page_title: Piracy
section_title: Mediterranean corsairs
hierarchical_section_title: Piracy / History / Europe / Mediterranean corsairs
caption_attribution_description: English: Anglo-Dutch fleet in the bay of Algiers as support for the ultimatum demanding the release of white slaves on august 26, 1816. Nederlands: Krijgsraad aan boord van de 'Queen Charlotte' van Lord Exmouth voor het bombardement op Algiers, 26 augustus 1816. Vier momenten uit de aanwezigheid van de Engels-Nederlandse vloot in de Baai van Algiers, 26-27 augustus 1816.
context_page_description: Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable items or properties. Those who engage in acts of piracy are called pirates, while dedicated ships that are used by them are called pirate ships. The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilizations. Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for privateering and commerce raiding. Historic examples include the waters of Gibraltar, the Strait of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of Aden, and the English Channel, whose geographic structures facilitated pirate attacks. A land-based parallel is the ambushing of travelers by bandits and brigands in highways and mountain passes. Privateering uses similar methods to piracy, but the captain acts under orders of the state authorizing the capture of merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation, making it a legitimate form of war-like activity by non-state actors.
context_section_description: Though less famous and romanticized than Atlantic or Caribbean pirates, corsairs in the Mediterranean equaled or outnumbered the former at any given point in history. Mediterranean piracy was conducted almost entirely with galleys until the mid-17th century, when they were gradually replaced with highly maneuverable sailing vessels such as xebecs and brigantines. They were, however, of a smaller type than battle galleys, often referred to as galiots or fustas. Pirate galleys were small, nimble, lightly armed, but often heavily manned in order to overwhelm the often minimal crews of merchant ships. In general, pirate craft were extremely difficult for patrolling craft to actually hunt down and capture. Anne Hilarion de Tourville, a French admiral of the 17th century, believed that the only way to run down raiders from the infamous corsair Moroccan port of Salé was by using a captured pirate vessel of the same type. Using oared vessels to combat pirates was common, and was even practiced by the major powers in the Caribbean. Purpose-built galleys (or hybrid sailing vessels) were built by the English in Jamaica in 1683 and by the Spanish in the late 16th century. Specially-built sailing frigates with oar-ports on the lower decks, like the James Galley and Charles Galley, and oar-equipped sloops proved highly useful for pirate hunting, though they were not built in sufficient numbers to check piracy until the 1720s.
  The expansion of Muslim power through the Ottoman conquest of large parts of the eastern Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th century resulted in extensive piracy on sea trading. The so-called Barbary pirates began to operate out of North African ports in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Morocco around 1500, preying primarily on the shipping of Christian powers, including massive slave raids at sea as well as on land. The Barbary pirates were nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, but had considerable independence to prey on the enemies of Islam. The Muslim corsairs were technically often privateers with support from legitimate, though highly belligerent, states. They considered themselves as holy Muslim warriors, or ghazis, carrying on the tradition of fighting the incursion of Western Christians that had begun with the First Crusade late in the 11th century.
  Coastal villages and towns of Italy, Spain and islands in the Mediterranean were frequently attacked by Muslim corsairs and long stretches of the Italian and Spanish coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants; after 1600 the Barbary corsairs occasionally entered the Atlantic and struck as far north as Iceland. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries. The most famous corsairs were the Ottoman Albanian Hayreddin and his older brother Oruç Reis (Redbeard), Turgut Reis (known as Dragut in the West), Kurtoglu (known as Curtogoli in the West), Kemal Reis, Salih Reis and Koca Murat Reis. A few Barbary corsairs, such as the Dutch Jan Janszoon and the English John Ward (Muslim name Yusuf Reis), were renegade European privateers who had converted to Islam.
  The Barbary pirates had a direct Christian counterpart in the military order of the Knights of Saint John that operated out first out of Rhodes and after 1530 Malta), though they were less numerous and took fewer slaves. Both sides waged war against the respective enemies of their faith, and both used galleys as their primary weapons. Both sides also used captured or bought galley slaves to man the oars of their ships; the Muslims relying mostly on captured Christians, the Christians using a mix of Muslim slaves, Christian convicts and a small contingency of buonavoglie, free men who out of desperation or poverty had taken to rowing.
  Historian Peter Earle has described the two sides of the Christian-Muslim Mediterranean conflict as "mirror image[s] of maritime predation, two businesslike fleets of plunderers set against each other". This conflict of fait
caption: The Bombardment of Algiers by the Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1816 to support the ultimatum to release European slaves
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