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The rise and progress of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean is a most curious and interesting historical fact. The causes which led to results so deplorable to commerce, civilisation, and Christianity are set forth in this chapter in order that some idea may be formed of the state of affairs in that region at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and also that the reflex action of the great triumph of the Christian armies in Spain may be more fully understood.

The maritime Christian States of the Mediterranean at this epoch were at the height of their power and prosperity, but were faced by the might of the Ottoman Empire, against which they waged perpetual warfare. Bitter and unceasing was the strife prosecuted by the Cross against the Crescent, and by the Crescent against the Cross; and riding, like eagles on the storm came the corsairs in their swift galleys ready to strike down the luckless argosy of the merchantman wheresoever she was to be met. But this was not all, as the shore as well as the sea yielded up to them its tribute in the shape of slaves and booty, and Christian mothers trembling in the insecurity of their homes would hush their wailing children with the terror of the names of Barbarossa, of Dragut, or of Ali Basha.

Popes and emperors, kings and princes, found themselves compelled to form leagues against these Sea-wolves who devoured the substance of their subjects, and great expeditions were fitted out to fight with and destroy the corsairs. Had Christendom been united no doubt the object would have been attained; but, as will be seen at the end of this chapter, an “Alliance of Christian Princes against the Turks”—which generic term included the corsairs—was not always used in the manner best calculated to injure those common enemies.

When in 1492 Granada was yielded up to “Los Reyes Catolicos,” Ferdinand of Aragon, and Isabella of Castile, by that luckless monarch known as Boabdil el Chico (or “the little”), the last remnant of the power of the Moors in Spain had gone never to return. On that small hill on the way to the coast still known as “el ultimo suspiro del Moro” (the last sigh of the Moor), Boabdil, as he looked for the last time on his lost capital of Granada, is said to have burst into tears. His fierce mother Ayesha had, however, no sympathy for her fallen son: “Thou doest well to weep like a woman for that which thou daredst not defend as a man,” was her biting—and totally unjust—comment, and the cavalcade pursued its miserable journey to the coast, from whence it embarked for the kingdom of Fez.

Great was the jubilation in Christendom; for more than seven centuries the followers of the Prophet had dwelt in the land from which Tarik had expelled Roderick the Goth in the eighth century. There they had dwelt and held up a lamp of learning and comparative civilisation which shone brightly through the miasmatic mists of cruelty and bloodshed in the Middle Ages, and none can question that, under Moorish rule in Spain in those centuries, the arts of peace had flourished, and that science, agriculture, art, and learning had found generous and discriminating patronage in the courts of Còrdoba and Granada.

And now all was over the iron chivalry of the North had broken in pieces the Paynim hosts. They were expelled for ever from Christian soil, or else were forced to live in a state of degrading servitude, sore oppressed by an alien rule, in the land which their forbears had won and kept by the sword.

There was jubilation, as has been said, in Christendom, but the knights and nobles who flocked from all parts of Europe to join the standard of the Catholic monarchs had no prevision of the consequences, no idea of the legacy that they were leaving to their descendants.

It is of this legacy that we have to speak, and there has been none more terrible, none fraught with more awful suffering for the human race. The broken hosts of the Moslem chivalry became the corsairs of the Mediterranean: ruthless pirates freed from all restraint of human pity, living only to inflict the maximum of suffering upon their Christian foes, who, having sown the wind at the taking of Granada, reaped in the coming centuries a whirlwind of blood and agony which continued down to the bombardment of Algiers by Lord Exmouth in 1816, and even later than that date.

Warriors to a man, the hosts of Boabdil crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Africa; warriors but now broken men, from whom had been reft not only their lands and houses but even the chance of remaining in their native country. Religious toleration had been the rule of the Moslem States in Spain. In the name of religion they had been expropriated; therefore toleration was slain, and to exalt the Crescent above the Cross became the duty of every fighting Mohammedan. Into all the ports and harbours of the North African littoral the Moslems intruded themselves, their one preoccupation to revenge themselves upon the Christians, of no matter what race or nationality. There was at this date but small opposition from the rulers of the Pagan States who held in their weak and inefficient hands such strong places of arms as Algiers and Tunis.

