RedHanded - ShortHand: White Slaves & the Pirates of the Barbary Coast

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

For all the centuries of slavery throughout human history, you might think one group came through mostly unscathed: white Europeans. But for more than a thousand years, Barbary pirates fro North Africa (funded by the Ottoman Empire) prowled European coastlines, snatching unsuspecting Christian folk and taking them to be slaves in the Islamic world.At their height, huge fleets of privateers were raiding coastal towns, sliding their ships silently up onto English beaches in the dead of night, and snatching people in their beds. Here’s the ShortHand, on the forgotten history of the Barbary corsairs.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / InstagramSources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com

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Now for you everywhere. Twice a week. Twice a week. It's very tasty. Now, when we think about slavery, in the West today, we tend to think immediately about the transatlantic slave trade. It was a barbaric era during which 12.5 million Africans were removed from their home countries and shipped all over the world a slave labor. But the truth about slavery, slavery that predates the transatlantic slave trade, and the slavery that still very much exists today,

whether it's Qatar's blood-soaked football stadiums or the fact that you can literally buy slaves in a slave market today, right now, in Libya, is far more complicated. Because every civilization and every corner of the globe throughout history has engaged in slavery at some point. It has been a pretty solid, undeniable part of the global order for the vast majority of our time as a species. And while today we might think that there was one group who escaped being enslaved, white Europeans,

that would be completely wrong. The Arab slave trade, which started in roughly the 7th century and lasted a whopping 13 centuries, targeted, yes, mainly Africans, but also enslaved Europeans. In fact, the word slave itself comes from the medieval Latin word Slavas, which was used in the 9th century to describe slaves. Slavic people. And that's because so many Slavs were captured, sold and enslaved in Central Europe during the Middle Ages, particularly by Muslims in Spain and in the Mediterranean, that their ethnic name actually became synonymous with the condition of servitude or slavery.

And this shameful period of history lasted a very long time. And as we said, spanned large parts of the world. But we can't do all of that in 20 minutes, so we're going to focus today on a time during which North African pirates proud European coastlines snatching up unsuspecting folk and taking them in their hundreds of thousands to be slaves in the Islamic world. This is the shorthand. Some of these pirates were among the most fearsome in the entire golden age of piracy, and they didn't stop at a little high seas mutineering.

At their height, Barbary pirates were raiding coastal towns, sliding their ships silently up onto English beaches in the dead of night, and snatching people from their beds. Those people would be taken to the prisons of modern-day Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, and forced to do back-breaking labour for the rest of their lives. Stories of pirates from the Barbary coast marauding across the Mediterranean date back as far as the 13th century.

But those were just a few rogue vessels, drifting around the high seas in search of gold, guts and glory. It only really kicked in when the old, Ottomans came a knocking. The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and longest-lasting empires in history, and in the early 16th century, it was getting to the absolute peak of its very considerable power, the centre of which was Istanbul. By this point, Ottoman influence had reached as far east as Indonesia, but Europe was proving to be a much more difficult challenge. The Ottomans sacked Vienna a few times, but big scary dynasties like the Habsburgs,

and growing colonial powers like Spain were proving totally impenetrable. The Ottoman Empire was Muslim, which was a very scary prospect for the supremely Catholic European powers. And it is a phenomenal understatement to say that there was bad blood between Spain and the entire Islamic world.

Muslim communities were still stinging from the reconquista, an eighth-century-long war of extreme gnarliness in which Spain fought Islamic settlers out of the bottom of European continents and over to North Africa. And more than that, they just kicked off the Spanish Inquisition, just a savage quest to go out and make sure the whole world was Catholic.

But not as savage as you think. No, because you should go and listen to our episode on the Spanish Inquisition where we delve into all of the details about it. And yeah, Hannah's right. It was not as bad as everyone thinks. Despite what I just said. Look, history and context. But history contradicts itself all the time and we're allowed to do the same thing. Thank you.

