THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS

Barbary corsairs weren’t just pirates. They were part of a larger enterprise.

There was a religious element to that enterprise: attacking European shipping and settlements was part of al-jihad fil-bahr (the holy war at sea). There was also an element of revenge. Tens of thousands of Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who had converted to Christianity) were forcibly expelled from Spain in an act of ethnic cleansing in the early 1600s. They ended up dispersed across the Maghreb, their lives broken, angry and bitter and seeking vengeance. More than a few served aboard corsair ships (some of them became captains) and, with their knowledge of the Spanish coast, guided a long series of devastating raids.

There was, however, another, perhaps more fundamental, aspect to the corsair enterprise: it was business.

Seventeenth century countries—both European and North African—were not nation states in the modern sense. Among other differences, they did not—could not afford to—maintain permanent, large military forces. When they fought wars, which they did pretty much constantly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they relied heavily on privateers. Privateers were private ships backed by private individuals who were given official authorization from their governments or monarchs to harass and attack enemy shipping (whoever the ‘enemy’ might be at the time). Any booty that was amassed was then split between the backers and the authorities.

Barbary corsairs were this sort of privateer. Like privateers everywhere, they were essentially businessmen.

They had authorization from the city states that employed them to capture enemy goods and people and sell them for profit. That profit was split between the captain and crew of the ship, the financial backers of the ship, and the city authorities. It was all perfectly legal and recognized as a legitimate commercial operation.

It was a rough business: selling stolen property and trafficking in human beings.

But Barbary corsairs were not the only ones to do it.

Everybody did it.

The various European nations of the period not only all employed privateers at one time or another; they also either tolerated or actively engaged in slavery themselves (there was a slave market in Livorno, for instance, just as there was in Algiers).

The universalness of these practices is all too easily glossed over or forgotten.

What we know about Barbary corsairs, and about the major corsair city states of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé, comes largely from narratives of escaped or ransomed European slaves or from the reports of Europeans who were in the Maghreb in some sort of official capacity, whether as business agents or consuls, or as members of the frequent ransoming expeditions. Such accounts tend, for understandable reasons, to play up the horror of the European captives’ situation.

There are frequent descriptions, for example, of the hellacious tortures European slaves were subject to in places like Algiers. The illustration at the top of this post depicts some of them.

This illustration is from an edition of Histoire de Barbarie (The History of Barbary), by Father Pierre Dan, a Trinitarian Friar who took part in an unsuccessful ransoming expedition to Algiers in the summer of 1634 .

Father Dan had an agenda when he wrote Histoire de Barbarie: he wanted to depict the Barbary States in an intensely negative way, partly to show them as being evil heathen infidels, but also to create sympathy in his readers so they would be more willing to support further ransoming expeditions.

But Father Dan also responded with genuine heartfelt anguish to the brutal realities of slavery. Here is his description of what it was like for human beings to be sold like cattle. The people being auctioned off in this case were captives who had been taken in a raid on Baltimore, Ireland, in the summer of 1631:

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They were brought to Algiers, where it was a pitiful thing to see them put up for sale. Women were separated from husbands and children from fathers. Husbands were sold on one side, wives on the other, their daughters snatched from their arms, without hope of any of them ever seeing each other again. I learned all this in Algiers from several slaves from this group who assured me that there was no Christian who did not burst into tears and feel extreme regret at seeing so many honest girls, and so many good women, given over to the brutality of these barbarians.

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Descriptions like those above are perfectly accurate in their way. Terrible, inhuman things did indeed happen in corsair ports like Algiers. But they tell only one part of the story—only one half of the story.

Barbary corsairs were not the only ones engaging in the business of human trafficking for profit, remember. Look at the following:

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If you had ever seen them as they were taken, you would have wept blood. Children were separated from their mothers, and husbands from their wives. For the loss of their loves ones, tears streamed down their cheeks. The virgin was paraded in the open, after her hijab was torn away from her, and the enemy watched gleefully, as tears choked her moans.

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The author here is expressing exactly the same sort of heartfelt anguish as Father Dan, but this author—Abu Bakr Albu Khasibi—is from the other side.

The Barbary States made a living from violent robbery and human trafficking. But the European states of the time did essentially the same thing.

Such practices were common, and, like common things everywhere, were taken for granted. It was a much rougher world than ours. People accepted such things as being part of the way the world worked. Capturing and selling people for profit constituted a legitimate business enterprise—at least as long as the people being bought and sold belonged to the other side, to the ‘enemy.’

Europeans were outraged and horrified by the treatment of their kin in the Barbary States, but they pretty much turned a blind eye to the way North Africans were treated in Europe.

North Africans were outraged and horrified by the treatment of their kin in the various European countries, but they pretty much turned a blind eye to the way Europeans were treated in North Africa.

Human nature, perhaps.

But it reminds one of Upton Sinclair’s famous line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Human trafficking was profitable.

In order to maintain that profit, the people of this period—Europeans and North Africans alike—engaged in brutal acts… all while viewing the other side as entirely reprehensible and justifying their actions as entirely appropriate.

Something we should all remember, maybe.