He sailed to the western Mediterranean, and on approaching the Spanish island of Minorca his ships hoisted flags captured from Spain’s fleet the year before. Back in Algiers, Barbarossa was undaunted and out for revenge. The following year Charles V sent a mighty military expedition that managed to recapture Tunis after a week-long siege punctuated with bloody battles. It worked he took the port by surprise in 1534. However, these raids were just part of a bigger strategy, a diversion to distract from Barbarossa’s true goal, Tunis. Barbarossa even threatened Rome, where a dying Pope Clement VII was abandoned by his cardinals, who fled after plundering the papal treasury. Near Naples, Barbarossa and his men attempted to capture the beautiful Countess Giulia Gonzaga, who only narrowly escaped. After reconquering the Greek ports, Barbarossa’s fleet terrorised the Italian coast. ( Explore the pages of a pirate's pilfered atlas.)īarbarossa now commanded over a hundred galleys and galliots, or half galleys, and started a strong naval campaign all around the Mediterranean. Süleyman was delighted and made Barbarossa admiral in chief of the Ottoman fleet. To impress the sultan, he loaded his ships with luxurious gifts: tigers, lions, camels, silk, cloth of gold, silver, and gold cups, and 200 enslaved women for the harem in Istanbul. When Charles V’s great Genovese admiral Andrea Doria captured ports in Ottoman Greece, Süleyman summoned Barbarossa, who quickly answered the call. But Barbarossa fought for politics as well as piracy.
Experienced corsairs, such as Sinan the Jew and Ali Caraman, came to Algiers, drawn by the prospects of making their fortunes. Oruç fled, only to be found hiding in a goat pen, where a Spanish soldier first lanced him and then beheaded him.īarbarossa’s fame spread throughout the Muslim world. In 1518 a fleet set out from the Spanish-controlled port of Oran and soldiers stormed Tlemcen. The Spanish reaction was not slow in coming. Oruç swiftly moved on to capture the Algerian cities of Ténès and Tlemcen, creating for himself a powerful North African kingdom that threatened and defied the authority of King Charles, just a short sail away in Spain. Oruç then had himself proclaimed sultan, to the joy of his brother and a growing army of supporters. Not a man to miss an opportunity, Oruç established his rule in the city of Algiers, disposing of the emir, who was apparently drowned while having his daily bath. His chance came in 1516, when the emir of Algiers requested his help in expelling Spanish soldiers from the neighboring Peñón of Algiers, a small island fortress. Oruç had begun to dream of becoming more than a mere pirate: he wanted to rule his own North African kingdom. It was while attacking one of these that Oruç lost an arm to a shot from an early musket called a harquebus. Soon they commanded a fleet of about a dozen ships, which they used to launch daring attacks on Spanish strongholds in North Africa. Their attacks on Christian ships, especially Spanish ones, brought them huge amounts of loot and attracted the attention of the emir of Algiers, with whom they joined forces. The brothers found they had a talent for piracy. ( Explore the remants of Blackbeard's pirate ship discovered off the coast of North America.) The place was a veritable den of corsairs, and they enthusiastically joined their ranks. Reunited with his brother, they settled on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia. Oruç spent two terrible years as a galley slave on one of the knights’ ships but eventually managed to escape. It is unclear whether Oruç joined the powerful Ottoman navy or a merchant vessel, but in 1503 his ship was attacked and captured by the Knights Hospitaller, a Christian military order then based on the island of Rhodes, in present-day Greece. Oruç, Barbarossa’s elder brother, was the first to take to the sea in search of adventure. He was born on the Greek island of Lesbos, the son of a Christian renegade who had joined the Ottoman army. Brothers in piracyīarbarossa had modest beginnings. He was a skilled warrior with a political instinct that led him to found a prosperous kingdom, allied with the Islamic empire of the Ottoman Turks, and actively defy one of Christian Europe’s most powerful monarchs, the Spanish emperor Charles V. Yet Barbarossa was much more than a soldier of fortune.
He fearlessly hijacked ships and sacked ports, loading his pirate galleys with vast hoards of treasure and prisoners fated for slavery. From his base in Algiers, North Africa, Hayreddin Barbarossa terrorised the western Mediterranean in the first half of the 16th century.
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