Barbary Corsairs — Mediterranean Piracy
The corsairs of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Salé raided Mediterranean and Atlantic shipping and coastlines for three centuries and enslaved somewhere between a million and a million and a quarter Europeans. They were not pirates in the strict sense. They operated under commissions from the Ottoman regencies of North Africa, paid a share to the ruler, and were fighting a religious war that mirrored the one the Knights of Malta and the Spanish galleys were conducting from the other side, taking Muslim captives in the same numbers. The technology that made the Atlantic raids possible was the sailing ship rather than the galley, introduced to Algiers around 1600 by a Dutch convert called Simon Danser. Raids reached Iceland in 1627 and the Irish village of Baltimore in 1631, where almost the whole population was carried off. Captives were ransomed, sold, put to the oar, or set to labour; religious orders in Spain, France and Italy existed specifically to collect ransoms, and consuls kept lists. Some converted and prospered, and a striking number of corsair captains were European renegades. States found it cheaper to pay tribute than to fight, and the young United States paid a fifth of its federal budget in one year before fighting two wars over it, which is where the Marine Corps hymn gets its shores of Tripoli. The French took Algiers in 1830 and the trade ended. The numbers are a corrective rather than a competition: the Atlantic trade carried more than ten times as many Africans westward over the same centuries, and the Mediterranean slaving ran in both directions between states that each considered the other the aggressor. Cervantes spent five years as a captive in Algiers and wrote about it.
- Year: 1580 CE
- Category: Military
