Pirates: A History

by Travers, Tim

  The Normans

  The Normans were a Viking/Frankish entity. They evolved from being Viking raiders and settlers in the area of Normandy to being an aggressive outward-looking group, which conquered England, and created empires in southern Europe and Sicily. The Normans used land warfare to build their empires, but also became sea raiders. It is difficult to know whether they can be called pirates, or perhaps more accurately, one can visualise the Normans as starting out as pirates, like their forebears the Vikings, but winding up as established powers in parts of Europe and the Mediterranean.

  At first, the Normans reacted to Muslim attacks. Before the destruction of the Muslim bases at Garigliano and Fraxinetum, these centres launched attacks on southern Europe, as did Muslim ships based in North Africa. The Bishop of Cremona reported that, ‘no-one coming from the west or north to make his prayers at the thresholds of the blessed apostles was able to get into Rome without either being taken prisoner by these men or only released on payment of a large ransom.’19 This situation gave some Norman knights and families the excuse to liberate southern Europe from the Muslims, although they also attacked Byzantine lands. Thus, among the Norman knights was a freebooter named Robert Guiscard, who from the 1050s and 1060s led the Normans in the lengthy conquest of southern Italy and Sicily from the Byzantines. It is reported of him that he ‘shrank from no violence and nothing was sacred to him; he respected neither old age, nor women and children and on occasion he spared neither church nor monastery.’20 Among his exploits was the successful siege of the city of Salerno in 1076, strangely enough with the aid of Muslims, Greeks, and Richard of Capua. He attempted to attack Constantinople itself in 1080, took Corfu in 1084 and aimed at the island of Cephalonia in 1085. Robert’s methods were to build large castles on his ships, covered with hides to protect crossbowmen and prevent fire. He also used catapults on his ships, as well as Greek fire, and crowded the rigging with crossbowmen to keep down the fire of defenders. Then he sailed close to castles located in the ports he was besieging and overwhelmed the castles.21 It is interesting that the start of a fight between ships at this time used tricks such as hurling bags of lime onto the enemy to blind the sailors, and the application of soft soap to make the decks slippery for boarders.22

  Robert Guiscard’s brother, Roger, also took a leading part in the successful but lengthy Norman effort to conquer Sicily, and carried on the struggle after Robert’s death in 1085. Apart from the two Guiscards, the most noteworthy Norman admiral during the height of Norman expansion was a certain George of Antioch. In 1146 he captured Tripoli in North Africa, and in 1148 he led a fleet of 250 ships to capture the port of Mahdiyya in what is now Tunisia. In 1147, George of Antioch found time to mount a large scale campaign among the Greek Ionian islands and Corinth. It is reported that by the end of the campaign ‘the Sicilian vessels were so low in the water with the weight of their plunder that they seemed more like merchantmen than the pirate ships they really were’.23 Then in 1149, George of Antioch raided up the Bosphorus, picking off the rich seaside Byzantine villas along the way, although he failed to plunder Constantinople. Subsequently, Norman raiding slowed down for a few years, partially caused by the death of George of Antioch, and his master, Roger Guiscard. After this, another Sicilian fleet under Tancred of Leche sailed from Messina in 1185 and in a joint land and maritime assault took Thessalonica, the second most important port and city of Byzantium. The Byzantine historian Nicetas was not impressed by the Normans, and wrote of their sack of Thessalonica:

  These barbarians carried their violences to the very foot of the altars in the presence of the holy images … it was thought strange that they should wish to destroy our icons, using them as fuel for the fires on which they cooked. More criminal still, they would dance upon the altars, before which the angels themselves trembled, and sing profane songs, then they would piss all over the church, flooding the altars with urine.24

  No doubt the Viking forebears of the Normans might have done the same in their earlier raids on monasteries and churches. Yet the Norman Empire in North Africa did not last long, and soon after George of Antioch’s death in 1153, their Mediterranean empire began to slowly disintegrate.

