Between the 16th century and the early 19th century, the Barbary slave trade in
South and
West Europe was one of two major slave routes for European slaves to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, the other being the contemporary
Crimean slave trade in Eastern Europe. The Barbary corsairs attacked a number of different nations in Southern and Western Europe, as well as the Americas. Some of the nations were exclusively attacked by sea, while others were also subjected to slave raids on land. Each nation had their own policy in order to address the issue, and different European governments maintained negotiations with the Barbary states in order to pay ransom for captives, prevent attacks on their ships or raids on their coasts. Armed raids began in the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman states of what is today, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya became de facto independent rogue states that lived on pillage, and persisted as late as the early nineteenth century, when France conquered modern Algeria. From the 16th to the end of the 18th century, the coastal areas of Italy (especially in the south-west) were raided by pirates launched from the coast of North Africa. To protect themselves, people in coastal areas moved inland into mountainous and rugged areas. The long-term impact of these pirate attacks persisted well into the 20th century.
Britain and Ireland Britain and Ireland were attacked by the Barbary Corsairs pirates primarily at sea but also by raids on land. The
Irish Sea was infamous for being frequented by Barbary pirates, although the vast majority captives from the British Isles were sailors and crews of ships around the Mediterranean. In 1620–1621, the government of
James VI and I maintained long negotiations to prevent attacks, but did not succeed. In the 1620s and 1640s, the coasts of Cornwall and Devon in England, as well as Southern Ireland, were subjected to raids by Barbary corsairs, who raided the coasts after having attacked ships outside of the coasts. In 1625
Barbary Corsairs raided
Mount's Bay enslaving 60 people the next year they raided
St Keverne multiple times the ports of
Looe,
Penzance,
Mousehole and oher Cornish ports were blocked by the Corsairs. A couple of years after the sack of Baltimore of 1631, the Irish village of
Dungarvan was also attacked by a slave raid resulting in around fifty captives. They also
raided Penzance in July 1640.
England assigned agents to North Africa to buy back English citizens, who were being held as slaves. In December 1640, the situation was so serious that a government committee, the Committee for Algiers, was formed to buy back English slaves from Algeria. In 1643, so many sailors from Britain had been taken as slaves to Algeria that the English government called for a national collection of ransom money from all the churches in the kingdom to make it possible to buy them free. To buy female slaves free was much more expensive than buying back male slaves. Most of those captured were women. Among the British victims of the Barbary slave trade were
Helen Gloag,
Lalla Balqis,
Elizabeth Marsh and
Thomas Pellow, all of whom were captured from ships. In 1646,
Algiers and the
English signed a treaty sending Edmund Cason to Algiers to retrieve English slaves who numbered about 2,555 captives in Algiers in March 1641. Edmund Cason reportedly freed 250 English captives before running out of money. He also had to pay Pashas, Ottoman officials, and translators. The most famous slave raid on the Faroe Islands was the
slave raid of Suðuroy in the summer of 1629, in which thirty people were abducted to slavery, from which they never returned. The
Danish–Algerian War from 1769 to 1772 between Denmark–Norway and the Deylik of Algiers took place partially because of the Barbary piracy against Danish-Norwegian ships, whose crews were sold into slavery. Among the Danish victims of the Barbary slave trade was
Hark Olufs. In practice however the corsair states of North Africa were Ottoman in name only and did not necessarily respect the obligations of the Ottoman sultan, who had weak control over the provinces, and France was subjected to their attacks despite the Franco-Ottoman alliance. During the 1550s, the French provinces of
Provence and
Languedoc were devastated by slave
razzias by the corsairs, which resulted in French complaints to the Ottoman sultan, and the city of
Marseille petitioned regent
Catherine de' Medici as well as taking separate measures to liberate enslaved natives and protect their commerce vessels, and reported to have lost twelve galleons aside from a large number of smaller boats. In 1555, Turgut Reis sailed to
Corsica and ransacked
Bastia, taking 6,000 prisoners. Among the French victims of the Barbary slave trade was
Antoine Quartier. About 400 people were captured and sold into slavery, As in Spain, the slave raids resulted in the abandonment of coasts and islands, and they were described as "the wretched beaches, the abandoned islands, the fishermen in flight, and the [slaving ships].... loitering past on the sea". The contemporary author Gregorio Rosso described the devastating slave raid upon Southern Italy in the summer of 1534: :"In late July he [Barbarossa] passed the lighthouse of
Messina, where he burnt some ships, and his rearguard fought with some galleys of Antonio d'Ora, who was in that place. Then they sacked Santo Lucito in
Calabria, leaving not a soul alive. After that, close to Citraro, Land of the Benedictine Monks of
Montecassino, and as the Citizens fled, he burnt that with seven half-completed galleys, half that were in the Court's service there. From there they went to
Pisciotta and on 7 of August passing in sight of
Naples with more fear than harm to the City, left men on dry land on the Island of Procita and sacked that Land; not content with this, he attacked
Sperlonga without warning, where they say more than a thousand people were made slaves: and finally he sent people to Fondi to seize Donna
Giulia Gonzaga to present her to the Great Turk, who desired her for the great fame of her beauty.
