About the white slave trade market in North Africa.
Let’s talk a little about the Ottoman presence in North Africa in order to refresh the memory of historians in junk. As a proverb says, the lions have no historians to write the hunting party, it is the hunter who tells it. It is for this reason that proliferates articles and books reverses roles, the executioner becomes the victim of his victim whom he had reduced to slaves. It is enough to play on the word barbaresque which resembles much berber so that these last of victims become guilty.
But before getting to the heart of the subject of who did what, I would like to say for the record that since the antiquity all the Mediterranean countries have devoted themselves to piracy. In the first place, the Greeks, favored by the geography of their country broke out into a hundred islands. Their natural enemies, the Phoenicians, possessed the majority of the coastal cities of the Mediterranean. From their first capturings in the Mediterranean, the slave trade became the essential activity of these pirates.
Throughout the centuries that followed, piracy continued to exist, although some sovereigns penalized the perpetrators. In the 5th century, Pope Gelase gave permission to the Jews to practice slave trade on condition that the Christians were spared. Thus the pagans were oppressed by the monotheistic believers until the beginning of the 20th century.
The prosperity of the time of the Crusades caused a recrudescence of this trade in the Mediterranean Sea. In the 15th century, the total victory of Spanish Catholics over their co-religionists of monotheism, the Judaist branch and the Muslim branch, obliged the two losers to exile Andalusia, which contributed to the acceleration of piracy activity.
Piracy, conceived as a profession, particularly attracted Europeans, Christians by birth, allies of the Ottomans, such as Portuguese, Flemish, German, French, Greek, Dutch, Sardinian, as well as simple adventurers and slaves passers-by from one monotheistic sect to another without the slightest state of mind as it is today.
The organization of trade seems to have been monopolized by the Jews
The organization of trade seems to have been monopolized by the Jews scattered throughout Europe, like in Amsterdam known at the time as little Jerusalem. One of them, which attracts special attention, is Joseph Nasi, a Marrana who has traveled all over Europe to end up as the gray eminence of Sultan Soliman the Magnificent and Selim II. He was made by them lord of Tiberias ( Currently Israel) and duke of Naxos.
Aroudj Barbarossa was the first to inaugurate the order of the great barbarian pirates (1473-1518). he was the son of a Greek potter, a christian of Mytilene, he converted to Islam and worked for the sultan of Constantinople. Then he became an independent pirate.
He conquered Algiers in 1530 after expelling the spaniareds from the Penon. The christian corsair originally surnamed Redbeard, had strangled Salim Toumi of Ait Mézghana (Prince Kabyle of Algiers) before marrying his wife Salima. By this gesture of terror, he wanted to mark the spirits of the inhabitants of Algiers who had fought his presence by allying themselves with the Berber dynasty of the Hafsides of Tunis who had fought him hard.
He then instituted a regime of unprecedented repression to punish them.
From the conquest of Algiers by the Ottoman pirates until they gave the relay to France in 1830, all the deys (Ottoman governor) who had succeeded each other to the regency were all without exception the importing janissaries from Albania , Venice, Bosnia, Crete, the Caucasus, Sardinia and Holland. But none of them was North African Berbers.
By colonizing Algiers and Tunis as a home port, he fought against Ferdinand V of Aragon and Charles V of Spain. Aroudj Barbarossa died during an expedition led by the Marquis of Comores, Spanish governor of the city of Oran (Algeria). His brother, Hayreddin Barbarossa (1476-1546), succeeded him. He was the true genius of piracy since his advent in the Mediterranean Sea. The Sultan of Constantinople appointed him governor of Algiers. A few years later he obtained the title of “Grand Admiral of all the Ottoman fleets”. He gathered under his orders several famous pirates: Sinan, a Jew from Smyrna, Salah Raïs, a christian renegade from Sardinia who was kidnapped from his native village by renegades, was one of the defenders of the regency in 1541. Khair-eddine had more than a hundred ships, of which more than 60 were galleys, built according to his own conception.
Barbarossa was the hyphen of the Franco-Ottoman alliance.
He was the hyphen of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. It was during the reign of the King of France Francois I that the city of Toulon received the order to welcome for a wintering this pirate and his men with all the honors. Thus the cathedral of Toulon was transformed into a mosque, the call to prayer took place five times a day, and the women of Toulon were forced to contribute to make the stay of the men at Khair-eddine Barbarossa pleasant.
To be continued…