The Barbary Pirates 15th-17th Centuries

by Angus Konstam

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Nomenclature: ‘pirates’, ‘privateers’ and ‘corsairs’ • Privateers and ports

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  The Arab conquests • The Hafsid and Marinid dynasties, 13th–15th centuries

  THE FIRST CORSAIRS

  The Ottomans • Kemal Reis • The brothers Barbarossa

  CHRONOLOGY, 1450–1660

  THE BARBARY COAST

  THE BARBARY STATES

  Morocco • Algiers • Tunis • Tripoli

  THE SHIPS

  The galiot • The galley • The fusta and barca longa • The xebec • The polacca The felucca and tartan • ‘Roundships’

  THE PIRATES

  Chain of command in the Ottoman regencies • The captains • Dual command Division of the spoils • The crews: officers • Nationalities • European renegades Galley slaves • Janissaries

  TECHNIQUES & TACTICS

  Limitations • Hunting-grounds and prey • Battle tactics

  FURTHER READING

  INTRODUCTION

  For the best part of three centuries the Barbary pirates dominated the waters of the Western and Central Mediterranean, preying on the ships and coastal settlements of Christian Europe. From their heavily fortified bases on the shores of North Africa – the ‘Barbary Coast’ – their galleys and sailing vessels ranged as far as Greece, West Africa, and even the British Isles in search of victims. While they fought for plunder, their most lucrative activity was the capture of slaves. The slave-markets of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli thrived on this steady traffic in wretched captives, and ensured that both the Barbary pirates and the emirs who ruled the Barbary states grew rich from the proceeds of human misery.

  Calling these seafarers ‘pirates’ is perhaps a misleading over-simplification. The terms used for them are discussed below, but it is important to emphasize their essential nature as ‘privateers’, sharing their bounty with the North African ports that provided them with ships, men, and a ready market for their spoils. The Barbary pirates also served in the war fleets of the Ottoman Turks, and fought alongside them in many of the great galley battles of the 16th century, as well as in amphibious campaigns such as the siege of Malta (1565).

  This lively 19th-century painting by an unknown artist shows Barbary pirates on the deck of a xebec, watching their consort attack a European sailing brig. Strangely, the dress depicted (apart from that of the Balkan soldier emerging from the hatch in the left foreground), may perhaps capture something of the ‘feel’ of the clothing worn by Barbary corsairs during earlier centuries, of whom there are virtually no contemporary illustrations.

  The 16th century was the heyday of the Barbary pirates, when their leaders rose to prominence as the actual rulers of Barbary states whose reach extended far beyond the bounds of the Western Mediterranean. The coastal city-states of modern Tunisia and Algeria were only nominally under Ottoman control; those in Morocco were independent of the Ottomans, and were usually only loosely controlled by the sultans in Fez. The Barbary states thrived on the profits of raiding and piracy, and their power extended into the African hinterland as far as the edge of that ‘second sea’ – the Sahara Desert. This study ends in the mid 17th century, when the European maritime powers managed to curb the most damaging activities of the Barbary pirates through a combination of naval activity and diplomatic initiatives. From that point on, despite temporary resurgence during times of opportunity when European powers were distracted by major continental wars, it was clear that the great period of Barbary piracy had passed.

  This early 17th-century painting shows a Barbary pirate galley attempting to board a Spanish galleon. It faithfully reflects the narrow, crowded deck of the galley, with musket-armed janissaries stationed on the bow platform above the main guns. (Andreis van Eertvelt, ‘A Spanish Engagement with Barbary Corsairs’; National Maritime Museum BHC 0747)

  Nomenclature: ‘pirates’, ‘privateers’ and ‘corsairs’

  While most Christians regarded them as pirates, the predatory seafarers of the Barbary Coast were actually privateers: that is, in Western terms, seamen who had been granted a licence by a state to fit out a ‘private man-of-war’ to attack the shipping of the state’s enemies. If such a captain captured a prize that was deemed lawful by the state’s courts, then he could keep the value of the ship, her cargo, and – in the case of these Barbary captains – the crew as well, who were sold as slaves. In return, the state would get a share of the profits. A privateering licence or ‘letter of marque’ was only valid when the state that issued it was at war, and it only covered attacks on the state’s enemies – but on the Barbary Coast the centuries-long religious conflict against Christian Europe was deemed an ‘eternal war’, so privateering licences were rarely revoked.

