THE BARBAROSSA BROTHERS

The Barbarossa brothers were famous pirates. Most people with any interest at all in pirates are familiar with the name “Barbaross,” but they mostly don’t know very much about the details of the brothers’ lives—such as where and when they lived.

There are many sources about the Barbarossa brothers, but one of the most interesting is none other than Father Piere Dan, a source we have looked at a number of times in this blog over the years. Father Dan, remember, was a French Trinitarian friar who headed a couple of ransom expeditions, one to Algiers in the summer of 1634, and a second to Tripoli in the early winter of 1635.

Father Dan also wrote a famous book: Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires, des royaumes, et des villes d’Alger, de Tunis, de Salé et de Tripoly (The History of Barbary and its Corsairs and Kingdoms, and of the Towns of Tunis, Salé, and Tripoli).

Histoire de Barbarie covers a lot of ground (it’s over 500 hundred pages), including histories of each of the cities mentioned in the title. The section on Algiers contains a history of that city, and that history includes the Barbarossa brothers—because, yes, the story of the Barbarossa brothers is part of the story of the city of Algiers.

So this week we begin Father Dan’s version of the story of the Barbarossa brothers—famous pirates—and how they came to influence the history of Algiers.

Father Dan’s text requires some background explanation to make clear sense of the events he describes, so there are quite a few explanatory footnotes in this post. Some of them are fairly long, but they really do help in understanding the history Father Dan is presenting.

Here (without further ado, as they say) is father Dan on Algiers and the Barbarossa brothers.

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Abuferiz, powerful King of Tunis,[1] having conquered the city of Bougie, and by the right he had, and by force of arms, wanted to gratify Abdala Haziz, the youngest of his children. For this purpose, he transformed the province of Bougie into a Kingdom by means of some other adjacent land that was annexed to it.

After the death of his father, the new King [Abdala Haziz], wishing to expand the limits of his State, and by an excess of ambition, manufactured a difference of opinion over some land, which became his excuse for taking up arms against the King of Tremecen.[2] Abdala Haziz declared himself against the King of Tremecen.  

The matter went so far that the citizens of Algiers, a city which is not far from Bougie, only about thirty leagues,[3] and that depended on the city of Tremecen, found themselves beset by this new King’s violent, unwelcome depredations.  

The Algerians either had more passion for their personal interests than for those of their legitimate King, or they believed their King not strong enough to defend them, for these people and some of their neighbors established an agreement with Abdala Haziz, on condition that, by paying to him every year, out of gratitude, a certain tribute which they would agree on, they would remain free in the future and could establish themselves as a Republic.[4] 

Things continued this way until the year 1510, when the Count Pierre Navarre,[5] having become master of the cities of Oran and Bougie, on behalf of Ferdinand, King of Spain,[6] so terrified the people of Algiers that, because of their apprehension, they fell within his power.  

Not believing they were strong enough to secure their city and their freedom, they voluntarily submitted to Selim Eutemi. This greatly powerful Moor, who was Xeque[7] and Prince of the Arabs who were residents of Mutijar, an extensive area of land near Algiers,[8] took the Algerians under his protection and maintained the peace during the course of several years.  

However, following the ordinary vicissitudes of States and of the things of the Earth, the city of Algiers and all its surroundings came under the domination of the Turkish Empire by means of Aruch Barbarossa.[9]  But even before this change happened, these barbarians, who were already practiced at being corsairs with some brigantines[10] they had, continued their plundering, attracting by their example many Moors from Spain living on the Barbary Coast, especially after Ferdinand had conquered the Kingdom of Granada, which occurred in the year 1492.[11]  

A short time later, King Ferdinand, who apparently saw the great damage done to his subjects by the city of Algiers and its corsairs, who kept pillaging the nearby islands, mainly those of Majorque, Minorque, and Levisse,[12] finally resolved to dislodge these birds of prey, or at least reduce them to such a degree that they could not, in the future, attack any further, nor continue their pillaging, or, if so, only with great difficulty.  

