The Barbary Corsairs
The island of Malta today seems like the most benevolent of places. It’s hard to believe that three centuries ago, this whole Mediterranean region bristled with slave-ships, fighting a bitter battle for god and gold. This conflict pitched the forces of Christendom against the might of Islam. Nominally a holy war, a continuation of the Crusades on the high seas, it was equally a pirate battle that sometimes approached the proportions of a small naval war. On the Muslim side were the Barbary Corsairs. These were slave galleys of the Barbary states — semi-autonomous city states on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. The Muslim fiefdoms there had been building and equipping rowed galleys to raid Mediterranean shipping from the early sixteenth century onwards. Captured Christians worked the oars in a punishing ritual that has been used in the succeeding centuries as a talisman of Muslim cruelty. But the story from the other side of the religious