Battle of Djerba

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Battle of Djerba
Part of the Turkish-Spanish Wars
Date May 9-14, 1560 Location Near the island of Djerba off the coast of Tunisia Result Decisive Ottoman victory
Combatants
Christian Alliance: Spain  Republic of Venice Papal States Republic of Genoa Duchy of Savoy Knights of Malta	Ottoman Empire
Commanders
Giovanni Andrea Doria	Piyale Pasha
Strength
54 galleys, 66 other vessels	86 galleys and galliots
Casualties
30 galleys lost, About 9,000 dead, About 5,000 captured	Few galliots lost, About 1,000 dead

The naval Battle of Djerba took place in May 1560 near the island of Djerba, Tunisia in which the Ottomans under Piyale Pasha's command overwhelmed a large joint European fleet, chiefly Spanish forces, sinking half its ships.^[1]

Contents 1 Background 2 Forces 3 The battle 4 Aftermath 5 Notes

[edit] Background

Since losing against Barbarossa Hayreddin's Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Preveza in 1538 and the disastrous expedition of Emperor Charles V against Barbarossa in Algiers in 1541, the major European sea powers in the Mediterranean, Spain and Venice, felt more and more threatened by the Ottomans and their corsair allies. Indeed, by 1558 Piyale Pasha had captured the Balearic Islands and together with Turgut Reis raided the Mediterranean coasts of Spain. King Philip II of Spain appealed to Pope Paul IV and his allies in Europe to organize an expedition to retake Tripoli from Turgut Reis, who had captured the city from the Maltese Knights in August 1551 and had subsequently been made Bey (Governor) of Tripoli by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.

[edit] Forces

The historian William H. Prescott reportedly wrote that the sources describing the Djerba campaign were so contradictory that he defied the reader to reconcile them. Anyone attempting to piece together the campaign will be forced to the same conclusion. Most reputable historians believe that the fleet assembled by the allied Christian powers in 1560 consisted of between 50 and 60 galleys and between 40 and 60 smaller craft. For example, Giacomo Bosio, the official historian of the Knights of St John writes that there were 54 galleys.^[2] Fernand Braudel^[3] also gives 54 warships plus thirty-six supply vessels. One of the most detailed accounts is by Carmel Testa ^[4] who evidently has access to the archives of the Knights of St. John. He lists precisely 54 galleys, 7 brigs, 17 frigates, 2 galleons, 28 merchant vessels and 12 small ships. These were supplied by a coalition that consisted of Genoa, Naples, Sicily, Florence the Papal States, and the Knights of S. John.^[5][6] The joint fleet was assembled at Messina under the command of Giovanni Andrea Doria, nephew of the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. It first sailed to Malta, where bad weather forced it to remain for two months. During this time some 2,000 men were lost to sickness.

On 10 February, 1560, the fleet set sail for Tripoli. The precise numbers of soldiers aboard are not known. Braudel gives 10,000-12,000; Testa 14,000; older figures in excess of 20,000 are clearly exaggerations considering the number of men a sixteenth-century galley could carry.

Although the expedition landed not far from Tripoli, the lack of water, sickness and a freak storm caused the commanders to abandon their original objective, and on 7 March they returned to the island of Djerba, which they quickly overran. The Viceroy of Sicily, Don Juan de la Cerda, Duke of Medina Coeli, ordered a fort to be built on the island, and construction was begun. By that time a Turkish fleet of about 86 galleys and galliots under the command of the Ottoman admiral Piyale Pasha was already underway from Istanbul. Piyale's fleet arrived at Djerba on 11 May 1560, much to the surprise of the Christian forces.^[7]

[edit] The battle

The battle was over in a matter of hours, with about half the Christian galleys captured or sunk. Anderson ^[8] gives the total number of Christian casualties as 18,000 but Guilmartin ^[9] more conservatively puts the losses at about 9,000 of which about two-thirds would have been oarsmen.

The surviving soldiers took refuge in the fort they had completed just days earlier, which was soon attacked by the combined forces of Piyale Pasha and Turgut Reis (who had joined Piyale Pasha on the third day), but not before Giovanni Andrea Doria managed to escape in a small vessel. After a siege of three months, the garrison surrendered and, according to Bosio, Piyale carried about 5,000 prisoners back to Istanbul, including the Spanish commander, D. Alvaro de Sande, who had taken command of the Christian forces after Doria had fled. The accounts of the final days of the besieged garrison are irreconcilable. Ogier de Busbecq, the Austrian Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople, recounts in his famous Turkish Letters that, recognizing the futility of armed resistance, de Sande had tried to escape in a small boat, but was quickly captured. ^[10] In other accounts, for instance Braudel's, he led a sortie on 29 July and was in that way captured. Through Busbecq's efforts, de Sande was ransomed and released several years later and fought against the Turks at the Siege of Malta in 1565.

[edit] Aftermath

The victory in the Battle of Djerba represented the apex of Ottoman naval domination in the Mediterranean, which had been growing since the victory at the Battle of Preveza 22 years earlier. The Ottomans soon assaulted the new base of the Knights of St John in Malta in 1565 (having previously expelled from Rhodes in 1522), but did not succeed this time. It was not until the destruction of a large Ottoman fleet by a combined Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 that the myth of the seeming invincibility of the Turkish naval forces finally ended. Although the Ottomans had captured Cyprus from Venice in 1571, shortly before the Battle of Lepanto, were able to build another large fleet in less than a year after Lepanto, and recaptured Tunis from the Spaniards and their Hafsid vassals in 1574, the unchecked Ottoman supremacy in the Mediterranean had come to an end.

[edit] Notes