Captured by Barbary corsairs: an Englishwoman's extraordinary tale

Summary

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Summary: “Captured by Barbary Corsairs: an Englishwoman's Extraordinary Tale”

Podcast: HistoryExtra
Host/Interviewer: Spencer Mizzen
Guest: Adam Nicholls
Date: March 29, 2026

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Overview of the Episode

This episode of the HistoryExtra podcast spotlights the extraordinary 18th-century story of Elizabeth Marsh, an Englishwoman captured by Barbary corsairs and thrust into a web of high-stakes diplomacy, personal peril, and cultural collision in North Africa. Host Spencer Mizzen interviews historian and author Adam Nicholls, unraveling Marsh’s unique journey—from her unusual upbringing and harrowing captivity to her resourcefulness in the face of danger and her lasting literary legacy. The conversation then broadens into the wider world of Barbary piracy, exploring its origins, scale, and ultimate downfall.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Elizabeth Marsh’s Remarkable Background

[01:36–03:16]

• International Origins: Born in Jamaica to a naval family and raised in Portsmouth, Marsh was “familiar with a far broader range of cultures and languages and religions and types of people than an ordinary young woman of her generation.” (Adam Nicholls, 01:57)
• Early Exposure: Her father’s tales and Portsmouth’s cosmopolitan character gave her “far broader mental horizon than we would probably think.” (02:15)

Events Leading to Her Capture

[03:38–06:08]

• Caught by History: Marsh, fleeing the instability after war broke out between France and England, secured passage from Gibraltar to England to meet her fiancé.
• A Real-Life Elizabeth Bennet: Nicholls analogizes her to “a kind of real life version of Elizabeth Bennet” for her blend of 18th-century delicacy and pluck (04:20).
• Disastrous Voyage: Separated from protection by fog, her ship became vulnerable to corsair attack.
• Geopolitical Pawn: Marsh and her companions were not enslaved but “became pawns in wider negotiations between Morocco and Britain.” (06:08)

The Female Captive: Marsh’s Memoir

[06:21–08:43]

• Literary First: Her memoir, The Female Captive, was the “first English female narrative about North Africa.”
• A Dual Persona: Editing for public consumption made her appear “a delicate young Christian female in need of protection, prone to fainting… But at the same time, she stands up to the Moroccan sultan.” (08:05)
• Quote: “There’s a kind of Jekyll and Hyde… there’s a split personality here.” – Adam Nicholls (08:20)

Facing the Sultan & Surviving Captivity

[08:43–13:02]

• The Sultan’s Interest: The crown prince (future Sultan Sidi Muhammad) summoned Marsh, reputed for his interest in European women but bound by Islamic law regarding marriage.
• Pretending Marriage: A male companion posed as her husband: “As long as they could keep up that pretense, Sidi Muhammad, the sultan, couldn’t just take her.” (09:38)
• Conversion Threat: Marsh claimed she was tricked into uttering the Islamic declaration of faith (“There is no god but Allah.”), potentially annulling her supposed Christian marriage (09:53).
• Diplomatic Stakes: Sidi Muhammad wanted her alive to leverage negotiations with the English. He tried to entice her to stay; when that failed, he threatened execution. But “if he kept her by force… that would ruin her value as a pawn.” (11:26)
• Calling the Bluff: “She had the gumption to stand up to him, but it wasn’t her individual action so much as the larger context.” (12:39)

Notable Quote:
“She called his bluff, effectively.”
—Spencer Mizzen (12:37)

“And it was a bluff.”
—Adam Nicholls (12:39)

Return to England & Aftermath

[14:29–17:22]

• Aftermath: Her original suitor withdrew, fearing her tarnished reputation (“she had been alone, unchaperoned, in the private chambers of a Moroccan sultan”). She married James Crisp instead, moved to India, and traveled extensively.
• Independent Spirit: Marsh traveled through India “for like a year and a half… She and a young army officer,” demonstrating ongoing independence (16:06).
• End of Life: She suffered breast cancer, endured a mastectomy without anesthetic, but did not survive the disease; she and her husband died in India.

