Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon
French soldier, scientist, explorer, adventurer and entrepreneur
1510 CE to 1571 CE
Nicolas Durand, sieur de Villegaignon, also Villegagnon (Villegaignon, Seine et Marne, France, 1510 – Beauvais, 9 January 1571) is a Commander of the Knights of Malta, and later a French naval officer (vice-admiral of Brittany) who attempta to help the Huguenots in France escape persecution.
A notable public figure in his time, Villegaignon is a mixture of soldier, scientist, explorer, adventurer and entrepreneur.
He fights pirates in the Mediterranean and participates in several wars.
Villegagnon is a nephew of Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Order of Malta.
He is ordained as a Knight of the Order in 1521.
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The Ottoman invasion of the island of Gozo takes place in July 1551, following an unsuccessful attempt to conquer nearby Malta on July 18th.
The Commander of the Ottoman fleet is Sinan Pasha, accompanied by Sala Reis and Turgut Reis.
The Ottomans had initially landed on Malta, at Marsamuschetto, with a force of ten thousand men, and marched upon Birgu and Fort St. Angelo, but resistance was strong, and the Ottomans had had to retreat.
They therefore turn their attention to Mdina, looting and burning the villages on the way.
Meanwhile, the Knights in Mdina, under the command of Fra Villeganion, ask the people living in the villages to seek refuge in the city and to help defend it.
When the Ottomans arrive they discovered a large garrison defending the city, and decide against their plan of attack as they did not want to fight a long siege.
A relief fleet meanwhile attacks the Ottoman ships anchored at Marsamxett.
The Ottoman force now decides to attack nearby Gozo island.
After a few days of bombardment, the castle of Gozo, under the command of Governor Gelatian de Sessa, capitulates.
About three hundred people escape from the Citadel by climbing down its walls and hiding from the Ottomans.
Between five and six thousand Christians, including Governor de Sessa and the Knights are taken captive and end up in slavery, being transported to Tripoli on July 30th.
The Ottomans only spare a monk and forty elderly Gozitans.
The Spanish Habsburgs had established a fort in Tripoli, modern Libya, in 1510 under Charles V, and remitted it the Knights of Malta in 1530.
The city is under the command of Father Gaspard de Vallier, with thirty knights (some authors say two hundred) and six hundred and thirty Calabrian and Sicilian mercenaries.
The Ottomans had had a base since 1531 in the city of Tajura, twenty kilometers to the east, where Khayr al-Din Barbarossa had been based.
The Ottomans encircle the fort at the beginning of August 1551, and establish three batteries of twelve guns each.
The Ottoman Siege of Tripoli is the first step of the all-out Italian War of 1551–59 in the European theater.
The French galleys of Marseilles are ordered to join the Ottoman fleet.
The French Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Gabriel de Luetz, Baron et Seigneur d'Aramon et de Vallabregues (often also abbreviated to Gabriel d'Aramon), joins the Ottoman fleet at Tripoli, with two galleys and a galliot.
The declared mission of the ambassador is to dissuade the Ottomans from capturing the city, at the request of the Grand Master of Malta, as Malta had not been identified as an enemy in the Franco-Ottoman alliance against the Habsburgs.
According to later reports, when Sinan Pasha and Dragut refused to lift the siege, on grounds that they were under order to eradicate the Knights of Malta from the African continent, d'Aramon threatened to sail to Constantinople to appeal to Suleiman, but he was then barred from leaving the city until the end of the siege.
Soon the soldiers in the fort mutiny, and negotiations for surrender start.
The siege, which culminates in a six-day bombardment and the surrender of the city to Sinan Pasha on August 15, succeeds an earlier attack on Malta in July, which the Knights had repelled, and the successful Invasion of Gozo, in which five thousand or more Christian captives had been taken and brought on galleys to the location of Tripoli.
The Knights, many of them French, are returned to Malta upon the intervention of the French ambassador, shipped onboard his galleys, while the mercenaries are enslaved.
Murād Agha, the Ottoman commander of Tajura since 1536, is named as the Pashalik of the city.
Nicolas de Villegagnon, the future explorer of Brazil, is present at the siege, and will write an account about it in 1553.
Ambassador d'Aramon, in Malta, writes a letter to Henry II about his Tripoli intervention.
The role of d'Aramon is widely criticized by Charles V and Julius III on suspicion that he had encouraged the Ottomans to take the city.
It appears that d'Aramon had participated in the victory banquet of the Ottomans, raising further suspicion on his role in the siege, and leading to claims by Charles V that France has participated to the siege.
D'Aramon in any case has a special relationship with the Ottomans, and is clearly aware that the fall of Tripoli represents a major setback for Charles V. Upon his return to Malta, Gaspard de Vallier comes under heavy criticism by the Grand Master Juan de Homedes y Coscon, who wishes to assign all the blame for the defeat on him.
