The Sultan's Admiral (3 page)

Aruj, the rais, or captain, of the galleot, was not the man to listen to his crew’s fears. Whatever his faults, he was, above all, that unusual human being, a total “man of action.” He was, perhaps, to fail in his life through not listening often enough to the cool voice of reason, yet all his successes were to derive from his ability to “grasp the nettle, danger.”

By now the Turkish galleot had pulled out into the middle of the narrow channel. Aruj, sensing that the only way to ensure the fidelity of one’s followers is to make quite sure that they cannot become one’s deserters, ordered half the crew to let slip their oars into the sea. It says much for the discipline of a Turkish crew on a private enterprise (not backed with the authority of their own or any state), that the men did as they were told. It says much also for the authority wielded by their captain.

To let slip half their oars meant that the galleot had no chance of making her escape if things went wrong. The men aboard her were now totally committed to the battle that lay ahead. They could not for a moment have the comforting knowledge that, if they were being worsted, they could escape over the horizon, or round the rocky coast of Elba.

Fingering the red beard that was later to become synonymous with his fame throughout Europe, Aruj stood watching the great Christian ship as she approached him, all in ignorance that there was an enemy in this part of the Catholic Sea. So the great galley approached, “not imagining the galleot to be Turkish (a sight till then unknown in those seas, the Barbary cruisers being only brigantines and small rowboats), and tho’ curious to know why it lay waiting, yet far from dreaming of an enemy. But being arrived near enough to take a full view of the make of the vessel, and to distinguish the Turkish habits, in the utmost hurry and consternation they began to make ready for an encounter …”

Now there was an immediate call to arms, and drums began to beat. The under officer lifted the silver whistle from the cord around his neck and blew the call to increase the stroke as the soldiers ran for their weapons. Too late! The Turks were upon them. Aruj and his men had been poised with their muskets and their bows in their hands, and now they opened fire upon a confused and unready enemy. A second later, the beaklike prow of the galley swept alongside the papal vessel and Aruj at the head of his men leapt on board. The Turks who had been manning the oars jumped from the rowing benches, seized their weapons, and followed their leader.

Within a matter of minutes the astounded officers upon the poop, the demoralised soldiers, and the whole crew of the great galley found themselves overwhelmed. There was no option but to surrender, and the captain formally handed his sword to Rais Aruj. He, his officers and men were bound and locked below hatches. From the slaves at the oars there came great cries of joy and wolflike howlings, as all of them began to rattle their chains, to call attention to the fact that they expected their new master to free them. But Aruj had no time to waste. He called his lieutenants round him on the poop. They gathered exultantly about him, but his next words were enough to reduce even their high spirits to an uneasy silence.

“I must—and will—have the other galley! We have captured this one. Now let us capture the second!”

They argued against it. He pointed out that if the first, and largest, vessel had succumbed so easily, so would the second. Finally the man’s dominant personality, combined with their recent triumph, allayed their fears. After all, had not their rais just proved himself correct against the judgement of those who had said that this vast galley was too much for them? And this time Aruj was also adding dissimulation as an additional weapon to the Turkish armoury. He ordered his captives to be stripped of their clothes and armour, and his own crew to remove their Turkish clothing and don that of the Christians. At the same time he had his galleot towed round and secured astern of the papal vessel. Now, to all intents and purposes, it would look to the second Christian ship as if the papal galley had encountered a corsair off the coast of Elba, had captured her, and was towing her off as a prize. The Turks were ever warriors, and now they were seized by Aruj’s enthusiasm and lust for battle.

That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:

Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,

The braves who fight thy war unsheathe the sabre …

Everything was ready. A Turkish overseer strode the long catwalk between the oar benches and gave the order for the stroke. The blades oh the port side were poised motionless above the sea, while the men on the starboard side threw their weight into the great looms of their oars. Slowly the galley circled to port, turning her beaked prow towards her approaching companion. The whistle blew again, and one of the Turks picked up the stick alongside a tambour and prepared to give the stroke. Thrum! Both banks of oars went into action, and the oar blades struck the water in unison. “The stratagem failed not of its desired effect . . The other galley, seeing the leader turn towards them towing behind her a foreign galleot, immediately altered course to find out what had happened. They saw the helmeted officers on the poop, and saw too the captain pacing up and down. But they were still too far away to descry that this burly red-bearded captain was not the same as the elegant Genoese who had stood there only half an hour before.

