Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean: The grand period of the Moslem corsairs

by E. Hamilton Currey

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.