PIRATES, PRIVATEERS, AND CORSAIRS – Corsairs & Captives

In this post, we get back to basics.

Barbary corsairs are also often called Barbary pirates, but they were not pirates, at least not the sort of wild buccaneering freebooters—like Captain Kidd or Blackbeard—that the word ‘pirate’ typically brings to mind. Barbary corsairs certainly behaved like pirates, in that they boarded ships and took by force everything they could (often including the ships themselves), but they were not lone wolves out purely for illicit personal profit. And though there was a strong element of jihad in the Barbary corsair enterprise, the situation was not a simple ‘clash of civilizations’—Maghrebi Muslims versus European Christians.

When trying to get all this straight, the term “corsair” can be a bit misleading.

The French for “Barbary privateer” is “corsaire barbaresque” The word “corsaire” (“la course” in the noun form) is one of various romance language versions of the Latin root word ‘cursus,’ to run and, by extension, to race, or to chase, or to hunt). “Corsaire” became the English “corsair” and was applied specifically to North Africans. All it really means, though, is “Barbary privateers.”

Barbary corsairs were, in fact, legally designated privateers.

The world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when Barbary corsairs were at their greatest strength—was different from our own. We casually refer to sixteenth/seventeenth century countries using familiar names like Spain, England, Holland, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, and the very familiarity of these names makes it easy to forget that these were not what we would today recognize as nation states. Among other things, they typically did not have standing armies and navies of the size and permanence we now take for granted. As a result, during the sustained conflicts that marked much of this period, sovereigns and governments resorted to merchant corporations, mercenary armies, and privateers to achieve their goals.

Privateers were supplied with official letters of authorization from their governments (in Europe, these were typically referred to as letters of marque) which gave them legal permission to attack and loot enemy shipping. In return for this legal sanction of their activities, privateers paid their governments, and other financial backers, a percentage of the profits they received from the loot they had violently taken. Privateers were, in other words, engaged in a piratical business enterprise officially sanctioned by the state.

Such privateering was standard practice on both sides of the Mediterranean.

The Barbary corsair privateering enterprise was far larger than many people imagine, and included not only the taking of European ships, goods, and captives at sea, but also extensive raiding of coastal settlements. Estimates are that, from the early-middle of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (a period of nearly three hundred years), corsairs operating out of North African ports captured and enslaved upwards of a million Europeans. It is difficult to accurately evaluate the cost of the goods they stole and/or destroyed, but it was colossal.

The enormous hauls of booty—both in terms of merchandise and human beings—they brought in allowed individual corsairs to become extremely wealthy men, but they were also the economic engine that enabled North African cities like Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Salé to grow and thrive. The corso, as it was often called (another word derived from the Latin “cursus”), became a huge, multinational business enterprise. Like all such business enterprises, its success depended in large part on growth.

Barbary corsairs were at their height from the tag end of the sixteenth century on until the eighteenth. During this time, they quite literally terrorized the Mediterranean and, from the early part of the seventeenth century onwards, the Atlantic as well.

Here is a description of the situation, written in the late sixteenth century, that shows how powerful the Barbary corsairs were at that time and how vulnerable Europeans felt themselves to be:

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The corsairs traverse the eastern and western seas [of the Mediterranean] without the least fear or apprehension, as free and absolute sovereigns thereof. Nay, they roam up and down as if chasing hares for their diversion. Here they snap up a ship laden with gold and silver from India, and there another richly fraught from Flanders; now they make prize of a vessel from England, then of another from Portugal. Here they board and lead away one from Venice, then one from Sicily, and a little further on they swoop down upon others from Naples, Livorno, or Genoa, all of them abundantly crammed with great and wonderful riches.

At other times, carrying renegados [Christian renegades who ‘turned Turk’ and converted to Islam] with them as guides, of which there are in Algiers vast numbers of all Christian nations—nay, the generality of the corsairs are no other than renegados, and all of them exceedingly well acquainted with the coasts of Christendom, and even the country inland—they very deliberately, even at noon-day, or indeed just when they please, leap ashore, and advance without the least dread and march into the country ten, twelve, or fifteen leagues or more. Poor Christians, thinking themselves secure, are surprised unawares. Many towns, villages, and farms are sacked, and infinite numbers of souls—men, women, children, and even infants at the breast—are dragged away into a wretched captivity. With these miserable, ruined people, and loaded down with other valuables, the corsairs retreat leisurely to their vessels, with eyes full of laughter and content.

In this manner, as is too well known, these corsairs have utterly ruined and destroyed Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Calabria, the neighborhoods of Naples, Rome, and Genoa, all the Balearic Islands, and the whole coast of Spain, in which last most particularly they feast as they think fit, on account of the Moriscos [Spanish Muslims who had been forced to convert to Christianity] who inhabit there. Being more zealous Mohammedans than are the very Moors born in Barbary, these Moriscos receive and caress the corsairs and provide them with whatever information they desire.

As a result of all this, before these corsairs have been absent from their abodes much longer than perhaps twenty or thirty days, they return home rich, with their vessels crowded with captives, and ready to sink with wealth. With scarce any trouble, they reap the fruits of all that the Mexicans and Peruvians have dug from the bowels of the earth with such toil and sweat, as well as that which merchants, facing manifest perils, have been scraping together for so long, and that they have travelled so many thousand leagues to fetch away, either from the east or west, with inexpressible danger and fatigue. Thus the corsairs have crammed most of the houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves [Algiers] with gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silks, cloths, velvets, etc., whereby they have rendered this city the most opulent in the world, so that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their Mexico, their Peru.[1]

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Such were the times.

[1] Joseph Morgan, A Complete History of Algiers, from the Earliest to the Present Times, Volume 2, pp. 593-594. The extract from Morgan presented here is his translation of a passage from an early seventeenth century Spanish work titled Topographia e Historia General de Argel (Topography and General History of Algiers), written by Diego de Haedo (aka Antonio de Sosa).