Hayreddin Barbarossa

Overview

Hayreddin Barbarossa — born Khizr, son of Yakup, on the island of Lesbos — was, with his elder brother Oruç, the founder of the Regency of Algiers as an Ottoman tributary state and, after 1533, the architect of Ottoman naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. His career spans the typical European-historiographical category of “corsair” (raider against Christian shipping) and the Ottoman category of kapudan (admiral); the distinction is one of perspective, not of activity. By the end of his life he was one of the most powerful military commanders of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean.

Origins

Khizr and his elder brother Oruç (in Italian sources “Aroudj,” from which the European nickname “Barbarossa” — red-beard — was first attached to Oruç and then inherited by Khizr) were the sons of Yakup, an Ottoman cavalry officer of Albanian origin settled on Lesbos after the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1462, and a Greek mother. The family ran a pottery trade and a small fleet. After their father’s death the brothers worked the eastern Mediterranean as private corsairs, taking small Christian shipping in the Aegean and along the Anatolian coast through the 1490s and 1500s.

Career

The brothers’ transition from independent corsairs to state-builders began around 1510, when they relocated their operation to La Goulette (modern Tunisia) under the protection of the Hafsid dynasty in exchange for one-fifth of their take. Oruç captured Algiers from the Spanish-allied local ruler in 1516 and proclaimed himself sultan; Khizr served as his lieutenant. When Oruç was killed by Spanish forces near Tlemcen in 1518, Khizr inherited his title and his beard (and his European nickname). He immediately sought, and received, formal recognition as an Ottoman governor from Sultan Selim I in Istanbul, which transformed Algiers from a freelance corsair city into a tributary state of the empire.

Through the 1520s Hayreddin consolidated the Regency, fortified Algiers, organised its galley fleet, and led raids that ranged from the Balearic Islands to the Italian coast. His most consequential operation of this period was the 1529 expulsion of the Spanish garrison from the Peñón de Argel, the small fortified island that had commanded the entrance to Algiers harbour since 1510; the fortress was then demolished and its stones used to build the breakwater that joined the island to the mainland and gave Algiers the harbour it retained into the modern period.

In 1533 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent summoned Hayreddin to Istanbul and appointed him Kapudan Pasha — Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet — with the brief to reorganise the imperial navy to match the Spanish-Italian fleets then dominant in the western Mediterranean. The campaigns that followed included the 1534 capture of Tunis from the Hafsids (lost again the following year to a counter-attack led personally by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V), the 1535 sack of Mahon on Minorca, the 1537 raids on the Italian coast (an attempt to land an army at Otranto to march on Rome), and the decisive 1538 fleet action against the Holy League at Preveza.

The Battle of Preveza on 28 September 1538 is one of the most consequential naval engagements of the sixteenth century. Hayreddin’s Ottoman fleet of approximately 122 galleys faced a Holy League fleet of approximately 302 vessels (162 galleys and around 140 sailing ships) under Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral commanding for Charles V. Hayreddin’s use of weather, sea-room, and the limitations of the larger Holy League sailing ships in light winds produced a tactical and strategic victory that established Ottoman naval supremacy in the central and eastern Mediterranean for the following three decades. The supremacy was not seriously challenged until the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, twenty-five years after Hayreddin’s death.

Fate

Hayreddin retired from active command after the joint Ottoman-French operations of 1543–1544 in the western Mediterranean — including the winter 1543 occupation of Toulon, which the French handed to him as a base — and lived his last two years in his palace at Beşiktaş on the Bosphorus. He died there on 4 July 1546 of natural causes, aged about sixty-eight. His mausoleum, designed by the imperial architect Sinan, still stands on the waterfront at Beşiktaş.

Legacy

Hayreddin’s career marks the consolidation of the corsair states of the North African coast — Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli — as Ottoman tributaries, the framework within which Mediterranean corsair warfare would continue for a further two hundred and fifty years until the early-nineteenth-century French and American suppression campaigns. The Regency of Algiers he established lasted until the French conquest of 1830. He is buried at Beşiktaş in a tomb that remains a place of pilgrimage in Turkish naval tradition; the modern Turkish Navy still gives the ceremonial honour of dipping its colours when passing his mausoleum.

Associates & contemporaries

• Oru\xC3\xA7 Reis (Barbarossa I) — Elder brother and original Barbarossa; co-founder of the Algiers regency; killed near Tlemcen, 1518.