Page 109 - sfogliabile 49

The best-kept secret in the Mediterranean: Barbarossa’s 1534 Tunis campaign 375

Süleyman) decided to lead in person with İbrahim Pasha, his grand
vizier and favourite . The prestige arising from the 1535 conquest of
6
Baghdad, former centre of the Abbasid caliphate, not only oversha-
dowed Barbarossa’s capture of Tunis but also helped diminish the
negative consequences of his immediate defeat by the emperor,
Süleyman’s archenemy in the Mediterranean. In fact, Süleyman had felt
the need to start a naval rearmament programme and shift his priorities
towards naval warfare since Andrea Doria’s conquest of Koron in 1532.
Yet, this shift towards including the Mediterranean and North Africa in
Ottoman strategic thinking was still in its infancy in 1534 when
Barbarossa was appointed admiral of the Ottoman fleet. The illustrated
account that the chronicler Matrakçı Nasuh wrote of the Baghdad
campaign, which, in a sense, may be considered as the equivalent of
Vermeyen’s Tunis tapestries, is indicative of the Sultanate’s priorities .
7
Contemporary Ottoman chronicles, therefore, neither glorified
excessively Barbarossa’s conquest of Tunis nor especially lamented his
inability to defend it. Moreover, they did not link the contest over Tunis
specifically with the person of Sultan Süleyman. In a period when
Charles V was heralded as Carolus Africanus in Europe, Sultan
Süleyman himself was isolated from the defeat of Barbarossa in North
Africa and was lauded as the conqueror of Baghdad.
This article will discuss the 1534-1535 Ottoman-Habsburg struggle
over Tunis in the light of the chronicles written by contemporary Ottoman
historians and those of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
My aim is to understand how Ottoman chronicles handled the question
of the sultan’s involvement in the conquest of Tunis, and to trace how the
opinions and accounts offered by the chronicles changed radically in the
course of time. There were narratives that were simultaneously in
circulation which flatly contradicted each other in their explanation of
what lay behind the conquest of Tunis. I will first address the arguments
and sources of modern historiographical approaches to the conquest of
Tunis. In the subsequent section, I will address Ottoman chronicles and
historical narratives to understand the framework of their contradictory
accounts, and to find an answer to the question whether the conquest of
Tunis was the result of a predetermined strategy with the prior knowledge
of the sultan, or whether Barbarossa was pursuing a semi-autonomous
policy reminiscent of his pre-Ottoman career.

6 R. Murphey, Süleyman’s Eastern Policy, in H. Inalcik, C. Kafadar (eds.), Süleyman the
Second and His Time, Isis Press, İstanbul, 1993, pp. 229-248.
7 R. Murphey, Süleyman I and the Conquest of Hungary: Ottoman Manifest Destiny or a
Delayed Reaction to Charles V’s Universalist Vision, «Journal of Early Modern History», 5
(2001), p. 221.

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