In Our Time - The Barbary Corsairs

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the North African privateers who, until their demise in the nineteenth century, were a source of great pride and wealth in their home ports, where they sold the people and goods they’d seized from Christian European ships and coastal towns. Nominally, these corsairs were from Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, outreaches of the Ottoman empire, or Salé in neighbouring Morocco, but often their Turkish or Arabic names concealed their European birth. Murad Reis the Younger, for example, who sacked Baltimore in 1631, was the Dutchman Jan Janszoon who also had a base on Lundy in the Bristol Channel. While the European crowns negotiated treaties to try to manage relations with the corsairs, they commonly viewed these sailors as pirates who were barely tolerated and, as soon as France, Britain, Spain and later America developed enough sea power, their ships and bases were destroyed. WithJoanna Nolan Research Associate at SOAS, University of LondonClaire Norton Former Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s University, TwickenhamAnd Michael Talbot Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of GreenwichProducer: Simon Tillotson Reading list:Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970) Des Ekin, The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (O’Brien Press, 2008)Jacques Heers, The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1450-1580 (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018)Colin Heywood, The Ottoman World: The Mediterranean and North Africa, 1660-1760 (Routledge, 2019)Alan Jamieson, Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs (Reaktion Books, 2013)Julie Kalman, The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023)Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of the Barbary Corsairs (T. Unwin, 1890)Sally Magnusson, The Sealwoman’s Gift (A novel - Two Roads, 2018)Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (John Murray, 2010)Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999)Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (University Press of Florida, 2005)Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves (Hodder and Stoughton, 2004)Claire Norton (ed.), Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Lure of the Other (Routledge, 2017)Claire Norton, ‘Lust, Greed, Torture and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern 'Renegade' (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29/2, 2009) Daniel Panzac, The Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800-1820 (Brill, 2005)Rafael Sabatini, The Sea Hawk (a novel - Vintage Books, 2011)Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th century (Vintage Books, 2010)D. Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2001)J. M. White, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2018)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, until their demise in the 19th century,

the Barbary Corsairs were a source of great pride and wealth in North Africa, where they sold the people and goods they'd seized from European ships and coastal towns. Nominally, these corsairs were from Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, but often their Turkish names concealed their European birth. And in the imagination and experience of their enemies, they were pirates who represented the values and threats of North Africa

to be tolerated only until gunboats could destroy them. With me to discuss the Barbary corsairs are Joanna Nolan, a research associate at Soas, University of London. Claire Norton, former Associate Professor of History at St Mary's University at Wittgenham, and Michael Talbot, Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich.

Michael Talbot, it's a complex situation, but let's start with something simple. What, at the very worst, was the European experience of the Barbary Corsairs? In the European imagination, and we're talking across the whole of Western and Northern Europe, Europe, the Barbary Corsairs were bogey men. They were the opposite of everything that European Christian civilization had to offer. They were painted as pirates, as anarchic states, as really the worst of humankind. And this happens both on sea and on land in the encounters

between Europeans and people from North Africa. And this is mostly around encounters of piracy, privateering, enslavement. And what tends to happen in the narratives that get constructed about North Africa is that the things that the North Africans do, the Europeans also do, are painted in the worst possible light. So whereas Europeans go around engaging in glamorous privateering, the North African states are vicious pirates. Whereas it's acceptable in an 18th century mind for Europeans to enslave hundreds of thousands, millions of people on the West Coast of Africa, it's unacceptable for Europeans. to be taken and sold in the slaves markets of North Africa. What period of time are we talking about, the 16th to the 19th century? Is that what you're talking about?

That's the main period. So the Barbary Corsairs, there's a prehistory that goes back as far as the 13th century in some respects. But the period that we call the Barbary Corsairs, that really starts with the Ottoman conquests of North Africa that start at the beginning of the 16th century. The real height, I suppose, of corsairing activity is at the end of the 16th. than the first quarter, first half of the 17th century, and then there's a very brief but violent resurgence at the start of the 19th century. What do the Europeans understand by the word barbary?

The term barbary is the same essentially as what we would call the Berber people in North Africa. They wouldn't call themselves that often these days. They call themselves Amazig because Berber and Barber have this negative connotation of uncivilised and that is rooted in both, a sort of a European understanding of that coast as being a place of uncivilisation, as I just mentioned before. It's also because North Africa is a place that's repeatedly conquered and colonised by outsiders.

So it's surprising in some ways that it's persisted as long as it has in describing the complex states and societies of North Africa. And Corsair? Corsair is a really complex word. It tends to denote violence at sea that is legitimate violence. So we tend not, if we do refer to the North African states, we tend not to use the word piracy anymore because piracy has the moral and legal implication that it's not right, it's illegal. Whereas what was happening in the Western Mediterranean was legal. These were not rogue pirates. They were employees of a state.

