Part 11 (2/2)
His manoeuvres certainly mystified the Turks, who viewed his tactics with mistrust, thinking them the outset of some deeply laid scheme; it never entered into their calculations for one moment that the great Andrea Doria, the terror of the Mediterranean sea, and the victor in scores of desperate engagements, was anxious to avoid a fight.
Grimani and Capello, docile to the orders of their admiral, followed him full of uneasiness and distrust; they were fighting men of the most fiery description; to them the issue seemed of the simplest: there was the enemy in inferior force to themselves, they had the weather gauge, why delay the attack?
”For much less than this,” says Admiral Jurien de la Graviere, ”the English shot Admiral Byng in 1756.” The conduct of Doria on this occasion has certainly never been explained; the two other leaders went on board and remonstrated with their commander-in-chief; they were neither of them men who could be treated as negligible quant.i.ties on the field of battle; both belonged to that brilliant Venetian n.o.bility so renowned in commerce and in war. Marco Grimani was in command of the Papal galleys, in itself a mark of the highest esteem and confidence from a potentate second to none in his influence in the civilised world. To Vincenzo Capello, Henry the Seventh of England confided his royal person and the command of his fleet when he crossed the Channel to encounter Richard the Second at Bosworth field. Five times had he filled the office of Providiteur in Venice, twice had he been commander-in-chief of her fleet, he was in perpetuity Procureur of St.
Mark, to him Venice owed her naval discipline. He wore on this day the mantle of crimson silk with which the Republic invested her generals.
Bitter was the rage in his heart, and bitterly must he have spoken to Doria, who, in spite of all remonstrances, continued his futile manoeuvrings.
There was glory won on this day, but it was gained neither by Andrea Doria nor Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa. The _Galleon of Venice_ with Alessandro Condalmiero and his gallant crew had shown to all a splendid example of disciplined valour unexcelled in sixteenth-century annals.
Barbarossa had captured a Venetian galley, a Papal galley, and five Spanish nefs, but he had recoiled from the a.s.sault on Condalmiero when the prize was actually within his grasp. For the rest it was a day of manoeuvring and tactics; tactics when sixty thousand men had been embarked on board two hundred s.h.i.+ps for a specific and definite object on the side of the Christians and under the command of their most celebrated admiral; and yet the balance of advantage was actually gained by the inferior force. No subsequent glories can ever wipe this stain from the scutcheon of Doria, or can excuse the fact that at the most supreme moment of his career he failed to fight the battle that he was in honour, in conscience, and in duty bound to deliver. Next day the wind came fair for Corfu, and Doria, his s.h.i.+ps untouched, unscathed, unharmed, put his helm up and sailed away followed by his fleet.
Sandoval records the fact that Barbarossa, roaring with laughter the while, was accustomed to say that Doria had even put out his lanterns in order that no one might see whither he had fled. This was an allusion to the fact--or supposition--that Doria extinguished on that night the great p.o.o.p lantern carried by him as admiral.
When Soliman the Magnificent heard of the result of this battle he caused the town of Yamboli, where he was at the time, to be illuminated, and in the excess of his joy he added one hundred thousand aspres to the revenues of the conqueror; there were processions to the Grand Mosque, and all Islam rejoiced and sang the praises of the invincible admiral who had humbled to the dust the pride of the Christian and caused the dreaded Doria to fly from before the fleet of the Sultan.
This, the most historical, if not the greatest feat in the life of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, was for him a triumph indeed; with a vastly inferior force he had driven from the field of battle his ”rival in glory,”
as he himself had denominated Andrea Doria, and he had accomplished this feat notwithstanding the almost mutinous condition of his own forces. In spite of this it is with Condalmiero and with him alone that the glory of this day must rest; alone, absolutely unsupported as we have seen, he fought one of those fights which bring the heart into the mouth when we read of them; the stern pride of the Venetian n.o.ble, who despised as canaille the pirate hosts by whom he was a.s.sailed, had its counterpart in the st.u.r.dy valour of Chief Bombardier Francisco d'Arba and the other nameless heroes of which that good company was composed; to them we render that homage which so justly is their due.
The whole campaign of Prevesa, as we have said, is a curious study in hesitation, in dilatoriness, in absolute lack of initiative and virility on the part of the two chief actors in the drama: that Doria should fly from the field of battle in an untouched s.h.i.+p is only one degree less incredible than that Barbarossa should have relinquished his attack on the _Galleon of Venice_. It would almost seem as if on this occasion each of the great rivals was hypnotised by the presence of the other; all their lives they had been seeking honour and riches on the sea, they knew, of course, that all men in both the world of Islam and that of Christendom looked upon them in the light of the special champions of the opposing sects, that the eyes of the entire world were fastened on this meeting of theirs in the cla.s.sic waters of the Ambracian Gulf. In consequence neither man was at his best; indeed, we might go further than this, and say that on this occasion both lamentably failed. There is no fault to be found with the strategic preliminaries to the final conflict, each admiral acting with prudence and wisdom in the situation in which he found himself placed. That the perfectly correct idea of not giving battle to a superior force when he held so strong an interior position was given up by Barbarossa, was, as we have seen, not his fault; and when he issued from his anchorage, in deference to a sentiment among those under his command which he could no longer resist, his dispositions seem to have been made with his usual skill. Where he failed, however, was where, from all his previous history, we should least have expected failure, in his abandonment of the attack on the _Galleon of Venice_; this, of course, was inexcusable, and can only be set down to failure of nerve at the supreme moment. The s.h.i.+p had been battered by artillery all day long, a huge percentage of her company were dead and wounded, and the remainder worn out with fatigue. On the Moslem side we have seen that there were squadrons of galleys able to relieve one another with no interference from Doria, who was persisting in his futile manoeuvring miles away. Had the galleon been boarded, as she might and should have been, at nightfall, nothing could have saved Condalmiero and his crew: so strenuous, however, had been their resistance, that the Turkish seamen feared the issue; in consequence the battle between them and the Venetians was a drawn one, with all the honours on the Christian side.
