The fall of La Goletta and the fort of Tunis in 1574 is a turning point in Captain Viedma’s account of Christian captivity: a military defeat that destroys two Spanish strongholds, scatters their defenders, and brings one of them, Don Pedro de Aguilar, onto the same galley bench as the narrator. The episode is not presented as an isolated siege. It follows the struggle over Tunis and the shifting alliances of Mediterranean war, and it gives the captive’s personal history a larger setting of lost fortifications, forced labor, and uncertain survival.

Strategic background

After Don John of Austria had seized Tunis in 1573 and installed Muley Hamet, the Ottoman ruler made peace with the Venetians. In 1574, he turned against the Goletta and the fort that Don John had left partly built near Tunis. Captain Viedma places their capture within this renewed campaign: the two positions were held by a small Christian force, while a much larger Ottoman army gathered around them. His account estimates the besieging force at 75,000 regular soldiers and more than 400,000 Moors and Arabs from across Africa, alongside extensive munitions, siege engines, and pioneers. These figures convey the immense disparity as the narrator understood it; they are part of his testimony, not an independently established count.

The narrative also addresses a disagreement over the defenders’ decision to remain inside the strongholds. Some believed the soldiers should have waited in the open at the landing place instead of shutting themselves in at La Goletta. Captain Viedma rejects that criticism as uninformed: with barely 7,000 soldiers between the Goletta and the fort, he argues, the defenders could not reasonably have expected to meet the vastly larger force in the open. Nor, in his view, could an unrelieved fortress hold indefinitely when surrounded by determined enemies on their own territory. His account therefore presents the loss as the result of overwhelming circumstances rather than a simple failure of courage or judgment.

The fall of La Goletta

La Goletta, long regarded as impregnable, fell first. Captain Viedma attributes its collapse to the way the surrounding desert terrain could be used for siege works. Water could be found at a depth of two palms, while the Ottoman force found none even at two yards; nevertheless, the besiegers used sandbags to raise their works until they stood above the fortifications. From this elevated position, they could command the walls and sweep the defenders’ position. The account emphasizes the practical force of that adaptation: a stronghold’s reputation and its walls could not compensate for an enemy able to reshape the ground around it.

The narrator specifically resists the notion that the Goletta’s defenders simply failed to do their duty. In his telling, they did what they could and should have done, but the siege works made the position untenable. The fall also carries a broader political and financial implication. Captain Viedma recalls the opinion that the Goletta had become an expensive possession, maintained principally to preserve the memory of its capture by Charles V. He says that he, too, came to regard its destruction as a special mercy to Spain, since the stronghold had consumed money without serving a greater purpose. This judgment complicates the account’s grief over military defeat: the loss is grave, yet the place’s long cost to Spain makes its fall appear to some as a release from a burdensome commitment.

Resistance at the fort

The nearby fort was taken only after sustained resistance. Captain Viedma reports twenty-two general assaults and more than 25,000 enemy dead. Of the 300 defenders who remained alive, he says, not one was unwounded. The figures make the fort’s capture a costly victory and give the episode a different character from the fall of La Goletta: the latter is explained through the besiegers’ command of the terrain, while the fort’s loss is accompanied by a prolonged, determined defense.

A small tower in the middle of the lagoon, commanded by Don Juan Zanoguera, capitulated on terms. The principal commanders met harsher fates. Don Pedro Puertocarrero, commandant of the Goletta, was taken prisoner and died of grief on the journey to Constantinople. Gabrio Cerbellon, the fort’s Milanese commandant, was also captured. Their outcomes show how the fall extended beyond the loss of ground: command, captivity, and death continued to shape the consequences after the fighting ended.

Captives and the afterlife of the defeat

Among those captured at the fort was Don Pedro de Aguilar, an ensign from Andalusia whom Captain Viedma describes as a respected soldier with an exceptional gift for poetry. The capture brought him to the narrator’s galley and bench, where both became slaves to the same master. Before they left port, Don Pedro composed two sonnets as epitaphs, one for La Goletta and one for the fort. In Captain Viedma’s account, these poems turn the loss of the positions into a record carried by their survivors: the places fall, but a captive’s act of remembrance travels with him.

When the captive mentions Don Pedro’s name, Don Fernando and his companions recognize it and ask what became of him. Captain Viedma can report only that, after two years in Constantinople, Don Pedro escaped disguised as an Arnaut with a Greek spy. He does not know whether the escape ultimately succeeded; seeing the Greek in Constantinople a year later gives him grounds only to suppose that Don Pedro may have regained his liberty. The event thus ends not with a secure account of every survivor’s fate but with a narrow, uncertain hope.

The episode belongs to the story within a story told by Captain Viedma, whose own experience of captivity frames the military history. In the wider account, Christian captives are held in a bano, and those listed for ransom occupy a distinct position from captives put to public labor. Don Pedro’s capture connects that system directly to the defeat: the fall of the fort moves a named defender from military service into enslavement, where poetry, comradeship, and the possibility of escape become part of the aftermath. The siege is therefore both a report of strategic loss and a hinge in the narrator’s account of how war continues to govern lives after a fortress has fallen.