SALÉ, THE TURBULENT CITY – PART 3

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

 

Before we can turn to how the Hornacheros rebuilt the ruins of Salé and created not only a new town but also a renowned corsair capital, and then an independent republic free from Moulay Zaydan’s rule, we first have to look at a final sequence of contributing events that occurred out in the larger world.

The Hornacheros were farmers and had no real knowledge of the sea. In order to transform Salé into a corsair center, they needed the sort of expertise that could only be provided by pirates.

As it turned out, exactly the sort of men they needed showed up—from England.

During the last couple of decades of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, the English and the Spanish were locked in a series of messy conflicts lasting nearly twenty years—1585–1604.

Spain was the world power among European nations at the time. The Spanish colonies brought in huge wealth, much of it in the form of silver and gold—and all that wealth had to be shipped across the Atlantic.

The English did their best to intercept that shipping and to harass the Spanish colonies where it originated. Trying to accomplish this presented a problem, however. England had neither the funds nor the naval vessels to properly prosecute the war against Spanish shipping in both the Atlantic and the Caribbean. To solve this problem, they employed privateers.

Privateers were a sort of pirate, but a very special sort. They were private individuals—as opposed to naval personnel—equipped with legal authorization from their government to attack enemy shipping in a time of war.

The cost of equipping a privateering expedition were born entirely by the backers of individual ships, but the profits were split between the private backers and the government. So not only was the English crown able increase the number of armed ships available for the conflict against Spain without having to pay anything, the Crown actually made money.

For nearly twenty years, English privateers hunted successfully throughout an enormous area, ranging from the English Channel down along the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal to Morocco and the west coast of equatorial Africa, across to the northeastern coast of South America and the Spanish Main in the Caribbean, up to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. They gained a vast amount of experience, both as sailors and navigators, and as pirates and men of war.

But then hostilities ended and privateering was banned by royal decree.

Most privateers returned quietly to life as merchant seamen. Some did not, however.

These men changed overnight from legally sanctioned privateers to out-and-out pirates. As a result, they could no longer operate out of English ports and had to find new ones.

Irish ports were the first ones they turned to. Ireland in those days was a sort of maritime ‘wild west.’ English control was tenuous, small harbors and ports were plentiful, and the local people and their English overlords saw the profit in dealing with pirates, both in victualling their ships and entertaining their crews (who had ready cash to spend) and in buying the stolen goods they offered at cut-rate prices.

The Irish ports didn’t last, though, for the English Crown began to assert control over Irish waters.

So the English pirates moved south, and soon they were scattered all across the Maghreb, from Tripoli in the east to Salé in the west. Some began hunting in the Mediterranean. Most, however, stuck with the waters they were familiar with—the Atlantic.

Due to the sustained exploitation of the New World during the sixteenth century, there were large numbers of ships conveying merchandise to and fro across the Atlantic. There was also an increase in secondary shipping rerouting New World wealth. Many of the shipping routes funneled into the bottle neck of the Strait of Gibraltar, either to the Spanish ports near it or to ports beyond it in the Mediterranean. All this shipping provided a continuous and reliable prey population that could support a relatively large number of predatory pirates. Having a base near to it was crucial, however.

The best place for such a base was the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Many of the ports along that coast, however, were in the hands of the Spanish.

For a while, English pirates made use of two of the last remaining ports not under Spanish control: al-Araish (modern Larache) and al-Ma’mura (modern Mehdya).

Al-Ma’mura in particular was a major operation. The writer of a letter dated 1611 estimates that there was a total of 40 ships and 2,000 English pirates cruising the Atlantic at the time, and that their “common rendezvous” was al-Ma’mura, where there was a large and efficient black market (dominated by merchants from Livorno, Italy) dealing in the stolen goods the pirates had to offer.

Neither al-Araish nor al-Ma’mura survived very long as pirate ports, though.

In return for providing military aid and funds to al-Ma’mum (one of the brothers Moulay Zaydan was fighting during the al-fitna civil war), the Spanish acquired al-Araish in 1610 (the year the Hornacheros came to Morocco). In August of 1614, the Spanish sent a flotilla—an armada, almost—of ninety-nine ships and 5,000 men against al-Ma’mura and took the town.

The 2,000 or so English pirates who had been using al-Ma’mura scattered and took up new residences in various ports. Some of them resettled in Salé, which was far enough south of the Straits of Gibraltar to be beyond Spanish control. They brought with them ships, crews, and expert knowledge of the pirate profession. More importantly perhaps, a sizeable number of the merchants who had been doing a brisk trade in stolen pirate booty in al-Ma’mura resettled in Salé as well, bringing with them both their business acumen and their connections to far-flung commercial networks throughout Europe and the Maghreb.

English pirates were not the only ones to choose Salé as a new base. Dutch pirates—their privateering careers ended by peace treaties with the Spanish, just as the English privateers’ had been—also began to gravitate towards Salé. And as the Algerian corsairs broke out into the Atlantic—thanks to the new sailing skills they had learned from English and Dutch renegades—they found it more convenient to sell captives and booty they had taken in the Atlantic at Salé rather than shipping them all the way back to Algiers. Like the English and Dutch pirates, this new breed of Algiers corsairs brought experience and expertise.

This serendipitous confluence of larger events—the bloody chaos of the Moroccan al-fitna, the arrival of the Hornacheros, and the influx of English (and other) pirates—created the conditions that allowed Salé to become a renowned corsair capital.

To see how these various threads came together and how the Hornacheros turned Salé into the (in)famous corsair center and independent republic that it became, see the next post in this series: Salé, the Turbulent City – Part 4.

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For those who may be interested…

The 1611 letter about the English pirate population at al-Ma’mura can be found in Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, première série, archives et bibliothèques d’Angleterre, tome II (The Unpublished Sources of Moroccan History, – First Series, Archives and Libraries of England, Volume 2), edited by Henry de Castries, p. 464.

Here is the full passage:

“They say further that there is in all of this kind of vermin [i.e., pirates] to the number of 40 sail and 2,000 men, all English. Their common rendezvous is at Mamora [al-Ma’mura] in Barbarie, where they have merchants of all sorts that trade with them for all kinds of commodities, especially those of Leghorn [Livorno].”

John Harrison, an English envoy in Morocco, had this to say in a report to the Earle of Salisbury dated 1610:

“In Mamora, a harbor of pirates upon the coast of Barbarie, the report is there have come in, at one time, but of late, to the number of twenty-two sails of pirates together with their prizes” (Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, première série, archives et bibliothèques d’Angleterre, tome II, p. 450).