Notable Quote:
“It’s hard to imagine, but she somehow survived a mastectomy without anesthetic.”
—Adam Nicholls (16:49)

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The Barbary Corsairs: A Broader Context

Origins and Motivations

[17:52–22:04]

• Roots in 1492: The start of mass piracy is traced to “the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” when Muslims were expelled from Spain and sought vengeance (17:57).
• A Region in Turmoil: North Africa was “a hornet’s nest” of ethnic, religious, and dynastic rivalries, enabling piracy to thrive (19:28).

The Barbarossa Brothers & The Rise of Algiers

[20:26–23:53]

• Famous Pirates: European renegades Orok and Hayreddin Barbarossa helped eject the Spanish from Algiers, then seized power for themselves.
• Algiers as Pirate Capital: Their success laid the foundation for “Algiers as the Corsair capital of the Mediterranean” (22:37).

Corsair Tactics, Economics, and Slave Trade

[24:00–27:09]

• Privateers Not Pirates: Barbary corsairs operated under state license, attacking specifically European ships (24:05).
• Slavery’s Legal Framework: Slavery under Islam required prisoners of war; initial piracy was depicted as religiously-justified conflict but soon became an economic engine.
• Scale of Enterprise: North African cities became “economically dependent on the corsairing enterprises… an international corporate business enterprise.” (26:34)

Notable Quote:
“So the whole Barbara Corsa enterprise begins as a religious jihad against the Spanish… But it morphs into a business enterprise.”
—Adam Nicholls (26:13)

Enslavement and its Scale

[28:22–29:14]

• Numbers: Estimates suggest as many as a million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary corsairs between the early 1500s and early 1800s.

Notable Quote:
“The best estimate I know is about a million… But people also claim there were about 2 million North Africans taken captive and enslaved in Europe then… Everybody was doing it.”
—Adam Nicholls (28:35)

Lasting Fear and “Barbary Corsair Panic”

[29:14–30:00]

• Persistent Terror: “They terrorized Europe for 300 years… everybody was just terrified of them.” (29:29)

The Demise of the Barbary Corsairs

[30:00–31:43]

• European Disunity Prolonged Piracy: The corsair states played European powers against each other for centuries.
• European Hegemony: By the early 1800s, European powers became strong enough to “stamp out the Corsair city states.” (31:01)
• French Invasion: The definitive end came when France invaded Algiers in 1830; “By the mid-1800s, there are no more Barbary pirates. They’re just a memory.” (31:41)

Notable Quote:
“If the European countries had just cooperated, they could have squashed them at any time, but they didn’t cooperate… This went on for the better part of 300 years.”
—Adam Nicholls (30:18)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “She was familiar with a far broader range of cultures and languages… than an ordinary young woman of her generation.”
  —Adam Nicholls [01:57]

• “I think of Elizabeth Marsh as a kind of real-life version of Elizabeth Bennet, and she has that plucky aspect…”
  —Adam Nicholls [04:20]

• “She called his bluff, effectively.”
  —Spencer Mizzen [12:37]

• “She had the gumption to stand up to him…”
  —Adam Nicholls [12:39]

• “It’s hard to imagine, but she somehow survived a mastectomy without anesthetic.”
  —Adam Nicholls [16:49]

• “They terrorized Europe for 300 years… everybody was just terrified of them.”
  —Adam Nicholls [29:29]

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Important Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |------------------------------------------------|:-------------:| | Introduction to Elizabeth Marsh | 01:36 | | Early influences and background | 01:57 | | Her voyage and capture | 03:45 | | Being a diplomatic pawn | 06:08 | | Writing The Female Captive | 06:38 | | Facing Sidi Muhammad and survival strategies | 08:49–13:02 | | Return, reputation, and aftermath | 14:29–17:22 | | Barbary Corsairs’ history and motivation | 17:52–22:04 | | The Barbarossa brothers and Algiers | 20:26–23:53 | | Privateers vs. piracy; economic underpinnings | 24:00–27:09 | | Scale of captivity and cross-Mediterranean slavery | 28:22–29:14 | | The end of Barbary piracy | 30:00–31:43 |

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Tone and Approach

Adam Nicholls combines vivid storytelling with clear-eyed historical analysis, evoking the high drama of Marsh’s ordeal and the sweeping geopolitical stakes. The dialogue is knowledgeable but accessible, mixing scholarly insight with empathy for the individuals—especially for Elizabeth Marsh, portrayed as courageous, resourceful, and ahead of her time.

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Conclusion

This engrossing episode illuminates both the singular resilience of Elizabeth Marsh and the tumultuous era of Barbary piracy. Against a backdrop of clashing empires, shifting alliances, and gendered expectations, Marsh’s experience offers a rare female lens on captivity, survival, and agency. Meanwhile, the wider saga of the Barbary corsairs reveals centuries-long cycles of violence, commerce, and international intrigue—culminating in the relentless march of European imperial power.

Listeners come away with a nuanced understanding of both the extraordinary individual and the world that shaped her fate.

Transcript

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Welcome to the History extra podcast. In 1756, Elizabeth Marsh set sail from Gibraltar to Britain with the intention of meeting her fiance. Instead, she was captured by Barbary Corsairs and taken to a Moroccan prince. But could she win her freedom? Here, talking to Spencer Mizzen, Adam Nicholls tells a story of lust, trickery, a fake marriage, and the delicate relationship between Britain and the power brokers of North Africa.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Adam, you wrote a feature for the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History magazine on Elizabeth Marsh, a young English woman taken captive by Barbary pirates in the 18th century. Clinton, can you start by introducing us to Elizabeth? What is it about her life that made it so extraordinary?

[Adam Nicholls]

The most interesting thing about Elizabeth Marsh is that she was a woman of her time. She was captured by Barbara Corsairs, but she wasn't just a woman on a ship who got caught by pirates. She was caught up in what we would think of today as large scale geopolitical events. Her dad was a ship's carpenter and he was an ambitious man, and he went to Jamaica with the Navy in hopes of bettering himself. And while he was in Jamaica, he managed to marry a widow who had some property. She owned a tavern and she conceived Elizabeth in Jamaica and the two of them went back to England. So she was an international person right from the get go. And she grew up in Portsmouth, which in those days was full of all sorts of people from all corners of the planet. So she was familiar with a far broader range of cultures and languages and religions and types of people than an ordinary young woman of her generation. And she was connected with the navy, so her father was a ship's carpenter, and he was often away on ships and came back with stories. And she had. Although her physical world was a very restricted one, the world that came to her door was way broader than we would normally think.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So she'd have known about this wider world via the stories that her father told her when he returned from his travels.

[Adam Nicholls]

Right. And the people she saw wandering the streets of Portsmouth, they were all, like I say, there are all kinds of people, including North Africans, traders, not Corsairs, of course, but traders and merchants. So she had a far broader mental horizon than we would probably think.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

As I said earlier, she was taken captive by Barbary Corsairs. How does she end up on a ship in the Mediterranean for that to happen?

[Adam Nicholls]

