When Antibes was bought by France from its financially straitened owners, a branch of the Grimaldi family, it had already become the front line on a hotly contested border with the ruthless Savoy dynasty, a kind of southern version of Prussia. The topography of the town became permanently changed, both through bombardment and through refortification. During this time, the anchorage in the bay of Cannes, sheltered by the Iles Lérins, became a strategically vital asset, pushing the projection of naval power west from Marseilles and Toulon nearer towards the pesky enemy town and port of Nice and its safe anchorage of Villefranche.
In the mid-sixteenth century, 1543 to be exact, the French king François Ier had the bright idea of hiring Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Turkish admiral, along with his fleet of 200 galleys and 14,000 of his formidable Janissary marines. Their job was basically to lay waste to the Christian litoral, killing and enslaving the infidels in the name of his most catholic majesty. They did this in a wide arc from Spain to Naples and beyond.
Thus it was that a Turkish fleet, bent on rapine and ethnic cleansing, lay peaceably at anchor off Antibes: peaceably as long as they were paid and fed. As a result, one of the earliest surviving images of Antibes is by the hand of a Turkish officer. The BH noted, however, that the roofscape is more typical of Constantinople than Antibes.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire