Hayreddin Barbarossa

• 1. Introduction

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  Hayreddin Barbarossa died in 1546 in a seaside palace on the Bosphorus, and in the centuries that followed, no Ottoman fleet would clear the Serai Point without firing a salute at his mausoleum. That tradition tells you something about the man. Born on the Greek island of Lesbos to a Turkish or Albanian sipahi father and a Greek Orthodox mother, Barbarossa rose from a potter's son to the grand admiral of the most powerful navy in the world. He secured Ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean for decades, forged alliances with the king of France, and dictated his memoirs in five hand-written volumes before he died. His birth name was Khizr. The name Barbarossa, which means Redbeard in Italian, came to him through his brother, and through a chain of events that began with corsair raids, family tragedy, and the violent politics of the western Mediterranean. How a boy who helped his father carry pottery became the man Christian Europe greeted with a sigh of relief at his death is the story this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots on Lesbos

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  Yakup Aga, Khizr's father, had taken part in the Ottoman conquest of Lesbos in 1462 from the Republic of Genoa's House of Gattilusio, which had held the hereditary title of Lord of Lesbos since 1355. As a reward for his service, Yakup was granted the fief of the village of Bonova on the island. He married a Greek Orthodox widow named Katerina, herself from Lesbos and the widow of a local priest. Together they had four sons and two daughters: Ishak, Oruç, Khizr, and Ilyas.

  The family made its living in two ways. Yakup became an established potter, and he purchased a boat to trade his wares. The four boys helped, with Oruç working the boat and Khizr working the pottery. It was a modest but connected life on an island that sat at the crossroads of Aegean commerce, and all four brothers eventually turned that maritime exposure into careers at sea.

  The oldest, Ishak, stayed on Mytilene and managed the family's finances. The other three became sailors, then privateers. Their main antagonists in those early years were the Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Knights of St. John, who were based on Rhodes and preyed on Ottoman shipping throughout the Levant. Fighting them was not merely profitable; it was politically justified as a counter to their own piracy.

• 3. The Corsair Brotherhood

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  Oruç, the most ambitious of the brothers, learned to speak Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, and Arabic early in his career. While returning from a trading run in Tripoli, Lebanon, he and his younger brother Ilyas were attacked by the Knights Hospitaller. Ilyas was killed in the fight. Oruç was wounded and captured, and he spent four years rowing as a galley slave for the Order of Saint John before his father paid the ransom to free him.

  That captivity did not slow Oruç. He went to Antalya, where Şehzade Korkut, an Ottoman prince and governor of the city, gave him 18 galleys and charged him with fighting the Knights. When Korkut became governor of Manisa, he gave Oruç a larger fleet of 24 galleys at İzmir and sent him on an Ottoman naval expedition to Apulia, where Oruç bombarded coastal castles and captured ships. On his return, he stopped at Euboea and captured three galleons and another ship.

  By 1503, Oruç had made the island of Djerba his western Mediterranean base, and Khizr joined him there. The following year, the brothers approached Abu Abdallah Muhammad IV al-Mutawakkil, the ruler of Tunis, and secured the use of the strategically placed port of La Goulette in exchange for one-third of their spoils. From there, Oruç seized two large papal galleys near Elba with nothing but small galiots. Near Lipari, the brothers captured the Sicilian warship Cavalleria, which was carrying 380 Spanish soldiers and 60 knights from Aragon.

  Between 1504 and 1510, Oruç transported Muslim Mudejars from Christian Spain to North Africa. That humanitarian mission earned him the honorific name Baba Oruç, meaning Father Oruç. Speakers of Spanish, French, and Italian corrupted it, by similarity of sound, into Barbarossa. It was a name born from charity, not from the red beard it appeared to describe.

• 4. Capture of Algiers

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  In August 1512, the exiled ruler of Bougie invited the brothers to help drive out the Spaniards. During the battle, Oruç lost his left arm. He later wore a silver prosthetic and was known thereafter as Gümüş Kol, meaning Silver Arm in Turkish.

  By 1514, the brothers were operating with 12 galliots and 1,000 Turks, destroying Spanish fortresses at Bougie and raiding as far as Ceuta. When Miguel de Gurrea, the viceroy of Majorca, arrived with a Spanish fleet as reinforcement, the brothers simply redirected toward Ceuta and then seized Jijel in Algeria from the Genoese. They also took Mahdiya in Tunisia. In 1515, Oruç sent precious gifts to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, who responded by sending him two galleys and two diamond-encrusted swords.

  In 1516, joined by the corsair Kurtoğlu, the three brothers captured Jijel and then Algiers from the Spaniards. They forced out Abu Hamo Musa III of the Beni Ziyad dynasty. The Spanish population of Algiers retreated to the island of Peñón and appealed to Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, but the Spanish fleet failed to dislodge the brothers. Oruç recognized that the best long-term protection against Spain was to offer Algiers to the Ottoman Empire, so in 1517 he ceded his self-declared sultanate and had the city accepted as an Ottoman province. Sultan Selim I appointed him Governor of Algiers and Chief Sea Governor of the Western Mediterranean, promising Janissaries, galleys, and cannons in return.

• 5. Khizr Becomes Barbarossa

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  In May 1518, Emperor Charles V arrived at Oran with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, joined by Sheikh Buhammud and Diego de Córdoba, marquis of Comares, and thousands of local Bedouins. They marched overland on Tlemcen, where Oruç and Ishak held the city with 1,500 Turkish and 5,000 Moorish soldiers for 20 days before being killed in combat by the forces of Garcia de Tineo. Both brothers died in the same campaign.

