Page 123 - sfogliabile 49

The best-kept secret in the Mediterranean: Barbarossa’s 1534 Tunis campaign 389

Süleyman after 1534 and must have certainly monitored Ârif Çelebi’s
52
account and known the official version. The same is also true for
Künhü’l-Ahbâr (1600), Gelibolulu Âlî’s famous historical work, which
offers an account of the rise of Barbarossa in Barbary and his
appointment as admiral, but is totally silent as to the events between
1534 and 1537 . Thus, it seems that making references to the
53
conquest of Tunis and to the authorization of the sultan had acquired
a quasi-taboo status, and the authors did not want to confront or
contradict the accepted version offered in official chronicles.
This deadlock was broken in the first half of the seventeenth
century by Peçevî, who represents the fifth approach. This asserted
that the seizure of Tunis was planned by Barbarossa and supported
by Süleyman, and that a sultanic order to take the city was issued.
According to Peçevî, Barbarossa wrote a memorandum to the sultan
and asked for his authorization to conquer Tunis and hand the city
over to Rashid, who in turn would open La Goleta to the Ottoman fleet.
The sultan found the proposal appropriate and authorized Barbarossa
to pursue this objective:

[Barbarossa writes to the sultan] That frontier is far away from the
Threshold of Felicity [İstanbul]. The army of Islam inevitably suffers hardship
and fatigue to arrive there. If the Tunisian realm is handed to Rashid, the port
of La Goleta is taken and preserved by the sultan and if the Imperial fleet
frequently stays in it, with the blessing of Allah, the conquest of the land of
al-Andalus would easily be accomplished. The sultan found the proposal
appropriate and sent the Imperial fleet with Hayreddin Pasha to those parts 54 .

Peçevî’s account is a qualified return to the first approach with
previously unmentioned details and a geo-strategic interpretation of
the campaign’s objectives. The interesting point is that Peçevî did not
mention the Tunisian episode in his chapter about Süleyman’s reign.
Instead, he preferred to write about it as preliminary historical
background to Kılıç Ali Pasha’s definitive conquest of Tunis in 1574.

52 M. Ş. Yılmaz, ‘Koca Nis¸anci’ of Kanuni: Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi, Bureaucracy and
‘Kanun’ in the Reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, 1520-1566, Ph.D. thesis, Bilkent
University, 2006, p. 95; K. Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, Narrating the
Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013.
53 G. Mustafa Âlî, Künhü’l Ahbâr [The Essence of Histories], Türk Tarih Kurumu
Basımevi, Ankara, 2009, vol. IV, ff. 297v-299v and 305v-307v.
54 P.İ. Efendi, Tarih-i Peçevî [History of Peçevî], ed. B.S. Baykal, Bas¸bakanlık Matbaası,
Ankara, 1981, p. 348. This passage is also translated and discussed in S. Soucek, Naval
Aspects of the Ottoman Conquests cit., p. 228. It is worth noting that this arrangement was
precisely what Charles V would do the following year, albeit with Mulay Hassan rather than
Rashid as sovereign.

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