And so although they were committing violence, it was legitimate violence. So corsairing is kind of a link to privateering and being legitimate maritime warfare. These North African places that we alluded to and that we will be talking about, well, Muslim, how did that play in? This plays into the Barbary Pirates narrative very much, as I mentioned before. North Africa becomes the opposite of everything that Western European civilization represents, and that includes the fear of Islam. It's at this time, particularly in the 16th century, that the Ottoman Empire is getting towards the height of its power. Vienna gets besieged in the 1520s, it will get besieged again in the 1680s,

This is a time when the Ottoman armies are really threatening the borders of the states in the west of Europe. And so in the imagination of European intellectuals and in many respects the general populace, Islam is this looming figure of threat. And so the Barbary Corsair has come to represent a very real manifestation of that threat. Thank you. Claire Norton, what were the rules of engagement for these ships sailing out from the ports in North Africa? Okay, so very similar to the rules of European Christian privateering. First of all, a privateer, the ship, the captain, the crew had to be issued with a letter of Mark or an Ottoman and Ijazet. What's a letter of Mark?

It's a written permission from the state authority, be that an empire, the Ottoman Empire or a city state, saying that this crew, this ship could go out and legitimately legally attack the ships of a designated nation, a designated state that the authorising state was at war with. And they were allowed to attack this state during a particular period of time when they might be at conflict. So an example might be in the 1570s, the Ottoman Venetian War. At that time, the Ottomans gave letters of Mark or this Ijazet to Ottoman privateers, which allowed them to attack the shipping, both mercantile and naval shipping of the Venetians. because they were at war with them,

and to capture the ship, the goods and the people. But as soon as that war ends, as soon as a peace treaty is agreed, these same actions by the privateers would slip over the line and become seen as piracy, which would be illegal and punished. And the second difference between piracy and privateering is that all goods taken during a privateering raid

would have to then be checked and were subject to a tax. payable back to the authority, the state that had issued the letter of Mark. How far were these rules followed? Well, that is a thing, isn't it? In theory, they should be followed strictly, but in practice they weren't, and they weren't by any state in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

So many Ottoman privateers, after the conclusion of peace with Venice, for example, although they could legitimately still attack the Habsburgs and not the Venetians, often did still attack people. And often with the collusion of local officials as well or them turning a blind eye, there was considerable effort at times put in for the illegal systems in place to offer redress to people and free people taken illegally

and to provide restitution or compensation for goods taken. But that wasn't always the case. So they set off, the corsairs, they set sail. What could their rulers, who'd given them these letters, have marked these permissions to attack anybody they thought was an enemy. What could they expect back at home? So one of the key benefits of this was that you could quite cheaply

and dramatically increase your military force at a time of conflict by bringing in these privateers, by bringing in these ships, which allowed you not only to harass enemy shipping across a broader geographical space, but also these ships could participate in large naval battles. They would bring in intelligence as well from their travels around. So that was another positive. And also the tax taken from the captives and the goods and the ships brought in allowed the building of considerable infrastructure around the Mediterranean world,

fortifications, towns, urban infrastructure. And of course, manpower with the captives with the enslaved people too. That was a big part of it, the enslavement, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. And the other thing that gave it is a merciless image. Yes, I mean, on all sides. I mean, everybody within the Mediterranean was subject to privateering attacks, be they Christian or Muslim.

That's one thing we have to remember. It wasn't simply something that North Africans participated in. Thank you. Joe, what happens do we have for the variety of people who might be corsairs? There's a Spanish abbot who was taken hostage in Algiers in the late 16th century. And he wrote of the most powerful corsairs stationed in Alge's stationed in Alge's. And of the 35, you had Galliots, which were the most expansive ships, 25 of them were European, drawn from predominantly, they were Venetians, Genoese and Greeks. Are these people who had been captured? No, these are renegades.

These are Europeans who, for whatever reason, have either been exiled or have sought exile from their home country because they were in trouble for presumably some form of course airing or privateering. elsewhere and they sought refuge in Algiers or Tunis or Tripoli in the sense that they could be harboured by the state because they were useful to the state there. Because we think of the corsairs as a situation in North Africa, but you're basically saying it was flooded with Europeans? Absolutely flooded with Europeans. Two of the most famous corsairs operating during the period that we've outlined were known as Morad Rice, the elder and Morad Rice the younger. They weren't related at all. Morad Rice the elder allegedly lived to the age of 104.

He was an Albanian born in Rhodes. So already you have the sense of a multilingual, multicultural, multinational background. He worked for the Ottoman Empire. He worked for himself. He worked out of Salle, the port in Morocco. And then Morad Rice, the younger, was a Dutch Jansianzun,

who was a Dutch corsair who based himself again, at times in the Barbary regencies, at times out of Salle. He conducted land, raids as well as sea raids. So there is this incredibly multicultural, multinational and crucially multilingual element to the Corses. You'd have to be an intrepid person to take a ship into the Mediterranean, wouldn't you? You would, or foolish potentially.

