In the summer of 1627, two sets of Barbary corsairs—one from Salé, one from Algiers—raided Iceland. The Salé corsairs pillaged the southwest corner of the island. The Algerine corsairs attacked the East Fjords, in Iceland’s southeast corner, and then Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands off the south coast.
Icelanders have always been a very literate bunch, and, as one Icelandic scholar once put it, “hardly had the pennants of the corsair ships disappeared below the horizon before people started writing about the attacks.”
One of the works dealing with the raids was a book titled Tyrkjarans-Saga (The Saga of the Turkish Raid), composed by Björn Jónsson, an Icelandic autodidact and scholar. Björn put this book together in 1643—only sixteen years after the raids.
Björn was a farmer in north Iceland for his entire life, but he nonetheless received a solid education, provided for him by a local magistrate. Iceland has a long tradition of such farmer-scholars, and they have played an important role in the country’s literary history.
The printing press came to Iceland in the early sixteenth century, but for over two centuries there was just a single press in operation, rigidly controlled by the Church, which permitted only pious religious books to be published. However, there was also a widespread tradition of manuscript reproduction. Educated men like Björn, entombed in their farmhouses during the long Icelandic winters, spent their time making copies (and copies of copies) of manuscripts that dealt with a wide variety of subjects, both religious and secular.
Björn compiled Tyrkjarans-Saga at the request of the local Bishop, Þórlakur Skúlason, and he began the book with the following:
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Bishop Þórlakur wishes that Icelanders should do no less than scholars in other countries who uphold the tradition of gathering together reports of events, each in his own land. Thus it is proper that we record tidings of the tragedy that stuck our own land sixteen years ago—the like of which has not happened in this country since it was first settled by the Norsemen nine centuries ago—when wicked evildoers called Turks, from the continent in the southern part of the world known as Africa, came here to commit murder, kidnapping, and robbery.
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Björn wrote out Tyrkjarans-Saga laboriously by hand, drawing on a variety of documents provided for him by Bishop Þórlakur and piecing them together to form a coherent narrative of the corsair raids and their aftermath.
Björn was almost 70 when he compiled Tyrkjarans-Saga (he died a little over a decade later, at the age of 81, of plague). It’s easy to imagine him working at a desk in his farmhouse, surrounded by the manuscripts he consulted—working in the daylight seeping in through a window in the day and by flickering candle- or lamplight at night (see the illustration at the top of this post).
Aside from the Preface, in which he presents a paean to the written word and explains in detail Bishop Þórlakur’s reasons for commissioning the work, Björn restricts himself to simply recording what his sources have written, sometimes quoting verbatim or closely paraphrasing the originals, at other times merely summarizing.
As a result, though Tyrkjarans-Saga is not, strictly speaking, a firsthand primary source document, it is the next best thing, and the details related in it come directly from the first-hand documents that Björn consulted.
Some of those documents have survived the centuries and are still around today in various forms. Some disappeared entirely, and all that remains of them is the references to them in Tyrkjarans-Saga.
One of those lost documents was a narrative written by an Icelander who was captured in the Algerine corsair raid on the island of Heimaey and later sold into slavery in Algiers.
His name was Einar Loptsson.
Here’s is Björn description of Einar’s capture during the raid:
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Two of the Turks came upon Einar Loptsson’s farmstead. They came upon two men there by the enclosure, whom they tied up. Einar was holding a baby when they found him. One of the Turks hit him twice in the head, wrenched the baby from him, and tossed it to the mother, whom they had previously captured. They tied Einar up like the others and then captured more of the couple’s children and drove everybody toward the Danish houses. Along the way, Einar’s wife, Ásta, fell down unconscious and lay on the ground for two or three hours. One of the Turks waited and brought her along later.
The Turks then came to Búastaðir. The man who lived there was named Jón Jónsson. His wife was Oddný Þorsteinsdóttir. The Turks discovered them a short distance from the farmstead, with one of their children. One of the pirates speedily cut off Jón’s head and took his wife, half dead, and dragged her and her child to the Danish houses, treating her roughly, pulling her hair and ripping her clothing. This same Oddný became Einar Loptsson’s wife after they returned to Iceland.
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The Algerine corsairs took nearly 250 captives from Heimaey. When these were added to the more than 100 taken in the east Fjords, the total came to nearly 400—Einar among them. The corsairs packed them all into three ships and set off for Algiers. It was the last time many of the Icelanders ever saw their homeland again.
After a month-long sea voyage, the captives were unloaded at the harbor in Algiers and brought into the Badestan—the slave market—to be auctioned off in batches to the highest bidders.
Here is Björn’s description of what happened to Einar in Algiers. Some background explanation is required for parts of the narrative; I have provided this in footnotes.
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Many of the poor captive folk in Algiers, in Barbary, suffered great misery and oppression by witchcraft and died while maintaining the true faith. To recount the agony and anguish of each of them would take too long. But I wish to briefly tell the story of that renowned man Einar Loptsson, who was captured on Heimaey, as previously described, along with his wife, whom the Turks treated inhumanely and wickedly.
Einar was in bondage to a Turk named Ibrahim.
After Einar had been in Algiers for ten months—it was April 29, 1628—his master ordered him to fetch some water and sent his concubine along with him. Einar’s master’s wife, who provided Einar with his food, knew nothing of this.[1]
The concubine gave Einar a water jug and directed him to a specific house, but she did not warn him that Christians were never allowed to use the well in a fortress there, upon pain of death, and she did not tell him about another well from which Christians were permitted to take water. The fortress was nearby to the house where Einar’s master lived.[2]
Einar knew nothing of the ungodly law that only people of the Muslim faith were allowed to go the fortress, and that no Christian was permitted to pass under the iron chains that were hung across the doors there. Any who did so were put to death.
Nevertheless, the concubine directed him toward the forbidden well
For the continuation of Einar’s story, see Tyrkjarans-Saga: Einar Loptsson’s Experience as a Slave In Algiers – Part 2 here in this blog
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[1] Ibrahim, Einar’s owner, had multiple wives, a common enough practice in Islam but unheard of in Iceland. So Björn resorts to the slightly clumsy (and inaccurate) device of referring to the wife who “provided Einar with his food” and the “concubine.” As becomes clear in the narrative, these two wives were feuding, and to the “concubine” seems to have used Einar to get revenge on the other wife.
[2] The “fortress” referred to here was the Qasba (from al‑Qasaba, meaning “the Fort”). The Qasba was located at the top of Algiers, near the crest of the mountain upon which the city was built. It not only served as fortress and armory, but also as a seat of governance.
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The English translation of the original Icelandic text of Tyrkjarans-Saga that appears here was done collaboratively by me and my Icelandic colleague Karl Smári Hreinsson.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing