Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The English Pirates of the Mediterranean

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

It's the late 16th century and the Ottoman Empire is continuing to advance across the eastern Mediterranean. In Istanbul, the Ottomans have begun ratifying ambassadorships and trade deals with the English crown. And in the middle of this comes a crew of the most sunburned Barbary Pirates you've ever met, hell-bent on plundering any ship they can find before they high-tail it back to...England? Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/143253364 We have new merch available in our store! www.llbdpodcast.com

So, the English were willing to trade goods of military value with the Ottomans. Definitely keep that in mind as the story of this visit to Chios unfolds. Chios is a major trading destination a couple of miles off the coast of Anatolia. It's now a part of Greece and was almost certainly mostly Greek and character when Hare Brown was hanging out there in early 1581, partying with the French consul, considering a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and deciding he'd change his surname to Harbourn when he got home to make it sound more prestigious. Justica across the water were the ports of Fokia or Fossa and Smyr,

or Ismere. It was a good place to be, and undoubtedly a great place to do business. But fortunately, he was not the only Englishman looking to go about business on the island at this time. A ship called the Bark Row, owned by the Newcastle-born merchant Roger Row, had left London in September 1580 bound for the Med. It traded cargo at Livorno, Malta, and finally Chios. Cargo destined for Catholic ports had been standard English fare. The cargo destined for Ottoman Chios, however, was a shipment of broken lead church bells. On Chios, Harbourn and his Flemish business partner generously hosted the ship's captain at his lodgings with the French consul. The crew remarked on Harburn's wealth and standing, his Janissary

guard, his connection to the French consul. One of them even let slip, when later interrogated by the Maltese Inquisition, that Harburn had been referring to himself as the Queen's ambassador at the court of the Turk. Harburn was undoubtedly living the life, and he wanted everyone on Chios to know it and see it. The problem was he had permission to be there and had been appointed a janissary guard and could do as he pleased, but the actual English capitulation that had been negotiated were not yet valid until they had been ratified by Elizabeth I and Sultan Murad the third, and an ambassador had officially been appointed and presented the Sultan with a gift. So, unless the Barkrow was there under French protection,

it was, in fact, trading illegally. Shocker. Hmm. A local official challenged the crew of the Barkrow when they made to leave the island. Why were they trading under French documentation when there was an English ambassador here? Harburn allowed himself to be duped for the French consul at the consul's suggestion, rather than bringing the French consul down to the port to explain or bribe the official. Harburn went down and presented his Ottoman copy of not yet validated English trading privileges. The Barkrow went merrily on its way without having to pay any French duties or bribes. And so what? Well, Harburn probably would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those petty and utterly unscrupulous English sailors. So one thing that we have to

understand about the 16th century Mediterranean is that it was both totally wild and that there were not really fixed sides or identities that couldn't be shifted or changed. Piracy and privateering was rife, and people switched patrons and nationalities, religions, according to who happened to capture them and when, or whether it was personally convenient to them. At this time, there were renegades quite literally all over the place, and it was much easier for male Christian captives to survive and thrive in Muslim service if they converted and their talents were useful, than vice versa. A prominent English example was a young man who rose to be the major domo and then treasurer to the Ottoman governor of Algiers,

captured as Samson Rowley by Corsairs while sailing aboard the swallow in 1577 Hassan Ayah was both the son of a Bristol merchant and also a Muslim eunuch bureaucrat slave I mean listen that is the most fucking Bristol sentence ever like put him in a pair of Air Jordan high tops and skinny jeans and make him look like a member of Hedukin and it's like yeah this is

fully on brand for Bristol he started out being the guy running up to you in the street in Bristol asking if you wanted to buy pills and then 20 years later he comes back fly as how his entourage and he the event that everyone's coming and also trying to sell you pills at, you know, it's like the Bristol cycle of Samsar. Yeah, and he's renamed himself Muhammad Al-Gabber

or something. I mean, Hassan Ayah is a much doper name than Samson Rowley. And honestly, Samson is a pretty cool name to begin with, so, you know. So the Ottoman Grand Admiral at this time was Uluch Ali Pasha, the hero of Lepanto, who defeated Giovanni Andrea Doria on his flank of the battle, but also a former Corsair captain who had been

born Giovanni Diogini in Calabria before being captured by the privateers of Hyridan Barbarossa as a teenager. He absolutely loved preying on merchant shipping from nations without Ottoman protection in the Mediterranean and so was a fierce opponent of England being granted trading rights. Others, on the other hand, simply turned Turk for convenience. Oh, believe me. Listen, that's me ordering a kebab after a couple of beers. Brother, brother, just wait. Oh, God. In 1593, a steward of the

visiting Austrian-Habsburg embassy to Istanbul, Ladislaus Murth, was discovered in flagrante with his dick inside an embassy kitchen boy. Facing serious punishment for his colleagues, he went straight to the Ottomans to negotiate conversion and a minor administrative post. From then on, he was an Ottoman, and it's thought the kitchen boy got to go with him too. In terms of the more material kind of convenience,

