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by Mohamed Cherif (Author)
This is the complete life story of Pirate Barbarossa or Khaireddine Barbarous, who dictated it to his colleague and friend in the sea life the poet and writer Syed Ali Almuradi. He recorded his autobiography after a request of Sultan Soleiman Alkanuni, known as Suleiman the Magnificent.
The individual is the son of his surrounding. What means this proverb? That means his environmental factors and circumstances influence directly and indirectly his thoughts and behaviors along with his life. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries extended the culture of Piracy, which had been developed worldwide centuries earlier in the Indian ocean, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Piracy was considered as the standard, the norm, and the normal of that age. It was a source of enrichment for ordinary people and for countries. It was practiced by countries implicitly, so many pirates worked for the service of empires. Barbarossa and his brother Arruj were not the exceptions. They were raised in this realm and atmosphere. It wasn't immoral to exercise piracy. Something is clear is that they engaged in piracy after they were regular traders with their ships and after the incarceration and the torture of Arruj the Barbarossa's oldest brother by the Rhodes Knights on his way to Tripoli in Lebanon.
Barbarossa, an Italian term meaning the Red Beard. Mostly the Venetians in the fifteenth century who called Khaireddine Basha or Kheder with this name. Barbarossa or Khaireddine was born on Midilli island (Lesbos today) in 1478. He died in Istanbul in 1546. At a fresh age, he uses the ship as we operate in our days, the cars and all the transportations means. With time, the sea became truly his proper home. A natural person can work outside throughout the day and return at the end of the day to his home to take a rest. Barbarossa took this rest in his ship's private cabinet in the sea's large everywhere.
Through this autobiography, Barbarossa talked about all the events that he lives, saw, or testified about by himself. The spiritual background was dominant in his stories as the antagonists of the Ottoman empire in an aside; the Venice, the Spanish and the Portuguese empires on another side each side represents a theology and his followers the Ottoman empire represents Islam, the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the Venetians represents the Christianity. Using words like Kaffer or kuffar, which means unbelievers or infidels, was frequent.
Despite his strong heart as an adventurer in true life not like in Hollywood movies, I discovered he possesses a highly sensitive soul when the matter concerns his brother Arruj, his siblings, his men, and the poor that he tried consistently to help them everywhere.
Barbarossa never spoke about his mom, his teaching, and his childhood. For example, he didn't reveal that his mommy was a priest's widow before she married his father. He didn't mention that besides the military employment of his father; he was working on pottery and when they started in trading he and his brother Arruj; they sold the pottery of their father outside the Midilli island. Their brother, Isaaq, preferred administrative job, he didn't specify it too.
Barbarossa and his brother Arruj rescued the lives of tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews escaping from the tyranny and the torture of The Spanish Church and transferring them to North Africa and Greece in Salonica.
This autobiography reflects all the cultures, values, morals, and behaviors of all people surviving at that time.