  Genoa and Pisa

  Meanwhile, at much the same time as the Norman expansion, the fleets of Genoa and Pisa were demonstrating their piratical abilities too. Ships from Pisa and Genoa had assisted the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, in taking Sicily back from the Normans in 1194, and already by the late eleventh century, Pisans and Genoese had driven the Muslims from Corsica and Sardinia, assisted the Normans in taking Palermo, and were raiding North African ports. The piratical activities of Pisa and Genoa increased very much after their fellow citizens were driven out of their trading quarters in Constantinople in 1182, due to anti-Western feeling, and for the next few years until the Crusade of 1204, a plague of piracy ensued. The net result was that by 1191 most Aegean islands were depopulated, or were simply used as ports by pirates. Efforts were made by Byzantium to control this piracy, either by buying off the pirates; or by the system of reprisal. Reprisal worked by taking over as compensation whatever property of the relevant city state in Constantinople could be found (i.e. if the pirate was Pisan, seize Pisan property of similar value in Constantinople, and alternatively, if the pirate happened to be Genoese, simply imprison a prominent Genoan in Constantinople until compensation was paid). Then there was naval action, as when the Byzantines employed a pirate fleet under one Stirione, a Calabrian, to capture the fleet of the Genoese pirate Gafforio. This was accomplished in 1195 and Gafforio was killed. A curious case of setting a pirate to catch a pirate, and not for the last time.25

  Genoese and Other Pirates

  Some well known pirates of the time included the Genoan, Guglielmo Grasso, who attacked Rhodes with a pirate fleet in 1192, killed all he found in the harbor, and plundered the town. He then managed to capture a ship carrying gifts for the Byzantine Emperor from the famous Saladin, which contained horses, mules, Libyan wild beasts, valuable metals and woods, plus Byzantine envoys. All aboard were killed except for some Pisan and Genoese merchants.26 Then there was Leone Vetrano, another Genoese pirate, who captured a castle in Corfu and raided various other ports in 1199. A Venetian fleet in 1207 finally defeated Vetrano’s pirate fleet. Vetrano was captured and subsequently put to death by impaling. Another pirate was Enrico Pescatore (the fisherman), who married Grasso’s daughter, and attacked Crete with five round ships and twenty-four triremes in 1206. He landed an army on Crete and captured the capital, and then, following this, built some fourteen or fifteen castles to solidify his hold on the island. But Pescatore was brought to heel in 1211, when the Venetians forced him to surrender his castle of Paleocastro in Crete. Pescatore agreed to financial terms, and left Crete. But violent piracy resumed in the 1213–1214 period, when the pirate Alamanno Costa, yet another Genoan, operated freely before being captured in 1217 and put in a cage.27 It must be admitted, however, that these Genoese pirates were perhaps more than simple pirates because of the number of ships and soldiers that they controlled, so for example, Pescatore styled himself Count of Malta.

  There were attempts to control piracy in the thirteenth century with commercial treaties between most of the chief Mediterranean powers, which sought to regularize commerce and outlaw piracy. These measures included, by 1301, the establishment of the Office of Piracies in Genoa in 1301 to compensate foreigners for Genoese piracy. Genoa also established harsh penalties for piracy. For example, in 1230, pirate captains were hung in chains on the city walls until they presumably died, while the right hands of their crewmen were cut off, to prevent them from carrying on the pirate trade. Another unpleasant form of punishment involved some 50 Venetians in 1261 who were captured trying to escape from Constantinople, and their captors, assuming them to be pirates, blinded them and cut off their noses.28

