Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (6 page)

Included in the Royal Fifth Pizarro brought the king was a small gold box belonging to Atahualpa, the Inca chieftain, for the cocoa leaves that he and his subjects chewed for energy. Charles kept it for his snuff and may have been toying with it as he took time out from conquering the New World to ponder the problems of administering it. The king was known for his silent reflections—he often stared into the air, his clear blue eyes focused on some unknown object, while his mouth lay open (due to the protruding lower jaw characteristic of the Hapsburg line)—and one imagines him turning to Francisco Cobos, his hovering counselor, and saying in his constrained and measured way of talking: “Send for Acosta [the court Jew]; we require new settlers bound for Jamaica.”

Arriving at Port Esquivel in October, the new settlers were welcomed by the twenty “Portuguese” families already there. Today, these fifty Jewish families are credited with founding Villa de la Vega (Town by the Fertile Plain), Jamaica’s capital for more than three centuries. Now called Spanish Town, La Vega, founded in 1534, represents the earliest documented settlement of converted Jews in the New World.
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Charles turned his attention next to the heathens at his door: Sultan Suleiman’s army, having overrun Persia and occupied Hungary, was on the move, and in the Mediterranean, Barbarossa’s armada of eighty-four ships had embarked from Constantinople to sweep Spanish power from the sea.
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The sultan’s naval commander, Khair-ed-Din, known to Christians as Barbarossa for his flaming red beard, was a terror in the Mediterranean even before he joined with Suleiman. The son of an unknown Greek father and a renegade Christian mother, he earned his infamy for his treatment of Christian prisoners: He tortured the men, while keeping the most comely women for his harem.

The sultan, having no navy, had left the sea’s defense to Barbarossa and ex-Iberian Moors who had crossed over to North Africa after their defeat at Granada, and were joined by a second wave in 1525 when Charles ordered all who remained to convert to Christianity. Made furious by their forced exile, they made up the bulk of Barbarossa’s crew. Barbarossa himself claimed to have ferried over seventy thousand Mudejares (Spanish Moors who stayed faithful to Islam). Returning to a region whence their ancestors came, they were welcomed by the region’s Turkish overlords, who also followed the ways of Mohammed.

The North Africa shore, known as the Barbary Coast, was likewise familiar to Iberian Jews, whose forebears had settled there in the first century after Rome’s legions conquered Jerusalem and dispersed upward of fifty thousand Jews to Spain and ports around the Mediterranean. The displaced citizens of Judea took to the sea, becoming the region’s major shipowners, merchants, and traders. Fifteen hundred years later, when the Sephardic exiles arrived in North Africa, they were consigned special quarters by their Muslim hosts. Together, the two exiled immigrant groups forged a formidable force.

Positioned to wreak vengeance on those who labeled them infidels and heretics, they partnered in the region’s most profitable industry—piracy. Sephardic merchants financed the Moors’ devastating raids on the coastal towns of Spain and Italy and shared the booty—spices from the East and Christian slaves from Europe. Setting forth in swift, multi-oared galleys from Algiers and other seaside bases, the Barbary pirates (known as corsairs) sacked and burned villages and carried off men, women, and children.
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If not ransomed, the males were stripped, chained naked to the oars, and forced to row until they died of fatigue; the women were sent to harems; and the children were raised as Muslims.

That July, Pope Clement, a Florentine Medici more concerned with his family’s interests than supporting Charles’s religious bent, delivered a blow against the Defender of the True Faith when, on his deathbed, he pardoned conversos for past offenses. This did not sit well with Charles. He and the pope had gotten along only when mutual self-interest demanded.
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Now that it did not, Clement’s decision to free up those masters of commerce threatened to turn the Mediterranean in matters of trade into a Jewish sea. If they were unchecked, Charles would be forced to deal with that deceitful race. Under the sultan’s suzerainty, the Jews had turned Turkey’s Constantinople and Greece’s Salonika into the sea’s richest ports, and via links with their brethren around the Mediterranean had developed new, lucrative trade routes to the East.