Yes. Or up and down that part of the Atlantic Front as well. Yes. How did they communicate with each other? There's a lot of Europeans, but a lot of Europeans have a lot of different languages, and then there are languages of North Africa, then there's the, you tell me how they communicated with each other. You're absolutely right, obviously. there were many, many nationalities, and this extended not only to the corsairs, but then obviously the slaves who they had captured aboard multinational ships. You could see just in the microcosm of individual ships

that there were many, many nationalities across and on the Mediterranean. A Belgian diplomat who was imprisoned in Algiers, I think in the 1660s, wrote that of the 550 slaves in his banjo, banjo. Banio. I beg your pardon. Banjo is a jail. that was established for the slaves

because they were in such numbers that they had to create sort of a barracks type scenario for them. Of the 550 slaves captured there, he heard 22 separate languages. So they needed some form of communication. And there had been this nautical mercantile jargon that had evolved over the Mediterranean from probably about the 13th, 14th century onwards,

which is what we know as lingua franca. Can you give us some notion of what lingua franco sounded like? I can do my best. Obviously we don't know. And the accents were very varied. Part of the diversity of the language was that although it had a sort of grammar and fixed vocabulary, there was variation across time and across space. But for example, there is a ritualistic phrase. The language is by nature ritualistic. There's a lot of sort of implied violence and imperatives in it. But there was this very standard ritualistic phrase that allegedly. the corsairs would say to their captives, which is, Dios Forte, non-pillar fantasia, Mondo Cuisi, say,

Vinir Ventura, and that means God is great, don't delude yourselves, the world is thus, if the wheel of fortune turns, you will return home. Thank you very much, Michael. To the outsiders,

the corsairs were Turks or Ottomans. So let's tell you, talk about the Ottomans, what was their relation to the corsairs? We have to first of all contextualise Ottoman North Africa within the broader expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. So at the 1500, the Ottoman Empire is still very much a Balkan and Anatolian Empire. Then thanks to the conquest of Salim I, who smashes through the Mamluk Empire in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, the Ottomans become a very much an Asian and Middle Eastern Empire. And then throughout the 16th century, they are expanded

constantly in all directions as far in the east as Indonesia and in the west to places like Algeria. And so the Ottoman North African states start to become a crucial part of the Ottoman Empire in the West as a sort of frontier zone. The biggest challenge facing the Ottomans in the 16th century were the Habsburgs and particularly the very powerful fleets of Spain. And so what they really needed was a kind of filtration system in the west of the Mediterranean to ensure that, ensure that the Ottoman trade and peaceful commerce in the East was protected. And to some extent, all three of the three regencies, so Algeria, Tunis and Tripoli, they fulfill this role as a kind of frontier zone, a barrier to protect the proper Ottoman Empire to the East. So from near

the very beginning, if we can call it the beginning in the 16th century, that beginning, not the even early beginning, they're drawing in the privateers. They're drawing in these licensed persons to help them in their empire building and holding. Absolutely. I mean, the proper Ottoman Navy was quite busy in the 16th century. I mean, if you think about the great clashes such as Lepanto later on, the Ottomans have plenty to keep their own galleys busy with. But by bringing in the North African states, and as we've heard already, by attracting the expertise of mariners from across Europe,

they're able to develop this huge defence mechanism over in the west of the Mediterranean. And that is really important not just for warfare, but also for peaceful commerce, because what these corsairs are doing, they're not just raiding enemy shipping, they're checking the shipping of nominal allies to make sure they're not smuggling the goods or people of their enemies on board. And the Algerians themselves, when they refer to themselves in their diplomatic letters, they call themselves Daril Jihad, so the abode of holy war. And that really gives us a sense of how they viewed themselves within this wider Ottoman system. And another way to view of them was that they become a sort of state on sea.

They absolutely do. And very quickly, because they are so important, and also, if you think about it quite distant from the centre of power in Istanbul, the three North African states are able to develop quite a lot of autonomy. They become, all three of these entities, become essentially independent states by the final quarter of the 17th century. This is intriguing, Claire. Can you give us a closer example of the way these privateers, pirates,

they were called by some people, mercenary pirates, were drawn in to the great states of the time, were drawn into the system and became part of the system and in some cases rose to run the system. Absolutely. So privateering offered a really good way for both Muslims and Christians, free and also enslaved people to rise to positions of power within the Ottoman state or the North African policies as well.

So this could be that they could be talent spotted while participating in large military campaigns or while rowing on galleys that is an enslaved person, they could be people who migrated to North Africa from Christian European countries to sell their services and their skills. Or they could be, in the case of the Barbarossa brothers, people who found themselves almost like the de facto rulers of an area in North Africa.

So if I give you a couple of examples from the different places, the Barbarossa brothers, Oratreras and Hyrajin Pasha, came from a mercantile, maritime. family on Lesbos. They had a Christian mother and a Muslim father and they were engaged in various merchant and privateering activities. And Oratres in the beginning of the 16th century, found himself active around Algiers and with a group of privateers managed to defeat the Spanish there and also the local Emir and then found himself in a way as the de facto ruler of Algiers. But fearing retribution, he thought that the best move might be to offer his loyalty to the Ottoman state.

And so in a way, he became appointed as the first governor, the first Malibay of Algiers. And he does this for two years until he dies. When he succeeded by his brother, Hayridin Pasha, who, because of his great seamanship and skills, rises very quickly to become the Capodonidaria, the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet where he oversaw all sorts of diplomatic and military alliances with the French and the Ottomans against the Habsburgs, but also expanded the might of the Ottomans into the Mediterranean. It seems to me that in some cases, people who did not, did better than if they'd stayed at home and tried to work their way up the system.

Absolutely. And another example of that is John Ward, who became quite notorious in sort of English folk literature and plays. So he was a privateer under Queen Elizabeth I, fighting against the Spanish during the end of the 16th century. And when the war finished, he found himself impressed into sort of forced labour in the Navy. And he didn't like that so much. So he mutinies and flees with some other people,

working as a pirate for a number of years, before deciding that he's going to best align himself with the local Ottoman official in Tunis and then he sails under the flag of Tunis as a privateer again getting great wealth and commanding a number of ships before converting eventually to Islam and then retiring a wealthy, happy person.

This is Muslim territory but a lot of Christians or non-believers, whoever they are, are coming into this Muslim territory. A lot of them are converted. Did that mean that they were in trouble when they went back to their own countries? What did it mean? It was relatively fluid.

I think you needed to demonstrate conceivably that you had converted, and that was also a way of buying your way out of slavery as well. The minute you had converted, you were no longer a slave. As a Christian who'd been captured, if you converted to Islam, you could be freed in the regencies of Algiers, Tunis, San Tripoli. And I think those people who returned could plead very much that this was something they had to do in all. order to save their lives. So can we talk a bit more about the slaves? They were enslaved and there

were different gradations of what happened to you when you were enslaved. Can you go through them? What happens when you get enslaved depends a lot on your background and your class. So you might be captured to be ransomed. If there was any thought that you might be wealthy enough or your nation state or your community might be able to raise enough money to ransom you, then you wouldn't be necessarily put out to labour, you would be kept in this banio, this prison that we heard about before, and waiting for money to be paid. And there are several unfortunate incidents around this. So one of the raids by this Jan Janssen character is to Iceland in 1627, when a huge number of Icelandic civilians are captured and taken back to Algiers to be ransomed.

And twice the Icelandic communities are able to raise the money to, freedom and twice the people who are in charge of the money spend the money on other things. So ransom doesn't always work out. That's if you're lucky. This is what will happen to you. If you are unlucky, there are other forms of enslavement that you might be subjected to. The most unpleasant, not that any enslavement is pleasant, but the most unpleasant would be put to work in the galleys and in the industrial facilities in places like Algiers,

Tunis and Tripoli. And being a galley slave was incredibly hard work. if we remind ourselves what a galley is, it's an awe-powered ship. So very much like Roman triremes, that same sort of technology, it's based on physical manpower. And so you could have a very, very miserable time, a relatively short life expectancy for a number of reasons. So the industrial and galley slave is a particularly nasty form.

Then there are other forms of enslavement that might see you put into domestic service. And this was both a blessing and a curse. You had the opportunity, potentially if you had a kind enough master, and if they saw enough potential in you, and they maybe encouraged you to convert to Islam, that this could be your way to socially climb within the North African regencies. There wasn't such a rigid as class system as we saw back in Europe. So your talents meant something.

So if you were very lucky, you might be in that position. But for the vast majority of enslaved people in domestic servitude, it meant that. It meant working in people's houses. For women, of course, that could mean sexual slavery as well. Very often it did. So none of this was particularly pleasant, but there are different forms of enslavement. And as Claire mentioned earlier, we talk about this happening in North Africa.

The exact same thing was happening in France, in the Italian states, and in Spain, where North African Muslims would be captured and go through very much the same process. Thank you, Claire. What do we learn? There were accounts of captivity accounts, weren't there? What do we learn from those? I suppose there were books? Yes, they were printed as books.

They were also transmitted as all tales. They were read. The literature is called. Yes, yeah. I think one of the, maybe, we get quite a rich description of what life was like in North Africa, what the military capabilities of the North African states were in the different qualities,

of their naval capacity, their geography, the socio-cultural situation, the politics, largely because a lot of the captives telling their tale when they came back wanted to demonstrate that their time in captivity had not been a waste, that they were able to produce some useful information, intelligence that would be of use to their mother country.

And also to some extent, to prove their loyalty, to say, no, no, we didn't tell when we were over there. We were there spying for you in effect. So that's very useful information. We also get an insight as to what life was like for captives. But this can be a little bit problematic in captivity narratives because of the different functions that they served within amongst their audiences. So to start with, many captivity narratives would tell a tale of extreme violence,

particularly attempts either on the captive or people that the captive might have heard of or knew to force them to convert to Islam through torture and other threats. And the problem with this is that that doesn't really cohere with other evidence we have both from Ottoman sources and other Christian European sources. And it also doesn't cohere with what the captives themselves say about their captivity.

