Chapter 7

THE COMING OF THE CORSAIRS

The rise and progress of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean is a most curious and interesting historical fact. The causes which led to results so deplorable to commerce, civilisation, and Christianity are set forth in this chapter in order that some idea may be formed of the state of affairs in that region at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and also that the reflex action of the great triumph of the Christian armies in Spain may be more fully understood.

The maritime Christian States of the Mediterranean at this epoch were at the height of their power and prosperity, but were faced by the might of the Ottoman Empire, against which they waged perpetual warfare. Bitter and unceasing was the strife prosecuted by the Cross against the Crescent, and by the Crescent against the Cross; and riding, like eagles on the storm came the corsairs in their swift galleys ready to strike down the luckless argosy of the merchantman wheresoever she was to be met. But this was not all, as the shore as well as the sea yielded up to them its tribute in the shape of slaves and booty, and Christian mothers trembling in the insecurity of their homes would hush their wailing children with the terror of the names of Barbarossa, of Dragut, or of Ali Basha.

Popes and emperors, kings and princes, found themselves compelled to form leagues against these Sea-wolves who devoured the substance of their subjects, and great expeditions were fitted out to fight with and destroy the corsairs. Had Christendom been united no doubt the object would have been attained; but, as will be seen at the end of this chapter, an “Alliance of Christian Princes against the Turks”—which generic term included the corsairs—was not always used in the manner best calculated to injure those common enemies.

When in 1492 Granada was yielded up to “Los Reyes Catolicos,” Ferdinand of Aragon, and Isabella of Castile, by that luckless monarch known as Boabdil el Chico (or “the little”), the last remnant of the power of the Moors in Spain had gone never to return. On that small hill on the way to the coast still known as “el ultimo suspiro del Moro” (the last sigh of the Moor), Boabdil, as he looked for the last time on his lost capital of Granada, is said to have burst into tears. His fierce mother Ayesha had, however, no sympathy for her fallen son: “Thou doest well to weep like a woman for that which thou daredst not defend as a man,” was her biting—and totally unjust—comment, and the cavalcade pursued its miserable journey to the coast, from whence it embarked for the kingdom of Fez.

Great was the jubilation in Christendom; for more than seven centuries the followers of the Prophet had dwelt in the land from which Tarik had expelled Roderick the Goth in the eighth century. There they had dwelt and held up a lamp of learning and comparative civilisation which shone brightly through the miasmatic mists of cruelty and bloodshed in the Middle Ages, and none can question that, under Moorish rule in Spain in those centuries, the arts of peace had flourished, and that science, agriculture, art, and learning had found generous and discriminating patronage in the courts of Còrdoba and Granada.

And now all was over the iron chivalry of the North had broken in pieces the Paynim hosts. They were expelled for ever from Christian soil, or else were forced to live in a state of degrading servitude, sore oppressed by an alien rule, in the land which their forbears had won and kept by the sword.

There was jubilation, as has been said, in Christendom, but the knights and nobles who flocked from all parts of Europe to join the standard of the Catholic monarchs had no prevision of the consequences, no idea of the legacy that they were leaving to their descendants.

It is of this legacy that we have to speak, and there has been none more terrible, none fraught with more awful suffering for the human race. The broken hosts of the Moslem chivalry became the corsairs of the Mediterranean: ruthless pirates freed from all restraint of human pity, living only to inflict the maximum of suffering upon their Christian foes, who, having sown the wind at the taking of Granada, reaped in the coming centuries a whirlwind of blood and agony which continued down to the bombardment of Algiers by Lord Exmouth in 1816, and even later than that date.

Warriors to a man, the hosts of Boabdil crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Africa; warriors but now broken men, from whom had been reft not only their lands and houses but even the chance of remaining in their native country. Religious toleration had been the rule of the Moslem States in Spain. In the name of religion they had been expropriated; therefore toleration was slain, and to exalt the Crescent above the Cross became the duty of every fighting Mohammedan. Into all the ports and harbours of the North African littoral the Moslems intruded themselves, their one preoccupation to revenge themselves upon the Christians, of no matter what race or nationality. There was at this date but small opposition from the rulers of the Pagan States who held in their weak and inefficient hands such strong places of arms as Algiers and Tunis.

Very soon the Moslems acquired the habit of the sea, and very soon the Christian States discovered how different was the Mohammedan dwelling at peace in Andalusia, or at worst fighting with his co-religionists, to the desperate corsairs created by their own act who now ravaged the shores of the tideless sea.

In the years succeeding to the conquest of Granada the corsairs became the scourge of the Mediterranean. France, Spain, Genoa, Venice, were all at odds with them; as the trading vessels, which had hitherto passed to and fro unmolested, were now captured, haled into North African ports, their cargoes sold, and their hapless crews forced to labour, naked and chained to the benches of the pirate galleys, until death came and mercifully put an end to their sufferings.