As the two galleys closed on one another in the narrow strait between Elba and Piombino, the Turks kneeling behind the bulwarks had their arquebuses and their composite Scythian-style bows at the ready. Baba (Father) Aruj would tell them when to reveal themselves and open fire. The moment came. The kneeling Turks arose—and suddenly the unsuspecting second galley was hit by a devastating hail of arrows and lead shot. The surprise was complete. Before the officers, let alone the sailors and soldiers of the galley, had had time to collect themselves—to wonder even whether their compatriots had gone mad—the rambade or forward fighting prow of the other galley was alongside them, tearing through the oars on their starboard side. With a great cry of “Allah! Allaaah!” the Turks swarmed aboard their astounded opponent.

A number of the Italians on the upper deck were killed or wounded in that first fusillade, and after that “the galley was instantly boarded and carried, with very little further bloodshed or resistance.” The triumphant Aruj found himself in possession of two of the largest vessels in the Mediterranean.

After disarming the officers and soldiers, his first thought was to release the Moslem rowers at the oars of both his new-found vessels. The Christian criminals or debtors could stay in their shackles to toil, but true sons of the Prophet (some of them Turks and others from the African territories) were immediately freed. Aruj and his lieutenants had a quick inspection of their Christian captives, picking out with a practised eye those who looked as if they could stand the rigours of the oar. The others would still fetch money in the slave market back home in North Africa. Those who had rich or influential relatives—whether they had been condemned to the oar or not—would one day be able to ransom themselves at a handsome profit to their captors.

Towing their own galleot behind the papal galley, the Turks turned to the south. They made their way between the rocky islands of Montecristo and Giglio. The days of hot summer passed as they crept down the Tyrrhenian Sea, then altered course to slide between Sicily and the southern tip of Sardinia towards their home port of Tunis. Sometimes a cool and favourable northerly breeze wafted from astern, and they goosewinged their great twin lateen sails. Only then was the monotonous clank of the toiling slaves (as they worked, their leg irons rattled in unison) completely stilled. Mostly though, since it was still the high heat of the windless Mediterranean summer, the two great galleys resounded day and night to the leathern voice of the tambour, the pipe of the silver whistle, and the dip, sigh, pause, and splash of the sweeping oars.

Many centuries before, the Romans had defeated their Semitic rivals the Carthaginians and had established sway over this sea. Now, with the aid of an Asiatic race, the Turks, the people from North Africa were about to reap their revenge upon the descendants of the ancient Romans. The salt-sown ruins of Carthage, the islands, the cities, seaports, and trading posts of the ancient Phoenicians—slumbering under the drunken summer sun—must have raised a ghostly cheer.

So they came swanning down the soft sea to the city that was described by an Arab chronicler as “Tunis—the White, the Odoriferous, the Flowery Bride of the West.” (There were some unkind enough to say that the adjective “odoriferous” was not complimentary, but referred to the stinking salt pans and the oozy sewage-laden lagoons around the city.) The land homs of the Gulf of Tunis closed around the two captured ships and the towed galleot. Soon they saw ahead of them, rising out of the heat haze and the low-lying coastal belt, the white houses of the port that they had made their temporary home.

“The wonder and astonishment,” says the sixteenth-century Spanish historian Diego Haedo, “that this notable exploit caused in Tunis, and even in Christendom, is not to be expressed, nor how celebrated the name of Aruj Rais was become from that very moment; he being held and accounted, by all the world, as a most valiant and enterprising commander. And by reason his beard was extremely red, or carroty, from thenceforwards he was generally called Barbarossa, which in Italian signifies Red-Beard.”

