THE BARBAROSSA BROTHERS – PART 2

This week, we continue the story of the Barbarossa brothers—(in)famous pirates—as recounted by Father Pierre Dan in his book Histoire de Barbarie.

Once again, 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 a little long, but they really do help in understanding the history Father Dan is presenting.

Last week’s post ended, remember, with the death (in 1516) of the Spanish king Ferdinand of Aragon (the same king who, with Queen Isabella of Castile, financed Christopher Columbus’s expedition across the Atlantic). As Father Dan puts it, “seeing that his death presented them with a favorable opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Christians,” the rulers of Algiers “sent an envoy to Aruch Barbarossa” to solicit his aid in liberating Algiers from the Spanish.

We pick up the story from there.

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Aruch Barbarossa, who was Greek, became a renegade Turk, gained great wealth as a sea-going pirate, and won the title of the most dreaded corsair of his time. When Algiers sent out people to find him, he was in small town called Gigery, where there is a good port, located one hundred and eighty miles from Algiers.[1]

The Algerines petitioned him to amass his ships and all his forces and to come and liberate them from the power of the Christians, with the promise that if he did them this favor, they would recompense him very well. Barbarossa was perfectly agreeable to this request, which seemed to him the best opportunity he had ever had to achieve his designs and to satisfy the secret ambition that he had to become Sovereign of Algiers. He allowed himself to be easily swayed by the prayers of these people and promised them willingly any kind of assistance.

After having armed six galleys that he had, in which he placed five hundred native-born Turks, and with a few other corsair ships, all Mohammedan, who had come to see him in Gigery as friends and who provided him with more men and money, he ordered their departure. With these forces, to which he added three thousand Moors from the city of Gigery, who recognized him as their Prince and were his subjects, whom he sent overland along with three hundred Turks, he came to Algiers, whose inhabitants received him with applause and gave him the same good reception they gave their Xeque, Selim Eutemi [then ruler of Algiers].

The first thing Aruch Barbarossa did upon his arrival was to attack with all his cannon the small fortress that the Spaniards had built [on an island in the harbor]. After that—only a few days after, it seemed—for ambition is such a cruel tyrant and so powerful that neither courtesies nor beneficence had enough charm to prevent these tragic and bloody acts, this faithless Prince Aruch Barbarossa conspired against Selim Eutemi. The Xeque had accommodated Barbarossa in his palace, giving infallible proof of his benevolence by the good treatment he offered.

But when the opportunity to discard him was presented, Barbarossa did not pass it up, and he strangled Selim Eutemi in a bath, where, according to the Mohammedan tradition, Selim was washing himself before going to pray.

The news of this sudden death spread throughout the whole city. The inhabitants did not know who to blame. Although Barbarossa was the perpetrator, he nonetheless acted as if he were dismayed and protested that he wanted revenge. As it happened, his people were the strongest in the city, and they proclaim him King of Algiers. They persevered so hard in this that the local Moors did not dare to oppose them, and so they were forced to recognize Barbarossa and proclaim him their sovereign in the year of our Lord 1516.  This is how the reign of Xeque Selim ended.

The Xeque’s son, who was still very young, fearing that Barbarossa would play the same trick on him that he had on his father, fled to Oran, a city fifty miles from Algiers, towards the Strait.[2] The Marquis of Comares, Governor of Oran,[3] received him courteously and sent him to Spain to see Cardinal Ximenes, who, after the death of King Ferdinand, found himself responsible for all the affairs of the Kingdom, in the absence of Charles V, nephew of the deceased King, who was then still very young in Flanders.[4]

The following year, in 1517, Xeque Selim’s son came to Algiers to recover his country, which had been usurped by Barbarossa. His naval force consisted of more than ten thousand Spaniards, under the leadership of their general François de Veta. But they were no sooner at the strand before the town when there came a furious storm, destroying the fleet, with the loss of most of the vessels and the soldiers. Even if a few tried to save themselves by regaining the shore, they fared no better, for they could no more avoid the fury of these barbarians than they could avoid that of the sea.[5]

Aruch Barbarossa ruled for some time in Algiers, but he was not spared death,[6]as Selim was not. After this, Aruch’s brother Cheredin Barbarossa[7] was declared King and Lord of Algiers, with the whole city’s common consent.

