THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SHORE

This week—the first of 2025—we continue the series of posts drawn from Corsairs & Captives, my new book.

This week’s excerpt takes a different perspective on things—the view from the other shore.

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My book Corsairs and Captives—and this blog—focuses mostly on the experiences of Europeans captured by Barbary corsairs and their subsequent enslavement in North Africa. Corsairs and Captives is a compilation of true stories either based upon the testimony of, or directly narrated by, those to whom the events happened. But the catalogue of atrocities that emerges from these stories makes it seem as if North Africans were inhuman brutes, while Europeans were innocents cruelly wronged.

This is not an accurate portrayal. Terrible, cruel things did indeed happen in corsair ports like Algiers and Salé. That, however, is only one part of the larger story of the age.

Barbary corsairs engaged in a rough business: plundering ships and coastal settlements and trafficking in human beings. But they were not the only ones engaging in such things. The looting of ‘enemy’ ships for profit was universally practiced by both North Africans and Europeans. Both sides also indulged in human trafficking for profit. There were slave markets in North African cities like Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Salé, but there were also slave markets in European cities like Naples and Livorno, and in Valetta, on the island of Malta. Human trafficking was not limited exclusively to North Africa; it was one of the things that generally characterized the times.

The universalness of these practices is all too easily glossed over or forgotten.

One of the reasons for this one-sided portrayal is that relatively few documents have survived from the North African side, and so, by default, much of what we know about Barbary corsairs, and about the corsair city states, comes from European documents—narratives of escaped or ransomed European slaves or the reports of Europeans who were in the Maghreb in some sort of official capacity, whether as business agents or consuls, or as members of the frequent ransoming expeditions. Such accounts tend to play up the horror of the European captives’ situation.

Look at the following extract from Father Pierre Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie, for instance:

They [captives taken from Baltimore, Ireland] were brought to Algiers, where it was a pitiful thing to see them put up for sale. Women were separated from husbands and children from fathers. Husbands were sold on one side, wives on the other, their daughters snatched from their arms, without hope of any of them ever seeing each other again. I learned all this in Algiers from several slaves from this group who assured me that there was no Christian who did not burst into tears and feel extreme regret at seeing so many honest girls, and so many good women, given over to the brutality of these barbarians.

Here is another description of the sale of human beings:

If you had ever seen them as they were taken, you would have wept blood. Children were separated from their mothers, and husbands from their wives. For the loss of their loved ones, tears streamed down their cheeks. The virgin was paraded in the open, after her hijab was torn away from her, and the enemy watched gleefully, as tears choked her moans.

The description above conveys exactly the same sort of heartfelt anguish as Father Dan’s, but this author (a sixteenth century Arab poet named Ibn Yajjabsh al-Tazi) is from the other side—the other shore.

Modern readers are appalled by the fact that the Barbary corsairs made a living from violent robbery and human trafficking. But the European states of the time did essentially the same thing, and such practices were woefully common. Like common things everywhere, they were taken for granted. It was a much rougher world than ours, and capturing and selling people for profit constituted a legitimate business enterprise—at least as long as the people being bought and sold belonged to the other side, to the ‘enemy.’

Europeans of the time were outraged and horrified by the treatment of their kin in the North Africa, but they pretty much turned a blind eye to the way North Africans were treated in Europe.

North Africans were outraged and horrified by the treatment of their kin in the various European countries, but they pretty much turned a blind eye to the way Europeans were treated in North Africa.

Human nature, perhaps.

So, yes, during the three hundred years or so of the Barbary corsairs’ ascendency—roughly the beginning of the sixteen to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries—Europeans were in constant danger of capture and enslavement when they sailed the Mediterranean and, later, the Atlantic. But so too were the North Africans.

Below, is an extract from a travel journal written by Abu Hassan ‘Al ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Ali Muhammad al-Tamjruti. In the late 1580s to very early 1590s, al-Tamjruti travelled from Morocco to Istanbul—where he served as an ambassador for the Moroccan Sultan Ahmad al-Mansour—and back. Here is a series of excerpts from al-Tamjruti’s travel journal that reveal how real the risk of attack at sea was for North African travellers.

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On August 13, 1589, we left Tetouan by sea… We continued on near Fourk (Cap de Trois Forches), a rectangular mountain protruding into the sea. It is a frightening spot because fishermen from among the Christians and Muslim mariners, who are called in their own language qarasin (corsairs), lurk there. They seize whomever they find of their weak enemies, and ships are often taken there…

To the east was Melilla, a city controlled by the Christians today, may God return it to Islam. We docked among the islands of Malwiyya, three islands near each other, where the river Moulouya flows into the sea. There, we stayed two days, delayed by a strong easterly wind that turned up the waves of the sea. The inhabitants of Tetouan told us that the Christians, may God destroy them, followed us in eight ships from Ceuta. But God defeated them and sent them back empty-handed because of this eastern wind, which enabled us to escape them, God be praised…

We left Tunis and passed Ras Adar (Cap Bôn), the mountains stretching out into the sea. It is quite frightening because Christians lurk there and capture ships, sailing out from the nearby islands of Malta and Sicily. Sailors say in the dialect of Tunis that he who passes by Ras Adar, let him first prepare his ransom money at home…

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For those who may be interested…

The first description of the miseries of being sold into slavery comes from Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie, 1649, p. 313

The second description of the miseries of being sold into slavery comes from Nabil Matar, “Piracy and Captivity in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Perspective from Barbary,” in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650, p. 56.

The excerpts from al-Tamjruti’s travel journal come from Nabil Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727, pp. 149-157.