II
“Yield dogs, yield!”
—Barbary pirates’ exhortation before boarding European merchant ships
The seeds of the Barbary States’ long jihad against Christian Europe and, later, America were planted by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain in 1492, the year they sponsored Christopher Columbus’s expedition into the Atlantic to find a western passage to India. The royal couple had grand ambitions for Spain, wishing to bring the entire peninsula under Christian rule. That meant finally crushing the Moors, the descendants of the Islamic conquerors of Iberia in 711.
The Moors were the progeny of invading Arab Moslems and of the North African Berbers whose origins predate the historical record, receding into the primordial mists millennia before Christ. Moslem cavalry pouring out of seventh-century Arabia reached Alexandria in 642 and began embarking on increasingly longer and larger expeditions into the Maghrib, the “land of sunset”—the vast arid region stretching from Egypt to the Atlantic, more than 2,000 miles. In the oceanic sand dunes and craggy hills, the Arabs met and conquered North Africa’s indigenous Berber tribes in bloody clash after sharp, bloody clash, advancing west inexorably. Many Berbers converted to Islam and became staunch Arab allies who assisted in later conquests. By 707, the invaders and their auxiliaries occupied coastal North Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.
During one expedition into the wild, barren land, Arab General Hassan ibn al-Nu‘man al-Ghassani happened upon what remained of Carthage, the Phoenicians’ once-mighty outpost and, later, the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. In 698, it was little more than ruins, occupied by ragged, starving bands living in squalor beside a large gulf. Hassan, a practical, energetic man, envisioned a new city closer to the head of the gulf; it would be better protected from the sea and from the rovers hunting easy plunder. It also would be perfectly situated for a shipyard. The city that he built became Tunis. Even as it went up, shipwrights began building a fleet of galleys, the oared ships that had carried merchants, adventurers, and conquerors along the Mediterranean shores for millennia. As the eighth century began, the first Barbary corsairs weighed anchor in Tunis to capture the merchant vessels of European Christians and sack Mediterranean coastal towns.
Before long, the Moslem conquerors were eyeing the towering landmass across the narrow straits from Morocco. The Moslem general, Tarik, gathered an invasion fleet to carry his assault troops across the short stretch of open water to Iberia, the onetime western province of the empires of Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. Iberia was a fabled land of silver and gold mines, fertile farmland and rich cities. For nearly 200 years, the Visigoths, one of the German warrior tribes that had overrun the crumbling Roman Empire and its far-flung provinces, had prospered there, but now the Islamic juggernaut was at their door.
In 711, Tarik and 7,000 Moslem Berbers alighted from troop transports onto the rock that would bear Tarik’s name—Gebal-Tarik, or Gibraltar. King Roderick summoned his Visigoth warriors to defend their land. The Moslems crushed the larger German army in one day, at Guadalete.
The Moors, as the amalgam of invading Moslem Berbers and later Arab arrivals would become known, prospered in Spain as no people had before or has since. Seville, Cordova, and Granada blossomed into densely populated, prosperous cities where Moslems, Christians, and Jews lived together in harmony. Women enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than they would anywhere else in Europe or the Islamic world for 500 years. As did Moorish males, they attended primary schools, where they learned to read, write, and recite the Koran before being instructed in a trade. Some went on to the universities to study mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, botany, medicine, and law. Literacy soared. Cordova alone boasted seventy libraries that held more than 500,000 books. (In 1800, U.S. libraries held only one tenth that number.) Advanced Moorish trade and agriculture practices created massive wealth and a food surplus that fed a growing urban populace. The Moors filled the cities with marble palaces, graced with their trademark double-horseshoe arches, and with gilded ceilings and doors inlaid with precious jewels.
But Christian power, formerly confined to the northern mountain fastnesses, expanded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Moors’ territories contracted. Isabella and Ferdinand’s marriage united Castile and Aragon. The Moors retreated to Andalusia.
