The Story of the Barbary Corsairs

For three centuries, the Barbary Corsairs held the Mediterranean hostage. This is their story: of exiled Moors nursing revenge after the fall of Granada, of men who built a pirate empire that humbled navies and turned the entire Christian world into a nervous shore. Stanley Lane-Poole brings these corsairs to life as neither mere bandits nor romantic rebels but as something far more unsettling: a sovereign maritime power operating with Ottoman sanction, their ports of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli functioning as states within states. From the legendary Barbarossa brothers to the great siege of Vienna, Lane-Poole traces how a scattered remnant of the expelled Moorish population became the terror of every shipping lane between Gibraltar and Constantinople. The book captures an age when piracy was policy, when the line between corsair and corsair-admiral blurred into meaninglessness, and when European powers that ruled continents quailed before a fleet of Algerine galleys. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Mediterranean became a theater of endless conflict and what it meant to sail those waters with everything at stake.