unrestricted profit from the misery of others, it is also not commonly recognized in the weird right-wing spaces that try to paint Barbary piracy as a kind of organized white slave trade that justifies transatlantic racialized slavery in the imperial period, that large swaths of the Barbary pirates or corsairs were Northern Europeans giving the authorities

back home the middle finger. The reason that Corsair fleets could turn up and raid Ireland and Cornwall and knew how to get as far afield as Iceland and the Faroe Islands was not because North Africans were miraculously gifted seafarers who could find places they'd never heard of and fault exactly upon the most undefended towns and villages, but rather because their captains and pilots were Dutch and English renegades and pirates. However, I have still hung up on this idea that you get caught and you're probably going to get executed or some kind of horrible punishment for being gay and you just throw a smoke bomb called become Turkish

and it's just like you thought you'd caught me nope my name is Hassan island now fuck you I am fascinated

with the idea of this period of like the ottoman's landing in cork and then like stealing people and selling them

into slavery in North Africa and it's just like a guy from corks who sounds like Roy Keen is like in Algeria or Morocco

I was like fuck a hot boy what are you looking at you're expecting me to build that pyramid there you fucking dick

but also the guy who captured him is also talking like Roy Keen. Like, that's the thing that blew my mind because I had heard these stories about it, but learning that like a significant number of the piracy and kind of like slave trading raids and all attacks on European coastal villages, that was actually being done by

the Barbary pirates was because it was people from those communities. Like, Idaho place where people are lazy as shit and we can totally take everything they've got. Hey, recruit them and do the, the Ottoman version of the fucking US Army recruiter showing up with the pull-up bar at schools. I mean, just, but the idea, like, you basically, like can become jacked and rich and incredibly openly gay

by becoming Ottoman and then you can go home and fuck up all the bullies from high school that you age. It's like it's powerful. You're right, boy. Do you want to hear

about this thing called paprika? God damn it. Giving paprika to a 17th century Irish person must have been like what all of the scenes when a character in a movie takes LSD and Sunshine of your love starts playing.

I mean, I guess the thing for me is like, Paprika is not, It can be spicy, but it also can just be relatively mild. But I feel like if you'd never had it before, it would be, like, even the sweet paprika would be completely life-changing. If they gave you the hot stuff, you would probably think you were dying. Like, you'd probably think that, like, you know, the angels were calling you home. And it's like, no, people in hungry eat this all the time.

You know, they think it's normal. And there's nothing normal about them otherwise. Yeah, some Irish milk farmer just like eat a kofta for the first time. And all you hear's, do, do, do, do do, do do. I just, you know, to me, the idea of like Ottoman status, Ottoman nests being, I mean, it makes sense because like so much of what they established in, you know, southeastern Europe and across the Mediterranean had to do with the idea of there being an incentive to converting and becoming Ottoman. And so it makes sense that like they would be happy to welcome volunteers, you know, people who wanted to convert to their side. But the fact that it was like such an instantaneous thing that could be like mid- stroke saying the shihada so you can fucking become Muslim, it's okay. No, they're just like, get off the ship and they just like

open a scroll that has the shahada translated to every possible language on the European coast. I just have the little idol of Christ on the ground, so it's like fucking Japanese missionaries. It's like, step on Jesus, read the thing. Okay, you can come with us. Can you figure out the one that's got

it in Max, please? This guy's just, whatever. He's really in a hurry. The kitchen boy is fucking yearning for it right now. Just like a coyote scouse accent saying the shahada. Oh, fuck. I can do the scouse accent. I'm not going to read the shahada on pod. We're not going to be disrespectful.

We're not going to be disrespectful. You know, we like getting the phone call from the, the maussela department where you have no choice but to answer the call. We don't want the opposite. We don't want to get the Ostrachfila calls. So we're going to fucking keep it respectful here. Look, at the end of 2025, as we're at now, I feel like if you got Big John to be a revert, you could convert like half of Britain. Side note, but I used to do this is the stupidest thing in the world and I realized it was just,

but it was always funny to me was invariably it felt like whenever I'd play Siv 6, or SIF 5 and then also Sive 6, like I kept the religion I wound up being able to discover the easiest with the way I played the game was always Islam. And so one time I was playing as the English as this happened. So I invented Islam as the English. And so all the cities in England in my empire were Muslim and had the crescent next to them sort of identifying they were Muslim. And I would just, it would be like, you know,

Birmingham or I don't know fucking like Nottingham, York all these different English cities Islamcised and I would just screenshot them and tweet them at Tommy Robinson and be like, look at this, what can you do about it? Can you help us, Tommy? Ending each tournament,

al-Hamdu-A-Lat, BASH! I have to admit that I've managed to keep myself pretty ignorant of Big John other than the broad strokes just because it's like one of those things where... Now he's the good Boschman the other one is the bad Boschman So inside you are two Bosch Man

Inside You Are Two Bosch Men sounds like What Wilfred Owen wanted most in this world LAUGHTER