Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
For the next few years, the Barbarossas were to make their home, and their main base for naval operations, on the sandy, sunburned island of Djerba.
The large lagoon between the island and the mainland, Bahiret el Bu Grara, some ten miles from east to west by fifteen from north to south, was ideal for harboring the galleys and galleots. The local Berber people were friendly, and the island, as well as the mainland behind it, was rich in fruits and corn, and grapes.
Not all Turks, even at this time, were strict Moslems when it came to alcohol, and then had been cultivated along this section of coast since the days of the RomanEmpire.Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
The island was well protected. A fortress guarded the entrance to the lagoon from the west, and it was not long before the brothers began to improve their defenses.
They did this to ensure that they would run no risk of being trapped in the lagoon by a superior naval force bursting through the western entrance, the aim channel. Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
A low-lying island, except in the center where a few hillocks runup to a height of about one hundred feet, Djerba was protected on the north of-lying banks of mud where even a mild breeze can raise heavy breaking seas, and on the northwest by further banks running out from the mainland coast. Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
It was a tricky place for any navigator unfamiliar with the area—highly suitable, therefore, for a sea rover’s hideout. Other shoals and shifting sandbanks along the coast on both sides of the island added to the hazards. Aruj and his men would soon grow familiar with all this coast. Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
They could enter or leave as, and when, they wished, yet still retain the comfortable knowledge that few other seamen in the Mediterranean would willingly come down into this treacherous southern corner of the Gulf of Gabes.
Until 1510 the island had been held secure for Spain by a garrison for commanding the entrance, but in that year “Don Garcia de Toledo, son of the duke of Alva … received that notable overthrow, and lost his life in the island.”Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitle
Morgan maintains that the reason the Barbarossas went to Djerba was that the sultan of Tunis was afraid the Spaniards would come back to take their revenge for their loss and that he offered them the island, thinking that they would be well able to look after it without any cost to himself.
There may be something in his argument. Djerba was a technical possession of Tunis, but like so many of the harbors and small coastal towns at that time, it was constantly changing hands between the local rulers and the Spaniards.
The Spanish interest along the North African coast was to maintain garrisons wherever possible, and to ensure Spain’s right to trade and the security of her merchant shipping upon these waters which, even before the arrival of the Turks, had been subjected the activities of local corsairs operating in small galleots. Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
Aruj Barbarossa was soon to remind His Most Catholic Majesty that the loss of Djerba was not just a small local disaster. From the moment of his arrival in1510 and throughout the following year, “he continued his excursions, miserablyravaging all the Italian coasts; nor any trading vessel being able to stir out without immense peril, insomuch that all Europe began to ring of his depredations.” Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
The Spanish Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were now exposed to the violence of the Turkish raiders, while their sea communications between Spain and Italy were daily at hazard. The appearance of Barbarossa’s squadronrowing purposefully up the coast of Sicily, or gliding through the AegadianIslands northward bound, to fall upon some unsuspecting coastal town or port, caused the working population to flee to the mountain villages inland.
Not only was the Spanish trade route being disrupted, but even agriculture and fishing were being brought to a standstill in the hot summer “months of the raiders.”Meanwhile, after every successful attack upon a merchant ship or raid upon some undefended village, the slave markets of Tunis grew rich with the captured. Barbaroslar Episode 26 English Subtitles
If Aruj had been content with remaining no more than the most successful sea captain and corsair of his day there seems small doubt that he could have stayed Djerba for years—to die either in battle at sea or of old age in his island retreat. But he was a restless man and the long sandy beaches, the softly leaning palm trees,
and the great salt lagoon where his ships idled at anchor were not sufficient to contain his ambition. He wished to be a king, and ruler of a real city: a city where there would be better opportunities for the exercise of power, and better facilities for shipbuilding. Djerba had disadvantages quite apart from the lack of any real township, the most important of these being the absence of any trees suitable for shipbuilding.
We know that a number of Turkish galleots were built out of the wood from captured prizes, but this was an unsatisfactory method, and one that could hardly be relied upon, particularly as the fleet needed to expand.By 1512,
Aruj and Khizr commanded between them twelve large galleots, eight of which belonged to the two brothers, and the other four to a Turkish sea captain who had heard of the choice pickings in the central Mediterranean and had sailed down from the Aegean to put themselves under the Barbarossas’command. Just as Drake, after his first successes in the Caribbean, was never lack for volunteers to sail under his flag, so these great Turkish captains were never at a loss for ambitious, tough seamen, eager for plunder at th
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