Algiers

What was Algiers like around 1715?

Seen from the sea, Algiers was a mass of white houses climbing a steep hill above a wide bay. A stone breakwater, the mole, joined the city to a fortified island and sheltered the corsairs’ harbour. Walls of the late 1500s ringed the town, with a citadel at the top. That old walled town, now called the Kasbah, still stands, with its mosques, palaces, houses and baths, and UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1992.

Turkish soldiers and officials held power, but Arabs, Berbers, a large Jewish community and Europeans lived there too, each community with its own leaders and judges, alongside thousands of captives. In the 1600s, estimates of its population ranged from about 40,000 to over 100,000; no reliable count exists for 1715.

Who ruled Algiers in 1715?

Algiers had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the 1500s, when the corsair brothers Aruj and Khair ad-Din, called Barbarossa, made it their base. For a time the sultan sent a governor, a pasha, every three years. Real power then moved to the janissaries, the Ottoman soldiers stationed in the city, most of them recruited in Anatolia (today’s Turkey). From 1671 the regency, as such a province was called, was led by a dey, and from 1689 the dey was chosen by the janissary officers and the divan, a council of leading men.

A dey kept power until he died, and many were killed in office: about half of all deys between 1671 and 1830 were murdered. In 1710 Baba Ali Chaouch became dey. He sent the sultan’s pasha away, refused to let a new one land in 1711, and persuaded the sultan to let the dey hold the pasha’s title himself. After that the sultan’s name was still said in Friday prayers and struck on coins, but the dey and his council governed.

Who were the corsairs of Algiers?

A corsair was a sea raider licensed by his own government, a little like a privateer. The corsair captains of Algiers, each called a raïs, formed a powerful community known as the taifa, led by an admiral. They needed the state’s permission to sail, and the government, the ship’s backers and the crew all took shares of every prize. Crews mixed Turks, North Africans and European converts to Islam, called renegades. Unlike Caribbean pirates, they were not outlaws, and they attacked only ships of nations their rulers were at war with.

By 1715 the fleet was smaller than in the 1600s, and in the 1700s it was made up mostly of fast xebecs, long Mediterranean ships with slanting sails and oars. They still took many Spanish ships, and from 1715 Dutch ones.

What happened to captives in Algiers?

Corsairs often valued people more than cargo. Captured sailors and passengers were paraded through Algiers and sold at auction in the market called the Badestan. Captives whom buyers hoped to ransom were often kept in the bagnios, walled compounds where a few hundred men slept. Others worked on fortifications, in the harbour and shipyards, in quarries, on farms and in households. By this time few captives rowed galleys, because the corsairs sailed mostly with sails.

Historians disagree about numbers. One study counts about 6,000 captives in the first half of the 1700s; observers at the time guessed 8,000 to 10,000 in 1700 and 9,000 to 10,000 in 1729. Food was poor, plague struck often and many died. Captives were pressed to convert to Islam, and a convert was much less likely to be ransomed.

Enslavement ran both ways. Spain, the Italian states and the Knights of Malta captured and enslaved many thousands of Muslims, who were rarely ransomed. The historian Robert Davis has made rough estimates of more than a million people taken on each side between 1500 and 1800, and other historians debate them.

How were captives ransomed from Algiers?

Two Catholic orders, the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians, collected money across Spain, France and Italy and sailed to Algiers to bargain with owners. The Mercedarians led ransoms from Algiers in 1723 to 1725. Spanish captives freed in those years had spent more than nine years in captivity on average. Families, merchants, consuls (the officials who looked after their country’s people abroad) and governments paid ransoms too, and Jewish merchants of Algiers sometimes arranged them. Catholic orders did not help Protestant captives, who depended on their own churches and governments.

Captive Trinitarian friars founded a hospital in 1612 in the Baño del Rey bagnio. Run with alms and staffed partly by captives, it cared for sick prisoners until 1816.

The most famous captive came long before the game’s era. The Spanish soldier Miguel de Cervantes was captured at sea in September 1575, tried four times to escape, and was freed by Trinitarian friars in September 1580. He later wrote Don Quixote.

How did treaties and Mediterranean passes protect ships?

A nation could buy peace with Algiers through a treaty, usually with gifts or regular payments called tribute. England signed treaties with Algiers from the 1660s, and the peace made in the early 1680s lasted. To prove a ship was British, the Admiralty, customs officers and colonial governors issued Mediterranean passes to qualifying ships. The top of each parchment pass was cut off along a scalloped line and the tops were sent to North Africa, so a corsair could check that the edges matched. Forged and sold passes caused disputes.

The Dutch copied the scalloped pass in 1712, the year they made peace with Algiers. In 1715 Algiers declared war on the Dutch Republic, and over the next eleven years its corsairs took dozens of Dutch ships and around a thousand sailors. Peace returned in 1726, bought with regular tribute, while British ships had profited by carrying trade the Dutch could not. Spain made no peace with Algiers until 1786.

What did Algiers trade?

Prizes and ransoms brought much of the city’s wealth, but in the 1700s Algiers relied more and more on selling grain. A report from the 1780s lists its exports as wheat, barley, beans, wool, hides and beeswax, traded with merchants from Marseille, Livorno and elsewhere. In came cloth, linen, iron, steel, timber, sugar, coffee, spices and hardware, while weapons, gunpowder and naval stores entered free of duty. Jewish merchants with links across the Mediterranean handled much of this trade. Grain and hides were everyday cargoes, as they were across the Atlantic.