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The best-kept secret in the Mediterranean: Barbarossa’s 1534 Tunis campaign 391

sixteenth-century European narratives of the conquest . However,
56
from Bostan Çelebi to Seyyid Lokmân, none of the Ottoman sources
had included the episode concerning Mulay Rashid in their accounts
of the conquest. Most importantly, the Gazavât never acknowledged
the fact that Barbarossa had cheated the Tunisians by creating false
expectations when he spread the news that he had come with the
Hafsid pretender to the Tunisian throne. Peçevî seems to be the first
Ottoman historian to have used this piece of information, probably
known but previously not circulated in any written form. Peçevî, like
the sixteenth-century Spanish authors, López de Gómara and Gonzalo
de Illescas, interpreted this deception as the key factor that had
facilitated Barbarossa’s rapid, initial advance in Tunis. In fact, Peçevî
portrayed Rashid as the most important element of a greater strategic
plan, of which Sultan Süleyman was certainly aware.
The account of Peçevî is recapitulated by Kâtib Çelebi, although
with certain differences, in his famous work on maritime history,
Tuhfetü’l-Kibâr fî Esfâri’l-Bihâr. He wrote this work after Peçevî’s
History and might have taken the story from him; or both might have
used a common source. However, Kâtib Çelebi divides his account of
Tunis into two episodes and explains the reasons behind Barbarossa’s
arrival at Tunis differently in each of them. In the first episode, he
comments that while Barbarossa was heading from Sardinia to
Algiers, the wind propelled the fleet westwards and they arrived at
Tunisian coast. This resembles Gazavât’s account, which mentioned
an adverse wind. In the second episode, Kâtib Çelebi offers an account
of Barbarossa’s memorandum and the sultan’s authorization for the
conquest in the same way as it was reported by Peçevî . Thus, Kâtib
57
Çelebi includes two logically incompatible explanations for
Barbarossa’s arrival in Tunis, as an unintended arrival, and as a
predetermined strategy to conquer it, probably as a result of using
information from the Gazavât and from Peçevî in turn.
All of the five approaches to be found in the Ottoman sources
demonstrate that the narrative of the conquest of Tunis was transformed
over time and according to genre. The picture resulting from the
chronological analysis of the evolution of the narrative on Tunis is striking
and requires little explanation. Bostan Çelebi’s ignored Süleymannâme, if
not that of Matrakçı Nasuh, explicitly indicated in the early sixteenth

56 F. López de Gómara, Guerras de mar del emperador Carlos V, eds. M.Á. Bunes Ibarra,
N.E. Jiménez, Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y
Carlos V, Madrid, 2000, pp. 156-157; G. de Illescas, Jornada de Carlos V á Túnez, Real
Academia Española, Madrid, 1804, pp. 8-10.
57 K. Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar fi Esfari’l-Bihar [The Gift to the Great Ones on Naval
Campaigns], ed. O.Ş. Gökyay, Milli Eğitim Basımevi, İstanbul, 1973, pp. 66-67.

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