THE CAPTIVES’ EXPERIENCE: ENTERING ALGIERS

Seen from the sea, seventeenth century Algiers presented a quite spectacular sight. The city was located on the northwestern horn of a large bay—15 kilometers across—ringed by verdant mountains. The buildings of the city ascended a mountain slope, tier after tier, up from the harbor to the mountain’s crest, 120 meters above sea level. Every structure was whitewashed frequently, so that they all gleamed brightly in the sun. More than one writer described this mass of whitened buildings, framed by luxuriant green mountains, as resembling a glittering diamond in an emerald setting.

European captives aboard an incoming corsair ship would have seen the white, gleaming lozenge of the city in its green frame emerge in the distance when the Bay of Algiers came into view. As the ship drew closer, the tiers of brilliantly white buildings would seem to rise up out of the sea, higher and higher, until they completely dominated the shoreline—a human-made alabaster mountain more than a kilometer high. They would never have seen anything even remotely like it.

When a corsair ship carrying captives entered the Bay of Algiers, it first passed by an island fortress bristling with cannon. A mole—a long, rocky causeway extending for about 300 meters—connected this fortress with the city itself and served as a breakwater to create a sheltered harbor.

As the corsair ship rounded the fortified island and entered the protected waters of the port to tie up at the mole, it would have fired off a celebratory cannonade, accompanied by blaring trumpets and waving flags. This was the standard way of announcing a successful expedition. Cannons in the shore batteries would have thundered out enthusiastically in response to the shipboard salvos, and all the rooftops of the city would have been crowded by women crying, “Allaluah! Allaluah!” A great crowd of excited people would have mobbed the harborfront.

This general excitement was a standard reaction to the arrival of any successful corsair expedition. It was motivated by a number of factors. Prominent among them was profit, for the economic driver of Algiers during this period was piracy: the violent capture by Algerian corsairs of goods and people and their subsequent resale—on a grand scale.

The varied merchandise and the human captives taken in corsair raids were sold in the Badestan, the most important market in Algiers (see the series of Algiers Slave Market posts here in this blog, in December, 2018, for details on the Badestan). The merchandise—items such as sugar, salt, oil, timber, leather goods, woolen cloth, silk, wine, spirits, tobacco, and much, much more—was offered at cut-rate prices (it was all stolen goods, after all). Many of the buyers were merchants who specialized in purchasing the stolen European goods cheaply and then shipping them back to European ports like Livorno, in Italy, to be sold for a hefty profit.

The human captives were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

There was an elaborate and formal process employed for sharing the profits of these sales. First, the Pasha—the Ottoman Governor of the city—received one eighth of everything. Then port fees and taxes had to be paid. Then the financial backers of the corsair expedition got their cut. Finally, the members of the corsair expedition itself received their share, the amount determined by each man’s place in the crew. These profits flowed out to a considerable number of people, all of whom would immediately start to spend their newly gotten wealth, providing a significant financial stimulus for the city’s economy.

So when a returning corsair expedition fired off a triumphant cannonade to announce its success, a lot of excited people would come crowding into the harbor. Some were no doubt drawn by simple curiosity, but many where there because, one way or another, they expected to benefit from the outflowing of wealth that was to come.

The arriving captives, though, would have understood none of this. All they saw were the crowds.

Being dragged off a ship in a strange new place, facing a bleak fate, and being confronted by a noisy crowd of hundreds of people was intimidating. More than that… it was terrifying. There are accounts of newly arrived captives being totally overwhelmed and dropping dead from sheer, uncontrollable terror during their first few minutes ashore in the city.

We moderns are used to large cities, with populations in the millions. In the 1620s, however, there simply were no such cities in Europe. The very largest European cities of this time—Paris, London, Naples—had a population of no more than 300,000-400,000. Cities of the next rank—such as Lisbon, Venice, Amsterdam, Rome—had populations of between 100,000-150,000. In the early seventeenth century, Algiers had a population of well over 100,000 (25,000-30,000 of whom were slaves), making it one of the most populated cities in the Mediterranean basin; only Naples was significantly larger.

For most Europeans, the sheer mass of people crowded into the harbor staring at them would have been a stunning shock.

The variegated nature of the crowds would have been equally shocking. The population of Algiers was a swirling mixture of peoples: indigenous North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Ottoman Turks, Europeans (both renegades and slaves), even Indians from the Americas.

Not only would the captives have seen a mass of strange faces staring at them—dark, light, round, narrow, bearded, bald, turbaned, black-eyed, blue-eyed, scarred, tattooed… They would also have been buffeted by a myriad of strange and incomprehensible languages.

And then there was the city itself. European cities of this period had their crowded slums, but they also had open squares and wide thoroughfares—and sky. Seventeenth century Algiers was a very different sort of place.

There was only one genuine thoroughfare in the whole city: al-Souk al-Kabir (the Great Street of the Souks). About 9 meters wide and lined with souks (markets), this street transected the city, running parallel with the waterfront. The rest of the place was a maze of narrow, twisty alleyways. Many buildings were constructed with their second floors overhanging the alleys, cutting off the light, so things had a dim, underground feel. And it was cramped. Neither a horseman nor two people walking side by side could pass through the streets easily. Everything was so dense, and the houses packed so close together, that one contemporary European observed characterized the city as “like a very tight pine cone.” Another European noted that “Properly speaking, there are no streets, but only little dark alleys which run crosswise and zig-zag among an enormous heap of houses.”

After they had been disembarked from the corsair ships, captives would have been herded up from the harbor in a victory parade through the maze of these narrow little streets, with the corsair Captain who had commanded the expedition marching proudly in the lead, flaunting his success before rowdy, appreciative crowds that would have clogged the route.

The newly arrived captives, prodded onwards by their guards in his wake, must surely have felt a growing horror at finding themselves driven into such a claustrophobic and disorienting warren of alleyways and crowded buildings, struggling to get a solid breath in the close, hot air, surrounded by noisy, ogling crowds…

It must have felt to them like they were being driven into the outskirts of Hell itself.