Description
From the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Barbary corsairs from North Africa swarmed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, seizing enormous amounts of booty and tens of thousands of captives, hauling them back to the slave markets in their home ports and auctioning them off to the highest bidder. The conflict between these Barbary corsairs and Europe was military, but not just that; religious, but not just that; social and economic, but not just that either. Above all, it was a human conflict, with all the confusion, blurred lines, and inherent messiness of such things, and the narratives it generated were more complicated than simple swashbuckling pirate tales. _Corsairs & Captives_ presents a collection of these narratives, all based directly on primary-source documents, a number of which are translated into English for the first time. They include biographies of four renegade corsair captains (Europeans who converted to Islam and became corsairs), descriptions of s
