Tinniswood gives us both a rollicking narrative and a rich brew of early modern maritime history. The author makes this story an entertaining picaresque of crime, combat, and moral compromise fierce sea battles and daring escapes alternate with corrupt hagglings as European governments vacillate between gunboat diplomacy and offering tribute for the release of their enslaved countrymen. Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean Adrian Tinniswood, Riverhead, 26.95 (368p) ISBN 978-1-59448-774-3. The million Christians sold into bondage often converted to Islam and became pillars of the North African economy.
As Tinniswood notes in Pirates of Barbary, 'Pirates are history.' In this. Yet most of the "Turkish" pirates Tinniswood highlights were British, Dutch, or Italian renegades who sometimes bought pardons and obtained naval commands from their native countries. Historian and author Adrian Tinniswood brings alive this dynamic chapter in history, where clashes between pirates of the East-Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli-and governments of the West-England, France, Spain, and Venice-grew increasingly intense and dangerous. The buccaneers, who kidnapped whole villages as far north as Ireland and Iceland, were denounced as the scourge of Christendom. Historian Tinniswood (The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England) revisits the kleptocratic heyday of the Barbary states-Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, bits of Morocco-which offered fortified harbors to pirates and in turn built their economies around the sale of stolen cargoes and captives. Forget the pirates of the Caribbean: their Old World brethren were an altogether more colorful and fearsome lot, according to this swashbuckling study.
0 kommentar(er)
