Hayreddin Barbarossa — Imperial Ottoman

Hayreddin, known in Europe as Barbarossa, was the most famous admiral in the long history of the Ottoman navy. A corsair of mixed Turkish and Greek Orthodox parentage, born on the island of Midilli (Lesbos), he built an empire in the central Mediterranean, brought Algiers into the Ottoman fold, and served as Kapudan Pasha, the admiral of the imperial fleet, from 1533 until his death in 1546. The careers of Hayreddin and his elder brother Oruç are the stuff of Mediterranean legend. The broader story of the Ottoman military and warfare provides the wider context; the article on Suleiman the Magnificent describes the sultan who appointed him.

Key dates

c. 1478 — Hayreddin born on Midilli, the son of a Turkish potter and a Greek Orthodox mother.
1504 — Oruç begins a career as a corsair based on Djerba.
1512 — Hayreddin joins his brother.
1516 — The brothers take Algiers from the Spanish.
1518 — Oruç is killed at Tlemcen; Hayreddin inherits the leadership.
1519 — Selim I grants Hayreddin the title of beylerbey of Algiers and a gold-trimmed cloak.
1529 — Hayreddin expels the Spanish from the Peñón de Argel.
1533 — Appointed Kapudan Pasha by Suleiman the Magnificent.
1538 — Victory at Preveza over the Holy League.
1543 — Joint siege of Nice with Francis I of France.
1546 — Death in Istanbul; burial in his mausoleum at Beşiktaş.

Origins

Hayreddin and Oruç, the sons of a Turkish potter named Yakup Ağa and his Greek Orthodox wife Katerina, were born on the island of Midilli (Lesbos) in the late fifteenth century. The family was part of the small Turkish community of the island, and the brothers grew up in a maritime environment, with access to the corsair ships that sailed from the Aegean and the central Mediterranean. Oruç, the elder, began a career as a corsair in the first years of the sixteenth century; Hayreddin, the younger, joined his brother in 1512.

The brothers’ early career was marked by a series of daring attacks on the shipping of the Christian powers and on the wealthy merchants of the North African coast. They based themselves in the small port of Djerba, in modern Tunisia, and from there they preyed on the Genoese, Sicilian, and Spanish shipping. The brothers were soon known to the Christian chroniclers of the Mediterranean as the “Barbarossa” brothers, from the reddish beard of Oruç.

The capture of Algiers

In 1516 Oruç and Hayreddin made the decisive move of their early career: the capture of Algiers. The Spanish had taken Algiers in 1510 and had built a small fortress, the Peñón de Argel, in the harbour. The brothers, supported by the local population, captured the city and began to extend their control over the surrounding territory. Oruç declared himself sultan of Algiers, and the brothers began a campaign against the Spanish possessions in the Maghreb, taking Bougie (Béjaïa) and Bone (Annaba) in 1516 and the city of Tlemcen in 1518.

The campaign of 1518 was a disaster. Oruç was killed at the battle of Tlemcen at the hands of a Spanish-Tlemceni relief force. It was Oruç, not Hayreddin, who had earlier been captured by the Knights of St John and held for a time as a galley-slave before being ransomed. Hayreddin returned to Algiers and began a long process of rebuilding the family’s position. He was soon approached by the Ottoman sultan Selim I, who offered him the title of beylerbey (governor) of Algiers and the protection of the Ottoman state, including a famous gold-trimmed cloak (hil’at) sent by the sultan as a mark of favour. Hayreddin accepted, and Algiers became an Ottoman regency in the early 1520s, supplying the empire with corsair captains, naval bases, and a permanent threat to Spanish Mediterranean commerce. Andrew Hess’s argument in The Forgotten Frontier that the Ottoman-Algerian relationship was less an absorption than a long negotiation between two sovereigns is, in my view, correct.

Kapudan Pasha

Hayreddin’s career as Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman fleet began in 1533, when Suleiman the Magnificent appointed him to the office. Hayreddin was a striking choice: he was not a product of the devshirme system, and he was not a member of the established Ottoman elite. He was, however, an experienced naval commander, and he had the political support of the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha. Suleiman gave Hayreddin the resources of the imperial arsenal at the Golden Horn, and Hayreddin began the long task of building an Ottoman fleet that could match the Spanish and Italian navies of the western Mediterranean.