Although incensed by the prospect, Charles withheld action—figuring that, with Clement dying, he could throw his support to a new pope who would reverse the pardon. But a month later, he received devastating news he could not abide: a Jewish pirate had conquered Tunis, his last stronghold in North Africa.

SINAN, “THE FAMOUS JEWISH PIRATE”

While Barbarossa’s name was feared throughout Christendom, he was not really a naval commander or even much of a sailor. Instead he occupied himself with building his navy and plotting its moves, and left most of the sea battles to his favored captain, Sinan, a Jewish refugee from Spain via Turkey.
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On August 20, 1534, Sinan, commonly known as “the Great Jew” or “the Famous Jewish Pirate,”
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led a hundred ships into the harbor and occupied the North African city of Tunis—hitherto a possession of Spain—on behalf of Suleiman. The strategic port was situated across from Sicily astride a narrow strait linking the eastern and western Mediterranean basins. Suleiman, who ruled the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean, had established a presence in the western basin when Barbarossa conquered Algiers in 1529. Now, with the crescent flag flying over Tunis, he held dominion over the entire Mediterranean. No longer could Charles’s ships venture safely beyond home waters; instead the Mediterranean had become an alien sea dominated by Muslim corsairs and Jewish merchants.

Charles’s first reaction showed that his religious fealty took a backseat to realpolitik. Not without some holy guilt, he dispatched an agent to Tunis to offer Barbarossa “the lordship of North Africa” to come over to his side. Failing that, he instructed that the agent was to poison or cut the pirate’s throat in the evening, when he was known to be in his cups. But evening never came. Punctuating his rejection of Charles’s offer with a swing of his curved scimitar, Barbarossa decapitated the agent.

Charles saw the mission’s failure as divinely ordained. Over the next year, obsessed with the idea of a crusade to reconquer Tunis, he secretly assembled an armada of four hundred ships and an army of thirty thousand from all parts of his empire.
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He himself would lead the hosts of Christendom to strike a decisive blow against the infidel. Tunis would be his holy crusade to show the world he was its righteous ruler.
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On June 10, 1535, as the imperial fleet was about to embark, Charles addressed the assembled nobles. Unfurling a banner of the crucified Christ, he pointed to the savior, exclaiming: “He is your captain-general! I am but his standard-bearer.”
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Five days later, the fleet anchored at the entrance to the captured port.

Having known of Charles’s intentions, Barbarossa likewise preached a holy war, and recruited several thousand mujahideen (Muslim warriors) to battle the crusaders. With spies keeping him current, Barbarossa fortified the fort at the entrance to the port, named La Goletta (the throat) because “it held Tunis by the throat.” Barbarossa had assigned its defense to Sinan and five thousand of his best men.

On June 15, 1535, the cannons of seventy ships bombarded the fort’s twin towers. For twenty-four days, Sinan and the defenders held out. Three times Sinan sallied forth to engage the attackers, but the odds were overwhelming and his sorties were repulsed. Finally, the fortress walls were breached by the relentless pounding of forty-pound iron balls fired from the Knights of Malta’s eight-decked galleon, the largest fighting vessel then in existence. Spanish, German, and Italian forces poured into the fort. Sinan, forced to evacuate, crossed the bay to the city with the remnant of his men. With the fort’s capture, Charles had seized control of the bay and with it Barbarossa’s eighty-seven galleys.

Barbarossa knew he was beaten, but was still determined to give the Christians a blow they would not soon forget. The next day, as Charles gathered his army for a final assault, an enraged Barbarossa told Sinan he had decided to slaughter the twenty thousand Christian slaves packed in the city’s underground dungeons. Sinan dissuaded him: “To stain ourselves with so awful a massacre,” he told his commander, “would place us outside the pale of humanity forever.”
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Human compassion aside, it made no sense to destroy one’s property before the battle was joined. Besides, he added, slaughtering so many prisoners would take too much time. His logic was persuasive, but as things turned out, sparing their lives proved the defenders’ undoing. Defecting Moors, looking to curry favor if the Spanish assault succeeded, freed the prisoners. Once released, the slaves raided the city arsenal, overpowered the guards, and threw open the gates.

