Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean

Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean

Leonidas Mylonakis

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780755643608
• eBook ISBN: 9780755606702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Did British, French and Russian gunboats pacify the notoriously corsair-infested waters of the Eastern Mediterranean? This book charts the changing rates and nature of piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century. Using Ottoman, Greek and other archival sources, it shows that far from ending with the introduction European powers to the region, piracy continued unabated. The book shows that political reforms and changes in the regional economy caused by the accelerated integration of the Mediterranean into the expanding global economy during the third quarter of the century played a large role in ongoing piracy. It also considers imperial power struggles, ecological phenomena, shifting maritime trade routes, revisions in international maritime law, and changes in the regional and world economy to explain the fluctuations in violence at sea.

1

Introduction: Piracy Enters the Modern Era

“You tell me Monte Cristo serves as a refuge for pirates, who are, it seems to me, a very different kind of game from goats.”

“Yes, your excellency, and it is the truth.”

“I knew there were smugglers, but I thought that since the capture of Algiers and the destruction of the regency, pirates existed only in the romances of Cooper and Captain Marryat.”

“Your excellency is mistaken. There are pirates, like the bandits who were believed to have been exterminated by Pope Leo XII, and who yet rob travelers at the gates of Rome every day. Has not your excellency heard that the French charge d’affaires was robbed six months ago within five hundred paces of Velletri?”

“But of course.”

“Well, if, like us, your excellency lived in Livorno, he would hear from time to time that a little boat loaded with goods, or a pretty English yacht, which was expected at Bastia, Porto Ferrejo, or Civita Vecchia has not arrived. No one knows what has become of it, and doubtless it will have been wrecked against some rock. Well, that rock it met was a low, narrow barge of six or eight men, who surprised and looted it on a dark and stormy night at the bend of some wild and uninhabited islet, like how bandits stop and loot a mail coach at the corner of a forest.”

“But,” said Franz, still stretched out in his boat, “Why do those who have such an accident not come to complain? Why do they not call down on these pirates the vengeance of the French, Sardinian, or Tuscan government?”

“Why not?” Gaetano said with a smile.

“Yes, why not?”

“Because, first of all, they carry off everything that is worth taking from the ship or yacht to their boat. They then bind the feet and hands of the crew, attach to each man’s neck a cannonball of twenty-four, make a hole the size of a barrel in the keel of the captured ship, go back to the bridge, close the hatches and return to their own boat. After ten minutes, the vessel begins to creak and moan; gradually it sinks. First, one side plunges, then the other; it rises and plunges again, sinking ever further. Suddenly a noise like a cannon-shot sounds: air bursting through the bridge. Then the ship agitates like a drowned man who struggles, getting heavier with each movement. Soon the water, pressuring upon the cavities, rushes out of the openings, like the liquid columns which would be thrown by the vents of some gigantic sperm whale. Finally, it utters a last rattle, makes a last turn on itself, and rushes into the deep by digging a vast funnel that swirls for a moment, fills up little by little and eventually completely fade away; so that at the end of five minutes it would take the eye of God himself to go to the bottom of this calm sea to retrieve the missing ship.”

“Do you understand now,” added the boss, smiling, “why the vessel does not enter the port, and how the crew does not file a complaint?”¹

By the time Alexandre Dumas wrote his masterpiece The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844, the only pirate ships that were supposed to be in the Mediterranean were either wrecks upon the sea floor or fictitious ones that were imagined memories of a romanticized past. For a novel set largely in France and Italy, the connection to an orientalized Eastern Mediterranean was strong. The protagonist’s mistress was none other than the fictional daughter of Ali Pasha Tepedelenli, the Lion of Ioannina whose roar commenced the Greek revolution and whose head later adorned a silver platter presented to Sultan Mahmud II. It was those uprisings in the Near East that advanced the plot while Edmond Dantes rotted his youth away in prison, creating the conditions for his rival to hone his military edge and his outlaw allies to thread the line of legality and make their way as smugglers. Dumas expected his reader to believe these to be romanticized characters of a past that no longer existed, making an exciting last hurrah in times when absolutism had returned to crush the dreams in which lower-class figures could rise to prominence.²

Whether or not pirates actually roved the eastern seas was of little concern to Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo is a work of orientalist literature, more concerned with using an imagined Other to reflect on developments closer to home than accurately describing faraway lands.³ It was widely accepted in France and the rest of Western Europe that maritime marauders were no more, that they only belonged to the realm of fiction. As it turns out, they were wrong. Piracy did not end with the conquest of Algiers and the demise of the Barbary corsairs. In the Aegean, piracy persisted and would do so into the following century.

