JANISSARIES IN ALGIERS – PART 1

More than any other North African city, perhaps, Algiers epitomized for Europeans the horrors of piracy and the slave trade. They described it using phrases like “the throne of piracy,” “that city fatal to all Christians,” and “the nest and receptacle of pirates.”

Algiers did not just suddenly spring up as an opportunistic pirate town, though, the way seventeenth century Caribbean pirate havens like Tortuga or Port Royal did. It had a history dating back to the Roman era and beyond.

For long centuries, it existed as a relatively unimportant merchant port. It was a “the nest and receptacle of pirates” back then too, but a relatively modest nest.  Its rise to prominence as one of the premier corsair capitals of the Mediterranean was a consequence not of piracy itself but, rather, of a large-scale geo-political shift in the Mediterranean basin that occurred in the early sixteenth century.

The genesis of that shift lay in events that occurred in Spain, which for the better part of eight hundred years—from the beginning of the eighth until the end of the fifteenth centuries—had been under Muslim domination.

At its greatest extent in the eighth century, al-Andalus (as Muslim Spain was called) included Portugal, almost all of what is now Spain itself, the Balearic Islands, and even the southwestern corner of the French Mediterranean.

Spanish forces fought a continuing battle against this occupation—known as the Reconquista (the re-conquest)—and in 1492, the combined armies of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (the same Isabella and Ferdinand who underwrote Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World) finally overran the last Muslim kingdom, the Emirate of Granada, in southern Spain.

As a consequent, something like 200,000 al-Andalus Muslims fled as refugees to North Africa.

Spain had been locked in a bitter struggle with the Muslim world for centuries, and the victory in Granada was not seen as the end of the fight. As far as the Spanish were concerned, the greater Muslim threat had only been temporarily checked. Flush with confidence from their victory, they decided to protect the homeland by taking the fight to the enemy.

If this phrasing sounds familiar, it is because the relationship between Spain and Islamic North Africa at the turn of the sixteenth century is eerily similar to the relationship between America and the Islamic Middle East in the early twenty-first century.

Just as twenty-first-century America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to “protect the homeland,” so sixteenth-century Spain invaded North Africa for much the same reason.

During the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Spanish forces marched eastwards along the Maghreb, systematically overrunning and occupying one town after another. They forced those settlements they did not outright conquer and occupy to sign treaties of capitulation and pay tribute. All this was seen at the time as a triumph and a vindication of the “take it to the enemy” strategy.

But just as the American invasions provoked a violent blowback—inspiring a new generation of jihadists, making al-Qaeda a larger, more prominent organization than it had been, and galvanizing the Islamic State into being—the Spanish invasion of North Africa spawned a similar jihad.

The Muslim exiles from al-Andalus, vowing vengeance, led reprisal attacks and corsair raids against the Spanish, and Muslims from many areas came to defend the Dar-al-Islam (the Abode of Islam) from the infidel threat—the very essence of holy war.

Algiers was one of the towns that the Spanish overran but did not occupy.

In 1510, the rulers of Algiers had been forced to sign a treaty acknowledging Spanish sovereignty and committing them to pay an annual tribute. To enforce this arrangement, the Spanish built a fort (known as the Peñon) on one of the islands in the bay on which Algiers sat and mounted cannons there to control the harbor—and thus the city. When King Ferdinand died in 1516, the Algerines saw this as an opportune moment to escape the hated infidel domination. They did not have the military resources to do it on their own, though.

For help, they called upon the Barbarossa brothers—Arūj and Hayreddin—legendary pirates who for years had been attacking Spanish shipping and raiding Spanish coasts (with the guidance of revenge-hungry al-Andalus refugees) as part of the holy war against Spain, the Great Satan. The Barbarossa brothers had a fleet of ships and could call up thousands of men in a just cause—such as liberating Algiers from the infidels.

Arūj, the elder brother, was a man of vaulting ambition, however. He did not just want to liberate Algiers; he wanted to rule it. He accepted the request of the Algiers authorities to come to the city’s aid, but soon after his arrival, he killed the ruler of the city (strangled him in his bath, so the story goes) and took control. His ambition did not end there. He wanted to establish a great empire, and so he set about trying to conquer the territory surrounding Algiers.

It proved his undoing. A scant two years later, he was killed in a clash with Spanish troops near the town of Tlemcen (some 280 miles /450 kilometers west of Algiers), and his dreams of a Barbarossa empire were shattered.

Hayreddin, Arūj’s younger brother, managed to hold on to Algiers. It took over a decade, but in 1529, he finally overwhelmed and destroyed the Peñon and wrenched Algiers from Spanish control. Hayreddin was just as ambitious as his older brother—but less monomaniacal. He realized that, alone, Algiers would not be able to stand against the Spanish, and so he offered allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent.

The Sultan happily agreed to this deal, and Algiers became part of the sprawling Ottoman Empire. To seal the arrangement, the Sultan granted the title of Beylerbey (from the Turkish, meaning Bey of Beys, i.e., Commander of Commanders) to Hayreddin. In order to ensure Hayreddin’s control of the city, he also sent a contingent of some 2,000 janissaries.

And so janissaries first arrived in Algiers.

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For more on the janissaries of Algiers, see the next post in this series here in this blog.