  A view of Algiers from the sea, from an early 17th-century engraving. The inner harbour is invisible here behind the dark bulk of the fortifications on the islet christened Le Peñón by the Spanish, who maintained a garrison there from 1510 until 1539. Other forts guard the hills overlooking the city.

  This continual state of maritime conflict was part of the greater ‘Holy War’ between Christians and Muslims, which by the early 16th century had been waged intermittently for the best part of 800 years. The 7th-century Arab conquests that began it were subsequently countered by the centuries-long Reconquista in Spain, and by the Crusades in the Middle East. After several hundred years of jihad and crusade the lands bordering the Mediterranean were fairly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, but this balance would be altered by the Ottoman Turkish expansion from the east, and the Spanish and Portuguese continuation of the Reconquista into North Africa from the west. On the Barbary Coast itself this war did not involve huge armies and fleets, or great battles. It was a state of continual low-level warfare, involving individual privateering ships or small ad-hoc squadrons that attacked Christian ships, raided Christian coastlines, and captured Christians for sale as slaves.

  The alternative term ‘Barbary corsairs’ is in fact more appropriate. It was current in the 16th century, when the Italian word corso meant the act of privateering, and a corsaro was an individual privateer – a sailor who made a state-sanctioned living from the corso. The term was also used by the French and Spanish, and effectively became shorthand not just for the Barbary pirates but also for Christian privateers such as the Knights of Malta. During later centuries the term corsair assumed wholly inappropriate romantic overtones, thanks to the hugely popular poem The Corsair (1815) by Lord Byron, the opera Il Corsaro (1848) by Verdi, and the ballet Le Corsaire (1858) by Berlioz. Today the terms corsair and pirate are largely interchangeable, which is misleading.

  Even the term ‘privateer’ is not wholly appropriate in this context, since it implies that these sailors confined their attacks to the high seas. In fact they ranged all around the shores of the Western and Central Mediterranean, attacking from the sea to raid fishing harbours or other settlements within a few miles of the shore. Sometimes they ganged together into larger squadrons or even fleets, enabling them to threaten larger ports and communities. In this respect the Barbary pirates were similar to the ‘buccaneers’ who frequented the Caribbean during the 17th century. Those English, French and Dutch buccaneers combined attacks on Spanish shipping with raids on settlements in the Spanish colonies around the Caribbean basin, and in this the likes of Sir Henry Morgan were merely following the example set by Khizr Barbarossa two centuries before. However, today even ‘buccaneer’ is used as just another term for pirate, so for our purposes Barbary ‘pirate’ is as good a word as any.

  The description ‘Barbary Coast’ is derived f
rom the name of the Berbers, the warlike tribal people who inhabited (and still inhabit) the North African coastal region intermingled with the Arabs who swept in from the east during the first century of the great Muslim expansions. The original ethnic origin of the Berbers is still uncertain; it is claimed that ‘Berber’ derives from the Italian word barbaro, originally from the Latin barbarus, simply meaning ‘barbarian’. By the 16th century the European term ‘Barbary’ had passed into regular usage as the collective name for the lands of the Berber people, so to insist on anything more pedantic here would needlessly muddy the waters.

  Privateers and ports

  As the pirates relied upon the small coastal states of North Africa for safe havens, recruits and resources, their fate became inextricably linked with that of the port cities that served as their bases. Soldiers recruited to guard the states’ rulers took part in piratical raids, state arsenals supplied the pirates with ordnance, and in return the pirates helped defend the ports and their hinterland from attack. The fortunes of these ‘rogue’ states and the pirates who operated from their ports were closely entwined.