So while they might start off with descriptions about it being a very violent place and Christians being persecuted, they will often then go on to describe what looks very much like an interfaith tolerant society, where Christians, Jews and Muslims lived alongside each other and worshipped freely. So William Oakley, for example, says that he used to meet with up to 50 or 60 other Christian captives three times a week to hear a preacher give a sermon and to worship the Christian God. And he never had any problem and he was allowed by his owner, his patron to do that. He also says that his patron treated him like a son and loved him and would give him provisions from the farm to celebrate Christian festivals.

And also set him up in employment. So he worked as selling tobacco and wine. And the prophets, he says, were shared. equally according to the investment that he and his owner had put in between them both. So we've got sort of this inside information which shows it being a religiously much more tolerant place than Christian European countries, for example. I would agree with Claire entirely. There were anecdotally within banjos, the jails, there were chapels, there were taverns.

Allegedly Christians were in charge of contraband. The Christians within the banios could sell tobacco and alcohol. And in fact, what you say about patrons or, as they knew them, their padrons, their masters, allowing them to progress beyond just the kind of servitude of domesticity, a lot of the slaves sort of rose through the ranks and really became quite senior within influential households and would hold high positions and would be treated with responsibility and dignity. So I think while there were probably plenty who suffered,

there was definitely a level of embellishment and exaggeration in these captivity narratives because, as Claire has pointed out, it served their purpose. You wanted to come in, Michael. Yeah, we often, we shouldn't be so surprised by what Jo and Claire have just told us about the treatment of non-Muslims in North Africa because we need to remember this is not a homogenously Muslim space. that there are local indigenous populations of Christians and especially Jews who live and work in Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, within the limits of Ottoman models of toleration, which means that they are second-class citizens compared to Muslims, but they are allowed a huge amount of communal autonomy in having their own laws, the freedom of worship, the right to trade and so forth. So if we only think of North Africa as being homogenously Muslim and anti-Christian,

then that leads us into the trap of being surprised when non-Ottoman Christians were treated relatively well occasionally. And I would add a number of the authors of captivity narratives also say, well, I was actually treated so well. I really thought about whether I was going to return to England when I was freed. And indeed, many of them chose to stay or maintain their business ties to their patron, their owner. once they were freed. And I think Jacques Marseille also says that, although they were depicted as the devils to us,

I found that actually their humanity, their charity and their coigness were not only as good as those of Christian Europe, but actually better. They treated us better. Jo, do you have anything to add to the picture of people coming back to their native land and what they brought back with them?

What I've come in to contact with more through what I've read is people choosing to stay, people not finding that a return to England or to France or Italy or Spain was actually really what they wanted. A lot of the, not only the captivity narratives, but a lot of the witnesses, the diplomats who were imprisoned, then found preferment once they were freed from prison. They were noticed for having diplomatic skills. Potentially they were useful because they already had links to their homeland.

and they often preferred to stay. When they stay, did they form a particular cadre of their own, or did they mix in? No, they mixed in. Often they would marry the daughter of the Bay or the day in the particular state. They would be appointed to some position. There was a lingua franca term for the captain of the sea, who was Rice Marina. And often a European would be elevated to that position. Christians were often executioners

and they would hold certain positions within households and the political influence. It's just, the penny's just dropped. Given a big sword and somebody's head was on the block and you chopped it off. Pretty much. That sort of executioner. Right.

Why did they pick Christians? I think they didn't want to soil their hands. That's a stopper, isn't it? In every sense. Wasn't it when they stopped being slaves and got out of it. Was there any temptation for them to go back to being privateers? I think probably there was a secularity to everybody's life. I think people, there was a fluidity at really, in every domain of life and at every level. I think quite often, privateers who had been

also themselves captured once freed, returned to being privateers. I think it was potentially in the cultural DNA of the era. Michael, got a stage where people are sending diplomats out to the corsairs. What effect did that have? It had the effect of ensuring that the country who had a treaty with these different states was able to better protect their shipping and therefore their goods and their people from being attacked. So as I mentioned earlier, in theory, all three of these North African Ottoman regencies are subjects of the Ottoman sultan, Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli. And to begin with, the countries like England, France and Holland assumed that their treaties with the Ottoman Sultan would protect them in dealing with the North African corsairs. Of course, because these are, as we said before, autonomous de facto independent states, they develop their own foreign policy and therefore tend to ignore whatever the Sultan says.

