Barbarossa, the Redbeard, may have been a mangled Baba, meaning father
The name Barbarossa sounds like Italian for Redbeard, and Europeans took it that way. One account says it began as Baba Oruç, Father Oruç, an honorific earned by a corsair who ferried Muslims out of Christian Spain. His younger brother Khizr inherited the name and became the Ottoman admiral who ruled the Mediterranean.
Khizr was born on Lesbos sometime between 1466 and 1483, one of four sons of an Ottoman cavalryman turned potter and a Greek Orthodox mother, the widow of a priest. The father bought a boat to sell his pots, and all four brothers took to the sea. They became privateers in answer to the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes, who preyed on Ottoman shipping. In one clash the Knights killed the brother Ilyas and captured Oruç, who spent four years as a galley slave until his father paid a ransom.
Oruç rebuilt his fortunes with galleys supplied by an Ottoman prince, then moved west to Djerba and the Tunisian port of La Goulette, paying the ruler of Tunis a third of the spoils. The brothers captured papal galleys and Spanish warships, and between 1504 and 1510 Oruç carried Mudéjars, Muslims living under Christian rule in Spain, to North Africa. In 1512 he lost his left arm in battle and wore a silver replacement, which earned him a second nickname, Silver Arm.
In 1516 the brothers seized Algiers from the Spanish. Oruç proclaimed himself sultan, then shrewdly handed the city to the Ottoman sultan Selim I in 1517 in exchange for troops, galleys and cannon, becoming its governor. Spanish forces and their local allies killed Oruç and another brother after a 20-day defence of Tlemcen in 1518. Khizr pledged himself to Selim, received the title of beylerbey, and took on the Barbarossa name along with the mission; the sultan also gave him the honorific Hayreddin, meaning roughly best of the faith.
He retook Tlemcen, beat back a Spanish-Italian attempt on Algiers in 1519, and kept bringing Spanish Muslims across, building a loyal following. In 1529 he captured the Spanish-held fortress on the Peñón of Algiers. Suleiman the Magnificent named him grand admiral in 1533, and his victory over the Holy League at Preveza in 1538 secured Ottoman supremacy at sea. He retired to Constantinople and died in 1546.
Source: Hayreddin Barbarossa