From Reggio to Genoa, from Venice to Taranto, the cry of rage and fear went up; it was re-echoed from the coasts of France and of the Balearic Islands, while Southern Spain seethed with disaffection, and the Moriscoes, as those Moors who remained in the country were known, were ever on the lookout to assist their bold brethren, the rovers of the sea. Christendom was completely bewildered: hitherto the relations between the nations and the Kings of Tunis, Tlemcen, Fez, and others of the North African potentates, had been of the most agreeable description. Both parties had denounced piracy, and had as far as in them lay done all in their power to discourage this form of robbery. But now all was changed, and, as has been said in the previous chapter, a situation arose analogous to that of the Spaniards in the West Indies a century and a half later when Morgan and the buccaneers were at the height of their maleficent prowess. The situation was analogous, but whereas Morgan, Scott, L’Ollonais, and others terrorised only such forces as Spain possessed in far-distant colonies, the corsairs were a terror to all the great nations of the world.

Granada fell, as has been said, in 1492 amid the rejoicings of the Christian States; but it had been well for Christendom as a whole if the Caliphs of Còrdova and Granada had never been defeated, and they and their subjects driven from their homes: to form the nucleus of those piratical States which existed from this date until well into the nineteenth century, as the scourge and the terror of all those who, during those ages, desired to “pass upon the seas on their lawful occasions.” The capture of Granada was separated from the fall of the Byzantine Empire by a period of thirty-nine years, as it was in the year 1453 that Constantinople was captured by the Caliph Mahomet II. Byzantium fell, and perhaps nothing in the records of that Empire became it so well as that last tremendous struggle; and when on May 29th, 1453, the Ottoman legions were victorious, the body of the last Emperor of Byzantium was found beneath a mountain of the slain only recognisable by his purple mantle sewn with golden bees. The Cross which Constantine the Great had planted on the walls 1125 years before was replaced by the Crescent, and the Christian Cathedral became that Mosque of St. Sophia which still endures.

From the earliest days of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean they were in close communication with their co-religionists of the Ottoman Empire; and this for a very good reason, which was that the Turk had not the habit of the sea, but was essentially a land warrior, and, as the story of the Sea-wolves progresses, we shall see how in a sense the Grand Turk and the pirates became interdependent in the ceaseless wars which were waged in the epoch of which we treat.

The fall of Constantinople resounded throughout Christendom as though it had been the crack of doom, and all men held their breath wondering what next might portend. So stunned were the maritime States that they took no action, letting “I dare not wait upon I would.” Their indecision was fatal. Had the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Catalans at this juncture formed an alliance, they might have chased the Turks from off the face of the waters; but to mutual jealousy and indecision was added fear—fear of this new and mighty power which had arisen and had swept away one of the landmarks of Europe. So it fell out that Genoa entered into an arrangement with the Grand Turk, and Venice concluded a treaty of commerce on April 18th, 1454. It was the Caliph Mahomet who first fortified the Dardanelles, where he mounted thirty heavy guns before which Jacques Loredano, the Venetian admiral, recoiled, reporting to the Republic that henceforward none could pass the Straits. We have, however, nothing to do with the Grand Turk in these pages, save, and except in so far, as he had an effect on the lives of the corsairs. This effect will develop itself as we proceed.

There is one body of men, however, concerning whom it may be as well to treat of briefly in this place, as the lives which they led and the deeds which they performed were inextricably entangled with those of the corsairs. These men were the members of that association first known as the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, later as the Knights of Malta. Between them and the corsairs it was war to the death; and not only with these robbers, but also with any ship which sailed beneath the insignia of the Crescent.

In 1291 the Soldan of Egypt chased the Knights Hospitallers, as they were also known, from the soil of the Holy Land; Philip IV. of France welcomed them in the island of Cyprus, and gave them the town of Limasol as an asylum. This for the time the knights were bound to accept, but they were impatient of charity, resentful of tutelage, proud and independent. Considering their own order as the greatest and most stable bulwark of the Christian faith, they bowed before neither King nor Kaiser; and the only boon they asked of great potentates, when allied temporarily with them in their eternal warfare, was that on all occasions theirs should be the post of the greatest danger.

This, indeed, they did not ask as a favour, but claimed as a right. It is easily understood that such desperate warriors, who fought only to conquer or die, were allies sought for eagerly by all professing the same faith.

Fulke de Villaret, Grand Master of the order in 1310, seized upon Rhodes, which, though nominally belonging to Greece, was at this time a refuge for bad characters of all nationalities. This island was in the most advantageous position, as it commanded the sea-route from Constantinople to Egypt and the ports of Asia Minor, and was also in close proximity to the coast of Caramania, from whence the order could draw the necessary timber for the building of their galleys and incidentally their motive power—in the shape of slaves—for the oars by which they were propelled.

