piracy 175
business. Bernat had received news of the ship’s rich cargo, presumably from an agent
in the harbor (if not in the custom house itself), almost immediately after it had
arrived, and he had sped southward quickly enough to seize the merchants and crew
even before they had disembarked. Without his intelligence network in place, Bernat
could not have found out about the shipment in time. Most people with an interest
in piracy had to maintain such networks; simply roaming the sea in hope of finding
a commercial vessel with large amounts of precious metals and easily transportable
goods like silk and spices was no way to run a piracy-business. And a business it was.
Third, Mediterranean piracy was intimately linked
to the slave trade and to inter-religious relationsIn economic typology, piracy was a redistributive enterprise; it produced no goods or
services of its own but contributed to the economic system by delivering the goods
and services produced by others (see also Catlos and Rotman, this volume). Trafficking
in people was profitable, and the holding of crews and merchants for ransom is a
specialized form of human trafficking. In ancient times slaves were chattels, and the
degree of humane behavior they received from their owners was simply a matter of
their market value. With the spread of Christianity, however, a patina of decency
became expected. St Paul, of course, enjoined all Christians to treat their slaves fairly
and instructed all Christian slaves to treat their masters with respect (see, for example,
Philemon 1, 1–25). Saints Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom echoed Paul. This
hardly justifies a conclusion that slaves’ lives were in fact made less miserable, but it
bears pointing out that Cassiodorus reported having witnessed free-born but poor
parents in southern Italy selling their own children into slavery as the best available
means of improving their lives (Variae, 8.33.3: Barnish, 1992: 110). Other parts of
the Mediterranean, such as the Maghreb, became known as sites of voluntary enslave-
ment by those seeking either a better standard of living or simply to emigrate in the
only way available to them. At least two early popes, Pius I (r. 158–167) and Calixtus
I (r. 217–222), began their lives as slaves—Calixtus, indeed, was owned by a Christian
master. Slave-trafficking being legal, though regulated, through most of the medieval
period, pirates found them profitable goods in which to deal. In the Abbasid and
Turkish eras the importance of the slave trade increased dramatically, ensuring further
business for pirates; the Turkish practice of devshirme—according to which Christian
children were abducted or purchased and raised as Muslims and a military elite (the
slave-soldiers known as Mamluks)—kept pirates and other slave-traders busy and well
compensated. Had the Uskoks supported the whole town of Senj by stealing from
the most obvious targets—namely the commercial vessels coming in and out of Venice
daily—they would most certainly have been crushed by the vastly superior Venetian
forces. Instead, they thrived by deriving the bulk of their wealth from providing both
Venice and Constantinople, among others, with slaves captured during their inland
raids. The decline of Mediterranean piracy coincided—though not by coincidence—
with the decline in Mediterranean slavery in the mid-to-late seventeenth century,
when the Ottomans gradually suspended the “harvest of boys” in the devshirme.
Religious antagonism affected most Christian-Muslim relations in the
Mediterranean, both commercial and piratical, but was commonly subordinated to
self-interest at the local level. The arrangement between the vojvodas of Senj and the