Her uncle was part of the Navy. He was a clerk, but he was a clerk in a fairly serious job, and he managed to pull some strings and he got his brother, Elizabeth Marsh's father, a job in the Mediterranean on the Balearic Islands. And they were there a year or so when war broke out between France and England and the English could not hold the islands. And so the people there were evacuated to Gibraltar, at which point it even began to look like Gibraltar might not stand. And so she wanted to get out. There's a almost Pride and Prejudice side to this. I think of Elizabeth Marsh as a kind of real life version of Elizabeth Bennet, and she has that plucky aspect to her, wedded with the sort of typical 19th century, delicate feminine aspect. She had a fiance, a young naval captain, and they were affianced, as they used to say, and she was going to England to meet up with him. And so she arranged a passage aboard a ship and they went out on a convoy to be protected from the French and of course, the Corsairs as well. And they hit a fog bank and everybody lost everybody. And then when the fog lifted, they could see the warship that was their protection sailing off in the distance. They tried to catch up, but couldn't. They were a little merchant ship and they sprung a leak and there was six feet of water in the hold before they knew it. So they. They fixed the leak and there they were on their own in the middle of the Mediterranean when they spotted a sail and the sale of course, was the. The sale corsair. But they weren't captured and enslaved. North African corsairs did that. They captured European ships, and the people in them took the merchandise, sold it at auction in the stooks, the markets in North Africa, and sold the people into slavery. But Elizabeth Marsh and her companions were not enslaved. They were part of this, as I say, this larger geopolitical setup where the North African states were in a constant series of treaties, wars, truces, betrayals. Just like Europe at the time. Right. Everybody was making these arrangements and breaking them and new arrangements. And so the Moroccans were in the process of trying to renegotiate these, the details of her treaty with England.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So she was kind of a pawn in this relationship.

[Adam Nicholls]

She was exactly that, right? Yeah, exactly that. Which gave her a certain protection because you don't want to destroy your pawn, otherwise your pawn has no more use.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

The reason we know. What we know about Elizabeth is that she wrote a book, the Female Captive, in the mid 18th century about her experiences. Can you tell us a little bit about that book? And how unusual was it for a woman to write about her experiences in this way? Way?

[Adam Nicholls]

This is the kind of book that, at the time, would have had a certain notoriety. Europeans, particularly the English, always had this sort of lurid, sexualized fantasy about North Africa and what happens to young English women who get taken by North Africans. So there was a certain titillation aspect about the whole thing. It was never a best seller, but it did have, as I understand it, it had a certain notoriety in its time, and it was new. This is the first English female narrative about North Africa. She's the first one to do it. And I think one of the reasons she was able to do that is because of her background, because she was not the usual sort of cosseted young woman. Her family, in terms of the socioeconomic scale of the day, they were the top end of the bottom end, if that makes sense. Right. One of her aunts married a French Huguenot, so she learned French, which was, if you were a cultured young woman in those days, you spoke French. So she knew French. She knew some Spanish. She certainly knew geography. She heard a lot of stories. She could do math. She could do bookkeeping. She was quite an accomplished young woman. So writing a novel was not by any means an impossible task for her.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

And what sort of woman emerges from the pages of the book? Do we get a sense of, you know, Elizabeth's personality from reading the book?

[Adam Nicholls]

Well, that's another very interesting question, because that book suffers from the same problem that many books suffer from. It was edited and it was edited in order to make it a successful publication and earn money for the publisher. And so she comes across in the book as a delicate young Christian female in need of protection, prone to fainting and having the vapors. And. But at the same time, she stands up to the Moroccan sultan. So there's a kind of Jekyll and Hyde is perhaps too strong a way of putting it, but there's a split personality here.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So you said just now that she stood up to the sultan. And we wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit. What happens next?

[Adam Nicholls]

What happens next is the sultan, who has a reputation for fancying European women, especially young, pretty European women, wants to see her. So they arrive in Saleh, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but he's in Marrakech and he's not actually yet the sultan. He's the sultan to be. So he wants to see Elizabeth. He's. He's very interested in her. He gives orders and they march overland to Marrakesh, where he immediately demands that she come into his chambers. And he meets her and is impressed. He can have any woman he wants, but he cannot have married women. The Quran forbids that. You can't sleep with another man's wife. That's out of. You can't do that. But if the woman is Christian and married to a Christian husband and she converts to Islam, the marriage is automatically annulled and she's fair game. So that's why her companion pretended to be her husband to protect her from the sultan. And as long as they could keep up that pretense, Sidi Muhammad, the sultan couldn't just take her. And although he's a complete despot, he does play by the rules. So as long as she is married, he's. He can't touch her. So there is this scene where, according to Elizabeth Marsh, she's tricked into saying, you know, there is no God but Allah, which is all you have to do if you convert to Islam. In. In those days, all the stories are you hold one finger up, you point to this guy and you repeat that and you have converted. So the story she told is she was tricked into converting. That means she's eligible for the harem. So there's this great flurry of enthusiasm and all the other wives who are in the room seem perfectly happy with this.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

But in the end, Sidi Muhammad backs Dang, doesn't he? He had all the power in this relationship, and it seems to me that you know, if we believe Elizabeth, she had very few cards to play. So what happened next? How did she outwit him?