In 1491, at the urging of Catholic clergy, Ferdinand and Isabella laid siege to Granada, Andalusia’s capital. It fell on November 25. The cardinals and bishops beseeched the monarchs to expel the infidel Moors from Spain altogether. The Moors had tolerated Christendom when they were ascendant, but the Christian Inquisition harbored no reciprocal emotion. Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and his bishops and monsignors soon convinced Isabella to take a hard line and give the defeated Moors of Granada a choice: baptism or exile. It was the same choice Ferdinand and Isabella would give Spain’s unbaptized Jews six months hence, with the result that over 100,000 eventually became exiles. Most Granadan Moors, however, preferred baptism to banishment; by professing a surface conformity, they could preserve their home and family, while secretly practicing the old faith as before—as many of the “converso” Jews did—although Ximenes made it difficult for them to do so, shutting down all the mosques and burning Moorish manuscripts. But the rural Moors were more uncompromising, stubbornly refusing to give up their faith or abandon their holdings. They dug into the fertile hills south of the city, bracing for the worst. It soon came: Ferdinand sent the Spanish army into action against them. The outnumbered rebels surrendered in 1492.
Thousands of exiled Moors who had spurned baptism loaded their possessions onto carts and their own backs and streamed into the port cities under the condemning eyes of the Spanish authorities. The Moors’ forced dispossession began a century of banishments and exile. While a few refugees found sanctuary in Italy, most retraced Tarik’s historic journey, in reverse, across the straits to North Africa—to Barbary, where they were welcomed by their Moslem brethren.
Wanting to avenge their banishment by the Spanish, the Moors found their way to the Barbary shipyards, where their thirst for revenge met a kindred spirit among the corsair captains, always ready to go raiding. Soon more of the long-bowed corsairs than ever plowed the western Mediterranean on raids against coastal Spain. The Moors’ former countrymen, the ones who professed a false allegiance to Christianity, helped guide them to Christian loot and captives. The “little war” against Spain had begun.
The escalating raids alarmed Isabella to the extent that she began contemplating a military expedition against Barbary. She sent spies to find which points were vulnerable to attack, but died in 1504 before mapping an invasion plan. The more cautious Ferdinand favored a containment policy while he concentrated on expanding Spanish trade with Italy. Meanwhile, the Moors’ hatred of Spain festered in the Barbary ports.
The Spanish cardinals and bishops would settle for nothing less than the extirpation of every last crumb of Moorish culture. With some justification, Spanish Christians believed the Moriscos, as the surviving Moors who had submitted to baptism were now called, constituted a “fifth column” in the deadly struggle between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe that had begun in earnest with the Crusades. Spain clamped down on them. The clergy wasn’t fooled by their baptismal-font conversions. They pressured Ferdinand’s grandson and successor, Charles V, to issue an edict requiring the Moriscos to speak only Spanish and to abandon their native costumes, their Moslem names, and their public baths. Moslems, Jews, heretics, and nonbelievers of every stripe all would soon experience far worse treatment as the Inquisition honed its inhuman instruments of persecution and torture, such as the rack and stake, but this was how it began in Spain, with intolerance of cultural diversity. Charles signed the edict, but it was his son, Philip II, who carried it out. In 1567, Philip ordered the Moorish baths pulled down, as well as a host of other punitive measures intended to eradicate Morisco culture. The next year, the Moriscos rebelled. War swept Andalusia. The Morisco rebels made the Sierra Nevada Mountains their headquarters. The Spanish exulted in the opportunity to destroy the Moors.
Given command of the Spanish forces was Philip’s gifted twenty-two-year-old half brother, Don Juan of Austria. Destined for renown at the epic naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, Don Juan ruthlessly clamped down on the Moriscos, soldiers and civilians alike. Spanish troops burned homes and farms, massacred women and children. The Moriscos retaliated in kind. But by May 1570, the Moriscos were finished. Fifty thousand were enslaved, or exiled to North Africa.
The remaining Moriscos began leaving Spain in large numbers, seeing that they, too, would be driven out eventually. The emigration continued for decades more. Between 1492 and 1610, three million Moors left or were forced into exile from Spain, settling mainly in Algiers, but also in Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli.
Barbary swelled with new naval recruits eager to make war on Christendom, which had deprived them of their country, homes, and livelihoods. By the early seventeenth century, the Barbary corsairs were raiding every western Mediterranean Christian shore with impunity and roving the Atlantic as far north as Iceland.