Anyway, this bad Spanish blood also mattered a lot to the Ottomans, geographically speaking. And that's because of the shape of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, if you did not know, quite large. On the north coast, it goes from Spain, across Italy, down the Balkan states, across all of Greece and then finally Turkey and only then after a couple of narrow straits to you hit Istanbul

and the only way to get into the Mediterranean is through a tiny tiny channel between Spain and the North African coast which is less than 10 miles wide meaning that the Ottomans having a peaceful trading relationship with the rest of the world was very difficult

with their mortal enemy just right in the way so the Ottomans said that the Ottoman's said that they had no choice but to get their own outposts on the other side. So they did this. They captured cities across Syria, Palestine and Egypt, before they took North African ports like Algiers, Tunis, Rabat and Tripoli.

These were well-established states of their own at this point, all with their own ancient cultures. But they agreed, probably because they were threatened with big fucking swords, to give their allegiance to the Ottomans. What the Ottomans really wanted, though, was protection for their ships coming into Istanbul. And if those pesky Christians could be given a bit of trouble while they were at it, well, all the better. After the bloodshed of the past centuries, violence against Christian states was justified as a form of jihad. And this is where we're getting back to the pirates, thank God.

Or to give them their official names, privateers or corsairs, which just means pirate. for government. That's what that means. And the reason we're using those particular words instead of pirate is because while they did do similar stuff, a corsair or a privateer was considered legitimate because they were either paid by a state or the Eastern Distrading Company, which at one point had a larger force than the crown. They weren't rag-tag bandits. They were state-sanctioned seafarers looking to rough up the empire enemies. Their hired guns is what they are. ships captains and crews would be signed off on behalf of the Ottoman Empire to act as hired guns with permission to attack any ship they saw with the flag of a designated nation this significantly inflated the Ottoman's naval power at the drop of a hat exactly when and where they were needed of course the specifics of who was at war with who were not paid too close attention to so practically any ship that wasn't Ottoman was fair game either way corsairs would go nuts raiding ships, sacking them for all they were worth. And all goods they swiped on those raids would be checked once back at port and subject to tax, including people. Yeah, the Ottomans loved, loved, loved, loved a better tax.

So they come in and they'd be like, either you convert and you submit or we will tax you to death. Do you know about the deleted scene of the Pirates of the Caribbean? No. Now's your moment. This is my moment. So the black pearl is famously what color? It's black. Okay, good.

And there is a deleted scene, I believe, in The Curse of the Backpile, the first one, that explains why it's black. And it's because it was a slave ship. And Captain Jack Sparrow was like, people aren't cargo, mate. And he mutinied, and then the Eastern Gear Trading Company burnt it. And that's why it's the black pearl. And they took it out. Why? Because I think it made Johnny Depp look too nice and too principled, which she just sort of gets towards the, like,

He's just a bit too like villainous, I think, was the argument. But that's why. Okay. All right. Sure thing. Is it Disney? Whatever. Oh, it sure is.

So yeah, you might think it's hard to take a tax percentage of people. But you would be wrong. The Pasha, who's the high-ranking Ottoman officer in charge of each city state, had a right under the Ottomans to claim one-eighthenth of all Christians that the Corsairs had captured. Mostly he'd get any female prisoners he'd. could, and they'd either join his Harim or they'd work as palace attendants, which I think is putting it nicely to be an Ottoman sex slave. And the remaining seven out of eight prisoners that weren't claimed by the Pasha were sent

to the slave markets. Eventually, the number of those captured got so many that special prisons had to be built. In these prisons, they survived exclusively on stale bread and water, and were given one change of clothes a year. In 1600, there were 60,000 people living in Algiers and 25,000 were Christian slaves. Fucking hell! Yeah.

