On April 29, 1536, the Muslim corsair ships of the Turkish pirate Hayreddin Barbarossa fell en masse upon a small fishing village on the Italian coast of Calabria called Le Castella; a village that still exists today under the same name, in the province of Crotone. Among the people they carried off — besides their usual prey, young and beautiful women to be sold as sex slaves in Istanbul, Algiers, Tunis or Cairo — there was also a seventeen-year-old boy, the son of a poor sailor. An ordinary, unremarkable kid who was about to enter a convent to become a friar.
Thirty-two years later, that same boy, torn by force from his family, would become the king of Algiers. And after that, absolute lord of Tripoli, and Tunis, and finally Grand Admiral of the entire Turkish-Ottoman fleet; with three thousand slaves to his name and a great mosque that also bears his name, built in Istanbul by the empire's finest architect. That boy was called Giovanni Dionigi Galeni. But the Turks rebaptized him almost immediately as Uluch (or Uluç) Ali Fartax, and in there lie two words and two stories. Uluch means renegade, new convert: the man who has crossed the line separating Christianity from Islam. Fartax, which is a Berber word and not a Turkish one, means scurvy-headed, because the boy suffered from that fungal disease of the scalp which he probably contracted through the hygienic conditions of captivity (we can all imagine how appalling the filth and the treatment must have been, chained up in those Turkish galleys). The Christians, and the Italians in particular, twisting his Turkish name, turned it into Uchalí or Occhiali, which in Italian means eyeglasses; today you will find him spelled in many ways depending on the book or encyclopedia you consult: Uluç Ali, Uluj Ali, Uccialì or Euldj Ali. And the nickname under which he passed into Spanish literature was given to him by Miguel de Cervantes himself, joining the two words into a single phrase: Ali the scurvy renegade.
The village, the father, and the priest who never was
Giovanni was born in 1519 in Le Castella, a fishing hamlet on the Gulf of Squillace, in Calabria, then territory of the Kingdom of Naples and therefore of the Spanish crown. His father, Birno Galeni, was a sailor. His mother, Giuseppa "Pippa" de Cicco, a peasant woman. In southern Italy, people named Giuseppe or Giuseppa are usually nicknamed Pippo or Pippa.
And here is the first detail that changes the color of the whole story: young Giovanni Dionigi was about to enter a convent to become a Dominican friar. His father had destined him for an ecclesiastical career, to lift one burden and one more mouth to feed from the household and to guarantee the boy a future.
Let's put that in perspective, because in the poor, underdeveloped Calabria of the sixteenth century, this was not just devotion: it was family strategy. For the son of a poor fisherman, the Church was the only social elevator in existence. To study, to learn to read and write and speak Latin, to finally get away from the sea and escape from poverty.
That plan lasted until the morning of April 29, 1536, when the pirate galleys of Hayreddin Barbarossa appeared on the horizon of Le Castella — the most powerful Muslim corsair in the Mediterranean and the favorite admiral of the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the man who at that moment reigned over the great Ottoman Empire.
The boy was captured by Ali Ahmed, one of Barbarossa's captains. And almost immediately, after being sold to Jafer Reis, a corsair captain who owned several pirate galleys, they chained him to an oar for being young and fairly vigorous. However, this author believes there may have been a reason why he was sold precisely to Jafer Reis and not to some other pirate: because this man, it seems, was also a Calabrian like Giovanni. Captured in Italy years earlier by the Muslim pirates, he had converted to Islam to escape slavery, and with his skills he had made a great fortune in Istanbul, the city formerly known as Constantinople. Be that as it may, our aspiring friar ends up chained to the oar of one of Jafer's galleys.
Fourteen years on the rowing bench
And here is where it's worth pausing, because this is the part that no Wikipedia-style summary, nor other more prestigious publications, ever tell properly. Whether out of a wish to always be even-handed and politically correct at all costs, or out of fear of offending and looking bad to somebody by telling the raw truth.
