Barbary corsairs
The Barbary corsairs, also known as the Barbary pirates, Ottoman corsairs, or naval mujahideen, were mainly Muslim corsairs and privateers who operated from the North African coast, known in Europe as the Barbary Coast. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they engaged in razzias—raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, as well as Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.
While such raids began after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 710s, the terms "Barbary pirates" and "Barbary corsairs" are normally applied to the raiders active from the 16th century onwards, when the frequency and range of the slavers' attacks increased. In that period, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli came under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, either as directly administered provinces or as autonomous dependencies known as the Barbary states. Similar raids were undertaken from Salé and other ports in Morocco.
The raids were such a problem that coastal settlements were seldom undertaken until the 19th century. Between 1580 and 1680, corsairs were said to have captured about 850,000 people as slaves and from 1530 to 1780 as many as 1,250,000 million people were enslaved according to historian Robert Davis, however these figures are disputed and have been questioned by other historians. Some of these corsairs were European outcasts and converts such as John Ward and Zymen Danseker. Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, the Turkish Barbarossa brothers, who took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century, were also notorious corsairs. The European pirates brought advanced sailing and shipbuilding techniques to the Barbary Coast around 1600, which enabled the corsairs to extend their activities into the Atlantic Ocean. The effects of the Barbary raids peaked in the early-to-mid-17th century.
The scope of corsair activity began to diminish in the latter part of the 17th century, as the more powerful European navies started to compel the Barbary states to make peace and cease attacking their shipping. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective protection continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Between 1801 and 1815, occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary Wars waged by the United States, Sweden and the Kingdom of Sicily against the Barbary states. Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely. The remainder of the threat was finally subdued for Europeans by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and continuous campaigns and colonization by the French during the mid-to-late 19th century.
History
The Barbary corsairs were active from medieval times to the 1800s.Muslim historical narratives
Both Europeans and Muslims considered themselves to be waging holy wars against each other during this era. European and American historical sources bluntly consider these operations to be a form of piracy and that their goal was mainly to seize ships to obtain spoils, money, and slaves. Muslim sources, however, sometimes refer to the "Islamic naval jihad"—casting the conflicts as part of a sacred mission of war under Allah, differing from the more familiar form of jihad only in being waged at sea. Accounts of Andalusian Muslims being persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition—willingly abetted by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, who were initially faced with the post-Reconquista necessity of binding their territories together, and hence adopted a militantly Christian national identity—provided more than enough justification, in Muslim eyes.The Middle Ages
In 1198, the problem of Barbary piracy and slave-taking was so significant that the Trinitarians, a religious order, was founded to collect ransoms and even to exchange themselves as a ransom for those captured and pressed into slavery in North Africa. In the 14th century, Tunisian corsairs became enough of a threat to provoke a Franco-Genoese attack on Mahdia in 1390. Moorish exiles of the Reconquista and Maghreb pirates added to the numbers, but it was not until the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the privateer and admiral Kemal Reis in 1487 that the Barbary corsairs became a true menace to shipping from European Christian nations.16th century
From 1559, the North African cities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, although nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, were autonomous military republics that chose their rulers and lived by war booty captured from the Spanish and Portuguese. There are several cases of Sephardic Jews, including Sinan Reis and Samuel Pallache, who upon fleeing Iberia attacked the Spanish Empire's shipping under the Ottoman flag.During the first period, the beylerbeys were admirals of the sultan, commanding great fleets and conducting war operations for political ends. They were slave hunters, and their methods were ferocious. After 1587, the sole object of their successors was plundering, both on land and sea. The maritime operations were conducted by the captains, or reises, who formed a class or even a corporation. Cruisers were fitted out by investors and commanded by the reises. 10% of the value of the prizes was paid to the pasha or his successors, who bore the titles of agha or dey or bey.
In 1544, Hayreddin captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, and enslaved some 2,000–7,000 inhabitants of Lipari. In 1551, Turgut Reis enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Ottoman Tripolitania. In 1554, corsairs under Turgut Reis sacked Vieste, beheaded 5,000 of its inhabitants, and abducted another 6,000.
