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378 Evrim Türkçelik

The argument that Barbarossa initiated and executed the attack to
Tunis has been recently adopted by Nicolas Vatin in a historiographical
essay on the 1534 campaign. After discussing critically the modern
historical literature and Ottoman and European primary sources on the
1534 campaign, Vatin argues that Tunis was not the objective of
Barbarossa’s first official campaign with Sultan Süleyman’s fleet. For
Vatin, Soucek’s principal source, Peçevî, cannot be considered valid
because this account was written more than a century after the events,
and analysed the Tunis campaign with the advantage of hindsight, and
following a similar approach to that of a modern historian. Vatin also
disagrees with İdris Bostan’s interpretation of the term diyâr-ı Mağrib and
argues that if they had wanted to allude specifically to the region of Tunis,
they would have used the term İfrîkıyye. Vatin bases his own arguments
on the statements found in two contemporary Ottoman sources, Lutfi
Pasha’s chronicle, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, and Seyyid Murad’s Gazavât-ı
Hayreddin Paşa, the semi-autobiographical account of Barbarossa’s life
and deeds. According to Vatin, there is no reason not to rely on the
personal testimony of Barbarossa and, in spite of its propagandistic
nature, he considers the Gazavât as «the most reliable narrative source
about Hayreddin». Finally, he concludes that there is no contemporary
Ottoman source that confirms that the sultan had determined that the
objective of the fleet should be the conquest of Tunis .
16
This interpretative bifurcation among scholars reflects the divergent
accounts of their sources, which do not really offer the desired
confirmation of either of these two lines of argument. There is no
contemporary Ottoman source explicitly indicating the existence of a
sultanic order to invade Tunis; nor are the arguments for an
unpremeditated or opportunistic campaign convincing enough. In fact,
modern historians, depending on their hypothesis, have preferred to
prioritize the sources that seem to confirm their point of view while
ignoring the others in order to draw their final conclusions. However,
apart from the historical sources used by these historians, there are
several little known or under-used Ottoman sources that offer different
narratives of the 1534 expedition. The fact that there were such diverse
representations of the same event points to the problematic perception of
the conquest of Tunis. Thus, the question is not that of simply identifying
who was behind the conquest; the topic also requires an analysis of the
discursive and narrative strategies employed by several Ottoman
historiographers, and it is precisely to this, which I now turn.

16 N. Vatin, Sur les objectifs de la première campagne navale menée par Hayreddîn
Barberousse pour le compte de Soliman le Magnifique (1534), «Archivum Ottomanicum», 35
(2018), pp. 173-191.

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