Before the pirate ships took aim on Europe, the theater of the long war between the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires shifted from the gates of Vienna to the western Mediterranean. The Ottomans had been invited into Algiers in the sixteenth century to drive out the Spanish troops sent by Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximenes to stop the corsair raids. With a foothold in the region, Sultan Suleiman dreamed of an Ottoman-controlled sea from Gibraltar to the Levant. He combined his eastern Mediterranean fleet with the Barbary corsairs and set out to crush Christian resistance. Charles V, who besides being Spain’s king was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, met the Ottoman challenge with a Holy Roman coalition navy.
For fifty years, the behemoths struggled for naval dominance and struck at one another’s western Mediterranean strongholds, with neither able to deliver a decisive blow. Charles’s attempted invasion of Algiers in 1541 was wrecked by storms; Suleiman’s assault on Malta in 1565 was stopped by the doughty Knights of St. John and timely reinforcements. Tunis changed hands several times. In 1571, the Holy Roman fleet commanded by Don Juan met the Ottoman navy at Lepanto in Greece’s Gulf of Corinth in one of history’s titanic naval battles, involving 542 ships and more than 150,000 troops and oarsmen. Spanish gunpowder and firearms carried the day, giving the Christians a seemingly momentous victory. But a year later, the Ottomans were at sea with an even larger fleet.
Matters closer to home began to absorb both imperial powers’ energies. Spain had gone bankrupt and was trying to suppress the rebellious Dutch. Constantinople was convulsed by a power struggle after Suleiman’s death, and the Ottomans faced a new threat from Persia. In 1580, the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires signed a truce. Christian and Ottoman war fleets disappeared from the western Mediterranean.
Washed up on the far shore of the global struggle between Christians and Moslems and filled with restless seamen, Barbary embarked on its golden era.
The shipyards of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli rang with cries of “Allahu akbar!”—God is great!—signifying the launching of yet another new corsair, a happy occasion calling for lamb’s blood to be poured ceremoniously over the prow. The sanguinary ritual spoke to the fervent hope that the raiders soon would spill Christian blood.
Hundreds of English and Dutch pirates migrated to Barbary at the beginning of the seventeenth century. No longer needed in the king’s service as privateers, they were exiled after merchants complained they were redirecting their attacks against English shipping. In Barbary, corsair privateer commissions awaited them from the ruling pashas. In Barbary, a pirate captain could grow rich, so long as he shared his loot with his crew and, of course, the pasha. While skilled seamen always were welcome in Barbary, the Europeans especially were, for they brought with them new technology: the sailing ship. Until then, the construction and operation of sailing ships were unknown in North Africa, which still employed galley ships propelled by slave oarsmen. The advent of the so-called “round ships” transformed the Barbary pirates into “The Terror.”
The round ships needn’t hug shorelines, nor haul 300 oarsmen and all of their food and water as the galleys did. With wind and canvas replacing the straining oar, sailing ships required comparatively few seamen, so they could be packed with fighting soldiers to overpower their victims quickly. Shipwrights adapted them to meet the pirates’ special needs. The decks were built taller than European ships. They were made maneuverable and fast, with shallow drafts. The modifications suited them for coastal raiding, and for attacking and boarding merchant ships.
Coming upon a merchant vessel, the corsair would fire a broadside, while, from the tall upper deck, pirate soldiers raked the victim ship’s decks with musketry. In the meantime, a large boarding party would mass on the ship’s long bow, armed with muskets, swords, and pikes, knives clenched in their teeth. As trumpets blared, the boarders clashed their arms, shouting, “Yield, dogs, yield!” Often, that was enough to compel a surrender. It was usually over quickly either way, with the merchantman’s crew stripped to their underwear, clapped in irons, and bound for Barbary’s slave marts, where they would be sold like cattle. Coming into port, the corsairs fired celebratory salvos to announce their success.
Sail liberated the corsairs from the coastal waters and opened up new frontiers to loot and destroy. In large numbers, they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Murad Reis, a legendary Algerian pirate captain, descended upon Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and took 300 prisoners, including the governor’s family. Then he stood offshore so the captives’ relatives could buy them back. In 1617, 800 raiders swept through Madeira and carried off 1,200 captives. A German renegade guided three Algerian ships to Denmark and Iceland in 1627, returning with 800 prisoners. Corsairs appeared off County Cork, Ireland, in 1631 and bore away 237 men, women, and children. Between 1613 and 1622, Algerian corsairs captured 447 Dutch ships. Four hundred English ships were taken in just four years, many right off the English coast. During six months in 1636, more than 1,000 Englishmen experienced the anguish of North African slavery. France wasn’t spared, either. Between 1628 and 1634, eighty French ships and 1,331 men and women fell into the raiders’ hands. Unsurprisingly, Europe experienced a serious shortage of ships and seamen.