Very soon the Moslems acquired the habit of the sea, and very soon the Christian States discovered how different was the Mohammedan dwelling at peace in Andalusia, or at worst fighting with his co-religionists, to the desperate corsairs created by their own act who now ravaged the shores of the tideless sea.

In the years succeeding to the conquest of Granada the corsairs became the scourge of the Mediterranean. France, Spain, Genoa, Venice, were all at odds with them; as the trading vessels, which had hitherto passed to and fro unmolested, were now captured, haled into North African ports, their cargoes sold, and their hapless crews forced to labour, naked and chained to the benches of the pirate galleys, until death came and mercifully put an end to their sufferings.

From Reggio to Genoa, from Venice to Taranto, the cry of rage and fear went up; it was re-echoed from the coasts of France and of the Balearic Islands, while Southern Spain seethed with disaffection, and the Moriscoes, as those Moors who remained in the country were known, were ever on the lookout to assist their bold brethren, the rovers of the sea. Christendom was completely bewildered: hitherto the relations between the nations and the Kings of Tunis, Tlemcen, Fez, and others of the North African potentates, had been of the most agreeable description. Both parties had denounced piracy, and had as far as in them lay done all in their power to discourage this form of robbery. But now all was changed, and, as has been said in the previous chapter, a situation arose analogous to that of the Spaniards in the West Indies a century and a half later when Morgan and the buccaneers were at the height of their maleficent prowess. The situation was analogous, but whereas Morgan, Scott, L’Ollonais, and others terrorised only such forces as Spain possessed in far-distant colonies, the corsairs were a terror to all the great nations of the world.

Granada fell, as has been said, in 1492 amid the rejoicings of the Christian States; but it had been well for Christendom as a whole if the Caliphs of Còrdova and Granada had never been defeated, and they and their subjects driven from their homes: to form the nucleus of those piratical States which existed from this date until well into the nineteenth century, as the scourge and the terror of all those who, during those ages, desired to “pass upon the seas on their lawful occasions.” The capture of Granada was separated from the fall of the Byzantine Empire by a period of thirty-nine years, as it was in the year 1453 that Constantinople was captured by the Caliph Mahomet II. Byzantium fell, and perhaps nothing in the records of that Empire became it so well as that last tremendous struggle; and when on May 29th, 1453, the Ottoman legions were victorious, the body of the last Emperor of Byzantium was found beneath a mountain of the slain only recognisable by his purple mantle sewn with golden bees. The Cross which Constantine the Great had planted on the walls 1125 years before was replaced by the Crescent, and the Christian Cathedral became that Mosque of St. Sophia which still endures.

From the earliest days of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean they were in close communication with their co-religionists of the Ottoman Empire; and this for a very good reason, which was that the Turk had not the habit of the sea, but was essentially a land warrior, and, as the story of the Sea-wolves progresses, we shall see how in a sense the Grand Turk and the pirates became interdependent in the ceaseless wars which were waged in the epoch of which we treat.

The fall of Constantinople resounded throughout Christendom as though it had been the crack of doom, and all men held their breath wondering what next might portend. So stunned were the maritime States that they took no action, letting “I dare not wait upon I would.” Their indecision was fatal. Had the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Catalans at this juncture formed an alliance, they might have chased the Turks from off the face of the waters; but to mutual jealousy and indecision was added fear—fear of this new and mighty power which had arisen and had swept away one of the landmarks of Europe. So it fell out that Genoa entered into an arrangement with the Grand Turk, and Venice concluded a treaty of commerce on April 18th, 1454. It was the Caliph Mahomet who first fortified the Dardanelles, where he mounted thirty heavy guns before which Jacques Loredano, the Venetian admiral, recoiled, reporting to the Republic that henceforward none could pass the Straits. We have, however, nothing to do with the Grand Turk in these pages, save, and except in so far, as he had an effect on the lives of the corsairs. This effect will develop itself as we proceed.