FOOTNOTES:
[23] See the Story of Turkey, 191.
[24] Doria et Barberousse, Pt. II. ch. xxv.
[25] The Spanish historians are silent on the subject of this expedition: or, rather, Haedo positively denies it, and says that Kheyr-ed-dīn sent an embassy to the Sultan, but did not go in person. Hājji Khalīfa, however, is clear and detailed in his account of the visit.
[26] For an account of Stambol and the old Seraglio see the Story of Turkey, 260 ff.
[27] See Chapter [XVI.], below.
[28] So says Jean Chesneau, French secretary at Constantinople in 1543. See Jurien de la Gravière, Les Corsaires Barbaresques, 13.
VIII.
TUNIS TAKEN AND LOST.
1534-1535.
The dwellers on the coasts of Italy soon discovered the new spirit in the Turkish fleet; they had now to dread Corsairs on both hands, east as well as west. In the summer of 1534 Kheyr-ed-dīn led his new fleet of eighty-four galleys forth from the Golden Horn, to flesh their appetite on a grand quest of prey. Entering the Straits of Messina, he surprised Reggio, and carried off ships and slaves; stormed and burnt the castle of S. Lucida next day, and took eight hundred prisoners; seized eighteen galleys at Cetraro; put Sperlonga to the sword and brand, and loaded his ships with wives and maidens. A stealthy inland march brought the Corsairs to Fondi, where lay Giulia Gonzaga, the young and beautiful widow of Vespasio Colonna, Duchess of Trajetto and Countess of Fondi. She was sister to the “heavenly Joanna of Aragon,” on whose loveliness two hundred and eighty Italian poets and rimesters in vain exhausted the resources of several languages;—a loveliness shared by the sister whose device was the “Flower of Love” amaranth blazoned on her shield. This beauty Kheyr-ed-dīn destined for the Sultan’s harem, and so secret were the Corsairs’ movements that he almost surprised the fair Giulia in her bed. She had barely time to mount a horse in her shift and fly with a single attendant,—whom she afterwards condemned to death, perhaps because the beauty revealed that night had made him overbold.[29] Enraged at her escape the pirates made short work of Fondi; the church was wrecked, and the plundering went on for four terrible hours, never to be forgotten by the inhabitants.
Refreshed and excited by their successful raid, the Turks needed little encouragement to enter with heartiness upon the real object of the expedition, which was nothing less than the annexation of the kingdom of Tunis. Three centuries had passed since the Sultans of the race of Hafs had established their authority on the old Carthaginian site, upon the breaking up of the African empire of the Almohades. Their rule had been mild and just; they had maintained on the whole friendly relations with the European powers, and many treaties record the fair terms upon which the merchants of Pisa, Venice, and Genoa were admitted to the port of Tunis. Saint Louis had been so struck with the piety and justice of the king that he had even come to convert him, and had died in the attempt. Twenty-one rulers of their line had succeeded one another, till the vigour of the Benī Hafs was sapped, and fraternal jealousies added bloodshed to weakness. Hasan, the twenty-second, stepped to the throne over the bodies of forty-four slaughtered brothers, and when he had thus secured his place he set a pattern of vicious feebleness for all sovereigns to avoid. A rival claimant served as the Corsair’s pretext for invasion, and Kheyr-ed-dīn had hardly landed when this miserable wretch fled the city, and though supported by some of the Arab tribes he could make no head against the Turkish guns. Tunis, like Algiers, had been added to the Ottoman Empire, against its will, and by the same masterful hands. It may be doubted whether the Sultan’s writ would have run in either of his new provinces had their conqueror gainsaid it.
Tunis did not long remain in the possession of Barbarossa. The banished king appealed to Charles V., and, whatever the emperor may have thought of Hasan’s wrongs, he plainly perceived that Barbarossa’s presence in Tunis harbour was a standing menace to his own kingdom of Sicily. It was bad enough to see nests of pirates perched upon the rocks of the Algerine coast; but Tunis was the key of the passage from the west to the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, and to leave it in the Corsairs’ hands was to the last degree hazardous. Accordingly he espoused the cause of Hasan, and at the end of May, 1535, he set sail from Barcelona with six hundred ships commanded by Doria (who had his own grudge to settle), and carrying the flower of the Imperial troops, Spaniards, Italians, and Germans. In June he laid siege to the Goletta—or halk-el-wēd, “throat of the torrent,” as the Arabs called it—those twin towers a mile asunder which guarded the channel of Tunis. The great carack St. Ann, sent, with four galleys, by “the Religion” (so the Knights of Malta [!-- illustration (Tunis, 1566) --] [!-- blank page --] styled their Order), was moored close in, and her heavy cannon soon made a breach, through which the Chevalier Cossier led the Knights of St. John, who always claimed the post of danger, into the fortress, and planted the banner of “the Religion” on the battlements[30] (14 July). Three desperate sallies had the besieged made under the leadership of Sinān the Jew; three Italian generals of rank had fallen in the melley; before they were driven in confusion back upon the city of Tunis, leaving the Goletta with all its stores of weapons and ammunition, and its forty guns, some of them famous for their practice at the siege of Rhodes, and more than a hundred vessels, in the hands of the enemy. Barbarossa came out to meet the emperor at the head of nearly ten thousand troops; but his Berbers refused to fight, the thousands of Christian slaves in the Kasaba (or citadel), aided by treachery, broke their chains and shut the gates behind him; and, after defending his rampart as long as he could, the Corsair chief, with Sinān and Aydīn “Drub-Devil,” made his way to Bona, where he had fortunately left fifteen of his ships. The lines of Kheyr-ed-dīn’s triple wall may still be traced across the neck of land which separates the lake of Tunis from the Mediterranean. Fifteen years ago this rampart was cut through, when nearly two hundred skeletons, some Spanish money, cannon balls, and broken weapons were found outside it.[31]
For three days Charles gave up the city of Tunis to the brutality of his soldiers. They were days of horrible license and bloodshed. Men, women, and children were massacred, and worse than massacred, in thousands. The infuriated troops fought one with the other for the possession of the spoil, and the luckless Christians of the Kasaba were cut down by their deliverers in the struggle for Kheyr-ed-dīn’s treasures. 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, who had taken little or no hand in Kheyr-ed-dīn’s wars and had accepted his authority with reluctance, the Grand Vezīr Ibrahīm was entering Baghdād and Tebrīz as a conqueror at the head of wild Asiatic troops, and not a house nor a human being was molested. Fas est et ab hoste doceri.