  The slave market of Algiers: detail from a 17th-century European engraving illustrating a history of the Barbary states. In the right foreground a young Christian captive is being displayed by pirates to potential customers – Berber landowners, city merchants and (wearing a plumed turban) an agha of janissaries.

  During the roughly 300 years of the 15th to 17th centuries, the ‘eternal war’ between Christendom and Islam was imbued with a fresh energy by, on the one hand, the aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Turks, and on the other by the efforts of Spanish-led Christian alliances to halt this Ottoman tide. Geographically the Barbary states, while allied to their fellow Muslims, were caught in the middle of this conflict. While this might have been disastrous for them, in fact they thrived, largely because Ottoman–Christian hostilities led to a dramatic increase in privateering activity. An influx of Turkish captains and Moorish émigrés to the Barbary Coast saw piracy as a way of taking the war to their religious enemies. The result was a long-running, low-level maritime conflict, with piratical attacks and slave-gathering raids playing a part in this greater religious struggle. It should be noted that the religious confrontation was also complicated at times by separate alliances, which saw, for instance, Muslim corsairs aiding France against the forces of the Spanish and Italians.

  This detail of a mid 16th-century tapestry depicting the Spanish conquest of Tunis in 1535 shows Berber soldiers armed with short bows, guided (left) by a turbaned and red-robed figure, presumably an officer. This is probably a reasonably convincing impression of auxiliaries in Berber service during this period.

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  In AD 665 an Arab army marched westwards from Egypt into the Exarchatus Africae, the Byzantine province of North Africa. Two decades previously a similar incursion had secured control of much of modern Libya; this time, the Arabs planned to conquer the whole of the North African coast. The Byzantines were defeated outside their provincial capital of Carthage, and their influence was reduced to a small enclave surrounding the city. These conquered territories became the Arab province of Ifriqiya, which encompassed all of modern western Libya, Tunisia and eastern Algeria. By AD 698, when Carthage was captured, the Arab Abbasid caliphs (‘commanders of the Faithful’) based in Baghdad nominally controlled the whole North African coast from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean.

  They divided it into three provinces: Egypt in the east, Ifriqiya in the centre, and the subsidiary province of Maghreb in the west (stretching from the western border of modern Tunisia to the Atlantic coast, with its provincial capital in Tangier). For 2,000 miles, from Alexandria to Tangier, the peoples of North Africa were bound together by the secular power of the caliphs and the spiritual power of Islam. But while religious unity remained strong, any political union proved transitory. The subsequent Umayyad Caliphate ruled its North African provinces from Kairouan near Tunis, but in the mid 8th century a revolt in the west led to the establishment of independent Berber states across the Maghreb. In the 11th century one of these dynasties – the Almoravids – unified these states and the Iberian province of al-Andalus into one political entity. By the mid 12th century that dynasty had been replaced by the Almohads, whose caliphate was extended into Ifriqiya, creating a state that stretched as far east as Tripoli. Their rule lasted a century, before local revolts and Bedouin incursions led to its fragmentation and collapse. For the next 250 years, until the start of the 16th century, the North African coast was ruled by independent Berber dynasties.

  A RAID ON CORSICA, c. 1480

  Corsica lay in the area of the Western Mediterranean frequented by privateers from Algiers, and here an Algerine galley lies off a small Corsican fishing village. Warned by lookouts in coastal towers, the inhabitants have fled into the hills, leaving the raiders free to search for plunder or any unfortunate villagers left hiding in their homes.

  1: Barbary captain

  This Reis wears a fur or fleece jerkin over his loose everyday clothes, and brandishes a kilij, the curved sword favoured during our period.

