“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” are the beginning lines from the United States Marine Corps hymn, and the Tripoli that’s mentioned is the largest city in today’s Libya. The hymn was written sometime after 1867, and these lines commemorate two of the Marine Corps’ most famous battles. The “halls of Montezuma” referring to the Mexican-American War of 1846 to ’48, and the “shores of Tripoli” refers to the battles the Marine Corps, along with the U.S. Navy, fought with the infamous Barbary pirates who terrorized the coast of North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and indeed a large part of Europe for three centuries.
The Barbary Coast of North Africa stretches from eastern Morocco to Tripoli, just under 1,000 miles. The name “Barbary” has nothing to do with barbarians; Barbary is the anglicized version of Berber, the native non-Arab peoples of the region. The Berbers had been famous warriors and raiders by land, when they and their allies decided to take to the sea in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Many of the Berber tribes were joined by refugees, both Muslim and Jewish, who were either fleeing or being forced out of Spain as the Spanish, under Ferdinand and Isabella, carried out the “Reconquista”—the reconquest of much of Spain after seven centuries of Arab Muslim rule.
The trade of countless nations flowed across, around, and out of the Mediterranean, and the Barbary pirates wanted their piece of it. Spices, gold, gems, and much else from the Middle East and India were carried over the waves of the Mediterranean; so were food items, wine, raw materials, and much else from Europe. The ships carrying these goods were one of the prime targets of the pirates, but the most lucrative good wasn’t pepper from India or frankincense from Persia; it was human beings.
Slavery had existed in the Mediterranean basin since before the time of Rome. During the Roman expansion, people from all corners of the empire were enslaved: Franks, Germans, Slavs, Greeks, various people from the Balkans, Africans traded to Rome by Egypt, Jews from Israel, and more. Some of the richest people in Rome and the Gothic and Arab empires which followed it were slave traders. Many Viking raiders grew rich and powerful from the treasure they hoarded trading slaves. Slavery was common in Europe, the north coast of Africa, and the Middle East until relatively recent times.
In the 1500s, the Ottoman Turks expanded along the North African coast. Due to distance and the fiercely independent nature of the Berbers and others, however, Ottoman control of the Barbary Coast was nominal. As long as the people there recognized the Ottoman Sultan as their overlord and gave help when it was asked, the Turks left the people of the coast alone. One of the many interesting things about the Barbary pirate is that, as time went on, many of them were not from the region. Many were Europeans, acting much like today’s mercenaries, looking for adventure and a quick buck. Unfortunately, what they were mainly looking for were other human beings to sell into slavery.
At first, the Barbary pirates confined themselves to the Mediterranean basin. This was done out of necessity, because for more than a century, the ships that the Barbary pirates traveled in were galleys. You might be familiar with the galley in virtually all movies about ancient Greece and Rome; the ships you see are galleys powered by slaves rowing their lives away. Though some of these movies and some Roman galleys did have sails, these were basic square sails; they weren’t the main source of the ship’s propulsion. They just added speed when the wind was right, for the ancients lacked the technology and the knowledge to tack into the wind. So likely, millions of human beings around the world toiled away at the oars.
By the mid-1500s, many areas of the western Mediterranean coastline of Europe were abandoned. The raids of the Barbary corsairs—another term for pirate, especially those of the Barbary Coast—had been so successful in raiding that those left fled inland for greater protection. One of the most infamous of the Barbary raids took place more than a thousand miles away on the coast of Ireland in 1631. The Barbary corsairs landed on the coast of western Ireland, and during the night, raided the village of Baltimore, taking dozens of slaves. The village remained empty for decades.
It would have been foolish for the pirates to raid the Channel Coast of England or look for rich, slow-moving merchant ships there, but English ships trading off the coast of France and in the Mediterranean were prime targets. In the seven years between 1609 and 1616, the English lost 466 ships to the pirates. That is a huge number. It not only shows the size of the English merchant fleet, but the size and activity of the Barbary pirates. And when you stop to consider that English ships were not the only ones seized, you have a group of very skilled, very rich pirates.
Before we tell you more about who many of the slaves were who were taken by the corsairs, let’s stop for a moment and explain what happened to them. For able-bodied men that were seized, a life of hard labor awaited. This could mean working in various mines along the Barbary Coast, which borders the Sahara Desert—you understand, “thirsty work” to say the least. Other men who knew something about shipbuilding might be put to work doing that, or many of the other menial tasks that daily life consisted of at the time. The worst fate for men was to be a galley slave.
