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Im glad HBO series game of thrones reintroduce this very important character of European history who raided many towns in southern Europe in search for slaves. This balance is necessary in the movie industry, im fed up with the black slaves or poor black servant type of character!
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Barbary pirates in Ireland : The Sack of Baltimore, Co. Cork
quote:The harbour side village of Baltimore in the south-west of Ireland is a favourite port of call for fishermen and yachtsmen because of its sheltered position behind Sherkin Island. Its location is of great interest to the artist, antiquary and naturalist. In McCarthy’s, one of its quayside pubs, a wall chart testifies to the marine mayhem that took place over the centuries in nearby Roaringwater Bay.
Situated in the barony of Carberry, in South Munster, the village grew up round a sixteenth century Castle of 0’Driscoll and, after his ruin, the place was colonized by the English. Around 1600 a defeat was inflicted on these local warlords when “several ships of the 0’Driscoll fleet sank in an affray with a fleet from Waterford” within sight of the 0’Driscoll stronghold towering above the village. In 1620 a Spanish galleon was sunk offshore.
Baltimore saga
A much stranger misfortune befell in 1631 when pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire stormed ashore at the little harbour village of Baltimore. In an era when it was common place for white traders from England to land on the African coast and to seize black people as slaves, this was one of the comparatively rare occasions when the boot was on the other foot.
A massacre took place when two Algerian galleys landed in the dead of night, sacked the town and bore off into slavery mostly women and children : altogether fifty youngsters ‘even those in the cradle’ were abducted, along with thirty-four women and nearly two dozen men, principally the descendants of dissenting and peaceful Protestant settlers from Cornwall, Somerset and Devon.
The invasion left King Charles I (reign 1625-49) incandescent with rage and provoked him into a reaction extreme enough to help create a revolution in England. Recognised at the time as an unprecedented act of aggression by the Islamist empire, Des Ekin’s recent book, The Stolen Village, is described as … a fascinating exploration of a forgotten chapter of British and European history.
The Sack of Baltimore
In 1631 a particularly brazen Barbary corsair was operating from Sallee on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. A sea captain from Flanders, he had ‘turned Turk’ and taken the name Morat Rais. That year, with two ships, on the night of 20 June 1631 this corsair chieftain made a surprise raid on the Irish coastal village of Baltimore successfully kidnapping most of its population of men, women and children. Their fate was to be sold into slavery on the Barbary Coast of North Africa. A French missionary priest working in Algiers saw several of Morat’s Irish captives put up for auction. After that, very little more was heard of them.
The pirates were steered up the intricate channel by a Dungarvan fisherman whom they had taken at sea for the purpose. Two years later he was convicted and executed for the crime.
The Sack of Baltimore by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814-1845), Irish patriot, poet and politician, is a vivid description in poetry of the raid by Algerian pirates in 1631. Its verses are in a book of Davis’s Poems Dublin : published by James Duffy, 1846. Born in Mallow, Co. Cork, son of an army surgeon, Davis was educated at Trinity College Dublin and called to the bar in 1838. He became the unofficial leader of the Young Ireland movement and jointly founded the Irish newspaper Nation (1842). He died prematurely in Dublin from scarlet fever on 16 September 1845 aged thirty-one. His funeral was a major public event.Barbary describes a region in North Africa stretching from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean that is named after the Berbers. In ancient times it consisted of Mauritania, Numidia, Africa, Propria, and Cyrenaica. It was successively conquered by Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, French, and Italians.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Barbary was notorious for its pirates who plagued the Mediterranean and its Atlantic approaches. Slavery in various guises was flourishing on all sides of the Mediterranean. Barbary corsairs thrived against a general background of the Eternal War between Cross and Crescent and struggles amongst European nations for power.
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