17th century
In the early years of the 17th century, the Barbary states attracted English pirates, many of whom had previously operated as privateers under Queen Elizabeth I. Still, they found themselves unwanted by her successor King James VI and I. Whereas in England, these pirates were reviled, in the Barbary states, they were respected and had access to safe markets to resupply and repair their ships. Many of these pirates converted to Islam.A notable Christian action against the Barbary states occurred in 1607, when the Knights of Saint Stephen sacked Bona in Algeria, killing 470 and taking 1,464 captives. This victory is commemorated by a series of frescoes painted by Bernardino Poccetti in the "Sala di Bona" of Palazzo Pitti, Florence. In 1611, Spanish galleys from Naples, accompanied by the galleys of the Knights of Malta, raided the Kerkennah Islands off the coast of Tunisia and took away almost 500 Muslim captives. Between 1568 and 1634, the Knights of Saint Stephen may have captured about 14,000 Muslims, with perhaps one-third taken in land raids and two-thirds taken on captured ships.
Ireland was attacked similarly. In June 1631, Murat Reis, with corsairs from Algiers and armed troops of the Ottoman Empire, stormed ashore at the little harbor village of Baltimore, County Cork. They captured almost all the villagers and took them away to a life of slavery in North Africa. The prisoners were destined for a variety of fates—some lived out their days chained to the oars as galley slaves. At the same time, women spent long years as concubines in harems or within the walls of the sultan's palace. Only two of these captives ever returned to Ireland. England was also subject to pirate raids; in 1640, 60 men, women and children were enslaved by Algerian corsairs who raided Penzance.
Another major figure was Moulay Ismail, the second ruler of the 'Alawi dynasty of Morocco. He was not a pirate himself, but encouraged and benefited from their operations, especially the slaves they captured and delivered.
More than 20,000 captives were said to be imprisoned in Algiers alone. The rich were often able to secure release through ransom, but the poor were condemned to slavery. Their masters would, on occasion, allow them to secure freedom by professing Islam. A long list might be given of people of good social position, not only Italians or Spaniards but German or English travelers in the south, who were captives for a time.
In 1675, a Royal Navy squadron led by Sir John Narborough negotiated a lasting peace with Tunis and, after bombarding the city to induce compliance, with Tripoli.
18th–19th centuries
Piracy was enough of a problem for some states to enter the redemption business. In Denmark:Until the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, British treaties with the North African states protected American ships from the Barbary corsairs. During the American Revolutionary War, the Corsairs attacked American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean. However, on 20 December 1777, Sultan Mohammed III of Morocco issued a declaration recognizing America as an independent country, and stating that American merchant ships could enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast. The relations were formalized with the Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship signed in 1786, which stands as the U.S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty with a foreign power.
The Barbary threat led directly to the United States founding the United States Navy in March 1794. While the United States did secure peace treaties with the Barbary states, it was obliged to pay tribute for protection from attack. The burden was substantial: from 1795, the annual tribute paid to the Regency of Algiers amounted to 20% of United States federal government's annual expenditures.
In 1798, an islet near Sardinia was attacked by the Tunisians, and more than 900 inhabitants were taken away as slaves.
After the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Royal Navy no longer needed the Barbary states as a source of supplies for Gibraltar and their fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. This freed Britain to exert considerable political pressure to force the Barbary states to end their piracy and practice of enslaving European Christians. Treaties were made, but the treaty with Omar Agha the Dey of Algiers was broken by the massacre of 200 Corsican, Sicilian, and Sardinian fishermen who were under British protection. This resulted in the bombardment of Algiers by an Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Admiral Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth. The following day when the allied fleet sailed back to renew the bombardment the Dey of Algiers capitulated. On the allied side casualties were 900 dead and wounded and the conflict was considered more ferocious than the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The Barbary states had difficulty securing uniform compliance with a total prohibition of slave-raiding, as this had been traditionally of central importance to the North African economy. Slavers continued to take captives by preying on less well-protected peoples. Algiers subsequently renewed its slave-raiding, though on a smaller scale. Europeans at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 discussed possible retaliation. In 1824, a British fleet under Admiral Sir Harry Burrard Neale was fired on and had to threaten to bombard Algiers again before the 1816 treaty was renewed.
Corsair activity based in Algiers did not entirely cease until France conquered the state in 1830.
The Treaty of Larache was a treaty between Sweden-Norway, Denmark, and Sultan Abd al-Rahman of Morocco as a result of the Moroccan expedition of 1843–1845. The expedition was conducted by the combined navies of Sweden-Norway and Denmark to pressure the Moroccan sultanate into agreeing to the reversal of several old unfair treaties and to put a halt to the annual payment of tribute to Morocco in exchange for safe passage through the Mediterranean. The final bombardment of a Moroccan city in retribution for piracy occurred in 1851 at Salé.