Free Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler Page A

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.” 21 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.” 22
    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.” 23 Thus, in line with his laissez-faire attitude to their presence both in Jamaica and elsewhere in the New World, he