THE FALL OF TUNIS AND THE FLIGHT OF BARBAROSSA
Autocracy in the sixteenth century was a very real and concrete fact.
The orders of great kings were, as a rule, implicitly obeyed, and, when
they were not, there was likely to be trouble of the worst description
for those by whom they had been contravened. It is this that causes us
to regard as most extraordinary one of the happenings in the armada
which sailed from Barcelona for the coast of Africa. A most peremptory
order was issued that no women, no boys, no one, in fact, save fighting
men of approved worth, should find a place in the ships. Says Sandoval,
“No se consintiesen en la armada mugeres ni muchachos ni otra gente
inutil, mas de aquellos solos que eran para pelear.” (There were not
allowed in the armada women, boys, or useless persons, but only those
who were capable of fighting.) It appears, however, that the women
paid no sort of attention to this ordinance, and the historian gravely
relates that “it was no use turning them out of the ships as, as soon
as you sent them down one side they returned and climbed up the other,”
It seems almost incredible, but is none the less a fact, that four
thousand women accompanied the expedition and landed at Tunis. The
autocracy of the Emperor apparently stopped short where women were
concerned, or else he was indifferent whether they came or not.
On June 16th the armada arrived before Tunis, and the army disembarked
to attack the fortress known as La Goletta. Into this strong place of
arms Barbarossa had sent some six thousand of his best men, mostly
Turkish soldiers, under the command of Sinan-Reis, a renegado Jew, and
one of the fiercest and most faithful of his followers. To the camp of
the Emperor came the fugitive King, Muley Hassan, in whose cause the
armada had nominally been assembled—how nominal this was we shall see
later by the light of the treaty concluded between him and the Emperor.
Charles had complete command of the sea for the time being, and, in
consequence, the ex-Sultan was amazed at the profusion and luxury which
reigned in the camp of the Christians; and he concluded that these
indeed must be the lords of the earth, as luxury and profusion was
hardly the note of such courts as then existed in the northern portion
of the African continent.
Although the army was landed, and with it artillery for the bombardment
of the Goletta, there remained, of course, “the army of the sea,”
under the orders of the redoubtable Doria; and while the Marquis del
Guasto, who was in supreme command on shore, prepared to batter down
the defences of the fortress on the land side, the attack was carried
on simultaneously from the sea by the galleys. The actual presence of
the Emperor stimulated the various nationalities under his eyes
to vie with one another in deeds of daring, and they contended among
themselves for the posts of the most honour and danger. The attacks of
the African horsemen were brushed on one side by the disciplined valour
of the Andalusian cavalry, while the great guns thundered from land
and sea against the walls of the doomed Goletta. Sinan and his Ottoman
soldiers performed prodigies in the way of repairing breaches in the
walls as soon as they were made; but Kheyr-ed-Din from the city watched
the progress of the bombardment gloomily, as he saw and knew that the
fall of the Goletta was but a matter of days. All this time he was far
from idle; sortie after sortie did the dauntless old warrior lead in
person against those engaged in the task of bombardment. Time and again
he heartened the Arab and Berber levies to attack, but the sallies were
repulsed, and the lightly armed Africans were driven like chaff before
the wind when they swooped down on the lines of investment.
But the time came at last when Sinan and his gallant Turks could hold
the place no longer; the walls were breached in six or seven places,
and Spaniards, Germans, and Italians made a simultaneous attack. Sinan
fighting to the last, evacuated the fortress, and retired actually
through the water across a shallow part of the bay to the city, with
the remnant of his once magnificent force; and now Barbarossa knew that
the end was come, and that Tunis must pass from his hands to those of
the Christian Emperor. It was not only the fall of the Goletta that
troubled him, but the equally important fact that by this the fleet
of the enemy was enabled to lay hands upon his own fleet, consisting
of eighty-seven galleys and galliots, together with his arsenal, and
no less than three hundred cannon, mostly brass guns of excellent
construction, mounted on the walls and planted on the ramparts. The
surprising amount of this artillery gives a measure of the strength of
the fortress and the efforts it must have cost the besiegers with such
a man as Sinan in command.
That the end was near was known to all, and not the least of their
embarrassments was the presence within the city walls of some twenty
thousand Christian captives. The city was large, the defences were
spread out over a great area, it was abundantly evident that it could
not be held, and, in consequence, Barbarossa summoned his principal
officers and communicated to them his decision.
“We will not remain here to be slain like rats in a trap
by the accursed of God by whom we are attacked. No,
rather will we perish, sword in hand, as our fathers
have done before us; but first there is a danger against
which we have to guard. Within these walls are twenty
thousand prisoners who will rise against us at the first
opportunity; let us, then, first put them to death, and
then we will leave this place and show our enemies how
the true Moslems can die.”