[Adam Nicholls]

We have to trust that she's telling the truth.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Sure.

[Adam Nicholls]

We don't know. We have to take her at her word. Right. The card she had to play was that she was a pawn, that she was valuable to Sidi Muhammad. As long as the English believed they could get her back intact, he could keep her. If he could get her to tell the English that she had willingly chosen not to return, then he could keep her. But if he kept her by force, he had this much larger political deal going. He wanted to change the details of the treaty with the English to get a better deal for Morocco. And one of his levers were these captives. Not just Elizabeth, but the others as well. It was James Crisp, and there was an Irishman and his son. So there was four passengers, plus the captain and crew of the ship they'd been traveling on. He had to keep them healthy and alive and available. And it worked. He'd managed to change the terms of the treaty and the captives were returned. But basically, they were hostages in this negotiation. So T. Muhammad's only option here was to try and convince Elizabeth to willingly stay. And so he presented her with this vast array of goodies and said, they're all yours, baby, Thinking that how could she possibly refuse? Because no Moroccan woman would refuse this. It's just beyond his imagination to think that somebody would say no. And then, if the story is to be believed, in a fit of petulance, he said, well, I'm going to burn you at the stake if you don't do this. I'm not sure anybody was still being burned at the stake in Morocco at the time. It could be that Sidi Muhammad knew that this was a threat that Europeans could take to heart because it was part of European history. But when she just said, let's go ahead, I don't know whether she knew he couldn't go through with that threat because that would ruin her value as a pawn. And she was the most important pawn. Right.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So she called his bluff effectively, then,

[Adam Nicholls]

and it was a bluff. She had the gumption to stand up to him, but it wasn't her individual action so much as the larger context. It was more important to him. No matter how much you might fancy the girl, it was more important to him to achieve his political aim rather than his personal.

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[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So we did achieve those political aims. And Elizabeth was eventually allowed to travel home, just briefly. What happened to her after that? I mean, what did the rest of her life have in store for her?

[Adam Nicholls]

She and James Crist got married because the naval captain withdrew from the engagement, because her reputation in polite society had been stained. She had been alone, unchaperoned, in the private chambers of a Moroccan sultan. And who knew what dastardly things might have happened. So in polite society, she was a questionable commodity. So the naval captain said, that's it. I'm out of here. I don't want anything more to do with you. At which point, Crisp seemed the best option. He had, in fact, proposed to her on the Balearic Islands, and she'd turned him down. She'd gone with this handsome young naval captain instead. And there's some possibility that, in fact, Crisp was pressured into marrying her to save her reputation. We don't really know, but that's a possibility. In any case, she married him. He was a merchant and a smuggler, and they moved to England. And for a while, things went well. And then again, these larger geopolitical realities, there was a bad combination of these things, and he went bankrupt. And to escape that, he fled to India to try and start anew. It was, you know, a place where there are all sorts of opportunities for a merchant. And Elizabeth had To move in with her parents at Chatham docks. She had two kids and no money. And that's when she wrote the book. She needed money and it was the only thing she could think of to get some income. So she wrote the book and got some money for that. And her husband began to prosper in India. He wasn't getting rich, but at least he was surviving and making a living. And he brought her and the two kids out to India. And as far as we can tell, this manuscript that contains a version of the book is bound together with another manuscript that contains a journal of her time in India that has never been published. And that is very interesting. It's the real Elizabeth Marx, you know, this much more self assertive and independent woman. And she took off, she left her husband, the kids were put in school and she traveled India for like a year and a half. She and a young army officer, which of course ran. Raises interesting questions. But she, she took off and just traveled all around India. And then she had the. The horrible misfortune to get breast cancer. It's hard to imagine, but she somehow survived a mastectomy without anesthetic. Just think of that for a moment. So she survived that, but she didn't survive the disease. And she and her husband both died in India.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Yeah. Just quite a sad end into a story then, basically. Yeah. Okay, Adam, I'm going to broaden this out a little bit because you've written widely on Barbary Corsairs over recent years. You wrote a book called Corsairs and Narratives from the Golden Age of Barbary Pirates, which was published only last year. So I wonder if I could just ask you to tell us a little bit about Barbary Corsairs. What made the North African coast such a fertile hunting ground for these vessels?

