For nearly three centuries between the 1500s and 1800s, the Barbary pirates ran amok throughout
the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
They were a perpetual thorn in the sides for both Europeans and Americans sailing these
waters.
They attacked ships along trade routes and pillaged coastal towns until many inhabitants
from Spain to Italy gave up and abandoned their villages.
The pirates enriched themselves along the way.
They took gold, jewels, and spices, but probably the most valuable commodities they stole and
traded were…humans.
Welcome back to Nutty History.
Today, we’re exploring the dark story of history’s forgotten prisoner trafficking
network: the Barbary Trade.
Chained below decks of the Barbary corsair ships, prisoners were forced to row until
they couldn’t row any more.
The Barbary pirates sailed galleys that relied more on oar power than wind power.
As the pirates tore across the Mediterranean, many of their male prisoners were sold into
hard labor in North Africa, and the women became part of the harems of wealthy men.
But the most brutal fate for those taken by the pirates was oarsmen on their galleys.
These poor souls could never leave their seats.
They were chained to their oars, had to relieve themselves where they sat, and were fed meager
rations of rotting vegetables and fish.
Exhaustion, disease, and infections from sores caused by rowing nonstop led to massive loss
of life and very short lives for those unlucky enough to be doomed to life below decks, if
life is what you could call it.
Estimates for the number of prisoners taken by the Barbary pirates remain cloudy.
The historian Robert Davis has estimated that Barbary traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli
took over one million Europeans as captives in the 250 years between the start of the
16th century and the middle of the 18th century.
His estimates have been disputed though.
No known records exist for just how many captives were taken by the pirates, although some observers
towards the end of the 1500s estimated that there were already some 35,000 Europeans in
captivity in North Africa.
Who were these pirates, and how did they help set up one of the most extensive prisoner
trafficking networks that no one has heard of?
At face value the term “Barbary Corsairs” might seem to refer to barbers who cut unruly
hair.
Though many of the Barbary pirates for sure had some wild, salty locks, this is unfortunately
not the origin of the name.
Corsair, first of all, is just another word for pirate.
And Barbary is an Anglicized version of Berber.
Berbers were an indigenous ethnic throughout North Africa – mostly in Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia, Libya – regions where most of the Barbary pirates, though not all as we’ll
find out, came from.
Although peak Barbary piracy spanned the three centuries between the 1500s and 1800s, their
history on the Mediterranean goes back a lot further.
At the end of the 12th century, Barbary pirates were such a nuisance that a French Catholic
organization called the Trinitarians was founded in order to collect ransoms for the people
who were captured and forced into hard labor around North Africa.
In 1390, the French and the Genoese teamed up to attack the Berber stronghold of Mahdia
in what’s now Tunisia.
The resulting “Barbary Crusade” was yet another Christian vs. Muslim stand-off, although
the reasons for the attack were as much economic as they were religious.
The Franco-Genoese siege of Mahdia ended in a draw, with both sides declaring victory.
The Berbers successfully beat back the Europeans, but the Genoese and French were able to gain
a bit more access to and enjoy less Barbary interference along certain maritime trade
routes.
But the Barbary pirate era really got into full swing towards the end of the 15th century
and beginning of the 16th.
Two fairly drawn-out historical developments during this time helped turn the Barbary pirates
from small-time nuisances to full-blown Mediterranean menaces.
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The first was something called the Reconquista.
Since the 700s, the Iberian Peninsula – now modern-day Spain and Portugal, had been mostly
controlled by the Umayyad Caliphate, a Muslim dynasty that at one point stretched nearly
into India in the east, through the Arabian Peninsula, across Northern Africa, and into
Iberia in the west.
Over the next 700 years, Christian kingdoms fought the Muslims in a drawn-out series of
wars that was dubbed the Reconquista, or reconquest.
By 1139, the Kingdom of Portugal was founded, and one hundred years later, Portugal’s
Reconquista was officially finished.
Spain had more work to do though, and during the mid-1400s, Ferdinand and Isabella joined
the houses of Castille and Ara-gon and cracked down hard on any non-Catholics.
As a result, thousands of people fled to North Africa, mostly Muslims and Jews, many of whom
turned to piracy.
Two of the most famous Barbary pirates were Sephardic Jews whose families had been forced
from their homes in Iberia.
Both held both Spain and Portugal in high contempt, for obvious reasons, and went about
doing all they could to get their revenge.
The first, Sinan Reis, probably became the most famous Jewish pirate in history.
He carried out countless raids of Spanish and Portuguese ships in the Mediterranean
amounting to millions of dollars worth of valuables, and even helped build a fleet to
help India expel the Portuguese from their territory.
Because of pirates like him both Spain and Portugal lost hundreds of ships over the centuries.
The other, Samuel Pallache, was a Moroccan-born Jew whose family had been forced to flee Iberia.
Pallache actually became quite a successful diplomat, and he was instrumental in finalizing
a trade agreement between the Netherlands and Morocco in 1610, one of the first treaties
between a European country and a non-Christian country.