So from the middle of the 17th century onwards, and really starting in the 1660s, places like England, France and Holland start to. negotiate treaties with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. And this does two things. First of all, it ensures that their subjects will be protected against corsairing activities. So if an Algerian ship sees an English flag, they know that that's the flag of a friend and they're not to attack it. However, on the other hand, these treaties give huge amounts of rights to the North African navies to search those friendly ships for enemy goods. And in every single one of these treaties from the end of the 17th century until the beginning of the 19th century, it gives Algerian, Tunis and Tripoli ships

the right to search enemy and friendly ships anywhere in the world. So if an Algerian ship is somewhere in the middle at the Atlantic and sees an English ship, they have treaty rights to search that ship looking for enemy goods. And so this is kind of intolerable for proud states

like England, France and Holland. And so they constantly try to renegotiate these treaties to get better terms. And I use the word renegotiate. very lightly, because what we see, in fact, from the end of the 17th century, are the first instances of European gunboat diplomacy, so that these consuls, these diplomats who arrive in these three North African ports, are always accompanied by warships of their states who threaten, and in some cases actually carry out bombardments of these cities.

Claire Norton, was there still a surface of chaos and violence? We're beginning to talk in rather cosy structured legalistic terms now. Are we in the right place? Well, in theory, yes, there was a legal framework for dealing with privateering and for providing recompense for people who had been captured illegally, are their goods taken illegally. But to the extent to which that functioned in reality, well, we're not really sure. But people did have recourse to the court of law.

so all of sort of the major towns would have had Muslim courts, which would be open to Christians and Muslims, who could bring a case saying, well, we think we were enslaved illegally, or our goods have been taken illegally. Now, of course, if you're an experienced captain or a seafarer in the Mediterranean, you've got connections, you speak the language, or you're familiar with some of the languages there,

you can make use of that court. If, however, you're taken from the coast of Italy, from a tiny village and then transported across the Mediterranean to sort of the East Mediterranean coast, you're going to have no idea of the court system and what you can do. So in that case,

people could be illegally enslaved and just disappear. Thank you. Joe, after centuries, two or three centuries of corsairing, had anything basically changed for these North African countries? They were in such constant flux throughout those centuries

that I'm not sure that they looked say in the early, in the early 19th century, how they had in the late 16th century. Nevertheless, there's no point along those three centuries that you can say this was representative of Algiers or this was representative of Tunis because there were these vast swathes of population flux and the different nationalities, the different language communities coming in. For example, in 1600, there were 60,000 people living in Algiers and 25,000. of them were Christian slaves, you know, but by the kind of late 18th century, that would have been very different, but there would have still been this diversity of nationality. And as such, I'm not sure how much they would have evolved in an ethnographic sense. Certainly, the corsairing provided the resources to build cities.

There was a huge amount of infrastructure that was built. The cities had, they had a mint. They had fountains. They had streets, they had sewage, they had all kinds of infrastructure that hadn't existed when they were first conquered by the Barbarossa brothers. Thank you very much. There's a stage where the European powers, including American powers, took this in hand and decided that they would exercise their authority and superior strength and organization in this and, as it were, get rid of privateers. Can you tell us how that happened? It's a pretty long process.

So as I mentioned, at the end of the 17th century, we see the first bombardments of North African ports by Britain and France, particularly. Which ports were there? So specifically Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. So these three ports, the main centres of these states. And these could be catastrophic. We have a number of Algerian sources who remember constantly these events as examples of brutality of European states against their civilised, multicultural, cosmopolitan, cities. Because when we're talking about bombardment, we're not talking about carefully aimed cannons against fortifications. They're using bombard ships, so mortars on a ship aimed roughly

in the direction of the port. So mosques are destroyed, civilian houses are destroyed, civilians are killed. And so as early as the 17th century, the North African states get a taste of this European violence. The 18th century is a period of relative peace comparatively. The North African states settle down a little bit and their commerce diversifies beyond corsairing and they become very important nodes in the Mediterranean trade. By the end of the 18th century, this changes again and that's in no small part due to the huge tumult in Europe itself. The French revolutionary wars change the balance of power. We see arms races and we also have a decline as a result of the war in peaceful commerce. And that starts to force the North African states to once again

send out their corsairing boats to try and get some money in. And this brings them into conflict once again with European states. And as you mentioned, after their independence, the United States of America, except naval technology has come on a huge way in the past century. And whereas in the end of the 17th century, the Algerians, Tunisians could hold their own to some extent against European navies. By the end of the 18th century, they are massively outgunned. And so it's no longer an equal.

fight, if any description. And so this marks the beginning of the end for corsairing as an activity. And there are some really key moments in this struggle. The United States has two wars in North Africa to try and stop their subjects being enslaved. The North African states also demand tribute from this new United States that they don't want really to pay. And so there's kind of a combination of factors leading up to a very important bombardment in 1816 by the British and Dutch navies that essentially eradicate the military force of the North African states, which paves the way in 1830 for the French invasion of Algeria, which is the start of North African colonisation. So finally, all of you, how does the idea of the corsets or the myth of the corsets play nowadays?