Well, all the historical evidence and the testimonies of the era point to the fact that a Christian galley slave fallen into Muslim hands —and likewise a Muslim fallen into Christian hands— was not a mere prisoner. He was an expendable piece of the war machinery of the Ottoman Empire. An object that lived chained to a wooden bench three or four meters long and ate whatever scraps were thrown at him. In fact, during the pirate naval campaigns up and down the length of the Mediterranean, campaigns that could last weeks or even months, the captive slept where he rowed and relieved himself right there where he sat. And when that sadistic, evil son of a bitch of a boatswain —the overseer of the rowers— beat out the stroke with shouts, drum and whip, the European slave rowed until he fainted or died.
And all this without mentioning the small detail that these men, chained together to an oar for long stretches of time, passed lice, crabs, fungus, smallpox, bubonic plague, leprosy, typhus, fevers, pneumonia, dysentery and, of course, the scalp disease Giovanni suffered from, back and forth to one another.
So it went: these men who roasted in summer and froze in winter eventually sickened and died. And if the ship went down in an attack or a storm, well, double bad luck: the galley slave went down with it, because he was chained, and no Ottoman Turk or North African pirate ever took the trouble to free them before the sinking.
Life expectancy chained to a galley bench was counted in months — sometimes even in weeks.
And yet the young Calabrian, Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, endured fourteen years.
Fourteen, Miguel de Cervantes tells us, and that is the official figure that has passed into history. Modern historians, and I myself, lower it considerably, because our man's brilliant later naval career, as a free man, forces us — no way around it — to compress that count, and some bring it down to four or five years, which is the most natural and likely. But nobody disputes the essential point: it was years, in the plural, not months. And he held out longer than almost anyone ever did. I am going to use the figure Cervantes gives us, because it is the one everybody knows and because he himself heard it told, during his captivity in Algiers, by people who had personally known this Italian.
And Giovanni Dionigi did not row in just any galley, but in the galley of his master Jafer Reis — the same man who, in time, with Giovanni now free, rich and famous as a corsair captain, would become his father-in-law when the young ex-slave married his daughter.
But in 1538, two years after his capture and while still a Christian captive, he took part in the Battle of Preveza — Barbarossa's great naval victory over the Holy League, the one that consolidated Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean for at least a generation. In other words: that Calabrian boy was present at one of the most decisive naval battles of the century, chained to an oar and rowing for the enemy of his homeland and of his faith, unable to see anything of what was happening up above.
His side won. The side that kept him in chains, I mean.
The slap that changed everything
And we come to the moment that explains everything, and which we know from a truly extraordinary source: the Quixote of the great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
During those years of captivity, Giovanni refused to convert to Islam because — what the devil — he had been about to become a priest in the bosom of the Catholic faith, the faith of his parents and his ancestors: he was not now going to renounce it to become a Muslim. He endured everything —the oar, the hunger, the thirst, the whip, the shouting, the tortures, the diseases, the sun and the ice— as a Christian, when it took only a single sentence, the Shahada, to stop being one: "Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah." In English: "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." Because the Christian renegade who embraced Islam ceased to be oar-meat and his condition improved markedly and at once — for renouncing the Christian faith was the easiest and most-used exit door in the whole Mediterranean.
But he spent all those years saying no. When we Italians say that Calabrians are strong, proud and very, very stubborn, this is exactly what we mean.
And one fine day something happened: a Muslim smashed a great slap across his face in front of everyone. That was all Giovanni needed to decide to jump to the other side of the barricade. Neither torture, nor hunger, nor despair had been able to break him. But that humiliation, inflicted by that particular man and in front of everyone, worked the miracle of making him change his mind and convert in order to take his revenge.
Where exactly did all this happen? We don't know with 100% certainty, for here the story forks into two equally plausible scenarios. I am going to tell you both, because I want the reader to be the one who decides. Though I have it fairly clear myself and have had my opinion formed for years.
In the first scenario — the more likely one, for me, on a simple question of timing — the slap comes from a levend, that is, a Turkish sailor on board the galley, with Giovanni still chained to the rowing bench. In the second, which supposedly happens some years later on land, he takes the blow in the house of his master Jafer Reis, and the man who strikes him is not a Turk but another Italian, a Neapolitan servant converted to Islam. Both scenarios work and both end the same way. Let's start with the one on board.
