Elite • 213 The history of military forces, artefacts, personalities and techniques of warfare E lit e • 2 The Barbary Pirates 1 3 The Barbary Pirates 15th–17th Centuries 15th–17th Centuries T For almost 300 years North African and Turkish corsairs dominated the h e Western and Central Mediterranean from their havens along the coasts B a of modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya – the Berber or ‘Barbary’ r b a Coast. The pirate galleys and light sailing vessels ranged far and wide, r y hunting ships, plunder, and captives for the slave-markets of Algiers, P i r Tunis and Tripoli. These skilled and ferocious seamen earned such a a t e reputation that they attracted European renegades to join them, and s 1 raided as far north as the coasts of England, Ireland, and even Iceland. 5 t h This book describes their origins, ships, lairs and hunting-grounds, – 1 their organization and tactics, and the careers of some of the greatest 7 t h corsair captains; it is illustrated with early engravings and paintings, C and colour plates of the pirates and their warships. en t u r i e s Full colour artwork  Unrivalled detail  Early engravings and paintings US $19.00 / UK £11.99 / CAN $23.00 ISBN 978-1-4728-1543-9 A n 5 1 9 0 0 g u s K o n s t a 9 781472 815439 m WWW.OSPREYPUBLISHING.COM ANGUS KONSTAM ILLUSTRATED BY GERRY EMBLETON ELI 213 Cover.v2.indd 1 26/04/2016 15:57 Author Illustrator Discover more at www.ospreypublishing.com Angus Konstam hails from the Orkney Islands, and is the Gerry Embleton has been a leading illustrator and researcher author of over 80 books, 60 of which are published by of historical costume since the 1970s, and has illustrated and Osprey. This acclaimed and widely published author has written Osprey titles on a wide range of subjects for more written several books on piracy, including The History of than 40 years. He is an internationally respected authority Pirates, and Blackbeard: America’s Most Notorious Pirate. A on 15th and 18th century costumes in particular. He lives former naval officer and museum professional, he worked in Switzerland, where since 1988 he has also become well as the Curator of Weapons at the Tower of London and as known for designing and creating life-size historical figures the Chief Curator of the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in for museums. Key West, Florida. He now works as a full-time author and historian, and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. 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Similarly, PO Box 883, Oxford, OX1 9PL, UK his thanks go to galley warfare ‘practitioner’ Thomas Foss, who helped 1385 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10018, USA rekindle his enthusiasm for this subject and period.  E-mail: [email protected] ARTIST’S NOTE Readers may care to note that the original paintings from which the colour Osprey Publishing, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc plates in this book were prepared are available for private sale. All reproduction copyright whatsoever is retained by the Publishers. 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Between 2014 and 2018 our donations will be spent on their Centenary Woods project in the UK. www.ospreypublishing.com  ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 2 29/04/2016 15:14 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 Nomenclature: ‘pirates’, ‘privateers’ and ‘corsairs’ Privateers and ports n HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 8 The Arab conquests The Hafsid and Marinid dynasties, 13th–15th centuries n THE FIRST CORSAIRS 10 The Ottomans Kemal Reis The brothers Barbarossa n n CHRONOLOGY, 1450–1660 15 THE BARBARY COAST 22 THE BARBARY STATES 24 Morocco Algiers Tunis Tripoli n n n THE SHIPS 32 The galiot The galley The fusta and barca longa The xebec The polacca n n n n The felucca and tartan ‘Roundships’ n THE PIRATES 40 Chain of command in the Ottoman regencies The captains Dual command n n Division of the spoils The crews: officers Nationalities European renegades n n n Galley slaves Janissaries n TECHNIQUES & TACTICS 55 Limitations Hunting-grounds and prey Battle tactics n n FURTHER READING 63 INDEX 64 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 3 29/04/2016 15:14 THE BARBARY PIRATES 15th–17th Centuries INTRODUCTION For the best part of three centuries the Barbary pirates dominated the waters of the Western and Central Mediterranean, preying on the ships and coastal settlements of Christian Europe. From their heavily fortified bases on the shores of North Africa – the ‘Barbary Coast’ – their galleys and sailing vessels ranged as far as Greece, West Africa, and even the British Isles in search of This lively 19th-century victims. While they fought for plunder, their most lucrative activity was the painting by an unknown artist capture of slaves. The slave-markets of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli thrived on shows Barbary pirates on the this steady traffic in wretched captives, and ensured that both the Barbary deck of a xebec, watching their consort attack a European pirates and the emirs who ruled the Barbary states grew rich from the sailing brig. Strangely, the dress proceeds of human misery. depicted (apart from that of the Calling these seafarers ‘pirates’ is perhaps a misleading over-simplification. Balkan soldier emerging from The terms used for them are discussed below, but it is important to emphasize the hatch in the left foreground), may perhaps their essential nature as ‘privateers’, sharing their bounty with the North capture something of the ‘feel’ African ports that provided them with ships, men, and a ready market for their of the clothing worn by Barbary spoils. The Barbary pirates also served in the war fleets of the Ottoman Turks, corsairs during earlier centuries, and fought alongside them in many of the