Tunisian war

The Habsburg African expedition was provoked by the actions of the famous pirate Khair ad Din Barbarossa , who was entrenched in the territory of modern Tunisia, from where, with the assistance of the French crown , he regularly burned and robbed cities on the Italian coast.

Religious emperor Charles V, mindful of the achievements of his ancestors - the Catholic kings - in the fight against the "infidels", declared a " crusade " against the Turks . He gathered 30 thousand soldiers, enlisted the support of the Genoese fleet and hired the largest ship of the time, the Santa Anna karakka, from the Maltese knights .

The main event of the Tunisian military expedition was a long and bloody siege of the Goletta fortress, which was followed by the almost total extermination of the Muslim population. The local Hafsid ruler was forced to recognize the emperor as his overlord , and a Spanish garrison was stationed in the port of Golett. This state of affairs persisted until 1569, when Algerian Bay Uluj Ali recaptured Tunisia from the Spaniards.

Four years after the victory at Lepanto, don Juan of Austria again drove the Saracens out of the vicinity of Goletta. He hoped to turn this part of the Maghreb into the first Christian kingdom in northern Africa and, laying the crown of this power on his head, begin a reconquest on the model of the one from which Portugal was born at one time. The opposition of his own half-brother - the Spanish king Philip II - forced him to abandon these plans.

The end of the African conquist was laid in 1574 by the Ottoman Empire . The Sultan sent a fleet to Tunisia under the command of Uluj Ali and Sinan Pasha , who commanded the ground forces. They removed from power the submissive Habsburg Hafsid dynasty. Juan of Austria set sail for help to the Spanish garrison from Sicily , but was late due to a storm. Under his command was the future writer Cervantes , according to whom the Christians captured in Goletta ended their lives as slaves in Turkish galleys.

The conquest of Africa turned out to be a costly failure for the Spanish crown. The initial expedition of Charles V alone cost at least a million ducats . Further efforts to hold Goletta forced Christian monarchs to go into debt to the Fuggers and other banking houses. A year after the abandonment of Goletta, the Spanish crown declared bankruptcy , as a result of which it made concessions to the rebel Dutch .

• James D. Tracy. Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War . Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-81431-6 .
• Roger Crowley Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World . Random House, 2009. ISBN 0-8129-7764-5 .