First scenario: the scene that nobody, except Giovanni, witnessed or wrote down
Here I am going to do something I sometimes do on this blog to make things easier to follow. Everything that comes next is a dialogue I have invented. It is fiction, but I don't think it strays far from the truth.
No chronicler was sitting on that bench. Nobody took notes. What we have are two lone sentences from Cervantes and a hypothesis from his modern Italian biographer. But I know well enough the punitive mechanics of a galley, the merciless Islamic legislation on slavery, and the head of a Calabrian —for I am the son of a Sicilian woman and a Campanian man, regions right next door to Calabria— to be able to reconstruct what must have happened there.
Make yourselves comfortable, sit down on the fifth starboard bench of that galley and watch what happens on the fourth bench to port. The air stinks of pitch, of vomit, piss and excrement, and of something even worse — it stinks of death! since several rowers already dead are still shackled among the living. It is midday and the heat is scorching when a levend, a Turkish sailor named Mehmet, walking down the central gangway, trips — through sheer clumsiness of his own — over the chains of an Italian prisoner shackled at the inner end of the fourth bench on the left. A prisoner the Turk has been humiliating and mistreating for days. You know what I'm talking about, right? — one of those personal, skin-deep antipathies that need no real or specific cause to arise. The Turk simply can't stand Giovanni, and since he is a Turk — the one with the whip, the law and the religion on his side — he treats himself daily to beating him, screaming at him and humiliating him in front of everyone on any possible pretext.
So after tripping, the Turk smashes a great slap across Giovanni's face in front of two hundred men and screams at him in his own tongue: "Orospu çocuğu gâvur! Zincirlerinin nereye düştüğüne dikkat et!" (Son of a whore infidel! Watch where your chains fall.) And he walks away laughing.
Giovanni Dionigi, who by now is no giant —the oar breeds no giants: it breeds lean men, all tendon and fiber, with hands turned into powerful hooks—, doesn't even raise a hand to his cheek. He stays still and silent, palms still closed around the oar, staring with murderous hatred at the back of the damned Turk walking away.
—No vaddari accussí Giuanni. Abbassa l'uocchi —Don't look at him like that, Giovanni. Lower your eyes— whispered a Sicilian voice from the bench behind—. Si dru sadicu di Memmet ti vidi, t'menti nten'mpicci —If that sadist Mehmet sees you, you'll be in trouble.
The man speaking was a rower on the bench behind. An old man from Messina, born Carmelo La Spada, who had been pulling an oar for twelve years and calling himself Hasan for eleven: for this man had converted to Islam a year after his capture, and now rowed as a buonavoglia — that is, as a free man with a contract and a wage.
—U sintisti acchistuu, Cammelu? —Giovanni said to him—. Lu gran cunnudu e sbiru tuccu mi dissi figghi-i-buttana, e cu me madri nuddu se metti. Me madri travagghia a tera, non faci a buttana. (Did you hear that one, Carmelo? That great cuckold of a Turkish thug called me a son of a whore, and nobody touches my mother. My mother works the land, she's no whore.)
—Giuannuzzu miu, tu t'á cammari... Chiddu è nu fetusu e figghiu-i-bona madri, però iddu è tuccu e mussummanu, e tu si sulu nu schiau cristianu... (My little Giovanni, you have to calm down. That guy is a filthy, stinking son of a bitch, but he is a Turk and a Muslim, and you are only a Christian slave.)
—Cammelu, ascuta a'mmia: a stu gran figghi-i-sugaminchia, u'mmazzu. Tuu giuru. (Carmelo, listen to me well: that son of a cocksucker — I'm going to kill him. I swear it to you.)
The old Messinese laughed, nervous and joyless. The words being exchanged in that hold were very serious ones, and could cost both their lives.
—Cettu, cettu, Giuanni, e comu no. (Sure, sure, Giovanni, of course.) Prima chi tu a chiddu u tocchi cu na sula manu, iddi, i tucchi, ti tagghiano i mani, i pedi, i ricchi e u nasu... (Before you so much as touch him with one hand, they — the Turks — will have already cut off your hands, feet, ears and nose.) —Carmelo added.
