The Sultan's Admiral (19 page)

Muley Hassan was prepared to accept the Emperor’s conditions in return for his restoration, and Charles either did not know or care that the exiled ruler was the most hated man in Tunisia. In any case, he wasted no time in setting everything in motion for an attack on Tunis at the first opportunity in the following year. The Marquis de Mondejar, Captain-General of Grenada, was ordered to raise men and money and set up camps for the troops outside the Andalusian ports. Andrea Doria, the Pope, and the Viceroys of Naples and Sicily and Sardinia were immediately acquainted with the imperial plan, and their help solicited or ordered as the case might be. The Knights of St. John, who held Malta in fee from Charles V, were also asked to lend assistance—something that they would have been unlikely to refuse in any case. Warfare against the infidel was their trade. Troops in Italy were told to prepare themselves for embarkation in the spring; orders were sent to Germany for the imperial troops to hold themselves in readiness; other detachments from Naples and Sicily were trained for the assault on Tunis. The main body of the invasion fleet would corrie from Spanish ports in the west, while other ships would join up from Genoa, Palermo, Naples, and Cagliari in Sardinia. The operation was well planned. Remembering previous failures on the dangerous North African coast, Charles V and his advisers clearly intended to leave little to chance. It was possibly the fact that they now fully realised the extent of the Turkish threat to Spain (and did not dismiss it as no more than the activities of “a few pirates”) which ensured the success of their expedition.

Kheir-ed-Din, for his part, was well aware that he had neither enough men nor a sufficiently fortified city to be able to withstand a large-scale attack. In the early spring of 1535, he sent fifteen of his large galleots down to Bone, a sheltered small harbour almost halfway between Tunis and Algiers. He had learned from previous experience that it was fatal to allow one’s ships to be trapped in port by the arrival of a superior fleet. His whole position upon the coast had been made possible by sea power, and he had no intention of losing his prime weapon in the event of Tunis falling. Clearly he must have been prepared to wait and see whether Charles and his fleet could manage to make a successful rendezvous for their combined operation. He must also have hoped that either inefficiency or some natural disaster would break up the armada before it could get off the Goletta of Tunis. But, if it were successful, he had now secured his fleet at Bone and Algiers. He had an escape route ready if things went wrong.

Late in May 1535, the Emperor and the main body of the fleet set out from Barcelona. On June 10 they rendezvoused at Cagliari with the Italian and Sicilian sections of the fleet and army. The total number of ships that left Barcelona is said to have been four hundred, while the fleet that finally set out for Tunis is reported to have been six hundred. As De Grammont recounts the events in his
Histoire d‘Alger
: “They left on the 13 th. of June, and arrived off Tunis on the 14th., and immediately attacked the Goletta; this had been well fortified, but the city of Tunis itself was not. After a number of skirmishes Barbarossa came out into the open country with his Turks. At the same time the local troops attacked the imperial army from the rear and on its flanks. On July 14th., the Goletta was taken by assault, and on the 20th., at the moment when battle was opened between the forces in front of the city, 12,000 Christian captives who were held in the town broke their chains, and, under the command of a certain Captain Paul Simeon, attacked the janissaries, who were already tired and worn out by the struggle . .

The immediate success of the attack on Tunis was due largely to the capture of the Goletta on the first day of the campaign. The credit for this must go almost entirely to the redoubtable Knights of St. John. The knights had come down from Malta for the campaign with four of their fighting galleys, and with the great carrack that was the flagship of their fleet. This was almost certainly the largest fighting vessel in the world at that time. Since it was her cannon that so swiftly blew to pieces the new walls of the Goletta and made a breach for the knights’ assault, some description of this immense vessel seems appropriate.

