CHAPTER X

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.

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