  Despite all this, piracy was common in the medieval Mediterranean, not just by Pisans and Genoese, but also, among others, by Veneti
ans, Amalfians, Lombards, Provencals, Catalans, Spaniards, Greeks, Slavs and Muslims – for treasure, or for slaves, or for ransom. For example, a certain Muslim emir, Usamah, operated galleys from Beirut in the 1190s, which captured 14,000 Christians, and sold them into slavery. Usamah owed allegiance to the famous commander Saladin, but seems to have operated independently. Usamah’s reign was brought to an end by the reconquest of Beirut in 1197 by the Crusaders.29 Some of this piracy involved the fierce and ongoing rivalry between Venice and Genoa, in which freelance privateers, corsairs, or unlicensed pirates, simply attacked ships of the opposition if circumstances were favourable. Piracy became even more prevalent in the fourteenth century, with its general nature and casual normality revealed by one of the stories told in Boccaccio’s Decameron, written between 1351 and 1353. The Decameron recounts a series of tales told by ten young refugees from the plague, who flee to the countryside, and tell stories over a period of ten days. In Boccaccio’s Fourth Tale on the second day of storytelling, a wealthy merchant from the Amalfi coast, Landolfo Ruffolo, makes a bad business decision and is headed towards poverty. He concludes that either he must kill himself or become a robber. Not surprisingly, he decides to rob. He has enough money to buy a small, fast craft, and so becomes a pirate ‘with the intention of stealing other men’s goods, especially the Turks’. Within a year he has made even more money from pirating than from his original merchant venture, and so he decides to retire from the piracy business. Ironically, his pirate ship is driven into a bay by a storm, where events turn against Ruffolo, as two large Genoese merchantmen are in the bay and ‘determined to seize it [Ruffolo’s ship], like the rapacious, money loving men they were.’30

  Boccaccio’s tale shows that piracy in the fourteenth century Mediterranean was normal and something to be expected. In this context, Genoa’s Office of Piracies ceased to operate in the early fourteenth century due to civil war, when the Genoese could no longer control their own ships.31 There was also a pirate fleet of twenty-nine ships that operated off the island of Negroponte in 1346.32 On the other hand, the convoy system, starting around the eleventh century, appears to have developed widely in the Mediterranean, and trade revived strongly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Convoys continued to be used in the fourteenth century, particularly by Genoa and Venice, as maritime rivalries encouraged the growth of piracy. At the same time, the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 allowed Catalan, Sicilian and Italian pirates to flourish in the Aegean, which was now free from Byzantine control. Similarly, the island of Lesbos was infested with pirates until it too fell to the Ottomans in 1462.33 By the late fifteenth century, the Ottoman navy began to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, and waged two wars against Venice, most successfully in 1499–1502. In general, the Ottomans tried to control piracy in the eastern Mediterranean, and although Ottoman forces were later soundly defeated in the famous galley battle of Lepanto in 1571, this battle did not have any lasting effect on the Ottomans.34 Meanwhile, in the western Mediterranean, pirates operated through the fifteenth century, and could originate from North Africa, Genoa, Granada, Portugal, Castile, Catalonia or France. For example, in 1401, the king of Aragon wrote to the king of Castile, praising him for dealing with pirates and corsairs ‘who go by sea robbing and stealing all they can not less from our vassals and friends than from strangers and yours and our enemies.’35

  As always, it is hard to distinguish between privateers who were commerce raiders against their enemies in the ongoing rivalry of Mediterranean city states and powers, and straightforward pirates, who raided all and sundry. But a major change occurred around 1500 when the Barbary corsairs emerged in the Mediterranean as raiders. These corsairs had their own arrangements with North African regencies such as Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis, which were under the nominal sovereignty of the Ottomans. Meanwhile, Western pirates, especially English and Dutch pirates, were also now operating in the Mediterranean. Thus there was a Mediterranean pirate offensive by Western pirates between 1595 and 1605, and ultimately, by 1610, according to one author, the Mediterranean had again become a systematic hunting ground for pirates, who took ships without any religious or other justification. This situation, along with economic and political problems, and technical backwardness, had much to do with the decline of Venice as a sea going power by around 1600.36

