Who were the Barbary corsairs, and how many Europeans did they really enslave?

The Barbary corsairs were mainly Muslim corsairs and privateers who operated from the North African coast, known in Europe as the Barbary Coast. As well as seizing ships, they raided European coastal towns and villages, from Italy, France, Spain and Portugal to Britain, Ireland and Iceland, capturing people and selling them at slave markets. From the 16th century the great ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were under Ottoman sovereignty, either as provinces or as autonomous dependencies known as the Barbary states.

How many people were enslaved is one of the most disputed questions in the history of piracy. Historian Robert Davis estimates that between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved from the 16th to the mid-18th century, about 850,000 of them between 1580 and 1680. Other historians question these figures. Davis assumes that the number captured stayed roughly constant over 250 years, and Peter Earle, a historian of the corsairs, thought he might be exaggerating. The authorities kept no relevant official records, so every total is a back-calculation from what observers saw; they estimated around 35,000 European slaves held on the Barbary Coast throughout the 17th century.

The individual stories are easier to trust than the totals. In 1551 Turgut Reis enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000 people. In June 1631, Murat Reis stormed ashore at Baltimore, County Cork, and took almost all the villagers into slavery in North Africa. The most famous captive was the author Miguel de Cervantes, held for almost five years, from 1575 to 1580.

The picture was not one-sided. Both Europeans and Muslims considered themselves to be waging holy wars against each other, and Christian forces took captives too: between 1568 and 1634 the Knights of Saint Stephen may have captured about 14,000 Muslims.