Titans of History

BARBAROSSA & SILVER ARM

c. 1478–1546 & c. 1474–1518

They came upon a ship from Genoa laden with grain and seized it on the spot. Then they saw a fortress-like galleon, a merchant ship laden with cloth, and took that without any difficulty. Returning to Tunis, they handed over the fifth of booty [due to the ruler], divided the rest, and set out again with three ships for the infidel coasts.

Katib Chelebi, in his History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks (c. 1650), describing an early episode in the life of Barbarossa and his older brother Oruc

Barbarossa—a brilliant Ottoman admiral, canny politician and founder of his own dynastic kingdom—was one of the four free-booting Muslim corsair brothers who dominated the Mediterranean and slaughtered and enslaved innocent Christians with audacious enthusiasm in the early 16th century.

Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha was born on the Aegean island of Lesbos around 1478 as Yakupoglu Hizir—one of four sons and two daughters—to a Turkish Muslim father, Yakup Aga, and his Christian Greek wife, Katerina. Hizir was an intelligent youngster, blessed with charisma and the ability to lead others. Dark in complexion, he later boasted a luxuriant beard with a reddish hue—hence his European nickname Barbarossa, meaning “red beard” (a corruption of Baba Oruc, an honorific title later inherited from his gifted brother Oruc, who earned it in 1510 after helping large numbers of Spanish Muslims flee persecution).

As young men, the four brothers—Ishak, Oruc, Hizir and Ilyas—bought a boat to transport their father’s pottery products, but with Ottoman vessels subject at the time to repeated raids at the hands of the hated Knights of St. John, based on the island of Rhodes, Oruc, Ilyas and Hizir soon turned to privateering, while Ishak helped oversee the family business at home. Hizir worked the Aegean Sea, and Oruc and Ilyas the coast of the Levant until their boat was intercepted by the Knights. Ilyas was killed and Oruc imprisoned for three years at the castle of Bodrum before Hizir launched a daring raid to rescue him.

Determined to avenge his brother, Oruc secured the support of the Ottoman governor of Antalya, who supplied him with a fleet of galleys to combat the Knights’ marauding. In a series of attacks, he captured several enemy galleons, subsequently raiding Italy. Joining forces, from 1509 Oruc, Hizir and Ishak defeated a host of Spanish ships across the Mediterranean. In one such battle, in 1512, Oruc lost his left arm, earning the nickname Silver Arm after replacing it with a silver prosthetic limb.

Undeterred, the three brothers raided yet further off the Italian and Spanish coasts, in one month alone capturing a further twenty-three ships. They began producing their own gunpowder, and over the next four years raided, destroyed or captured a succession of ships, fortresses and cities. In 1516, they liberated Algiers from the Spaniards, Oruc declaring himself a sultan, though he relinquished the title the following year to the Ottoman sultan, who in return appointed him governor of Algiers and chief naval governor of the western Mediterranean—positions he held until 1518, when he and Ishak were killed by the troops of Charles I of Spain (later Emperor Charles V).

Hizir, the sole surviving brother and the man remembered today as Barbarossa, took on his brother’s mantle. In 1519, he defended Algiers against a joint Spanish–Italian attack, striking back the same year by raiding Provence. Then, following numerous raids along the French and Spanish coasts, in 1522 he contributed to the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes that finally vanquished the Knights of St. John. In 1525, he raided Sardinia, going on to recapture Algiers and take Tunis in 1529, launching further attacks from both.

In 1530, Emperor Charles V sought the help of Andrea Doria, the talented Genoese admiral, to challenge Barbarossa’s dominance, but the following year Barbarossa trounced Doria, winning the personal gratitude of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who made him Capudan Pasha—fleet admiral and chief governor of North Africa—and giving him the honorary name Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha.

In 1538—already a living legend among the Muslims for freeing African Muslim slaves from Spanish galleys and bringing glory to the Ottoman empire—Barbarossa scattered a combined Spanish, Maltese, Venetian and German fleet at the Battle of Preveza, thereby securing Turkish dominance of the eastern Mediterranean for nearly forty years. In September 1540, Charles offered him a huge bribe to switch sides, but Barbarossa refused outright, and in 1543, as his fleet lurked in the mouth of the River Tiber, he even threatened to advance on Rome, but was dissuaded by the French, with whom he had entered into a temporary alliance. By now the cities of the Italian coast, including the proud Genoese, had given up trying to defeat him, choosing instead to send huge payments in return for being spared from attack. Barbarossa was master of the Italian and Mediterranean coasts.

In 1545, undefeated and having ensured Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean and North Africa, Barbarossa retired to a magnificent villa on the northern shore of the Bosphorus. Here he wrote his memoirs until he died from natural causes in 1546. He left his son, Hasan Pasha, as his successor as ruler of Algiers.

He had seized and enslaved as many as 50,000 people from the Italian and Spanish coasts, and was famous for his savage cruelty. For the Ottomans, Barbarossa was a remarkable admiral. Christians saw him as a merciless pirate, perhaps the most terrifying that ever lived.