 

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For a continuation of Father Dan’s recounting of the story of the Barbarossa brothers, see the next post in this series here in this blog.

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[1]  “Gigery” corresponds to modern day Jijel, located on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Algeria, east of Algiers, a little less than halfway between Algiers and Tunis. Jijel had been controlled by the Genoese until the Barbarossa brothers attacked and captured it in 1514. The modern calculation of the overland driving distance between Algiers and Jijel is about 190 miles (304 kilometers), which matches Father Dan’s estimate pretty closely. However, this raises the interesting question of what sort of “mile” (“milles” in the original French text) he had in mind, and why he uses this measurement of distance here rather than leagues, as he does elsewhere. He certainly would not have been thinking in terms of modern statute miles. Measurements of distance were not universally standardized in the seventeenth century, so there is no simple way to know what exact unit of measurement he might have had in mind here.

[2]  In this context, “towards the Strait” (“vers le détroit” in the original French text) means in the direction of the Strait of Gibraltar: that is, westwards. The modern calculation of the distance between Algiers and Oran is about 220 miles (350 kilometers), which does not correspond with Father Dan’s figure. Once again, it is a challenge to know exactly what unit of measurement Father Dan had in mind.

[3]  The “Marquis of Comares” was Diego Fernández de Córdoba y Arellano, I marqués de Comares (1460-1525). The Spanish captured Oran in 1509 and held it until the early eighteenth century. Diego Fernández served two terms as Governor of Oran: 1510-1512 and 1516-1518.).

[4]  “Cardinal Ximenes” was Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), a Spanish cardinal and statesman who had been advisor to King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. When King Ferdinand died in 1516, Cardinal Ximenes served as Regent for Charles, Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s grandson (who, in 1519, became Holy Roman Emperor), who was then a teenager living in Flanders (i.e., the Spanish Netherlands). Charles assumed the Spanish throne in 1516 but did not actually reside in, and rule from, Spain until 1517, the year Cardinal Ximenes died.

[5]  In an attempt to consolidate their gains after the death of Aruch (Oruç) Barbarossa, the Spanish launched a large-scale naval attack on Algiers. Their fleet was wrecked by a storm as it lay at anchor off Algiers, as Father Dan describes. Modern estimates put the number of men in the Spanish forces at 5,000-7,000 rather than 10,000, put the loss at around 4,000 men, drowned or killed by the Algerians, and cite Don Hugo de Moncada, who had been Viceroy of Sicily, as leading the expedition rather than François de Veta. It is not entirely clear which Spanish historical figure the francophonesque name “François de Veta” may refer to. The Spanish had appalling bad luck in their attempts to conquer Algiers from the sea (see the Two Spanish Armada posts in early May, here in this blog).

[6]  Aruch Barbarossa was killed by the Spanish in a battle near Tremensen in 1518.

[7]  “Cheredin” (more commonly spelled “Hayreddin”) is a rendering of the Arabic Khayr ad-Din, which can be variously translated as “the pious,” “the fruit of the [Islamic] religion,” “the best of the [Islamic] religion,” or “the goodness of the [Islamic] faith.” The name was an honorary title given the younger Barbarossa brother by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, for whom he served as Kapudan-i Derya (also rendered as Kapudan Pasha), the admiral (captain-in-chief) of the Ottoman navy. Under Hayreddin Barbarossa, Algiers became the capital of an Ottoman sanjak (province or district). Over time, the city was transformed from a relatively minor port town to one of the major administrative and military centers of Ottoman North Africa—and the premier corsair capital of North Africa.