The knights fortified the island until it was practically unassailable in that age. In the meanwhile their navy grew so rapidly that, in 1436, they were actually in a position to fight the Turks in line of battle. To Rhodes came the younger sons of noble families from every nation in Europe, all aflame with ardour to fight for “the religion”; and the great nobles themselves did not disdain to take service in so chivalrous an order.

Their former enemy, the Soldan of Egypt, made a descent on the island in 1440, and in 1444 besieged the place in form; but he was beaten off, after forty-two days’ ceaseless fighting, with great slaughter.

“Soldier and sailor too” were the bold Knights of Saint John; for them no toil was too arduous, no danger too great. In heat and cold, in storm and tempest, they plied their trade of war, their holy crusade to extirpate the infidel from off the face of the waters. They looked for no material reward, and riches and honours they contemptuously rejected. Strong in their marvellous faith that on their shoulders rested the propagation of Christianity in these latter days, they swept the seas with a calm assumption of victory which caused it to be half assured before the fight began. And when the battle was joined, where could be found such paladins as these men who claimed it as an inalienable right to head the hurricane rush of the boarders from the decks of their galleys, to be ever the leaders when the forlorn hope should mount the breach? Life for the knights of this order was looked at literally with a single purpose—the advancement of Christianity and the downfall of that pestilent heresy which proclaimed that Mahomet was the prophet of God. Against all who bowed the knee in the mosques of the false prophet their lives were vowed, and it is but the barest justice to them to record that on the altar of this their faith these were ungrudgingly poured forth.

Naturally reprisals were the order of the day. Equally fanatical was he who held to the Moslem faith; in consequence many were the attempts to stamp out, once and for all, the prime enemies of the Ottoman Empire. In 1480 a Turkish fleet of one hundred and forty ships issued from the Dardanelles, an army awaited it on the coast of Caramania which was rapidly embarked, and on May 23rd the fleet anchored a few miles from the town of Rhodes. Here, then, was a trial of strength in which the Hospitallers delighted. After repeated attacks in detail, on July 28th a grand assault was made which the Turks considered would be absolutely decisive: it was decisive, but not in the fashion which they anticipated.

The standard of the Janissaries already floated on the first curtain of the rampart when Pierre D’Aubusson rallied the knights for one last desperate effort. “Shall it be said in days to come that ‘the Religion’ recoiled before a horde of Moslem savages; that the banner of Saint John was soiled by their infamous touch? But this is no time for talk. Ye have swords, Messires; use them!”

Thus the Grand Master; and then the knights, in their battered armour and with their hacked and dinted swords, flung themselves once more upon the foe. The Janissaries closed in around them; but these fine troops were not what they had been two months before, and the close contact with the Hospitallers, which had endured sixty-five days, had been to them a lesson fraught with disaster: they had already lost six thousand men, and their adversaries were still absolutely undismayed. His helmet gone, his banner held aloft over his head, Pierre D’Aubusson was ever in the thickest of the fray unconquered, unconquerable; and pressing close behind him came the knights, each jealous for the glory of his “Auberge.” French, Venetian, Catalan, Genoese German, none can tell who fought best that day; but the Janissaries were beaten, and three thousand of their corpses cumbered the ditch into which they were hurled by their foes; there were besides fifteen thousand wounded in the Turkish camp.

The heart was out of that great army which had embarked to the sound of trumpets and the blessings of the Mullahs but ten weeks before, and they sailed away a beaten force. Mahomet II. swore to avenge his defeat, but his days were numbered, and he died at Scutari on May 3rd, 1481, at the age of fifty-two, and in the thirteenth year of his reign.

In the year 1499 Daoud Pasha, Admiralissimo to Bajazet, the successor to Mahomet II., defeated Antonio Grimani the Venetian admiral in that combat known to the Republic as “La deplorabile battaglia del Zonchio.” The populace of Venice demanded that Grimani should be instantly beheaded, but he not only escaped their vengeance but lived to be nominated as Doge on June 6th, 1521, at the age of eighty-seven: certainly a curious record for an unsuccessful admiral of that date.