  2: Bowman

  Unlike the embarked Turkish janissaries of a generation later, the pirates carried whatever weapons were available and that they were comfortable using. This seaman, based on a contemporary picture of Turkish archers, carries a short, powerful, recurved bow and a quiver of arrows, and has a sword slung from a baldric. He wears his jacket and shirt thrown back off his right shoulder for ease of movement in combat.

  3: Berber crossbowman

  This locally recruited pirate wears typical clothing of the Maghreb, and is armed with a crossbow with a composite stave, as used in north-west Africa for both hunting and war. Note the spanning hook on the front of his belt, and his straight sword with a plain cruciform hilt. The bow, quiver of bolts and spanning hook are based on examples in the Museum of Antiquities in Algiers.

  The Hafsid and Marinid dynasties, 13th–15th centuries

  In the early 13th century the Almohad province of Ifriqiya was governed by the Hafsid dynasty, but in 1223 the latter declared their independence from the Almohads, and thereafter they maintained their rule over the region from their capital in Tunis for another three centuries. During this period they extended their borders by absorbing the small neighbouring Berber kingdom of Tlemcen in what is now north-western Algeria, and by the 14th century their territories extended as far east as Tripoli. However, in the Maghreb to the west another expansionist Berber dynasty had established itself. These Marinids had taken power in Morocco in the 1240s, and within a century they were battling the Hafsids for control of Tlemcen. The zenith of Hafsid power was in the mid 15th century; after that their grip on the region was weakened by internal Berber revolts, Bedouin incursions, and attacks by the increasingly powerful Christian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Thus, at the close of the 15th century, there were two principal independent Berber states on the North African coast, both of them beset by internal and external threats.

  THE FIRST CORSAIRS

  Piracy in the Western Mediterranean existed long before the coming of the Barbary corsairs – indeed, predators had operated from ports along the Berber coast since the Vandals conquered the region in the 5th century AD. After the 7th-century Arab conquest such activity took on a religious element, as Berber raiders attacked Christian shipping and raided ports on the northern shores of the Western Mediterranean. During the medieval period pirates operated from ports on the coasts of southern Spain and Catalonia, from Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, and from southern Italy. Beyond Italy, the Uskoks preyed on shipping passing their bases on the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, while Greek pirates operated from the rugged coastline of the Peloponnese.

  Christian slaves dragging or carrying their chains as they go about their tasks for their Berber masters, in a 17th-century depiction of Algiers. These domestic slaves were fortunate: many others worked in the stone quarries, in the fields, or served as
galley slaves. This scene is actually atypical of European engravings, which often depicted shocking scenes of cruelty in an effort to raise support for groups that were seeking to ransom Christian captives in the Barbary states.

  What changed the situation on the North African coast was the late 15th-century climax of the Reconquista. The Spanish campaign of reconquest against Granada, the last remaining Muslim kingdom in Andalusia, led to a steady exodus of Moorish refugees to North Africa. The final capitulation of Granada in 1492 ended the Reconquista in Spain, but also ushered in a new round of conflict as the victorious Spanish turned their attention to the ports of the African coast. During the 15th century the Portuguese had established a presence on the north-west coast of Morocco, capturing Ceuta in 1415 and Tangier in 1471. This gave them control of the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar, but they had little interest in expanding their North African possessions beyond the capture of smaller enclaves on Morocco’s Atlantic coast – notably, Safi and Agadir – which served their greater focus on establishing trade routes around Africa and on to India and the East Indies. It would be the Spanish who would pose the greater threat, and their eastwards expansion along the North African coast would all but overwhelm the weak and divided Berber states that stood in their way. What the Berber rulers needed was the support of a powerful Muslim ally to halt this Spanish offensive.

  One of the Kuloghi (a term meaning ‘sons of slaves’), the force of auxiliary cavalry who served the rulers of the various Barbary states during our period. These horsemen were actually the sons of Ottoman officials who had married into Berber families. This arquebusier is clothed almost entirely in black (see Plate E4).