And he went on: Nu schiavu cristianu com'attia, mai e poi mai pote tuccari a nu mussummanu. Figghiu meu, tu u sai megghiu i mia chi è proibbidu. Ye na cosa inutili, è com'annari a'mmiscarici o' mari... (A Christian slave like you can never, ever lay a hand on a Muslim. My son, you know better than I do that it is forbidden: it is a useless thing, it's like going out to beat up the sea.)
Giovanni and Carmelo went on talking in their dialect a good while longer, for Sicilian and Calabrian are almost identical, interchangeable tongues. I'll translate for you from here on, because what comes next is a wise man explaining to another how the world works.
—Now listen to me, boy, because you're not going to like this —Carmelo told him—. From his point of view, and from the point of view of Turkish law, that man hasn't even offended you. To offend a man, you first have to recognize him as an equal man. And here you are not one: you are an object, a slave, a piece of property. That's why he slapped you and shoved you aside, the way you'd shove aside a dog or a rope.
Giovanni kept staring at the point of the gangway where the other man had disappeared.
—So you're saying there's nothing to be done?
—I didn't say that. —Carmelo leaned toward him—. I said that a Christian cannot attack a Muslim. But there is a door — there always has been — and you know it as well as I do, because they've been showing it to you for fourteen years, and for fourteen years you have said no.
—Don't say it, and don't even dream it!
—I don't need to say it out loud. Because I can see you're already thinking it yourself. —The old man lowered his voice—. Listen to me well, because the imam is not going to explain this to you. Out there you are not a man: you are another man's thing. A thing doesn't take revenge, boy — it gets broken and replaced. But a believer does. A believer can demand satisfaction from another believer. He can look him in the eye. He can call him to account.
—And my soul? And God the Father Almighty?
—God and your soul, you say? —Carmelo took a while to answer—. Your soul has been tied to a wooden bench for fourteen years, boy, and neither God nor anyone else has come down here to fetch it. I asked myself the same question once. I was your age. And do you know what I've learned in twenty years at the oar? That the sea doesn't tell one prayer from another. That the ones who pray to Allah and the ones who pray to Jesus suffer, sweat, row and die all to the same beat, and when the galley goes to the bottom of the sea, they all go down together — some in chains, some not.
Giovanni didn't answer.
—Think it over tonight —said the old man—. And if tomorrow you still want to kill him, don't do it as a slave. Do it as his equal. It's the only way.
That night, Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, son of Birno the sailor and Pippa the peasant woman, native of Le Castella, who was to have been a priest, did not sleep a wink.
And at dawn he asked to speak with the captain, who also served as the ship's imam, to recite before him that sentence of the Shahada and bind himself for life to Allah and Muhammad.
He renounced his faith. Not out of fear, nor for economic convenience or religious conviction. He did it only to be able to return the blow to the Turk and kill him — which is exactly what he did that very same day.
End of the invented scene. Now back to what is documented — and to the second scenario.
Second scenario: the house of Jafer Pasha
Italian tradition and the modern biography by the Italian historian Mirella Mafrici place the episode of the slap somewhat later, when Galeni had already moved from the oar to domestic service in the house of his master Jafer Pasha. During an altercation, that version says, Giovanni killed with a single punch the man who had slapped him. And that man was not a Turk — he was another slave. Apparently, a Neapolitan manservant.
The one who had already crossed
Let's stop here, because this detail changes everything and deserves that we reason it through together.
The sources say "Neapolitan slave" and add nothing more. But the logic of the episode forces one single conclusion: that man must already have been converted to Islam.
And the reasoning is very simple. If the offender had been a Christian captive like himself, Giovanni would not have needed to renounce his faith at all. Slaves, as we can all well imagine, fought among themselves daily, and that was a mere matter of domestic discipline in the master's hands, not of religious law. The legal mechanism whereby —"a Christian may never lay a hand on a Muslim, much less kill him"— only kicks in and bites if the other man was a Muslim.
