Who made the Barbarians pirates?
Anyone who saw Melanie Phillips’ recent piece on Britain’s campaign against the Barbary pirates and their kidnappings off the Cornish coast might like to read this article on the English role in introducing piracy to the Muslim world. Among the pirates were people of English and Dutch origin, “disgusted by religious wars in their own countries, and unpersuaded by Trinities and Vicarious Atonements, âtook the Turbant of the Turkeâ”.
This isn’t to justify kidnapping unsuspecting innocents from coastal villages, although the British navy was also full of people kidnapped in a similar way from coastal towns by press gangs, which were necessary because conditions were awful and the sailors were paid “in arrears”, i.e. when the Navy felt like it. There were, however, documented incidents of slaves and freed slaves refusing to return to England from their new homes in Morocco and Algeria.
She reveals her ignorance in recanting the sob story of people “forced to work all hours in appalling conditions building the vast palace of the monstrous and psychopathic Sultan, Moulay Ismail, who tortured and butchered them at whim”; in fact, Isma’il was notoriously brutal to everyone. This Wikipedia article mentions that he adorned the walls of his capital, Meknes, with 10,000 of the heads of his slain enemies – no doubt not English slaves he or his functionaries found lazy.
For more on the subject of the English under Ottoman rule, the reader might like to read Nabil Matar’s book Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, Columbia University Press, June 1999.