The life of a galley slave was most often quite short and extremely miserable. Men were placed at the oars, chained to the deck and to the oars, and never allowed to leave—never. That meant that in addition to rowing everywhere and often being beaten or whipped by the crew while doing so, the enslaved rower would take his meals at the oars, and meals likely consisted of fish remains and rotting vegetables. Galley slaves remained at the oars in all weather; they did not have cushions to sit on. Worst of all, galley slaves were never unchained to relieve themselves. They did so at the oars; their benches and bodies became coated with waste until a hard rain or the crew finally doused them with water because of the stench.
As you can likely imagine, the constant friction of their skin on the oars, their feet on the deck, their buttocks and thighs on the benches meant that the slaves often had open cuts and/or raw skin. In turn, this meant widespread infection, disease, and death. It also meant gangrene and maggots eating away at you while you were rowing and being whipped. Though it takes place in Roman times, the epic movie “Ben-Hur” illustrates well the life of a galley slave. Not only was the life of an enslaved rower miserable, it was also at times filled with terror. Though by the 1500s, galleys had started to carry smaller primitive cannons, their existence depended on getting within grappling distance of their foes and pulling their ship towards the enemy. All the while, the slaves sat and waited while combat took place around them. And if that was not enough, if the ship went down, so did the slaves chained to their benches.
People who take slaves are not generally moral people. In the overwhelming number of cases, slavers throughout history took surrendered and captured enemies, raided lands nearby, and/or bought slaves of many different races and ethnicities. Slaves had been taken in Africa for untold centuries: Africans took Africans, Arabs took Africans, and when Europeans began to journey to the continent, they took slaves. Some of them went to Europe, but the majority were sent to the Americas, where there was no sizable European workforce, at least not at first. The story of slavery in the United States is a long and complicated one, filled with notions of racial superiority to justify the practice of capturing and breeding millions of people for centuries. However, this video is about the pirates and slaves of the Barbary corsairs.
There are a number of unusual things about the Barbary pirates. They were not just Berbers; in their later history, many were not. No, in addition to the Berber captains were Arabs, Turks, Dutch, Greeks, and even a number of cases like that of Jack Ward, an English Barbary pirate in the early 1600s. One famous pirate was an Arab Muslim woman named Saeeda al-Hurra, who became governor of a district of Morocco and was later the wife of its Sultan, at a time when Muslim religious tolerance exceeded that of Europe. Even a small number of Jewish men became pirates, one such being Sinan Reis, who rescued the son of the most famous Barbary captain, Hayreddin Barbarossa—known in the Mediterranean from the English translation, “Redbeard.”
In 2004, Ohio State University history professor Robert C. Davis published “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters,” which drew notice for its story of how European slaves made their way into the slave pens of the Barbary Coast and the Ottoman Empire. Davis’ method of calculating the number of white slaves taken is mathematically sound, though many have said that his formula only takes an average number for every year for more than two centuries. By Davis’ calculations, at least 1.5 million European slaves were taken from the coastal villages and ships in the Mediterranean basin, and as far afield as Ireland, as you heard in the case of Baltimore.
Men were sent to hard labor in the mines, galleys, or the fields. Women were sorted by attractiveness and health; those deemed unattractive were made to do work in the kitchen, fields, and homes. Attractive women and girls were sent to various important figures for their harem, including for the Sultan of Sultans in Istanbul. Children were often taken and raised as Muslims, some of those making their way into the famous Janissaries, an Ottoman version of the Roman Praetorian Guard.
From the middle 1600s on, various European nations waged war on the Barbary pirates. This was done not only to stop the taking of European slaves—and note, the European slavery of Africans continued—but to stop the pirates’ seizure of important and valuable commodities such as olive oil and cotton from Egypt. One nation who took particular offense to the Barbary pirates’ raids was the United States. The United States fought two wars, the First and Second Barbary Wars, to stop the seizure of trade goods bound for the new nation and to stop the seizure of American sailors to sell in the slave markets. Interestingly enough, the Sultan of Morocco had been among the first to recognize the USA, and Moroccan pirates were forbidden to attack U.S. ships. The U.S. allied with Sweden in the Second Barbary War (1815) to inflict a heavy defeat on the pirates, and piracy in the Mediterranean went into a rapid decline, though it did continue into the late 19th century.
