The Story of the Barbary Corsairs | Page 9

the African States; nevertheless piracy went on, and most pertinaciously on the part of the Christians. The Greeks, Sardinians, Maltese, and Genoese were by far the worse members of the fraternity of rovers, as the treaties themselves prove: the increase of commerce under the stimulus of the Crusades tempted the adventurous, and the absence of any organized State navies gave them immunity; and there was generally a war afoot between some nation or other, Christian or Moslem, and piracy (in the then state of international law) at once became legitimate privateering. Our buccaneers of the Spanish main had the same apology to offer. But it is important to observe that all this was private piracy: the African and the Italian governments distinctly repudiated the practice, and bound themselves to execute any Corsair of their own country whom they might arrest, and to deliver all his goods over to the state which he had robbed.[4] These early Corsairs were private freebooters, totally distinct from the authorized pirates of later days. In 1200, in time of peace, two Pisan vessels attacked three Mohammedan ships in Tunis roads, captured the crews, outraged the women, and made off, vainly pursued by the Tunisian fleet: but they received no countenance from Pisa, the merchants of which might have suffered severely had the Tunisians exacted reprisals. Sicily was full of Corsairs, and the King of Tunis paid a sort of tribute to the Normans, partly to induce them to restrain these excesses. Aragonese and Genoese preyed upon each other and upon the Moslems; but their doings were entirely private and unsupported by the state.
Up to the fourteenth century the Christians were the chief pirates of the Mediterranean, and dealt largely in stolen goods and slaves. Then the growth of large commercial fleets discouraged the profession, and very soon we begin to hear much less of European brigandage, and much more of Moorish Corsairs. The inhabitants of the coast about the Gulf of Gabes had always shown a bent towards piracy, and the port of Mahd[=i]ya, or "Africa," now became a regular resort of sea rovers. El-Bekr[=i], in the twelfth century, had noticed the practice of sending galleys on the cruise for prey (perhaps during war) from the harbours of Bona; and Ibn-Khald[=u]n, in the fourteenth, describes an organized company of pirates at Buj[=e]ya, who made a handsome profit from goods and the ransom of captives. The evil grew with the increase of the Turkish power in the Levant, and received a violent impetus upon the fall of Constantinople; while on the west, the gradual expulsion of the Moors from Spain which followed upon the Christian advance filled Africa with disaffected, ruined, and vengeful Moriscos, whose one dominant passion was to wipe out their old scores with the Spaniards.
Against such influences the mild governors of North Africa were powerless. They had so long enjoyed peace and friendship with the Mediterranean States, that they were in no condition to enforce order with the strong hand. Their armies and fleets were insignificant, and their coasts were long to protect, and abounded with almost impregnable strongholds which they could not afford to garrison. Hence, when the Moors flocked over from Spain, the shores of Africa offered them a sure and accessible refuge, and the hospitable character of the Moslem's religion forbade all thought of repelling the refugees. Still more, when the armed galleots of the Levant came crowding to Barbary, fired with the hope of rich gain, the ports were open, and the creeks afforded them shelter. A foothold once gained, the rest was easy.
It was to this land, lying ready to his use, that Captain Ur[=u]j Barbarossa came in the beginning of the sixteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Le Comte de Mas-Latrie, Relations et commerce de l'Afrique Septentrionale avec les nations chrétiennes au moyen age, 1886.
[4] Le Comte de Mas-Latrie, Relations et commerce de l'Afrique Septentrionale avec les nations chrétiennes au moyen age, pp. 175-9.


PART I.
THE CORSAIR ADMIRALS.

III.
UR[=U]J BARBAROSSA.
1504-1515.
The island of Lesbos has given many gifts to the world--Lesbian wine and Lesbian verse, the seven-stringed lyre, and the poems of Sappho; but of all its products the latest was assuredly the most questionable, for the last great Lesbians were the brothers Barbarossa.
When Sultan Mohammed II. conquered the island in 1462, he left there a certain Sip[=a]hi soldier, named Ya'k[=u]b--so say the Turkish annalists, but the Spanish writers claim him as a native Christian--who became the father of Ur[=u]j Barbarossa and his brother Kheyr-ed-d[=i]n. Various stories are told of their early career, and the causes which led to their taking to the sea; but as Lesbos had long been famous for its buccaneers, whether indigenous or importations from Catalonia and Aragon, there was nothing unusual in the brothers adopting a profession which was alike congenial to bold hearts and sanctioned by time-honoured precedent.[5]