was practised at the battle of Actium by Octavius, who by a skilful manoeuvre caused Antony to lengthen his line, which he then cut through and attacked the ships of Cleopatra, which were in support: this was too much for the lady, who fled with her sixty ships, followed by Antony, to his eternal disgrace. The remainder of his fleet fought bravely for a time, but was eventually defeated, the land army also surrendering to Octavius. The date of the actual battle of Actium was September 2nd, 31 B.C.: it was in September 1538190 that the battle of Prevesa between Andrea Doria and Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa took place, and the conditions of the battle were almost exactly similar.
To this very place came, 1569 years later, the Christian and the Moslem, the Crescent and the Cross, each under its most renowned leader, each side burning with an inextinguishable hate. It was one of the peculiarities of this warfare that into it entered so much actual personal feeling, each side hating the other for the love of God in the most poisonous fashion. Save and except the battle of Lepanto in 1571 (with which we shall deal later in the story of Ali Basha, or Occhiali as he was called by his Christian opponents) the contest at Prevesa was far the most important ever fought by those strange oar-propelled vessels known as galleys. It was memorable in many ways, but particularly so for the ages of the men in chief command. Andrea Doria was at this time seventy years of age; in fact, Guglielmotti gives the date of his birth as 1466, thus making him two years older. That amazing veteran Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, who died in his bed at Constantinople on July 4th, 1546, at the age of ninety, must have been eighty-two. Vicenzo Capello was sixty-eight, as the epitaph on his tomb at Venice in the church of Santa Maria Formosa says that he was seventy-two in the year of his death, 1542.
Once again Christendom was nerving itself for a supreme effort against the corsairs, and, during the time that Barbarossa was raiding and ravaging among the islands of the Archipelago, the Christian fleet was gradually assembling. At first it numbered some 150 galleys, 81 Venetian, 36 Pontifical, and 30 Spanish; Charles V. sent, at the last moment, 50 ships on which were embarked 10,000 troops. The force totalled altogether 59,000 to 60,000 men, 195 ships, and 2,594 cannons. This was no doubt a most formidable armada, but the policy of those by whom it was composed was not all directed to the same end. While Charles desired, above all things, to exterminate the corsairs for good and all, which was, in the circumstances, the only sound view of the matter, the Venetians were for fighting defensive actions to maintain their supremacy in the Ionian Islands, and were disposed to let the future take care of itself. There was not, in consequence, that absolute unanimity among the various commanders of the expedition as was necessary for its complete success.
The concentration of the Christian fleet took place at Corfu. The Venetians arrived first, with Vincenzo Capello in command; Marco Grimani brought thither the Papal contingent; they anchored and waited, but Andrea Doria did not appear. Days lengthened into weeks, and Grimani and Capelli chafed and fumed; provisions were running low and the dignity of Venice and of the Pope were flouted by this strange remissness on the part of the Admiral of the Emperor. At last, furious with impatience, Grimani made a raid into the Gulf of Arta, which was defended at the entrance by the fortress of Prevesa. The only result of this ill-timed attack was that two Papal captains and a number of soldiers were killed. Grimani then returned to Corfu, to find Capello irritated to the last extent by the non-appearance of Doria.
At last, on September 5th, the Imperial fleet hove in sight. It was composed of forty-nine galleys, but these were supplemented by a great number of sailing ships; the sailing craft, however, did not arrive till September 22nd. These vessels were gradually making way among the Spaniards since the discovery of the new world.
At this time the Venetians possessed fourteen nefs. Doria had augmented these by twenty-two of his own, and the total number of thirty-six was commanded by Franco Doria, a nephew of the admiral. The Venetian nefs were commanded by Alessandro Condalmiero, captain of the Galleon of Venice. This was the most formidable fighting vessel in the Mediterranean; she was reckoned an excellent sailor, she was by far the most heavily armed sailing ship then afloat; in fact, in the opinion of contemporary seamen, she was “an invincible fortress.”
Doria, Grimani, and Capello had now nearly 200 ships carrying nearly 60,000 men. Such a force, in all ages, has been considered great. William the Conqueror conquered Britain with a less number; it is almost half the total of the personnel of the British fleet in the present day which has to defend a country with 40,000,000 inhabitants, and all this force had been raised, armed, and equipped to combat with a Moslem corsair.
Barbarossa had succeeded in assembling 122 ships. He was accompanied by all the most famous corsairs of the day, among whom was Dragut, who fell at the siege of Malta, and of whom we shall have more to say in due time. Far and wide ranged the swift galleys of the Ottoman fleet, for the plan of the commander of the Moslems was to locate and destroy his enemies in detail if possible. At last news came to him that Grimani’s ships had been sighted in the Gulf of Arta. Not one moment did he lose; he would fall upon the Papal contingent with his whole force and destroy it utterly. Such, at least, was his plan when he sailed for Prevesa; but, notwithstanding his haste, he was too late. Happily for himself, Grimani had returned to Corfu before the arrival of his enemy.
At this juncture Barbarossa hesitated; had he not done so, and had he followed Grimani to Corfu, he might have destroyed both him and Vincenzo Capello in detail before the arrival of Doria. The Prevesa campaign is a curious study of hesitation on both sides, and the idea naturally occurs were not the corsair and the Christian commanders-in-chief too old for the work on which they were engaged? Men of over seventy are not impetuous, but grave and deliberate as a rule; but there is no rule without its exceptions, and Doria and Barbarossa were not as other leaders. Up to the present their dash and initiative had been unimpaired. There was no question that Barbarossa not only made a mistake in hesitating, but that by it he lost the game. Instead of striking at once he did what he had never done before in the whole of his career, which was to send to Constantinople for instructions. Some of his galleys had captured a fishing-boat off Corfu, the crew of which had seen Doria’s fleet. The Moslem leader sent the fishermen themselves to report to Soliman exactly what they had seen, and to ask for and bring back instructions from that potentate. What Barbarossa had discovered was that the odds were very much against him; so much, in fact, that he would have to act on the defensive. In consequence, he steered for Prevesa and entered the Gulf of Arta, which is approached by a long narrow strait, dominated by the castle of Prevesa. Once inside he anchored his galleys in such a position that they could fire direct out to sea, thus overwhelming with their fire any vessel attempting to enter.
Barbarossa now occupied the same position as did Octavius in his combat with Antony. The rôle of the latter general was now taken by Doria. Antony, like Doria, had heavy ships which could not advance to the attack owing to their too great draught. Octavius, with his light-draught ships, could both attack and retreat into safety if overmatched.
On September 22nd Doria, having collected all his ships, gave orders to fill up with wood, water, and fresh provisions. On the 25th, to the sound of the trumpet, the Commander-in-Chief, with his fleet of two hundred sail, weighed anchor and sped before the wind rapidly southwards. Grimani commanded the advance-guard, Doria was in the centre, Vincenzo Capello, with his Venetians, brought up the rear. Formed in two columns, the nefs followed the galleys; the Galleon of Venice, commanded by Condalmiero, a squadron in herself, preceded them.