He is brought in front of a tribunal, and stripped from the habit and cross of the Order.
However, Nicolas de Villegagnon, who had helped repel the Ottomans at Malta, staunchly defends de Vallier and exposes Homedes’s duplicity.
De Vallier will later rehabilitated by Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette.
Villegaignon will go on to became an important historical figure in the attempt by king Henry II to build a "France Antarctique", by invading present-day Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1555 with a fleet of two ships and six hundred soldiers and colonists, mainly French Huguenots and Swiss Calvinists who seek to escape Catholic persecution in Europe.
Coligny has secretly focused on protecting his coreligionists, by attempting to establish colonies abroad in which Huguenots could find a refuge.
He organizes the expedition of a colony of Huguenots to Brazil, under the leadership of his friend and navy colleague, Vice-Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, who establishes the colony of France Antarctique in Rio de Janeiro, in 1555.
Two ships carrying five to six hundred French soldiers and Huguenots dispatched by Admiral Gaspard de Coligny establish a colony, to the great displeasure of the Catholic Portuguese in Brazil, at the site of present Rio de Janeiro in 1555.
Led by French admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, who desires to help the Huguenots find a refuge against persecution, the settlers occupy one of the islands of Guanabara Bay, now called Villegagnon Island.
Villegagnon builds Fort Coligny on the island when attempting to establish the France Antarctique colony.
To the still largely undeveloped mainland village, Villegaignon gives the name of Henriville, in honor of Henry II, the King of France, who also had known of and approved the expedition, and has provided the fleet for the trip.
Villegaignon secures his position by making an alliance with the Tamoio and Tupinambá Indians of the region, who are fighting the Portuguese.
The French crown will fail, however, to make good use of Villegaignon's exploits to expand the reach of the French kingdom into the New World, as is being done at this time with the claims of Jacques Cartier in the present-day province of Québec, Canada.
All of these settlements are in violation of the Papal bull of 1493, which had divided the New World between Spain and Portugal, a division defined more exactly in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Villegaignon, unchallenged by the Portuguese, who had initially taken little notice of his landing, endeavors to expand the colony by calling for more colonists in 1556.
He sends one of his ships, the Grande Roberge, to Honfleur, entrusted with letters to King Henry II, Gaspard de Coligny and according to some accounts, the Protestant leader John Calvin.
The king of France has financed and prepared three ships and put them under the command of Sieur De Bois le Comte, a nephew of Villegagnon, after the one ship had been sent to France to ask for additional support.
They Huguenot émigrés are joined by fourteen Calvinists from Geneva, led by Philippe de Corguilleray, including theologians Pierre Richier and Guillaume Chartrier.
The new colonists, numbering around three hundred, include five young women to be wed, ten boys to be trained as translators, as well as fourteen Calvinists sent by Calvin, and also Jean de Léry, who will later write an account of the colony.
They arrive in March 1557 on the Petite Roberge, with eighty soldiers and sailors led by Vice Admiral Sieur De Bois le Comte; the Grande Roberge, with about one hundred and twenty on board, captained by Sieur de Sainte-Marie dit l'Espine, and the Rosée, with about ninety people, led by Captain Rosée.
Doctrinal disputes had arisen between Villegagnon and the Calvinists, especially in relation to the Eucharist, and as a result the Calvinists had been banished from the island in October 155.
They settle among the Tupinamba until January 1558, when some of them manage to return to France by ship together with Jean de Léry; five others choose to return to the island, where three of them are drowned by Villegagnon for refusing to recant.
Villegaignon returns to France in 1558, disgusted with the religious tension that exists between French Protestants and Catholics, who have come also with the second group.
Mem de Sá, the new Governor-General of Brazil, has received from the Portuguese government the command to expel the French.
He attacks on March 15, 1560, with a fleet of twenty-six warships and two thousand soldiers, and destroys Fort Coligny within three days, but is unable to drive off their inhabitants and defenders, because they escape to the mainland with the help of the Tamoios, where they continue to live and to work.
The fort is destroyed and the first Portuguese mass is celebrated on the Island on March 17, 1560.
Mem de Sá's victory had been facilitated by the information about the fort which had been provided by Jean de Cointra and Jacques Le Balleur, French dissenters who had escaped from Villegaignon.
The French have continued to attack Portuguese shipping and to maintain interest in a permanent colony.
Noting that Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay has not been occupied, Vice Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a French navigator, leads a mix of Huguenots and Catholic here in 1555 to establish a colony, France Antarctique, on Ilha de Sergipe.
His Utopian dream of finding a religious refuge for Protestants and Catholics fails after a decade.
Despite their good relations with the natives, the French cannot withstand the Portuguese assaults that begin in 1565.
This year, to ensure future control of the bay, Mem de Sá founds the city of Rio de Janeiro, which becomes the second royal captaincy.