Pirates of the…Mediterranean?
In response to my recent post on nineteenth century Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao, Margins reader Davide reminded me of another highly successful pirate* and then made the provocative comment that the subject of piracy in the Mediterranean is very interesting and often neglected by historians.
Challenge accepted. It’s a big question, but let’s take a quick look:
Piracy was a problem in the Mediterranean as early as ancient Egypt** and remained a problem for the next thousand years. By 67 BCE, pirates were such a threat to Roman navigation and commerce that the Roman senate sent Caesar’s ally and rival Pompey to find a solution to the problem. They agreed to provide him with up to 500 ships for up to three years. Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen zones, which he systematically cleared of pirates over the course of three months using fifty warships and fifty transports. (He also used the war against the pirates as the jumping off point for Roman expansion into Syria and Palestine–but that’s another story.)
Pompey reduced piracy to a low grade irritant during the lifetime of the empire, but it picked up again during the Middle Ages when there was no central power strong enough to patrol the seas. Muslim and Christian corsairs alike attacked merchant vessels and sold captives as slaves–sometimes in the name of religion, sometimes because they could. (There is of course, always a question of whether a ship was a pirate or a legitimate warship of a hostile power: both sides were quick to point fingers and say “pirate”.)
The “golden age” of Mediterranean piracy dates from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries when the Barbary corsairs (and their European counterparts, the Knights Hospitallers) terrorized the waves. Just as Elizabeth I of England used licensed privateers as an economical way to fund her lifelong battle against Spain , the Ottomans co-opted the corsairs of Algiers and Tunis as a way to strengthen their navy and expand their influence westward.
The Barbary corsairs were finally repressed in the early nineteenth century, but piracy remains a problem today on a smaller scale, as a quick Google search will reveal.
Anyone have something they’d like to add?
* Barbarossa (Redbeard), a sixteenth century Barbary corsair who worked his way up from pirate to emir of Algiers (1519) and eventually grand admiral of the Ottoman fleet (1533). A successful pirate by any standard and worth a blog post in his own right. Coming soon to a history blog near you.
**At least that’s our first documented reference to piracy. An Egyptian document from 1075 BCE describes the voyages of an Egyptian emissary from Karnak who narrowly escaped an attack by pirates from the Phoenician city of Dor, located in modern Israel. In fact, pirates probably existed from the moment that humans tried to ship valuables by water.
Road Trip Through History: A Little Piece of the Great River Road
A while back, My Own True Love and I had to abandon our plans to take a three week drive down the Great River Road, which winds from Minnesota to Louisiana along the Mississippi. This last weekend we treated ourselves to four days and the brief stretch of the river that runs along the edge of Illinois from Nauvoo to Quincy. Instead of roots music, regional food, and lots of historic sites, we had a home-grown musical, a Maid-Rite sandwich, missing (or at least elusive) historical markers, and lots of Mormons.
We spent most of our time at Nauvoo, where the Mormons built a thriving community from 1839 to 1846, after being driven out of Missouri. They spent a number of years in Nauvoo before once again being driven out, this time making the trek across the plains to Utah. Today, Nauvoo is effectively a Mormon pilgrimage site.
There are two different clusters of sites commemorating the Mormon history of Nauvoo, run by two different off-shoots of Joseph Smith’s original congregation. The Church of Latter Day Saints offer twenty-some reconstructed buildings and businesses with volunteer docents–the general feel is a small-scale Williamsburg with a Mormon emphasis. The surviving historical sites are in control of the Community of Christ, which broke off from the Latter Day Saints in the early 1850s .* Community of Christ volunteers give walking tours of the sites. We left knowing more about Mormon history than we knew when we arrived–and with several big unanswered questions about the relationship between the Mormons and their neighbors in both Missouri and Illinois.
A small but useful exhibit run by the local Chamber of Commerce puts the Mormon years of Nauvoo in a larger context that included a communal settlement of Icarian socialists,** immigrants who fled the 1848 revolutions in Germany, and an engineering project on the Mississippi led by then Lt. Robert E. Lee.
Some of the high points of the trip included:
• A brief ride in an oxen-drawn wagon, with a very knowledgeable guide. We were surprised to learn that oxen are simply cattle trained as draft animals. Oxen were cheaper and stronger than horses, easier to drive,** and able to feed themselves by grazing on a long trek.
• A living history program about making bricks.
• Driving on a county road along the Mississippi early on a beautiful Sunday morning
• The Villa Katherine in Quincy Illinois: a home built in the Moorish style in 1900 by a man who can most politely be described as an enthusiast.
We’ve got lots of River Road left to travel.
*One of the sources of disagreement was over who was Joseph Smith’s legitimate successor after his murder. The splinter group who became the Community of Christ believed that Smith had anointed his eleven-year-old Joseph Smith III as his successor and were prepared to wait until he had grown old enough to take his rightful place. This reminded me of the Sunni/Shia split over Mohammed’s successor. Déjà vu all over again?
**Worth a blog post of their own. Coming soon to a history blog near you.
***As long as they’d been trained to yoke. If you were desperate and hooked an untrained pair of cattle to a yoke, you were asking for trouble.
History On Display: Amazing Grace, the Musical
Earlier this week, My Own True Love and I took a chance on the “pre-Broadway world premier” of a musical by a new composer/playwright based on the historical story of John Newton (1725-1807), the slave trader turned Anglican minister and abolitionist who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace”. At a minimum, we knew there would be at least one good song.
Newton’s story–complete with love story–would be a gripper even without the personal transformation that inspired the song. He was impressed into the British Navy in 1744. After deserting ship, he was captured, flogged, demoted and eventually traded to a merchantman involved in the Triangular Trade between England, West Africa, and the West Indies. Dogged by bad luck–often brought about by a bad attitude and questionable choices– he became the prisoner of a powerful and highborn West African woman, worked as her factor in the slave trade, was rescued,* and almost died in a horrific storm at sea.
Amazing Grace, the musical, turns Newton’s story into a powerful drama, with themes of love, redemption, and freedom. It does an excellent job of portraying the brutality of the West African slave trade, the lesser brutality of the British Navy in the mid-eighteenth century, and the heroism of those involved in the British abolitionist movement. I suspect that some of the details of Newton’s life were tweaked to make a more dramatic story. For instance, nothing I’ve read suggests that Newton’s father headed the mission to rescue his son or that his life-long love Mary Catlett was part of the abolitionist movement.** (The production makes up for slight in accuracies by providing an excellent study guide on line.)
Two aspects of the play bothered me, though both made for good theater. Both Newton and Mary Catlett are attended by loyal family slaves who serve as their owners’ consciences, as well as surrogates for parents who are present but inadequate. The African scenes, particularly those involving the evil Princess Peyai, had overtones of old adventure movies like King Solomon’s Mine.
All caveats aside, Amazing Grace is worth seeing if it comes your way. If you can stand at the end and sing “Amazing Grace” with the cast tears in your eyes or at least a lump in your throat, you’re a tougher history buff than I am.
* Or perhaps just convinced to come home, depending on which version you read
**And if she was, I want to know more. Anyone?