The island of Lesbos hangs like a pendant on the ear of western Turkey. Rich and fertile, its capital, Mitylene, fronting the continent of Asia across a ten-mile-wide channel, it had been famous in antiquity as the home of the poetess Sappho. Lesbos had also long been renowned for the excellence of its wine and its olives. Around the great Gulf of Kalloni in the west stretch the fertile plains where the vines abound and where the olives ripple like a silver sea when the north wind spins their leaves. Behind the town of Mitylene itself, another large inlet makes an excellent port, safe from the gale-force meltemi winds of midsummer.

Throughout the Middle Ages Lesbos had remained a prosperous island, secure under the protection of the Byzantine Empire. But after the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians and soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, it had suffered a similar fate to all the other Aegean Islands. It had become a trading centre dominated, as well as disputed over, by Venetian and Genoese. It was inevitable, with the decline of Christian power —Europe itself being divided into a number of warring states— that an island like Lesbos should attract the attention of the Turkish master of the Asian coast.

After his capture of Constantinople in 1453, the triumphant Sultan Mehmet II began to occupy the islands of the Aegean. As the master of Constantinople, as well as of the mainland of Greece, he could hardly tolerate these Italian enclaves in what had now become a Turkish sea. Furthermore, the possession of Constantinople had at last given the Sultan a great seaport. For the first time in their history the Turks, a predominantly land people, were faced with the necessity of creating a merchant navy, and a fighting navy to protect it. It was this, above all, which provided the main driving force behind their extraordinary naval expansion during the following century.

As for the islands, it was not only that the Sultan desired their revenues (and to be quit of Christians trading in his waters), but they had also become wasp nests of pirates. Mitylene itself was one of the most notorious havens for Catalan, Italian, and Sicilian pirates, who raided the other islands and swarmed around the mouth of the Dardanelles, preying on Turkish shipping. They even had the insolence to raid the mainland of the Sultan’s dominions and carry off Turkish citizens for sale as slaves in the marts of Venice and Genoa. A Sultan who was described as “Master of the East and West, the Possessor of Men’s necks, and the Peacock of the World” was not likely to tolerate such activities for long. With the aid of his recently formed navy he began systematically occupying the islands. Little did the European pirates who had operated from them realize that they had “sown the wind and would reap the whirlwind.” As the Turks gradually spread into the Mediterranean world they were to produce a race of men that would make the activities of the Italian pirates in the Aegean look like children’s games. Among the islands of the Aegean the Turks would learn—as had the ancient Greeks many centuries before them—the arts of navigation and seamanship. Thence they would expand throughout the whole Mediterranean, until there would not be a European seaport safe from them. They would go so far as to threaten great inland cities, so that even the Pope in Rome could not be sure that he would not wake one morning to find that his capital had been invaded overnight by marauding Turks.

It was in Lesbos that Barbarossa and his brothers were born. The island had fallen to the Turks in 1462 and, in accordance with his policy of settling deserving soldiers in newly conquered territory upon their retirement, the Sultan handed over lands and property to the men who had helped capture the island. Among those left behind to inherit the rich earth and the commerce that had formerly belonged to Genoese and Venetians was the father of the Barbarossas. He has been variously described as a “retired janissary” and a “Sipahi soldier.” Certainly, although some Spanish writers claim that he was a native Christian, there is little doubt that he was a Moslem. His name was Ya’Kub (Jacob), but the most reliable sources state that he himself was the son of a Christian. This would make perfect sense if one may assume that he had been a janissary; for all janissaries were the sons of Christians, forcibly abducted from their parents, converted to the Moslem faith in early childhood, and then trained to be the most formidable warriors of the Grand Turk. Although the janissaries, so long as they served in the army, were forbidden to marry, it was natural that they should do so upon retirement. Ya’Kub, accordingly, married a woman of Lesbos. She was, it would seem, the widow of a Greek priest. (Unlike the Church of Rome, the Orthodox Eastern Church does not forbid marriage to its clergy.)