And here it's worth undoing a very widespread error: converting to Islam very often did not automatically free the captive. In Barbary and Ottoman practice, the renegade improved his condition enormously and had freedom much closer at hand, but he could remain in servitude for years, until he paid off his debt to the master who had laid down money for him in the slave market. That is why the sources can call him a "Neapolitan slave" without that saying a single word about his faith — exactly as Cervantes calls Uluch Hasan Pasha a "Venetian renegade": an Italian who had already spent half his life as a Muslim, and who became governor and viceroy of Algiers years after him.
So this is the scene: two southern Italians plunged into the same hell. One had already crossed the line. The other had spent fourteen years refusing to cross it. And it was precisely the one who had already crossed the line who struck the one who had not.
Look closely at the mechanism, because it is as old as the world and hasn't changed a bit: the convert, the newcomer, always needs to constantly prove to his masters which side he is on, and the cheapest, most visible way to prove it is to turn with hatred on those who were once his own. And not on the enemy.
It isn't me saying so. It's Cervantes himself. And not from hearsay, but after spending five years a prisoner in Algiers in the hands of the Venetian renegade Hasan Pasha, whose real name was Andrés Celeste, and into whose hands the Spanish writer fell.
Miguel de Cervantes wrote that this Venetian Beylerbey (viceroy) was —paraphrasing— the most evil, sadistic, cruel son of a bitch of a demon ever seen upon this earth.
The school of Dragut
Be that as it may, once free —or at least no longer oar-meat—, Giovanni-Ali became a corsair. By 1541 he was already sailing in the fleet of Dragut Reis, the most feared seaman in the Mediterranean, of whom I already spoke in another article on this blog.
And here is where Cervantes's arithmetic doesn't add up, as I warned you above: if, as is certain, he is captured in Calabria in 1536, and in 1541, five years later, he is already sailing as a free man with Dragut, the fourteen years at the oar that the Quixote speaks of simply don't fit.
His career followed the classic path of the corsair who knows what he's doing: first he bought a share in a brigantine sailing out of Algiers, then he took enough booty to become owner and captain of his own galley, and he ended up with the reputation of being one of the boldest reis on the entire Barbary coast.
In 1565 he appeared at Malta. The chronicles of the Great Siege —the same ones I work with in Malta 1565 · The Great Siege of Malta— record his arrival on June 27 with four corsair ships and six hundred levend fighters.
And when his master Dragut died from the impact of a projectile from his own artillery, it was Uluch Ali who received from the sultan the viceroyalty of Tripoli in his place. He departed on July 25 with fifteen galleys, carrying two things aboard: Dragut's corpse, to bury him in his own city, and the pashas' order to send to Malta all the gunpowder and munitions of Tripoli that Dragut, while alive, had refused to hand over.
From there, his rise is unstoppable. In 1568 he is named Beylerbey of Algiers —that is, viceroy. In January 1570, he seized Tunis, marching overland with some five thousand men and expelling the previous king, Hamid.
In thirty-four years he had gone from being chained to an oar to governing the entire North African coast.
The Battle of Lepanto: how to come out of a lost battle a winner
On October 7, 1571, in the Gulf of Patras, the most famous naval battle of the sixteenth century was fought — and the greatest defeat in Ottoman history.
Uluch Ali commanded the left wing of the sultan's fleet, and it was the only one that managed to return to Constantinople (Istanbul). Facing him was the Genoese Gian Andrea Doria, great-nephew of the grand admiral Andrea Doria, one of the finest seamen in Christendom.
And while the Ottoman center collapsed and its commander-in-chief Ali Pasha was killed —his head ended up displayed on a pike—, the Calabrian did the only thing that could be done: he kept his squadron together.
He outmaneuvered Doria. He broke through the Christian line. And he captured the most symbolic prize of the entire day: the flagship of the Knights of Malta, with its great standard. The very Order that six years earlier had repelled him at Malta.
When defeat became evident, he neither went down with the rest nor let himself be taken. He cut the towing cable of the Maltese flagship he was hauling —thereby renouncing the material trophy in order to save his ships— and pulled his squadron and his men out of the disaster. On the way to Constantinople he kept picking up scattered galleys and survivors.
He reached the capital of the empire with eighty-seven ships.
