Category: Background

When people think of Barbary corsairs, they often envision them in oared galleys massing to attack European sailing ships—rather like[…]

Mostly, when we think of slavery, we think of it in terms of the Africans who were forcibly shipped across[…]

The term “great ordinance” was used throughout the seventeenth (and the late sixteenth and early eighteenth) centuries to mean “cannon”[…]

When you’re dealing with events that took place four or five hundred years ago, the exact dates when those events[…]

Something a little different this week… Living in the twenty-first century as we do, with access to Google Earth, Google[…]

(This post is a continuation of Shipbuilding in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries – Part 1. If you haven’t done[…]

Have you ever wondered how people built wooden sailing ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The process seems, on[…]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Charles V’s ill-fated expedition against Algiers was the storm that put an end to[…]

When people hear the phrase “the Spanish Armada,” they invariably think of the great fleet of ships sent by the[…]

When most people think of Barbary corsairs, they think of them as being Muslims from North Africa. They were. And[…]