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  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.