[Adam Nicholls]

Large scale geopolitical events. And we can pin it down, the beginning of it, to one particular year, 1492, which seems unlikely, right? I mean, that's the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue. What does that have to do with North African pirates? But it's also the year that the Spanish Reconquista, the reconquering of Spain from the Muslims, that finally succeeded. And the last Muslim sultanate in the Iberian Peninsula in Granada was overrun and that was it. Islam was finished in Spain. A huge number, hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled and went to North Africa. And they were pissed. They'd been there for the better part of eight centuries. That was their home. They'd just been evicted from their home and they wanted to get back. And if they couldn't get back. At least they wanted revenge. And one of the ways that they could get revenge was piracy. Also, from the Spanish point of view, they'd won a battle, but not the war, because this is not just Spain, it's the Spanish Habsburg Empire that at this point took in a lot of Europe, what is now the Netherlands and Belgium, parts of Italy, parts of what are now Germany. And they were in an existential struggle for dominance with the Ottoman Empire. And so the Spanish authorities felt themselves under existential threat. And so they decided that they needed to take the fight to the enemy in order to protect the homeland. And so they invaded North Africa and they took a series of towns, moving down from Tangier and moving eastwards across the Mediterranean coast of Africa, taking one town after another and occupying it. And of course, they. They created this huge blowback. And so now it wasn't just the ex occupants of Spain that were pissed at the Spaniards. Everybody was. But there's another aspect of this, too. At this point, North Africa was in chaos. At this point, there were two sets of indigenous inhabitants, the Berbers, who'd been there forever, and the Arabs come boiling out of the Middle east in the 8th century and had settled all throughout North Africa, and they were all duking it out for supremacy. It was a hornet's nest of all sorts of things. And dynasties were rising and collapsing, and new ones were showing up. It was a land of opportunity for ambitious men. And then the Spaniards get involved in the mix, and then the Barbarossa brothers get involved. You know, the famous Barbarossas.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Yes. Can you tell us a little bit more about them then? Because they're really big players in this story.

[Adam Nicholls]

They really are. Yeah. They were European renegades. Renegades were Europeans who converted to Islam. They realized that there were opportunities available to them now in this chaos, in this power vacuum. And they just didn't know what their entrance would be. They knew the possibility it was there. They were just waiting for an entrance, and then they got it. The Spanish had not occupied Algiers, but they had occupied an island in the harbor, and they built a fortress, put cannon in it, and they commanded the city. And the residents of Algiers did not like this. They wanted the Spanish out, and they didn't have the resources to do it themselves. And they looked around and they thought, ah, the Barbarossas, they're just the boys to do this. So they contacted them and said, would you help us get rid of the Spanish? And there were two brothers, Orok and Haywardin. Oruk is the Elder one, Haywardin's the younger one, and Oruk was being the elder brother, was of course, in charge. And he said, no problem, we can do this. So they picked up essentially an army and they marched into Algiers, fired a few cannon shots at the penon of the fortress and then gave up. And the next step was that Horrock Barbarossa strangled the leader of the forces in Algiers in his bath and declared himself king of Algiers. He didn't get rid of the Spanish, he just got a kingdom for himself.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Was it from here, then that they started sort of attacking European shipping in the Mediterranean? Was this the seeds of that?

