Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean Part 19

That which the fighting Pontiff, Pius V., said when he heard of the victory is in character with everything which history has told us of this remarkable occupant of the chair of Saint Peter. It was short but very much to the point, consisting of the one sentence, "Fuit h.o.m.o misus a Deo cui nomen erat Joannes."

In a collection of epitaphs printed in Colonia in 1623 (and edited by one Franciscus Swertius) is one in Spanish by an anonymous author on Don John of Austria. In this, which takes the form of question and answer, it is asked of him "who with so much real glory lies so humbly 'neath this stone," what it is that Spain can do for him, what temple or what statue can she raise to his honour. To this the hero is made to reply that "My temple is found in my works, my statue has been my fame." This is not only a pretty conceit, but it is very substantially true when we think of the place in history which this man attained.

It remains to speak of the future career of Ali Basha after his experiences at Lepanto. He now returned to Constantinople, where he found that the bitter complaints of the Janissaries concerning their lack of pay had preceded him; this must have been annoying, as by this time so insignificant a circ.u.mstance had probably escaped his memory. His old friend and patron Piali Basha was still in power; the Basha used his influence, and the corsair laid at the feet of the Sultan the great Standard of Saint John captured by him from the Knights--which was the only trophy which came to Constantinople from that disastrous battle; and in consequence we are told that "instead of reprimands he was loaded with caresses and applauses."

There was in Ali the same dauntless quality of never knowing when he was beaten which had distinguished Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa. His exploits at Lepanto had secured him the high favour of the Sultan, which he used in a manner most grateful to that sovereign by approaching him with a request that he might be allowed to fit out another fleet to revenge himself on the Christians. The Sultan acceded to his request, and such diligence did he use that in June 1572, only eight months after the crus.h.i.+ng defeat of the Turks, Ali took the sea with two hundred and fifty galleys besides smaller vessels. So powerful had he now become that Selim nominated him as his Admiralissimo, allowing him also to retain the Bashalic of Algiers. With his new fleet he sought out the allies once more, finding them at anchor in a port in the Morea. He lay outside the harbour defying them to come out, which they refused to do--"but they parted without b.l.o.o.d.y noses"--is Morgan's comment. Haedo attributes this inertia on the part of the allies to dissension among their leaders; but, however that may have been, Ali gained almost as much favour with the Sultan as if he had defeated them in a pitched battle. "But these are the judgments of G.o.d and things ordered by His divine providence and infinite wisdom," says Haedo. The connection is somewhat hard to establish.

In 1573 the Bashalic of Algiers pa.s.sed into the hands of Arab Ahmed, and in this same year Don John of Austria recaptured Tunis from the Turks. Ali, with a fleet of two hundred and fifty galleys and forty smaller vessels, recaptured it again in a siege lasting forty days, and once more returned to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of Spanish captives. He was yet to live some years to hara.s.s the Christians, against whom he ever displayed a most inveterate rancour. In 1576 he set out from Constantinople with sixty galleys and ravaged the Calabrian coast, where he had been born. In 1578, the Janissaries of Algiers having a.s.sa.s.sinated Arab Ahmed the Basha, he was sent to chastise them, which he did with a heavy hand.

Ali was never married, and left no descendants; in the later years of his life he built himself a sumptuous palace some five miles from Constantinople, and no man in all the realm save the Sultan himself was so great a man as the Calabrian renegado, the unknown waif from Southern Italy who possessed neither name nor kindred. He was tall and robust in stature, but all his life suffered from "scald-head"; for a definition of which ailment we may refer the curious to the dictionary. He possessed, for a chieftain and a fighting man, the disadvantage of a voice so hoa.r.s.e as to be inaudible at a few paces distant. In default of offspring he maintained at his charges five hundred corsairs, whom he called his children. He died in the year 1580, and with him what has been called the "Grand Period of the Moslem Corsairs" in this book may be said to have come to an end.