In 1500 was formed the “Alliance of Christian Princes” at the initiative of the Borgia Pope Alexander VII. Louis XII., King of France, and Ferdinand V. of Spain announced their adherence to this effort against the Turk, and Pierre D’Aubusson, the veteran Grand Master of the Knights of Saint John, was nominated as Captain-General of the Christian armies. For the purposes of this war the admiral of the Papal galleys in the Mediterranean, Lodovico del Mosca, purchased from Ferdinand, King of Naples, all his artillery, of which a description is given by the Padre Alberto Guglielmotti, a Dominican friar, author of a work entitled, “La Guerra dei Pirati e la Marina Pontifica dal 1500 al 1560 A.D.” “There were thirty-six great bombards, with eighty carts pertaining to them; some drawn by horses, some drawn by buffaloes harnessed singly, or two, four, or even six together; two waggons laden with arquebuses for ships’ boats; nine with about forty smaller bombards (_bombardelles_) placed three, four, or even six on each waggon; twelve with ordinary pieces of artillery; as many more for the service of twelve big guns; thirty-seven carts of iron balls; three with gunpowder; and finally five laden with nitre, darts, and bullets. Splendid artillery of most excellent workmanship and great power escorted by two thousand men under arms, without mentioning the companies who marched before and after each waggon.”

The French king had prepared a fleet and army under Count Philip of Ravenstein; the Spaniards were under the command of Gonsalvo de Còrdoba, the “Great Captain.” The history of the “Alliance of Christian Princes” is illustrative of the methods of those potentates at that time. After one or two unimportant skirmishes with the Turks, in which no great harm was done on either side, the French and Spaniards joined together, and seized the Kingdom of Naples: the prudent king of this territory, having sold his artillery to Lodovico del Mosca, did not await the coming of his Christian brethren.

In the territory known to the Romans as Byzacena, which stretched from Algiers to the confines of Tripoli, there was reigning at this period one Abu-Abd-Allah-Mahomed, a Berber Moslem of the dynasty of Hafsit. Between this dignitary and Genoa a treaty of commerce had been arranged and signed. But treaties on the shores of the Mediterranean were capable of very elastic interpretation; they never reckoned with the corsairs, and these latter were in the habit of intruding themselves everywhere, and upsetting the most carefully laid plans. Curtogali, a corsair who had collected a great following, was now a power with which to reckon, and high in the favour of the Grand Turk at Constantinople. This robber presented himself at Bizerta—one of the ports of Abd-Allah-Mahomed—with a squadron of thirty ships, and demanded hospitality. As Curtogali disposed of thirty ships and some six thousand fighting men it would probably have been impossible for Abd-Allah to have refused his request in any case; but he was far from wishing to do so, as, by a convenient interpretation of the Koran, the pirate had to deliver up one-fifth part of all the booty which he reft from the Christians to the ruler of the country in whose harbours he sheltered. There was no place so convenient for the purposes of the pirate as Bizerta: from here he could strike at Sicily, at the Balearic Islands, at Rome, Naples, Tuscany, and Liguria, while at the same time he held the trade slowly sailing along the North African littoral at his mercy. Great were the depredations of Curtogali, and even Pope Leo X. trembled on his throne, while Genoa, Venice, and Sicily seethed with impotent fury.

In the meanwhile who so happy as Abu-Abd-Allah-Mahomed? We cannot do better than to take the description of his position from the pages of the good Padre Alberto Guglielmotti. The Franciscan says: “He [that is, Abd-Allah] desired peace with all and prosperity for his own interests. Friendly to the merchants in their commerce; friendly to the corsairs in their spoils. Let all hold by the law: the former contentedly paying customs dues, the latter cheerfully handing over a fifth part of their robberies, and Abd-Allah—their common friend—would ever continue at peace with them all. Outside his ports the merchants and the pirates might fall by the ears if they would: that was no reason for him to trouble his head. On the contrary, he would joyfully await them on their return either with customs dues or tribute of the fifth as the case might be.”

However well this state of affairs may have suited Abd-Allah, the Genoese held that the situation was far from satisfactory. In consequence they sent an army against Curtogali, and on August 4th, 1516, they captured Bizerta, set free a number of Christian captives, and plundered the town. But they did not capture Curtogali, who, only five weeks after, made a daring attempt to carry off the Pope in person from the sea-shore in the neighbourhood of Rome. Curtogali ended his days as the Governor of Rhodes, from which the Knights of Saint John were finally expelled by Soliman the Magnificent on December 22nd, 1522. This was the greatest blow which the fraternity ever received. On December 24th the Turks made a triumphal entry into the town, and it was said that “Sultan Soliman was not insensible to the sorrowful position of his vanquished enemies, and when he saw the Christian Commander, Prince Philippe Villiers L’Isle Adam, he remarked: ‘It weighs upon me somewhat that I should be coming hither to chase this aged Christian warrior from his house.’” At the beginning of the following year the knights left the island, never to return. On the day of this desolate embarcation the herald blew upon his trumpet the “Salute and Farewell” and the identical instrument upon which this call was sounded is still preserved in the armoury at Malta, to which barren island the knights were forced to retreat.