The Barbary Corsairs ......one to listen to on the wireless today

This is one I enjoyed.

It was broadcast today in the series In Our Time and is available to listen to.

A Barbary pirate, Pier Francesco Mola, 1650

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the North African privateers who, until their demise in the nineteenth century, were a source of great pride and wealth in their home ports, where they sold the people and goods they’d seized from Christian European ships and coastal towns. 

Nominally, these corsairs were from Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, outreaches of the Ottoman empire, or Salé in neighbouring Morocco, but often their Turkish or Arabic names concealed their European birth. Murad Reis the Younger, for example, who sacked Baltimore in 1631, was the Dutchman Jan Janszoon who also had a base on Lundy in the Bristol Channel. 

While the European crowns negotiated treaties to try to manage relations with the corsairs, they commonly viewed these sailors as pirates who were barely tolerated and, as soon as France, Britain, Spain and later America developed enough sea power, their ships and bases were destroyed".

With Joanna Nolan, Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, Claire Norton, Former Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, and Michael Talbot, Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich

Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Pictures; A Barbary pirate, Pier Francesco Mola, 1650,Louvre Museum,  Accession number RF 1948-41 and RF 1948 41, Department of Paintings of the Louvre

*The Barbary Corsairs, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001s5ds