For this purpose, he once again sent the same Pierre Navarre, with a powerful army, against the city of Algiers. Seeing itself so strongly pressed, Algiers bowed under the yoke of Ferdinand, with the consent of Xeque Selim, and promised to pay Ferdinand, as homage, a certain tribute every year, and agreed not to go corsairing at sea in future.  

However, because Ferdinand knew full well that, unless they were prevented by some powerful obstacle, the Algerians would not abandon their piratical occupation, he had a fortress built in Algiers on a small island where nowadays is located the port, and he put about two hundred men in garrison there, with much ammunition and food.  

These barbarians, constrained by force of arms, were unable for some time to cause any trouble to trade or to disturb Christians. But death, which does not spare Kings’ scepters nor shepherds’ crooks, took Ferdinand from the world, which happened in the year 1516.

Those infamous robbers then resumed their previous course, and, like the infidels they were, they did not keep the oath which they had solemnly given to a king on whom they were dependent. On the contrary, seeing that his death presented them with a favorable opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Christians, they sent an envoy to Aruch, or Hariaden, Barbarossa, whom we mentioned above.

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[1]  The city of Tunis, capital of present-day Tunisia, is situated in essentially the same location as the legendary ancient city of Carthage, competitor of Rome and home of Hannibal Barca (who famously crossed both the Pyrenees and the Alps with a conquering army that included a contingent of elephants). Carthage was destroyed by the Romans in the second century BC in the last of the Punic Wars, and the site only became a city of importance again with the rise of Islamic civilization along the Maghreb in the seventh and eighth centuries CE and the establishment of Tunis.

[2]  Tremecen (modern Tlemcen) was the capital of the Zayyanids, a Berber dynasty that had carved out a realm from the disintegrating Almohad (al-Muwahiddin) Caliphate in the early part of the thirteenth century. “Abuferiz, powerful King of Tunis” had wrested his empire from that same struggling Almohad Caliphate as well (see footnote 10). Tremecen was eventually annexed by Ottoman Algiers in the sixteenth century and remained an integral part of the Ottoman Empire’s North African possessions until the French conquest of Algeria in the 1830s-40s.

[3]  The “leagues” (the word in the original French text is “lieues”) that Father Dan uses here are likely the “lieue ancienne” (“old league”), the typical French unit of linear measurement until the 1670s, when it was replaced by the “lieue de Paris” (the “Paris league”). A lieue ancienne equaled a distance of just over 2 miles (3.248 kilometers). The distance between Bougie (modern Béjaïa) and Algiers is calculated today as being about 110 miles (180 kilometers). The discrepancy between Father Dan’s estimate and the modern one might be the result of him not, in fact, using lieue ancienne, or it might simply be that it was difficult for him (or anyone else at the time) to get accurate measurements, since there were no very precise mechanisms for recording such overland distances during this period. To complicate matters further, he was likely relying on travelers’ (subjective) accounts of such distances.

[4]  The events Father Dan describes here took place during the thirteenth century, when the Almohad (al-Muwahiddin) Caliphate was disintegrating. Arising at the beginning of the twelfth century, the Almohads, a Berber Muslim dynasty, replaced the then-ruling Almoravids (another Berber Muslim dynasty) and eventually controlled much of North Africa and al-Andalus (the Muslim dominated part of Spain). The Almohads lost most of their Spanish possessions in the early thirteenth century, however, and their North African empire unraveled soon after. Abou Ferez (“Abuferiz” as Father Dan renders the name), the “powerful King of Tunis,” was one of several local rulers who wrested independence from the crumbling Almohad Caliphate. His son, Abdala Haziz, enlarged the empire his father had begun. Algiers was part of the realm that the Zayyanid dynasty, based in Tremecen, which had also arisen from the remains of the Almohad Caliphate. The Algiers citizens likely felt they could not rely on Tremecen to protect them against Abdala Haziz’s “violent, unwelcome depredations” because the Zayyanid rulers of Tremecen had their hands full consolidating territory closer to home. Father Dan makes no mention of this large-scale dynastic struggle. It is difficult to know if he was unaware of it, or if he just didn’t consider it worth including.