Even those hardened men of blood shrank before the horror which was
proposed to them by their chief, and Sinan-Reis took up his parable and
spoke the minds of all when he said that follow him to the death they
would cheerfully do, but stain themselves with so awful a massacre
was to place themselves outside the pale of humanity for ever. It was
seldom that they crossed his mood, and Barbarossa listened in frowning
silence, accepting as a partial excuse that time pressed, and to put
to death twenty thousand persons would occupy longer time than they
could spare. On the morrow a battle was fought which, as Kheyr-ed-Din
anticipated, ended in the complete rout of the Moslems. Everywhere the
Corsair King was in the forefront of the battle, and it is said that he
disposed of fifty thousand men on this occasion; but this is probably
an exaggeration, and in any case the bulk of his forces consisted
of those African levies which, in a pitched battle against European
troops, were practically useless owing to their want of discipline
and cohesion. Very soon the hosts of the Emperor had prevailed, and
the Arabs and Berbers had fled back into the wilderness from whence
they had come and whither it was useless to pursue. Barbarossa, at the
head of such of his corsairs and Turks as were left—a number estimated
at some three to four thousand—burst through all opposition and also
escaped, travelling so rapidly that pursuit was abandoned almost at
once. And then the event happened which the Moslem leader had foreseen:
some of the Christian captives managed to get free from their shackles
within the city and released others; they overpowered those left to
guard them, and threw open the gates to the soldiery of the Emperor.
Then occurred one of those awful horrors of which this time was so
prolific: before Charles or his generals could prevent them the
soldiery had swept into the town and commenced to slay, to plunder,
and to ravish, without distinction of age, sex, or nationality.
Ostensibly these Christian warriors had come to rescue the inhabitants
of Tunis from the oppression of Barbarossa, but while that chieftain
was in full flight across the mountains to Bona, those by whom he
had been defeated entered the town, which they had come to save,
and perpetrated a massacre so awful that it is said that no less
than thirty thousand people perished. It is a terrible blot on the
escutcheon of the Emperor; as, although he and his generals deprecated
the massacre—and indeed to do them justice tried to prevent it—this is
no excuse for allowing their men to get out of hand, when they must
have been aware of the inevitable result: as the Moslem corsairs at
their worst were equalled in their iniquities by the European soldiery,
once the strong hand of discipline had relaxed its grip.
It may have been that the Emperor was displeased with this excess of
zeal on the part of his army; but, if it were so, the chroniclers are
silent concerning the matter, being far too busy singing the praises
of the Cæsar to think of such a trifle as the massacre of most of
the persons whom he had come to deliver. The wretched inhabitants of
Tunis must have found it somewhat difficult to distinguish between the
corsair, who killed three thousand of their fellow townsmen, and the
Christian Emperor, who had massacred ten times that number. Charles,
however, reaped great glory from an expedition which had but one good
result, which was, that he succeeded in rescuing twenty thousand
captives; these men, very naturally, on their return to their homes
in every corner of Europe, magnified the wonderful deeds of that prince
who had been instrumental in securing their release, and the massacre
of the Tunisians was conveniently ignored. Charles had defeated
Barbarossa and expelled him from Tunis; he had now displayed his
magnanimity and altruism by the terms which he imposed on the miserable
Muley Hassan. As far as that individual was concerned, he certainly
deserved nothing better; but, as a _finale_ to an expedition blessed by
the Pope, and looked upon almost in the light of a modern crusade, it
certainly displays a remarkably keen eye for the main chance.
The preamble of the treaty runs as follows:
“That the King of Tunis, recognising that he had been
expelled from his kingdom by Barbarossa, and that the
Emperor in person, with a powerful armada, had come
and expelled this tyrant, taking from him the fortress
and town of Tunis and restoring them to the King
Muley Hassan: that this monarch is most grateful for
so magnificent a service, and in recognition thereof
contracts to liberate all Christian captives who may be
in his realm, to give them a free passage to their homes,
and from this time forward binds himself to extend to all
Christians kind and generous treatment.”
There can be no exception taken to this, which was the least which the
Emperor had the right to expect; but this was only, as we have said,
the preamble.
Muley Hassan was further made to contract to hold his kingdom in fee to
the Spanish Crown, to covenant that no corsair should use his ports
for any purpose whatsoever, that the Emperor should not only retain
the Goletta but that all other fortified seaports should be put into
his hands, that the King of Tunis should in future pay twelve thousand
crowns per annum ‘for the subsistence of the Spanish garrison of the
Goletta, that he should enter into no alliance with the enemies of
the Emperor, and should annually present, as an acknowledgment of his
vassalage, six Moorish horses and six hawks.
Muley Hassan had exchanged the comparatively dignified position of a
prince in exile, who has been expropriated by the strong hand, for that
of the puppet of one of the greatest enemies of his religion. Neither
he nor his people were one whit the better for the change, and, as far
as vassalage was concerned, they would in all probability, in the state
of religious feeling at the time, have sooner been subordinate to the
Moslem corsair than to the Christian King.
[Illustration: MULEY HASSAN, KING OF TUNIS.]
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.