Barbary Coast

I

Introduction

Barbary Coast, historical name for a region of northern Africa that became synonymous with piracy.

The name Barbary is derived from the Latin word barbaria. It first appeared in English from the 14th century onwards with the various meanings of “land of the barbarians”, “barbarity”, and “barbarous”. From the 16th century it was applied to northern Africa to the west of Egypt, and as an adjective to its mainly Mediterranean coast.

Historically, “Barbary Coast” refers to the period of Turkish rule in northern Africa from the 16th century to the early 19th century, which was notorious for the Barbary corsairs or pirates who preyed upon the European coasts and European shipping.

II

Origins

Piracy on a large scale began as a response to the fall of the Moorish kingdom of Granada to Spain in 1492, and the expulsion of all Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. This was followed by the Spanish capture of the North African ports of Melilla (1497), Mers el Kebir (1505), Oran (1509), Bejaïa (1510), and Tripoli (1510), together with the tiny islands off the Moroccan coast that they fortified as the Peñón de Vélez and the Peñón de Alhucemas (1508), and the Peñon of Algiers on an islet opposite the city (1509). These presidios (fortified settlements), however, failed to prevent the escalation of the Muslim response, which began with piracy but ended with the overthrow of the Ziyanid and Hafsid dynasties at Tlemcen and Tunis, and the annexation of North Africa as far as Morocco by the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

III

The First Pirates

The Ottoman conquest began with the arrival of pirates from the Aegean Sea under the leadership of the Barbarossa brothers Arūj and Khayr ad-Dīn, who seized power at Algiers in 1516. Arūj was killed by the Spaniards in 1518, but Khayr ad-Dīn turned for help to Constantinople (modern-day İstanbul, the Ottoman capital). Appointed beylerbey or commander-in-chief at the head of an Ottoman army, by 1525 he had conquered most of what is now northern Algeria, with Algiers as his capital. Ten years later he became Kapudan Pasha or Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet, as did two of his successors at Algiers, his son Hassan and the renegade Uluj Ali.

Under the beylerbeys, Algiers was thus in the forefront of the protracted struggle between Spain and the Ottomans for supremacy of the Mediterranean, which was marked by the capture of Tunis by Emperor Charles V in 1535, the siege of Algiers by the emperor in 1541, the siege of Malta by the Turks in 1565, and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and continued until peace was made in 1581. By that time Tripoli had fallen to the Ottomans in 1551, Bejaïa in 1555, and Tunis in 1574. Of the presidios, only Oran and Mers el-Kebir then remained in Turkish territory, together with Melilla on the coast of Morocco.

IV

Ottoman Rule

The post of beylerbey was abolished in 1587, and Ottoman North Africa was divided into three separate provinces or regencies ruled from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, the ancestors of the modern states of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Each was initially governed by a Pasha appointed by Constantinople, and garrisoned by Janissaries (Turkish musketeers) under the command of an Agha (commander), or at Tripoli by a Bey. At Tunis the Bey commanded the sipahis (cavalry), while at Algiers three Beys were appointed to rule the interior of the country at Constantine in the east, Medea in the centre, and Mazouna (later Mascara, then Oran) in the west. The corsairs were represented by their Rais (captains).

The three regimes were exclusively Turkish, a character that was maintained by the continual recruitment of the Janissaries in Anatolia (the area of modern Turkey), and the exclusion from their ranks of the kouloughlis (their sons by native wives). The corsairs were honorary Turks, since the majority were either Spanish and North African Moors or renegades, captives of the corsairs who had “turned Turk”: the beylerbey and Kapudan Pasha Uluj Ali was only the most notable of these—captured from the Calabrian coast (the foot of Italy) by Khayr ad-Dīn Barbarossa, he later commanded the left flank of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. After the conquest, government was conducted efficiently in the cities with the help of local notables, and economically in the countryside through tax-collecting expeditions in alliance with tribal chiefs: the inhabitants of the more mountainous regions and the deserts to the south were left largely to themselves.

The orderliness of government and the peace that was generally kept in the three Regencies contrasted with the fighting among the Turks themselves for power and independence from Constantinople. In the course of the 17th century the Pashas sent from Constantinople to Algiers and Tunis became mere figureheads. At Algiers the Agha finally took power in 1659, followed in 1671 by the Dey, an officer elected first by the Rais and then from 1689 by the ojaq (corps of Janissaries). Despite this the Dey was frequently assassinated by the ojaq. At Tunis power fell first into the hands of the Dey of the Janissaries and then into the hands of the Beys, who established the hereditary dynasty of the Muradids followed in 1705 by that of the Husaynids. At Tripoli the Pasha was finally ousted in 1711 by Ahmed al-Karamanli, the kouloughli commander of the cavalry and founder of the Karamanli dynasty. All three regimes remained part of the Ottoman Empire, but from the end of the 16th century conducted their own affairs, and exploited for their own benefit the piracy in which they had originated.