[Adam Nicholls]

It was the siege, yeah, because they were pirates. Right. But they still had this problem of the Spanish on the penon, as they call it, on the island. So Uruk Barbarossa sort of put that on the back burner for the moment and wanted to extend his empire, which he proceeded to do. But in a town called Tlemcen, a couple of hundred kilometers west of Algiers, he was killed. He was killed by the Spanish. And his younger brother then had a problem. Clearly, the empire that he and o' Rourke had imagined was not going to work. They weren't going to be able to take over North Africa. And he still had the Spanish on this island with guns aimed at the city. So that was his first priority. He had to get rid of them. And unlike his brother, he focused on doing that. And he bombarded the the fortress for a couple of weeks, pounded it to rubble, and then launched several boats full of guys onto the island and took the fortress. It was helped by the fact that the Spanish were not supplying it properly. They ran out of ammunition. They didn't have any food or water. They really didn't stand a chance. But still, Hayward and Barbarossa now had a problem. What was he going to do? The Spanish were going to come back. It was too strategic and a place for them to ignore. And he didn't have the resources to resist the Spanish Habsburg Empire. So he turned to the Ottomans and he said, if you come and help me, I'll make Algiers one of your places. We'll be part of your empire. Geopolitical maneuverings, right? And the Ottoman sultan said, sure, sounds like a great plan to me. And so all of a sudden, Algiers gets the resources it needs. Its leader is a pirate. Many of its citizens are seriously pissed at the Spanish. And that's the beginning. That's the beginning of Algiers as the Corsair capital of the Mediterranean.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Did they specifically target European shipping, or is it basically A case of preying upon any vessel that they happen to come across.

[Adam Nicholls]

Oh, no, it was specifically European pirates are pirates. You know, they'll attack anybody. But it was European shipping. And technically speaking, Barbary Corsairs aren't pirates. They're privateers. There's a legal difference. A privateer is employed by a government or a monarch to attack and harass and sink enemy shipping. And enemy is the key word. They're part of a war effort. And a privateer who's captured by the enemy is a prisoner of war. A pirate who's captured by the enemy is a pirate and hanged outright. They had letters of authorization from their governments, and they went out and they only attacked the people. At least in theory, they only attacked the people that they were permitted to attack by their letters of authorization.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

How widely did they range? Where would you find Barbary Corsairs attacking their prey?

[Adam Nicholls]

They started out just in the Mediterranean, and they started out using oared galleys. The oared galleys are essentially motorboats run by human muscle. And oared galleys are great in a relatively placid sea like the Mediterranean, but useless on the open waters of the Atlantic. So for the better part of a century, they were restricted to the Mediterranean.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

And when were they at the height of their powers? You said the words better part of the century. When exactly we talking about The Barbarossas

[Adam Nicholls]

are the middle part of the first half of this? 1500s, 1530s, 40s, that kind of stuff. The Barbary Corsairs reach their peak about 100 years later, in the early mid-1600s. But to understand what they're doing and why all this happened, there's another side to it, and that's the religious side. Slavery in Islam is okay, but there are rules. And the rules are that the only people who can be legally enslaved are prisoners of war. And only when that war is a war that is authorized by Sharia law, it can't be an illicit war. It has to be a legally authorized war. And the captives can be enslaved or ransomed, whatever you want to do. Nobody else offspring of slaves can be enslaved, but that's it. So the whole Barbara Corsa enterprise begins as a religious jihad against the Spanish, because the Spanish Muslims want to get their land back, but it morphs into a business enterprise. They start out, it's a religious war. It's not just piracy. It's war. And so they fight the enemy. They take the captives. Now, these captives legally can be enslaved. So they bring them back and they sell them at the slave markets. And then they used the funds to make themselves church, but also finance more expeditions. And that process, over the decades, becomes a huge economic driver of North Africa and cities like Algiers and Tunis and Tripoli and eventually sale, that's their main source of income. They're economically dependent on the corsairing enterprises. And so it becomes an international corporate business enterprise.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

How much money were they making? Can it be sort of put into context in 21st century terms?