But Spain suffered most. The Moriscos hadn’t forgotten their expulsion and their losses; their hatred for the Spanish burned brightly.
The Spanish abetted it by expelling more than 250,000 Moriscos in 1609. In relentless retaliatory raids, the Moriscos and their Barbary allies wasted coastal towns and fields, carrying off loot and captives. Despite the pleas of the people, the Spanish government refused to divert significant numbers of warships to coastal defense from convoying supplies to the monarch’s cousin Hapsburgs in Austria. Spanish coastal cities were thrown upon their own, largely ineffectual measures. Gibraltar’s nine watchtowers manned by forty-two paid guards were not much of a deterrent and did little to allay the fear that gripped the people. In a 1614 letter to the king, Gibraltar’s citizens said they never felt secure from the corsairs, “neither at night nor during the day, neither in bed nor at mealtimes, neither in the fields nor in our homes.” Even when privateers licensed by the king attempted to interpose a barrier of armed ships between the raiders and Spain, the corsairs slipped through. Long stretches of coastline were abandoned, and commerce, community life, and fishing declined as the people moved away, or were slain or spirited away into captivity. Spain and Italy reported losses of 300,000 to 500,000 inhabitants each late in the seventeenth century—roughly 5 percent of their populations, comparable to losses today of 2 million to 3 million each. Spanish reformer Pedro Fernandez Navarrete said much of it was due to the loss of “those who, because of our neglect, are in slavery or captivity.” Spain arguably never fully recovered from the habitual “climate of fear” from centuries of Barbary terror, retaining a vestigial xenophobia that it never has entirely shaken.
Europe’s ruinous losses were the agencies of Barbary’s unprecedented good fortune. In 1616 alone, the take exceeded 3 million livres—hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s currency. The corsair chiefs lived like pashas, and the pashas like sultans. Algiers’s population exceeded 100,000, making it one of the most populous cities on earth at the time. European pirates and Moriscos, Moslem and Jewish immigrants from the Levant, went on a spending binge, building palaces and stuffing them with loot and slaves. Wrote Diego de Haedo of his visit to Algiers in 1612: “... They have crammed most of the houses, the magazines, and all the shops of this Den of Thieves with gold, silver, pearls, amber, spices, drugs, silk, clothes, velvets, &c., whereby they have rendered this city the most opulent in the world: insomuch that the Turks call it, not without reason, their India, their Mexico, their Peru.”
Algiers’s lavish public baths had steam rooms, hot and cold water, and masseurs. After being kneaded and steamed, washed and dried, the sleek Algerian businessmen, corsair captains, and government officials might enjoy coffee or sherbet, and perhaps a pipe of opium. They went home to their nouveau riche palaces, decorated ostentatiously with mirrors from Venice; silks and velvets from Lyon and Genoa; Delft porcelains; carved Italian marble; Bohemian glass; and English clocks. Their worldly needs more than met, the new rich tried to secure their places in heaven as well. The Algiers skyline sprouted minarets as the corsair captains attempted to outdo one another’s noblesse oblige with bigger and better mosques; the city soon had more than 100.
Admiral Ali Bitchnin, commander of Algiers’s sixty-five corsairs, was the apotheosis of showy extravagance, with his two palaces in the city, a suburban villa, and several thousand slaves. He traveled with a large bodyguard. His sense of religious and civic obligation impelled him to build a mosque and a sumptuous public bath. The hazards of his busy trade, including the possibility of his own capture when he was kidnapping and robbing Christians, caused him to keep two captive Knights of St. John as human exchange currency at the ready.