After British, French, and Russian gunboats sailed into the Eastern Mediterranean flying the banner of civilization and security, piracy in the region was believed to have vanished along with its legally permissible equivalents, corsairing and privateering. Ottoman, Greek, and other archival sources show this to be inaccurate. Piracy carried on well past the installation of the Bavarian monarchy in Greece and the French colonization of Algiers in 1830 that brought an end to Mediterranean corsairs and the 1856 Treaty of Paris which formally outlawed privateering. Pirates continued raiding Greek and Ottoman waters into the early twentieth century. The nascent Kingdom of Greece viewed these marauders alternatingly as a menace and as nationalist martyrs revolting against the Ottomans as Greek rebels did earlier in the century.

This book charts the changing rates and nature of transnational piracy during the nineteenth century and considers the factors that shaped it. These range from political reforms to changes in the regional economy caused by the accelerated integration of the Mediterranean into the expanding global economy. Imperial power struggles, ecological phenomena, shifting maritime trade routes, revisions in international maritime law, and changes in the regional and world economy contributed to fluctuations in extrajudicial violence at sea. State decisions to label non-state naval raiders as illegitimate pirates or legitimate insurgents in a popular national uprising were central to claims over nationhood and sovereignty. Greece periodically protected pirates who pillaged neighboring seas and claimed them as rebels carrying out Greek irredentism. The Ottoman Empire struggled maintain its legitimacy as the Abode of Peace by effectively controlling piracy and exercising its monopoly on violence. Great Britain used the continued threat of piracy to international trade as a reason to maintain a strong naval presence in the region that did little on their own to mitigate the frequency of pirate raids. Maritime marauders only ceased to harry the Aegean coastline when both licit economic opportunities were available and, at the same time, local, regional, and international authorities dissuaded them from profiting through plunder.

Defining Piracy

The common understanding of piracy is violent theft originating from the sea carried out upon coastal settlements and transiting ships. Exact definitions of piracy vary by time, place, language, jurisdiction, legality, legitimacy, and social contexts. James Wadsworth recently proposed a definition of piracy that attempts to take a flexible approach to the topic: “Piracy is seaborne banditry that can manifest itself as parasitic, episodic, intrinsic or some combination of the above, given the specific historical and cultural context in which it was practiced.”⁴ There are some key differences that separate maritime piracy from terrestrial banditry. Piracy requires a ship, which is a sizable startup expense compared to that needed to commit banditry on land. It traditionally requires large numbers of people to crew said ship, especially if the goal is to overwhelm the intended target and to make resistance hopeless. Even smaller enterprises reliant on a handful of raiders on a caique must procure and maintain a vessel and a crew capable of operating it.

Another distinction is that piracy is a crime that takes place where borders are fluid and jurisdiction is murky. The boundary of international versus territorial waters also remains in flux. Over the centuries of its existence, the Ottoman Empire consistently expanded its maritime boundaries in an attempt to secure its island provinces from foreign interference.⁵ The Sublime Porte considered islands and coastlines to be borderlands of its jurisdiction, a territorial littoral to be protected from foreign pirates, privateers, and the lawlessness of the open sea.⁶ In the present day, we consider territorial water to be a certain distance from controlled land. Exactly how far that is has caused fierce debate and tension between Greece and Turkey, almost leading to war in the Aegean in several instances. The reach of territorial waters has been considered six, ten, or twelve nautical miles at various points over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Currently, further reach from the shoreline favors Greece as it controls almost all the Aegean islands.⁷ Disagreement over these exact details leads to the grey and black spaces where pirates and smugglers can operate most effectively.