  Venice did not go down without a fight, as shown by the capture in October 1584 of a large Muslim galley off Cephalonia by the Venetians. Gabriele Emo, commander of a Venetian squadron of convict galleys, cut to pieces 50 Muslims, 75 Turks, 174 Renegade Christians, and 45 women, while releasing 200 galley slaves.37 But Venice suffered from the difficulty of manning their galleys – the larger galleys required 164 rowers on 27 benches. So, after 1545, convicts were sent from prison to the oars, eventually some 500 per year. And by 1595 all Venetian galleys were mainly rowed by convicts, with very few free men volunteering. Despite the effort to solve the manpower problem by using convicts in the galleys, it seems that 60 per cent of the convicts died of poor conditions, partly due to their meagre supply of food – five ounces of biscuits and one cup of wine per day being the allowance. As if these galley problems were not enough, Venice turned to building very large galleasses and galleons in the early 1600s, but these were very expensive and good crews were impossible to find. By 1611 there was only one great galley available, and that was leaking and unseaworthy.38

  Unfortunately for Venice, at this time the city had to deal not only with Barbary corsairs and European pirates, but also with privateers sailing out of Naples and Sicily, and an enterprising group of pirates operating in the Adriatic. These Adriatic pirates, called Uskoks, lived in the port of Senj, near Fiume, and operated in the border area between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. They attacked Venetian ships, using rowed boats with a crew of about thirty to sixty, and had a reputation for being violent. Certainly, Venice cut off the heads or otherwise executed those Uskoks they caught, and viewed Uskok society as evil:

  The most honored [Uskok] families, and those considered of the greatest merit, are those who for the longest time have traced their origins in a continuous descent from those hanged, cut to pieces, and foully massacred in other ways in their pursuits.

  Venice believed that, ‘All those things which are universally detested as contrary to every humanity, are always praised by them as proper to men of valor.’39 The Uskoks attacked Venetian ships from the 1570s until they were brought under some kind of limits by the Hapsburgs after the Venice-Hapsburg war of 1615–1617.

  The medieval Mediterranean was a very complex place, full of constantly changing powers, with a bewildering variety of pirates, privateers and corsairs who changed status according to desire and necessity. But these raiders were all really part of a fluctuating Mediterranean economic system, stimulated by the competition between Islam, Byzantium and the Christian West. Consequently, distinctions between piracy and legitimate maritime conflict cannot easily be drawn. As one historian of the medieval Mediterranean suggests ‘Pirate and corsair crews were cosmopolitan. Captains of all races roved the seas in the service of anyone who would pay or license them.’ So, emperors of Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade issued letters of marque to Western corsairs to fight against other Western corsairs. Genoese, Pisans, Franks, and perhaps even Muslims, served as corsairs for Byzantium in the thirteenth century. Greeks served the Muslim emirs of Aydin (in the area of Smyrna), in the fourteenth century. Hence, it can be concluded that in the medieval Mediterranean ‘There was no sharp distinction between the peaceful merchantman and the pirate on the one hand and the man of war and the corsair on the other.’40 This same difficulty will arise later with the Barbary Corsairs and the Knights of Malta, but at the same time as the medieval Mediterranean created a sea of pirates and corsairs, the northern world of Europe produced its own form of medieval piracy.

  3

  Piracy in the Northern World

  Just as piracy in the Mediterranean world went through complex changes, so a
similar evolution took place in the pagan north. Vikings were raiders from Scandinavia, and the name Viking may come from the word ‘Vik’, meaning creek or inlet from which the Vikings emerged. In general, however, Scandinavians were called the Norse, and pirates and raiders were differentiated from the Norse by being called the Vikings. The first Viking ships arrived off the shores of England and France in the 780s, although the traditional start of the Viking age of attacks on the British Isles and Western Europe is the Viking raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the English coast of Northumbria, in 793. These raiders were probably Norwegians, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded this attack with dismay:

  In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on June 8, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.