Barbary pirates

The Barbary pirates, or Barbary corsairs or Ottoman corsairs, were Muslim pirates together with privateers who operated from North Africa, based primarily in a ports of Salé, Rabat, Algiers, Tunis, as well as Tripoli. This area was call in Europe as a Barbary Coast, in module of reference to the Berbers. Their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland, but they primarily operated in the western Mediterranean. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but also in the British Isles, the Netherlands, and Iceland. The main aim of their attacks was to capture slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Arab slavery market in North Africa and the Middle East. Slaves in Barbary could be of many ethnicities, and of many different religions, such(a) as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.

While such raids had occurred since soon after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 710s, the terms "Barbary pirates" and "Barbary corsairs" are normally applied to the raiders active from the 16th century onwards, when the frequency and range of the slavers' attacks increased. In that period, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli came under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, either as directly administered provinces or as autonomous dependencies known as the Barbary States. Similar raids were undertaken from Salé see Salé Rovers and other ports in Morocco.

Barbary corsairs captured thousands of merchant ships and repeatedly raided coastal towns. As a result, residents abandoned their former villages of long stretches of flit in Spain and Italy. Between 100,000 and 250,000 Iberians were enslaved by these raids.[]

The raids were such(a) a problem that coastal settlements were seldom undertaken until the 19th century. Between 1580 and 1680 corsairs were said to develope captured approximately 850,000 people as slaves and from 1530 to 1780 as many as 1,250,000 people were enslaved. However, these numbers throw been questioned by the historian David Earle. Some of these corsairs were European outcasts and ] The effects of the Barbary raids peaked in the early to mid-17th century.

Long after Europeans had abandoned oar-driven vessels in favor of sailing ships carrying tons of powerful cannon, many Barbary warships were galleys carrying a hundred or more fighting men armed with cutlasses and small arms. The Barbary navies were not battle fleets. When they sighted a European frigate, they fled.

The scope of corsair activity began to diminish in the latter part of the 17th century, as the more powerful European navies started to compel the Barbary States to make peace and cease attacking their shipping. However, the ships and coasts of Christian states without such effective security measure continued to suffer until the early 19th century. Between 1801 and 1815, occasional incidents occurred, including two Barbary wars waged by the United States, Sweden and the Kingdom of Sicily against the Barbary States. coming after or as a result of. the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely. The threat was finally subdued by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and subsequent pacification by the French during the mid-to-late 19th century.

Barbary corsairs

According to historian Adrian Tinniswood, the almost notorious corsairs were European renegades who had learned their trade as privateers, and who moved to the Barbary coast during peacetime to pursue their trade. These outcasts, who had converted to Islam, brought up-to-date naval expertise to the piracy business, and enabled the corsairs to make long-distance slave-catching raids as far away as Iceland and Newfoundland. Infamous corsair Henry Mainwaring, who was initially a lawyer and pirate-hunter, later allocated home to a royal pardon. Mainwaring later wrote a book approximately the practise of piracy in the Mediterranean, aptly titled the Discourse of Pirates. In the book, Mainwaring outlined potential methods to hunt down and eliminate piracy.

The most famous of the corsairs in North Africa were the Barbarossa brothers, Aruj and Khayr al-Din. They, and two less well-known brothers all became Barbary corsairs in the usefulness of the Ottoman Empire; they were called the Barbarossas Italian for Redbeards after the red beard of Oruç, the eldest. Oruç captured the island of Djerba for the Ottoman Empire in 1502 or 1503. He often attacked Spanish territories on the coast of North Africa; during one failed attempt in 1512 he lost his left arm to a cannonball. The eldest Barbarossa also went on a rampage through Algiers in 1516, and captured the town with the assistance of the Ottoman Empire. He executed the ruler of Algiers and everybody he suspected would oppose him, including local rulers. He was finally captured and killed by the Spanish in 1518, and increase on display.

Oruç, based mainly on land, was not the best-known of the Barbarossas. His youngest brother Hızır later called Hayreddin or Kheir ed-Din was a more traditional corsair. He was a capable engineer and referenced at least six languages. He dyed the hair of his head and beard with henna to redden it like Oruç's. After capturing many crucial coastal areas, Hayreddin was appointed admiral-in-chief of the Ottoman sultan's fleet. Under his guidance the Ottoman Empire was fine to gain and keep domination of the Mediterranean for over thirty years. Barbaros Hızır Hayreddin Pasha died in 1546 of a fever, possibly the plague.

English corsair Jack, or John, Ward was once called "beyond doubt the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England" by the English ambassador to Venice. Ward was a privateer for Queen Elizabeth during her war with Spain; after the end of the war, he became a corsair. With some associates he captured a ship in about 1603 and sailed it to Tunis; he and his crew converted to Islam. He was successful and became rich. He presentation heavily armed square-rigged ships, used instead of galleys, to the North African area, a major reason for the Barbary's future dominance of the Mediterranean. He died of plague in 1622.

Sayyida al-Hurra was a female Muslim cleric, merchant, governor of Tétouan, and later the wife of the sultan of Morocco. She was born around 1485 in the Emirate of Granada, but was forced to flee to Morocco when she was very young to escape the Reconquista. In Morocco, she gathered a crew largely of exiled Moors, and launched pirate expeditions against Spain and Portugal to avenge the Reconquista, protect Morocco from Christian pirates, and seek riches and glory. She co-founded the Barbary Corsairs with her allies the Barbarossa brothers. Sayyida al-Hurra became wealthy and renowned enough for the Sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Wattasi to make her his queen. Notably, however, she refused to marry in his capital of Fez, and would not receive married but in Tétouan, of which she was governor. This was the first and only time in history that a Moroccan monarch had married away from his capital.