Non-state maritime marauders are typically divided into three or four sub-categories: pirate, privateer, corsair, and filibuster. The labeling of an action as piracy varies by context. Louis Sicking categorizes maritime military entrepreneurs upon two axes: first, whether they took orders from a state; and second, whether they were financed by a state. Navies and temporary war fleets both took orders and received funding from the state. Filibusters, such as those used for American expansion during the nineteenth century, were financed by but did not answer to the state; they were simply armed irregular soldiers who were set loose to make trouble for the enemy. Privateers answered to the state, but did not receive any funds, and instead were remunerated via captured booty. Lastly, pirates operated entirely outside of state control. They were unaffiliated opportunists who robbed whatever hapless victim they could. They were the enemy of any state claiming to provide security over their dominion. As with all forms of military entrepreneurship, the lines separating these naval forces were muddied and violated at a moment’s notice. Naval officers would not turn down plunder and prizes out of hand, and even the most anarchic of pirates had some alibi should they come face to face with the law.⁸

Privateers were naval entrepreneurs who were given letters of marque to raid the shipping of enemy states. They were funded by capturing prizes which were regulated and assessed at tribunals. Thus, they operated in a similar manner as pirates, with the exception that they accepted one sovereign, rather than none. They were to abide by the alliances and regulations laid out by their patron state, but they operated with much more autonomy than regular naval forces. To their victims, there was often little difference if their assailant bore a letter of marque. States commissioned privateers to accomplish their general goals, as Britain hired privateers like Sir Francis Drake to raid Spanish bullion shipments, simultaneously weakening their imperial rival and bringing extra revenue into state coffers.

Corsairing and privateering are categorically the same thing, with corso being the Latin-based root meaning “pursuit” used for corsair in Mediterranean languages (French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, etc.). The use of corsair for privateer arose in a distinct geography with historical baggage. Some historians describe Mediterranean corsairs and Caribbean privateers as the same, except the former are guided by religious ethos rather than the state.⁹ This leads to discussion of corsairs to be reminiscent of the grand sectarian divisions laid out in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations.¹⁰ The narrative of piracy in this view takes on the undertones of crusade and jihad, two topics more often discussed with more passion than reason. Two groups dominate the history of corsairing. One was the order of the Knights of St. John, based in Malta, and the other was the Barbary corsairs of the Ottoman Empire’s North African vassal states: Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli. There were also other smaller groups, all based in the Mediterranean. In general, historians cast the conflict of corsairs in the Mediterranean as a struggle between a Christian northern shore against an Islamic southern one in need of complication.¹¹ When we take a critical view of Mediterranean corsairs as not only being motivated by religious conflict alongside a reminder that Atlantic privateers also participated in confessional conflicts, the two categories of raiders seem more alike despite their different historical contingencies.¹²

When discussing categories of maritime violence, note that the terms described above are used by Anglophone academics. Both Greek and Turkish authorities from the nineteenth century used different categories for piracy based on their mother tongues. In Ottoman Turkish, the term korsan encompasses all extrajudicial providers of maritime violence: pirates, privateers, and corsairs. Thus, when reading Ottoman documents referring to a korsan, pirate is only a correct translation when couched in proper context. Other Ottoman terms like levend (irregular), ehl-i fesad (people of malice), eşkiya (brigand), and harami (thief) could all refer to a pirate, but they are more general terms for outlawry that could also refer to terrestrial irregulars or brigands.¹³ When appearing alongside korsan, such descriptors suggest that the sailors in question were pirates, not privateers. Nautical occupations like firkateci (frigateer) were frequently employed to refer to pirates, but those terms also covered licit sailors.¹⁴ When the Ottomans saw a korsan, they saw a maritime military entrepreneur that could either be coopted to serve the state or labeled as an outlaw and hunted down. Either option acted to strengthen the state’s claim to legitimacy by securing a monopoly on violence.

We need to pay close attention to attached adjectives and other contextual clues present in the documents if we are to understand the relations between these raiders and the state of Greece. Ottoman documents frequently described the raiders in one way or another as Yunan korsanları. The term Yunan was used specifically to refer to Gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Dates
• Maps
• 1 Introduction: Piracy Enters the Modern Era
• 2 Piracy during the Ottoman Civil Wars
• 3 A New Age of Piracy
• 4 Paris, Patrols, and Persistent Piracy
• 5 Currants, Capital, and Declining Piracy
• 6 Piracy during the 1897 Greco-Ottoman War
• Epilogue: Why Was This All Forgotten?
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint