Sinan Reis

Sinan Reis (d. 1546), also known as Ciphut Sinan and Sinan the Chief, was a Barbary corsair and Ottoman naval commander who served as Hayreddin Barbarossa's second in command in the western Mediterranean.¹²

Sinan Reis served under Hayreddin Barbarossa and became his foremost deputy in Ottoman naval operations in the western Mediterranean.¹ He fought at the Battle of Preveza in 1538, the great Ottoman naval victory that secured Ottoman supremacy in the Mediterranean for decades.² Sinan Reis died in 1546.¹³

European references of his own time repeatedly call Sinan "the Jew": English state papers of 1533 describe him as a famous Jewish pirate of Barbary, and a Portuguese report of 1528 calls him "the Great Jew".¹ On this basis Edward Kritzler, in Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean (2009), held that Sinan was born to a Sephardic Jewish family exiled from Spain or Portugal which later moved to Ottoman Smyrna.⁴ The contemporary Spanish chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, however, explained the epithet quite differently, arguing that "the Jew" did not denote Jewish origin but marked Sinan's escape from Christian ships on which he had been a captive.⁵ Ottoman sources are silent about Sinan's origins, so his origin and personal faith are left unsettled in this record.¹