Hayreddin’s tenure as Kapudan Pasha was marked by a series of major operations. In 1538 he won a decisive victory at Preveza, off the coast of Greece, over a combined fleet of Spain, Venice, the Papal States, and several Italian powers. The victory gave the Ottomans control of the eastern Mediterranean and made Hayreddin the master of the sea. In 1535 he had lost Tunis to the emperor Charles V, and although he and his captains raided the Spanish and Italian ports of the western Mediterranean in the following years, he did not retake Tunis during his own lifetime. In 1540–1541 he oversaw the recapture of Algiers itself, when the Spanish under Charles V attempted to take the city and were repulsed in a campaign that ended in disaster for the imperial fleet at the hands of Hayreddin’s forces in the harbour. In 1543 he joined forces with the French king Francis I in the siege of Nice. In 1544 he wintered at Monaco; and in 1545 he raided the Spanish-held coast of Italy, including a descent on the Gulf of Salerno. His right-hand man, the corsair Sinan Pasha (sometimes called Sinanet or Koca Sinan Pasha, not to be confused with the later grand vizier of the same name), worked closely with him throughout the 1540s.

The Mustafa Âli chronicler, writing half a century after Preveza, captures the Ottoman reading of the battle:

“In the days of the late Kapudan Pasha Hayreddin, the galleys of the infidels were scattered before him like chaff before the wind. The Mediterranean was the sultan’s sea, and the Franks came to him as supplicants.” — Mustafa Âli, Nusretname (late 16th c.).

The relationship between Hayreddin and his subordinate Piyale Pasha, who would succeed him as Kapudan Pasha in 1546, was the model for the pairing of admirals that the Ottoman navy used throughout the sixteenth century. The sultan relied on the pairing of Hayreddin and Piyale Pasha, who would succeed him in 1546.

Hayreddin’s death and legacy

Hayreddin died in Istanbul in 1546, after a long illness. He was buried in the large türbe (mausoleum) he had built for himself on the Bosphorus, in the district of Beşiktaş. The mausoleum is still standing, and it remains a site of popular memory in Istanbul. Hayreddin’s son Hasan Pasha succeeded him as Kapudan Pasha, and the Pasha family of Algiers remained a major force in the central Mediterranean for several generations.

Hayreddin’s legacy is a long one. The corsair state of Algiers, which he and his brother had founded, lasted until 1830. The tradition of the corsair-admiral, who rose to high command by ability at sea rather than through the palace school, became a feature of Ottoman naval history. The Great Siege of Malta in 1565, in which Hayreddin’s former son-in-law Turgut Reis served as a senior commander of the Ottoman forces, is the defining episode of the tradition he had founded. The most famous literary treatment of Hayreddin is the play Barbaros by Namık Kemal, the nineteenth-century Ottoman writer and reformer, which made Hayreddin a national hero of the modern Turkish Republic.

The question of whether Turgut Reis was, in fact, Hayreddin’s son-in-law is one the Ottoman sources do not resolve; the standard modern reading, after the work of İdris Bostan and others, is that the relationship was close but probably not by marriage. The older accounts, including Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea, accept it.

Ottoman military and warfare — A general account of the Ottoman military, in which Hayreddin was a major figure.
The Ottoman navy — The fleet that Hayreddin commanded as Kapudan Pasha from 1533 to 1546, and which he rebuilt into the dominant naval force of the western Mediterranean.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The siege warfare tradition of the Ottoman army, of which the fleet was a major support.
The Janissary corps — The infantry that was transported on the fleet on amphibious operations, and whose political weight Hayreddin had to manage.
The Great Siege of Malta — The 1565 siege in which Hayreddin’s successors, his son-in-law Turgut Reis and the Kapudan Pasha Piyale Pasha, played major roles.

Sources and further reading

Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (Faber, 2005); Empires of the Sea (Faber, 2008).
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).