It is here that we shall take leave of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, as although he was yet to live another eight years before he died in his bed at Constantinople in July, 1548, there are no further happenings of any great importance in his career.
”Valorous, yet prudent, furious in attack, far-seeing in preparation, he ranks as the first sea-captain of his time;”[1] as the story of his life has unfolded itself in these pages we have seen what manner of man it was who terrified Europe, who made for himself a reputation which stands out clear and distinct among all the great men of which this century was so prolific. One of the surest methods of estimating a strenuous man of action is to seek for the names of those by whom he was surrounded: the men selected by him to a.s.sist in the carrying out of the work of his life; thus in reading of Napoleon Bonaparte we interest ourselves in his marshals, in reading of Nelson we note the captains by whom he was supported. In the case of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, a great man of action if one ever lived, we find no trace of devoted adherents on that high plane of command we have indicated in the cases cited above. That he had devoted followers enough is absolutely certain, but of high officers we very seldom find a trace, and these he treated with contumely and offence on many occasions; witness the treatment meted out to Ha.s.san and to Venalcadi. There is practically no trace of his domestic life to be found, we cannot discover that he possessed any intimate friend. There is none other in all history to whom he can be satisfactorily compared; there are few who in their generation have wielded such enormous powers, who have climbed so high from the sheer una.s.sisted force of their own intellect and their own character.
[Footnote 1: Stanley Lane Poole.]
Physical strength such as is vouchsafed to one man in a million, a const.i.tution nothing could impair, endurance incomparable, were his bodily attributes: an intellect cold, clear, and penetrating was his, joined to an imperturbability of temperament which enabled him to accept with a cheerful philosophy blows by which weaker men were absolutely prostrated; his outlook on life was not dimmed by any affections, and pity was a sensation which to him was entirely alien. In this record of his deeds the reader has been spared all mention of the atrocious tortures he was in the habit of inflicting on his victims for any or no provocation, and many of them are as incomprehensible as they are sickening. That in which he was supreme was his craft as a seaman in an age when real seamen were rare; on land he was frequently defeated, at sea there seems to be no record of such an occurrence. To sum up, he appears to us in the light of history as a body, a brain, and an intellect, without any trace of a heart. His path through life was one unending trail of blood and fire, moistened by the tears of his countless victims, followed by the curses of those whom he despoiled.
Yet, in spite of this, it is impossible not to admire the man who, by his own superhuman energy, ever swept all obstacles from his path, and caused the whole of the civilised world to quail at the name of Barbarossa.
He died peacefully in his bed at Constantinople in July, 1546, to the grief of the world of Islam and the inexpressible joy of Christendom. ”The king of the sea is dead,” expressed in three Arabic words, gives the numerical value 953, the year of the Hegira in which he died.
For many years after his death no Turkish s.h.i.+p ever left the Golden Horn without her crew repeating a prayer and firing a salute over the tomb of Bes.h.i.+ktsah, where lie the bones of the first and greatest of Turkish admirals, the corsair who was at one and the same time admiral, pirate, and king.
CHAPTER XIV
THE NAVY OF OARS. THE GALLEY, THE GALEa.s.sE, AND THE NEF
In the sixteenth century the vessel of war in the Mediterranean was essentially that oar-propelled craft known to us as the galley. As time went on she was gradually superseded by the sailing man-of-war which was able to carry that heavy ordnance which the light scantling of the galley did not permit of her mounting; but for the use of the corsairs who lived by means of raids and surprise attacks, whose business it was to lie perdu on the trade routes, the mobility of the galley was of prime importance, and they could not afford to trust to the wind alone as a motive power. The galley was a.n.a.logous to the steam vessel in that it was independent of the wind to a large extent: human bone and muscle supplied the part of engines, and those who fought upon the sea caused themselves to be moved over the face of the waters by the exertions of their enemies. It is true that upon one occasion, as we have seen, Kheyred-Din Barbarossa did possess a fleet of galleys the rowers of which were all Moslems, which crew upon battle being joined dropped their oars, seized their weapons and a.s.sisted in the conquest of the foe. But this was an isolated instance, as it was almost impossible at any time and in any circ.u.mstances to procure free men ready to undertake a life of such intolerable suffering as that of a rower on board a galley; in consequence these men were almost invariably slaves, or else in later times condemned felons whose judges had sent them to work out their sentences upon the rowers' bench. The great characteristic of the galley was her mobility, and in a comparative degree her speed, as for a short burst, when her crew of rowers were fresh, their trained muscles were capable of tremendous exertion; for any length of time, however, it is obvious that her speed must have declined as the rowers became exhausted.
She was long, narrow, of extremely low freeboard, and slight depth of hold; a galley of 125 feet between perpendiculars would perhaps be 180 feet over all taking in the p.o.o.p and the prow. A galley of this length would only have a beam of 19 feet and a depth of hold of 7 feet 6 inches. The sailing s.h.i.+p of contemporary times would for the same length have had a beam of about 40 feet and an extremely high freeboard; she was in consequence necessarily slow and incapable of sailing on a wind.
So distinct at this time was the line drawn between the sailing vessel and the galley that the actual terminology used was entirely different; that is to say, the names of such things as masts, sails, rudder, tiller, stern, stempost, cut.w.a.ter, etc., were not the same words; the sailor who used sails could not understand his brother mariner who used oars, and _vice versa_.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GALLEY UNDER OARS.]
<script>