There were many like Ali Bitchnin who believed in giving back to the community. Consequently, expensive, ornamented fountains, drinking troughs, and public latrines sprouted in every major city. With its pirate lucre, Tunis built a slave mart, the Berka, and repaired the Roman aqueduct at Carthage. Merchants prospered buying and selling corsair loot. Some of the wealth even reached the pockets of the lower classes. But for the most part, the peasants, craftsmen, and workers lived as simply and frugally as before.
An abundance of European slaves magnified the atmosphere of unbridled opulence; there were so many slaves that the middle and upper classes enjoyed unparalleled freedom from every sort of drudgery. Father Pierre Dan, one of the “Redemptionist” priests who negotiated ransoms for captives, estimated in 1634 that the city of Algiers alone was the unhappy home of 25,000 Christian slaves, mostly Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Europeans rightly feared captivity in Barbary as though it were death; it often was worse. As soon as they fell into the raiders’ hands, the captives were stripped of their clothes, given rags to wear, and either were put in irons or made to work the ship. The pashas had their pick first. The youngest, handsomest male slaves were usually chosen as palace pages, and the prettiest women were sent to Constantinople as gifts to the sultan.
The rest were auctioned in the slave mart. Algiers’s “zoco” was in the middle of the commercial district. Potential buyers examined the prisoners carefully, as they would any domestic animal they were considering purchasing. They checked over their teeth, walked them back and forth to see if they limped, poked and prodded them, made them jump, stripped them naked and felt their hands for calluses, a reliable indicator of their worth as manual laborers. Young boys and girls were prized above all, of course. For strictly pecuniary reasons, noblemen, army officers, and government officials also were valued highly, for they might be ransomed to their countrymen for a good price. Skilled workers were coveted, too, especially if their specialty happened to have anything to do with gunnery, seamanship, or shipbuilding.
The slave marts were stages for heart-wrenching scenes. Father Dan happened to witness an Irish family sold piecemeal into slavery, never to see one another again. Their inconsolable grief moved even hardened onlookers to tears. “It was a piteous sight to see them exposed for sale at Algiers, for when they parted the wife from the husband, and the father from the child; then, say I, they sell the husband here, and the wife there, tearing from her arms the daughter whom she cannot hope to see ever again.”
Literature and the Redemptionist religious orders commonly depicted the Moslems as heartless, barbaric captors. True, some corsair captains made a practice of slicing off and collecting the noses and ears of their galley slaves. One reportedly bit off a Spanish slave’s nose and ears for singing while he rowed. However, such atrocities were exceptions.
Christians usually were treated no worse than Moslem captives in Christian hands. It was in the owners’ interests to keep slaves healthy for ransom or labor, although they rarely gave them much more than bare-minimum subsistence. To guarantee faithful service, slaves were loaded with chains weighing up to sixty pounds. At night, they were chained to stanchions or iron rings embedded in the floors of their squalid dungeons. “Our beds were nothing but rotten straw laid on the ground, and our coverlets peaces of old sailes full of millions of lice and fleas,” wrote Sir Anthony Sherley, a seventeenth-century slave in Morocco. Ships docking in Algiers were required to remove their rudders and oars so would-be escapees wouldn’t be tempted to commandeer them and sail to freedom.
Christian slaves toiled in the fields and vineyards, mined copper, carried water, chopped wood, took the place of fourlegged beasts in the traces of carts and wagons, and quarried stone under extremely dangerous conditions. The fortunate few chosen as secretaries and interpreters, and the lucky ones employed as shipbuilders and carpenters—excellent, prestigious work—faced one immense drawback: They were so prized that their redemption often could not be purchased at any price. Surgeons were another valued class of worker, excused from all but professional duties. They wore three-corner hats and military clothing. Any captive who had ever sewn up a wound claimed to be a surgeon.
Seventeenth-century captives were largely spared the horrors of the galley ships, where before the advent of sail many Christian slaves ground out their days in abject misery. Chained naked to their rowing benches, six abreast, galley slaves pulled on a fifteenfoot oar as two boatswains with long, coiled whips paced a bridge overhead, watching for slackers. Sometimes they toiled twelve to twenty hours without rest—sleep was never really restful, for the slaves never slept stretched out full-length—with a sailor shoving wine-soaked bread into his mouth for sustenance. If they collapsed, they were flogged until they died or passed out and then were pitched overboard. For the pitiable galley slave, death might have come as a relief
Among the slaves lacking special skills, a few lucky ones landed in good situations. One was Germaine Mouette, a privately owned French captive in Morocco from 1670 to 1681. Initially assigned to grind corn with a hand mill, Mouette found the work too arduous and deliberately ground the corn coarsely so that it was inedible. He was given easier work—watching over his master’s young son. The boy became so attached to Mouette that before long the slave became a de facto family member. His ubiquitous twenty-five-pound chain was discarded and his diet improved radically from thin gruel and hard black bread to white bread, honey, and butter. Eventually ransomed, Mouette and his captors parted with tears and regrets.
