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400 Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra

landsknechts . From the outset, chroniclers and observers realised
15
that the war was extremely costly, particularly as news that the
Ottoman fleet under Barbarossa had arrived in Christian lands had
already forced the emperor to organise extensive -and expensive -
defensive measures throughout the Mediterranean coastal areas. The
chronicler Sandoval wrote:

The emperor ordered provisions to be sent and fortifications in the
principal ports of Naples and Sicily to be reinforced, which was very costly,
but he knew that galleys are like lightning: they may be visible and may even
be heard, but it is impossible to predict where they will strike until the harm
is done. Once he saw that the enemy had seized the whole of the kingdom of
Tunis and forced Mulay Hassan to flee, he was determined to do everything in
his power to remove Barbarossa from there. To achieve this, he sent his
couriers to the pope, and ordered Andrea Doria, the viceroys of Naples, Sicily
and Sardinia, the marquis del Vasto, Antonio de Leyva and others to amass
as many troops and ships as they could, and to provide them with all the
necessary armaments, munitions and victuals for the campaign but to do this
secretly. He raised large sums of money, and ordered don Luis Hurtado de
Mendoza, the marquis of Mondéjar, Captain-General of the kingdom of
Granada, to levy men and prepare victuals in Andalucía and its ports. Finally,
to make sure he had everything necessary to carry out successfully an
expedition of such magnitude, he levied eight thousand Germans. He
summoned the veteran soldiers from Coron and Naples, who numbered up to
four thousand men and levied eight to ten thousand Spaniards in the Spanish
kingdoms who were joined by the majority of the nobility from those realms.
In Italy some eight thousand Italians were levied. The emperor gathered this
vast war machine with all possible secrecy 16 .

15 A very interesting account written by a German soldier who was recruited for the
campaign has been recently published by Rubén González Cuerva, giving us a different
viewpoint of the event: N. Guldin, Relato de la jornada del emperador Carlos V a Túnez,
in R. González Cuerva and M.A. Bunes Ibarra (eds.), Túnez 1535 cit., pp. 109-134.
Niklaus Guldin was a lowly infantryman, who seemed primarily concerned to secure the
salary he had been promised and get a share of the booty taken during the brutal sack
of Tunis, although he claims that they got relatively little out of it. The figures he gives
for the fleet and soldiers are somewhat inflated: «Todos los barcos juntos han sido 300
– así naos como galeón, galeras, mediagaleras, fustas –, la gente de guerra junto con la
gente de mar han sido 100.000». Ivi, p. 119.
16 P. de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechos del emperador Carlos V. Rey Catholico
de España y de las Indias, Bartholome Paris, Pamplona, 1634, book XXII: «Hizo, pues,
el Emperador bastecer y fortificar los lugares más importantes de Nápoles y Sicilia, que
costaron hartos dineros, conociendo que las galeras son como rayos, que si bien se ven
y oyen, no se sabe dónde van a dar hasta que han herido. Mas después que vió cómo el
enemigo se había apoderado de todo punto del reino de Túnez, echando de él Muley
Hacem, puso todo su pensamiento en echarle de allí. Para lo cual envió sus correos al
Papa; escribió, mandando guardar secreto a Andrea Doria y a los virreyes de Nápoles,
Sicilia y Cerdeña, y al marqués del Vasto, y a Antonio de Leyva y otros para que se

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