AD 1534-1705 - Ottoman Regency
Piracy lured adventurers from around the Mediterranean to the Maghribi coastal cities and islands. Among them were two brothers, Aruj and Khair al Din, the latter known as Barbarossa (Redbeard) to Europeans. Muslims from the Greek island of Lesbos, they reached Tunisia in 1504 and sailed from Jerba Island under Hafsid patronage. In 1510, however, the brothers were invited by the maritime republic of Algiers to defend it against the Spaniards. Instead they seized Algiers and used it as a base of operations not only for piracy but also for conquests in the interior. Khair al Din subsequently recognized the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan over the territory that he controlled and was in turn appointed the sultan's regent in the Maghrib, bearing the title beylerbey (commander in chief). He was forced to abandon Algiers temporarily (1519-25) to the Hafsids, who resisted Ottoman penetration in the Maghrib, but with Turkish troops Khair al Din was able to consolidate his position in the central Maghrib and in 1534 mounted a successful seaborne assault on Tunis.
The Hafsid sultan, Hassan, took refuge in Spain, where he sought the aid of the Habsburg king.emperor, Charles V, to restore him to his throne. Spanish troops and ships recaptured Tunis in 1535 and reinstalled Hassan. Protected by a large Spanish garrison at La Goulette, the harbor of Tunis, the Hafsids became the Muslim ally of Catholic Spain in its struggle with the Turks for supremacy in the Mediterranean, making Tunisia and the waters around it the stage for repeated conflict between the two great powers.
In 1569 a Turkish force operating out of Algiers retook Tunis, only to lose it again in 1573 to Don Juan of Austria. The next year, however, the Turks returned with a large armada and 40,000 troops, compelling the Spanish garrison to abandon Tunis. The last of the Hafsids was carried off to Constantinople, and Tunisia became a province of the Ottoman Empire, governed by the beylerbey in Algiers, with Turkish as the language of administration.
In 1587 the Ottoman Maghrib was divided into three regencies - at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. In Tunisia the authority of the beylerbey as regent gave way to that of a pasha (governor) appointed by the sultan for a one-year term. The regency was provided with a corps of janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants who were committed to a lifetime of service in Tunisia. The corps numbered 4,000 infantrymen and was organized into 40 companies, each commanded by a junior officer with the rank of dey (literally, maternal uncle). It formed a self-governing military guild, subject to its own laws, whose interests were protected by the Divan, a council of senior officers. Real power came to rest with the army, and the pasha's role was reduced to that of ceremonial head of state and figurehead representative of Ottoman suzerainty.
While the mission of the janissaries in Tunisia was to maintain order and collect taxes, the Barbary corsairs supplied the regency's treasury with a steady income from piracy and waged war at sea against Spain. Piracy was a highly disciplined business, calculated as an extension of overall Turkish naval strategy in the Mediterranean. Operations were conducted by the rals (pirate captains), who preyed on shipping and raided the European coasts of the western Mediterranean to capture and carry away hostages to be held for ransom or as merchandise for the slave markets of North Africa. The razs - many of them European renegades who had apostatized and become "Turks by profession"-were banded together in a self-regulating tafa (guild) to further the corporate interests of their trade and to counter the influence of the Turkish military garrison in the affairs of the regency.
Mutinies and coups were frequent, and generally the janissaries were loyal to whomever paid and fed them most regularly. In 1591 the deys staged a successful coup against their superior officers in the divan and forced the pasha, acting as regent for the sultan, to appoint their chosen leader as head of government - in which capacity he continued to bear the title of dey. The deys, their Turkish infantry reinforced by spahis (locally recruited cavalry), were secure in their control of the cities and the coastal region but relied on a civilian official, the bey, to oversee the government of the tribes and to collect taxes in the hinterland with his private army of Tunisian auxiliaries. Such was the strength in the country. side of one of these officials, the Corsican renegade Murad Bey (d. 1631), that he secured a hereditary title for his family both to the beylicate and also to the office of pasha.
The political history of seventeenth-century Tunisia thus became one of the struggle between the dey, backed by the janissaries and the Turkish bureaucracy, and the bey-pasha, who increasingly came to be identified with the interests of the old Arab elite for control of the apparatus of government. After 1666 the bey-pasha dictated the choice of the dey and gradually relieved him of his duties as head of government. The beylicate, in the meantime, had established itself as the representative of order and stability against tribal anarchy and military indiscipline.
Tunisian naval units were dispatched to reinforce the Turkish navy in time of war, and the sultan as caliph was recognized as the spiritual leader of Islam; but, although it remained nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Tunisia had in fact become an autonomous state governed by a hereditary ruling house.
By the late seventeenth century, trade had become a more important source of income than piracy. Commercial agreements were entered into with European trading partners, particularly France, and concessions for the development of trade were granted to foreign interests. Tunisia imported finished manufactured goods in exchange for a variety of commodities-grain, olive oil, dates, hides, textiles, and sponges. Tunisian hatters enjoyed a monopoly on the sale of the shashiya, the red fez worn throughout the Ottoman world, which they made of Spanish wool imported by Jewish merchants in Tunis.
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