Khair ad-Din Barbarossa
Khair ad-Din or Chaireddin , called Barbarossa by Christian Europeans , ( Arabic خير الدين Chair ad-Din , DMG Ḫair ad-Dīn 'Wohl der Religion', actually Khizir , Turkish Hızır, Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa , * around 1478 in Mytilini on Lesbos ; † July 4, 1546 in Kostantiniyye / Istanbul ) was an Ottoman corsair in the Mediterranean, ruler of Algiers and admiral of the Ottoman Empire .
childhood
Khair ad-Din was born around 1474, the youngest of four sons. After Lesbos became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1462, his father Yakub (a former Janissary or Sipahi soldier) settled on the island, where he married Catalina, widow of a Greek priest. From this marriage there were two daughters and four sons. According to their age, the sons were named Oruç , İlyas, İzhak and Hızır (Khair), who as the youngest son helped his father in the family's own pottery. It was not until 1500 that Hızır, when he was twenty-six, and his brother Oruç, who was four years older, left Lesbos for North Africa.
On the way to Kaptan-ı Derya
Under the leadership of Oruç, they knew how to build up their own powerful fleet of corsairs in the shortest possible time, with which they plagued the western Mediterranean. The focus of their successful raids, which they undertook from the Gulf of Tunis, were the strait of Sicily and the coasts of Calabria , Sardinia and Corsica . Khair ad-Din and his brother Oruç were among the richest men in the Mediterranean in 1510 and commanded a total of eight galleons . Based on their success as a corsair, he conquered Algeria with his brother Arudsch in 1516 and after his death in 1518 became Bey of Algiers (1518–1546), whose port served from then on as the starting point for the control of the east-west sea routes in the western Mediterranean. Khair ad-Din recognized the suzerainty of the Ottomans and was in return from the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Pasha appointed. From then on he was considered Governor General of Algiers , which was synonymous with the fact that the occupation of these areas on the North African coast was recognized as a fact by the Sublime Porte in Istanbul for the first time. Khair ad-Din was able to drive the Spaniards out of Bône and Constantine with Ottoman military aid in 1529 .
Thanks to his successful raids, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman Mediterranean Navy (Kaptan-ı Derya) by Süleyman in August 1533 . He spent the winter of 1533/34 in Istanbul, where he turned his attention to the reorganization of the capital's shipyard on the Golden Horn . With the support of the Grand Vizier Makbul Ibrahim Pascha , Khair ad-Din set about redesigning the shipyards of the Ottoman Navy , on whose premises he stayed the whole winter so as not to lose any time. The goal pursued here was the redesign of the Ottoman navy and the design and planning of new ships. For example, from 1543, Jean Chesneau, the French secretary in Istanbul , tells us: "The superiority of the Turks at sea goes back to Khair ad-Din's first winter in the shipyards of this city."
First ventures as Grand Admiral
After working all winter, Khair ad-Din set sail as Grand Admiral of the renewed Ottoman navy in July 1534 with a total of eighty-four galleys and galleons from the Golden Horn. The aim of the fleet was initially to plunder the southern west coast of Italy, starting near Reggio , and moving northwards through the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sperlonga , and then to return to the capital of the Ottoman Empire loaded with slaves and other booty. The Ottoman ships haunted the waters and coasts of Italy until late autumn 1534. Khair ad-Din himself, however, turned to the southwest with a course to the Gulf of Tunis , where he succeeded in August 1534 with the help of the Janissaries placed at his side to take the city with little resistance and thus integrate it into the domain of the Ottomans.
Battle for Tunis
Charles V could not under any circumstances accept the occupation of Tunis by the Ottomans, as there are less than a hundred nautical miles between Sicily and the North African city and the island would have been exposed to the permanent danger of being attacked by the corsairs without effective protection can. At the end of May 1535 he left Barcelona with his fleet and arrived in Tunis on June 14th with around six hundred ships. On the same day the siege of the city began, in which the Knights of the Order of St. John from the island of Malta were also involved. When twelve thousand Christian prisoners mutinied in Tunis on June 20 , and the situation for Khair ad-Din became increasingly hopeless, he was forced to give up the city and move to Bône. Although the mutiny of the slaves was decisive for Charles's victory, we must expressly point out the Knights of St. John, whose work in the struggle for the city contributed significantly to the victory and was even respected by the Ottomans.
Although Karl had achieved his goal of retaking Tunis in favor of Spain , so that it no longer posed a threat to Christian shipping through the Strait of Sicily, he failed to pursue Khair ad-Din and to him on the battlefield with the superior Spanish fleet ask and beat decisively. This is due either to the fact that Tunis was released for a three-day sack (which involved all Christian soldiers, mercenaries and slaves including the Knights of St. John) or that Karl did not consider his troops strong enough to fight against Khair ad -Din to continue.
But instead of retreating into the Levant , as the Spaniards suspect, Khair ad-Din set sail with fifteen galleons from Bône on a north-westerly course towards the Balearic Islands . While Andrea Doria was searching for him on the North African coast on the orders of Charles V, he attacked the port city of Maó in the north of the island of Menorca with his fleets , captured six thousand soldiers and acquired a large number of guns to replace the in Cannons lost during the Battle of Tunis.
Despite the temporary loss of Tunis, which was to be retaken from the Ottomans in 1574, Khair ad-Din managed to assert himself in Algeria and to subdue the tribes of the hinterland as well as to continue his conquests in the Mediterranean .
The Serenissima is being pushed back
Many of the Aegean islands , such as Crete , were owned by the Republic of Venice around 1535 and were not bothered by the Ottomans and their fleet. The “Serenissima” and the Hohe Pforte were on friendly terms at that time. But despite the peace between the two powers, the sultan's merchant ships were increasingly attacked by the Venetians on their voyage between Istanbul and North Africa, and the crews were dragged into slavery . The Ottoman leadership could not accept this breach of peace, so that in late autumn 1535 Khair ad-Din was appointed to the Ottoman capital. When he arrived in Istanbul, Sultan Suleyman I entrusted him with the task of driving the Christian powers out of the Levant , the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea in order to regain control of the sea routes in the vicinity of the Ottoman rule. As a result, the shipyards and arms factories of Istanbul were busy re-arming the Ottoman navy throughout 1536. After the work was finished in May 1537, Khair ad-Din led the Turkish fleet, which consisted of more than one hundred galleys , into the Mediterranean and haunted the coast of Puglia . During the looting, the Ottomans captured around 400,000 gold pieces and thousands of slaves.
The battle of Preveza
Faced with this threat, Pope Paul III. in February 1538 the formation of a Holy League from his armed forces as well as those of Spain and Venice to counter the Ottoman raids and to provide ad-Din's naval force. On September 28, both fleets met near the port city of Preveza . The squad of the Holy League consisted of 302 ships (162 galleys and 140 barques), of which 55 galleys were provided by the Republic of Venice, 49 by Spain and 27 by the Papal States and the Order of St. John. Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral in the service of Emperor Charles V, was in command. Opposite was the Ottoman squadron, which at that time comprised a total of 122 large and small galleys. The naval battle of Preveza finally saw the Ottomans victorious: although they had about 400 dead and 800 wounded, they did not lose any ships. In return, they were able to sink, set on fire or capture several League ships and capture a total of around 3,000 people.
The defeat of the Christian fleet meant that many of the previously Venetian islands (e.g. Naxos , Kasos , Tinos and Karpathos ) fell under Ottoman rule, while others were now obliged to pay tribute to the Sultan in Istanbul. For Venice itself, the well-built and manned Ottoman fleet under the leadership of Khair ad-Din was a permanent threat, which under no circumstances should result in a conflict, as this would only have serious consequences for overseas trade.
Alliance with France
After Khair ad-Din had secured Ottoman supremacy in both the eastern and western Mediterranean, his last years as Kaptan-ı Derya of the Ottoman fleet were marked by the alliance between France and the Ottoman Empire (the so-called "unholy alliance") . For Khair ad-Din and his master, Sultan Suleyman I, a military cooperation between the two powers seemed to contain only advantages, because everything that contributed to the weakening and dissolution of the power of Spain could only be of use to the Ottomans. So it was obvious for the Ottoman leadership to ally themselves with the French king Francis I against Charles V, although this alliance was never fixed in a document, which is due to the fear of the French about the propaganda effect of such a treaty in the rest of the West .
