THE IMPORTANCE OF GETTING DATES RIGHT

Last week, we looked at the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

I ended that post with the following:

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There’s nothing especially complicated about Julian or Gregorian calendars, and converting dates from one system to the other isn’t hard (just add or subtract 10 days). However, if you’re reading seventeenth century documents and don’t pay attention to which calendar system is being used, you can get confused about chronology.

And if you’re confused enough, you can end up drawing wrong conclusions about timing and about the cause/effect of events.

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The obverse of this is also true: if you’re clear about your dating, you can more accurately pin down the timing and the cause/effect of events from hundreds of years ago.

This week, we’re going to look at an example: the Barbary corsair raid on southwest Iceland in the summer of 1627.

Two corsair expeditions made it to Iceland that summer, one from Salé (on the Atlantic coast of Morocco), one from Algiers. The Salé corsairs raided the southwest of Iceland. They arrived in Icelandic waters on June 20 and departed a little after June 25. The Algerine corsairs attacked the East Fiords, on Iceland’s southeast coast, as well as the Westman Islands off the south coast. They arrived on July 5 and left on July 19.

These dates derive from the seventeenth century Icelandic documents dealing with the corsair raids.

They are Julian dates.

The Gregorian calendar was officially adopted in 1582—Pope Gregory XIII decreed its adoption in a papal bull in that year. Catholic countries changed over to this new calendar quite quickly. Protestant counties did not. England, for example, only officially adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Denmark adopted it in 1700. Since Iceland was a Danish possession, seventeenth century Icelanders used Julian dates.

It is generally accepted that the commander of the Salé corsair expedition was Murad Reis—aka Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, a Dutch renegade.

Just because something is ‘generally accepted,’ however, doesn’t necessarily make it true.

In order to conclude that Murad Reis was in fact the commander of the Salé corsair expedition, we need evidence.

The Icelandic sources make it very clear that one of the two corsair expeditions came from Salé. A variety of contemporary sources (Dutch, English, French) place Murad Reis in Salé in 1627. There isn’t space enough to present these sources here in this post, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one. We can reliably place Murad Reis in Salé.

The Icelandic sources plainly name the commander of the Salé corsairs: Amórað Reis. This seems clearly to be an Icelandic rendering of Murad Reis.

However, such orthographic similarity isn’t sufficient in itself to clinch the issue.

We need something more.

An Icelandic book titled Tyrkjaráns-Saga (The Turkish Raid Saga) helps provide that ‘something more.’

Tyrkjaráns-Saga was written by Björn Jónsson, an Icelandic auto didact and scholar, in 1643, only sixteen years after the corsair raids, and is based on first-hand written accounts by Icelandic captives. The book describes the Salé corsair raid in detail: their arrival, their attacks on Icelandic settlements, their sea voyage to Salé, and their arrival there.

Here is the passage in Tyrkjaráns-Saga (translated into English) that describes the arrival of the Icelandic captives in Salé

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They came to Turkish-ruled Barbary, to the roadstead of the capital of that Turkish community which is called Salé… This was Monday, the thirtieth day of July. They sat there for two days because the surf was surprisingly large, as it often is in Iceland, and nobody from shore came out to them.

After that time, some men did come out from shore, and the pirates wanted to put into the harbor. The captives were again returned to the ship’s hold and sat there with two Turks guarding them. The Admiral himself stood on the ship’s deck giving orders, and nobody else spoke while the ship was brought into port.

When the ship gained the harbor, they fired twelve cannon in celebration. Next, they sounded trumpets and bagpipes triumphantly. Then the lords of that land and their friends came out, and they were pleased when they saw the [Icelandic] captives. After that, the Icelanders were brought ashore, on the second day of August, and taken to the castle in the city of Salé.[1]

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The continuity of the narrative in Tyrkjaráns-Saga makes it clear that the “Admiral” mentioned in the extract above is Amórað Reis (Murad Reis), and that he commanded the ship that attacked Iceland’s southwest coast and then returned to Salé.

However, to really nail this down and identify Murad Reis indisputably as the commander of the Salé corsair raid on Iceland, we need some non-Icelandic evidence that corroborates the Icelandic narrative.

As it turns out, there is just this sort of evidence: a letter signed by Murad Reis himself.

Murad Reis was more than just a corsair captain. He was ‘Admiral’ of the Salé corsairs. He wasn’t an admiral in the naval sense, though, (he didn’t command the Salé corsair fleet at sea). Rather, he was what might be called the Harbor master. He issued official documents to corsair captains and collected taxes and duties.

Among his multiple functions, he also served as a kind of unofficial representative in Morocco for the Dutch government (since, remember, he was a Dutchman). When the States-General (the governing body of the United Republic of the Netherlands) had a Salé-related problem, they frequently turned to Murad Reis for help.

In 1627, the States-General had one such problem: a Dutch merchant ship that had been taken by Salé corsairs and for which the States-General were demanding restitution. They wrote to Murad Reis for help. He responded in a letter dated August 12, 1627, sent from Salé to the States-General in The Hague and received by them on October 16 of that year. The letter begins as follows (translated from the original Dutch into English): “I received on 11 August your Lordships’ letter of 16 February 1627 from Captain Gillis Jacopsen when I returned from the sea.”[2]

The dates mentioned in Murad Reis’s letter are Gregorian.

In 1627, Iceland might still have been using the Julian calendar, but the Dutch were not.

The Hague, where the States-General had its seat, was in the Dutch province of Holland. Holland converted to the Gregorian calendar, along with most of the other Dutch provinces, in 1583. So in Murad Reis’s day, correspondence to and from the States-General employed Gregorian dates.

According to Tyrkjaráns‑Saga, Murad Reis’s ship arrived at the Salé road on July 30 and then spent two further days in the roadstead waiting for the sea to calm. On the second day (August 1), a boatload of men came out from the town to the ship—presumably because the surf had calmed sufficiently. The ship then crossed the sandbar (that lay across the mouth of the river upon which the town of Salé was situated) into the harbor. It is not entirely clear whether it did so that same day (August 1) or the next. All we know is that the captives were brought ashore on August 2.

These, remember, are Julian dates.

Gregorian dates are 10 days ahead of Julian ones. So the Gregorian date of August 11—the date Jan gives in his letter to the States-General as the day he received their letter when he “returned from the sea”—corresponds to the Julian date of August 1.

In Tyrkjaráns‑Saga, that was the day “some men did come out from shore” to the ship waiting in the Salé roadstead.

August 12—the date on the letter that Jan wrote to the States-General—corresponds to August 2, Julian. In Tyrkjaráns‑Saga, that was the day the Icelandic captives were brought ashore.

So the “expedition at sea” that Murad Reis had just returned from was clearly the raid on Iceland. Moreover, it seems that he received the States-General’s letter from one of the party that came aboard his ship on August 1/11, and that he penned his response when he came ashore (along with the Icelandic captives) on August 2/12.

Getting the Julian/Gregorian dates clear here allows us to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that Murad Reis was in fact the commander of the Salé corsair expedition against Iceland in the summer of 1627.

A good example of how important it can be to keep the distinction between Julian and Gregorian dates clear when dealing with old documents.

[1] Björn Jónsson, Tyrkjaráns-Saga, p. 19.

[2] Henry deCastries, ed., Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc, première série, dynastie Saadienne: archives et bibliothèques d’es Pays‑Bas, tome IV (The Unpublished Sources of Moroccan History, First Series, Saadian Dynasty: Archives and Libraries of the Netherlands, vol. 4), p. 170.