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536 Mahmut Halef Cevrioğlu

shipyard (tersane emini), the arsenal chamberlain (tersane kethüdası)
and certain captains kissed the sultan’s hand for the final time at the
Yalı Köşkü (on the shore of the Golden Horn) on 12 June .
38

5. Preparing the Navy: Antonio de Ávalos

At this point, it will be useful to pay attention to Morisco de Ávalos,
one of the chief men in charge of preparing the armaments for the Ot-
toman fleet in the imperial shipyard. The abovementioned news from
Istanbul (12 March) specified that Antonio de Ávalos had been intro-
duced to the Ottoman grand admiral by the diplomatic representative
of Spain’s archenemy in Istanbul: Cornelius Haga, the long-time am-
bassador of the Dutch Republic at the Porte. It was thanks to Haga
39
that de Ávalos had become the petardier and cannoneer of the Ottoman
navy . Both as a Morisco living in Istanbul and as a weaponry specialist
40
in service of the Ottomans, de Ávalos requires further analysis.
Regarding the utilisation of explosives aboard, it must be pointed
out that petards and fireworks were indeed in use by the seventeenth
century maritime warfare. Petards, normally, made part of siege wea-
ponry, employed to blast fortification walls or gates. But, in a similar
vein, the petards were also applied on the stern of enemy ships to
breach holes. And as fireworks, one must understand the “stink pots”,
incendiaries cast on enemy vessels. An example from the contempo-
rary Dutch navy calls attention to specialists preparing such explo-
sives, like the petardier in 1623, wielding the petard to «blow the tran-
som clean off a ship» . It can be assumed, therefore, that Antonio de
41
Ávalos was one such specialist working for the Ottoman navy.
In this respect, de Ávalos is a worthy example to underline the
trans-imperial character of the early modern Mediterranean: challeng-
ing as it might be to track down the identity of Antonio de Ávalos in
Ottoman archival documents, it is, nonetheless, possible to come
́
across his family name in the related literature. Krstic, for instance,
has shown that Dutch ambassador Cornelius Haga’s liaison with the

38 Boa, KK.d 667M, p. 86.
39 The reference work for Cornelius Haga and his activities is A.H. De Groot,
The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic. A History of the Earliest Diplomatic
Relations, 1610-1630, Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, Leiden, 1978,
pp. 166-167, and particularly on p. 315.
40 Ags, Estado, Leg. 3591-136. Venice, 23 April 1633, f. 417r: «… un Morisco
de Sevilla que se llamava Antonio de Abalos, aquien el Ministro de Olanda que alli
asiste, ha yntroducido con el Baxa del Mar…»
41 B. De Groot, Dutch Navies of the 80 Years’ War, 1568-1648, Osprey, Oxford,
2018, p. 34. I must express my gratitude to Fatih Torun (Indiana University) for
prompting me to be more attentive towards the use of petards at sea.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XX - Dicembre 2023
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)