sailors, but then turned privateers in the Mediterranean to counteract the privateering of the Knights Hospitaller (Knights of St John) who were based on the island of Rhodes (until 1522). Oruç and Ilyas operated in the Levant, between Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt. Khizr operated in the Aegean Sea and based his operations mostly in Thessaloniki. Ishak, the eldest, remained on Mytilene and was involved with the financial affairs of the family business. Death of Ilyas, captivity, and liberation of Oruç Oruç was a very successful seaman. He also learned to speak Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, and Arabic early in his career. While returning from a trading expedition in Tripoli, Lebanon, with his younger brother, Ilyas, they were attacked by the Knights of St John. Ilyas was killed in the fight, and Oruç was wounded. Their father's boat was captured, and Oruç was taken as a prisoner and detained in Bodrum Castle at Bodrum for nearly three years. Upon learning the location of his brother, Khizr went to Bodrum and managed to help Oruç escape. Oruç, the corsair Oruç later went to Antalya, where he was given 18 galleys by Şehzade Korkut, an Ottoman prince and governor of the city, and charged with fighting against the Knights of St John, who were inflicting serious damage on Ottoman shipping and trade. In the following years, when Korkut became governor of Manisa, he gave Oruç a larger fleet of 24 galleys at the port of İzmir and ordered him to participate in the Ottoman naval expedition to Apulia in Italy, where Oruç bombarded several coastal castles and captured two ships. On his way back to Lesbos, he stopped at Euboea and captured three galleons and another ship. Reaching Mytilene with these captured vessels, Oruç learned that Korkut, who was the brother of the new Ottoman sultan Selim I, had fled to Egypt to avoid being killed because of succession disputes – a common practice at that time. Fearing trouble due to his well-known association with the exiled Ottoman prince, Oruç sailed to Egypt, where he met Korkut in Cairo and managed to get an audience with the Mamluk Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, who gave him another ship and entrusted him with the task of raiding the coasts of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean that were controlled by Christians. After spending the winter in Cairo, he set sail from Alexandria and frequently operated