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370 María José Rodríguez Salgado, Rubén González Cuerva, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra

the Adriatic did not survive the internal competition between the
Christian powers over the spoils.
Even without the Venetian fleet, the largest Christian fleet in the
region, but neutralised by its alliance with the Ottoman sultan, Charles
V was able to gather an extraordinary mixture of naval forces in 1535
from his own lands and those of his allies. The imperial fleet included
ships and materials from the Spanish realms, the Low Countries,
Naples, Sicily, Genoa, Florence, the Papal states, the Knights of St.
John, and Portugal. It was an impressive achievement. A fleet manned
and transporting thousands of men who had never before fought in the
Mediterranean, particularly the infantry levied in southern German and
Swiss lands.
Factual accounts of the 1535 campaign, with more or less detailed
descriptions of the main stages of the conflict are easy to come by. The
five articles that make up this dossier address some of the many gaps
in our knowledge of this campaign and challenge some of the enduring
misconceptions that continue to circulate about the conflict. To do so,
they broaden the context and consider the situation before the
campaign, as well as looking beyond the imperial alliance to how other
powers responded. They approach the topic from a cosmopolitan
viewpoint and share the fundamental aim of reconstructing the complex
political and religious situation. The contributors set themselves
ambitious goals to cover important topics and fill gaps and have had to
overcome serious problems due to limited source materials.
The dossier opens with the Ottoman-corsair conquest of Tunis in
1534, a subject which has not been adequately studied to date. In the
absence of Ottoman political correspondence, Evrim Türkçelik analysed
the chronicles of the period as well as those of the following century to
address the fundamental question whether Barbarossa launched the
conquest of Tunis in 1534 under explicit orders from Süleyman, that is
in order to execute an Ottoman strategy of expansion in the Maghreb;
or if he commandeered the Ottoman forces under his command in order
to carry out what was in essence a Muslim corsair strategy to control
the Mediterranean by taking the most strategic ports in the region, and
specifically Tunis which facilitated attacks on the Italian states. One of
the chief merits of Türkçelik’s article is to offer a systematic analysis of
the Ottoman sources and thereby to present an alternative perspective
of the conflict from the point of view of a political culture that is very
different from the dominant, Western vision.
Calculating the economic impact of financing an amphibious
expedition of the magnitude and complexity as that launched by
Charles V in 1535 is crucial. Levying and transporting some 30,000
men from all over Europe and fitting out a fleet that probably reached

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)