So far as Tunis was concerned the expedition of Charles V. was fruitless. Before he sailed in August he made a treaty with Hasan, which stipulated for tribute to Spain, the possession of the Goletta by the crown of Castile, the freeing of Christian slaves, the cessation of piracy, and the payment of homage by an annual tribute of six Moorish barbs and twelve falcons; and he and the Moor duly swore it on Cross and sword. But the treaty was so much parchment wasted. No Moslem prince who had procured his restoration by such means as Hasan had used, who had spilt Moslem blood with Christian weapons and ruined Moslem homes by the sacrilegious atrocities of “infidel” soldiers, and had bound himself the vassal of “idolatrous” Spain, could hope to keep his throne long. He was an object of horror and repulsion to the people upon whom he had brought this awful calamity, and so fierce was their scorn of the traitor to Islam that the story is told of a Moorish girl in the clutch of the soldiers, who, when the restored King of Tunis sought to save her, spat in his face; anything was better than the dishonour of his protection. Hasan pretended to reign for five years, but the country was in arms, holy Kayrawān would have nothing to say to a governor who owed his throne to infidel ravishers; Imperial troops in vain sought to keep him there; Doria himself succeeded only for a brief while in reducing the coast towns to the wretched prince’s authority; and in 1540 Hasan was imprisoned and blinded by his son Hamīd, and none can pity him. The coast was in the possession of the Corsairs, and, as we shall see, even the Spaniards were forced ere long to abandon the Goletta.
Nevertheless, the expedition to Tunis was a feat of which Europe was proud. Charles V. seldom suffered from depreciation of his exploits, and, as Morgan quaintly says, “I have never met with that Spaniard in my whole life, who, I am persuaded, would not have bestowed on me at least forty Boto a Christo’s, had I pretended to assert Charles V. not to have held this whole universal globe in a string for four-and-twenty hours; and then it broke: though none had ever the good nature or manners to inform or correct my ignorance in genuine history, by letting me into the secret when that critical and slippery period of time was.”[32] Naturally admirers so thoroughgoing made the most of the conquest of Tunis, the reduction of the formidable Goletta, the release of thousands of Christian captives, and, above all, the discomfiture of that scourge of Christendom, Barbarossa himself. Poets sang of it, a painter-in-ordinary depicted the siege, a potter at Urbino burnt the scene into his vase; all Europe was agog with enthusiasm at the feat. Charles posed as a crusader and a knight-errant, and commemorated his gallant deeds and those of his gentlemen by creating a new order of chivalry, the Cross of Tunis, with the motto “Barbaria,” of which however we hear no more. Altogether “it was a famous victory.”
The joy of triumph was sadly marred by the doings of Kheyr-ed-dīn. That incorrigible pirate, aware that no one would suspect that he could be roving while Charles was besieging his new kingdom, took occasion to slip over to Minorca with his twenty-seven remaining galleots; and there, flying Spanish and other false colours, deceived the islanders into the belief that his vessels were part of the Armada; upon which he rowed boldly into Port Mahon, seized a rich Portuguese galleon, sacked the town, and, laden with six thousand captives and much booty and ammunition, led his prize back in triumph to Algiers. In the meanwhile Doria was assiduously hunting for him with thirty galleys, under the emperor’s express orders to catch him dead or alive. The great Genoese had to wait yet three years for his long-sought duel.
Having accomplished its object, the Armada, as usual, broke up without making a decisive end of the Corsairs. Kheyr-ed-dīn, waiting at Algiers in expectation of attack, heard the news gladly, and, when the coast was clear, sailed back to Constantinople for reinforcements. He never saw Algiers again.