While most captives were not as severely abused as the Redemptionists claimed in their dreadful accounts—which, after all, were intended to encourage donations to their ransom funds—cruelty was commonplace enough. At the rock quarries, slaves were harnessed to sleds and, under the lash of their “drivers,” forced to drag huge boulders to the quays and shove them onto barges that hauled them to the harbor fortresses and breakwaters. Two thousand slaves built the Moroccan city of Meknes during the last quarter of the seventeenth century; some were burned alive operating lime kilns. Slaves were bastinadoed—the soles of their feet and their buttocks flailed with inch-thick sticks—flogged, halfstarved, tortured, burned, and skewered. As punishment for the capital crime of killing a Moslem, a condemned Christian faced the unspeakable fate of being cast from a parapet upon gleaming hooks cruelly protruding from the city walls and, impaled, dying a slow, agonizing death that could last for days.
Redemptionist priests like Father Dan of the Order of the Holy Trinity and Redemption of Captives enabled many slaves to return to their homes and avoid dying in chains. Jean de Matha founded the order in 1199 to ransom Crusaders from the Moslems. Recognizing Matha’s good services, Pope Innocent III bestowed upon his order the Convent of Saint Mathurin in Paris, and it became the order’s headquarters and shorthand name, the Mathurins, the name by which the friars were known as they spread throughout France. When they put down roots in Italy and Spain, they were called Trinitarians. The friars raised ransom money in their parishes and journeyed to North Africa with full purses to barter with the Moslems for the return of the enslaved Christians.
The sight of the Redemptionists in their resplendent white robes, emblazoned with blue-and-red crosses on their breasts to signify the Holy Trinity, debarking in Algiers and Tunis cheered the pashas and corsair captains. The well-meaning friars actually helped preserve terrorism, kidnapping, and slavery as profitable enterprises. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Redemptionists were a permanent feature of the Barbary landscape, like the forest of moored, square-sail pirate corsairs and the frenzied slave marts. The pashas allowed the friars to open prison hospitals staffed with nurses, cooks, and chaplains. Moslem slaveholders contributed to their upkeep so their slaves could receive good medical care. During eighty-two redemption missions between 1575 and 1769, friars bought the freedom of 15,500 captives. By no means were these the only redemptions; between 1520 and 1830, an average of 2,000—3,000 slaves were sold each year just in Algiers’s zoco. The white slave trade was enormously profitable.
During the first half of the seventeenth century, Europe was absorbed by its own internal bloody religious and civil wars. No royal embassies were sent to treat with Constantinople; no expeditions were mounted; no appeals were made to free the slaves. While the Europeans pitted their warships against one another, the Barbary corsairs had free rein. The captives’ countrymen bore the burden of paying what ransoms they could.
Europe futilely attempted to temper Barbary’s attacks on its shipping by going to Constantinople to parley with the Ottoman sultan, who ostensibly controlled the regencies in Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis (but not Morocco, never an Ottoman province). But the negotiations, even when concluded successfully, failed to scale back the depredations.
Then, in a radical departure, England opened direct negotiations with Algiers’s pasha in 1622, in effect recognizing Algiers’s autonomy from the Ottoman Empire and bypassing Constantinople. England had accurately assessed the drift in Ottoman—Barbary relations in recent decades. While the sultan continued as before to appoint the pashas of Tripoli and Algiers, increasingly those rulers operated independently, and Tunis began its own succession in 1591, when janissaries—Turkish soldiers— revolted and put one of their own in power. It wasn’t long before Tripoli and Algiers founded family dynasties.