great galley battles of the 16th of whom there are virtually no contemporary illustrations. century, as well as in amphibious campaigns such as the siege of Malta (1565). The 16th century was the heyday of the Barbary pirates, when their leaders rose to prominence as the actual rulers of Barbary states whose reach extended far beyond the bounds of the Western Mediterranean. The coastal city-states of modern Tunisia and Algeria were only nominally under Ottoman control; those in Morocco were independent of the Ottomans, and were usually only loosely controlled by the sultans in Fez. The Barbary states thrived on the profits of raiding and piracy, and their power extended into the African hinterland as far as the edge of that ‘second sea’ – the Sahara Desert. This study ends in the mid 17th century, when the European maritime powers managed to curb the most 4 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 4 29/04/2016 15:14 damaging activities of the Barbary pirates through a combination of naval This early 17th-century painting activity and diplomatic initiatives. From that point on, despite temporary shows a Barbary pirate galley resurgence during times of opportunity when European powers were attempting to board a Spanish galleon. It faithfully reflects the distracted by major continental wars, it was clear that the great period of narrow, crowded deck of the Barbary piracy had passed. galley, with musket-armed janissaries stationed on the Nomenclature: ‘pirates’, ‘privateers’ and ‘corsairs’ bow platform above the main guns. (Andreis van Eertvelt, ‘A While most Christians regarded them as pirates, the predatory seafarers of Spanish Engagement with the Barbary Coast were actually privateers: that is, in Western terms, seamen Barbary Corsairs’; National who had been granted a licence by a state to fit out a ‘private man-of-war’ to Maritime Museum BHC 0747) 5 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 5 29/04/2016 15:14 A view of Algiers from the sea, from an early 17th-century engraving. The inner harbour is invisible here behind the dark bulk of the fortifications on the islet christened Le Peñón by the Spanish, who maintained a garrison there from 1510 until 1539. Other forts guard the hills overlooking the city. attack the shipping of the state’s enemies. If such a captain captured a prize that was deemed lawful by the state’s courts, then he could keep the value of the ship, her cargo, and – in the case of these Barbary captains – the crew as well, who were sold as slaves. In return, the state would get a share of the profits. A privateering licence or ‘letter of marque’ was only valid when the state that issued it was at war, and it only covered attacks on the state’s enemies – but on the Barbary Coast the centuries-long religious conflict against Christian Europe was deemed an ‘eternal war’, so privateering licences were rarely revoked. This continual state of maritime conflict was part of the greater ‘Holy War’ between Christians and Muslims, which by the early 16th century had been waged intermittently for the best part of 800 years. The 7th-century Arab conquests that began it were subsequently countered by the centuries- long Reconquista in Spain, and by the Crusades in the Middle East. After several hundred years of jihad and crusade the lands bordering the Mediterranean were fairly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, but this balance would be altered by the Ottoman Turkish expansion from the east, and the Spanish and Portuguese continuation of the Reconquista into North Africa from the west. On the Barbary Coast itself this war did not involve huge armies and fleets, or great battles. It was a state of continual low-level warfare, involving individual privateering ships or small ad-hoc squadrons that attacked Christian ships, raided Christian coastlines, and captured Christians for sale as slaves. The alternative term ‘Barbary corsairs’ is in fact more appropriate. It was current in the 16th century, when the Italian word corso meant the act of privateering, and a corsaro was an individual privateer – a sailor who made a state-sanctioned living from the corso. The term was also used by the French and Spanish, and effectively became shorthand not just for the Barbary pirates but also for Christian privateers such as the Knights of Malta. During later centuries the term corsair assumed wholly inappropriate romantic overtones, thanks to the hugely popular poem The Corsair (1815) by Lord Byron, the opera Il Corsaro (1848) by Verdi, and the ballet Le Corsaire (1858) by Berlioz. Today the terms corsair and pirate are largely interchangeable, which is misleading. Even the term ‘privateer’ is not wholly appropriate in this context, since it implies that these sailors confined their attacks to the high seas. In fact they ranged all around the shores of the Western and Central Mediterranean, 6 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 6 29/04/2016 15:14 attacking from the sea to raid fishing harbours or other settlements within a few miles of the shore. Sometimes they ganged together into larger squadrons or even fleets, enabling them to threaten larger ports and communities. In this respect the Barbary pirates were similar to the ‘buccaneers’ who frequented the Caribbean during the 17th century. Those English, French and Dutch buccaneers combined attacks on Spanish shipping with raids on settlements in the Spanish colonies around the Caribbean basin, and in this the likes of Sir Henry Morgan were merely following the example set by Khizr Barbarossa two centuries before. However, today even ‘buccaneer’ is used as just another term for pirate, so for our purposes Barbary ‘pirate’ is as good a word as any. The description ‘Barbary Coast’ is derived from the name of the Berbers, the warlike tribal people who inhabited (and still inhabit) the North African