The stereotypes of the corsair or the privateer do live on and they have provided an excuse for people to narrate the history of the Mediterranean almost as this clash of two qualitatively different but mutually antagonistic civilisations, the Christian West and North and an Islamic south and east, where the Islamic world is somehow lawless because they're engaging in piracy or corsairing rather than the more legal privateering. And they're violent and they're religiously intolerant because they're trying to force Christians to convert. And then this spills over, I think, into how we can look at this geographical region today and also Muslim communities today.

And that's problematic because if we instead see privateering as something that was spread throughout the Mediterranean that was engaged in by all maritime states, we can think of the Mediterranean more as a shared world where all. the communities around contributed to developments in legal and political and maritime sciences and institutions. And we can, to some extent, move away from this idea of Christian European exceptionalism. I think part of the issue is that the vast majority of the sources that we have are European. And so we do have a European-centric understanding of the Corses. And Claude's point is really well made that, in fact, there were mirror images across the Mediterranean.

If you looked at the ethnographic makeup of Marseille and the structures there and the way that different communities were treated, it wasn't so different from what Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli looked like. And likewise, other sort of Western European ports on the Mediterranean. Michael. I think the legacy is actually still a very dangerous one. So we mentioned earlier the conquest of Algiers in 1830 by France and they used the Barbary Pirates narrative as a justification for the imperialism and colonisation of North Africa.

In 1758, a writer called Ahmed de Vattel wrote a book on international law, in which he called the North African states an enemy of humanity. Just think of those words, an enemy of humanity, who were, you had a right, if not a duty, to kill and eradicate. And so the narrative of the Barbary court says, first of all, became a justification. occasion for 19th century imperialism. It was revived again at the beginning of this century. So after the 9-11 attacks, historians with an agenda started looking back to find other clashes between Islam and Christianity, and particularly in the United States, they found in their history books

this long-forgotten story of American Marines storming Tripoli and attacking Algiers, and it became a kind of justification for more recent wars. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks, Claire Norton, Joanna Nolan and Michael Talbot. And to our studio engineer, Duncan Hannan, next week, the Theory of the Leisure Class, Thornestein Vevelin's critique of conspicuous consumption from 1890. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What I usually say is, what do you think you didn't get a chance, chance to say, what do you think you didn't get a chance to say that you would like to have said, starting with you, Joanna? Well, I was interested in the etymology of Barbary, because as you rightly said, it's quite possibly from Barbaro, but the word Barbaros, meaning a barbarian and other, comes obviously from the Greek as well, so there's that.

And then also from Sumerian, the word Bar meant other outside of. And so the duplication of Barbar was very much the label of the people. people of that region as other, outside of all kinds of norms and civilization, which I think fits with the discussion we've had. I could tell you a story about the jailer captain, for example, which is a fictitious tale that circulated in Europe, but gives an idea of the fluidity at this time in terms of how people moved around. So in brief, there was a Muslim called Yusuf, who was travelling on a ship and his ship was

shipwrecked and he and some of the passengers and crew were rescued by a French pirate or privateer. We're not sure. The Muslim passengers were put immediately in the jail in the hold and the Christians were allowed to join the crew. But the jailer of the ship didn't like the captain and the crew so much. So when they went on to land to conduct a raid, he took the opportunity of making an alliance with the Christian passengers and the Muslims who were in the jail in the hold and saying, why don't we just take this ship? So they agreed that that's what they'd do, and they did. And then they had to think about what were they going to do.

So they were thinking, where would they sail to? Who would they align themselves with? So they thought about the Ottoman Empire. No, they would see us as pirates, because we've taken this ship by force. We don't have a letter of mark. And they'll punish us, they'll put us in the galleys and we'll have to row as galley slaves. Shall we go to Algiers?

No, they're too greedy. they will tax us too much. Shall we go to Tripoli? They're too poor. So they settled on going to Tunis, where they thought that they would make the best possible life. So you've got the French captain, who's a Christian, he later converts to Islam,

with a mixed crew, as you were saying, Joe, of Christians and Muslims, now sailing a friendship, but out under the flag of Tunis. And I think that, although a fictitious story, sort of exemplifies what probably did go on. Oh, there's so much I would have loved to have said I mean because it's so complicated right

I mean we're talking about three very distinct states that we wouldn't talk about France or Spain or Portugal in the same breath in this period yet we talk about Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli in the same breath but one thing I guess we focus quite a lot on the sea which makes sense because we're talking about corsairs but the land is really interesting and the military forces on land in both

in all three of those states are really interesting because they are Ottoman Janissaries and so this Janissaries being So the Janissaries are, and this is why I didn't bring it up, because it's such a complicated subject in its own right. They start off as enslaved Christian children who are recruited to be the Sultan's private army, kind of like the Praetorian Guard of the Ottoman Empire. However, by the 17th century, they're so powerful that Muslims are volunteering their children to join this thing. So it's no longer doing what it was meant to do in the first place.