England’s 1622 treaty with Algiers forever changed the relationship between Europe and Barbary. Henceforth, Europe would bargain with the Barbary States as equals and not depend on Constantinople to force their compliance with treaties they scarcely even acknowledged. Other European nations lined up to sign treaties with Algiers and Tunis. Holland was first.
But even with a treaty, Dutch ships were still being seized by corsairs. Dutch officials sent a punitive squadron. Admiral Lambert appeared in Algiers’s harbor in 1624 with several Algerian corsairs he had captured. He demanded the release of all Dutch captives and a new treaty, or he would hang the several hundred captive Algerian crewmen. The pasha and his officers refused, disbelieving that Lambert would carry out his threat. Lambert hanged all the captives from the ships’ spars and sailed away, leaving Algerians convulsed with horror, shock, and lamentations. Soon Lambert’s squadron reappeared with a fresh inventory of captured Algerian ships and their crews. When the admiral repeated his demands—and his threat—the Algerians released all their Dutch slaves and captured Dutch ships with alacrity, and signed a new treaty.
The Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, the year, too, that Holland won independence from Spain after eighty years of war. England, France, Spain, and Holland built towering new men-of-war of 100 guns or more for the next round of hostilities, and kept them in fighting trim by sending them to the Mediterranean when the corsair raids cut too deeply.
English Admiral Robert Blake reached Tunis in 1655 to negotiate at Oliver Cromwell’s behest. England had recently beaten the Dutch navy and now was busy fighting Spain, which Tunis took as a signal to step up its seizures of English merchant ships. Should Tunis refuse to negotiate, Blake’s orders were to “assault them either by land or sea and fight with, kill and slay all such persons as shall oppose you.”
The Tunisians stated their bargaining position bluntly by firing on Blake’s ships. Blake sailed to Porto Farina in the Gulf of Tunis to commit mayhem on the corsairs anchored beneath the fortress guns. “The Lord, being pleased to favor us with a gentle breeze which cast the smoke on them ... facilitated our attack.” Blake sank or burned nine Tunisian corsairs with heavy loss of life, at a cost of just 25 English killed and 40 wounded. From Tunis, Blake sailed to Algiers for further “talks.” The sobering news of Blake’s punitive attack on Tunis preceded him, and the pasha was delightfully conciliatory, eagerly reaffirming his nine-year-old treaty with England.
Blake’s success inspired the other major powers to use force to discourage the unrelenting depredations on their shipping, but they discovered it acted as only a temporary brake on the attacks. Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, backed by a formidable fleet, dictated treaties to Tunis and Algiers in 1661 and liberated Christian prisoners. Ten years later, British Admiral Edward Spragg sailed burning ships—“fireships”—into the anchored Algerian squadron, destroying the cream of the fleet and killing 3,100 sailors. The shocking loss touched off a rebellion. The four janissary chiefs who had ruled Algiers for twelve years were assassinated, and a corsair captain was named the first “dey.” He and his descendants ruled Algiers until France’s invasion in 1830.
France was the next European power to retaliate against Algiers, whose dey had gone so far as to declare war. In 1682, Admiral Abraham Duquesne appeared off Algiers with orders to destroy the city, unleashing a terrific bombardment that killed 500 people and demolished 50 buildings. His orders executed, Duquesne sailed away without negotiating. The next year, he was back. He shelled the city again. Eager to avert further devastation, Dey Baba Hassen sent Duquesne a boatload of Algerians as hostages and offered to return hundreds of French slaves. But Duquesne wanted 700,000 livres in reparations for French shipping losses. Hassen said he didn’t have the money.
One of the hostages delivered up by Hassen, Mezzo Morto, assured Duquesne that if he put him ashore he could convince Hassen to meet his terms. There was more to Morto’s plan than what he told the French admiral, who sent Morto to the city in a boat to try his persuasion on the dey. The former hostage proved to be a dynamo of vaulting ambition. He rallied the corsair captains, assassinated Hassen, succeeded him as dey, and then threatened to kill all the French nationals in Algiers with cannon fire if Duquesne didn’t stop the bombardment. Duquesne refused indignantly and ordered the fleet to resume its shelling.