Fondi was sacked, and Donna Giulia scarcely had time to save herself that night on a horse in her nightgown, just as she was." The aftermath of the slave raids described "two thousand dead and taken in the pillage" and how it would be necessary with tax exemption for the surviving population for Fondi and Sperlonga in December 1534; how especially women had been targeted for slavery in Sperlonga, were 162 houses had been destroyed; that 1,213 houses in Fondi had been broken in to and valuables of 26,000 ducats had been stolen in that town alone, and that 73 men, women and children had been killed and 150 enslaved from Fondi. In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured
Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners in the process, and deported to slavery some 9,000 inhabitants of
Lipari, almost the entire population. When pirates sacked
Vieste in southern Italy in 1554 they took an estimated 7,000 slaves. Rich Italian families often attempted to buy back their captured relatives, and the
Senate of the Republic of Venice often made efforts to buy back captured noblemen. During such negotiations, Italian or Jewish merchants were often used as the intermediaries. and the entire population of Gozo was abducted and sold into
slavery in Libya.
Netherlands No slave raids were performed against the coasts of the
Netherlands. Dutch ships were however a frequent target for corsair pirates. The Dutch government regularly assigned agents to buy back Dutch citizens captured and enslaved in North Africa. Dutch slaves were reportedly among the highest priced, and the corsairs demanded higher prices from them than for many other Europeans.
Portugal The territories of
Portugal were also subjected to coastal raids by the Barbary pirates. In 1617, the
Barbary Corsairs from Algeria conducted the
sack of Madeira, during which they attacked the Portuguese island and abducted 1,200 of its inhabitants as slaves. The attack occurred during the height of
slavery on the Barbary coast. Madeira was at that time a part of the
Iberian Union headed by the
Monarchy of Spain.
Spain Spain was one of the worst affected areas in all Europe to attacks by the corsairs. Both Spanish ships as well as coasts were subjected to attacks by the corsairs from the early 16th century onward. The corsairs of Tunis mainly raided the sea and coasts of Italy and Greece, while the
Corsairs of Algiers and Morocco frequented the waters and coasts of Spain and Western Europe. The slave raids on Spain started in the early 16th century onward. The
sack of Cullera in Spain on the Mediterranean Sea, occurred on 20 May 1550, when the
Ottoman general
Dragut landed in
Cullera,
Valencia and sacked the city taking away many inhabitants in slavery. Dragut attacked Cullera at night with 300 men. Dragut sacked the city, seized goods from the people and took almost all of the inhabitants of the city as slaves. He kept the captives in a cave before taking them to a slave market in Algiers. In 1558 Barbary corsairs captured the town of
Ciutadella, destroyed it, slaughtered the inhabitants, and carried off 3,000 survivors to
Istanbul as slaves. In 1563 Turgut Reis landed at the shores of the province of
Granada, and captured the coastal settlements in the area like
Almuñécar, along with 4,000 prisoners. Barbary pirates frequently attacked the
Balearic islands, resulting in many coastal watchtowers and fortified churches being erected. The threat was so severe that
Formentera became uninhabited. In 1637 for example, 315 women and children were captured from the town of Calpe. The Swede Johan Gabriel Sparfwenfeldt, who visited Algiers and Tunis in 1691, described empathically how he had met and spoken to many Swedish slaves who asked him for help to be bought free and return to "their homes, to their children, their parents and the land of their home", and listed 23 names of the Swedes then held as slaves. Sweden attempted to protect their ships by use of insurance against slavery, convoys, international treaties, and by maintaining friendly contact with the corsairs. The captives were also bought free by their relatives. This did not only apply to slaves from rich families: many poor women are known to have collected money to buy their husbands and sons free. When the young sailor Erik Persson Ångerman was enslaved in Algiers after having taken captured from the ship
Wibus from Stockholm on 10 May 1725, he sent a letter to his wife Maria Olssdotter via his colleague Petter Wallberg (who had been bought free and was returning to Sweden) and told her he "sat in hard slavery" in Algiers. Maria Olssdotter had no funds to buy his freedom, but appealed to the king via the governor of
Gävle for money to be gathered in the churches for the purchase of her enslaved husband, and her application was approved; this was not an unusual case, as many poor women are known to have done the same. One of the Swedish victims of the Barbary slave trade was
Marcus Berg (1714–1761).
British North America and United States There were no Barbary land raids in
British North America and the later United States. However, the Barbary pirates attacked American ships, took American captives and sold them as slaves. Already in 1661, a chronicler wrote "for a long time previous the commerce of
Massachusetts was annoyed by Barbary corsairs and that many of its seamen were held in bondage." During the
American Revolutionary War, the pirates attacked American ships. On December 20, 1777, Morocco's sultan
Mohammed III declared that merchant ships of the new American nation would be under the protection of the sultanate and could thus enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast. The
Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as America's oldest unbroken friendship treaty with a foreign power. In 1787, Morocco became one of the first nations to recognize the United States of America. Starting in the 1780s, realizing that American vessels were no longer under the protection of the
British navy, the Barbary pirates had started seizing American ships in the Mediterranean. As the United States had disbanded its
Continental Navy and had no seagoing military force, its government agreed in 1786 to pay tribute to stop the attacks. On March 20, 1794, at the urging of President
George Washington, Congress voted to authorize the building of
six heavy frigates and establish the
United States Navy, in order to stop these attacks and demands for more and more money. The United States had signed treaties with all of the Barbary states after its independence was recognized between 1786 and 1794 to pay tribute in exchange for leaving American merchantmen alone, and by 1797, the United States had paid out $1.25 million or a fifth of the government's annual budget then in tribute. The Barbary attacks on American ships were a contributing cause of the Americans participating in the
Barbary Wars. ==Barbary wars==