Battle of Preveza
9:00 AM
Ye Pirate Bold
Dead Men Tell No Tales
Curated by Sonia Larbi
Ohannes Umed Behzad, Battle of Preveza 1538, 1866 |
60,000 soldiers in around 300 ships assembled on a neighboring island. Andrea Doria arrived with the Spanish-Genoese fleet and was put in charge. Before that, the Papal fleet had already engaged the Ottoman ships. Barbarossa succeeded in repelling the forces from Preveza. After the small tiff, Doria had enough intel to make a decision. Barbarossa was only 122 ships and 12,000 men strong. A head-on attack at sea would quickly take care of the pirate fleet.
The day of the battle, the Holy League was taken off guard by the fleet of Ottoman ships heading towards them. Doria was not expecting such a daring and offensive move from a fleet so incredibly outnumbered. But as the Christian fleet tried to band into formation to meet the pirates, they found they had no wind to fill their sails. Barbarossa had calculated correctly. He was sailing at full speed with the wind while the Holy League sat in the water, completely immobile. The main gunships were out of range of Barbarossa and had to watch while the nimble pirates boarded and sank almost half the fleet.
By the end of the battle, 3,000 Christian soldiers were taken prisoner. Barbarossa's men suffered 800 casualties and 400 deaths, but succeeded in conquering the largest Christian fleet in the Mediterranean. He also signed a peace treaty with Venice that transferred ownership of strategic islands in four different regions to the Ottoman Empire and paid 300,000 ducats of gold to his brother, Aruj. With the momentum from Preveza, Hizir liberated Tunis and the other port cities the Holy League occupied on the Barbary coast. Even though Hizir's beard wasn't fiery red like his brother's, he still catapulted the Barbarossa name into eternal infamy.
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