Morto ordered Père Vacher, the vicar apostolic, to be tied to the mouth of a cannon. The vicar was blown to bits. Algiers’s ramparts were also soon stained with the viscera of other French clergy and nationals. Unmoved by the slaughter, Duquesne continued the shelling, destroying more than 500 homes, several mosques, and a public bath. When Morto displayed a mulishness equal to Duquesne’s and refused to sign a treaty, the French fleet just sailed away, leaving the French nationals’ fate in their Algerian enemies’ hands.
Five years of hostilities ensued between Algiers and France without any resolution, and the French king Louis XIV sent Admiral Jean d‘Estrées to humble the Algerians. Upon reaching the city, he found Morto still the ruler—and more recalcitrant than ever on the subject of reparations. D’Estrées resumed the bombardment Duquesne had suspended five years earlier. The Algerians responded by blowing to bits with cannons the French consul, the vicar general, and other Frenchmen. D‘Estrées retaliated by executing Turkish captives and floating their bodies ashore. With neither side willing to compromise, d’Estrées also left without a treaty.
The punitive expeditions had no enduring effect on the Barbary States’ morale. No sooner would the European men-of-war leave the western Mediterranean than new corsairs would be christened with lambs’ blood and sally forth in search of Christian prizes. A sustained allied blockade such as Jefferson envisioned never seemed to have occurred to Europe’s leaders. “The Terror” became an accepted hazard of conducting foreign trade, much like hurricanes and mutinies, desertions and accidents at sea.
Holland greatly aided Barbary’s incremental shift to semirespectability by proposing a radical change in its relations with Algiers: a “permanent” treaty with annual tribute. Holland was weary of signing treaties that inevitably were broken, with a consequent loss of men, ships, and cargo, followed by a retributive counterstrike, and finally a new treaty to be broken later. It would be more economical, the pragmatic Dutch reasoned, each year to simply give the dey a cash “present” and “naval stores”—in other words, the masts, cannon, gunpowder, swords, and muskets that enabled the Algerians to continue extorting money from Europe. Of course, the Barbary States didn’t object to their extortion racket’s elevation to a line item in Holland’s annual budget. In 1712 Holland sent Algiers $5,000, ten 24-pound cannons, 25 large masts, 450 barrels of gunpowder, 2,500 cannonballs, and 50 chests of gun barrels and swords—the very weapons of war that Barbary’s rulers needed to extort even more money from Europe.
Austria, Venice, Naples, Hamburg, Sweden, Denmark, and the other small European trading nations lined up to sign similar treaties. Too weak to fend off the piratical raids on their shipping, they preferred the predictability of annual tribute to the random catastrophic losses inflicted by the corsairs. France and England were contemptuous, as they could afford to be, possessing the war fleets to sporadically compel the Barbary rulers’ respect. Yet even they succumbed quietly to the temptation of buying long-term security with treaties sweetened by lavish presents, the occasional new warship, and plenty of cash.
The treaties enriched the rulers, but deprived the corsair crews of plunder and the freebooting, roving life they loved. Acutely aware that thousands of idle, brooding seamen, soldiers, and captains were the volatile ingredients of revolution, the rulers broke the treaties deliberately from time to time to keep the corsair crews busy and their captains in loot.
Algiers perfected the elaborate bit of de rigeur theater that came to attend the rupture of treaties. The dey would peremptorily send for the consul. Fearing the worst, the consul would dutifully present himself and receive a tongue-lashing over a trumped-up slight that the ruler would claim was tantamount to war. Of course, all the consul’s efforts to repair the breach were doomed. Before long, soldiers would march out and chop down the consular flagpole, and out would go the corsairs to hunt down that nation’s merchantmen. Denmark and Sweden, Russia, the two Sicilies and Naples, Venice, and, later, the United States learned to read the signs. A new treaty with one meant another inevitably would find its flagpole on the ground.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Barbary States were shadows of their former selves, surviving largely on their reputation. Algiers’s population, thinned by plague and a stagnant economy, had dwindled in the 1780s to 30,000, one-third of the city’s size 150 years earlier; the once-mighty pirate nation’s corsair fleet had shrunk to just ten ships, some unseaworthy; and its slave population hovered around 1,000, a tiny fraction of the 25,000 who thronged Algiers in Father Pierre Dan’s day.
Yet Europe continued to pay obeisance to the Barbary States’ jihad protection racket as though the regencies’ corsair fleets remained the scourge of old.