Slaves were obviously put to work, in the fields, felling trees, on building sites, or sent by their masters to sell goods in town. If they collapsed from exhaustion, they were beaten until they got back on their feet and resumed work. The most common, or at least well-known, role that European slaves would play, was rowing in the Ottoman Union.

ships. They'd be chained to oars below deck, meaning soon enough, the ships going out to capture Europeans were powered by other Europeans who'd been captured before. Anyway, let's meet some of the bloodthirsty cutthroats that were doing all of this Christian swiping. First, we've got a few native Ottoman pirates, the Barbarossa brothers, Khadir and Aroogh. They were both born on the island of Lesbos, which is now Greece, but it was there. then solidly Ottoman, and they took to piracy pretty young, cutting their teeth on the old-fashioned illegal, daring high seas variety of piracy. And they did so well that they built a hardy crew, and then a fleet.

And then that fleet got so powerful that it took the whole city of Algiers. The Ottoman Empire even gave them nominal titles. They made Arrouge the governor of Algiers, and Khadir was the chief sea governor. That doesn't mean anything. The ocean cannot be owned. And when the brothers had heard of the savagery happening to their Islamic brothers in Spain, they decided to take their new posts, however made up very seriously. They funded their city-state,

mostly through massive industrial-scale piracy across the Mediterranean. But then, their mortal enemies reared their ugly heads. A Spanish fleet stormed Algiers and sacked the city and killed Arooge. Kadeer inherited his brother's nickname Barbarossa, which is Italian for Redbeard, and swore to fuck up the Spanish as much as he could for the rest of his natural life. And Barbarossa slash Redbeard

is remembered as one of the most fearsome pirates in history. It was also the Nazi code name for the invasion of Europe. Hmm, I didn't know that. Maybe France? A European country. Sure. We'll get to it on another short one. But many Barbary Corses, some of the most deadly, in fact, were not natively Ottoman. Despite being under Islamic Ottoman rule, North African ports were surprisingly multicultural. And many Europeans who'd been exiled or otherwise run away from their homes ended up there.

Though I will say, I think multicultural is not the right word. I think we should multi-ethnic because they all wouldn't have been Arab, which is what the Ottomans would have been. But they are definitely under the Ottoman Empire. definitely not like you can do what you want to do. They are like, you submit or you get the sword. Yeah. So I think multi-ethnic at best, not multicultural. And if you're on a loose end and you've been rejected by your homeland,

joining the corsets crew was probably a pretty easy way to legitimize yourself. You get a job, you get a bunch of nice new friends and, you know, protection from the state. Plus a lot of independently owned slaves converted to Islam in an effort to not be murdered. Back in Europe, this was known as Turning Turk. And there are some stories of some converting early and rising in the ranks, maybe getting a post overseeing the other labourers, then getting promoted from there. A few were even freed,

and fewer still got into the corsairing game themselves. Which brings us to potentially the most successful pirate of this entire period. He started off with the name, Jansoon. While raiding around North Africa on behalf of the Dutch crown, Jan Zun was captured by pirates and imprisoned in Algiers. But Jan the man wasted no time in turning Turk. He converted to Islam and before too long was leading a small fleet of his own. He even got himself a new Muslim name and it's a doozy.

Morat Reyes, which means Captain Ambition. It's pretty good. On the nose. If it had just been his men, Little name is, don't kill me. But he certainly was an ambitious little captain. He became a top-tier Barbary Corsair. He built his fleet to 17 ships,

which went on all sorts of swashbuckling adventures, raiding other ships all over the shop. And this fearless band of brothers got boulder and boulder, going way outside the Mediterranean to intercept bigger and bigger ships. And then, because they were so brave, so ambitious. and probably under quite a lot of pressure. I don't have a huge stake in society. They started to go ashore.

In 1627, Marat Rees' legendary ambition reached as far as the coasts of Iceland. And the few weeks he spent there have gone down in Icelandic legend. And it was particularly brutal because old Captain Ambition's raid accidentally coincided with another one. by another Dutch-born corsair, who Icelandic sources refer to as that soul ripper named Murad Flaming. Wow. That's better than Captain Ambition. I think you're right. You can have it.