Charles’s forces stormed in. For a day the battle raged. Charles, on a gallop around the city, had his horse shot from under him. Charles, known for his courage and cool composure, smiled when his men entreated him to take shelter from the barrage of bullets, and said: “An Emperor was never yet known to be shot.”
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So it was with Barbarossa, who reportedly killed dozens of men “with the keen blade of his scimitar.” But the issue was never in doubt. Sensing that all was lost, Sinan and Barbarossa mounted their camels and, with four thousand men, escaped to the desert to fight another day.

On July 21, Charles’s victorious army swept through the city. For three days, his righteous crusaders looted Tunis and massacred its citizens. An estimated seventy thousand people were killed and forty thousand taken captive. The carnage was called the worst of the century by Catholic chroniclers who wrote of the shameful affair, for the victims were not Barbarossa’s men but the innocent people of Tunis who a year before had been the Christians’ allies. Only when the crusaders and freed Christian slaves began killing one another in a fight over the spoils did the assault end. Jews were not exempted from this bloodshed of murder and looting. As one noted, “The Jews had no savior on the day of the Lord’s wrath.” Those not “smitten with the edge of the sword when the uncircumcised came to the city” were taken captive and held for ransom, while those who escaped into the desert were left destitute when the Muslims “plundered everything they brought with them.”
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To memorialize his victory, Charles had brought along a poet and historian to record his victory, and a court painter whose mural of Sinan’s force unsuccessfully counterattacking was made into a tapestry that hangs today in a Vienna museum.

On their return home, the twenty thousand rescued Christians sang their emperor’s praise, hailing him as the knight-errant who had vanquished the scourge of Christendom. His reputation as defender of the faith was enhanced when the new pope approved his demand that an Inquisition commence in Portugal. Charles had been pushing for this, though not for any sanctimonious religious reason. Rather, the conversos in Portugal had accumulated wealth that Spanish conversos had transferred to them for safekeeping, thereby bleeding Spain’s riches. To rein in the conversos’ power, he called on Portugal’s King John to threaten them with the holy fire. The concerted action of the two monarchs brought about a further exodus of conversos from both nations.

King John went along with Charles, but did so reluctantly. Though the two were close—John’s sister Isabella was happily wed to Charles—Portugal’s king could ill afford to bar these talented people from his empire. He sought their advice for most endeavors he undertook; moreover, he was heavily in debt. Conversos had loaned him 500,000 ducats and he knew they were good for more. Just as Spain’s New Christians rose to influential positions denied them as Jews, so too had Portugal’s Jews. From the time they were forcibly converted in 1497, as New Christians they had married into the best families and filled the highest offices of state. Portugal’s nearly 100,000 conversos represented 10 percent of King John’s citizenry. Despite their elevated status, the general populace did not trust them. Having rejected conversion in Spain, it was not likely that a forced baptism had truly altered their beliefs. From infidels outside the church they were now seen as heretics within.

By the mid-1530s, Charles had come around to the view that while many Spanish conversos only pretended to be Christian, they were neither numerous nor powerful enough to threaten him. He appreciated their ability to stimulate commerce and thereby increase the cash flow to his treasury, which by March 1536 was nearly empty. His adviser Corbos cautioned him that he was “on the verge of bankruptcy.”
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Thus, in line with his laissez-faire attitude to their presence both in Jamaica and elsewhere in the New World, he directed the magistrates of Antwerp, northern Europe’s trading capital, to grant Spanish conversos full settlement rights, and solved the problem of Jamaica by giving the island away.