coastal region intermingled with the Arabs who swept in from the east during the first century of the great Muslim expansions. The original ethnic origin of the Berbers is still uncertain; it is claimed that ‘Berber’ derives from the Italian word barbaro, originally from the Latin barbarus, simply meaning ‘barbarian’. By the 16th century the European term ‘Barbary’ had passed into regular usage as the collective name for the lands of the Berber people, so to insist on anything more pedantic here would needlessly muddy the waters. The slave market of Algiers: Privateers and ports detail from a 17th-century European engraving illustrating As the pirates relied upon the small coastal states of North Africa for safe a history of the Barbary states. havens, recruits and resources, their fate became inextricably linked with that In the right foreground a young of the port cities that served as their bases. Soldiers recruited to guard the Christian captive is being states’ rulers took part in piratical raids, state arsenals supplied the pirates displayed by pirates to potential customers – Berber landowners, with ordnance, and in return the pirates helped defend the ports and their city merchants and (wearing a hinterland from attack. The fortunes of these ‘rogue’ states and the pirates plumed turban) an agha of who operated from their ports were closely entwined. janissaries. During the roughly 300 years of the 15th to 17th centuries, the ‘eternal war’ between Christendom and Islam was imbued with a fresh energy by, on the one hand, the aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Turks, and on the other by the efforts of Spanish- led Christian alliances to halt this Ottoman tide. Geographically the Barbary states, while allied to their fellow Muslims, were caught in the middle of this conflict. While this might have been disastrous for them, in fact they thrived, largely because Ottoman–Christian hostilities led to a dramatic increase in privateering activity. An influx of Turkish captains and Moorish émigrés to the Barbary Coast saw piracy as a way of taking the war to their religious enemies. The result was a long-running, low- level maritime conflict, with piratical attacks and slave-gathering raids playing a part in this greater religious 7 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 7 29/04/2016 15:14 struggle. It should be noted that the religious confrontation was also complicated at times by separate alliances, which saw, for instance, Muslim corsairs aiding France against the forces of the Spanish and Italians. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND In AD 665 an Arab army marched westwards from Egypt into the Exarchatus Africae, the Byzantine province of North Africa. Two decades previously a similar incursion had secured control of much of modern Libya; this time, the Arabs planned to conquer the whole of the North African coast. The Byzantines were defeated outside their provincial capital of Carthage, and their influence was reduced to a small enclave surrounding the city. These conquered territories became the Arab province of Ifriqiya, which encompassed all of modern This detail of a mid 16th- western Libya, Tunisia and eastern Algeria. By AD 698, when Carthage was century tapestry depicting the captured, the Arab Abbasid caliphs (‘commanders of the Faithful’) based in Spanish conquest of Tunis in Baghdad nominally controlled the whole North African coast from the Nile 1535 shows Berber soldiers to the Atlantic Ocean. armed with short bows, guided (left) by a turbaned and red- They divided it into three provinces: Egypt in the east, Ifriqiya in the centre, robed figure, presumably an and the subsidiary province of Maghreb in the west (stretching from the officer. This is probably a western border of modern Tunisia to the Atlantic coast, with its provincial reasonably convincing capital in Tangier). For 2,000 miles, from Alexandria to Tangier, the peoples of impression of auxiliaries in Berber service during this North Africa were bound together by the secular power of the caliphs and the period. spiritual power of Islam. But while religious unity remained strong, any political union proved transitory. The subsequent Umayyad Caliphate ruled its North African provinces from Kairouan near Tunis, but in the mid 8th century a revolt in the west led to the establishment of independent Berber states across the Maghreb. In the 11th century one of these dynasties – the Almoravids – RAID ON CORSICA, c. 1480 A Corsica lay in the area of the Western Mediterranean they were comfortable using. This seaman, based on a frequented by privateers from Algiers, and here an Algerine contemporary picture of Turkish archers, carries a short, galley lies off a small Corsican fishing village. Warned by powerful, recurved bow and a quiver of arrows, and has a sword lookouts in coastal towers, the inhabitants have fled into the slung from a baldric. He wears his jacket and shirt thrown back hills, leaving the raiders free to search for plunder or any off his right shoulder for ease of movement in combat. unfortunate villagers left hiding in their homes. 3: Berber crossbowman 1: Barbary captain This locally recruited pirate wears typical clothing of the This Reis wears a fur or fleece jerkin over his loose everyday Maghreb, and is armed with a crossbow with a composite clothes, and brandishes a kilij, the curved sword favoured stave, as used in north-west Africa for both hunting and war. during our period. Note the spanning hook on the front of his belt, and his 2: Bowman straight sword with a plain cruciform hilt. The bow, quiver of Unlike the embarked Turkish janissaries of a generation later, bolts and spanning hook are based on examples in the the pirates carried whatever weapons were available and that Museum of Antiquities in Algiers. 8 ELI 213 Layouts.v8.indd 8 29/04/2016 15:14