More than a hundred and thirty Ottoman vessels had been captured or sunk that day. He appeared before Sultan Selim II not as a defeated man in flight, but as the man who had saved what remained of the fleet. And he handed him the great standard of the Knights of Malta.
The sultan then granted him the honorific title of Kılıç —Sword—, and on October 29, 1571, twenty-two days after the greatest naval catastrophe in Ottoman history, he named him Kapudan Pasha: Grand Admiral of the empire's entire fleet.
From that moment on, the fisherman's son from Le Castella stopped being called Uluch Ali (Ali the renegade) and was known definitively as Kılıç Ali Pasha. Ali the Sword.
The logistical miracle
What he did next is, technically, more impressive than Lepanto.
In Europe, people celebrated for months that Ottoman naval power was destroyed forever. Te Deums were sung, paintings were painted, medals were struck.
Kılıç Ali Pasha, meanwhile, got to work. And in less than a year he rebuilt the entire fleet.
He did not limit himself to copying what was lost: he improved the design. He ordered heavier ships built, inspired by the Venetian galleasses —the ones that had mauled the Ottomans at Lepanto—, more powerful artillery for the galleys, and firearms for the embarked infantry.
In June 1572, barely eight months after the disaster, he put to sea with two hundred and fifty galleys and a cloud of smaller vessels, looking for a rematch. He found the Christian fleet anchored in the Morea, on the Greek peninsula of the Peloponnese, and tried to draw it out into open water with quick, successive thrusts. He did not succeed: the Christians, chastened in reverse, were too prudent to let themselves be enveloped.
But the message was clear. Lepanto had changed almost nothing. The Ottoman Empire was still master of the eastern Mediterranean, and in 1574 it retook Tunis from the Spanish.
Kılıç Ali remained Grand Admiral until his death, on June 21, 1587, in Istanbul. Sixteen years in the post.
The ex-slave's mosque
With the money, the influence and the power he wielded as Kapudan Pasha, he commissioned the greatest Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan, to build a great religious complex in the Tophane district of Istanbul.
The Kılıç Ali Pasha Mosque still exists and can be visited. Sinan filled in the shore beside the strait with rocks in order to raise there, by the sea, a complex that would include a Quranic school or madrasa, a public bath with hammam, and a great fountain still admired for its elegance.
And there is a tradition about its construction that, true or not, says a great deal about how he was remembered: it is told that, having been a captive himself, he saw to it that the prisoners who worked on the site were always treated well, with justice and humanity.
Giovanni is buried there, in Tophane.
But what truly closes this story is not the mosque; it is the fact that beside it he ordered a new village built, to which he gave the name La Nuova Calabria. The New Calabria.
And when he died, in June 1587, he left everything to his slaves.
They say he never returned to Le Castella — unless the legend is true that, already an admiral, he made a clandestine voyage to the Calabrian coast for the sole purpose of embracing his mother once more. That he landed by night, without an army, without banners and without corsairs. Just to see her. And that Pippa de Cicco, peasant woman, widow of a poor sailor, cursed him for the decisions he had made and for having abandoned the Christian faith. There is not a single document to support it. But as tragedy, it is perfect. And that is why in Calabria they have been telling it for four hundred years. In the main square of Le Castella there is a bust of him, and in Isola di Capo Rizzuto (the Calabrian municipality to which Le Castella belongs) there is a square that bears his name: Piazzetta Uccialì.
His own people, in the end, wound up reclaiming him the way important sons are always reclaimed, one way or another: by putting up a statue of them.
Sources and references
- Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Part One, ch. XL —the Captive's Tale.
- Francesco Balbi da Correggio, The True Account of All That Happened on the Island of Malta in the Year 1565 (1568).
- Mirella Vera Mafrici, Uccialì. Dalla Croce alla Mezzaluna. Un grande ammiraglio ottomano nel Mediterraneo del Cinquecento (Rubbettino).
- Gustavo Valente, Vita di Occhialì (Ceschina, Milan, 1960).
- Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
- Svat Soucek, "'Uludj 'Ali," in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Brill.
Per Aspera ad Astra
David S. Matrecano
Ibiza, August 2026