But Pallache also liked to dabble in piracy – or privateering, which was basically just
state-sponsored piracy.
Sponsored by the Moroccan government, Pallache raided many Portuguese and Spanish ships – a
less than diplomatic job.
The second historical development that led to the rise of the Barbary Pirates was the
Ottoman conquest of North Africa.
By 1566, the Ottoman Empire controlled nearly all of the region.
However, the Ottomans pretty much left the regional governments alone and let them do
what they wanted, as long as their kings paid tribute to the Sultan in Istanbul and gave
them military help when they needed it.
But many powerful Ottoman captains did end up making their way to North Africa and turning
to piracy – state-sponsored or otherwise.
One of the most famous was Hayreddin Barbarossa.
He and his brother Oruc started off as corsairs, raiding Spanish and Italian ships in the Mediterranean.
They amassed a pretty sizable fleet, and then went about raiding Spanish coastal towns and
cities.
In 1516, the brothers captured Algiers from the Spanish, and were de facto rulers of the
city for a couple years before it was annexed by the Ottomans.
Eventually, Barbarossa rose from an Ottoman Corsair to the highest naval rank in the Empire,
becoming the Admiral General of the Ottoman navy, amassing a fleet of 210 ships.
The Barbary Corsairs weren’t content with just plundering the Mediterranean, and by
the early 17th century, they had begun moving up into the British Isles and Scandinavia.
From 1609 to 1616 alone, the English lost 466 ships to Barbary piracy.
They conducted raid after raid along the English and Irish coasts, taking many captors along
the way.
Their captives were taken to the forced labor markets in Algiers and Tunis.
The men would normally be forced into hard labor, the women would become part of the
harems of wealthy elites, and the children were often reeducated.
The Barbary Trade and the raids that fed it became so problematic that the English government
set up an organization called the Committee for Algiers in 1640 that was tasked with overseeing
the ransoming of captives.
According to reports at the time, there were somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 English
people being held in captivity in Algiers.
In 1646, a guy named Edmund Carson was sent to Algiers by the English to try and get back
as many prisoners as he could.
At around 30 pounds per man and even more for women, Carson managed to buy back about
250 English men and women before he ran out of money.
Eventually, the pirate threat around the British Isles became so bad that it even affected
the fishing industry, as no fishermen wanted to head out to sea for fear of being attacked
by the Barbary Corsairs.
The corsairs even became a threat in Denmark.
At the beginning of the 18th century, a fund was set up called the slavekasse.
Money was systematically collected from churches around the country to help pay for the ransom
of hundreds of Danish and Norwegian sailors captured by the pirates.
By the mid 1600s, Europeans began negotiating with the pirates.
Treaties were set up, usually involving tributes to the pirates in the form of money in exchange
for the promise that the pirates wouldn’t attack any signee’s ships.
In 1662, England set up the first such official treaty.
It was a weird system, because the English and the Dutch and the Spanish actually had
much more powerful Navies with more modern and better equipped ships that could easily
destroy the pirates' more primitive galleys.
However, through the treaties, each European country was hoping they could kind of deflect
the pirate’s wrath towards a different European rival.
After the American Revolution, the protection against Barbary piracy that was afforded under
British rule vanished, and the newly-formed United States had to figure out how to handle
the pirate threat as their ships brought valuable goods across the Atlantic from the Mediterranean.
It started with Morocco.
Morocco has a unique and often overlooked place in American history.
It was both the first country to recognize the United States as an independent nation
in 1777, and the first country to take an American ship after the US achieved independence.
Despite that, the Americans and Moroccans finally agreed to a truce.
The 1786 Moroccan-America Treaty of Friendship still stands as the United States’ oldest
non-broken treaty with a foreign power.
But there were still threats from Barbary corsairs sailing out of Algiers, Tunis, and
Tripoli.
Between 1785 and 1790, pirates from Algiers captured more than a dozen American ships
and hundreds of prisoners.
Finally, in 1796, Algiers and the US agreed on a treaty where the US would pay more than
half a million dollars in exchange for the return of the captives and shipping protections.
A similar deal was struck with the rulers of Tripoli and Tunis but in 1801 the ruler
of Tripoli canceled its treaty and declared war on American shipping in the region.
In response, the US teamed up with Sweden to lay siege to important harbors in Tunis,
Tripoli, and Algiers.
It became known as the First Barbary War.
After four years of blockades, sieges, and battles, the three Barbary states eventually
succumbed and signed a treaty ending the war.
It was an uneasy truce though, and when the Americans turned their attention back towards
North America during the War of 1812, the Barbary pirates went right back to pillaging
American ships in the Mediterranean.
This led to the Second Barbary War in 1815.
This one was shorter, and resulted in a resounding American victory that all but ended the rampant
piracy that had been going on for centuries.
No longer would the US and other European countries pay tribute to pirates in exchange
for protections.
The whole episode was one of the primary reasons for the rapid development of the United States
navy, a navy that would go on to dominate the world in the next couple hundred years.
What part of history do you think is often overlooked or has been forgotten about?
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