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Many ex-Spanish Muslims became Barbarossa’s associates, led by the noble girl Aisha, whom we saw leaving Granada in 1492 with the last amir. When the noble refugees arrived in Morocco, now beset with factional war, her father married her to the potentate of the port of Tétouan. When the husband died, Aisha took over Tétouan as Lady of Power, Sayyida al-Hurra, fortifying the town and creating a fleet that raided Christian shipping – known to Christians as the Pirate Queen. Basing themselves on the island of Djerba, the brothers raided Italy and Spain, seizing Christian children and girls to sell in the slave markets. Raids often enslaved as many as 6,000. The brothers captured African ports, first Oran then Algiers and Bougie, where Oruç lost his arm. When he replaced it with a silver prosthetic, Turks called him Silver Arm. Offering Algiers to Selim the Grim, who accepted it as a sanjak (province), Silver Arm infuriated Charles, who ordered attacks on Oran and Tlemcen during which Silver Arm was killed. The last brother Khidr, red-bearded Barbarossa, took command. Sending ships to aid the new sultan Suleiman’s attack on Rhodes, Barbarossa again raided Italy and Spain; his captains hit northern France, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight, while he made Algiers into a luxurious slaving boomtown – the start of what Christians called the Barbary Coast.

When Barbarossa, chief admiral and governor of north Africa and Rhodes, left Istanbul, he pursued Doria, landing at Ostia, the port of Rome, and capturing Capri (he built Castello Barbarossa there, whose ruins still stand). Thanks to her intelligence network operated through her Jewish femme d’affaires Strongila, it was Hürrem who informed Suleiman of Barbarossa’s first victories.

Faced with a Habsburg counter-offensive, Ibrahim pulled off a treaty with France against Charles, partly negotiated by Barbarossa, who visited Toulon with his fleet. Charles V dispatched an envoy to offer Barbarossa the lordship of Africa or assassinate him. Barbarossa beheaded the hitman.

In 1535, Charles struck back, seizing Tunis while Suleiman and Ibrahim were leading an offensive against the Safavi shah of Iran, Tahmasp, capturing Baghdad. But Ibrahim, after ten years of viceregal power, had grown too comfortable with Suleiman, and too cosmopolitan, even for the easy-going Ottomans. The longer a minister is in office, the more enemies are made. Ibrahim was not shy of his magnificence. ‘Though I am the sultan’s slave, whatsoever I say is done. I can at a stroke make a pasha out of a stableboy, I can give kingdoms and provinces to whomsoever I choose,’ he told foreign envoys. Outside his palace on the hippodrome, Ibrahim erected the statues of Hercules, Diana and Apollo captured in Hungary, which shocked the iconoclast Muslims. ‘Two Abrahams came into the world,’ joked the poet Figani, ‘one a destroyer of idols, the other an idol worshipper.’ Ibrahim had Figani strangled. Although Ibrahim had a male Italian lover, he had long loved the sultan’s sister Hatice, sending her poems – without Suleiman’s permission. On campaign he let his flunkies call him ‘sultan’. He had executed a rival vizier – and he had clashed with Hürrem. ‘An explanation has been requested for why I am angry with the pasha,’ she had written to Suleiman in 1526. ‘It will be heard. For now, send greetings to the pasha if he’ll accept them.’ Suleiman let Ibrahim marry his sister, with a fiesta in the hippodrome. But the vizier was close to the sultan’s eldest son Mustafa, whose likely succession would be a death threat to Hürrem’s sons.

On the Ides of March, 1536, the padishah and vizier broke the Ramadan fast together. Then Ibrahim went to bed in the inner Topkapı. Some time in the night, Suleiman sent his killers, the Tongueless, into Ibrahim’s apartments where they garrotted his childhood friend. The Makbul (favourite), wits said, had become Maktul (killed), buried in an unmarked grave. Hürrem’s position was enhanced: Suleiman appointed Rüstem, their son-in-law, as grand vizier. His wife, their favourite daughter Mihrimah (Son of Moons), would become an Ottoman potentate in her own right.