CALAFAT HASSAN REIS: THE SORCERER

This week, we continue the series of posts drawn from Corsairs & Captives, my new book.

This week’s excerpt is about a famous Barbary corsair captain named Calafat Hassan Reis, who had a reputation for being a sorcerer.

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During the age of the Barbary corsairs, successful corsair captains were not only wealthy and important men; they were folk heroes. Tales were told of their daring exploits and of how they bravely met their end: one captain’s legs were blown away by a chance cannon ball during an attack; another suffered fatal musket wounds but insisted on having a chair brought to him and sat in it shouting clear orders to his men to the last; a third escaped capture by beaching his ship and marching away inland with his crew, only to succumb to wounds received while battling a local militia.

Corsairing was a violent, dangerous business, and few captains died peacefully in their beds. But the stories kept being told—and kept the names of renowned corsair captains alive even after the captains themselves were long gone.

One of the names that have come down to us is that of Calafat Hassan Reis, was one of the most successful (and infamous) corsair captains of Algiers.

Born into a poor family in Greece, he was likely captured in a corsair raid and became a renegade—like so many others of his generation. Before he began his career as a corsair, he worked as a calker, somebody who filled in the gaps between the planks of a ship’s hull to make them watertight. One of the words for a calker is “calfateur,” and the story is that he kept this name as a sort of ironic homage to his past.

Calafat Hassan Reis was wildly brave and wildly successful; he was also reputed to be a sorcerer of great power. Despite all this, however, he—like so many other corsair captains—did not end up enjoying a peaceful retirement. In fact, his end was quite… Shakespearean.

In the summer of 1626, Calafat Hassan Reis was hunting in the waters along the southern coast of Italy and on into the eastern Mediterranean, leading a fleet of seven heavily armed, square-rigged sailing ships and several oared galleys (Algerine corsairs, like corsairs in general, often hunted in packs during this period).

Things began well in a modest way, and they took several small prizes. Then, one morning, they spotted a large Venetian merchant ship. Calafat Hassan Reis sent four of his galleys and his lightest, fasted sailing ship to chase after the Venetian. The wind was light, and the galleys—which relied on manpower at the oars rather than the wind—quickly overhauled their prey.

The plan of attack in a situation like this was a standard one: the galleys would fire a few shots from their bow cannons as they drew near to intimidate the crew of the Venetian ship. If such intimidation did not succeed, the galleys would crash up against the ship’s hull and the soldiers crowded onto the galleys’ decks would swarm the ship, shrieking and shouting, brandishing cutlasses and pikes and pistols.

This time, it did not work out that way.

In a situation like this, many European vessels would have simply surrendered. The Venetian ship did not. Instead, it loosed off volley after volley of witheringly effective cannon fire and drove the galleys back. Eventually, it took Calafat Hassan Reis’s entire fleet to overcome the Venetian. It was not until they had reduced the merchant ship to a wreck—the masts shattered, the sails ripped to shreds by cannon balls, dead men littering the deck—that the corsairs were finally able to board it. The corsairs lost a lot of men. No more than a couple of dozen remained alive aboard the Venetian vessel.

At first, Calafat Hassan Reis was furious. The paltry gain of a single ship was not worth the men he had lost of the damage his feet had sustained. But then he discovered that there were three Capuchin friars aboard the Venetian vessel, passengers on their way to the Holy Land. This was good news, for Catholic priests could often be ransomed for very high prices. They alone made this capture worth the effort.

The friars were transferred to Calafat Hassan Reis’s ship and chained up in the hold, and the fleet moved on in search of new prey.

The next six weeks was a series of astonishing successes as Calafat Hassan Reis’s fleet launched lightning-fast shore raids along the coast of Sicily and went on to capture one Europea vessel after another.

By the time the summer season had begun to turn, Calafat Hassan Reis’s ships were stuffed with captives and booty—including the three Capuchin friars still chained up in the hold.

It was time to consider returning to Algiers.

Calafat Hassan Reis did not make such decisions lightly. In fact, he did not really make them at all. Rather, he let them be made for him through the divinatory properties of what one European chronicler refers to as his “magic book.”

Calafat Hassan Reis’s practice of divination gave him a reputation as a powerful sorcerer among North Africans and Europeans alike. We moderns tend to be skeptical about such things. There was no denying, however, that Calafat Hassan Reis was spectacularly successful at taking booty and captives, and he and those around him attributed this success to his sorcerous, divinatory practices.

Faced with a decision about whether or not to end his corsairing for the season, he consulted his “magic book.” The result was clear: it was not yet time to return to Algiers.

So Calafat Hassan Reis ordered his fleet northwestwards, towards the southern coast of Sardinia, to do a last series of raids there before returning in triumph to Algiers.

Though he could not know it at the time, this was a decidedly inauspicious decision…