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Authors: Joseph Wheelan

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But Christian power, formerly confined to the northern mountain fastnesses, expanded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Moors' territories contracted. Isabella and Ferdinand's marriage united Castile and Aragon. The Moors retreated to Andalusia.
In 1491, at the urging of Catholic clergy, Ferdinand and Isabella laid siege to Granada, Andalusia's capital. It fell on November 25. The cardinals and bishops beseeched the monarchs to expel the infidel Moors from Spain altogether. The Moors had tolerated Christendom when they were ascendant, but the Christian Inquisition harbored no reciprocal emotion. Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and his bishops and monsignors soon convinced Isabella to take a hard line and give the defeated Moors of Granada a choice: baptism or exile. It was the same choice Ferdinand and Isabella would give Spain's unbaptized Jews six months hence, with the result that over 100,000 eventually became exiles. Most Granadan Moors, however, preferred baptism to banishment; by professing a surface conformity, they could preserve their home and family, while secretly practicing the old faith as before—as many of the “converso” Jews did—although Ximenes made it difficult for them to do so, shutting down all the mosques and burning Moorish manuscripts. But the rural Moors were more uncompromising, stubbornly refusing to give up their faith or abandon their holdings. They dug into the fertile hills south of the city, bracing for the worst. It soon came: Ferdinand sent the Spanish army into action against them. The outnumbered rebels surrendered in 1492.
 
 
Thousands of exiled Moors who had spurned baptism loaded their possessions onto carts and their own backs and streamed into the port cities under the condemning eyes of the Spanish authorities. The Moors' forced dispossession began a century of banishments and exile. While a few refugees found sanctuary in Italy, most retraced Tarik's historic journey, in reverse, across the straits to
North Africa—to Barbary, where they were welcomed by their Moslem brethren.
Wanting to avenge their banishment by the Spanish, the Moors found their way to the Barbary shipyards, where their thirst for revenge met a kindred spirit among the corsair captains, always ready to go raiding. Soon more of the long-bowed corsairs than ever plowed the western Mediterranean on raids against coastal Spain. The Moors' former countrymen, the ones who professed a false allegiance to Christianity, helped guide them to Christian loot and captives. The “little war” against Spain had begun.
The escalating raids alarmed Isabella to the extent that she began contemplating a military expedition against Barbary. She sent spies to find which points were vulnerable to attack, but died in 1504 before mapping an invasion plan. The more cautious Ferdinand favored a containment policy while he concentrated on expanding Spanish trade with Italy. Meanwhile, the Moors' hatred of Spain festered in the Barbary ports.
 
The Spanish cardinals and bishops would settle for nothing less than the extirpation of every last crumb of Moorish culture. With some justification, Spanish Christians believed the Moriscos, as the surviving Moors who had submitted to baptism were now called, constituted a “fifth column” in the deadly struggle between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe that had begun in earnest with the Crusades. Spain clamped down on them. The clergy wasn't fooled by their baptismal-font conversions. They pressured Ferdinand's grandson and successor, Charles V, to issue an edict requiring the Moriscos to speak only Spanish and to abandon their native costumes, their Moslem names, and their public baths. Moslems, Jews, heretics, and nonbelievers of every stripe all would
soon experience far worse treatment as the Inquisition honed its inhuman instruments of persecution and torture, such as the rack and stake, but this was how it began in Spain, with intolerance of cultural diversity. Charles signed the edict, but it was his son, Philip II, who carried it out. In 1567, Philip ordered the Moorish baths pulled down, as well as a host of other punitive measures intended to eradicate Morisco culture. The next year, the Moriscos rebelled. War swept Andalusia. The Morisco rebels made the Sierra Nevada Mountains their headquarters. The Spanish exulted in the opportunity to destroy the Moors.
Given command of the Spanish forces was Philip's gifted twenty-two-year-old half brother, Don Juan of Austria. Destined for renown at the epic naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, Don Juan ruthlessly clamped down on the Moriscos, soldiers and civilians alike. Spanish troops burned homes and farms, massacred women and children. The Moriscos retaliated in kind. But by May 1570, the Moriscos were finished. Fifty thousand were enslaved, or exiled to North Africa.
The remaining Moriscos began leaving Spain in large numbers, seeing that they, too, would be driven out eventually. The emigration continued for decades more. Between 1492 and 1610, three million Moors left or were forced into exile from Spain, settling mainly in Algiers, but also in Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli.
Barbary swelled with new naval recruits eager to make war on Christendom, which had deprived them of their country, homes, and livelihoods. By the early seventeenth century, the Barbary corsairs were raiding every western Mediterranean Christian shore with impunity and roving the Atlantic as far north as Iceland.
Before the pirate ships took aim on Europe, the theater of the long war between the Ottoman and Holy Roman empires shifted from the gates of Vienna to the western Mediterranean. The Ottomans had been invited into Algiers in the sixteenth century to drive out the Spanish troops sent by Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximenes to stop the corsair raids. With a foothold in the region, Sultan Suleiman dreamed of an Ottoman-controlled sea from Gibraltar to the Levant. He combined his eastern Mediterranean fleet with the Barbary corsairs and set out to crush Christian resistance. Charles V, who besides being Spain's king was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, met the Ottoman challenge with a Holy Roman coalition navy.
For fifty years, the behemoths struggled for naval dominance and struck at one another's western Mediterranean strongholds, with neither able to deliver a decisive blow. Charles's attempted invasion of Algiers in 1541 was wrecked by storms; Suleiman's assault on Malta in 1565 was stopped by the doughty Knights of St. John and timely reinforcements. Tunis changed hands several times. In 1571, the Holy Roman fleet commanded by Don Juan met the Ottoman navy at Lepanto in Greece's Gulf of Corinth in one of history's titanic naval battles, involving 542 ships and more than 150,000 troops and oarsmen. Spanish gunpowder and firearms carried the day, giving the Christians a seemingly momentous victory. But a year later, the Ottomans were at sea with an even larger fleet.
Matters closer to home began to absorb both imperial powers' energies. Spain had gone bankrupt and was trying to suppress the rebellious Dutch. Constantinople was convulsed by a power struggle after Suleiman's death, and the Ottomans faced a new threat from Persia. In 1580, the Holy Roman and Ottoman
empires signed a truce. Christian and Ottoman war fleets disappeared from the western Mediterranean.
Washed up on the far shore of the global struggle between Christians and Moslems and filled with restless seamen, Barbary embarked on its golden era.
 
The shipyards of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli rang with cries of
“Allahu akbar!”
—God is great!—signifying the launching of yet another new corsair, a happy occasion calling for lamb's blood to be poured ceremoniously over the prow. The sanguinary ritual spoke to the fervent hope that the raiders soon would spill Christian blood.
Hundreds of English and Dutch pirates migrated to Barbary at the beginning of the seventeenth century. No longer needed in the king's service as privateers, they were exiled after merchants complained they were redirecting their attacks against English shipping. In Barbary, corsair privateer commissions awaited them from the ruling pashas. In Barbary, a pirate captain could grow rich, so long as he shared his loot with his crew and, of course, the pasha. While skilled seamen always were welcome in Barbary, the Europeans especially were, for they brought with them new technology: the sailing ship. Until then, the construction and operation of sailing ships were unknown in North Africa, which still employed galley ships propelled by slave oarsmen. The advent of the so-called “round ships” transformed the Barbary pirates into “The Terror.”
The round ships needn't hug shorelines, nor haul 300 oarsmen and all of their food and water as the galleys did. With wind and canvas replacing the straining oar, sailing ships required comparatively few seamen, so they could be packed with fighting soldiers
to overpower their victims quickly. Shipwrights adapted them to meet the pirates' special needs. The decks were built taller than European ships. They were made maneuverable and fast, with shallow drafts. The modifications suited them for coastal raiding, and for attacking and boarding merchant ships.
Coming upon a merchant vessel, the corsair would fire a broadside, while, from the tall upper deck, pirate soldiers raked the victim ship's decks with musketry. In the meantime, a large boarding party would mass on the ship's long bow, armed with muskets, swords, and pikes, knives clenched in their teeth. As trumpets blared, the boarders clashed their arms, shouting, “Yield, dogs, yield!” Often, that was enough to compel a surrender. It was usually over quickly either way, with the merchantman's crew stripped to their underwear, clapped in irons, and bound for Barbary's slave marts, where they would be sold like cattle. Coming into port, the corsairs fired celebratory salvos to announce their success.
Sail liberated the corsairs from the coastal waters and opened up new frontiers to loot and destroy. In large numbers, they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Murad Reis, a legendary Algerian pirate captain, descended upon Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and took 300 prisoners, including the governor's family. Then he stood offshore so the captives' relatives could buy them back. In 1617, 800 raiders swept through Madeira and carried off 1,200 captives. A German renegade guided three Algerian ships to Denmark and Iceland in 1627, returning with 800 prisoners. Corsairs appeared off County Cork, Ireland, in 1631 and bore away 237 men, women, and children. Between 1613 and 1622, Algerian corsairs captured 447 Dutch ships. Four hundred English ships were taken in just four years,
many right off the English coast. During six months in 1636, more than 1,000 Englishmen experienced the anguish of North African slavery. France wasn't spared, either. Between 1628 and 1634, eighty French ships and 1,331 men and women fell into the raiders' hands. Unsurprisingly, Europe experienced a serious shortage of ships and seamen.
But Spain suffered most. The Moriscos hadn't forgotten their expulsion and their losses; their hatred for the Spanish burned brightly.
 
The Spanish abetted it by expelling more than 250,000 Moriscos in 1609. In relentless retaliatory raids, the Moriscos and their Barbary allies wasted coastal towns and fields, carrying off loot and captives. Despite the pleas of the people, the Spanish government refused to divert significant numbers of warships to coastal defense from convoying supplies to the monarch's cousin Hapsburgs in Austria. Spanish coastal cities were thrown upon their own, largely ineffectual measures. Gibraltar's nine watchtowers manned by forty-two paid guards were not much of a deterrent and did little to allay the fear that gripped the people. In a 1614 letter to the king, Gibraltar's citizens said they never felt secure from the corsairs, “neither at night nor during the day, neither in bed nor at mealtimes, neither in the fields nor in our homes.” Even when privateers licensed by the king attempted to interpose a barrier of armed ships between the raiders and Spain, the corsairs slipped through. Long stretches of coastline were abandoned, and commerce, community life, and fishing declined as the people moved away, or were slain or spirited away into captivity. Spain and Italy reported losses of 300,000 to 500,000 inhabitants each late in the seventeenth century—roughly 5 percent of their populations,
comparable to losses today of 2 million to 3 million each. Spanish reformer Pedro Fernandez Navarrete said much of it was due to the loss of “those who, because of our neglect, are in slavery or captivity.” Spain arguably never fully recovered from the habitual “climate of fear” from centuries of Barbary terror, retaining a vestigial xenophobia that it never has entirely shaken.
BOOK: Jefferson's War
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