Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Barbaroslar The island of Lesbos hangs like a pendant on the ear of western Turkey. Richard fertile, its capital, Mitylene, fronting the continent of Asia across a ten-mile-wide channel, it had been famous in antiquity as the home of the poetess Sappho. Lesbos had also long been renowned for the excellence of its wine and its olives. Around the great Gulf of Kalloni in the west stretch the fertile plains where the vines abound and where the olives ripple like a silver sea when the north wind spins their leaves. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Behind the town of Mitylene itself, another large inlet makes an excellent port, safe from the gale-force Meltemi winds of midsummer. Throughout the Middle Ages Lesbos had remained a prosperous island, secure under the protection of the Byzantine Empire. But after the sack of Constantinople by the Venetians and soldiers of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, it had suffered a similar fate to all the other Aegean Islands. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
It had become a trading center dominated, as well as disputed over, by Venetian and Genoese. It was inevitable, with the decline of Christian power —Europe itself being divided into a number of warring states— that an island like Lesbos should attract the attention of the Turkish master of the Asian coast.After his capture of Constantinople in 1453, the triumphant Sultan Mehmet began to occupy the islands of the Aegean. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
As the master of Constantinople, as well as of the mainland of Greece, he could hardly tolerate these Italian enclaves in what had now become a Turkish sea. Furthermore, the possession of Constantinople had at last given the Sultan a great seaport. For the first time intheir history the Turks, predominantly land people were faced with the necessity of creating a merchant navy, and a fighting navy to protect it. It was this, above all, which provided the main driving force behind their extraordinary naval expansion during the following century. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
As for the islands, it was not only that the Sultan desired their revenues (and to be quit of Christians trading in his waters), but they had also become wasp nests of pirates. Mitylene itself was one of the most notorious havens for Catalan, Italian, and Sicilian pirates, who raided the other islands and swarmed around the mouth of the Dardanelles, preying on Turkish shipping. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
They even had the insolence to raid the mainland of the Sultan’s dominions and carry Turkish citizens for sale as slaves in the marts of Venice and Genoa. A Sultan who was described as “Master of the East and West, the Possessor of Men’s necks, and the Peacock of the World” was not likely to tolerate such activities for long. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
With the aid of his recently formed navy, he began systematically occupying the islands. Little did the European pirates who had operated from them realize that they had “sown the wind and would reap the whirlwind.”Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
As the Turks gradually spread into the Mediterranean world they were to produce a race of men that would make the activities of the Italian pirates in the Aegeanlook like children’s games. Among the islands of the Aegean the Turks would learn—as had the ancient Greeks many centuries before them—the arts of navigation and seamanship. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Barbaroslar Episode 23
Thence they would expand throughout the whole Mediterranean until there would not be a European seaport safe from them. They would go so far as to threaten great inland cities so that even the Pope in Rome could not be sure that he would not wake one morning to find that his capital had been invaded overnight by marauding Turks. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
It was in Lesbos that Barbarossa and his brothers were born. The island had fallen to the Turks in 1462 and, in accordance with his policy of setting deserving soldiers in newly conquered territory upon their retirement, the Sultanhanded over lands and property to the men who had helped capture the island. Among those left behind to inherit the rich earth and the commerce that had formerly belonged to Genoese and Venetians was the father of the Barbarossa.Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
He has been variously described as a “retired janissary” and a “Sipahi soldier.”Certainly, although some Spanish writers claim that he was a native Christian, there is little doubt that he was a Moslem. His name was Ya’Kub (Jacob), but the most reliable sources state that he himself was the son of a Christian. This would make perfect sense if one may assume that he had been a janissary; for janissaries were the sons of Christians, forcibly abducted from their parents, converted to the Moslem faith in early childhood, and then trained to be the most formidable warriors of the Grand Turk. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Although the janissaries, so long as they served in the army, were forbidden to marry, it was natural that they should do so upon retirement. Yakub, accordingly, married a woman of Lesbos. She was, it would seem, the widow of a Greek priest. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
(Unlike the Church of Rome, the orthodox Eastern Church does not forbid marriage to its clergy.)About the ancestry of the Barbarossas, one thing is certain— there is no evidence that they had a drop of Turkish blood in their veins. Some Christian commentators have made great play with the fact that the two brothers who fathered Turkish prowess at sea were not Turks, but this is irrelevant. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
No one has ever denied to the Turks their prowess in warfare or their fanatical courage. The sons of Ya’Kub may have been Roumeliot, Albanian, or Greek in their physical lineage, but they were certainly “Sons of the Prophet” in their faith. It is a curious thought that, when the classical Greeks of antiquity descend upon the land that they were to make their own, they dispossessed a MotherGoddess (hitherto worshipped throughout the eastern Mediterranean) and installed, among a pantechnicon of gods and goddesses, a male god, the King of the Sky. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
The female mother goddess was, as it were, driven underground, until, with the increasing complexities of Christianity, she reasserted herself as the virgin Mary. The Moslem Turks now, in their turn, removed the female from the religious calendar and brought back a conception of God not so far removed from the ancient Zeus. When nations are defeated, women submit to the new conquering males, and it is an ironical fact that the mother of the Barbarossaswas the widow of an Orthodox Greek priest.“Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
A retired janissary, described as un Musulman, made his home [inLesbos], married the widow of a Greek priest, and evidently prospered as a potter since he is said to have owned a vessel for the transportation of his wares and traded sometimes as far as Constantinople. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Most of the family must still have been resident there in 1501, when Venetian and French forces tried to seize the island as a suitable base for operations against the Dardanelles, on the strength of a Genoese report that it was molting rich, fertile el printable . .Both Turkish and Spanish records have it that Ya’Kub was a potter: Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
an important trade then as now; and it is more than likely that he also had some acquaintance with the sea. Indeed, on an island like Lesbos, how could a man live without being familiar with the sea? The briny wind swirled the sails of the windmills that ground the corn. It drove the coasters southwards to Chios, Samos, Andros, and all the clustering islands of the archipelago. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
Islanders are usually seamen, and the sons of Ya’Kub were to prove that the salt was in their blood and the high north wind in their hearts. There were four sons and two daughters of the marriage between the ex-janissary and the widow of the Greek priest. Their mother’s name was Catalina. We do not know the names of her daughters, but then, in the eastern Mediterranean, daughters are nothing to boast about. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
A man may proudly tell you how many sons he has, but he will omit to mention his daughters. The sons, in the order of their seniority, were Aruj, Elias, Isaac, and Khizr(later to become the most famous man in Turkey, and indeed in the Mediterranean, under his acquired name of Kheir-ed-Din). It is possible that the two girls were brought up as Christians, under the Moslem custom which permitted the females to be raised in the religion of their mother. Barbaroslar Episode 23 English Subtitles
The four boys were, without any doubt, brought up as Moslems —and there were few Moslemsmore dedicated to their faith than janissaries like their father. The fact that Arujhad a red beard and Khizr a brown, or auburn, the beard is an indication that they were not of Turkish blood.