By the men whose deeds have been here chronicled the pirate States of Northern Africa were established; and, as we have seen, they maintained an unceasing warfare against all that was mightiest in Christendom, aided and abetted by the Sultans of Constantinople. In the sixteenth century the Sea-wolves had this at least to recommend them, that they feared neither King nor Kaiser, albeit these great ones of the earth were bent on their destruction. Villains as they were, they were none the less men to be feared, men in whom dwelt wonderful capabilities of leaders.h.i.+p. Such, however, was not the case with those by whom they were succeeded; and the great and civilised nations of the world tolerated for centuries in their midst a race of savage barbarians whose abominable insolence and fiendish cruelty were only equalled by their material weakness and military impotence. Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli became recognised States, and the Great Powers degraded themselves by actually accrediting diplomatic agents to the "Courts" of these people.

"The Algerines are robbers, and I am their chief," was the remark made by the Dey of Algiers to the English Consul in 1641, and the man spoke the plain unvarnished truth. Yet at this time the Algerines had no more than sixty-five s.h.i.+ps, and no organisation which could have held out for twenty-four hours against such attacks as had been successfully resisted on many occasions in the previous century.

On April 10th, 1682 (O.S.), "Articles of peace and commerce between the most serene and mighty Prince Charles II., by the Grace of G.o.d King of Great Britain, etc., and the most ill.u.s.trious (_sic_) Lord, the Bashaw, Dey, and Aga, Governor of the famous city of Algiers in Barbary," were concluded by "Arthur Herbert, Esquire, Admiral of His Majesty's Fleet." It need hardly be said that such a treaty as this was not worth the paper on which it was written; that the barbarians by whom it was signed were as ignorant as they were unprincipled, and that the only argument which they understood at that, or any other time, was that of the right of the strongest.

When we of the present day read of the deeds of the corsairs we are filled with horror, we fail to understand how such things could have been tolerated, we seek for some explanation. When we hear of a "League of Christian Princes," and find that all its members could accomplish was to turn their arms the one against the other, we are even still more puzzled.

What was it, then, that lay at the root of this problem? The answer would appear to be in the ethical standpoint of the sixteenth century. We are so accustomed in the present day to hear of the rights of man that we are apt to forget that, in the time of Barbarossa, of Dragut, of Charles V., and the Medicean Popes such a thing did not exist, and the only rights possessed by the common man were those vouchsafed to him by his sovereign lord. We have also to take another factor into consideration, which is that what we call "humanity" simply did not exist, the result being that the raids of the Sea-wolves were not judged by the great ones of the earth from the standpoint of the amount of suffering which they inflicted, but in what manner these proceedings affected the wealth and power of the lord of the territory which had been despoiled. So differently was society const.i.tuted in those days that the very victims acquiesced more or less meekly in their fate, each one unconsciously voicing that most pathetic saying of the Russian peasant that "G.o.d is high and the Czar is far away."

The fact of the intolerable lot of the common man in these times helps us to understand one thing which otherwise would be an insoluble problem: which was, why did Christian soldiers so often become renegadoes and fight for the corsairs under the banner of those who were the fiercest and most irreconcilable foes of themselves and their kindred? The life of the common soldier or sailor did not offer many advantages; it was generally a short and anything but a merry one, and the thing by which it was most profoundly affected was capture by the corsairs.

When this happened he became either a "gallerian," rowing out his heart on the benches of the Moslem galleys, or he festered in some noisome dungeon in Algiers, Oran, or Tlemcen. For him, however, there was always one avenue of escape open: he had but to acknowledge that Mahomet was the Prophet of G.o.d and the prison doors would fly open, or the shackles be knocked off the chain which bound him to the h.e.l.l of the rower's bench. Many of the Christian captives had really nothing to bind them to the faith of their fathers--neither home nor lands, wealth nor kindred, and they were doubtless dazzled by the amazing success which accompanied the arms of the leaders of the pirates. Is it wonderful, then, that such men in such an age should grasp at the chance of freedom and throw in their lot with their captors?

It was treachery, it was apostasy, and no amount of sophistry can prove it to have been otherwise; but the man who would sit in judgment in the present day must try to figure to himself what the life of a galley-slave meant--a life so horrible and so terrible that it is impossible, in the interest of decency, to set down a t.i.the of what it really was.

We who in the present day sit in judgment upon the virtues and vices of a bygone age can, in the ordered security of our modern civilisation, see many things which were hidden from our forefathers, even as in another three hundred years our descendants will be able to point the finger of scorn at the mistakes which we are now committing. We have seen how it was that the pirate States arose; we have seen also how, in future generations, they were allowed to abide. We cannot, in common honesty, echo the words already quoted of the historian that "these are the judgments of G.o.d, and things ordered by His divine providence and infinite wisdom," neither can we acquit the heirs of the ages for that slackness which prevented them from doing their duty; we have, however, to ask ourselves this question, that, had it fallen to our own lot to deal with the problem of the extermination of the pirates, should we have done better?