[5]  “Count Pierre Navarre” was Don Pedro Navarro, Count of Oliveto (1460-1528) who led Spanish forces in a series of North African military conquests (Bougie, Tremesen, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli) in 1510.

[6] “Ferdinand, King of Spain” was King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of Aragon (1453-1516), husband of Queen Isabella I of the Kingdom of Castile (the same Ferdinand and Isabella who oversaw the conquest of the last Muslim Kingdom in Spain, in Granada, and who underwrote Christopher Columbus’s famous expedition to the New World).

[7]  “Xeque” is a rendering of “sheik.” It is the word used in Father Dan’s original French text. The modern French rendering would be “cheik.”

[8]  Jacques Philippe Laugier De Tassy, who was Chancellor at the French consulate in Algiers in 1717-1718 and who wrote Histoire du royaume d’Alger, (History of the Kingdom of Algiers), has the following to say about the land of Mutijar: “On the east side [of Algiers]… there is a beautiful, well-watered and fertile plain. It is nine or ten leagues [i.e., 9-10 lieu de Paris, which equaled approximately 2 miles/3.25 kilometers] long and four wide. It is populated by ancient tribes or Arab nations and is called the plain of Mutijar…. This is where Prince Selim Eutemi ruled, whom the inhabitants of Algiers called their Governor in the beginning of the sixteenth century” (Histoire du royaume d’Alger, 1725, p. 202).

[9]  Aruch Barbarossa was the elder of the two Barbarossa brothers—Oruç and Hayreddin—the famous pirates. Oruç (Aruch) was known as “Baba Oruç” (Father Oruç). To European ears, apparently, this sounded like “Barbarossa” (“Redbeard” in Italian). The story has it that the Barbarossa brothers did indeed have red beards, and so the name stuck, first for Aruch, and then for his younger brother Cheredin (though supposedly the younger brother hennaed his beard to achieve the desired color).

[10]  The term “brigantine” can be confusing. It came to mean a two-masted sailing ship with a combination of square and gaff (trapezoidal) sails that became common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, there was also a type of galley known as a “brigantine,” a medium-sized ship with between twelve to eighteen banks of oars (i.e., twenty-four to thirty-six oars; large Capitana (flagship) galleys could have as many as thirty banks of oars). “Brigantine” also had an earlier use as a generic term meaning any sail- or oar-powered war ship. Father Dan probably has brigantine galleys in mind here.

[11]  Father Dan is referring here to the culmination of what is known as the Reconquista (the reconquest) of Spain. In the early eighth century, a mixed force of Berber and Arab Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula (then part of the Kingdom of the Visigoths, an offshoot of the defunct Roman Empire). The Muslim occupation lasted eight centuries. It was, however, a period of constant and complex conflict. By the middle of the thirteenth century, only the Kingdom of Granada—a strip of land along the south Mediterranean coast of Spain, running roughly from Gibraltar in the west to Cartagena in the east and extending some 100 miles (160 kilometers) inland—remained in Muslim control. In 1469, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile married, uniting their two kingdoms. Under their aegis, the Reconquista was completed and the Muslim Kingdom of Granada fell in 1492. In the ensuing decade, large numbers of Spanish Muslims emigrated to North Africa. In 1501, those remaining were given an ultimatum: convert to Christianity or be expelled. As a result of all this, tens of thousands of displaced, vengeful Spanish Muslims flooded into the Maghreb. These were the “Moors from Spain” Father Dan cites as being attracted to Algerian “plundering”—as a way to exact revenge for their defeat and expulsion from Spain, which had been, after all, their homeland for some eight hundred years.

[12]  “Majorque, Minorque, and Levisse” are among the Balearic Islands, located in the Mediterranean southeast of the Iberian coastline and north of Algiers. The standard names used by English speakers are Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza. “Levisse” is Father Dan’s rendering of “Eivissa,” the Catalan form of the Spanish “Ibiza.”