THE STORY OF THE HORNACHEROS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CORSAIR REPUBLIC OF SALÉ – PART 3

(This post is a continuation of The Story of the Hornacheros and the Founding of the Corsair Republic of Salé – Part 2. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read Parts 1 and 2 in this series before continuing on here.)

The town of Salé was (and still is) actually two towns. They sit across from each other on either bank at the mouth of the Bu Regreg river, which flows northwestwards into the Atlantic Ocean from its headwaters in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The town on the north bank of the river is today known as Salé, that on the south bank as Rabat (now the capital city of Morocco). The modern cities are frequently referred to as a single entity: Rabat-Salé, reflecting the place’s dual nature. Seventeenth century Europeans, however, referred to the town on the north bank of the river as Old Salé and that on the south bank as New Salé.

Old Salé got its name because it had been around a long time, having originally been founded in the eleventh century. Over the centuries, it prospered both as a port (during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was one the most important centers for trade with European nations) and as an intellectual and religious center (it contained a series if madrasas—religious schools—and Muslim holy men and marabouts flocked to it). When the Hornacheros arrived, Old Salé was an agricultural and trading town, and still a religious center. Like almost every town of any size during this period, it had a high, protective wall. It is hard to know the exact population, but it seems unlikely that it ever reached much more than 7,000 or 8,000 in the early seventeenth century, and was likely less than that—a town rather than a city.

New Salé had a very different history.

The south bank of the Bu Regreg where it meets the sea consists of a rocky promontory almost 100 feet (30 meters) high. It is a perfect spot to place a defensive fortification. In the twelfth century, it became the site of a ribāt—a fortified garrison. (Rabat, the name the modern city now bears, derives from the ribāt originally built there.)

The ribāt only acquired real significance when it became the focus of an ambitious building project began by Abu Yusuf Yaʿqub al-Mansur, one of the Almohad Sultans—the Almohads being one of the various dynasties that, over the centuries, ruled al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) and North Africa.

Al-Mansur had grand plans for the site, re-naming the place Ribāt al-Fath (Citadel of Conquest) and intending to make it his new capital city and to use it as a major base from which to prosecute the holy war against the infidel Spaniards

Things didn’t turn out that way, though.

The fortress of the ribāt was strengthened, a large perimeter wall was constructed to enclose the city-to-be, an aqueduct to bring in fresh water was built, and a grand mosque was begun, a mosque that would have been the largest in the world at that time if it had been completed.

But al-Mansur died (in 1199) and construction halted.

The city walls—built using innumerable slaves as a labor force—were a thoroughly impressive accomplishment, extended over three miles (about 5 kilometers) all told, averaging 8 feet (2.5 meters) in thickness and 25 feet (7.5 meters) high. But the city that was supposed to fill the space inside those walls was never built. Of the mosque, only the great tower of the minaret—known as Hassan Tower, 144 feet (44 meters) tall—remained.

The place fell into decay. The population dwindled. The aqueduct was destroyed. By the early 1500s, there were only two or three streets, with a few shabby shops on them, all located near what remained of the ribāt fortress on the promontory. The imposing perimeter walls enclosed only fields.

In the image above, you can see what Old and New Salé would have looked like when the Hornacheros arrived. The view is looking eastwards from the Atlantic. The Bu Regreg river, in the center of the image, flows down from the mountains into the sea. Old Salé is on the left, on the north bank of the river (though it is mislabeled in the image as “Sala Nova,” Latin for New Salé); New Salé is on the right, on the river’s south bank (it too is mislabeled: as “Sala Vetus,” Latin for Old Salé). You can plainly see the empty fields inside the enclosing walls of New Salé.

This was essentially what the place was like when the Hornacheros arrived.

As mentioned in Part 2 of this series of posts on the Hornacheros, the inhabitants of Old Salé severely disapproved of this sudden influx of foreigners. Old Salé, remember, had a long tradition of being a religious center and an abode of holy men. Its pious inhabitants viewed the Hornacheros as heretical. They made it very clear to the newcomers that they were not welcome in Old Salé.

So the Hornacheros set up in New Salé.

The place was a wreck, though. The extent of the ruination can been glimpsed in a remark made in a letter written by an English merchant who was in Morocco in the 1630s: “It was then in a manner desolate, abandoned by the Larbyes [the local inhabitants] because of wild beasts, for the ruinous castle had become a receptacle for lions, which there bred and terrified the poor peasants, so that they left the place and dwelt in doars [tents] in the open fields, less commodious but more secure.”

It is not too difficult to imagine how the Hornacheros must have felt when they realized that this new home they had finally reached was a crumbling ruin. They had little in the way of alternatives, though, so they chased out the lions (if there ever really had been lions denning there; there were indeed lions in Morocco at this time, but the English merchant was just repeating a story he had been told) and proceeded to rebuild. They chose to settle in the ribāt fortress—a place that would become known as the Qasba (from Arabic al-Qasaba, meaning “the town center” and also “the fortress”). By the time they were done, the Hornacheros had repaired the crumbling walls of the fortress and constructed over 200 houses inside those walls.

The Hornacheros, remember, had been an autonomous community back in Spain, so they were uniquely equipped to set themselves up in their new home. Soon—nobody knows quite how soon—they had rebuilt the Qasba and had a functioning self-ruling government going.

However, they found themselves surrounded on all sides by locals who mistrusted them and refused to accept them. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because they simply had grand ambitions for the town they were founding, they sent out word to other Spanish expulsados in Morocco that Salé was a good place to settle. They even helped pay travel expenses for this new batch of settlers. As usual, it is difficult to come up with precise numbers, but it seems that a total of somewhere around 10,000 Andalusian expulsados made the trip to Salé. They built a town for themselves inside the great al-Mansur walls, separate from the Qasbah where the Hornacheros lived.

So now New Salé had a combined population of somewhere around 13,000 people—nearly double that of Old Salé.

Relations between the two towns rapidly deteriorated.

Meanwhile, the Hornacheros had to come up with some way to make their new and growing home economically viable.

The solution they settled on was… piracy.

The Hornacheros had control of New Salé. They had the financial resources and access to manpower (both the Andalusians and the local inhabitants). And both expulsado groups were blisteringly eager for a means to avenge themselves upon their Spanish persecutors, who had taken from them their homes, their young children, their livelihoods, and whatever original dreams and hopes they might once have had.

So they had the harbor, the resources, and the motivation.

By themselves, however, the expulsados—Hornacheros and Andalusians both—could not have transformed Salé into the pirate capital it would become. The Hornacheros may have been well funded and armed, but they came from an inland town in Spain, and so they had no experience as seamen. The Andalusians came from all over the Iberian Peninsula, but while some of them must have come from coastal areas, most of them probably had little experience with the sea; Spanish Moriscos were, on the whole, mostly farmers. If they had been left to their own devices, the two groups of expulsados would no doubt had made a go of things and created a prosperous town, but it would have been a market town, a farming town, a trading town. In order for the place to become a pirate capital, it first needed an influx of pirates to provide the necessary expertise.

Those arrived at just the right time—most of them from England.

For how English pirates factor into the creation the (in)famous corsair republic of Salé, see The Story of the Hornacheros and the Founding of the Corsair Republic of Salé – Part 4.