The one thing that you can count on Icelanders for is A, writing everything down and B, making it epic. A source from the time describes one man who was killed while attempting to flee the pirates. It says this. When his wife saw this, she at once fell across his body screaming. Her dead husband, they cut into small pieces as if he were a sheep. What are you doing to your sheep? Is that normal? Butchery? I don't know. Just cube the sheep for me, please. I would like a finely diced sheep.

It goes on to say this quote, sorry before I got distracted by sheep. Then they began to set fire to the houses. There was a woman who was there who could not walk. Her they threw on the fire, along with her two-year-old baby. And when she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter. They struck both child and mother with a sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire,

and even stabbing fiercely at the poor burning bodies. Oh, yikes. So long story short, icy bloodbath. And more than 400 people were marched aboard the Turkish ships to make the 3,000 mile trip back to North. North Africa, where there would be sold as slaves. Then Moratries turned his attention to the British Isles. Oh dear.

In 1627, he even captured the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. He actually held it for five years, using it as a base for other raids, as a place to keep prisoners en route back to Africa. From there, he and his dastardly crew hit coastal towns and villages across Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset. they would run their ships aground onto unguarded beaches and creep into villages in the dead of night. There they'd snatch victims from their home

and scarper before anyone could sound the alarm. Coastal towns saw huge numbers of people disappear overnight. And in 1631, Corses took almost the entire population of a small village in Ireland. I think this is the thing. When people hear pirates,

there's like a lot of, like, as we talked about in other episodes we've done on pirates, because we have and they're coming. A lot of like, oh, you know, they're pirates. Like, it's fun. And I'm like, no, they're slavers. They are slavers.

It's like, it's not fun and games. Like, how do you think they get these people? Yeah. And like, they're specifically targeting different regions for different things. Like the Harim's of like the Ottoman kings and whatever they're called. They wanted like the exotic white. women. That's why they wanted to steal them for their sex slave harings. And they're like, that's why they're coming to Ireland. That's why they're coming to Britain. They want like,

blonde hair, blue-eyed, red-haired, big bosomed white women. And that's why they're there to steal them. So yeah, it's not, it's not fun in games, guys. This is pirates of the most despicable order. Short hand's meant to be fun, but this isn't. Nothing's fun anymore. Anyway, while out on one of their not fun raiding slavery jaunts, Moratrice's fleet went on a bit of a spree seizing ships out in the Celtic Sea, and they imprisoned the crews as they went. One of these ships had been captained by a man called John Hackett. Hackett was from Dungarbon, which is on the west coast of Waterford and the south of Ireland.

And then, in return for his freedom, weasily old John Hackett, who, by the way, is a huge grass, spilled the beans on the best ports to hit along the South Irish coast. The fleet had been looking at Kinsale, which is in Cork, but Hackett advised against it, saying that it was too well protected, so he sent them off to Baltimore instead. Baltimore was a small Cork village that had subsisted mostly on its pilchered farming industry. Needless to say, it wasn't a particularly dramatic place.

That is, until the very early hours of the 19th century. of June, 1631, when almost 200 armed corsairs jumped down onto the beaches. The pirates burst into houses and grabbed villages out of their beds torching thatched roofs in their wake. They fired muskets and started banging drums to draw more people out of their homes. More than a hundred people were led back to their ships. They were then taken away from their pleasant Pilchard Farming Peace forever and spirited away to the slave markets of North Africa. It's highly like, all but three died in slavery. Slight poetic justice, though.

People from the area eventually got their hands on John Hackett, and he was hanged on a cliff top near the village. Which was immortalised in a famous poem by Thomas Davis in 1845, called The Sack of Baltimore. And here's a line for you. Then flung the youth his naked hand against the shearing sword, and then sprung the mother on the brand, with which her son was gourd.