[Adam Nicholls]

In the aggregate, huge amounts of money. A city like Algiers taxed everything. They got a lot of money from taxes. A little bit here and a little bit there, but it all amounted up. But the individual corsairs themselves led a kind of hand to mouth existence because a lot of what happened was determined just by luck. You head off onto the ocean, who knows who you're going to find? You might. You might cruise around for two months and never encounter a good prey ship. Or you might stumble across a Spanish galleon full of gold and silver. You just don't know. But unless you stumble across one of those prey ships that is full of treasure, you're just basically making a living. If you get a ship that's full of sugar and you bring that back and you sell it and you have a cargo of, you know, five tons of sugar, the price of sugar is going to go way down because there's a glut on the market. So you're not going to get that much money. And it's hugely expensive to run a Corsair ship. You know, it's. It's a struggle. Some people got really rich.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Do we know how many Europeans were enslaved by Barbary Corsairs over the decades or centuries they were in operation, and how were they treated? Generally, it's really hard to know how

[Adam Nicholls]

many people were taken captive. The best estimate that I know of, it's about 300 years, early 1500s to early 1800s. The best estimate I know is about a million. That's a guesstimate, but it seems a quite reasonable one. However, people also claim that there were about 2 million North Africans taken captive and enslaved in Europe then. In fact, there were more Muslim slaves in Europe than there were European slaves in North Africa. I'm not sure if that was the case, but certainly everybody was doing it. It wasn't just North Africans that were taking people captive and enslaving them. The Europeans did exactly the same thing.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

And how large did the Barbary Corsairs loom in the European imagination? I mean, was there something that could be described as a Barbie Corsair Panic.

[Adam Nicholls]

Oh, yeah. You remember back in the early 2000s, An Inconvenient Truth.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

Yes.

[Adam Nicholls]

Remember that phrase? The Barbary Corsairs were an inconvenient truth. They terrorized Europe for 300 years. Sailing the Mediterranean was extremely risky. I've written a series of books with an Icelandic colleague of mine, Carl Smarri Clansson, about the attack on Iceland. Corsairs to Algiers and Saleh. There's a lot of cooperation between the different Corsair cities. They were everywhere, and everybody was just terrified of them.

[Interviewer/Spencer Mizzen]

So finally, Adam, how did the age of the Barbary Corsairs come to an end? What did the big European powers do in the end to sort of end what they saw as the scourge of the Barbary Corsairs?

[Adam Nicholls]

One of the ironies in all of this is that the Barbary Corsairs, taken individually, Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, Saleh, they were relatively small city states. They didn't have the resources or the power of any individual European country. If the European countries had just cooperated, they could have squashed them at any time, but they didn't cooperate. And the Barbary Corsairs had this. This knack of playing one power up against another. And the French made treaty arrangements with the Algerines, but they were quite happy to have the Algerines attack the Spanish because that kept the Spanish busy. And so this went on for the better part of 300 years with the Corsairs playing one power off against another. But gradually, the European powers got stronger and stronger and bigger and better financed. They had access to the whole planet. The Corsair city states didn't. And so the resources available to the European states were just getting exponentially more and more and more until eventually, in the early 1800s, the individual European states had the resources simply to stamp out the Corsair city states. So 1830, thereabouts, the French decided it had enough with the Algerines and they just invaded Algiers. That was it. Invaded the place, took over. No more piracy was over. And then everything else collapsed, the domino effect. Everything else collapsed very quickly. And by the mid-1800s, there are no more Barbary pirates. They're just a memory.

[Narrator/Host]

That was Adam Nicholls speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Adam is a former associate professor at the University of Maryland, focusing on Barbary Corsairs. His books include Corsairs and Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates.

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