The National Interest
Winter 2001/02

Echoes from the Barbary Coast

by Rand H. Fishbein

 

On the day that United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 11 lifted off from Boston’s Logan airport, bound for a fiery collision with the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, a lone observer watched from below. That observer was the U.S.S. Constitution, the oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy and an early witness to the ravages of Middle Eastern terrorism.

Launched in 1797, the Constitution ("Old Ironsides") and her sister ship, the U.S.S. Constellation, were built to wage war on the Muslim pirates operating along North Africa’s Barbary Coast. It was a wild, untamed region of petty states and warlords whose reach extended deep into the Mediterranean Sea, from Gibraltar to the borders of Egypt. Each owed nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan, who demanded that payment of an annual tribute be made to his treasury in exchange for the protection afforded by his army. This tidy arrangement worked well for those local rulers who knew their place in the imperial social order, and for the Sultan as well. The only thing lacking was an ample source of revenue. The solution was piracy.

For nearly four centuries the Barbary states, and the brigands they employed, prowled the Mediterranean in search of prey. The lumbering merchant vessels of the time were no match for the Muslim corsairs, built for speed and lightning strikes. It was a way of life that took its toll on countless merchant ships and their crews. After seizing their cargo and scuttling the vessels, the pirates would ransom the ill-fated seamen back to their sovereign or the company that had chartered them. Often enough, however, the victims of these maritime hijackings would languish in fetid prisons, unsure of when, or even if, they would ever be rescued. Some were sold into slavery.

It was a lucrative business, one that yielded great riches not only for the pirates, but also for the Muslim states that gave them refuge. For many of the rulers, plunder became a mainstay of their survival. In the parlance of our time, however, this system of piracy was state-sponsored terrorism, pure and simple—an extortion racket in which the pirate, the petty states of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire were all complicit. . . .