SALÉ, THE TURBULENT CITY – PART 5

(This post is a continuation of Salé, the Turbulent City – Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

It is often said that Salé was an independent pirate republic, ruled by a governing council, presided over by a pirate captain. The reality was something quite different.

First, as should be clear by now, Salé wasn’t the sort of wild, anything-goes pirate haven that seventeenth century Caribbean ports such as Tortuga or Port Royal were. And it wasn’t any sort of utopian freeport ruled by an egalitarian pirate brotherhood either. Salé did indeed become an independent republic (of sorts), but the driving force behind that independence wasn’t pirates—it was the Hornacheros.

The Hornacheros, remember, had settled in New Salé, on the south bank of the Bou Regreg River. They had set themselves up in the Qasba—the fortress on the hill overlooking the mouth of the river—and were in a dominant position geographically. More importantly, they were a self-inclusive group with the ruthless cosa nostra clannishness of a crime syndicate combined with a history of effective self-government. And they were ambitious.

Remember, also, that the Hornacheros had entered into a deal with Sultan Moulay Zaydan: he would give them Salé as a home, and they, in turn, would hold it for him and be loyal subjects. They remained loyal for a time, but as they became more settled and secure in their new home, they began to chafe at the demands the Sultan made on them.

Morocco was still caught up in the al-fitna chaos that had ensued after the death of Sultan al-Abbas Ahmad al-Mansur in 1603. By the late 1620s, the churning internecine conflict showed no signs of abating.

So Moulay Zaydan (Al-Mansur’s surviving son) needed soldiers. He regarded the Hornacheros as his legitimate subjects and conscripted them into his military forces to fight in his wars. After a time, the Hornacheros decided that such demands were too onerous and refused to comply.

When Moulay Zaydan tried to reassert his authority over them, they resisted. When he pushed harder, they revolted and declared their complete independence from him. Moulay Zaydan’s position had been so weakened by the continuing al-fitna turmoil that he simply didn’t have the necessary brute force at his disposal to prevent the Hornacheros from breaking away.

The Hornacheros also had a European ally: the English.

The Salé corsairs had been raiding the English Channel for years, taking hundreds of Captives every summer (in 1625 alone, they took over 1,200). The English were fed up with this and sent a Special Envoy to Salé to negotiate some sort of peace treaty that would stop the Salé corsairs’ depredations. The Envoy’s name was John Harrison.

As the official representative of Chares I, the King of England, Harrison had the power to negotiate in the King’s name. He offered the Hornacheros the backing of the English in their bid for independence from Moulay Zaydan. The Hornacheros agreed to an allegiance. They even went so far as to offer to become subjects of the English Crown—though this was more likely a political ploy than a genuine offer.

The promise of royal aid that Harrison held out, though, helped give the Hornacheros a sense of the legitimacy of their cause. By the late spring of 1627, they had officially declared their independence from Moulay Zaydan. According to Harrison, they had a grand notion that they could call together all the expulsados in the country and carve out an empire for themselves. It must have been a heady time.

In May of 1627, the Hornacheros of Salé performed their first official act as a republic: they signed a draft treaty with the King of England. In that treaty, they referred to themselves as “the most honorable lords… captains and governors of the powerful town of Rebato [i.e., Salé] and its territories… councilors of the town government, on behalf of all the Andalusian residents of this powerful town.” They clearly saw themselves as serious representatives of a serious place.

Moulay Zaydan died in September, 1627. His son, Abd al-Malik, found himself in an even weaker position than his father and was unable to do anything at all about the Hornachero revolt.

So Salé became a fully independent republic.

It was an odd sort of entity, though, existing in a kind of cultural and political bubble on the shore of the Atlantic. Most of the inhabitants of New Salé still spoke Spanish as a first language rather than Arabic, and the town’s official language of correspondence was Spanish (the draft treaty with King Charles I was in Spanish).

The Hornacheros formed the government, employing the same sort of Governor/Ruling Council apparatus they had employed back in Hornachos. They had no local alliances and no direct involvement in the ongoing al-fitna power struggles. They were more connected to the European nations they preyed upon—and relied upon for sources of supply—than to any Moroccan powers.

And affairs did not progress smoothly within Salé itself.

The Hornacheros showed no inclination to share power—or revenues. Before they revolted, there had been an official Caïd (Governor) in Salé who represented Sultan Moulay Zaydan, but the Hornacheros ruled the town. They collected—and kept—all the duties and taxes: 20% of the value of all corsair prizes brought into the port plus a customs tax of 5% on all goods and local produce sold in the town. They collected these revenues under the Sultan’s official authority, but they never shared any of the money with the Sultan. They never shared any of it with either the Andalusians in the town below the Qasba or with the pious Muslims in Old Salé across the river either. After independence, they continued monopolizing these revenues.

As a result, the Hornacheros grew wealthier and more powerful with each passing year.

The Andalusians, meanwhile, found themselves delegated to the status of second-class citizens. As can be imagined, they were not happy about this. They provided manpower for pirate expeditions and the necessary intelligence for raids along the Spanish coast, and they no doubt must have received some share in the profits of each raid they participated in, but they clearly resented being cut out of the lucrative revenues derived from duties and taxes.

After independence, friction between the Hornacheros and Andalusians grew so severe that it erupted into a series of armed clashes and, eventually, outright civil war. For a time, the Andalusians ruled in Salé, and the Hornacheros found themselves exiled. Eventually, though, a compromise was reached, and the two factions shared power—though always uneasily.

The inhabitants of Old Salé were equally fed up with the Hornacheros, and the ulema of the city declared a fatwa against them, accusing the Hornacheros of, among other things, refusing to grant the Muslims of Old Salé the share in the corsair profits that that was rightfully due to them. An ongoing armed conflict erupted between the two cities—Old Salé on the north bank of the river and New Salé (and especially the Qasba) on the south bank—that sputtered on for years.

In fact, the history of the independent republic of New Salé is pretty much a history of one conflict after another, as the town lurched from crisis to crisis, punctuated only briefly by short periods of calm—until, in 1641, as the al-fitna chaos continued, a new warlord took control of Old Salé. This warlord was more powerful than any who had preceded him, and he was able to exert enough brute control to take over both towns and settle things down.

And that was the end of Salé as an independent republic. It continued as a corsair port, but it never again quite reached the prominence it once had had.

In 1666, Mulay al-Rashid bin Sharif, the first Alaouite Sultan of Morocco, ascended the throne. He consolidated enough power to be able, finally, to put an end to the al-fitna conflict (the Alaouites are still the ruling dynasty in Morocco today). He also put an end to any hopes the Hornacheros of Salé might have had of reasserting their independence.

So the independent republic of Salé lasted for only about fifteen turbulent years. A surprisingly brief time, considering the outsized role the place played in Barbary corsair history.