Barbarossa

Ottoman military leader

• Born: Unknown
• Birthplace: Mytilene, Greece
• Died: 1546
• Place of death: Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now in Istanbul, Turkey)

Barbarossa, a corsair, was instrumental in commanding and advancing the Ottoman Empire’s most powerful naval fleet, which dominated the eastern Mediterranean region for more than a century after his death. Barbarossa’s exploits helped extend Ottoman control to North Africa.

Early Life

The early lives of Barbarossa (bahr-bah-RAW-sah) whose original name was Khiḍr and his older brother, Arūj (d. 1518), were passed on the island of Mytilene in Greece. Apparently, their father was a Muslim convert and possibly a member of the Ottoman military establishment. Nothing is known about the educational background of either brother, but their careers suggest that they had practical training as sailors.

By the time Khiḍr was an adult, around 1500, both he and his brother had left their Greek homeland as privateers, roaming the eastern Mediterranean Sea in search of prey, either Christian or Muslim. The main focus of their activities, however, was along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, where a number of Spanish enclaves had been established alongside small non-Ottoman Muslim states between Egypt’s borders and Morocco to the west. Spanish presence along the coast had grown after the final victory at Granada and expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492. Wherever they could, the Spaniards exploited weaknesses in Muslim rule along the coast eastward, to what is now Tripoli in Libya. Such outposts challenged Muslim military response.

No Islamic state, however, even the by-then-powerful Ottoman sultanate in Constantinople, appeared ready to do battle to remove Christian enclaves from North Africa. In such a setting, the arrival of only partially organized Turkish corsair formations could work either to the disadvantage or to the advantage of Christian interests in the area. If independent corsairs fought for the Spaniards in exchange for safe harbor rights, they became informal allies. In the case of Arūj and Khiḍr, such dealings appeared treasonous, and they committed themselves to fighting in support of menaced Muslim rulers from Tripoli to the western borders of what later became the Ottoman province of Algeria.

Life’s Work

Barbarossa and his elder brother were not the only renegade Muslim corsairs who were active in mid-Mediterranean and North African coastal waters in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The Spanish and Muslim populations employed a general word derived from the Arabic term for “head men,” ru’asa, to describe leaders (in this case naval leaders, or captains) of individual ships or small groups of ships engaged in sporadic attacks on Mediterranean maritime movements. These attacks did not seem to pit Muslims against Christians or vice versa, but were instead motivated by booty from any source.

Barbarossa and Arūj, however, developed fairly systematic arrangements to carry out sea raids in the name of a specific Muslim sponsor: al-Ḥasan, the then-reigning sultan of the Ḥafṣid Dynasty located in Tunis. The Ḥafṣids offered the adjacent port of Halq al-Wadi as a safe haven for the Barbarossa brothers. Initially, around 1510 to 1513, the Ḥafṣids might have done this to obtain protective services on the sea against threats of Spanish attacks from their small enclave in Bejaïa on what eventually became the Algerian coast. Soon, however, it was apparent that the Barbarossa brothers wanted more independence in making their own decisions.

After Arūj seized another small town on the western side of Ḥafṣid territory, the port of Djidjelli, the Barbarossas not only undertook sea raids in their own name but also established contacts with the hinterland Berber tribal populations. These tribes, known as Kabyles (from the Arabic qabilah), may even have agreed to form armed units to serve the Barbarossas on land. Ḥafṣid reaction to this upstart small state in Djidjelli involved one of the major contradictory moves in the last decades of their rule from Tunis: They concluded a treaty with the Spanish Christians to protect them against possible threats from their former but unpredictable Muslim protégés.

These tense developments led the brothers to take a major step that would determine the future status of Barbarossa, in particular. In 1516, the corsairs landed in the area near three Spanish-held islets in what would become the Bay of Algiers. The weak Muslim ruler there was literally under the guns of the Spanish and was forced to pay them tribute. The Barbarossas not only forced the ruler out of power but also used this new base of operations to move even farther inland than they had been able to do in Djidjelli. Attacks on the territory of the sultan of Tlemcen (an inland town with an important Islamic regional role) proved to be a turning point. The new sultan of the Zayyanid Dynasty had just renewed Tlemcen’s long-standing tributary status to the strong Spanish garrison at Oran, but he was challenged by a rival to the succession, who called on Arūj and Barbarossa to help him free the region from Spanish influence.

Although this goal was in the process of being achieved, the protracted inland struggle and the expansion of fortifications against Spanish attacks against Algiers were not yet completed when Arūj met his death in 1518. Almost immediately Barbarossa called on the Ottoman sultan Selim I for military assistance. Ottoman forces arrived too late to save Barbarossa from having to evacuate Algiers. The threat came not from the Spanish, however, but from an alliance between the Ḥafṣid sultan of Tunis and disgruntled Berbers from the Djidjelli area, who refused to recognize Barbarossa. It took Barbarossa nearly five years to retake Algiers, but this time he made certain that his authority to rule would be recognized without hesitation by Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent , the strongest Muslim ruler in the entire Mediterranean area.

Süleyman not only granted the formal title of Ottoman commander and bey (governor) to Barbarossa in Algiers but also sent troops to help expand territory under his control. Much of Barbarossa’s final success, however, was gained by allowing local leaders substantial autonomy if they would agree to recognize his governorate in Algiers. In 1534, he was called to Constantinople to serve as the general commander of the Ottoman fleet. Despite a full-scale Ottoman naval effort under Barbarossa to dislodge the Ḥafṣids from Tunis, capture of the city was temporary (1534-1535). Barbarossa carried out one more major, successful service for the Ottomans (at the naval Battle of Preveza in 1538 against the fleet of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) before he retired in 1544. He died in Constantinople in 1546.

Significance

Because the Ottoman Empire had not undertaken formal military campaigns in North Africa prior to Sultan Selim I’s 1517 conquest of Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz region’s Muslim holy cities, Barbarossa’s establishment of outposts along the coast offered attractive possibilities to Sultan Süleyman. In fact, the Ottomans did not have to send land forces to North Africa; it was enough to announce Barbarossa’s status as main deputy of imperial authority and to send more or less token forces to formalize imperial presence in the area. Such methods seem to have worked in general terms for Barbarossa’s governorship in the then ill-defined zone that became Algeria. In more traditionally autonomous Muslim areas, however, especially Ḥafṣid Tunis, his claim of ascendancy would not be imposed as easily.

Many historians believe that, by the time Barbarossa was called back to Constantinople to serve at the highest level of Ottoman administration, the North African zones he conquered and over which he had been appointed were already changing into very loosely organized Ottoman provinces. Many of the local elements supporting what the Ottomans still called their beylicates would not, in the generations following Barbarossa’s appointment as beylerbey (provincial governor), have been recognizable as part of the temporary system established so quickly in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Bibliography

Heers, Jacques. The Barbary Corsairs, 1400-1580. London: Stockpile, 2003. A history of corsair activity in North Africa before and after Barbarrosa’s career.

Hess, Andrew. The Forgotten Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Still the most detailed study of the early interaction between Ottoman and European politics in North Africa.

Perkins, Ken. Historical Dictionary of Tunisia. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Covers the personal careers of corsairs who played similar roles in Tunisia’s history before and during the Ottoman period.