Although piracy was at its peak of power during the 1600’s, piracy still is existent today. Author Adrian Tinniswood published his book, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17th-century Mediterranean (2010) around the time that piracy was making a comeback. Pirates of Barbary is about the upswing of piracy to the downfall of it, including the struggles, personalities, stories of pirates on the Barbary Coast, and the battles and shaping of religion and race between the Muslim empires and Christian Europe. In particular, my point of interest in the book was the idea of the different types of pirates. This is the central point that caught my interest, because before reading Pirates of Barbary, the image of pirates I …show more content…
If a corsair was defined as a “pirate,” it was basically an insult. The two words only correlate with one another because, “It was only the lazy English who persisted in treating the two words as synonymous” (Tinniswood 29). Essentially, pirates are defined thieves and do not discriminate when it comes to their victims, unlike the corsairs, who were foreign privateers that were generally either Muslim or British. Two corsairs Tinniswood introduced in Pirates of Barbary were the Barbarossa brothers; “In the early years of the sixteenth century two brothers had emerged as dominant figures in the Muslim fight against Christian ambitions in North Africa” (Tinniswood 6). Hizir and Oruc Barbarossa were 16th-century Turks in the service of the Ottoman Empire against the Spanish for the control of the North African coast (Hassan). The religious divide between the Christians and Muslims during this time was significant, because Christian pirates were a threat to merchants. So, one of main ambitions of the corsairs was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade. Overall, the Christians and Muslims engaged in acts of piracy in order to fight over political and economic