  Khizr, now alone, contacted Sultan Selim I and offered his allegiance. In 1519, the Sultan gave him the title of Beylerbey, along with Janissaries, galleys, and cannons. Khizr inherited his brother's position, his name, and his mission. He recaptured Tlemcen in December 1518 and then defeated a Spanish-Italian army attempting to retake Algiers in 1519. That same year he raided Provence, Toulon, and the Îles d'Hyères in southern France, and in 1521 he struck the Balearic Islands before seizing Spanish ships returning from the New World off Cádiz.

  In May 1529, he captured the Spanish fort on the island of Peñón of Algiers, the last Spanish stronghold in the harbor that had sheltered the Spanish population since 1516. Three months later, in August 1529, he answered requests from Andalusia and transported 70,000 Mudejars to Algiers in seven consecutive crossings of the Strait of Gibraltar.

• 6. Grand Admiral of the Ottomans

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  In 1532, Suleiman I recognized that events in the Mediterranean demanded a commanding naval figure. Andrea Doria had captured Coron, Patras, and Lepanto on the Peloponnese during Suleiman's expedition to Habsburg Austria, and though Ottoman forces later retook those cities, the vulnerability was clear. Suleiman summoned Barbarossa to Istanbul. Barbarossa set sail in August 1532, raiding Sardinia, Corsica, and several Aegean islands along the way, and captured 18 galleys near Messina before arriving at Constantinople with 44 galleys. He was received at Topkapı Palace, where Suleiman appointed him Kapudan-i Derya, or Grand Admiral, of the Ottoman Navy, and Beylerbey of North Africa.

  In 1534, Barbarossa sailed from Constantinople with 80 galleys and recaptured Coron, Patras, and Lepanto. In July of that year, he crossed the Strait of Messina, raided Calabria, and then appeared off Campania, sacking the islands of Capri and Procida. In Sperlonga, in the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, he took 10,000 captives. His forces entered Fondi and ransacked the palace of Giulia Gonzaga. He then torched Vallecorsa before capturing Tunis in August 1534, sending the Hafsid Sultan Mulay Hassan into exile.

  Charles V dispatched an agent to offer Barbarossa lordship over all of North Africa in exchange for his changed loyalty, or if that failed, to assassinate him. Barbarossa rejected the offer and decapitated the agent with a scimitar.

  In 1535, a Spanish-Italian force of 300 galleys and 24,000 soldiers retook Tunis. Barbarossa had already abandoned the city, sailing into the Tyrrhenian Sea. He rebuilt a fort on Capri, which still carries his name, before returning to Algiers and continuing to raid the Spanish coast. In September 1535, he repulsed another Spanish attack on Tlemcen.

• 7. Victory at Preveza

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  In February 1538, Pope Paul III assembled a Holy League against the Ottomans, drawing together the Papacy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Venice, and the Maltese Knights. Its combined fleet was commanded by Andrea Doria. Barbarossa's forces, led by Sinan Reis, met that fleet at the Battle of Preveza in September 1538 and defeated it decisively. The victory secured Ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean for the next 33 years, until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

  In 1540, Barbarossa led a crew of 2,000 men to Gibraltar, capturing the town and taking 75 prisoners. The loss represented a significant share of Gibraltar's total population. Emperor Charles V, still hoping to turn Barbarossa, personally contacted him in September 1540 and offered to make him his Admiral-in-Chief and the ruler of Spain's territories in North Africa. Barbarossa refused.

  In October 1541, Charles V himself laid siege to Algiers. Both Andrea Doria and Hernán Cortés urged the Emperor to abandon the campaign due to the season, but Charles pressed ahead. A violent storm disrupted the landing operations. Doria took his fleet into open water to avoid being wrecked on the shore, and much of the Spanish fleet ran aground. Charles withdrew with a severely battered force. The most powerful ruler in Europe had failed twice to dislodge Barbarossa from the city he had held for more than two decades.

  Venice, having suffered repeated losses across the Aegean and Ionian Seas, finally signed a peace treaty with Sultan Suleiman in October 1540, agreeing to recognize Ottoman territorial gains and pay 300,000 gold ducats.

• 8. The French Alliance and Legacy

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  In 1543, Barbarossa sailed toward Marseilles with a fleet of 210 ships carrying 14,000 Turkish soldiers, for a total of 30,000 Ottoman troops, to assist France against the Habsburgs. Passing through the Strait of Messina, he asked Diego Gaetani, governor of Reggio Calabria, to surrender the city. Gaetani responded with cannon fire, killing three Turkish sailors. Barbarossa besieged Nice and captured the city on the 5th of August 1543 on behalf of King Francis I of France. King Francis then ordered the evacuation of Toulon and placed the city entirely in Barbarossa's hands. For the next six months, Toulon functioned as a Turkish city, complete with a mosque and a slave market.

  On his way back to Constantinople in 1544, Barbarossa appeared before Vado Ligure and threatened to bombard Genoese cities. The Republic of Genoa paid him a substantial sum to spare them. He captured Ischia in July 1544, took 4,000 prisoners at Procida, and enslaved between 2,000 and 7,000 inhabitants of Lipari after bombarding the citadel for 15 days when the city refused to surrender.

  Barbarossa retired to Constantinople in 1545 and dictated his memoirs to Muradi Sinan Reis. Those memoirs fill five hand-written volumes, known as Gazavat-ı Hayreddin Paşa, or Conquests of Hayreddin Pasha. They are exhibited today at the Topkapı Palace and Istanbul University Library. He built a palace on the Bosphorus in the neighborhood now called Büyükdere, and he died there in 1546. His mausoleum in Beşiktaş was built in 1541 by the architect Mimar Sinan, at the very site where the Ottoman fleet used to assemble, and a memorial was added beside it in 1944. The British naval historian Edward Keble Chatterton called him the greatest pirate that ever lived and one of the cleverest tacticians and strategists the Mediterranean had ever produced.