One word in conclusion. That which they did has been set down here; the record, however, is not complete, as many of their acts of cruelty, l.u.s.t, and oppression are not fitted for publication in the present day. It has been said, with truth, that no man is much better or much worse than in the age in which he lives; and to hold the scales evenly--if one were tempted to shock contemporary opinion by too literal a transcript of all that was done by the corsairs--it would also be necessary to cite the reprisals of their Christian antagonists. It has seemed better to leave such things unchronicled: to present, with as much fidelity as possible, the public lives and acts of these troublers of the peace of the sixteenth century.

Looking back, as we do, over three hundred and fifty years, and judging as fairly as is possible, it would seem that there is little which can be said in their favour.

But we may at least concede that, no matter how infamous were the Barbarossas, Dragut, and Ali, they proved that in them dwelt one rare and supreme quality, which, in all the ages, has covered a mult.i.tude of sins.

At a time when every one was a warrior and the whole world was an armed camp, men sought great captains in whose following to serve. Among the Moslems of Northern Africa, in ordered succession, there rose to the surface "veritable men of the sea," in the wake of whose galleys ravened the Sea-wolves. When we consider how undisciplined and how stupidly violent these pirates were by nature, and how they were welded into a h.o.m.ogeneous whole by those of whom we speak, we are forced to the conclusion that seldom, in all the ages, have abler captains arisen to take fortune at the flood, to dominate the minds and the bodies of a vast host, to prove that they were, in deed and in truth, supreme as leaders of men.

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED

Sailing s.h.i.+ps and their Story. E. Keble Chatterton.

Barbary Corsairs: Story of the Nations. Stanley Lane Poole.

Compleat History of the Present Seat of War in Africa between Spaniards and Algerines. 1632. Joseph Morgan.

History of Philip II. William Hickling Prescott.

History of Charles V. Robertson.

Histoire de Barberousse. Richer.

Vie des plus celebres marins. Richer.

Histoire de Barberousse. Sander Rang et Ferdinand Denis.

Doria et Barberousse. Les derniers jours de la Marine aux Rames. Admiral Jurien de la Graviere.

Histoire de Barbarie et ses corsaires. Pierre d'An. Paris, 1637.

Histoire d'Alger. Laugier de Ta.s.sy.

Messire Pierre de Bourdeille Seigneur de Brantome. Vie des hommes ill.u.s.tres et grands capitaines etrangers de son temps. 1594.

Histoires de les Chevaliers de Malte. Mons l'Abbe de Vertot. Paris, 17S6.

Histoire de Venise. P. Daru.

Topografia e Historia general de Argel El Senor Don Diego de Haedo.

Reverendissimo Arcobispo de Palermo. Presidente y Capitan-General del Reyno de Sicilia por el Rey Felipe Segundo. Nuestro senor.

Valladolid, 1612.

Descripcion general de Africa. Don Luys de Marmol Caravajal. Granada, 1573.

Historia de Carlos Quinto. El Maestro Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Obispo de Pampluna. 1612.

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Cervantes.

Arte de Navegar. Martin Cortes.

Dialogos del arte militar. Bernardino de Escalante.

Seville, 1583.

Historia del combate naval de Lepanto. Cayetano Rosell.

Epitaphia joco-seria. Francisco Swertius. 1623.

La Guerra dei pirati e la marina Pontifica dal 1500 al 1560.

Padre Alberto Guglielmotti.

Storia della sacra religione et ill.u.s.trissima milizia de San Giovanii Gerosolimitano. Jacopo Bosio.

Lo a.s.sedio di Malta, 18 Maggio-8, Settembre, 1565. Conte Carlo, Sanminiatelli, Zabarella, Colonello.

LIST OF THE KINGS OF ENGLAND, FRANCE, SPAIN, SULTANS OF TURKEY, POPES OF ROME, AND GRAND MASTERS OF MALTA, BETWEEN THE DATES 1492-1580, THE PERIOD COVERED IN THIS BOOK.