HORDES OF CORSAIR VESSELS – Corsairs & Captives

This week, we begin a series of posts consisting of extracts from Corsairs & Captives, my new book.

Here is the first, dealing with the general situation in regards to Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean around the turn of the century from the 1500s to the 1600s.

Barbary corsairs, remember, were not pirates, at least not the sort of wild buccaneering freebooters—like Captain Kidd or Blackbeard—that the word ‘pirate’ typically brings to mind. Barbary corsairs certainly behaved like pirates, in that they boarded ships and took by force everything they could (often including the ships themselves), but they were not lone wolves out purely for illicit personal gain. Neither were they simple religious fanatics. The corso (as the act of corsairing was sometimes known; the word derives from various romance language versions of the Latin root word ‘cursus,’ to run and, by extension, to chase) may have begun as part of al-jihad fil-bahr—the holy war at sea—but the North African city states quickly became economically dependent on it. And as with most business enterprises, prosperity required growth.

Hordes of corsair vessels swarmed the Mediterranean and, later, the Atlantic, taking everything and anything they could, both at sea and on land. The pilfered merchandise and captured people these corsairs brought back were auctioned off in the souks (markets). The city authorities took a cut at every stage. The financial backers of the expeditions also took a cut. The corsairs themselves divided up what remained. All of these parties spent their profits in the local economies, invigorating them. A kind of financial feeding frenzy ensued: the more merchandise and captives that came in, the more the profits soared… and the more the demand increased. Men became rich, some very, very rich—especially on the buying and selling of human beings. All this meant that the larger corsair enterprise could not be allowed to stop, or even to slow down. For if the pirated booty ceased to flow, the North African city states faced financial ruin.

As a result of all this, the corso became a massive enterprise, far larger than most people imagine. It included not only the taking of European ships, goods, and captives at sea, but also extensive raiding of coastal settlements all along the Mediterranean littoral, the Atlantic coasts of Europe, and even Iceland on one occasion. It has been estimated that from the early-middle of the sixteenth to the early part of the nineteenth centuries—a period of just about 300 years—corsairs operating out of North African ports captured and enslaved upwards of a million Europeans. It is difficult to accurately calculate the cost of the goods they stole and/or destroyed, but it was enormous.

Here is a description of the situation, written in the late sixteenth century, that shows just how powerful the Barbary corsairs were at that time and how vulnerable Europeans felt themselves to be:

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The corsairs traverse the eastern and western seas [of the Mediterranean] without the least fear or apprehension, as free and absolute sovereigns thereof. Nay, they roam up and down as if chasing hares for their diversion. Here they snap up a ship laden with gold and silver from India, and there another richly fraught from Flanders; now they make prize of a vessel from England, then of another from Portugal. Here they board and lead away one from Venice, then one from Sicily, and a little further on they swoop down upon others from Naples, Livorno, or Genoa, all of them abundantly crammed with great and wonderful riches.

At other times, carrying renegados [Christian renegades who ‘turned Turk’ and converted to Islam] with them as guides, of which there are in Algiers vast numbers of all Christian nations—nay, the generality of the corsairs are no other than renegados, and all of them exceedingly well acquainted with the coasts of Christendom, and even the country inland—they very deliberately, even at noon-day, or indeed just when they please, leap ashore, and advance without the least dread and march into the country ten, twelve, or fifteen leagues or more. Poor Christians, thinking themselves secure, are surprised unawares. Many towns, villages, and farms are sacked, and infinite numbers of souls—men, women, children, and even infants at the breast—are dragged away into a wretched captivity. With these miserable, ruined people, and loaded down with other valuables, the corsairs retreat leisurely to their vessels, with eyes full of laughter and content.

In this manner, as is too well known, these corsairs have utterly ruined and destroyed Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Calabria, the neighborhoods of Naples, Rome, and Genoa, all the Balearic Islands, and the whole coast of Spain, in which last most particularly they feast as they think fit, on account of the Moriscos [Spanish Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity] who inhabit there. Being more zealous Mohammedans than are the very Moors born in Barbary, these Moriscos receive and caress the corsairs and provide them with whatever information they desire.

As a result of all this, before these corsairs have been absent from their abodes much longer than perhaps twenty or thirty days, they return home rich, with their vessels crowded with captives, and ready to sink with wealth. With scarce any trouble, they reap the fruits of all that the Mexicans and Peruvians have dug from the bowels of the earth with such toil and sweat, as well as that which merchants, facing manifest perils, have been scraping together for so long, and that they have travelled so many thousand leagues to fetch away, either from the east or west, with inexpressible danger and fatigue. Thus the corsairs have crammed most of the houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves [Algiers] with gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silks, cloths, velvets, etc., whereby they have rendered this city the most opulent in the world, so that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their Mexico, their Peru.

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Things were not quite as bad as they are depicted in the quote above—it is unlikely that corsairs returned to their ships carefree and at their leisure ‘with eyes full of laughter’ during a shore raid—but they were bad enough…

For those who may be interested…

The quote about the atrocious state of affairs regarding Barbary corsairs comes from Joseph Morgan, A Complete History of Algiers, from the Earliest to the Present Times, Volume 2, pp. 593-594. The extract from Morgan presented here is his translation of a passage from an early seventeenth century Spanish work titled Topographia e Historia General de Argel (Topography and General History of Algiers), written by Antonio de Sosa.

For a long time, the Topographia was thought to have been written by Diego de Haëdo, a Catholic prelate who lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Modern scholarship, however, has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that the book was in fact written by Antonio de Sosa, an Augustinian friar of Portuguese extraction who was seized by corsairs from Algiers in the late 1500s and who spent five years in that city as a captive.

Friar Antonio’s story is particularly interesting, as it’s a love story—not the sort of thing you’d expect from your average Augustinian friar.

We’ll look at friar Antonio’s story next week.