It's not quite a rhyme, is it? I'll let you off Thomas as it was 1845. And as for Captain Ambition, all of that pillaging couldn't last forever. You're going to burn out eventually. And Murat-Rees was ambushed in the end and captured by the Knights Hospitola, and he was kept in pretty gruesome conditions

in a dungeon in Malta for five years. And then he was sprung from his jail during a daring siege by a group of corsairs hell bent on saving him, and then he was given a hero's welcome back in Morocco. But he never really got over it, and he died shortly after. Good. And one last thing, his fourth son, Anthony Janzun Van Sali, grew up rich in Morocco and then later emigrated to America, where he bought up loads of land in New York City, and he is the 10th great-grandparent of Humphrey Bogart. I'm currently writing

two-part on a story that like it's about the British Black Power movement and the amount of people who show up in this story John Lennon Jason Statham Louis Theroux's dad Jane Seberg JFK

it is madness well this is why they can never make it be an absolute casting disaster as a film You know what? Yeah that's why we can podcast about it So anyway, the point is, at the height of the Barbary Corses' reign of terror, they were literally rushing ashore and snatching up entire villages at a time to sell into slavery.

And those raids we mentioned were just a few particularly well-documented stories, far away from the North African ports. Spanish and Italian people were also taken in their thousands. Slavers raided the coast of Valencia, Andalusia, Calabria, and Sicily, at an absolutely unbelievable rate. Writers said it happened so often that, quote, there was no one left to capture. So shall we talk numbers?

In terms of how many were held in the slave prisons, more than 35,000 European Christian slaves could have been held along the Barbary coast at any one time. And in the most active years of all the raiding and slaving, between 1530 and 1780, the figure of slaves could easily be as high as one and a quarter million people. But no one really did anything.

They tried a bit. Whilst this was going on European powers, did make some half-assed attempts to buy people back out of slavery. But there wasn't really like an organised system in place. It wasn't really the top of anyone's agenda. In Catholic Spain and France, collections started being made at mass for the specific goal of ransoming slaves,

which was seen as great Catholic work and various Catholic religious orders fundraised to send rescue missions. But as now, you never really know where that collection plate money is going. Protestants took a little bit longer to get organised. In the UK, it felt mostly to private funders who conducted a few large-scale ransomings. And in 1646, one Edmund Casson came back from North Africa with 244 freed-slave. Hmm. Good for him. Absolutely. Did he write Amazing Grace, though?

if he didn't, not interested. Wow, tough. That's the real reason we don't know about white slaves. No bangers. You're right. And I think also the reason we don't know much about who the Ottomans captured versus like we do know more about like we actually have museums and stuff to talk about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Because we were doing the capturing. Well, because the Ottomans were like, we killed them all. There's no one left to commemorate anything. That's why we don't know or we don't. There's no museums across previous Ottoman Empire. No. Like commemorating the Ottoman slave trade. They just quite literally genocided everybody that they took.

So anyway, still, this poor guy, Edmund Casson, he comes back with, you know, 244 people, good for him, but it was kind of a drop in a big, briny ocean. And for a while, paying huge ransoms just made the pirates stronger, because of course it did. and it was just an occasional extra payday to help them carry on pirating. But eventually, European powers made treaties with the African ports to let their ships pass unhindered.

And then, when ships were still attacked, they lost their patience. By the end of the 17th century, they started attacking North African ports. It started off mostly in Britain and France. But then the US joined in eventually and conducted two bloody wars in the early 1800s. then the British and Dutch tag team to finish them off. These attacks were devastating, and quite a lot of ancient metropolitan multicultural cities

were reduced to dust. More than 4,000 Christians were liberated, and piracy in the Barbary Coast came to an end. Oh, did it? No. In short, because as I said, you can still buy, I guess piracy, maybe, but I don't know. Yeah. On that bombshell.

On that note. That is it, guys. That is your episode from us. One of your episodes from us this week. We'll see you next time for another shorthand. See you all the time. I'm in your house. Yeah. Booh. Bye.