Free The Sultan's Admiral by Ernle Bradford

galleots and took them with him, as well as a great deal of shipbuilding material and a number of Christian slaves belonging to him and his brother.
    Throughout the winter Khizr and his Turks were steadily engaged on making good their losses. By the spring they had built three new galleots, bringing their numbers up to nine, and they had also established a powder mill on Djerba, so that they were no longer dependent on outside sources for their ammunition supplies. During the following year, 1513, the trade routes of the Mediterranean were unmolested, and the island ports and harbours of the European powers were able to return to normal. The Genoese, it was widely rumoured, had broken the power of the Turkish raiders and had taught them a lesson: not to interfere in the central and western Mediterranean.
    But, far south in Djerba, there was no respite from activity. Day and night the shipbuilders and their slave-labour force were kept busy. Aruj himself, almost recuperated from his wound, came down to see his brother Khizr. He forgave him his defeat off Tunis, because of the way in which he had already rebuilt the fleet. Abbot Diego de Haedo, however, who knew many of the younger Barbarossa’s servants and followers, says that there was nothing to forgive: that Khizr, under the circumstances in which he was placed when Andrea Doria arrived off the port, did “all that was humanly possible for a man to do.”
    Aruj was a stubborn man and he was unaccustomed to reverses. Bougie had been almost in his hands when the accident of his wound had caused his men to abandon the attack. He was determined to return the very next year and secure Bougie for himself. He was already in communication with the exiled king, and they had agreed to repeat the plan that had so nearly succeeded in 1512. The Turks would bring the same number of ships, twelve galleots, and the same number of men, and they would once again besiege the city in concert with the mountain troops. What had failed once would surely succeed a second time.
    Accordingly, in August 1514, the Spanish garrison at Bougie found itself once again besieged and under fire, and cut off by hostile tribesmen from the interior. “The battery against that unlucky fort was instantly erected, and carried on incessantly with the utmost fury. In a very few days he almost levelled it with the ground, and the Spaniards, forced to dislodge, retired to the city . . Bougie was now protected by a further bastion, which had been erected in the past two years. It stood on the edge of the sea, “whose strand and shore,” Morgan comments, “is very beautiful.” It was indeed a lovely stretch of coast, with mountains rising behind it and with fertile land running down to the sea. But this rich agricultural land, combined with yet another stroke of ill-fortune, was to help deprive the Turks once again of their anticipated victory.
    As August drew to a close, the clouds began to mass above the mountains. The rainy season was approaching, and while the siege of the second bastion went ahead the first rains of September started to fall. Now the Berbers, and especially the coast-dwelling Moors, were entirely dependent upon this autumn rainfall for their next year’s crops. It was imperative for them to get back to their farms and small holdings, “in order to plough and sow their lands, for the best sowing time in Barbary is after the first rains have fallen.” Gradually the ground forces began to slink away. It was at this very moment, when once again the city of Bougie seemed to lie within their grasp, that Aruj and Khizr were told by their coastal lookouts that Spanish ships were approaching.
    It was the annual autumn relief, bringing with it ammunition and stores to enable the garrison to survive through the winter. Under the command of a Spanish captain, Martin de Renteria, five large men-of war—sailing galleons that took advantage of a fine onshore breeze—came proudly into the bay. They had