This week we continue the series of posts about Algiers, describing what the experience would have been like for European captives who were brought into the city.
In 1619, Jean-Baptiste Gramaye, a Flemish scholar, was held captive in Algiers for six months (May through October). He kept a careful record of the successful corsair expeditions that came in during that season: 25 ships and a total of 578 captives.
And that was not even a particularly good year. In 1607, Algerian corsairs raided several towns in Calabria (the toe of the Italian ‘boot’) and took no fewer than 1,400 captives. In 1612, they took over 3,800 captives from Spain (a stunningly successful year). In 1617, they took 26 ships and a total of over 1,700 captives. In 1618, they took nineteen ships and a total of nearly 1,500 captives, most abducted in a single raid on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands.[1]
The varied merchandise and the human captives taken in these raids were brought back to Algiers and sold. The merchandise—such items 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) in the Badestan, the main market in Algiers. Many of the buyers were European 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 in the Badestan to the highest bidder.
Legally speaking, Barbary corsairs were privateers rather than simple pirates. That is, they had official authority from their government to attack enemy shipping. So what they did was, technically, perfectly lawful. It was also a profitable business.
Corsairing was a risky enterprise, of course, but the returns from a successful expedition could be huge. Equipping a ship for a corsair cruise, however, was also hugely expensive. The way to share both the risk and the expense was through multiple investors. A wealthy man might singlehandedly finance the outfitting of a corsair ship, but it was more common for consortiums to do so. In some cases, individual corsair ships might be financed by the combined funds of several dozen people, each investor receiving a share of the profits commensurate with his (or her) investment.
An elaborate and formal process had been developed for the sharing out of those profits.
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 expedition had to get their cut. Finally, the members of the corsair expedition received their share, the amount determined by each man’s place in the crew.
Once the booty and captives were sold, the 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.
Father Pierre Dan, a Trinitarian friar who was in Algiers in the summer of 1634, described the city’s reaction to the arrival of a successful corsair expedition as follows:
All those of the city run in a crowd to greet the arriving corsairs, to whom they give great praise… They have a keen interest in the new arrivals, since rich and poor alike are all well aware of the gain to be had, for from whom is it that the successful pirates will buy more stuffs to dress themselves with, and whom will they pay when they frequent the cabarets and other places of debauchery?[2]
So when a corsair expedition arrived and fired off a triumphant cannonade in the Algiers harbor to announce its success, a lot of excited people would have 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.
—⸎ —
Arrival in Algiers could be a shattering experience for European captives.
First, for most captives, especially those from rural areas, Algiers would have seemed huge. The harborfront was over a mile across (almost 2 kilometers). A protective wall, thirty feet (9 meters) high and nearly ten feet (3 meters) thick, encircled the city, in places coming right down to the seashore, so that the waves broke against it.
Standing on the mole, shivering and uncertain, newly arrived captives could see the tops of the minarets of the mosques poking up above the massive barrier of this wall. Beyond them, the long, white, slope of the city rose up and up into the sky.
Few captives would ever have seen anything like it.
It was not just the physical dimensions of Algiers that gave the place its impression of intimidating size, though. It was also the huge crowds of people.
We moderns are used to large cities, with populations in the millions. In the early seventeenth century, however, there simply were no such cities in Europe. The very largest European cities of this time—Paris, London, Naples—had populations 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.
Algiers had a population of well over 100,000—25,000-30,000 of whom were slaves—making it the second most populated city in the Mediterranean basin; only Naples was larger.
For many European captives, the sheer mass of people would have been a stunning shock.
The variegated nature of the Algiers crowds must 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. Antonio de Sosa, a Portuguese cleric who was a captive in Algiers in the late 1500s, and who wrote a detailed account of his experience, included in one of his chapters a long list of the types of renegades in the city. This list gives a sense of the heterogeneous nature of the Algiers population. Here is part (about half) of it:
Beginning with the remote provinces of Europe, the following renegades may be found in Algiers: Muscovites, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Danish and Norwegians, Englishmen, Flemish, Frenchmen, Basques, Castilians, Portuguese, Valencians, Sardinians, Corsicans, Venetians, Bosnians, Albanians, Greeks, Syrians, Abyssinians of Prester John, as well as Indians from the Portuguese Indies [India], from Brazil, and from New Spain [Mexico].[3]
Not only would newly arrived 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.
For the next installment of this series of posts on Algiers, see the next post here in this blog.
____________________
[1] Alger XVIe – XVIIe siècle: Journal de Jean-Baptist Gramaye, « évèque d’Afrique », (Algiers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: the Journal of Jean-Baptist Gramaye, the “Bishop of Africa”), a translation of Gramaye’s Diarium rerum Argelae gestarum ab anno MDCXIX (A Diary of events in Algiers from the year 1619), originally published in 1623, trans. & ed. by Abd el-Hadi Ben Mansour, pp. 141-42 and p. 178.
[2] Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires, des royaumes, et des villes d’Alger, de Tunis, de Salé et de Tripoly, seconde édition, originally published in 1649, p. 88.
[3] An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), a translation by Maria Antonia Garcés & Diana De Armas of the first book of Antonio de Sosa’s Topographia, e historia general de Argel (Topography and General History of Algiers), first published in 1612, p. 125.
The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson
The story of the Barbary corsair raid on Iceland in 1627
Amazon listing