{"id":1226,"date":"2005-10-02T10:36:19","date_gmt":"2005-10-02T09:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2005\/10\/02\/who_made_the_barbarians_pirates"},"modified":"2025-10-11T12:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T11:01:10","slug":"who_made_the_barbarians_pirates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/10\/02\/who_made_the_barbarians_pirates","title":{"rendered":"Who made the Barbarians pirates?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who saw <a href=\"http:\/\/www.melaniephillips.com\/diary\/archives\/001423.html\">Melanie Phillips&#8217; recent piece<\/a> on Britain&#8217;s campaign against the Barbary pirates and their kidnappings off the Cornish coast might like to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.masud.co.uk\/ISLAM\/ahm\/ward.htm\">this article<\/a> on the English role in introducing piracy to the Muslim world.  Among the pirates were people of English and Dutch origin, &#8220;disgusted by religious wars in their own countries, and unpersuaded by Trinities and Vicarious Atonements, &#8216;took the Turbant of the Turke'&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThis isn&#8217;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 &#8220;in arrears&#8221;, 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.<\/p>\n<p>She reveals her ignorance in recanting the sob story of people &#8220;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&#8221;; in fact, Isma&#8217;il was notoriously brutal to everyone.  <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ismail_of_Morocco\">This<\/a> Wikipedia article mentions that he adorned the walls of his capital, Meknes, with 10,000 of the heads of his slain enemies &#8211; no doubt not English slaves he or his functionaries found lazy.<\/p>\n<p>For more on the subject of the English under Ottoman rule, the reader might like to read Nabil Matar&#8217;s book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.columbia.edu\/cu\/cup\/catalog\/data\/023111\/0231110146.HTM\">Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery<\/a>, Columbia University Press, June 1999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anyone who saw Melanie Phillips&#8217; recent piece on Britain&#8217;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&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-melanie_phillips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-jM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42789,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions\/42789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}