It “had eight decks or floors, and such space for warehouses and stores that it could keep at sea for six months without once having occasion to touch land for any sort of provisions, not even water; for it had a monstrous supply for all that time of water, the freshest and most limpid; nor did the crew eat biscuit, but excellent white bread, baked every day, the Corn being ground by a multitude of handmills, and an oven so capacious that it baked two thousand large loaves at a time. The ship was sheathed with six several sheathings of metal, two of which underwater, were lead with bronze screws (which do not consume the metal like iron screws), and with such consummate art was it built, that it could never sink, no human power could submerge it. Magnificent rooms, an armoury for five hundred men; but of the quantity of cannon of every kind, no need to say anything, save that fifty of them were of extraordinary dimensions; but what crowned all was that the enormous vessel was of incomparable swiftness and agility, and that its sails were astonishingly manageable; that it required little toil to reef or veer, and perform all nautical evolutions; not to speak of fighting people, but the mere mariners amounted to three hundred; as likewise two galleys of fifteen benches each, one galley lying in tow off the stern, and the other galley drawn aboard; not to mention various boats of divers sizes, also drawn aboard; and truly of such strength her sides, that though she had often been in action, and perforated by many cannon balls, not one of them ever went directly through her, or even passed her deadworks.”

If this leviathan served to remind the Turks that they still had much to learn about shipbuilding from such master mariners as the knights, they knew already “The Religion’s” fighting spirit. They can therefore have been little surprised to find that in the assault on the breach it was the Knights of St. John who claimed the van. A knight of the French Langue, the Chevalier Cossier, led the charge. Soon, the eight-pointed white cross on the standard of the order was floating above the breached battlements. Even the janissaries fled in disorder before these indomitable men.

If it was the escape and revolt of the Christian slaves in the city which finally delivered Tunis into the hands of Charles V, it was this first sudden and triumphant assault on the Goletta that put the prize within his grasp. Even Barbarossa recognised the qualities of these opponents. It is interesting to see that as late as the eighteenth century (when the Order of St. John was on the decline), Morgan could describe how greatly they were still respected by their Moslem enemies: “They are good corsairs; they are men; and as such behave … Were they not Cross-kissing Christians, and so much our enemies as they are, they would be very worthy of our esteem; nay, the best of us would take a pride in calling them our brothers, and even in fighting under their command.”

But now, with the fortress at Goletta captured, and the city behind him in the hands of the former slaves, Barbarossa realised that there was nothing left but to put into action his plan of escape. Together with his principal lieutenant, Sinan “the Jew of Smyrna” and Aydin, he and the rest of the Turks withdrew to

Bone, where their ships awaited them. It was Charles’s great failure (and one which he and all Europe would regret for a long time) that he did not annihilate the Turks in this hour of victory. Now was the moment when, leaving the city in the hands of a limited number of troops, he should have hastened after Kheir-ed-Din and defeated him on the battlefield. Charles had the troops to do it, he had—temporarily at least—the command of the sea. Furthermore, he was operating in a territory where many of the inhabitants were no more hostile to him and his Christians than they were to Barbarossa and his Turks. That he failed to do so was the penalty he had to pay for the way in which European armies at that period were allowed to pillage any city that they had taken by assault.

If a city formally surrendered before a breach had been made in its walls, then a meeting would be held between the leaders of the besieging army and the principal citizens. The terms of the surrender would be worked out, and the imposition of monetary and other tributes would be formally agreed. But in the case of a city that held out after its walls were breached, and which clearly had no intention of surrendering, the rules of war allowed the attacker to hand the city over to his troops for three days and nights. In drink and rape and loot the soldiers then took their wages for their part in the campaign. If such was the case in Europe, it was not to be expected that any mercy would be shown to the city of Tunis, the capital of a Moslem state. The fact that it was the Turks, and not the Tunisians, who had provoked this act of retribution made no difference.

“The streets became shambles, the houses dens of murder and shame: the very Catholic chroniclers admit the abominable outrages committed by the licentious and furious soldiery of the great Emperor. It is hard to remember that almost at the very time when German and Spanish and Italian men-at-arms were outraging and slaughtering helpless, innocent people in Tunis … the Grand Vizir Ibrahim was entering Baghdad and Tabriz as a conqueror at the head of wild Asiatic troops, and not a house nor a human being was molested.” Discipline in the Turkish army was infinitely more strict than in any of the European armies. In their long years of conquest throughout Asia Minor, Greece, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, the Sultans, the Vizirs, and the Pashas of the Ottomans had learned that a ruined city is a poor inheritance. They preferred to pay their troops; only permitting them to loot on special occasions, and then only for a strictly limited period of time. The Turkish soldier feared his officers and his sergeants more than he feared the enemy. This efficient way of ensuring discipline was one that was to be adopted by many Western armies in later centuries.

Tunis, recaptured for the benefit of Spain, was now handed back to Muley Hassan. The fortress at Goletta, once it had been made secure, was to become a Spanish possession, with a Spanish garrison (just as the Penon at Algiers had formerly been). An annual tribute was exacted from the restored ruler of the city, no Christians were to be among the slaves, and no Turks or other corsairs were to be permitted to use the harbour as a base for their activities. It seemed, on the face of it, a great victory, and the Emperor Charles V’s conquest was well celebrated in Europe. Barbarossa had been defeated. Thousands of Christians had been freed, and the threat to Mediterranean trade in the narrow strait of Sicily seemed to have been eliminated. Unfortunately for Spain and Europe, the failure to follow up his initial success rendered hollow the whole of Charles’s campaign.

Morgan has it that Barbarossa was now urged by his followers to withdraw altogether from the western Mediterranean: “Several of his captains proposed to him, that it was advisable for them to make the best of their way to the Levant, in order to solicit the Grand Signior’s aid, to recover what they had lost; since they could not think it in any wise safe for them to pretend to abide in those Western Seas, where, sooner or later, the Emperor would not fail working their destruction. At this discourse, Kheir-ed-Din, being highly incensed, angrily replied: ‘To the Levant did you say? Am I a man to show my back? Must I fly for refuge to Constantinople? Depend on it, I am far more inclined to go to Flanders.’ And so, without communicating his intention to any, he commanded them all to follow his galleot . .

The dialogue, of course, is invented—or perhaps no more than oral tradition—but in any case it has the right ring about it. Certainly, we know the details of Barbarossa’s next action. Far from taking any notice of the fainthearts among his lieutenants and supporters, he at once opened an aggressive war against the Kingdom of the Emperor. As on other occasions in his life, Barbarossa showed all the qualities of a master strategist and tactician. If he was often prepared of his own volition “to withdraw in order to jump farther,” he was also aware that on the occasions when an opponent has forced one to withdraw, he little expects that one will use this withdrawal period in order to begin a new act of aggression. Barbarossa, having ordered his galley captains to follow him “without troubling to ask themselves questions,” immediately put out to sea. It might have been expected that he would head for Algiers to reinforce the city, just in case Charles V decided to swoop back along the coast and complete his destruction of “the Turkish pirate.” Far from it— the Admiral’s galley set out on a northwest course into the Mediterranean.

No one in Spain or in its island off-riders, the Balearics, had any thought or concern for the Algerian corsairs. They knew well enough that Charles V was down off Tunis with a huge fleet, bent on destroying Barbarossa and removing all threat from their shores and sea lanes for ever. They had nothing else to fear in the native seas of the Catholic Emperor so, no doubt, their watchtowers and their guard posts were practically unmanned when the strike force arrived. Beating swiftly along the lazy summer sea came Barbarossa’s fifteen galleots from Bone, together with a number of others that he had summoned to join him from Algiers. The elated inhabitants of the Balearics, gazing southward from the crags of Formentera, Ibiza, and Mallorca, were in no doubt that this was part of the imperial fleet, detached from the main body to water and revictual. “All this was no more than what the insidious Kheir-ed-Din had projected; for the better to beguile and confirm them in their error, he hoisted Spanish and Italian colours . . Passing the southern Balearics, the squadron made its way to the north, rounded Minorca and swept into the great harbour of Mahon on the north coast of the island.

“In fine settled weather,” says the
Admiralty Pilot
, “anchorage can be obtained off the entrance to the harbour.” But these incoming vessels had no intention of anchoring. A large Portuguese merchantman was lying there placid as a goose, and fired a friendly salute to the “Emperor’s ships.” This was returned by a thunder of shot from the bow chasers, a crackle of arquebus fire, and a hail of arrows. Despite a brave resistance by the astounded Portuguese, the ship was taken. The Turkish squadron now bore up towards the sleepy town of Mahon, tucked in its comfortably defensive elbow of water. They swept past the islets that glow green in that pleasant bay, ignoring such unimportant plunder. Off the shelving shore near the town they turned at the command of whistles, gongs, and the crack of lashes, to come in stern first towards the shore. Down went the gangplanks and out stormed the soldiers—an infuriated hornet’s nest of men who had been driven from their pleasant home in Tunis to seek revenge.