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G - 130 : Piracy - A cruel but lucrative Business


Fort Mont-Alban built in 1557 between Nice and Villefranche-sur-Mer to prevent a repetition of the devastating Siege of Nice in 1543 by Hayreddin Barbarossa and the French


Over the last seven years of sailing we continued to run into the legacies of Muslim corsairs like Hayreddin Barbarossa or Turgut Reis. Their galleys are long gone but the watch towers to look out for them or the heavily fortified coastal towns still bear witness to these horrible times. For two years, I made an entry to my black note book every time I read of a corsair landing or attack on a village, town or island. Arrived now at more than 150 entries from 1487 to 1625 and decided to draw them to a map.

My Map was too small to record all the multiple landings


The map shows a pattern. Despite truces and peace treaties, the raids continued unabated for a full 130 years. There was never a break. The map also shows that the civilian population was the main target. Anyone living in Spanish, Genovese, Venetian or Papal territories had to expect attacks without warning. For reasons I will explain in a later blog, the coast of France was spared. So were major towns which were beyond the military capacity of the Barbary pirates. The few towns sacked were towns with outdated defences such as Bonifacio and Calvi in Corsica, Ciutadella & Mahon on Menorca, Gonzo on Malta and Otranto in Apulia.

The Citadel of Calvi, a Genovese colony, was built to prevent further Corsair Attacks


The strength of the Corsair attackers varied between 10 – 20 ships and 800 to 3’000 men. Seldom did the Sultan’s Grand Fleet of 200 – 300 galleys sail as an entire body like for the Battle of Prevezza in 1538, the Siege of Nice in 1543, the invasion of Malta in 1565 or the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. But a dozen of heavy canons and a thousand men were more than enough to overwhelm local resistance and raid a village or an island. The aim of the Corsairs was to loot and enslave the population, not to occupy the places they attacked.

The Battle of Preveza (1538) was one of the few Occasions when both Fleets clashed head on


Nobody knows how many people were enslaved. The Ottoman Empire did not keep records of these transactions. A good estimate for the 130 years are 1.25 million or 8 – 12’000 people a year. This numbers reconciles with the reports from the raided villages and islands. A slave aged 12 to 35 could fetch 350 Turkish Gurus. (One Gurus = one Spanish Peso or 25 grams of silver). In one season, the Corsairs could thus make 3.5 million Spanish Pesos or 437’500 golden Florin (used a gold to silver exchange ratio of 1 : 8). My numbers have to be taken with caution. It is very difficult to get reliable price information and exchange rates for this period. But I guess the order of magnitude is right.

Wealthy European Captives were ransomed back to

Europe. On this Gravure a Clergyman is haggling with

a Corsair (1684)

These were not trivial sums. A palace at the Canale Grande in Venice at the time cost 3’500 Florins, a men-of-war galley 55’000 Fl, a lighter scouting galley 15’000 Fl, one of the big bastions of Amsterdam’s town walls 500’000 Fl. The Chief of the Venetian Arsenal made 240 Fl a year, the Chief Architect of the Duomo in Florence 100 Fl, an employee at the Medici Bank 15 – 40 Fl and an experienced soldier about 50 – 60 Fl p.a.


The profit and loss for the pirates was thus highly attractive:


Sale of the captives in the slave markets Fl 437’500

Sale of loot (estimate) Fl 100’000

Salary for 3’000 hired soldiers Fl 180’000

Replacement of 20% of their fleet (4 galleys) Fl 220’000

Profit Fl 137’500


Fl 137'500 is 480 kg of pure gold or 40 palaces on the Canale Grande. In a nutshell, piracy was a very lucrative business. It made its participants rich. That it caused untold misery for civilians, nobody cared. The ideology of the ” Holy War against Infidels” provided perfect cover. People who do not believe are not humans. Moral problem solved – sounds very familiar. Our society did not consider black Africans as human beings for a long time either.


Turgut Reis, one of the most dreadful Corsairs was

captured in 1540 and randsomed for 3'000 Florins in 1544


For the Ottoman Empire, the corsairs’ persistent attacks were quite advantageous. Their campaign cost the Sultan nothing – am sure he even got a share of the profit in form of taxes. It kept the core of the Ottoman fleet well trained and it forced his enemies to protect the coastal towns with expensive bastions. Fortifying a town like Syracuse or Trapani could easily cost ½ million Florin. Never counted the number of Mediterranean towns fortified in the 16th century but in Sicily, Calabria and Apulia alone there are more than a dozen. We will see many of them during our three weeks: Monaco, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Nice, Antibes, St Tropez, Port Cros, Toulon, Marseille, Mahon, Ciutadella, Palma, Ibiza. I guess this massive building program cost the Spanish Crown at least 50 million Florin. Money that could not been spent on its own fleet of galleys which was always only 1/3 of the Ottoman Fleet.

The Old Town of Ibiza was fortified in the 16th Century to protect it against Corsair raids


There was another long-lasting economic effect which has only been researched recently. Since the protection of the thousands of coastal villages was impossible, people moved from the fertile coastal plains to the mountains. Of course, farming output dropped. Rural poverty set in and could still be measured in the 20thcentury. The long-term effect of the corsairs’ raiding activities is partially the cause for Italy’s mass emigration in the 19th century.


Italian Villages attacked during the Period


For the coastal towns the effect was similar. Once nobody was living on the coastal plains anymore, trading ceased, no commercial freighters needed to be built, economic activity slowed down considerably. At the same time, these towns were settled with high taxes to repay the debt incurred for the fortification. It was a catch-22 situation that only changed when the piracy threat was finally removed in the early 19th century and tourism started to bring new money into these regions.

These Guns in Monaco were not just for decorative Purposes - We will see them in Week 1

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