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no better. The Lateran Council of 1079, the Council of Nantes in 1127, and a bull
of Pope Calixtus II in 1124 also tried to suppress it, to no avail.
The revival of Roman law in the twelfth century did little more than reintroduce
the tradition codified by Justinian, but with an important difference. In the interven-
ing centuries, when Muslims dominated most of the sea lanes, religious strictures
came into place that forbade Muslims to enslave other Muslims or to purchase
Muslims as slaves; only non-Muslim slaves could be held and traded. Since the Islamic
empire (and the separate Islamic splinter states, after the empire began to fracture in
750) was as dependent on slave labor as every other early society, Muslims had to keep
adding new slaves to the labor pool—which meant piracy. Muslim pirates criss-crossed
the Mediterranean in search of new captives, and some even ventured outside of it and
skirted the western coast of Africa. Spanish–Muslim and Maghrebi–Muslim pirates
introduced slaves from sub-Saharan Africa into Europe in large numbers. Census
records from the tenth century show that the city of Cordoba alone had 8000 black
African slaves in residence. At the other end of the Mediterranean the arrival in large
numbers of the Seljuk Turks sparked a dramatic increase in slave piracy, since the
Mamluk forces they developed in Egypt absorbed so many recruits.
The religious issue—the requirement to limit the trade in slaves to members of a
religious community other than one’s own—inspired a kind of competitive piracy
between Christian and Muslim states. Religious pride was at stake, which meant that
piracy took on some of the characteristics that ultimately defined the crusade mental-
ity. Like crusading, piracy was a legitimate use of force if it was waged for a just cause,
in a just manner, and by individuals authorized to do so. And, as with crusading,
strict regulations were established to mitigate the violence done by pirates. Corsairing
(state-sponsored piracy) had a long genealogy that reached back at least to the sec-
ond century bce, when Polybius described the practice under Queen Teuta in Illyria;
in the first century ce Josephus described how the Jewish community at Joppa con-
structed a pirate fleet that “made all the waters from Syria, past Phoenicia, and all the
way to Egypt impassable.” But the religious element in the twelfth century found
expression in the custom of distinguishing between true pirates (that is, criminal
plunderers at sea) and privateers (licensed and regulated sea marauders). A case can
be made, in fact, that the evolution of piracy helped shape the development of the
idea of crusading by establishing a precedent for a type of self-regulated aggression,
an extra-legal activity governed by generally-agreed rules of engagement. The same
Catalan and Valencian warrior sailors in the thirteenth century, and their Muslim
counterparts in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, in fact often encountered one another
in both piratical and crusading campaigns. The great Catalan–Sicilian admiral Roger
de Lauria (d. 1305) was as well known in his lifetime for his pirating activity as for
his command of the naval forces that cleared the western Mediterranean of Tunisian
and Moroccan fleets. The Greeks, Venetians, and Ottomans who fought one another
for control of Crete in the seventeenth century shared the same blend of religious
and commercial motives. The Barbary pirates of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
certainly acted out of crusading-like zeal; they plundered the coastlines of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard continually in search of victims, and by the
end of their heyday they had captured and enslaved as many as 1 000 000 European
Christians; most of the men they captured were condemned to life as galley slaves,
while the women and children were shipped variously to the Ottoman territories to