At the urgent request of Francis I, Khair ad-Din sailed in the summer of 1543 on the orders of Sultan Suleyman I with a fleet of one hundred galleys for France with the aim of inflicting as much damage as possible on the territories of the Spanish king. After Reggio had been sacked, Khair ad-Din besieged and conquered the castle of the city of Gaeta north of Naples and then moved north with his fleet to the meeting point with the French naval forces in front of Marseille . The united French-Ottoman fleet captured Nice in September , the storming of the city was mainly due to the Ottoman siege guns (see Siege of Nice (1543) ). Before Khair ad-Din retired to Toulon with the Ottoman fleet to winter , he sent a squadron of galleys with the task of plundering cities and ports on the coasts of Catalonia in order to pursue the task imposed on him, in the domain of Charles V, for example to do as much damage as possible. It is worth mentioning the discipline of the Ottoman armed forces and their peaceful coexistence with the urban population of Toulon, which is described by a visitor to the city as follows: “In Toulon, you could imagine yourself in Constantinople, everyone goes about their business with the greatest of naturalness ... never have Troops engaged in such correct behavior. ”There is a certain irony in history that Ottoman ships were at anchor in Catholic France, the rowers of which were largely enslaved Italians, Spaniards and even French. The power of Khair ad-Din and ultimately also of the Ottoman Sultan was never shown so clearly to the rest of Europe as in that winter of 1543.
In the spring of 1544 Khair ad-Din set sail with the Ottoman fleet from Toulon towards Istanbul and, after leaving French territory and returning to Spain, attacked the island of Elba , the island of Procida off Naples and sacked Ischia . When they arrived in Istanbul, the Ottoman warships were filled with gold and slaves, loot from Italy and Spain, money and gifts from France, and tribute payments collected from the islands of the Ionian and Aegean Sea.
Death and meaning of Khair ad-Din
Khair ad-Din died of a fever on July 4, 1546 at the age of about 70 in his palace on the Bosporus . It was placed in his mausoleum in what is now Barbaros Park in Istanbul's Beşiktaş district . On his grave was engraved in Arabic: "The Lord of the Sea died." The new Kapudan Pashas were later appointed in the mausoleum built by Sinan . From now on, the Turkish fleet was to fire gun salutes there before each expedition.
In 1944 a monument was erected in his honor right next to his grave , on the back of which the following lines by the Turkish poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı are written:
- Deniz ufkunda bu top sesleri nerden geliyor?
- Barbaros, belki, donanmayla seferden geliyor!
- Adalar'dan mı? Tunus'dan mı, Cezayir'den mi?
- Hür ufuklarda donanmış iki yüz pare gemi
- Yeni doğmuş aya baktıkları yerden geliyor;
- O mübarek gemiler hangi seherden geliyor?
- Where do the cannon sounds come from from the sea horizon?
- Barbaros, perhaps, returning from a voyage with his fleet!
- From the islands? From Tunisia, from Algeria?
- Two hundred ships in the open sea
- Coming from the direction of the rising moon
- What dawn do these blessed ships come from?
Khair ad-Din left a well-organized North African province to the Ottoman Empire and ensured the Ottomans' maritime dominance for 30 years. In the Turkish consciousness he is considered a national hero.
See also
literature
- Ernle Bradford : Chaireddin Barbarossa - The corsair of the Sultan. Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-442-02978-3 .
- Heath W. Lowry: Lingering Questions Regarding the Lineage, Life & Death of Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa. In: Marios Hadjianastasis (ed.): Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination: Studies in Honor of Rhoads Murphey. Brill, Leiden 2015, ISBN 9789004280915 , pp. 185-212.
Web links
- Literature by and about Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Barbarossa, Khair ad-Din |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hızır, Barbaros Hayreddin Paşa (Turkish); Chair ad Din; Chaireddin |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Ottoman corsair in the western Mediterranean, ruler of Algiers |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1467 or around 1475 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mytilene on Lesbos |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th July 1546 |
| Place of death | Constantinople |