And the Janissaries become, particularly in these three North African ports, a huge political. and economic power in their own rights. And they have massive impacts on the political structures. So Algiers, for example, has a weird kind of democracy in not for everyone, but the rulers are elected by the Corsairs and the Janissaries. And so it's a really interesting insight into complicating this Barbary Corsairs narrative, that they're not just North African. These people are from Anatolia, from Greece, from Crete and so forth. And they're not just on the sea, you have this huge power on land too. But yeah, I think we need to do a whole other show

on the Janissaries, to be honest with you. Was there any communication between the North African states? Yes. And it was, again, incredibly complicated and it wasn't always friendly. So particularly between Algiers and Tunis, they have several pretty major wars between them at the end of the 17th and into the 18th century. They mostly result in Algiers winning and Tunis

becoming a sort of vassal state. But they have a huge amount of, of competition over economic resources, both on land and on sea. And we haven't even talked about Morocco, which is the other part of this story, which we haven't covered because obviously we've covered the Ottoman world, but there are frequent conflicts between Algiers and Morocco, and they have their own corsairing culture. But also which overlaps at times with that of Algiers. The only other thing I wanted to also bring up was the democratisation, as it were, within

the households as European slaves made their way up through sort of preferment is reflected also in the language, in the use of lingua franca. It was often used because it offered this sort of neutral form of communication. No one was demeaning themselves that, you know, the Arab elites or the Ottomans weren't demeaning themselves by speaking the European language, a pure European language, Tuscan or Venetian. And at the same time, it allowed the slaves to, to find this sort of middle ground whereby they could communicate successfully with their masters. I would add one more thing where we were talking about Morocco.

We've got the sort of the city state of Sally, which is often seen or described as a pirate city. And that sort of illustrates the double standard that we have, that they're described as a pirate city rather than, say, a city state in the way that Venice or other Mediterranean cities where it was a powerful privateering polity, really. I mean, smaller but independent from Morocco for much of the time we're talking about.

And it was issuing its own permissions for its privateers to work rather than being a nest of pirates. So I think we have to be careful with vocabulary when we talk about. There were clear structures. I mean, yes, there was spillover and overlap and not everybody adhered to their rules. But in all the different cities, there were clear structures of governance

and I guess where they slip through the cracks is that the corsairs were the economic powerhouse across the board. So they could write their own rules at times. That's right. And we know from this, I mean, we talked about sources before. So much this history has only been written using the European sources. But there's hundreds of documents in Arabic and in Turkish in the European archives of documents, letters from the North African states to the British king or queen to the French king. And they have a real sense of injustice when their... rules aren't being followed by Europeans. So I think that as Queen Anne gets a letter from

Haj Mahmud, who's the day of Algiers, and he's complaining, you know, your ships are meant to be our friends, but you're smuggling our grain to our enemy in Spain, and you're smuggling weapons to give to our enemies. Why are you doing this? So they have a real sense of justice of their own rules. Anybody else? I'm talking about Lingua Franca's legacy in Polari. So there are various words within Polari, which is a language that sort of existed throughout the 19th and some of the 20th century. It was a language of initially performers, street performers, circus performers, and then in the theatre. And then it became the sort of in language of the gay community, particularly in Britain. And Polari, obviously, the name itself comes from Palare, allegedly the Italian, but also potentially lingua franca.

and there are lots of elements of the vocabulary which stem from lingua franca. So Bonatavada, which means nice to see you, is almost lingua franca exactly. And with the structure of lingua franca, Boninocci, good night, scarpa to escape. Scarpa?

Scarpa, yeah. Vogue, a cigarette, comes from Fuego, which is fire in lingua franca. So there are all kinds of little pockets of lingua franca across various European nations, but even in a language like Polari, which obviously was made particularly popular, by Round the Horn, the Radio 4 series

with Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddock, and they spoke a lot of Polari within that, and a lot of the expressions they used stem from Linguar Franco. Must get our back issues of Round the Horn. Yeah, indeed. Indeed, spot the words. Simon asked me to say something about the island of Lundy which is So the island of Lundy is in the Bristol Channel

And it's it was briefly A part technically of the Ottoman Empire I suppose a very far reaching outpost of it Jan Janssen who took on this name Muslim name Muradres who we've heard about a few times in this show He set up base on Lundy Island And we thought for a long time

It was kind of like an urban myth But in the state papers the British state papers. There are actual minuteed documents from the Cabinet of State complaining and concerned of the presence of North African corsairs off the coast of England. And for quite a while

they're raiding along the coast of Cornwall, the south of Wales, the west coast and east coast of Ireland. And it's kind of weird to think about it that the Ottoman crescent flew over the island of London and the Bristol Channel. We're going to be not interrupted

so we should join and our producers Simon Tillots and bearing gifts. Does anyone want to your coffee? That sounds amazing. I'm fine, thank you. Yes, please, thank you. Tea, which is very fine. Tea sounds great.

Tea, please. Tea, please. Thank you, please. Free teas. Maybe just a little bit more water if there was. Yeah, thank you. From BBC Radio 4, life can be unexpected. It was big.

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