Use logo for “THE OTHER COLUMN”

Talk about a marketing nightmare.

Suppose you’d spent more than 10 years researching and writing a laudatory biography of a fascinating historical figure, one who’s mostly been overlooked by other writers. You send the finished product to a publisher, but even as it’s being considered, world events conspire to paint your hero as a fiend and the ancestor of even worse fiends. Suddenly, nobody wants to read anything nice about this guy, even if it’s true.

The manuscript languishes in your desk drawer for a few years, before you decide it’s still worth putting before the public, even if you have to pay for it yourself. So you sign a deal with one of those print-on-demand outfits, and before long, you’re holding the book in your hands.

Now, if there were just some way to sell a few copies to somebody besides relatives or close friends who owe you favors or people you can blackmail. But, like the ill-fated authors of such vanished volumes as “Kim Jong Il Is Really A Sweetie Pie” and “You Can Always Trust Good Ol’ Jack Abramoff,” you’ve fallen victim to a shift in popular perception that’s beyond your control. The unsold copies of your book seem destined for the bargain table at rummage sales, right next to “Johnny Damon: King of Red Sox Nation” and “How the Baldacci Administration Fixed the Mess at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.”

This is the unfortunate situation in which Rodney S. Quinn of Gorham finds himself. Quinn served as Maine’s secretary of state from 1979 to 1989 and was one of the architects of the Democratic Party’s long dominance in the state Legislature. But he’s also an amateur historian of some note, with a particular interest in the Middle East. Even before he retired from public office, he was hard at work uncovering the almost-forgotten story of a 16th-century Mediterranean pirate who became his era’s master of maritime warfare and a key figure in the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.

Quinn’s book is called “Barbarosa: The Sword of Islam.”

You can see the problem. Muslim fighters, particularly those who specialized in pillaging Christian ships and cities and enslaving the inhabitants, are not held in high regard in the United States at the present time. It doesn’t much matter to the book-buying public that Barbarosa might have had good cause for his campaign of terror and destruction. Presumably, Osama bin Laden is also convinced he’s justified in his terrorism, but that doesn’t mean the market is ready for “The Al Quaeda Guide to Personal Fitness and Weight Loss.”

So, I don’t expect to see Quinn’s book on any best-seller lists. Which is too bad, because it contains a lot of insight into the roots of the current conflict in the Middle East. As the Washington Post reported recently, many fundamentalists in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other countries are driven by the goal of re-establishing an Islamic Empire spanning the Mediterranean and much of Asia, just like the one Barbarosa helped put in place.

That might sound like a dry topic, but Quinn never allows tedium to set in, employing a breezy writing style that reads more like a novel than a work of academic history. He also doesn’t allow more than a dozen pages to pass without inserting large doses of sex (much of it fictional), violence (all too much of it real) or weirdness (Charles I, king of Spain and Barbarosa’s sworn enemy, was, “A man in whose blood the poison of insanity ran – his mother spent the last quarter of her life gibbering under restraint, and his grandson boiled and ate his own shoes”).

But what really drives the story is the character of Barbarosa. Most reference works barely mention him, noting only that he was a Barbary pirate and twice encountered and defeated the great Italian naval commander Andrea Doria. That’s a little like sloughing off Abe Lincoln as a log splitter who once won a couple of debates. A Google search for Barbarosa turned up dozens of sites dealing with a 1982 western starring Willie Nelson, a lot of links to a punk band from Atlanta and some Web pages dealing with a military operation during World War II (which was named after a different guy).

Barbarosa (his real name was Khizr) was born on a Greek island around 1475, the son of a former member of the Ottoman sultan’s elite fighting corps and a Christian mother. As a teenager, he joined his older brother (who was the original Barbarosa, which means “red beard”) as a pirate, preying on Venetian and Spanish ships in the Mediterranean. A friend in Istanbul helped him earn a place at an elite school, where he learned not only fighting skills, but engineering, military strategy and politics. He then rejoined his brother, preying on Christian shipping and eventually conquering entire kingdoms in North Africa.

Faced with a growing military threat from Spain, he swore allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, which gave him access to money, troops and ships. After his brother’s death, he assumed his nickname and launched successful naval operations and adroit political maneuvers that allowed him to expand the Islamic empire into much of the western Mediterranean and return loads of booty and Christian slaves to the sultan. As a reward, Barbarosa was promoted to admiral of the fleet and eventually became the third highest-ranking official in the empire. Along the way, he revolutionized warfare at sea, inventing new strategies and employing improved technology to defeat the world’s greatest naval powers.

He also, according to Quinn, had more sex than a porn star, married more wives than Donald Trump – although to be fair to The Donald, he’s limited to one at a time, while Barbarosa could have as many as he wanted – and drank more wine than a boatload of Minnesota Vikings on an off-week binge. It soon becomes apparent that for a guy called “The Sword of Islam,” Barbarosa wasn’t a particularly observant Muslim. But the religious leaders of his day were more tolerant of such shortcomings than their modern equivalents, and he never suffered for his indulgences.

Quinn’s book does have some faults. He skips around in the narrative to no apparent purpose. The first time we meet Barbarosa is late in his career, during a particularly violent episode that does little to illuminate his character or achievements. Quinn also fills in holes in history with invented segments, which, while entertaining, are not as clearly delineated from the factual material as scholars might wish. He sometimes drifts into long discussions of issues that have little to do with his story and appear to be included only to titillate (an explanation of how eunuchs are created is not recommended for the squeamish). And he seems to go out of his way to be insulting to women (“Women offer green meadows of sex on which rulers and rich men may graze”), gays (who he seems to blame for the decline of the Ottoman Empire) and blacks (who are described as having “coarse” features when compared to Arabs and Europeans). It’s not the 16th century anymore, Rod.

Despite these slips, the book is, for the most part, entertaining and educational.

It just doesn’t seem to be salable – even if Oprah endorsed it.

Rodney S. Quinn’s “Barbarosa: The Sword of Islam” can be ordered at www.trafford.com/05-1965. Al Diamon, whose column on almost anything appears monthly, can be e-mailed at ishmaelia@gwi.net.

Copy the Story Link